P&W Sighting

Look--a page from this month's Poets & Writers, and what do I see in the upper right corner? Mendeleev's Mandala! Yay!

And Jeannine Hall Gailey's The Robot Scientist's Daughter is on the bottom left, next to Devon Moore's Apology of a Woman Who Is Told She Is Going to Hell. (This photo is courtesy of Devon, too--I don't have my copy yet.)

Yay for Mayapple Press & its authors!

Neat on the Net: Heat Wave

It's stiflingly humid here. But here are three interesting things from the net:

1) Oprah on how to beat the lags and dips in your daily rhythm (called utradian rhythms). In all this heat, we can all use tips on how to maximize our energy by listening to our body.

2) Here is an excerpt from Li-Young Lee's talk at Poets & Writers Live: Agents & Editors in Chicago on June 20, 2015. On abundance and scarcity. On what two (make that three) things a poet must study. A new (as yet untitled) poem.

3) My friend poet Erin Malone sent me this picture from the Poets House newsletter. Do you see what I see? Eeeeee! It's Mendeleev's Mandala, on the upper left shelf! (And featured in the picture is poet Jan Clausen with her new book Veiled Spill: A Sequence--that's what the picture is really about.)

Literary Cities

Poets & Writers blog has a list of city guides which give the literary side of some 17 US cities, including Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon (the other Portland has a guide too!). Written by writers familiar with these locations, the guides list known haunts and homes of authors, famous bookstores, relevant museums, cites made famous by literature, book festivals and other literary events, etc. Check it out and see if your city is featured, or give your next vacation that literary bent.

79 Best

Poets & Writers 79 best books for writers here.

Poets & Writers Favorite Lines

Some favorite lines of the people at Poets & Writers. What a good idea--to photograph the actual pages the desired lines appear on instead of just quoting them. Check it out.

Repeat After Me: "Repeat"

Once again I am borrowing a prompt from Poets & Writers excellent weekly e-newsletter The Time is Now, which I strongly encourage you all to subsribe to.

This week the prompt was: "Look back through the poems you've written this year and make a list of images or words you've repeated. This list will guide you toward identifying your poetic obsessions. Choose one of your poetic obsessions and write a poem that fully explores it."

A few years ago I wrote a poem cycle that relied heavily on a similar idea. Each poem was titled by two words, and the first word repeated the second word from the previous poem's title, while the second word was copied to the next poem in the cycle as the first word in that title (so that three poems in row would be titled "shadow: dwelling:" "dwelling: gravity:" and "gravity: body:" for example). The second word of the title of the 30th and last poem cycled back to the first word of the first poem. Once I decided on this form, I thought I might as well look for words that already recurred in my writing, as they would logically lead me to obsessions to mine more deeply. Some of the words I identified were: glass, roofs, gravity, north, chaos.

Once I read a chapbook of a friend's and commented that she had used the word "heel" repeatedly, something she herself had never noticed. We all have these repetitions, these obsessions, and it can be  fruitful to realize the patterns that exist in our own work. Not having examined my poems recently for any obsessions, I'm glad to be reminded to go back and look.

So, what images and words show up obsessively in your work?

LinkedIn for Literati

I get a lot of requests from LinkedIn members to be added to their networks, and I always grant them, but I really had no idea what LinkedIn did, how it was different from other social media, and why and how I should use it to my advantage as a poet.

But now I know, thanks to an article at Poets & Writers website called "Network: How to Use LinkedIn to Connect with Your Community." Author Thomas Israel Hopkins explains that LinkedIn is more a business tool than the other social media out there, and he gives advice on how to make the best usage of it for writers. Check it out if you are looking for more ways to enhance your career in writing, if you are looking for work, or if you are just curious.

Recently I've been a little discouraged by social media online. I joined sites in order to feel less alone out here in Japan where I am largely by myself, but as I watch how interconnected the world of poets is and how people know and promote one another in ways that are not accessible to me as an actual stranger to everyone, I actually have felt more, rather than less, lonely these days. It may be time for me to take a break and unplug.

But anyway, it's good to know what options I am ignoring.

Googledy-goop

Here's a fun poetry prompt that came in the November 24th issue of the Poets & Writers email newsletter, The Time is Now:

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Use Google translator (translate.google.com) to experiment with the text of an existing poem (yours or someone else's). Translate the text from English into another language, such as Finnish, Urdu, or Korean, and then translate the foreign-language text back to English again. Observe the metamorphosis of syntax and diction as the poem travels through the filter of another language. Then look for a particularly striking phrase, an odd construction or image, and use it to begin a new poem.

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I saw this done years ago by (I think it was) Juliana Spahr....I'm fuzzy on the details now, but as I recall (and this may be completely incorrect) she used translation software such as Babel Fish to translate something from English into a foreign language (dare I say Japanese, or is that my own particulars coloring my memory?) and then back into English. The disturbed syntax that resulted really was pure poetry. I think she used the entire translation as her poem, rather than mining the results as suggested above, but as I say, I could be completely wrong about who, what, when, where, and how in this story that isn't a story but half a memory, or less.

I used to sometimes use in my poems my sons' convoluted English that resulted from them being raised bilingually. Sometimes they said things that were just so delicious, I had to use them. As they get older and more fluent in both of their languages, we have fewer linguistic snafus, which is good for them, but sort of sad. They speak much less colorfully (but much more effectively) now.

Anyway, this idea from P&W looks like good fun. I'm going to try and mine it for some interesting lines to work with. If you try it and want to report (or share results), please do.

Prompts for When You're Stuck

Here's an interesting writing prompt that came to my inbox this week courtesy of the Poets & Writers "The Time is Now eNewsletter." You can subscribe to it by clicking on the link. (The newsletter comes once a week, supplying you with a poetry prompt, a fiction prompt, and a recommendation for a book on craft.)

This week's poetry prompt was:

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Choose a draft of a poem that you've been working on or a poem that you aren't satisfied with. Print it out double-spaced. Write a new line between each line, then revise the poem as a whole, working to first expand it, then distill it to its most powerful form.

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This is similar to a prompt I mentioned a few months ago in which you choose a poem by someone else, delete every other line (all the odds or all the evens), fill the missing lines in with lines of your own, then delete the lines that still remain from the original poem (whichever you didn't delete the first time around, the odds or the evens), and fill those in with your own lines.

These two ideas please me. When I am stuck, working in a puzzle-like way, solving something, fitting things together, is often a useful way to get unstuck.

Another idea I've read for getting unstuck is to simply say the very opposite of what you just said (replace the line with its opposite, or abut one opposite against another) and see what comes of that. Of course, sometimes it's not clear what the opposite of a line would be (for Seinfeld fans, remember the episode in which George decides to do the opposite of everything he would normally do in order to attract women; or, for Friends fans, remember when Joey does the opposite of everything that Chandler tells him to do: this is the episode about "going commando"--can you tell from my pop culture references when I moved to Japan and stopped keeping up with American pop culture?) But when the opposite is not clear, that might be an excellent opportunity to really use your imagination, and perhaps get past whatever is blocking you.

Finally, another good idea for when you are stuck is to use start the next line of the poem with a "turning" word or phrase, such as but, however, still, anyway, on the other hand, just to see what happens. (Yes, this is similar to saying the opposite, only not going quite so far in jogging your thinking out of its rut.)

I take no credit for these ideas, but have used them all at one time or another, and found them sometimes helpful, sometimes not.

Winning Words: Traci Brimhall

Poet Traci Brimhall, whose manuscript Our Lady of the Ruins recently won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, has a history of winning contests, and some haunting poems to back up her legacy. She is interviewed here at Poets and Writers online concerning her advice and experience with entering contests. Enjoy.