The Cloudy House

The Cloudy House is a website all about 'the poetics of building a project book,' curated by Cynthia Marie Hoffman and Nick Lantz. It features interviews with Julie Carr, Shane McCrae, Simone Muench, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Sarah Blake, Nicky Beer, and more, all talking about their project books. If you love project books, like I do, you've probably been following this website for some time now.

Today The Cloudy House introduces a new feature, called the Spring Round-up, discussing book projects in progress. They have showcased the work of six poets with books in progress (and for the publishers among you, that means these manuscripts are looking for presses). This includes the work of Maggie Smith, Vandana Khanna, Joni Wallace, Victoria Chang. J L Conrad, and me. You can learn more about the projects of each of these poets and their current projects, including my current project WHITEOUT, about the death of my uncle on Denali.

Thanks, Cynthia Marie & Nick!

Meta-Project

I've blogged about the book of poems vs. the project book in the past, more than once in fact. Recently I've found a site devoted to the project book, asking such questions as:

"What makes a book of poetry a project book, and what separates a successful project from an unsuccessful one? How does taking on a project affect a poet’s writing process, and what does the proliferation of project books in general signify for contemporary poetry?"

Hosted by Cynthia Marie Hoffman and Nick Lantz, The Cloudy House features interviews with poets who've explored the project book, including Caki Wilkinson, Shane McCrae, Oliver de la Paz, Julie Carr, and more.

It's a terrific resource.

Free Online Course from Univ of Iowa

The University of Iowa's International Writing Program is offering its first Massive Open Online Course, entitled "How Writers Write  Poetry." Running from June 28 to August 9, this class features twice-weekly craft talks from poetry luminaries such as Robert Hass, Kate Greenstreet, Dora Malech, James Galvin, Kiki Petrosino, Richard Kenney, Kwame Dawes, Larissa Szporluk, Shane McCrae, and Marvin Bell, among others. There will also be a online discussion and writing assignments.

The course is free. Yes, you read that right, free. And it has unlimited enrollment. It's supposed to be useful for the beginning poet to the practice poet looking for inspiration and new tips. Check out the syllabus, or sign up today. I did!

Channel Shane McCrae

If you are a fan of Shane McCrae (as I am, see here and here), you may have wished you could channel him, or his sensibilities, while writing your own work. Now you can. Black Lawrence Press, publisher of McCrae's latest book Non-fiction (don't be fooled--it's poetry), is offering a consultation with McCrae over five of your own poems if you purchase a bundle of Black Lawrence titles, including Non-fiction. The bundle total is $10 off the price of the books purchased separately, and includes the online consultation. Sign up by May 31 to receive a written critique from McCrae on your poems. I've already signed up!

In the past, I've used the personalized creative writing sessions of Black Lawrence Press's parent company, Dzanc Books, currently called Creative Writing Mentorships, in which a writer selects a mentor from an impressive list, currently including Molly Gaudry and Alissa Nutting. The writer then purchases time with her mentor, at $20 for one hour, $30 for two hours, or $50 for 4 hours. My experience with poet Michele Battiste significantly strengthened the manuscript I had been writing at the time--it soon found a publisher. And I'm happy to hear Battiste has a new book just out with Black Lawrence now, titled Uprising.

These are economical ways to get some one-on-one help with your poems. Plus the writers all volunteer their time so that proceeds can go to the Writer-in-Residence programs that Dzanc offers free to students in elementary and secondary schools across the country.

And I just discovered that Dzanc now has Online Writing Workshops. I don't have first-hand experience, but will likely try one in the future, given my good experiences with other Dzanc programs. Would love to hear from anyone who has had experiences with Dzanc programs. Thanks.

What Next?

1) Despite having piles of books everywhere, many as-yet-unread, I'm always wondering what to read next, and looking around for more books. If you are like me, you'll be glad for Ron Slate's semi-annual poetry feature, in which 14 poets recommend books of other poets. You can find a poet you admire (say Idra Novey, Anna Journey, or Shane McRae) and see whose work they selected, maybe someone unknown to you (which is always exciting). Or you might be alerted to the fact that an already admired poet (say, Kate Greenstreet or Carl Phillips) has a new book out you hadn't heard about yet. In either case, it's worth a quick look at these recommendations.

2) Thanks to an old friend from my writing group in Florida (eons ago), Mary Bast, I've recently come to know about the work in erasure supported by the Silver Birch Press. So far they've begun an anthology called Silver Birch Press NOIR Erasure Poetry Anthology (sorry, submissions already closed) and are currently collecting poems for a Valentine's Day anthology (submissions still open), with one of Mary's already featured here. Lots of erasure poems can be found on the Silver Birch Press blog, so for those of you interested in the form, it's a good resource.

 3) Recently I've been working on some poems with an emotionally difficult subject matter. However, they are coming quickly, if painfully, which signals to me that it is the time to deal with this subject matter. Interestingly, the other day I was stuck on two of the poems, needed a title for one, and one last phrase for the other. What to do next? I went to bed thinking, I need to look at Edward Hirsch's work. I have no idea why I thought this (I haven't read any Hirsch in a few years) but I felt compelled. So the next morning I pulled down my Hirsch books, opened one which had a bookmark in it and read the bookmarked poem, flipped through and read a few more. And then I had both the title of the one poem and the missing bit of the other. The words I needed weren't in the Hirsch book, but they were triggered by it. Probably reading many different things would have triggered the words for me, but somehow my unconscious mind knew Hirsch would do it. And so, listen to your unconscious mind, that old refrain. (I'm uncomfortable writing about this, because I think of myself as a rational person, not whoo-whoo at all, but see, I'm arguing that accessing the unconscious is a rational thing to do, though it feels kind of whoo-whoo.)

Speaking of which, I've had the urge recently to do something about the composer Aaron Copland. I don't know why, but he's been heavily on my mind, and somehow I feel resistant. I don't know that much about him, so I looked at some biographical material online and I listened to Appalachian Suite (on YouTube--amazing, you can just want to listen to something and there it is). Appalachian Suite was my introduction to Copland, in music class in the seventh grade, and even then I felt drawn to and resistant to Copland. My son's music festival was last week, and they performed Holst's Jupiter. My son was humming it around that house, and that got me to humming it, and I actually insisted to my son that it was Copland, and he insisted it wasn't, and we looked it up and of course it wasn't. But don't you think Jupiter has that Copland sound? Anyway, must overcome my resistance and figure out why Copland is haunting me these days.

Whiting Fdn: Shane McCrae

Congratulations to Shane McCrae for winning a Whiting Foundation Award for 2011. Click here to see the other winners this year.

The Whiting Foundation gives $50,000 (yes, that's right, $50,000 each) to ten writers annually in an award to honor those "of exceptional talent and promise in early career."

To learn a little more about Shane McCrae, see my earlier post here, which links to an interview with him and also some poems by him that are available for viewing on the web.

First Books: Shane McCrae

If you have recently published your first book, or if your working on the manuscript to what you hope will be your first book, you are probably familiar with the interview series by Keith Montesano (who took over for the amazing Kate Greenstreet) called First Book Interviews.  It's largely a nuts-and-bolts discussion series about getting published rather than a literary endeavor, but for those writers in the throes of finding a publisher or preparing a manuscript, it's endlessly fascinating.

The current interview is with poet Shane McCrae, whose book Mule came out recently from Cleveland State Poetry. McCrae's writing makes me feel naked as the reader; I can only imagine what it does to him as the poet.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

If you struck up a conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”

Ha! I can’t image ever doing that! But if somehow it got out that I had written a book, I would probably say, lamely, that it was about stuff that had happened in my life, because I would feel presumptuous saying that the poems were actually about what I tried to write them about. Like, I wrote a bunch of poems about God, for example, but how could I say such a thing? And if I said instead that those poems were about me trying to write poems about God, well, then that would just be me being a jerk. I would be very bad at this conversation.

**********

And here are some links to McCrae's work online (sorry, I can't get this stupid bold type to turn off):

Three Poems at Shampoo

"Mulatto" at Agni Online

"Horses Running Fast" at Verse Daily

And if you enjoyed the interview with McCrae, check out other first book author's at the First Book Interviews website.