Buddhist Poets: Call to Submit

Rattle Issue 36 (Winter 2011) will feature poems by Buddhist poets (poems need not necessarily be about Buddhism though.) Also wanted are essays about the interplay between poetry and Buddhism. Check out the guidelines here. Submission period closes August 1st.

Punk Punk-tuation

The summer I was nine, I sat one day in my mother's van in the parking lot of the local Wawa (those of you who know what a Wawa Market is now know where I grew up), wilting in the humidity, waiting with my sisters and brother for my mother to emerge with the green checkered ice cream carton that was going to save us from the heat, when I suddenly realized that the word "as" was going out of fashion. From my dazed and sweaty position, I jolted upright in my sticky naugahyde seat. I hadn't heard anyone use the word "as" in...as long as I could remember. Right then and there I decided single-handedly to rescue the word "as" from its recent obsolenscence. So it became my summer of similes: the backyard as hot as a desert, the pool as fun as a carnival, and on and on. It must have been tedious for everyone in the vicinity, but I will say this: the word "as" is alive and kicking today, and you all have my nine-year-old self to thank for it.

Now I propose to do the same for my favorite punctuation mark: the colon. The first problem in re-popularizing the colon is, well, its name. Sounds rather gastrointestinal, if you know what I mean. So first, I'd like to propose a contest to rename the colon. If you have any good ideas, anything better than mine (the dual vertical period, the rotated nostril mark) please write in immediately. My campaign depends on it.

Now, let's do a colon-oscopy, an in-depth examination of the colon, but not the icky kind. Let's look at the uses of the colon, as copied and pasted here from The Guide to Writing and Grammar:

(From here on down, I am cutting and pasting from said website, until further notice.)

***************

Use a colon [ : ] before a list or an explanation that is preceded by a clause that can stand by itself. Think of the colon as a gate, inviting one to go on:

There is only one thing left to do now: confess while you still have time.

The charter review committee now includes the following people:

the mayor

the chief of police

the fire chief

the chair of the town council

You nearly always have a sense of what is going to follow or be on the other side of the colon.

We will often use a colon to separate an independent clause from a quotation (often of a rather formal nature) that the clause introduces:

The acting director often used her favorite quotation from Shakespeare's Tempest: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

We also use a colon after a salutation in a business letter . . .

***************

Okay, here is where I stop copying and pasting from the website, though I do want to mention, for those of you who are huge colon fans (like myself), that if you scroll to the bottom of that website, you will find The Poor Man's Animated Exercise on Uses of the Colon, with fabulous and (literally) colorful examples of when to use and when not to use the beloved colon.

Okay, so here's what I like so much about colons: You nearly always have a sense of what is going to follow or be on the other side of a colon. And that's why I adore using colons in poems. I like to follow a colon with something that I hope the reader won't expect to follow or be on the other side, combined with the structural implication that I did in fact expect the reader to expect it, or know it, or to perhaps bop herself on the side of the head thinking "Why didn't I see that coming?" I love the tension, all embodied in that one tiny punctation mark: the colon. In fact, I probably use colons too often: so sue me.

And I love the inventive use of other punctuation marks in other people's poems too. For example, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon in her book Open Interval uses the em-dash and the colon in combinations that my poor brain cannot understand. Reading those poems gave me a headache. I actually threw the book at one point, my head hurt so badly. And I loved every minute of it. Van Clief-Stefanon almost tore a hole in my brain with all that wild punctuation, and how often do you get to say that?

So here's what I want from you, readers, if any of you actually made it this far:
1) suggestions for re-christening the colon
2) examples of other poems and poets using punctuation creatively and to great effect
3) tributes to your own favorite punctuation marks.

The end. (And none too soon.)

Dzanc You Very Much

A few years ago I sent a poetry manuscript around to a number of contests and open reading periods, and was a finalist or semi-finalist in about a third of the places I had submitted to. But I didn't find a publisher. One of the contest judges sent me a note saying that I had the strongest poems in their contest, but the overall quality of my manuscript was uneven. The results seemed to indicate that I was close to having a solid manuscript, but I was at a loss as to how to make that leap. Living in Japan, being sort of isolated, and not having a critique group to help me, I wasn't sure what to do.

I decided to cut the manuscript in half, and keep only the strongest of the poems. Then I added in a cycle of 30 poems that I had been working on during the year my manuscript had made the rounds. But I wasn't sure if the new cycle made my manuscript better or worse.

Serendipitiously, a writer in an online writing support group I belong to mentioned the Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions. I was immediately intrigued because Dzanc Books has published a few poets and short story writers I hugely admire, in particular Stefi Weisburd (under the Black Lawrence Press Imprint), Terese Svoboda, and Shellie Zacharia (under the Keyhold Press Imprint).

The Dzanc Creative Writing Sessions, hereafter denoted DCWS, were offered online at the incredible rate of $50 for 4 hours of critiquing by a writer of one's choice. The reason they are able to offer such an insanely low price for this valuable service is that the writers donate their time, and the revenue generated goes into Dzanc's literary program. It's a situation in which everyone wins! (By the way, 1-hour and 2-hour sessions are also available for $20 and $30 respectively.)

So I looked at the list of poets participating in the DCWS, and while I found two whose work I loved, I immediately knew I wanted the advice of the uber-talented Michele Battiste, a poet who weaves math and science into many of her poems, something I have a tendency to do as well. Check out Michele's blog here.(The other poet who caught my eye was Brent Goodman, in case you were wondering.)

So Michele Battiste gave me four hours of acute attention, lots of line edits, an overarching view of what she thought I was doing in my series, and a request to see poems more since she hadn't used up all of my 4 hours yet, despite the detailed nature of her help. The experience was absolutely invaluable for me, especially living in the poetry hinterlands as I do.

So when I sent my manuscript out again, I had no trouble finding a publisher, and when withdrawing it from the other places I had sent it to, I was told that it had made it to the finals in a number of cases and even had been selected as a winner in a contest the very morning I withdrew it from consideration.

All of this absolutely came to be due to the fine critiquing of Michele Battiste under the auspices of the DCWS, which I cannot recommend enough.

If you've had a critique online or via email or snail mail, with a poet or writer you don't personally know, I'd love to hear your experience.

Leaping While Sleeping

When I was a graduate student, I would sometimes be assigned a difficult mathematical proof to present to the class. There was one that I had worked on for days, but the night before the presentation I was still stuck at a crucial step. I had a copy of the finished proof (I'd been given the paper expositing it, and was to explain it to the class in lieu of their having to slog through it), and if I skipped over that one step, I could explain everything after it, as well as before it. But that one step eluded me, and the paper offered no explanation for a highly convoluted line of mathematical symbols which seemed unrelated to anything that came previously.

At 3 am, I gave up and went to bed, slightly horrified, because as the only woman in the entire graduate program, I particularly hated to fail in front of my peers. When I awoke in the morning, I knew the answer. I just woke up with it in my head. It was a brilliant piece of symbolic manipulation necessary to force the proof to its end. Later, when presenting the proof to the class, I impressed even the professor who admitted that he also had not been able to figure out that particular leap between lines.

This has happened to me several times with regards to proofs or math problems, and a few more times when I was working as a financial analyst. My subconscious mind (or perhaps my unconscious mind--I asked a psychiatrist friend once what the difference was and he replied, Well, that's the million-dollar question) can solve things that my conscious mind cannot.

Do poets have this ability to access the not-conscious mind too? Apparently they do. In an interview with the UK Guardian in December of 2006, the poet Anne Carson (my hero) said, "I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time. But the jumps between them are entirely at that moment."

I suspect that many poets can access those jumps, have those moments, when they are awake. I, however, cannot, at least not yet. I suffer from the overly rational mind as described by Sir Rabindranath "Tagore" Thakur: "A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."

So I have learned to access my not-conscious mind, which is so much more resourceful than my conscious mind, in sleep. However, I cannot force it. It doesn't work unless I have exhausted every possible avenue my conscious mind can attempt in my waking hours. And even then, it doesn't always work. When insight like that comes, it's a gift.

Dreams are a well-known source of creativity. Many scientific discoveries were first seen in dreams: the helical structure of DNA was first seen by James Watson in a dream, for example. I know poets also commonly use the imagery of their dreams in their work. But what I want to know is this: all you poets out there, can you access your not-conscious mind in the waking state? Can you make those genuinely astounding intuitive leaps without resorting to sleep? And if so, how? And by how, I mean not only how does it happen, but also how do you stimulate that kind of access organically? What rituals do you have, if any, that lead to these kinds of soaring leaps in your thinking? Seriously, I'd like answers to this, if you've got them.

Calling All Bards of the Binary Code

Are you equally comfortable with Linux and linebreaks? If so, this post is for you.

Poetic use of mathematics and science as both topic and literary device has been around for quite some time. For a classic compendium, see Verse and Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics, compiled by Kurt Brown (Milkweed Editions). In the past few years, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney (AK Peters), has also come on the scene. The latter editor also has one of the better blogs on the subject, compiling poems and briefly introducing the thinking or history behind them, at Intersections--Poetry With Mathematics.

I have to admit, however, that I am not as familiar with the blending of computers/computer science and poetry. Recently I was directed to the following site, Thinking Machines, run by Neil Aitken, editor of Boxcar Poetry Review. Here Aitken is soliciting poems for an anthology about computers, programming, and poetry. Neil Aitken is presently working on his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, but in a previous incantation he was a programmer, so he's the go-to guy for all things on this subject. He even has suggestions to stimulate your thinking about this mix of topics on the website cited above.

If you have a poem relating to programming and poetry, OR if you are a programmer and a poet who's written poems on any subject, you are invited to submit. So check it out.

And if you have a favorite book of/about poetry and math/science/computing, let me know! I'd love to hear about it.

Ditching the Prompt

Although I used to generate all the ideas for my poems by myself, the time finally came when I began to use prompts to stimulate my creativity. In the past year or so, I have enjoyed using prompts supplied by Robert Lee Brewer for his April PAD Challenge (Poem-A-Day Challenge) and have also have tried some offered by Molly Fisk on Facebook (search for "Molly Fisk - Writer, Teacher, Speaker" and "friend" her to get more information).

Earlier this month I received a thoughtful rejection from an editor who found a poem I had submitted "began on the 5th line," rather than where I had started it. When I had a look, I saw that the first four lines were a direct response to a writing prompt, but on line five, the poem took off in its own direction. I needed to jettison the writing prompt, which had given me a good start but had finally been outgrown; however it took the keen eye of an editor to point this out to me. (Eventually I rewrote the first four lines, and am happy to report the revised poem was accepted for publication by the very same insightful editor.)

Sometimes writing prompts become part of the medium, the very essence of a poem, and sometimes they remain merely a tool, a launching site. Sometimes writing prompts make up the integrity of a piece, like the paint in a painting, and sometimes they are the paintbrush, a tool to get the painting made. In the latter case, when it's time to display the final piece, the writing prompt, like a paintbrush, needs to be put back in the drawer. But the brushstrokes, the ghostly outlines of the prompt, remain.

Which reminds me of this classic poem by Frank O'Hara (1926-1966):

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.


So how do you know when to keep the lines generated by the writing prompt, and when to jettison them? I don't know yet. I just know that in the future I'll be careful when considering my "final" version of a piece generated by a prompt. I'll look to see whether the lines responding directly to the prompt have become an integral part of the medium or have remained a tool, and decide what to do then.

Kudos for Judy

Check out this insightful review in the Japan Times of Judy Halebsky's debut full-length poetry collection, Sky=Empty, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize 2009 (New Issues Poetry & Prose). Reviewer Steve Finbow puts Judy's work in historical perspective, and he showcases a few of Judy's inimitable lines. Well worth your time to have a look!

Book Publication Update

For all you patient folks who have been wondering "Whatever happened to that book Jessica said would be coming out in 2011?" here's the update. After a number of unavoidable delays, I have a new release date for The Insomniac's Weather Report. It is set to be published on or before March 15th by Three Candles Press. So stayed tuned. I'll keep you posted.

Ear Graffiti

All my life I've misheard things. "Did you feed the dog?" becomes to my ears "The toaster's in the garage," for example. When I turn to the people in my life and ask, "Ummmm, what did you just say?" they often won't tell me until I confess to what it is I think I've heard. From long association with me, they know my brain has come up with something improbable enough to alert me that nonsense is afoot, and they enjoy my discomfiture, good-naturedly enough that I've begun to enjoy it too. Sort of.

In the last ten years I've begun misreading things too. Once, for example, "peasants storming the Braille" caught my attention, and sent me back to the original, which had "Bastille" instead of "Braille." Recently I read the title of a novel (by Janette Turner Hospital) as The Last Michigan instead of The Last Magician, although I suppose it could have been The Last of the Mohicans too, only it wasn't.

So I keep a list of my more fantastical misreads and mishears and I insert them into poems. Why not? I might as well get some advantage from my periodical states of confusion. Sometimes when I've got a long list of misreads and mishears, I challenge myself to get them all into a single poem. And occasionally literary journals publish these poems. Go figure.

Apparently I'm not the only one who does this. Last month I read this in Andrei Codrescu's The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape:

"Mishearing is the true aristocrat of hearing. By extension, so are mistakes. How far into the new truth can one be taken by mistakes? 'Never let a typo go,' Ted Berrigan advised me, 'it may be the threshold of the new, the door into the unexpected.' Mishearing. Mistakes. Misunderstandings. Misgivings. Miscastings. All the pretty misses of discovery."

Because I am raising bilingual sons, I read a lot about second language acquisition. Some years ago I read (and I've forgotten the reference, I apologize) that one of the struggles for second language learners is the inability of their brains to fill in sounds that get lost in conversation. Background noise and simple movement in positioning of mouths and ears (the turning of the head, for example) mean that all of us miss syllables now and then when we are listening, but we often have no idea we missed a small bit of something, because our brains go ahead and fill it in, as though we had heard it in the first place. From years of hearing and reading things in context, our brains can often guess what syllable we missed, and whisper it to us. However, the brains of second language learners don't have years of examples stored up in their new language, and their brains cannot fill in the blanks, so they notice when they've missed a couple of phonemes here and there. They can't keep up.

So what does that mean for me, that my brain goes ahead and fills in the syllables I miss with, um, nonsense rather than searching out the most likely words that fit the context? According to Andrei Codrescu and Ted Berrigan (and who could be in better company than that?) it's a good thing, a chance to discover and maybe to create. I agree. I just wonder how many mishears and misreads I don't catch because they seem probable enough. Now that's scary.