Annotations and more annotations

Since I'm the first of us to start and I've already been tasked with things, I have to share how hard it is to annotate.

First, of course, I'm really reticent to say things like: have you even thought of a complete rewrite?

More often than not, if I find a logical flaw in my work, I'm all over rewriting completely, but if you don't know me, it probably comes off as meaner than intended. So I attack a couple of things that I find myself thinking about in my own work.

A teacher friend of mine told me to pick only two things because if I attack more it appears like a personal attack, even if it isn't.

So I have to posit this question to the group: how much criticism is too much? Should you reserve careful reading and annotation only to those people you know and love? And if you find the premise of the work to be offensive simply on the face of it, how do you even start to approach that?

decision: made.

Well, after a very long spring, as Tanya and Erika know, I finally made my own decision about the creative writing MFA: I will be attending the University of Minnesota. It's a three year program with a TAship--this means tuition waiver, health insurance, and a stipend. Whew. (I'll get to teach literature, composition, and creative writing to college kids! Wait... wasn't I just one myself?)

My other choices had been: FSU, Emerson, Bennington, Vermont College, Pacific University, Antioch, Stonecoast, New England College, Alaska, and Goddard. A lot of great adventures in these other universities and schools, but the U of MN made the most sense for me.

I hope this spring is treating you all well. Here, we had a snow day yesterday, and it has melted mostly, leaving muck for the dogs to trail in. I saw Mary Oliver on Sunday night and was completely enamored. Matthea Harvey and Mary Jo Bang are also coming out during poetry month, among others, and I think on Saturday I'm going to Alex Lemon's book release party. Plenty of fun to be had in the cold of the Midwest!

Missing you all.

xox

Where I'm headed this year...

Off to Bennington for the MFA program, it seems. Got the phone call Monday and I've never been quite so pleased that what I want and what I need seem to align themselves.

Getting out of my own way has never felt so good.

Hello

Hello all! I would like for you to take a moment and visit either of these two blogs I am now working on. They are a great way to be informed about the Miami community and also stay involved with your own.
http://jesswritez.blogspot.com/
http://imcreativeimpact.blogspot.com/

Take a look at the website for Imagine Miami, a non- profit organization, and find out ways to improve your community. http://www.imaginemiami.org/
Hope all is well and feel free to contact me with any questions.

-Jessica Gomez

minnesota book awards: reader's choice

Hello all:

Just wanted to point out the Minnesota Book Awards' Readers Choice voting is going on all through March. While I don't want to sway you, the reason why I know about this is because my friend Eireann Lorsung's music for landing planes by has been nominated. I encourage you to go and vote; I think a book of poetry, be it hers or someone else's, ought to win out this year!

All you have to do is click here and scroll down to vote!

my tally, too :)

In:
- Emerson (early Feb, by mail)
- Goddard (mid Feb, by phone)
- New England College (mid Feb, by phone)
- Vermont College (mid Feb, by phone)
- Pacific University (today, by mail)
- Florida State University (today, by phone)

poetry and poems

i heard back from new england
i got in!
havent heard back from the other two, my fingers
are crossed...
heres a poem thats still a draft...
xoxo
e

Fairytale Wedding

I am in a violet wedding dress with bullet holes
something seems out of place
Everyone else are wearing caps and gowns

There’s an audience applauding no one
Mother and Father are dressed in Sunday’s
finest; there’s a stain of something
resembling split pea soup
on Father’s tie

I try saying I think we are supposed
to be at the church at seven
but raspberry bubbles come out of my eyes
my mouth is sewn shut with licorice sticks
the color of my grandmothers cheeks
when she was seventeen, a raven haired vixen
from the old country, getting fat on ice cream and love

She will teach you her secrets–
how to make a man fall for you
Lust, she will tell you is the trick
Make him desire you, and cook your way into his soul

The groom is headless
and he’s not wearing any socks
The maid of honor is fucking your brother
It’s almost June
grandmother says, You look a little rosy
a little plumper and juicy, I could almost eat you up
I want to stick that beautiful bouquet of calla lilies up her ass

Run away before my life is over
this is not a fairytale
He is not the one

speaking of valentines day...

here's one i wrote on the first day of new poems week with sharon olds awhile back–
read it the other nite for anitvalentines salon, if any of you find your way to ny, pls let me know, the salon was huge success, already planned for march and starting april, was all sorts of fun
which i needed bc i just finished applying for low residency MFA programs, and was up till four am everynite, i planned it a little late!! hope everyone is well
xoxo
e

I’m Hooked

They married last night
Jenny and Richard
I hate them in their happiness–

Their journey begins
Dreams and fairytales

I’m hooked on the ventilator of life

Hatred and fear
I want to poison their love
Make them feel like me

stream of consciousness from Nura, hoping for a snow day

Thursday night on my mother's 81st birthday,
the telephone florist couldn't locate yellow roses
and so I think she's unhappy with the sunflowers.
I'm watching Celebrity Rehab after the Obama Clinton debate-
ice cream and TV have been my best friends this month-
February is very February and without the poetry class
I teach I wouldn't write anything but emails at work
but I made a promise to write a poem a week, none of which
are worth posting but it's good to keep the pen moving
toward the notion of a poem- like praying during crises of faith.
The lunar eclipse last night,
the promise of freezing rain,
all the Valentine chocolates vanished,
at least I'm not on Celebrity Rehab.
I myself love sunflowers.

Love, Nura and Yay Molly! and THANK YOU Erica I love reading your work on the blog.

To Red

My skin is a thousand eyes
and my body a liquid
yes to your dropping stone. . .
and in the orbits of those widening
ripples
our children nestle,
unconceived.

Saw this today and thought of you guys...

The Kiss

by Stephen Dunn

She pressed her lips to mind.
—a typo
How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.
She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.
Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?
I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,
defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

the waiting game

I got accepted to Emerson's MFA program this weekend, and I've learned that Cornell did phone calls (which means I will get a rejection shortly). Two down, sixteen to go. I'm dancing about with anxiety.

The Boogeyman In My Closet

Hi all...
another dream poem
busy here
things are good
if you want to see my work online go to http://www.sundress.net/wickedalice/contents19.html
and also there's http://www.sundress.net/wickedalice/contents14.html
i also have a lot of creative non fiction which is elsewhere but will put that up later
hope everyone is doing well
if anyone is on myspace pls let me know, i have blog there i keep daily

erika

The Boogeyman Living In My Closet

Enters me through my pinky toe
each night at midnight

Sleeping with one eye open
is not as easy as it sounds
one foot supplanted to the ground

How does he get inside my head?
I want to banish him to a land of
my choosing, where little girls with
Barbies and tea parties would put him
in his place, shackle his pathetic little
body to a monstrous tree, perhaps allow
a lion to use him for a lollipop or a latrine

The buzzing in my brain will not end
I feel like I am going insane
this brain, on fire
man for hire, take your ass back into the night
you’re not wanted here–

When I put my head onto my pillow
I am afraid of sleep
cannot close my eyes
afraid of what’s underneath the bed
of what is inside my head
I don’t know if he is me, or I am thee
what is real, or fantasy
slumber, lullaby
hush little girl, don’t say a word…

2 things

Hey all:

1. Major Jackson did a photo essay from the Poetry Festival and a whole bunch of my images came up. It's on the Poetry Foundation's website here. You can view my full photo set of the experience here.

2. Two of my poems were published today here.

Hope you are all doing well! I'm in dire need of a nap. :)

xox

I was amazed after I finally posted what I backwash of shame I felt. It took four days to work up the courage to come back to the site. So now I'm here I wrote this incantation. It's not really a poem. It's a blurt.

Incantation

Ask.
Knock.
Squeak.
Speak.
The word is strong.
Sound is essential.

Defy the shame.

Come out.
Show up.
Dig up the talents.
Release the light.
Dare.
Vote.
Shout.
Shine
Be still.
Be radiantly,
quietly,
articulately,
completely
yourself.

Hello

Hello,

I am so happy to see all of you have kept in touch. I am new to the blogger world and I just created my own account (very exciting)! I hope to post some of my poetry soon to see what you all think of my writing. I hope you are all well and continue with the creative spirit you showed at the festival.

:0) Jessica

Friday Evening February First

Gratitude for the poems and messages you have posted on our blog. Reading them lets me be with you all again and inspires me to write.

I think we are a rare group of poets, and I am sustained by us.

I rarely miss the past but the fact is that I miss our time together.

Nura

From Eliza, as she tries to learn how to post :)

Dear Friends:

I feel like a mid-night stalker: I don't know how to come out of the dark and actually post! So here I am commenting and filling up the airwaves.

But because my resivion has to do with my conflict about speaking and being heard I'm sending these three poems which are the middle of a set of six called "Revision." They're a response to our gathering and my inability to revise the last poem I brought to the group.

Take Note

What’s alive is never what you think.
What you think is already dead.
No, these words are mis-said.
What’s alive is in between. . .
like Kachinas. . .
stepping down. . .
or across. . . living as they do in the cracks
of dimensions
so they appear – if you happen to see them – spindly,
loose-limbed, gigantic.

Everything you see is questionable.
What you think, more so.

But I still lift my head to look out
the door at the river roaring
with Saturday boats.


The Teacher

I’m sure we all wrote a hundred poems
the Saturday after Malena’s workshop.
Twelve disciples in a room communing
with each other’s work.

What else could we do?

Gurdjieff says we go to church for the sex
of gathering bodies, the electricity of minds
brought to attention. . .
. . . and her stillness,
her clarity
held up before us.


The Work We Do
(Sunday)

1.
My brother the engineer builds giant buoys
that ping the China Sea. Counting fish,
the government says.

2.
Like a whale sounding his sea, mapping passage, gauging
threats - where shallows lie, where canyons rise, or fall,
where others group, where dangers lurk - we gather feedback,
collect echoes, test the limits of our event.

3.
After that first gulp, that first smacking cry, the falling panic
at the grave grip of a dry sea, the hard edged world of flat echoes,
unbearable light, what comfort? Who responds late at night?
Are you angry her cries break your sleep, her aloneness echoing
your own?

4.
The buoy’s pings are so loud they stun whales,
my brother says regretfully,
at the end of his career.

5.
If I squeeze into a small enough box, if I muffle
the sound, will my siblings be safe?
Will I?

These poems feel incidental, trivial. But the process of writing them was interesting.

Thanks to all, e.

Oh, my goodness! I'm here! After all that huffing and puffing and leaving stray comments.

Thank you all for that wonderful encounter. I've so enjoyed reading your posts and amazing poems. It's so good to have this venue. Thank you, Molly.

E.

I wrote a dozen poems the days after the workshop, and this is one of a series of six called "Revision." None of the poems have much gravitas, but they're playing with the event and the issues that troubled me about the poem I failed to revise.

The Teacher

I’m sure we all wrote a hundred poems
the Saturday after Malena’s workshop.
Twelve disciples in a room communing
with each other’s work.

What else could we do?

Gurdjieff says we go to church for the sex
of gathering bodies, the electricity of minds
brought to attention. . .
. . . and her stillness,
her clarity
held up before us.

State to State: Minnesota and New York poetry contest

Paddling and writing

Friends:

Yes, I'm still paddling through the Center of the Malenaite Constellation -- back at work but writing poetry every early morning. I will post, quite soon, a new poem and read what you have offered. I tried to write a combination of an incantation and a variation on repeated words, where I worked from different forms of the same root ("relic"). Ah, to be mysterious. . . Hope you are all doing well, and I think there's no doubt we need to have an Alternate Universe Party sometime at Ericka's house (yes, I know you don't want too many people. . .) Take care, all.

Jim

Latest poem for my fellow Malenaites

Forgiveness Returned for Her Black Sadness

Let me be where I am.

Let this bread, this morning, be their own ceremony.

Let me pass the gilt mirrors without looking.

When the lead mouth of fear clamps onto mine

and blasts her wind of rope and iron filings into me,

let my breath be forgiveness returned for her black sadness.

Let me leave the perfect round stone on the forest trail,

the wet starfish at the shoreline. Let me not forget

my last drink. Let me be kind.

I had a nightmare the sky had been sold for advertisements,

loud, colored beams of Gap and Coke projected onto the clouds.

Let the whole deal crash first. Let us abandon cleverness.

Let there be gentleness for the old bleached blond with her

stapled face, sending back her steak to the restaurant kitchen;

let us understand her deep love for the little dog back at the hotel.

At work, in the car, let me see the white classroom

and blue sky windows of Malena. Let poems

be cups of language made for holding silence.

Nura

Man In The Moon

Man In The Moon

Lamb chops and violins dancing in malcontent rivers
while figs furried mouths tell little white lies
razor sharp secrets beholden to no one
the man in the moon, creating chaotic synergy

Mother nursing lemons
I forgot the sugar–
Won’t you be a dear, and run to Jupiter
While you’re there, pick up a six pack of
Mars bars, and some wheat grass, oh, and
say hello to Aunt Lily, she’s the one with
three eyes and a hole where her heart used to be–

Fingers racing across the chords of time
unable to make sense of anything
stringing together sentences and sentencing
the universe through verse
They came two by two
Archaic creatures, abandoned because
of their religion or color or some such absurdity

This cosmos of creation
where salmons fly freely and cellos make babies
where Uncle Frank has two heads and Cousin James
wears skirts made of purple glazed bologna–
where speaking one’s mind won’t land one in jail

This is the universe I want to know
where I want my unborn babies to grow
Dancing rivers, man in the moon
mothers and brothers, held together by a paper thread
When I put my head down at night, this is what I dream of

special thanks to molly
the suggestion of taking a dream and writing about it as though
it wasnt a dream is fantastic
i've written two that i like and working on two others
my work is usually very concrete and brutal but i have vivid
imagination and can go nuts so this is fantastic! i love it–
i dont remember many dreams but the idea is enough, its just so much
fun, thank you, thank you! hope everyone is well
erika

After the Phone Company Layoff

... But somewhere between Malena describing her synethesia and my brother damning the flower guy at the club to the most center level of hell, reserved only for traitors, Nixon and Cheney, I couldn't resist and wrote this in the car on the way home...


After the Phone Company Layoff

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong. -- Sir Arthur Eddington

And what becomes of the man who sells flowers
In the tourist district at two in the morning
After the bars have been shuttered,
And the now emptied streets echo a longing?

Will Ed, the bartender still cleaning,
Offer him fingers of bourbon to oil his bones
In that dimmed bar, curtains drawn against knocking
Of the streetlights? When Ed asks that flower-man

How he came to his vocation,
Will the man remember when he was laid-off
From the phone company, how a once disavowed
Gift returned, and he shouldered that burden

His supernatural sensitivity to love,
A synesthesia which confuses love with a certain brilliance?

Will he tell him how he forded traffic's river
Once they were revealed, glistening among the rest of us?
How he lingered on the sidewalk,
Watched their walking away? How their rooted shadows
Tangled into each other and reluctantly followed?
How the woman smiled up at the man,
Twirled the stem between her fingers, oblivious to thorns?

Or would he fret for that couple he chased two blocks,
Crying out Flowers! Flowers! How they mistook
Insistence for madness? How he prays they won't learn late,
Leave behind a birthed and abandoned shining?

I imagine that he will consider these things yet merely shrug,
Gather up his black plastic pail, slouch toward his car.
He will lurch onward to a low, two-story weekly-rate motel
within a constellation of other cheap motels lining the boulevard
Doors opening outward to the flicker and drone of lightposts.

A woman is waiting for him there,
her arms aching for what is left,
each unclaimed blossoming.

missing you all

Dear Malenaites,

Home after many hours on planes and in airports with another poem under my heartbelt which I'll post here as soon as I finish tinkering. I loved our time together and felt so helped and well-tended by all of you. Many thanks and I am quite excited here to be writing on the very first blog of my life! (Is that the proper preposition- on the blog or is it in the blog?)
Much love, Nura

:)

To Post: Once you have logged in, you can post several ways. Immediately after logging in, you can click on the link that says "New Post" on it OR you can bring our blog up and click on the link in the upper left hand corner that also says "New Post." You'll get a new window that has a box in it--write to your heart's content, then click on the orange button at the bottom that says "Publish Post." Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any further questions!

oh yes, and this, from c.f.

Here's what Carolyn gave me recently--some exercises (my "homework") and some revision techniques:


Try writing poems using these exercises:

1. Write an “epistolary” poem, (the word is the same as the “epistles” or letters from the apostles in the new testament). This is a poem in the form of a letter to another person, often omitting the salutation (“dear....”) but in other respects, resembling a letter. The poet Richard Hugo wrote a number of these.

2. Write a poem in answer to a letter you receive from someone (or, if you read some interesting published letters, try answering one of them in the form of a poem).

3. Write a “persona” poem, in which you become someone else and speak in the poem as that person (Amelia Earhart? a Civil War nurse? a trapeze artist in the circus? Sir Walter
Raleigh?)

4. Choose eight or ten words at random from your “loved words” list and try writing a poem, quickly, in ten or twelve lines, using these words. Then check your list to see if there are any interesting substitutions you can make.

5. Take two poems you have written which are related in some way, cut the lines apart, and splice together a new version, then re-write the poem according to the new version, so that you produce one long poem.

6. Try writing a poem that provides instructions on how to get somewhere or do something (recipe, directions, assembly, or how to recover from a death, a lover, an addiction, etc.)

7. Write a poem that re-tells, or “transforms” a story or myth. (Try biblical stories, classical myths, fairy tales, etc.). Anne Sexton’s book “Transformations” might be a model for this.

8. Write poems “in the style of” poets from your anthology (that is, the private anthology of favorite poems you make as you read). (There should be a little italicized line, indented between the title and the text of the poem, saying “after so and so”.

9. Write a poem in which you tell what happens in a dream (without telling the reader it is a dream).

10. Write a series of short, linked poems, illuminating (without commentary) episodes from your memory of childhood.

11. Keep a travel diary on a trip (jotting down words, phrases, place names, events), and when you return write a sequence of poems which are dated in the form of a diary, and which illuminate your journey in some way.

12. Choose a work of prose that you especially admire, and, pulling phrases from that work, compose a poem from the phrases. Between the title and the text of the poem, insert an indented, italicized “credit line”--from “ “ by so and so”

13. Write a poem in which you begin by situating yourself in a particular place (on the roof of your house, in your room, etc.), describe that place, and then, by association, “travel” imaginatively somewhere else, and end the poem by returning to the place you are. The poem should be long enough that the reader is surprised to come back. John
Ashbery’s poem “Guadalajara” is a good model for this.

14. Write poems based on interesting black and white photographs from the past. Look
at photography books by Atget, Lange, Weston, Bourke-White, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, etc.

15. Research the history of your current home or hometown, and write a poem based on an interesting historic event you learn about. I once wrote about a fire which burned my town completely in 1872.


Revision suggestions:

1. Read each line of the poem separately, to be sure that it is interesting by itself. Cut words from the end of the line or add words from the beginning of the next line if you think it would improve the inherent meaning of the line.

2. Look at each word in the poem, and see if you can substitute a more interesting, specific word. Tree might become sycamore. River might become the Shenandoah. Bird might become gull, cardinal, finch, vulture.

3. Eliminate unnecessary commentary and description. If you have the word “snow,” then you already imply (and can eliminate sometimes) “winter,” “cold,” “icy” etc.

4. Be careful not to eliminate important articles (a, the, an) or conjunctions (and, but).
Or you your poem will read like a newspaper headline.

5. Check to see if the opening lines and closing lines are necessary. Sometimes the true poem begins most interestingly with the third line, and ends with the third from the last.

6. Check to see if all the stanzas or strophes are necessary. Sometimes you can cut the whole stanza, and strengthen the poem.

7. If the poem is in stanzas, sections, or parts, cut them into individual pieces and play with their arrangement. Sometimes the poem is better if arranged a different way (while keeping all the sections). Sometimes this is how you discover whether any can be cut.

8. Subject all adverbs to intense scrutiny (as to whether they are necessary) “ran quickly” might be better expressed as “hurried.”

9. Subject all adjectives to strong scrutiny (as to whether they are necessary) “white snow” is redundant. “Snow” would suffice all by itself. (“Black wind” , however, is interesting, because unusual, unexpected...)

10. Read the poem aloud several times, and mark with a highlighter pen those places which were more difficult to read (tongue-twisters). Examine them and see if you can improve them.

11. If you are not certain whether your poem is in proper syntax and is grammatical, type the poem out as prose and check the sentences for completion and proper usage, then re-line.

12. Check to see that the sentences within the poem (which might go on for several lines), are, in fact, complete sentences (or have a good reason why not).

13. Try writing the poem in a different “person”— switch from “he” to “I” or vice versa.

14. Check the verb tenses to see whether they are consistent and/or correct.

15. See if compound verbs can become simple verbs (for compression) “I would run” might be able to become “I ran”, etc.

16. Check for spelling errors.

17. Check for consistency in spacing between lines.

18. Check to see whether the poem is well placed on the page.

19. In sending poems out to be published, always send clean, correct versions.

20. Break any of the above rules except #19 if you think it is necessary to the poem.

What happens when I leave and where I go

Contact information: Tanya.Jarrett@gmail.com


Blog info: http://mathilde.vox.com/

(Regrettably, I haven't really blogged much at all this year, but there's about a year and some change of archive which is personal, and sometimes farsical and funny... )

This is probably the best place to post a copy of the Joe Bolton poem I mentioned earlier. Being from Nashville, this one is close to my heart.

LINES FOR HANK WILLIAMS
by JOE BOLTON
The way his high voice would break and break down,
Beautifully lonesome, lost…who once wrote
A song at gunpoint in a hotel downtown,
Fingers shaking to hold the simple chords.
The world was one long night, endless Nashvilles,
A jambalaya of women, whiskey, and pills.
At the Opry they poured coffee down his throat
Backstage before the show, and he’d cough
And rise, trying to remember his own words.
And once, driving through the dark of the night
In a Cadillac with Minnie Pearl, he broke
Into “I Saw the Light,” then broke it off,
His voice losing volume as he spoke:
“There ain’t no light, Minnie. There ain’t no light.”



He plays with the form a bit in this one, but this is the one I could find. The book I can find in print is Last Nostalgia. His work manages to repay me for every ounce of attention that I give it; I can't recommend it enough.

me, online

I just wanted to let you know about a few places where you can find me online. I'll probably put up a sidebar where we can find each other, but it seems kind of silly to just have me right now:

- my homepage
- my day-to-day blog
- my poetry blog

Also: You can see "Harry Houdini" here and purchase your own copy of the postcard here.

I especially wanted to call attention to my poetry blog because of the sidebar. I have a ton of resources listed in the right hand column, many of which I hope are useful to you! I also have put up links to New Pages, where you can find wonderful resources for literary magazines, MFA programs, etc. and a link to Shaw Guides, in case you are interested in another workshop experience, just in another geographical location. Also in the sidebar are links to writing retreats (which I am dying to go on... we have one right in Red Wing called the Anderson Center, and I highly recommend you look into it, especially since you'll have a tour guide right there in town!), grants and fellowships (which we all could use!), etc. It's certainly a work in progress, but I hope it's helpful.

Welcome!

Welcome all, to our poetry blog. I hope this is a good way to get in touch with one another, find out how everyone else is doing--send each other good links and whatnot.

If you have any questions on how to post, please let me know. Once you've logged into Blogger, you should see a screen where you can "view blog" or create a "new post." (You need to log in to post.) Simply write what you wish and click on "publish post" when you are done! It's fairly easy.

If you want to create a link, then you simply highlight the text you want to have linked and click on the green button that has always reminded me of a turtle head with glasses (if you hover over it with the mouse, it will say "link") and type in the web address. If you want to upload a photograph, you can click on the button between the spellcheck (abc with a check mark) and the film strip (which I haven't used yet, but I think that's pretty self explanatory). To leave comments, which everyone loves, you click on the part of the post that says "0 comments" (or 1 comment or whatever it is) and you can type in a response to the post.

If you think of anything you'd like to see added to the sidebar, please let me know!

I look forward to hearing from everyone. :)