NaPoWriMo Day…Oh, who am I kidding?

So instead of writing poems the last few days, I’ve been working on a lyric essay project. I started it back in January, with the goal of building up a book-length body of poemy prose on the topic of adoption. As part of that project, I wrote some material about horses. Now, I’m shaping and adding to that material in order to fulfill a related goal, of having an excerpt ready to send out to journals by May 1. Here’s a little excerpt of that excerpt:

***

The places Stormy and Poco carried me to—the places on the edge of Reno where a person could ride a horse—were mostly broken places. Broken trail, or trails leading to places broken from having trails leading to them. The trails were power line roads, maintenance roads along irrigation ditches, dirt access tracks leading to small reservoirs or cattle-trampled springs that fed the irrigation ditches. Burned-out rangeland and fire breaks. They were rutted and rocky off-road roads, roads leading to the shot-up shooting ranges out in the sage. Always lots of rocks, always shattered glass. Sometimes, snakes.

NaPoWriMo Day 7.4 (Day 18 for Everyone Else)

Northern Harrier. Photo credit: National Wildlife Federation

Today, the fourth of my poems is published in the online journal Cascadia Review. All four poems (titled “Went Hiking,” “Strange Bird,” “One Way,” and ”Day After Thanksgiving”) are now presented on the home page, along with my “Statement of Place” in the Cascadia bioregion.

These four poems are also included in my chapbook, Impossible Lessons, which will be ready to meet the world in about four more weeks.

(Coming some time soon: NaPoWriMo, Day 8! I think!)

I Feel Like the Luckiest Poet on the Planet

You guys! Amazing presents are falling out of the sky and bonking me on the head! Here are three of them:

1) Remember when I mentioned that MoonPath Press had accepted my chapbook manuscript to publish this spring? Well, it’s almost time. Editor and publisher Lana Hechtman Ayers, who is magic, tells me that by early next month, the chapbook, titled Impossible Lessons, will be ready. I’m going over the final proofs this week, and soon I hope to have the cover image to show you.

2) Four of my poems from that chapbook are being published this week by the online journal Cascadia Review, one each day, today through Thursday.  My thanks to Dana Guthrie Martin, editor, and Joannie Stangeland, poetry editor, for selecting my work and curating it so beautifully.

3) Last year, the monthly online journal Conversations Across Borders published two of my poems (here and here). In a couple of weeks I get to be part of a reading of Bellingham CAB authors, including Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor and Paul Piper. It’ll be Saturday, April 27,  4:00 p.m., at Village Books in Fairhaven. Part of CAB‘s mission is to support educational and writing-related charities worldwide; currently, the editors are donating CAB proceeds to Cura Secondary School, which provides education to children orphaned by AIDS in Cura, Kenya. You can help support CAB and its work by subscribing or by purchasing selected pieces individually.

Further details, and poems, to follow.

Cheers,
Jennifer

The Blog Hop Hops Along to Marilyn Cavicchia

Today, Chicago poet and editor Marilyn Cavicchia carries on the Blog Hop by posting about The Next Big Thing in her writing. Click here to read her delightful interview about what she’s working on!

Marilyn Cavicchia is an editor at the American Bar Association and a freelance editor at home. She received a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in journalism, both from Ohio University. For about 15 years after college, she wrote hardly any poetry. Since resuming in 2009, she has had about a dozen poems published in literary journals. Her next challenge: chapbooks.

Bad Blogger

Hello, Dear Readers–

I’ve been away too long! The past few weeks have been filled with poetry-related excitement. Here’s where I’ve been:

• Participating in a Mother’s Day reading at an outdoor sculpture garden. Along with six other Bellingham poets, I read poems celebrating mothers while the sun shone, the rhododendrons bloomed, and the visual art luminesced. Since most of my own poems about motherhood involve vomit and being an unwitting casualty of the Mommy Wars, I had to go looking for poems more appropriate to the occasion. I found wonderful pieces to share by May Sarton, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Martha Silano.
• Studying Martha Silano’s collections Blue Positive and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. The latter, especially, in addition to being a delightful and thought-provoking read, fascinated me for the way Silano manages to arrange the poems into a sequence that somehow–brilliantly–interweaves pieces about motherhood, faith, aliens, sex, cosmology, and consumer culture. I went to school on the structure of this book, since at the same time, I was also…
• Reworking my book-length manuscript to include some of the poems I wrote during NaPoWriMo. Realizing that the sequence of poems I’d come up with for my manuscript last fall was actually a tangled mess, I struggled mightily to find a new arrangement that makes any kind of sense out of my poems about theodicy, origin myths, the food chain, and cognition. Adding to the urgency were two May deadlines for first-book competitions–one of which I’d already submitted the Messy Manuscript to a few months back, but withdrew to substitute the New and Improved.
• Receiving acceptances by two literary journals! Getting my first acceptance by a paying market is a thrill–I’m a professional writer now! The complicated part was completing the mountain of paperwork attendant upon becoming an independent contractor with the State of Texas (via the public university where this literary journal is housed). In addition to signing up to receive the honorarium check, I also may have agreed to donate organs and possibly acquired licensure to drive a hazardous-materials rig. I’m not sure–the accountant I had to hire is still figuring out what I committed to. (In any case, my apologies in advance to Reno King, whose tax dollars are probably at work here. If it’s any consolation, the accountant is very deserving.) More details as press time approaches!
• Attending the Skagit River Poetry Festival. This is the west-coast sister of the Dodge Festival, held every two years in charming La Conner, Washington. During the three days, I took in readings and panel discussions by Jeremy Voigt, Christopher Howell, Chris Dombrowski, Linda Bierds, Rachel Rose, Mark Schafer, Marie Howe, Bob Hicok, Ellen Bass, Lorna Crozier, Jericho Brown, Caroline Forché, Tony Hoagland, and Nikki Giovanni. It was a feast of beautiful and nourishing words. And on the final day, I attended a terrific writing workshop with Tony Hoagland, whose book What Narcissism Means to Me (in addition to having the world’s funniest title) gave me permission, when I first read it four years ago, to engage in serious play with poetic voice.
• Learning how to levitate. Actually, this was completely effortless; the gift of walking on air was given to me at the Skagit River Poetry Festival, by a small-press editor I deeply respect, who asked, out of the blue, to see my book manuscript. So I’ve spent the past week re-re-reworking the thing to submit there. In the immortal words of Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes, not the Reformation), “Further bulletins as events warrant”!

It’s good to be back here with you, blogger friends!

Cheers to you,
Jennifer

Appetizer for Thought: Myths as Vestigial Visions

This past year, American Poetry Review has been running a series of interesting essays by poet Doreen Gildroy titled “Poetry and Mysticism.” I’ve been enjoying the series, and I’m particularly struck by an idea Gildroy includes in the third installment, in the May/June 2011 issue, which I’ve finally had a chance to read.

In this segment, Gildroy addresses, among other subjects, the idea that myths are vestigial visions:  stories created to preserve some glimmers of a revelation, a moment of seeing and expanded understanding. Gildroy asserts that the storyteller seeks out not just the story, but more importantly the storytelling state.  The story is a by-product, and thus potentially useful as a sign of the storyteller’s vision–a map of a visionary experience. She quotes painter Robert Henri, author of The Art Spirit:  ”If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented.”

What a bold and tantalizing theory! Robert Henri’s assertion that the arts in general were invented to preserve experiences of transcendence goes even further than Doreen Gildroy’s linking of mythological narratives to such experiences. I wonder whether these ideas are echoed by scholars in related fields (mythology, cultural anthropology, depth-psychology, archaeology, etc.). Have any of you run across these ideas before? I’m curious to see what else may be out there along these lines.

Well, Bless Your Buttons!

I am thrilled and amazed by the response of readers to my posts on this new blog. Thank you for all your Subscriptions and Likes! Fellow and sister bloggers, please tell me:  does the happy rush ever diminish, of being notified by WordPress that your posts are being read, and liked, and subscribed to? And more basically, is it weird to be so sublimely tickled by this feedback?

Perhaps all those rejection slips have gotten to me in ways I didn’t recognize (on average, I get just two poem acceptances per year from lit mags), but I cannot express how superbly gratifying it is to know that something I write is actually being read by other human beings.  Marvelous.

Henceforth I will be addressing you not as the hypothetical Reader, but as actual–plural–Readers.  Dear Readers.