tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86452578202860499792024-02-18T23:33:23.558-08:00Writer's Island• Poetry • Nonfiction • Sci-fi • <br>• Art • Cyclone Press •Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.comBlogger165125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-29360848854116996582023-02-14T16:52:00.005-08:002023-02-18T16:14:52.629-08:00Three Books That Broke the Reading Drought, Part 3<p><i>In parts 1 and 2, I talked about two books that finally ended my reading blahs at the end of last year—Larry McMurtry’s wonderful travelogue </i><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2022/11/three-books-that-broke-reading-drought.html" target="_blank">Roads</a><i> and Miles Franklin’s influential feminist novel </i><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2022/12/three-books-that-broke-reading-drought.html" target="_blank">My Brilliant Career</a><i>. Next up is a book I didn’t want to even think about.</i></p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><b><a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005148" target="_blank"><i>Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy</i></a><br /></b>Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano<br />(Norton, 2020)</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnw2OxKs7oWM5MzvASOEbdBJT6NztmlqXKzNobzzaDttBWVFNKiAH7Us-H_Z2mKs2hy4nI7nKg7ptLQbwChkZCeEU397sDmH5gVJ1ojj_mlNnT5KnQpP2_xo8L08G2zf_E_copcud-joUVWyjK9HWRqBsytVQdByZrOya3zDC93YXiYbWfWWbW8Ijd/s475/Fire%20in%20Paradise%2051926961._SX318_SY475_.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="314" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnw2OxKs7oWM5MzvASOEbdBJT6NztmlqXKzNobzzaDttBWVFNKiAH7Us-H_Z2mKs2hy4nI7nKg7ptLQbwChkZCeEU397sDmH5gVJ1ojj_mlNnT5KnQpP2_xo8L08G2zf_E_copcud-joUVWyjK9HWRqBsytVQdByZrOya3zDC93YXiYbWfWWbW8Ijd/s320/Fire%20in%20Paradise%2051926961._SX318_SY475_.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>This book sat on my shelf for about a year because I didn’t want to read it. I sort of wanted to grok its content—the story of how the town of Paradise, California, suffered a massive wildfire that basically destroyed it in November 2018. But I also just didn’t want to touch it. My own valley in southern Oregon went through a similar fire in September 2020 that destroyed more than 2,500 residences, killed three people, and left thousands homeless—an experience that, let me tell you, you never really understand until you see it and smell it and listen, horrified, to the police scanner all day and all night while it burns. And I didn’t even lose my home—the people who lost everything had an unimaginably worse experience than I did. Many of my friends and co-workers lost their homes, and I also know people who lost everything in the Paradise fire, which is just a couple of hours south of here. Fire, fear, evacuation notices—in this part of the West, we go though that every summer, and it is so awful that it always makes me question whether it’s a good idea to live here. I didn’t want to relive that night after night by reading a book about it before bedtime.<p></p><p></p><p>But a radio journalist friend gave me a copy of <i>Fire in Paradise</i>; her station had interviewed the authors, Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, and she said they’d written a compelling story and knew what they were talking about. So I finally took a deep breath and opened it up one night—and wow, what a gripping and enlightening read it turned out to be.</p><p></p><p>Gee and Anguiano, both reporters for the <i>Guardian</i>, interviewed hundreds of people just after that tragic day in Paradise—residents, city council members, the mayor, firefighters, police officers, and hospital workers. And what they assembled is a multidimensional, minute-by-minute account of the fire as it started in a steep, remote spot the firefighters instantly knew would be trouble, and then as high winds drove the inferno right through the heart of the town, only to swirl around and drive it back over parts that it had missed earlier. In other words, everybody’s nightmare. </p><p></p><p>Honestly, if you lived through that fire or one like it, you might not want to read <i>Fire in Paradise</i>. Many times I had to put the book down and catch my breath; it hit much too close to home, too close to everything I’m thinking as I pack up my evacuation boxes at the start of every summer and set them by the front door (because I know people who only had minutes to get out before their houses burned down). But the book also gave me a lot to think about: primarily, how the mayor and town council of Paradise had an evacuation plan in place, much like the one we have here in my town, that divided the city into zones so the emergency office could issue alerts by zone and get people out in a relatively orderly manner and prevent traffic gridlock. And then the fire, whipped by 60-mile-an-hour winds, trashed their plans by raging right through the center of town, pushing everyone out at once. And they ended up with exactly the gridlock everyone had feared, and dozens of people died. At one point in the book, the mayor says the evacuation plan they had actually saved some lives—it was much better than nothing—but there’s simply no way to evacuate a town of 25,000 people all at the same time. We talk about that all the time in my town, which is roughly the same size as Paradise, with an interstate hemming it in on one side and steep mountains on the other, and just two main exit routes—one to the north, one to the south. </p><p></p><p><i>Fire in Paradise</i> doesn’t provide answers or prescriptive advice about wildfires; in fact, the authors don’t go very far into the origins, natural and manmade, of our ever-hotter megafires here in the western U.S. (I think <i>The Big Burn</i> covers that, but I have yet to make it through that book.) They do spend some time delving into PG&E’s tarnished safety record, including the many aging high-voltage power line towers that, like the one that caused the Paradise fire, are overdue for replacement. And the book’s short foray into the tangled, illogical business of public utilities is so fascinating (and horrifying) that it deserves a book of its own. (Are you listening, Michael Lewis? Please write that one.) This is a book that makes me wish I could live to be 500 years old so I’d have time to study all the things I didn’t learn in my youth: forestry, geology, how water systems and electrical utilities work, and so on.</p><p></p><p>But the most indelible ingredient in <i>Fire in Paradise</i> is the residents who fled the fire and lived to tell about it, including some who miraculously sheltered while the fire burned right over them, and many of whom lost loved ones. Their stories are literally stranger than fiction—I mean, there are moments that are simply incredible, but they actually happened, the kind of thing you can’t just talk about in a casual conversation. Some writer—Fitzgerald?—once said that novels are written about things people don’t talk about at the dinner table. This book is filled with those stories, too intense to share with just anyone. So there’s an intimacy to the book too, these people revealing these hard stories to us. You’re left with a deep empathy for what they went through—and that’s a testament to the way these two authors wove these experiences together with care and respect. I’d read anything they’ve written. This book will stay with me for a long time.</p><br /><div><br /></div>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-88252099783048380842022-12-17T13:20:00.004-08:002022-12-17T13:20:49.958-08:00Three Books That Broke the Reading Drought, Part 2Continuing our tale of the book lover who somehow lost her love for books, I was in a bit of despair after finishing Larry McMurty's travelogue <i>Roads</i> (which I gushed all over <a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2022/11/three-books-that-broke-reading-drought.html" target="_blank">in Part 1 of this blog series</a>). Maybe <i>Roads</i> was a one-time thing, I thought; maybe I'd go right back to the book blahs. So I grabbed one off my shelf more or less at random, an older copy of Miles Franklin's <i>My Brilliant Career</i> that I'd found at a Friends of the Library sale* in Medford, Oregon.<div><br /></div><div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCyeQARgwA3QnG4ZPhD4BYyrTvlA7p1Vev4q6rJo_YK_wvHPBEseb4PalMvlyPokrX7Tsvqh4YYAw3MD3BzOS-xxXwvjImHduYAlC9m674fgJjHp5n_5CDacqBqBwqlP8GZpAGkczK8LOEvWC123x1iuh4yEMBMGXXjxxPSJHVDfHk9TtWKnHt75R/s1512/My%20Brilliant%20Career%20IMG_9262.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1512" data-original-width="896" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmCyeQARgwA3QnG4ZPhD4BYyrTvlA7p1Vev4q6rJo_YK_wvHPBEseb4PalMvlyPokrX7Tsvqh4YYAw3MD3BzOS-xxXwvjImHduYAlC9m674fgJjHp5n_5CDacqBqBwqlP8GZpAGkczK8LOEvWC123x1iuh4yEMBMGXXjxxPSJHVDfHk9TtWKnHt75R/s320/My%20Brilliant%20Career%20IMG_9262.jpg" width="190" /></a></div>I remembered fondly but vaguely the 1979 film starring Judy Davis, which I saw in the 1980s during my very impressionable community-college days. But I hadn’t realized the origin behind this 1901 novel (the story of which you can read in the “new introduction” to the 1980 edition). This tale of a fiery girl growing up in the farmlands of Australia was written by a 16-year-old named Stella Franklin, who took her grandfather’s name, Miles, as a male pseudonym since it was tough going for female authors at the time. The book was picked up by a publisher when Franklin was in her early 20s, it sold well immediately, and then started to create problems for Franklin and her family when readers mistook it for an autobiography, thinking she’d basically trashed her relatives in some sort of tell-all. Stung by the notoriety—and maybe also by a male literary critic who theorized that the girl in the book, and by extension, Franklin herself, must be mentally ill—Franklin withdrew <i>My Brilliant Career</i> from publication and basically kept it in a drawer for the rest of her life. She went on to publish many more novels and became one of Australia’s preeminent writers. <i>My Brilliant Career</i> was finally published again after her death in 1954, and had another resurgence of popularity. It’s now regarded as an early feminist novel, and it’s unlike anything from that era that I’ve read before.</div><div><br /></div><div>What I love about <i>My Brilliant Career</i> is the voice of the protagonist, Sybylla. She makes bad decisions, hurts the people around her, and is so disagreeable that even Judy Davis, who played her in the movie, said she didn’t like the character. But man, Sybylla—well, Miles Franklin—had a thing with words. There are passages in the novel where Sybylla waxes poetic for a full paragraph about the way a creek looks, or a sunset, or a chair in a shady spot where it’s 110 degrees in the shade. (It’s often 110 in the shade where she lives.) Those extravagant passages just knocked me out; I went back and read them over and over, they’re so beautiful. And she’s funny; I also laughed a lot. And she never does what you expect her to do; even when she’s screwing up royally, it’s because she’s taken another left turn to defy expectations. </div><div><br /></div><div>I’m sure there are scholarly dissertations about why this was a feminist manifesto, but what I saw, again and again, was a woman who had no interest in the constraints expected of her in that culture at that time—to marry well, of course, and to be dainty and quiet and behave herself so as not scare off the men. And to wait around for a man to determine what her life will be like. In a way, it was like seeing Larry McMurtry in <i>Roads</i>, audaciously writing about whatever the hell he wanted to write about; <i>My Brilliant Career</i> is about that kind of freedom of choice to follow your own path. But Sybylla doesn’t really have any outlet for those independent impulses, and the book doesn’t resolve nicely the way the movie does; she’s a woman stuck in her times who will probably always catch hell for her rebellion. At one point you begin to see that her mother and other female relatives may have had that spark at one time too; there are layers of subjugation and frustration running through most of the women in the book. But… again, it’s also funny. Very funny. I found it a delight from beginning to end, a world I was glad to settle back into—110 degrees and all—at the end of the day. Even when things are going horribly for Sybylla, there’s charm, absurdity, and a lot of unexpected warmth. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>In part 3, I’ll talk about a recent book in a totally different genre—</i>Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy<i>, by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">* Holy moly, people, if you're ever in Medford during one of those sales, get yourself over there. This was by far the biggest library sale I've ever seen, a huge meeting room filled with tables and boxes of books, spilling over into another room next door. Literally thousands of books, old and new, nicely divided into fiction, travel, history, classics, cookbooks. I picked up about five books (for like $10) on Saturday and liked it so much that I went back on Sunday because I'd heard some sale volunteers saying they had boxes stored away that they hadn't even opened yet. I found all sorts of new books the next day and got about five more.</span></div></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-75542746585123091212022-11-06T12:34:00.005-08:002022-12-17T13:22:22.942-08:00Three Books That Broke the Reading Drought, Part 1I had an odd phenomenon going on this year: I kept quitting books. I must have started 10 or 20 in a row—books that looked great, things I’d been wanting to read—and then got 30 or 40 pages into them, and put them down. I just lost interest and couldn’t get it back. A terrible case of the reading blahs. <div> </div><div>This happened enough that I wondered if my eyesight was going, or maybe something was wrong with my brain. Or could it be that I’d just fallen out of love with reading? Like when you go on a date with somebody who’s really great, but in the end, they do *nothing* for you down in the body? Could it be that the thrill muscle just didn’t thrill anymore? </div><div> </div><div>And then, much like dating, I found the right book and the thrill muscle made its return. And weirdly, I found the thrill three times in a row—three books that broke the reading drought and were so good that here I am, foisting little reviews of them on you, thinking maybe they’ll thrill you too. Here’s the first one; I’ll publish the other two in separate posts. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Roads-Driving-Americas-Great-Highways/dp/0684868857/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3IFUEN9UFC0J8&keywords=roads+larry+mcmurtry&qid=1667693730&s=books&sprefix=roads+larry+mcmurtry%2Cstripbooks%2C164&sr=1-1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="893" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPpWei49nEFel4lvJG1kkFndCXrQdXIHB8EkE-GGrV5Aipva3uBelDtyBvaSm8bVMFf9TgQsHgTD28qJeXyGeBFvKRRlozvDJiWFSmjF-lPciAD287tAdz8zTa1BMawFiHlOo7lkOQOYSiB-O_A3A2_1E7gwb2ZqnYLI9OemlLy1i5KBCde8AxCtZD/s320/Roads%20616q5tH-FtL.jpg" width="210" /></span></a></div><b><i><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Roads-Driving-Americas-Great-Highways/dp/0684868857/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3IFUEN9UFC0J8&keywords=roads+larry+mcmurtry&qid=1667693730&s=books&sprefix=roads+larry+mcmurtry%2Cstripbooks%2C164&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Roads</a></span></i></b> </div><div>Larry McMurtry </div><div>(Touchstone, 2000) </div><div><br /></div><div>This slim book, like an old flame, had been sitting on one of my bookshelves for years. McMurtry’s <i>Lonesome Dove</i> is one of my all-time favorite books, and I’d read other things by him that I liked, but for some reason I’d never cracked this one open; it sounded too dour or something. One night, despairing of all the half-read books taunting me from my shelves, I pulled down this travelogue of the highways of America, and within five pages I was hooked—and the rapture lasted all the way to the end. And then I wished the book were twice as long so I could stay in that car with McMurtry for a few more days. </div><div><br /></div><div>The thing I kept thinking about <i>Roads</i> is that Larry McMurtry never would have gotten it published if he weren’t already famous. I mean, <i>Roads</i> is largely one man’s musing stretched over a framework of travel, as McMurtry drives the interstates north to south and east to west and back again. But the beauty is just that—the travel is the book’s premise, but the book is also not about travel. It’s about Larry McMurtry—his opinions, his memories, his passions (just listen to him go on about his love of the Plains), and his deep, long-earned research and knowledge about the American West. It’s also about people, some that he knew and some that he never met, who lived just off this or that highway. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the greatest thing about <i>Roads</i> is that it’s a book where a brilliant writer is writing about whatever the hell he wants to write about. That was what drew me most, and it’s also why I say he probably would never have had it published if he weren’t already a Pulitzer Prize winner and famous screenwriter (<i>The Last Picture Show</i>, <i>Terms of Endearment</i>); in today’s marketplace, I can’t imagine a publisher would take a chance on the musings of some unknown author. But these are Larry McMurtry’s musings, and he’s so good at it; it’s like he’s just talking in the car there with you. And thank goodness he was already famous, because now we have this exquisite book that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, and as full of surprises as your uncle who works as a rocket scientist and also likes bats and Burmese food and Soviet trivia. It is a seriously fun, eclectic book. A very beautiful book. It renewed my love of travel writing, and a few weeks later at a library sale I picked up two more travel books and two early McMurtry novels, so it also feeds a delicious addiction. Even though I’ve now read it, <i>Roads</i> is again back on my shelf because I know I’ll want to dip into it again for quick bites, à la carte, of its oddly meandering, wholly satisfying essays. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>Check out part 2 in this three-part series—my mini-review of </i><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2022/12/three-books-that-broke-reading-drought.html" target="_blank">My Brilliant Career</a><i><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2022/12/three-books-that-broke-reading-drought.html" target="_blank"> by Miles Franklin</a>.
</i></div><div><br /></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-52793719151965348342022-09-21T17:48:00.001-07:002022-09-21T17:57:31.504-07:00Art Imitates Art: Poetry Postcard Fest 2022 Wrap-Up<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjerQx9f_om5q98SueWegW2GTDlj63FfkvMOv0DnI2oL7OxZtC3hEjlyUjE1EvKsSRYjomInagxsXGPummPgsXcC7xcknCb9gB-Lsruax7_ldGLpUBHVq2ufjsZjTEr8aVEk5hEbFvWlaHOJ01w8U7neGX4NClXJrpIf9iWucAZi9zY3H2ccCfBok1/s432/IMG_9016%20copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="432" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjerQx9f_om5q98SueWegW2GTDlj63FfkvMOv0DnI2oL7OxZtC3hEjlyUjE1EvKsSRYjomInagxsXGPummPgsXcC7xcknCb9gB-Lsruax7_ldGLpUBHVq2ufjsZjTEr8aVEk5hEbFvWlaHOJ01w8U7neGX4NClXJrpIf9iWucAZi9zY3H2ccCfBok1/w320-h320/IMG_9016%20copy.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Cards I got from other Festers. Go, Group 9!</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left;">The annual August writing marathon is done—30 days, 31 poems written on 31 hand-painted postcards and mailed off to other poets and artists around the country (and one in the UK). This was my 10th year doing the </span><a href="https://ppf.cascadiapoeticslab.org" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">August Poetry Postcard Fest</a><span style="text-align: left;">, and as always, it was… different than other years. It’s different every time; it grows and morphs around what’s happening in the rest of my life, and in the world. This year, the writing came easy. I rarely was stuck for an idea, and I didn’t feel the usual peevish rebellion about having to write on a schedule, even though it was also a really busy month at work. Every few evenings I’d write three or four poems, and then I'd take a few days off. I like that pace with short postcard poems, which tend to ripen better in batches or something. </span></p><p></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>Serial and random</b></p><p>I started out the Fest bent on seriality. Weeks earlier, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about: I’d turned 60 a few months earlier, and it was weirding me out. I just could not believe I was 60. I know lots of people in their 60s who suddenly got hernias and prolapsed bladders and tumors. When I think of 60 I see washed-out gray, stooped, moving slowly. Possibly shaking a rolled-up newspaper at a kid riding a bike too fast. 60 has moved in like a houseguest I didn’t invite and will not leave. I guess I’ll have to make my peace with 60; in the meantime, I plan to kayak the hell out of it. </p><p> So the first few poems of the month were all about 60—puns and visual images of the number, free-associated strings of maladies and misery. But by about the fifth poem, I could feel that I wasn't making any peace with 60, and not even very much sense. I’m not sure any of those poems are keepers. So I moved on to other ideas. </p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5XbstzEsVmBsA51IhN6BsDG___q-4pzL3xFd_DecpaA_pHTp4P8TPO4tsSQybdY8EPZyDCXEncfBcTwaeJiP-SF0kz_XVNpWbs8S2eSURxca-FO9p9uWVAberhQmjR0uKbCAJ4MOqfK6qgZ8jrjHjaQQ_Y5X-RLQrmCKCYppxV87EcK1VqoOYynCK/s432/IMG_9018%20copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="432" height="127" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5XbstzEsVmBsA51IhN6BsDG___q-4pzL3xFd_DecpaA_pHTp4P8TPO4tsSQybdY8EPZyDCXEncfBcTwaeJiP-SF0kz_XVNpWbs8S2eSURxca-FO9p9uWVAberhQmjR0uKbCAJ4MOqfK6qgZ8jrjHjaQQ_Y5X-RLQrmCKCYppxV87EcK1VqoOYynCK/w200-h127/IMG_9018%20copy.JPG" width="200" /></a></p> After that there were a lot of random poems, experiments, some of which turned colors and boiled over, which is good, and some of which didn’t. Two of my favorites were about black widow spiders. I always seem to write about black widows during August, since they’re in the crooks and corners of patios and garages around here, growing big and shiny in the sweltering heat and knitting their cottony egg sacs. Of course their ferocity is legendary, but in reality they’re mostly timid and serene. I always get a lot of poetic mileage out of black widows.<br /><p><br /></p><p><b>A game of 20 extras</b></p><p>This year I again hand-painted all of my postcards. I love that ritual, and I have to get an early start on it; I was painting the cards back in May or June so I could paint three or four at a time and then take a few days off (same as the writing). This year I used mostly Strathmore watercolor postcards; after experimenting last year, I settled on Strathmore as a good compromise between durability and quality. (Plus Strathmore used to have a mill in Westfield, Mass., where I lived, and they were a big employer there.) I also used a few scraps of cotton paper, always my favorite for watercolors, but cotton feels too pliable to send naked through the mail, so I popped those into envelopes so they wouldn’t get scuffed. </p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPIB4O9nIQdhLUW9TT3giKaIp1iEor8nGp_M6c2J0Pb-u1uIkTgcHDh2wF2JfPDbOYafWXwhBtobhJlBbmxppEVF-QnHTVDYiPrxHqkpcthGl3KELXWVmY4HtlXNfFAQJ4otibB2D6cJ1mR1Ke272Sy33MCnAlvVpUHqD2AhycKptdqfI8jh3QNxWA/s432/D6E083F6-19FB-4D30-BCA4-0D47A6A52E%20copy0D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="432" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPIB4O9nIQdhLUW9TT3giKaIp1iEor8nGp_M6c2J0Pb-u1uIkTgcHDh2wF2JfPDbOYafWXwhBtobhJlBbmxppEVF-QnHTVDYiPrxHqkpcthGl3KELXWVmY4HtlXNfFAQJ4otibB2D6cJ1mR1Ke272Sy33MCnAlvVpUHqD2AhycKptdqfI8jh3QNxWA/w320-h210/D6E083F6-19FB-4D30-BCA4-0D47A6A52E%20copy0D.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A keeper. Can’t go wrong with Prussian Blue.</span></td></tr></tbody></table> Also like last year, I painted about 20 more postcards than I needed so I could keep my favorites, in case I might want to put them up for sale in my online store (which doesn’t exist yet; one of these days). I went though last year’s 20 "good extras" and was happy to find that a few of them didn’t seem that great anymore, which I took as a sign that maybe I’m a better artist now. So I sent those off with poems on them this year, donating them to the world of postcard poems. I also cut up a couple of failed paintings and turned the pieces into postcards—a great tip from a fellow postcarder in the Fest’s Facebook group—but honestly, cutting them up didn’t make them better paintings. </p><p> Some of the paintings I especially liked this year were monochromes and duochromes, abstract landscapes using just a couple of watercolor techniques—wet-in-wet gradients and dry brush, with some scraping and scratching. I had a lot of fun with those and kept a bunch.</p><p><br /></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Rjs-lxeeCpoBW1JB6ddSZkIRW5Yh7ZkFQptlPZqulgwTiGU6xMeBeP12-GXnmYyS8jTWNgLLxMX8X_LcKaGBDBASBq0E0cGf89aYMAv5quHYLnRg3OaynhfFGy-5XDZQ9mPFYAbMRi2CCaMEH0lH5krBR0ElJ6El2EWjYUHnzKrxZbLN9uzVuXn_/s432/IMG_8746%20copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><img border="0" data-original-height="288" data-original-width="432" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2Rjs-lxeeCpoBW1JB6ddSZkIRW5Yh7ZkFQptlPZqulgwTiGU6xMeBeP12-GXnmYyS8jTWNgLLxMX8X_LcKaGBDBASBq0E0cGf89aYMAv5quHYLnRg3OaynhfFGy-5XDZQ9mPFYAbMRi2CCaMEH0lH5krBR0ElJ6El2EWjYUHnzKrxZbLN9uzVuXn_/s320/IMG_8746%20copy.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I painted this one for a specific poem. <br />A bit like being a kids' book illustrator.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><b>Mirror, mirror … never mind</b></p><p>This year I tried something new: painting postcards specifically for the poems, and also the reverse—writing ekphrastic poems about my own paintings on the postcards*. I sort of liked painting to complement the poems; that was a free-wheeling exercise in abstraction, or in surreal representation. But I didn’t like writing ekphrastic poems about the paintings; that felt weirdly self-referential, a kind of narcissistic loop. Like, I painted this somewhat abstract landscape, and now I’m writing a poem about it. It was a sham, a trick I was pulling on the reader—a made-up poem about a made-up visual scene. It was like trying to build a house on air. There didn’t seem to be much point to it. </p><p> One of my favorite poems of the month was about a baby that someone at a party asked me to keep an eye on for a few minutes. We were outside, it was raining a bit, the baby was sleeping in a little covered hammock—and suddenly the world exploded into metaphors. That was way better than any made-up landscape. There’s something to be said for writing poems about real things. This was a good reminder of that.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiApj4AUo7GGIY9R1-2cpvTFE5m7kPQ3rBbGtnPgL8Q1QXmMUwUG_uZ2XJQfGGNqEnGuAkun_xiPsUMImEjIhorBxWcFciVlaxr8fy4eHc_2NYtDxPsjxghMMRP-ehcgtyy79utMYGPeuB51i2G8Ho-iuzvX-Z-mXZ1nyLOdQjkHDSoG6yw8CKDEHOv/s432/IMG_8850%20copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="277" data-original-width="432" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiApj4AUo7GGIY9R1-2cpvTFE5m7kPQ3rBbGtnPgL8Q1QXmMUwUG_uZ2XJQfGGNqEnGuAkun_xiPsUMImEjIhorBxWcFciVlaxr8fy4eHc_2NYtDxPsjxghMMRP-ehcgtyy79utMYGPeuB51i2G8Ho-iuzvX-Z-mXZ1nyLOdQjkHDSoG6yw8CKDEHOv/w320-h205/IMG_8850%20copy.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghQAWGKNzL9-L6LipBmP56csYotZHT9IOL5qxn1Zjf_plnI12MOm9hb4P_bm8kVZwYpMNWYzNccoAmwKhp-vOtgpYZ2qlDIORAPbarfmrMRfTRNzy5FovILa05HWdhCqhYI4IpKcXYwFsWPeVzAmaMg28v-H3L-0wamqQZLP8_m83hpxzCcfnlLfHL/s432/IMG_8874%20copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="286" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghQAWGKNzL9-L6LipBmP56csYotZHT9IOL5qxn1Zjf_plnI12MOm9hb4P_bm8kVZwYpMNWYzNccoAmwKhp-vOtgpYZ2qlDIORAPbarfmrMRfTRNzy5FovILa05HWdhCqhYI4IpKcXYwFsWPeVzAmaMg28v-H3L-0wamqQZLP8_m83hpxzCcfnlLfHL/w213-h320/IMG_8874%20copy.JPG" width="213" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZkWPEMP6hbEXU0vGdUCcIgjNOfsPZLN65ghlXKj1Sf6rM4vWgAvh-2mbC8fh0vVItRHocUyew5e6A4VjUydO27-fmHvPHw8UBszK3jsl9D9IplU9joQgYq5QkRsIGhnqzcVUipQw_IYQR1W83wvSL1rO4rKdBh0LB5MsJr4pu2PMPmWkg4bZK3rv/s432/IMG_8895%20copy.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="432" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYZkWPEMP6hbEXU0vGdUCcIgjNOfsPZLN65ghlXKj1Sf6rM4vWgAvh-2mbC8fh0vVItRHocUyew5e6A4VjUydO27-fmHvPHw8UBszK3jsl9D9IplU9joQgYq5QkRsIGhnqzcVUipQw_IYQR1W83wvSL1rO4rKdBh0LB5MsJr4pu2PMPmWkg4bZK3rv/w320-h211/IMG_8895%20copy.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">* Coincidentally, I just did a (live! in-person!) reading here in Ashland with my friend Allan Peterson, a renowned poet and longtime visual artist and art professor. </span><span style="font-size: small;">During the Q&A after our reading, he</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"> said that he has no desire to pair up his poetry and artwork—say, in a book of his poems and paintings—because then the writing and painting “will be trying to explain each other.” </span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Recently Allan asked how my art was coming along, and I said I’d become so engrossed in painting small postcards that I hadn’t painted much of anything else recently. He said he once had a student who felt she’d confined herself too much by always making small paintings, and he advised her to “use bigger brushes.” </span></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-49868663609620327132021-12-25T18:18:00.001-08:002021-12-25T18:21:16.581-08:00A Year of SketchBox<p>A year ago, I decided to try <a href="https://getsketchbox.com" target="_blank">SketchBox</a>, a subscription service that sends you a small box of art supplies every month. I’d been taking a series of Zoom painting classes that had just ended, and I was worried that art would drift out of my life if I didn’t have some stimulation coming in regularly to challenge me. (I’m the kind of person who never goes to the gym unless a tennis partner or class instructor is waiting for me, foot tapping with impatience.)</p><p>There are lots of these subscription companies—ArtSnacks, ScrawlrBox, and Let’s Make Art, to name a few—but I decided on SketchBox because the ads had beautiful art, the materials seemed varied and high-quality, and it wasn’t aimed at kids; there were no hobbit houses or cartoon dogs in the ads. SketchBox has two tiers—a Basic Box at $25/month + $5 shipping, and a Premium Box at $35 + $5, which has everything from the Basic Box plus a few extras. I sprang for the Premium Box because I knew I’d always wonder what extras I was missing out on if I got the Basic Box. I steeled myself for that $40/month payment; I’m not made out of money, and this seemed like kind of a loony extravagance. But I didn't have any more painting classes lined up, I was curious about SketchBox, and I knew I could cancel it at any time if it wasn’t my thing.</p><p>And now it’s a whole year later, and I’ve received a full year of SketchBox boxes. What's the verdict?Read on. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>What I love about SketchBox</b></p><p>• You don’t know what will be in each month's box. No clue. I didn’t think I’d like that—you’re shelling out $40 a month, and you don't know what you're getting? But they smartly send you an email when it’s shipped, and that gives you 3–5 days for the excitement to build, and then it arrives, and—I’ve got to say, it’s exactly like getting a Christmas present. Every month, I tore into that box with glee. Not knowing what to expect makes it . . . better.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSQZDYI_J5kSQcVC_qJsKpgahzKEpKmbSBqEo3EycADBlsSHLQoF5zxcDtGJLWzt8gPzmq4ft_J7oL5u922TsGpDKhsuEinfPzposcP04tTGUXRnos5nk5gOSm-1gMQusNNRsgjHS2OaM4CRR25qddJJaCzeZ9FdNgUEv2BQRwFk8r78yjsGRgBDZL=s626" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="626" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhSQZDYI_J5kSQcVC_qJsKpgahzKEpKmbSBqEo3EycADBlsSHLQoF5zxcDtGJLWzt8gPzmq4ft_J7oL5u922TsGpDKhsuEinfPzposcP04tTGUXRnos5nk5gOSm-1gMQusNNRsgjHS2OaM4CRR25qddJJaCzeZ9FdNgUEv2BQRwFk8r78yjsGRgBDZL=s320" width="256" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The February box was tinted graphite.</td></tr></tbody></table>• It introduced me to media I didn’t know existed. This is partly a function of my age and situation; I have skills from being an art major in my 20s, but I’ve been out of the art game for more than 30 years, and I don’t really know what materials are out there now. Back in January, my very first SketchBox had acrylic inks—what were these little bottles? I tried them, and I was smitten. The next month was tinted graphite—smitten again. Later boxes had a Daniel Smith Watercolor Stick, a pan of <a href="https://stonegroundpaint.com" target="_blank">Stoneground</a> watercolor, Fude brush pens, Color Sparx Watercolor Powder. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. And many of the supplies are fancy brands made in Europe or Japan.</p><p>• With every box you get a link to an online video tutorial showing you how to use everything in the box. This was great—full of tips and techniques. (Ask me all about swatching.) Some other box subscriptions offer instructions in magazine format, but I would much rather have a video. I only wish they were a little longer.</p><p>• SketchBox usually includes a pad of paper, again often from Europe or Japan. Some other subscription services don’t do this; I’m sure it reduces their costs and subscription fee, but I love trying out different papers. My one quibble is that the paper is always 4 inches wide to fit in the SketchBox shipping carton. I'd love to occasionally get a larger pad, 6x9 or 8x8.</p><p>• One of my favorite things has turned out to be the SketchBox online community—it's large and active, and those connections have led me to other opportunities. Through posting and tagging my artwork that I made with the SketchBox supplies, I've found other SketchBox artists on Instagram, who talk about online instructors they like, many of whom have free tutorials on Youtube. And because several of my new Instagram contacts are in Germany, their posts are in German, and so are the video tutorials they recommend—which gives me a chance to brush up on my German, something else I haven’t used in 30 years. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Not so hot</b></p><p>Did I love every one of the 12 SketchBoxes I got this year? Honestly, no. There were a few supplies that didn’t grab me. I’ve tucked them away in hopes that I'll warm to them one day, and because SketchBox tends to mix supplies, no box was a complete fail; there was always something I liked in it. But for me, the duds were:</p><p>• Alcohol markers. These are very hot right now, and some artists do amazing things with them. I’m just not one of them, and don’t have much patience for these. They also require special paper that they won’t bleed through. And they smell weird, like slightly dangerous fruit juice. </p><p>• Oil pastels. One summertime box was all about oil pastels, five colors in very nice European brands, along with three small canvases. But I just can’t with oil pastels. They’re messy and inexact. And they also smell funny, like old crayons.</p><p>• Metallic and pearlescent paints. These seem to be popular, but I’m not sure why. Sure, you can paint something cool with them—you can mix colors just like any watercolor—but then you turn it to the light and go, “What the f***—why so <i>glittery</i>?” I'm clearly the wrong audience for these.</p><p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiT4CajJF2B3pHNf0yZBu9sF3H3udNqiA3IhCrF03oKulmPHmP_dt7Ge2ZrvauDbp2XBQh9wSKqLPm3FGyOlpAAnAJ2rwe1ZXcvmkpWqWOhHPT1vTe9n42VcsZCI7n3ZIOSVOaebiKJ5pHUNlbqRx0v1lD0D0YHk-sDx9-fkowiBI2qw5OmoPUxd_co=s1400" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="1400" height="154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiT4CajJF2B3pHNf0yZBu9sF3H3udNqiA3IhCrF03oKulmPHmP_dt7Ge2ZrvauDbp2XBQh9wSKqLPm3FGyOlpAAnAJ2rwe1ZXcvmkpWqWOhHPT1vTe9n42VcsZCI7n3ZIOSVOaebiKJ5pHUNlbqRx0v1lD0D0YHk-sDx9-fkowiBI2qw5OmoPUxd_co=w400-h154" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Accept no substitutes.</td></tr></tbody></table>• White markers and blender markers. Do these ever work? Well, the one that worked was the white Sakura Gelly Roll, which is a miracle—if you want to add white highlights to a panting*, just get that and skip the others.</p><br /><p><br /></p><p><b>Seemed silly; ended up cool</b></p><p>• Every once in a while, a SketchBox includes . . . a pencil. Usually a European-made one, kinda fancy. I laughed the first time I got one, rattling around loose in the box—like, who doesn’t have a jillion pencils? But I've come to really like these. Some have hard lead and are good for light sketching that won’t show under a watercolor. Others are dark and smooth and are good drawing pencils all by themselves. There’s something to be said for good pencils, and they now have a special place in my drawer. I feel a certain calm reverence when I use a pencil made in Switzerland.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgUJqBnseOnbKczXgzsZDQmuCMSFMIH_LwWVEdnLC3YT8Cb4TRGGBjpugOxQW0BNlnsnZuzXAf_CPJLVzr2pxzV8gqBYe7qInhO2ZUvlQv004AfguTnt3GRSH8xsAR763milnCp_lds5vt9oRDIgTRS8KYkSgM4Jd_JNimAwIF96UKD-yitRwb6guVJ=s450" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="357" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgUJqBnseOnbKczXgzsZDQmuCMSFMIH_LwWVEdnLC3YT8Cb4TRGGBjpugOxQW0BNlnsnZuzXAf_CPJLVzr2pxzV8gqBYe7qInhO2ZUvlQv004AfguTnt3GRSH8xsAR763milnCp_lds5vt9oRDIgTRS8KYkSgM4Jd_JNimAwIF96UKD-yitRwb6guVJ=w159-h200" width="159" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Get one. Seriously.</td></tr></tbody></table>• Pencil sharpener. I also laughed when this tumbled out of the July box—a <a href="https://www.staedtler.com/intl/en/" target="_blank">Staedtler</a> Mars Lumograph tub sharpener. But holy crap, people, that thing has ruined me for other sharpeners. So sharp, so precise, so German. It retails for only $4.69. Run out and get one right now. I also love the Staedtler acrylic fine liner that came in the January box. Use it all the time. I am Team Staedtler.</p><p>• All of the brushes. Come on, if you’ve painted for any time at all, you probably have about a thousand brushes. But SketchBoxes often include one lone brush, an unusual shape or size that I probably wouldn’t normally buy—a chisel blender, a dagger, or a filbert—because they’re sort of luxurious and unnecessary. The kind of thing you might get—wait—as a Christmas present! I love them all now. </p><br /><p><br /></p><p><b>Dreaming on</b></p><p>To conclude, I loved this year with SketchBox. And I don’t feel like I’ve quite had my fill of it, so I’ll continue my subscription for a while. I figure they’ll probably start repeating themselves at some point, but I like to think about what surprise might be in the next box. And there are a few things I wish they’d include, done up SketchBox-style, a fancy European or Japanese version of:</p><p>• Kneaded eraser</p><p>• Sand eraser</p><p>• More mouth-watering watercolors from <a href="https://stonegroundpaint.com" target="_blank">Stoneground</a></p><p>• Samples of European watercolors I’ve been wanting to try: Gallo, Roman Szmal, Nevskaya Palitra, Sennelier, Maimeri</p><p>• Fountain pen</p><p>• Nib pen</p><p>And sticking with SketchBox will keep me from trying those non-art subscription services that now keep popping up in my Facebook feed like weeds—international snacks, cosmetics, coffee, spices, whisky. (Wait—the whisky one. Hmm . . .)</p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh185HrDd2mmk7Z0CZYC7iuUtFsms3G2xd7nLu3cvgz71npXasTksUp0B-nM70nIOenCbJy1Zo53DM0Cw6Px4yaHah7HJrnfZgo12awpZZpsKKqqQ7uq3ud9KIo9CKEBLmzEyR7c4lHeceQ_wCeLa7HPLDRqfSMqG8uP3q472A9XA3V17K73ofEkJcK=s747" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="747" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh185HrDd2mmk7Z0CZYC7iuUtFsms3G2xd7nLu3cvgz71npXasTksUp0B-nM70nIOenCbJy1Zo53DM0Cw6Px4yaHah7HJrnfZgo12awpZZpsKKqqQ7uq3ud9KIo9CKEBLmzEyR7c4lHeceQ_wCeLa7HPLDRqfSMqG8uP3q472A9XA3V17K73ofEkJcK=w400-h268" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Made with the November box—Gansai Tambi <br />watercolors and Color Sparx Watercolor Powder.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">* Many watercolorists shun this—adding white with a marker or gouache. Personally, I’ll only do it if the painting isn’t working and I’ve screwed it up somehow; then I’ll have at it with whatever markers are at hand just to see what happens. I’ve actually ended up with some good paintings this way.</span></p><br /><div><br /></div>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-92019653807115438442021-11-03T14:40:00.005-07:002021-11-03T16:06:36.988-07:00Inktober: Shut Up and Draw<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCu2ywLnwjZ05NyteRx7Hi08efecqypy7iAkApFQiI7RhJqzgxLpFFhBoR982dbL8emVOF85oMue_Ut5IfJvyYHtSgAziNzdtZXWDcRvxgp-5_-VwQH6nAefjBa0mxNvlr92Ptn1gEPbg/s2048/fullsizeoutput_7c2.jpeg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1631" data-original-width="2048" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCu2ywLnwjZ05NyteRx7Hi08efecqypy7iAkApFQiI7RhJqzgxLpFFhBoR982dbL8emVOF85oMue_Ut5IfJvyYHtSgAziNzdtZXWDcRvxgp-5_-VwQH6nAefjBa0mxNvlr92Ptn1gEPbg/w317-h252/fullsizeoutput_7c2.jpeg" width="317" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Does an embarrassing clutter of markers <br />make you draw more? In a way, yes.</span></td></tr></tbody></table>If you’ve ever read this blog, you know that I love me a writing marathon. Every year, I do <a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2020/04/napowrimo-plague-year-edition.html" target="_blank">NaPoWriMo</a> and the <a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2021/09/poetry-postcard-fest-2021-both-sides-now.html" target="_blank">August Poetry Postcard Fest</a>, two 30-day writing marathons that I rely on to generate new poems. The rest of my writing year tends to be haphazard, and I work full time, and I’ve never been a write-every-day kind of person. But I’ve found that I can keep up a daily practice of just about anything for 30 days, after which I collapse in a boneless heap of laziness.<p></p><p>So I was thrilled to find that in the world of art—which I’ve recently rejoined after a long and bitter absence (future blog post)—there are also marathons. And this past month I decided to try one: Inktober*, a 30-day sprint where thousands of people from all over the world draw or paint a piece of ink artwork every day and post it on Instagram (#inktober2021). Back in my youth, drawing in ink was my <i>thing</i>, so I was eager to give this a try. I wondered: Could I keep up with a drawing a day? Would it energize me, or make me hate art all over again? And what, in today’s avalanche of art supplies, qualifies as “ink”?</p><p>I gathered everything in the house that had ink in it—fistfuls of pens, markers, India ink, even a Cross fountain pen that I bought in a closeout sale three years ago and hadn’t had the guts to take out of its package, it was so unapproachably pretty. I also snuck in some bottles of liquid watercolor, which felt like cheating but oh well. I chucked it all onto an end table in the living room and piled even more on it over the course of the month, my own Inktober hazmat site.</p><p>So, how’d it go? Pretty good. I drew <i>almost</i> every day. Okay, I skipped about 10 days, but I tried not to sweat that; not sweating things turned out to be one of the themes of my marathon. I ended up with about 20 new pieces of art, including a few that I’m proud of. </p><p>During the month of drawing, I had a lot of thoughts—some ups and downs, many times when I almost bailed, and a lot of late-night pondering over the connections between visual art and poetry, different animals on the artistic family tree that still share some genes. So, observations:</p><p><br /></p><p><b>“Inking” is actually drawing.</b></p><p>I had to laugh at this. Around day 5, I realized that I’d started the marathon with some lofty notion that “inking” would mean just grabbing a fancy pen or some brush markers and whipping up some instant art, a happy little miracle every evening. But I found out I’m too much of a mechanic for that; I preferred doing a pencil sketch first and then inking over it. The few spontaneous doodles that I did were my least favorite pieces of the month—they seemed inert, uninspired. But the drawing thing became an unexpected visit with an old love—I adored drawing in my teens and 20s; then, after some art trauma, I lost my confidence in drawing and didn’t do it for decades. But after this past month of drawing pears and apples and trees and cows and horses and houses and mountains, I now feel like I actually can draw again, like I <i>want</i> to. The muscle memory of it is still there, still in my hands; in fact, with my older brain, I seem to be better at it, better at seeing shape and value. I am, in particular, better at pushing the darkness (a metaphor on a platter). And luckily, the joy is still there too.</p><p><br /></p><p><b></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipaksdznqsIfYC9nsPTNF-b0S8mkPcs3raIQnoX-wlfv4VmfCWwMp783fMRU1mR5Fia-D288pMZPHh6MNJgnFrToerl8fp8AZ6pNUhYAzLDoCx2exsljQzvqlYTnTKLJKUJ0VWuH4CWDc/s2048/fullsizeoutput_7c1.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="2048" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipaksdznqsIfYC9nsPTNF-b0S8mkPcs3raIQnoX-wlfv4VmfCWwMp783fMRU1mR5Fia-D288pMZPHh6MNJgnFrToerl8fp8AZ6pNUhYAzLDoCx2exsljQzvqlYTnTKLJKUJ0VWuH4CWDc/s320/fullsizeoutput_7c1.jpeg" width="320" /></a></b></div><b>To keep drawing, I had to fight my own fragility.</b><p></p><p></p>This is one way that Inktober was different than a poetry-writing marathon—it turns out I have all sorts of confidence in my poetry, but almost none in my visual art. I’ve been doing poetry for a long, long time, and I’ve written so much and had so many poems published and rejected that I can write a crappy poem one night and completely forget it about by the next day; I know there will always be another poem. But the same wasn’t true of drawing; if I did a drawing one night that I didn’t like, I felt melodramatically wounded—absolute despair, like it was all over and I should just give up. This happened several times early in Inktober; I’d draw and post something that I wasn’t happy with, and it would haunt me into the next day: <i>Well, there it is—I’m a crappy artist, and now the whole world knows</i>. Luckily, by the next evening I’d usually get the bug to try something different—thank you, pile of art supplies on the end table—and that night’s drawing sometimes turned out OK. And the pendulum would swing the other way—<i>Hey, this came out cool, so maybe I’m good at some things</i>. Or even <i>I like that color</i>. By the end of the month I was very aware of those swings and was consciously trying to even them out. I realized that the fragility was a result of the Great Art Trauma in my 20s—a time when I decided I was a bad artist and feared showing that to the world—and the marathon became a way of working through some of that. And some of the drawings I didn’t initially like grew on me over time; they weren’t what I set out to do, but once I let go of that, they didn’t seem so bad.<p></p><p><br /></p><p><b>The brain wants to get all up in art’s business.</b></p><p>I would start drawing, and my brain was clicking away. I could feel it, trying to control my hand. <i>Careful. Don’t be derivative. That’s too Miro; people will notice. Don’t try that again—you’ve drawn so many bad horses!</i> And then, without my noticing, that language center would shut off. Things got very quiet, and for a while I was all body—my hand scratching at the wet ink, flicking grass or branches onto the paper, my face contorted, my voice whispering to itself—<i>rounder, darker, right here</i>. I would sit back and see the balance of the scene, see what it still needed. It felt just like I was playing deep into a tennis match—all motion, intent, instinct, the body doing what it knows how to do. It was also just like being in the middle of writing a poem—the editor had fled and the subconscious was now driving; that’s always the interesting part. Oh, the brain came back later to criticize what I’d drawn, and sometimes it hurt me. This is a place where art and poetry differ: A poem can always be changed, but ink is pretty much forever and leaves an ugly stain when you try to fix it.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Drawing/painting takes longer than writing poems.</b></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0QsM2Zs1cW-FkwR1mp3dgGeUa8vPE2PU2_rjX2XFZzYrJdvfsQkscF7pV4Ii4H0d7U9ieee_crSvhdoyrT7Gosyv0CWFoTVzJni6cwAaNs3hL52rUDpweo6V6hJEp6-fLDS-3vun5wWs/s2048/IMG_7373.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0QsM2Zs1cW-FkwR1mp3dgGeUa8vPE2PU2_rjX2XFZzYrJdvfsQkscF7pV4Ii4H0d7U9ieee_crSvhdoyrT7Gosyv0CWFoTVzJni6cwAaNs3hL52rUDpweo6V6hJEp6-fLDS-3vun5wWs/s320/IMG_7373.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>I got tired during Inktober. Really tired. Every night—even if I set out to draw/paint something simple, like a pear—I ended up spending at least an hour on the piece, and often longer. And afterward I’d be so wired that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And it was a busy month at work, so I was already tired in the evenings. Toward the end of the month I felt sleepy every day by late afternoon. My system for writing every night during poetry marathons works better; somehow I can predict how much time it will take and compensate for it so I don't get exhausted. So that needs some thought. And, riffing off that …<p></p><p><br /></p><p><b>I’m sort of lucky I survived.</b></p><p>By that I mean, all that staying up late and drawing when I was half awake probably wasn’t conducive to great art.** And by all rights, bad art should have finished off my fragile ass (see above). However, Inktober made me try out markers and pens and notebooks and pencils, and it forced me to go through my own reference photos (which I take all the time on drives around town) and raid them for things to draw. It was a month of experiments, and I found a few things that I unexpectedly seemed to be good at (and a few that I just liked doing). And in a way, doing that every night produced the same results you get—if you’re lucky—after receiving umpteen rejections of your poems for umpteen years. You stop caring so much about each rejection, because you know you’ll write again and will send stuff out again. Same thing with this art marathon; the next night, there was another pen, another fistful of markers, and another picture in my head. And I tried again. And that was maybe the best thing about Inktober—all those days to try.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdSnmzxvnTFUHVXlTIvNDRg7p3vF0656YO_pb3cJeClHY5v4OO_b1vC_Ihhfs33gCcHaxnRsudbNw1riST77QXN0bsAFLiOJMgoOvuXOcqQ_vc3NSLF3TVlLLDrt_LIhwwp5JP1uv3w2E/s2048/fullsizeoutput_7af.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdSnmzxvnTFUHVXlTIvNDRg7p3vF0656YO_pb3cJeClHY5v4OO_b1vC_Ihhfs33gCcHaxnRsudbNw1riST77QXN0bsAFLiOJMgoOvuXOcqQ_vc3NSLF3TVlLLDrt_LIhwwp5JP1uv3w2E/s320/fullsizeoutput_7af.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><br /><br /><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">* Another thing I found out this past month is that the art world, like the poetry world, has its scandals and infighting. Apparently the guy who owns the trademark to Inktober was accused of plagiarizing another artist's educational writing, and it caused a split in the art world; some artists now refuse to participate in Inktober and have spawned all sorts of rival marathons. So that gives me something else to check out next year.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">** This is a debate that poets often have about NaPoWriMo: the argument that if you have to crank out a little ditty every day, how good are the ditties going to be? I understand that viewpoint—and I used to share it—but I found that NaPoWriMo serves a purpose for me, if only to shake up my usual writing practice and to force myself to write when I don’t feel like it, which results in interesting themes and forms. I always figure if I can get four or five decent poems out of the 30 that I write during NaPoWriMo, that’s a fine return on my investment. And I end up with stumps of weird stuff that sometimes serve as sparks for other poems later.</span></p><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-54692595011054620232021-09-04T17:40:00.005-07:002021-09-04T17:56:20.427-07:00Poetry Postcard Fest 2021: Both Sides Now<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJZQBMc-pKU_jLhUAcsvErVo3NdCU0M4OFvEOVayGsxkBdnbDV5ushdTok_uHbf4RzMJLLaV7oYSW0ShAwUnQh1KM0ocPb-6VwY73zp8ofjJ4p1bO0Em2Ow2jgu39V7iP0xKfMhL_U-8/s576/IMG_6970.JPG" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="429" data-original-width="576" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFJZQBMc-pKU_jLhUAcsvErVo3NdCU0M4OFvEOVayGsxkBdnbDV5ushdTok_uHbf4RzMJLLaV7oYSW0ShAwUnQh1KM0ocPb-6VwY73zp8ofjJ4p1bO0Em2Ow2jgu39V7iP0xKfMhL_U-8/s320/IMG_6970.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All the postcards I received this year, <br />plus a bonus Buckley.</td></tr></tbody></table>The poems are written, the cards are mailed: The 2021 <a href="https://ppf.cascadiapoeticslab.org/">Poetry Postcard Fest</a> is a wrap.<br /><span> <span> </span></span>This year, the annual August writing marathon attracted more than 500 participants from 13 different countries. My group (go, Group 8!) had 33 people in it, and I ended up writing 33 poems—32 to the other people in the group, and an extra card to someone else.<br /><br /><br /><div><b>Side 1: The poems</b></div><div>Those 33 poems meant that I wrote a little more than one poem per day, but this year I didn’t even try to write one every day; I almost always wrote them in clumps of three or four and then took a few days off between writing sessions. I’ve done this in the past, too; it makes the “poem-a-day” thing less of a chore for me. And as I’ve said in past PoPo recaps, writing several poems in one sitting sometimes makes them more interesting; often I'll riff on the subject of one poem and expand it into others. This time I had a series of poems about eavesdropping, since I seemed to be overhearing a lot of conversations and was fascinated by the relationship between the loud talker and the unwilling listener, and the incompleteness of the information you overhear—<i>Is that person always like that? Did that person bring this problem on himself? How reliable is the narrator of this story? </i>I also had a few poems about painting (more on that below), and lots of small scenes from around my town of Ashland, Oregon, which was plagued by hazardous wildfire smoke all through August.</div><div><span> <span> </span></span>Looking back through the poems, I can see a few that seem like keepers, like something I might end up getting published if some editor likes them. A few fizzled. My favorite one is about my bathrobe, which had nothing to do with eavesdropping or smoke and just sort of flew in on its own, as the best poems sometimes do. </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikKlG0CsdzDfoXRdY7cSoQ9PFG_ihwzQt65t4PyEA_aCEUkI00OHO7gLll7C_5ipECrfqFDSsrKNrlFkca2tu85dGFaGt5bNvAjZ9hFtUHq5YqiDIHh9J-6XqkHWwkWMGlzrwh3E6mqSw/s576/IMG_6925.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="576" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikKlG0CsdzDfoXRdY7cSoQ9PFG_ihwzQt65t4PyEA_aCEUkI00OHO7gLll7C_5ipECrfqFDSsrKNrlFkca2tu85dGFaGt5bNvAjZ9hFtUHq5YqiDIHh9J-6XqkHWwkWMGlzrwh3E6mqSw/w294-h221/IMG_6925.JPG" width="294" /></a></div><span> <span> </span></span>Thinking about which poems I might send out to journals made me go back just now through poems from past PoPo Fests (this was my 9th year), and I see that fewer of them have been published than I thought*. None at all from last year. And in fact I rarely send those postcard poems out to journals at all. I suspect that some part of my mercenary brain thinks that short poems—and especially short abstract poems—are less “publishable” out there in the mean world. In April, during <a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2020/04/napowrimo-plague-year-edition.html" target="_blank">NaPoWriMo</a>, I put a lot of pressure on myself to write longer, more “serious” poems, whatever that means. April is sort of a poetry crucible, when I think hard about a lot of things and try to write deeply into them. In contrast, the August Postcard Fest is more of a lark; I have fun with these shorter poems, and I feel pretty much zero pressure. Hence I think I tend to take them less seriously. Or perhaps they really are “slight.” I need to think about that more.<br /><br /><br /><b>Side 2: The postcards</b><br />This year, I took a totally new approach with the actual postcards: I hand-painted all of them. In past years I’ve used giveaway postcards from restaurants, touristy ones I picked up at the drugstore, and ones I got printed at Vistaprint with my own photos on them. But I’ve been doing a lot of watercolor painting this past year, and I was intrigued by the idea of painting each one individually. In retrospect, that sounds kind of nuts—paint 33 individual paintings?—but I was already thinking of it back in April or May, so I started painting them then. I tried out lots of different paper—postcards made for watercolor by Daniel Smith, Hahnemühle, Schmincke, and Strathmore, and also 4x6-ish pieces of heavy watercolor paper by all sorts of companies. Pretty much anything I ran across the past few months that seemed like it would hold up in the mail. I ended up putting a few in envelopes, especially if the paper was 100% cotton; it seemed too soft not to get torn in the canceling machines. <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO0BRRYOrby_hc9eqKBcPXz7pq8kT5RSyf0gJqX_lV15kQ8tzCt042QTdh8fsOIsReLGA5RK47K3ElSGhMwoaLtH9nu7GPKm8MhxGltroeROHO3NtL-X_AvIFyjvy74375NEXRh9twECg/s576/IMG_6943.JPG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="576" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO0BRRYOrby_hc9eqKBcPXz7pq8kT5RSyf0gJqX_lV15kQ8tzCt042QTdh8fsOIsReLGA5RK47K3ElSGhMwoaLtH9nu7GPKm8MhxGltroeROHO3NtL-X_AvIFyjvy74375NEXRh9twECg/w253-h190/IMG_6943.JPG" width="253" /></a></div></div><div><span> <span> </span></span>I painted them in batches of 4 or 5; I’d do a bunch of skies in slightly different colors and styles, and then some kind of land or trees or whatever. I tried really hard not to overthink them. I did a few others with markers. And it was an absolute blast—serious fun, and again, with no pressure at all. I was surprised at what a useful process it was to paint so many little 4x6 paintings; I kept a bunch of them because I want to do larger versions of them, and I was constantly experimenting and coming up with techniques and color combinations that I didn’t expect to find. Just totally screwing around with paint. It wasn’t hard, it was joyful, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I ended up painting about 50 postcards total because I kept painting ones that I liked enough that I didn’t want to send them away.<br /><br /><br /><b>Bonus track: The community</b><br />Once again, the PoPo Fest’s Facebook group was really fun to keep up with all through August. People take such different approaches to the postcards; some do collages, one person used grocery cartons (she sent me one made from a Kleenex box). Some found vintage postcards; one woman in Alabama sent me an old postcard featuring a building in my town in Oregon, which amazed me. And many, many others didn’t really care about the postcards; for them, it was all about the poems. I’ve done it lots of ways over the years, and they’re all good; the PoPo Fest is flexible enough to accommodate pretty much any way you want to do it. <br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><span>* Here are a couple of PoPo poems that did get published:</span></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwTrchE3bW3QWd-zVsCDOJ1n5Z5c4FWFGpG0vAVAcPntwfymLcfPo8IAaEzT0xgcPNBKGRYRvnhxC1Vjse4FNKPQhkFIqU9d0dI5JDsyyw4xwCcY6Vv8XOO3kWde0zCSiO9KHs8ky3Sgc/s384/IMG_6965.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="288" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwTrchE3bW3QWd-zVsCDOJ1n5Z5c4FWFGpG0vAVAcPntwfymLcfPo8IAaEzT0xgcPNBKGRYRvnhxC1Vjse4FNKPQhkFIqU9d0dI5JDsyyw4xwCcY6Vv8XOO3kWde0zCSiO9KHs8ky3Sgc/s320/IMG_6965.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Speaking of smoke, <br />this one was in <i><a href="https://www.crabcreekreview.org/index.html" target="_blank">Crab Creek Review</a></i>, 2019.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyUq0H469MWzcVJewuEWkJ7jPPLSghTIsgRVfhr-fgq36ypfvluhxfn78Ck5z-x7HE8vH4n0nTND_iHfZZBw6Jo3OyrGQlfxOzJU5tEShx_yAtsaO0xyBJU6kET8mrH1f5VYdQ0ePuA68/s739/Lab+Results+RHP.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="616" data-original-width="739" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyUq0H469MWzcVJewuEWkJ7jPPLSghTIsgRVfhr-fgq36ypfvluhxfn78Ck5z-x7HE8vH4n0nTND_iHfZZBw6Jo3OyrGQlfxOzJU5tEShx_yAtsaO0xyBJU6kET8mrH1f5VYdQ0ePuA68/s320/Lab+Results+RHP.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In <i><a href="https://www.issues.righthandpointing.net/144" target="_blank">Right Hand Pointing</a></i>, 2021.</td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span><b>Past PoPo Fest Recaps:</b></span></div><div><span><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2019/09/august-poetry-postcard-fest-2019-wrap.html" target="_blank">2019: Fresh Horses</a></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2018/09/smokin-august-poetry-postcard-fest-wrap.html" target="_blank">2018: Smokin'</a></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2016/09/august-postcard-poetry-fest-2016-wrap-up.html" target="_blank">2016: "I finished on time"</a></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-long-and-short-of-postcard-poems.html" target="_blank">2015: Slacker Moments</a></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></div>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-32758315711653809512020-12-31T15:30:00.019-08:002021-04-14T17:12:50.896-07:00The Writing Year: Get thee behind me, 2020<div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw4va4EZ9Gb97iVBmZiTSYEec8Wb9nSM25K8dJ_epL0MSAr43p-fUyZm_igPtxYts-9tGm49PBlOnyK9C_3KP7XL94dn54GSO67qMwKOphKONcrqxS1LAn_uOkd5V_BhjvhxMIFL80i6I/s1600/train-whale+tail.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1066" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw4va4EZ9Gb97iVBmZiTSYEec8Wb9nSM25K8dJ_epL0MSAr43p-fUyZm_igPtxYts-9tGm49PBlOnyK9C_3KP7XL94dn54GSO67qMwKOphKONcrqxS1LAn_uOkd5V_BhjvhxMIFL80i6I/s320/train-whale+tail.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Derailed subway train in the Netherlands saved by a whale <br />sculpture, 11/2/20. Seems like an apt metaphor for the year.</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial;">I will just start by saying: All through the shitshow of 2020, the writing world remained an inspiration for me. I don’t know quite how we did it, but writers kept on writing. Poets figured out how to do readings online. Everybody learned Zoom. Literary journals continued, adapted, and sometimes thrived. A few really beautiful anthologies were produced about the pandemic, the ugliest of subjects. </span></div><div><span> </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Back on March 11, I wouldn’t have believed any of this. That was the day the NBA shut down, which, for some reason, was the watershed moment for me—the end of the civilization I knew. I pictured us at the end of the year, holed up in our dark bunkers reading old can labels to each other and trying to find the last station on the hand-crank radio. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> So yes, as of today, we’re still here, but I won’t say it was a good year for writers. Or for my writing. Or for anything. That would be crass, cruel, and beside the point. Still, there were times of beauty and weirdness. Here are some things that changed, and things that surprised me, and some actual good things that grew, mushroom-like, in the dark year now ending.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><b><span style="font-family: arial;">Zoom poetry events: some good, some bad.<br /></span></b><span style="font-family: arial;">Seeing friends read in other cities—amazing! Seeing famous poets whose voices I'd never heard—fantastic! Attending open mikes with readers from other countries—transcendent! </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Going to online poetry conferences...um...</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span></span> Okay, let’s talk about that for a minute.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> I “went” to some online poetry conferences, the kind with presentations and workshops happening at various times through the day, where I could pop in on Zoom to check out each classroom and pop out if the thing wasn’t to my liking. I’m a restless conference-goer at the best of times, and on Zoom it was very easy to hit the “leave meeting” button when a presentation wasn’t floating my boat. At one day-long conference, I found one class I liked, stumbled across another that I sort of liked, and then bailed on another six—<i>six!</i>—after watching them for five or ten minutes. I can’t imagine walking out on six classes at an in-person conference; it would be too embarrassing to stand up and look at my watch as if thinking <i>Oh dear, I left the baby in the car</i> and clunk noisily out the door. But on Zoom, leaving is easy, silent, instant. <i>Click. </i>And I’m not sure if that’s good (freedom!) or if it’s hazardous to people like me with short attention spans; I wonder if I missed anything good. And the one thing I love most about writers’ conferences—the hanging out with other writers, grabbing a coffee between classes and drinks at the end of the day—was completely absent from those online ones. So, for me, Zoom conferences offer all the things I like least about conferences, and none of the things I like most.<br /></span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> <br /></span></span><b><span style="font-family: arial;">I wrote a lot about the pandemic. <br /></span></b><span style="font-family: arial;">I journaled to preserve the strange, disaster-movie quality of it all: the sudden shutdowns and surreal speed of it, the news from overseas, the appalling lack of response from the U.S. government, the rumors, the social divisions. It felt important to chronicle these things. I also wrote a shit-ton of pandemic poems early on, some of which I <a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2020/04/napowrimo-plague-year-edition.html" target="_blank">posted on Instagram with graphics</a>, which was an empowering, absorbing project. I published some others in journals and anthologies. Some poet friends, I know, didn’t write at all about the pandemic. I totally hear that (see the next paragraph); I just felt compelled to make bread with the dough at hand, and pandemic dough was what I had.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>I wrote almost nothing about a disaster close to home.</b></span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEw_zVQnecl8958VaocFF-LDgKrNf7fG_p54XqylyV83lKt-YW0Qtj3IonPc_mWO_82STLUEqNKPMZNsekBjEXGekqgfEQKtxbENlTDBz_A-NQnPnbKb38ycZ3_-7Gdzb_ulPUzqEBiFU/s986/Fire-20-large16x9_IMG_5722.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="986" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEw_zVQnecl8958VaocFF-LDgKrNf7fG_p54XqylyV83lKt-YW0Qtj3IonPc_mWO_82STLUEqNKPMZNsekBjEXGekqgfEQKtxbENlTDBz_A-NQnPnbKb38ycZ3_-7Gdzb_ulPUzqEBiFU/w308-h174/Fire-20-large16x9_IMG_5722.jpg" width="308" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial;">As if the pandemic, layoffs, racial tension, and that nail-biter election weren’t enough, my region got hit with another huge blow</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial;">on September 8 and 9</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> when the Almeda fire tore through our Oregon valley, destroying more than 2,500 homes. It was epic, horrifying, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">unbelievable,</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: arial;">frightening, and very, very sad. Many of my friends and co-workers lost everything. Even now, the burn zone—which starts 3 miles from my house and stretches 10 miles to the northwest—is a mind-altering, life-changing thing to see: miles and miles where homes and businesses used to be, everything now reduced to a hip-high, gray/white landscape of debris that looks uncannily like ruined tombstones. I’ve written a grand total of one poem about all that, although I did journal a lot. It was just too close; I know too many people whose lives are forever changed. To make art out of that and put it up on the internet did not feel like the right thing to me. It’s delicate, and I was not in the right mental space to do it.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"> This made me think a lot about poems of witness and current-events poems. I write a lot of those, and I’ve always recognized that it’s different when you’re farther from the disaster; of course it’s easier to write about it. But there’s a voyeurism to it, an inauthenticity that, paradoxically, makes it possible to take the art/poem in different directions than if you’d seen the event yourself. But when it happened to people you know, there’s a line of ethics in there. Maybe there’s always a line of ethics, and we just trample over it all the time without thinking. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>Working at home hasn’t given me more time to write. <br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">I’ve been working at home full time since March 17 (and am so grateful to be working), and I <i>still</i> never feel like I have enough time to write. It turns out working at home in sweats is still working. I still really look forward to weekends.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>I superly, very muchly miss drinking with poets in bars.<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">This surprises me, how much I miss the after-reading drink with a few friends at the pub. The big group walking to the restaurant for a meal with the famous poet who’s in town for one night. The random meet-ups in the hotel bar after a long day at the conference. The dinner with a poet friend where we talk about sequencing manuscripts and have a bit too much to drink and laugh our asses off. Writing is great, but being a poet is also about living in a world.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>I miss doing road trips for out-of-town readings. </b></span><b style="font-family: arial;">I also enjoy not doing them.</b></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRadGO4J1eQ" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="811" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQNCarwH1dxnles1BHCl5HoVrRa1gyq3d0Np7lnltENQMHVy0gxdJPOL3OAQc6Z0MhJyFoMZ7ztR2aBPzxgf2tvmETW6CLKBZCbF82IFiR9H8fjPPCh-xkD-fVs5nlJyoDHZv_UL8MdAc/w278-h182/Screen+Shot+2020-12-22+at+4.23.44+PM.png" width="278" /></a></div>Honestly, my relief at not doing them slightly outweighs how much I miss them. That’s mostly because of my 18-year-old cat, whose health has (knock on wood) been more stable during this quiet, stay-at-home year. I’ve also saved a lot of money by not traveling. I've loved the online readings I’ve done, but they don’t sell a lot of books. So the metric is all different. Two online readings I really enjoyed doing this year were the Spring Creek Project’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f72B_h7pJ-U" target="_blank">video series The Nature of Isolation</a> (check out their other videos too, with writers and visual artists) and <i>Rattle</i>’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRadGO4J1eQ" target="_blank">interview/reading series, Rattlecast</a>, where I talked a <i>lot</i> about poem sequencing and revision and last lines and the music business and the problem with persona poems. </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><b>I had to take some new author photos.<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: arial;">Because my hair is much longer now. I wasn’t identifying with the photos taken a couple of years ago, the short-hair ones. Is this isolation some kind of chrysalis? Will some of us emerge with antennae and tails? Will that be a wonderful thing? The pragmatist in me says <i>Stop it. Cruel. Crass</i>. The writer in me says…<i>wings</i>.</span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><p>
</p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><br /><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br /></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;">Netherland subway train photo by Robin Utrecht/Getty.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;">Almeda fire photo </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;">courtesy of Governor Kate Brown's office.</span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-17922176836931367702020-04-15T15:55:00.000-07:002020-04-15T16:16:05.327-07:00NaPoWriMo, Plague Year Edition<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDJueenmrOeesu50yaRxysVOyuyPvfnYlIrxzmkYJsOc_ZXUtsE8BUIG2-18bbINAeJqFuy7sFtSCTHC48t81FldGvdqdmLTPGAfLHXI0JthDKNX0Jjij6reOOEjce3-meyzgaONnqL4o/s1600/IG+poem+3-21-20+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDJueenmrOeesu50yaRxysVOyuyPvfnYlIrxzmkYJsOc_ZXUtsE8BUIG2-18bbINAeJqFuy7sFtSCTHC48t81FldGvdqdmLTPGAfLHXI0JthDKNX0Jjij6reOOEjce3-meyzgaONnqL4o/s320/IG+poem+3-21-20+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I got an early start on NaPoWriMo by writing <br />Instagram poems in March. Let's just say<br />there was a theme.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It’s April 15th, which means I’m halfway through National Poetry Writing Month (<a href="http://www.napowrimo.net/" target="_blank">NaPoWriMo</a>). This is the annual poem-a-day writing marathon that thousands of people do during April, and that I've been participating in for about 12 years. As usual, I’m running a small private Facebook group with about 15 other people who are writing poems every day and sharing them there, where only we can see them. Every year, I rely on NaPoWriMo's discipline to help me produce a stockpile of first drafts that I can revise later, poems I probably wouldn’t have written if I hadn't set myself the goal of writing one every day for 30 days. And I’ve always loved the camaraderie of doing it with a group. (Left on my own, I’d flake after about three days.)<br />
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<b>Hard syrup</b><br />
So, how’s the marathon going? I won’t lie to you, reader; this one's been a slog. I haven’t had a single good patch of days where the poems were flowing freely; this year they’re all feeling sort of extruded, like old maple syrup that you have to squeeze really hard to get out of the bottle. Most years, there are a few days like that. But this time, it’s every day—a steady diet of hard syrup.<br />
<br />
Of course, this year is different. Everything is different. We’re all carrying the immense weight of the Coronavirus pandemic, a horror show that keeps morphing with its shutdowns and layoffs and fevers and ventilators and shortages and epic presidential incompetence, and so many of us are waiting it out at home, isolated and bewildered. (For my part, I'm working at home, extremely grateful to still have a job, and staying away from people as much as possible.) There’s no guidebook for how to live and be during something like this, let alone try to keep up a writing practice. I see writers on social media talking about how they haven’t been able to write at all, and others saying how all their writing is doom and gloom and mostly cathartic, or they find themselves writing chirpy upbeat nonsense that even they don’t buy. On Twitter I’ve been reading good advice that people are getting from their therapists and counselors, and most of it boils down to this: You are going to feel all the feels, and many at the same time. Whether or not you choose to make art out of this (or substitute “be productive” or “stay positive”) is up to you, and there’s no one way; we’re all learning this, and because it’s grief, it will take its own path through you. Just know that it will.<br />
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<br />
<b>Getting out there, metaphorically</b><br />
But I had a poetry-writing marathon to get on with, and I realized that the pandemic felt a lot like the choking wildfire smoke we've had for weeks at a time in southern Oregon in recent summers. I was writing a lot then too, and all I could write about was that damned smoke; it was literally in my face, constantly. The pandemic is functioning like that as well, but of course everyone, everywhere, has it in their face. As with the smoke, I felt like I needed to break the current crisis down into small increments, micro-scenes of my own everyday life; it’s too vast and overwhelming—not to mention still developing—to take on much more than that in a single poem. And the whole thing is surreal, isn’t it? Like a dream that you’ll wake up from and think, <i>Whoa, that was nuts</i>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLPh_rOJQ2bcqxSVbsjouC4DJMJ5qguk1Q2Uuwg4XqqEunftbBL2jDnBAGtflMYYbaQVyBLZe98vzen1AcTFBY-V4cCTIokvN2KlkWUSlNhXF8Xz0zgqlD2NCSj6IsxQMj4pV71lMGKk/s1600/IG+poem+3-22-20.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLPh_rOJQ2bcqxSVbsjouC4DJMJ5qguk1Q2Uuwg4XqqEunftbBL2jDnBAGtflMYYbaQVyBLZe98vzen1AcTFBY-V4cCTIokvN2KlkWUSlNhXF8Xz0zgqlD2NCSj6IsxQMj4pV71lMGKk/s320/IG+poem+3-22-20.jpg" width="320" /></a>I started writing poems about the pandemic back in March, before NaPoWriMo began, because the emergency was beginning to hit us locally and hard. And I decided early on to post a lot of them on Instagram (<a href="https://www.instagram.com/amymillerpoet/" target="_blank">@amymillerpoet</a>). I’ve been dabbling with Instagram poetry the past few months; I like the mixture of text and images, the block of art. The whole thing about how the poem is now published because I went and blabbed it on Instagram is just another interesting thing; I’m not sure what to do with that. But suddenly it felt like a time to let the poems walk out the door, since I literally couldn’t. We are truly all in this together, and I had a strong compulsion to get poems out in the world where all sorts of people could read them, not just the ones who subscribe to literary journals. And, I don't know, maybe I just needed a gigantic distraction. The discipline and techie geekiness of making those Instagram poems was like a lifeline I was following through some very dark water.<br />
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And now that NaPoWriMo is halfway through, I’m continuing to write and post some Instagram poems; the impulse to put together words and images is still strong. So maybe NaPoWriMo has felt like a slog because I was already tired from writing a poem a day in March, more or less. But, like I used to say about the great NBA player Tim Duncan, what made him great was that he kept going on bad days too; he just changed his game a little. So I’m still welcoming the daily discipline of NaPoWriMo, even if it hurts more than usual. I’m still hoping to hit a few three-pointers.<br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-7001608459189610932020-01-01T12:26:00.000-08:002020-01-01T12:47:58.279-08:00100 Rejections: Pain or Gain?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh30OZPe7i-BrRC6f9XTkCDJYcZZhkv2Qt_wd_4r_0sv7eSiN0zH-UDU71Bpauich2PZCj7znrNL8biHHnL8GtG0oMa61M2aLkg2aYRq925-xaA7rjuDKUG0H-i4bQQFh4zSUNXs8pNzs/s1600/IMG_4692+LR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1201" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh30OZPe7i-BrRC6f9XTkCDJYcZZhkv2Qt_wd_4r_0sv7eSiN0zH-UDU71Bpauich2PZCj7znrNL8biHHnL8GtG0oMa61M2aLkg2aYRq925-xaA7rjuDKUG0H-i4bQQFh4zSUNXs8pNzs/s320/IMG_4692+LR.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I keep the guidelines of journals I'm interested in <br />
on my desk. That way they're right in my face<br />
and I can't avoid them.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It’s the start of a new year, and I’ve just crossed the finish line of a marathon I began last January, a strange, windmill-tilting quest to collect 100 rejections of my writing in one year. Yep, that’s right—I sent my work out to a <i>lot</i> of publishers during the past year, hoping that 100 of them would reject it in 2019.<br />
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The idea of boosting your submission process by trying for 100 rejections was championed back in 2016 by writer Kim Liao in her now-famous article <a href="https://lithub.com/why-you-should-aim-for-100-rejections-a-year/" target="_blank">“Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year.”</a> It’s great reading, and it got a lot of writers talking about Liao’s philosophy, which was inspired by a friend’s advice to her: “Collect rejections. Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”<br />
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I like this approach, and although I’d never really counted rejections, I knew that in past years I got way fewer than 100 per year; probably more like 20 or 30. So this past year I decided to participate in an online group where everyone was trying to get 100 rejections in 2019. (I like to do these things with groups because without any accountability or encouragement, I know I'll probably blow it off after a couple of weeks.)<br />
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<b>The count & the amount</b><br />
How did it go? In short, I didn’t make it to 100 rejections. I got 52, so I basically ran a half-100 marathon. And to get those 52 rejections, I sent out a lot more submissions than I normally would in one year. So my first takeaway is: It’s <i>really</i> hard work sending out enough submissions for 100 to bounce back.<br />
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My second takeaway was that it was fascinating to actually keep track of how many submissions I sent out (71*), how many were rejected (52), and how many were accepted (19). That meant a 27% acceptance rate, or roughly 1 out of every 4 submissions, and it held steady pretty much throughout the year. That 27% stat makes me happy. I’d never done enough analysis to figure out my acceptance rate in past years—I was afraid to, to be honest, fearing the percentage would be so depressing that I’d hang up my notebooks and never write again. But 1 in 4? I can live with that.<br />
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I kept a simple ongoing list of rejections and acceptances in my Notes app so I could jot them down anytime I got an e-mail with a yes or a no (and even at that, I may have missed one or two; I track submissions with an index card system that I love but that isn’t stat-friendly). By my calculations, I made $970** from writing in 2019, most of it from a second-place win in a national contest and reprints of a couple of articles that I wasn’t expecting and that I counted as a win. I didn’t keep track of how much I paid in contest entries and reading fees, but I'm cheap about those so I figure they came to about $100.<br />
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<b>The reckoning</b><br />
Because I’ve never kept meticulous stats on acceptances and rejections in the past, I can’t say how many more of either I got in 2019. But at a glance back through my 2018 submissions, it looks like I got more than twice as many acceptances in 2019. So based on that alone, this is a good system. I got into a few journals I didn't think I had much chance at; I was in "why not?" mode a lot this year, and that's a good way to be. And although, as I said, I worked a lot to send out all of those submissions, I never felt exhausted or defeated by the project. It was fun; it was a game. I’m a sucker for games.<br />
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However, I can’t help thinking that the whole process made me very eager to be published, perhaps more than was healthy. Like many writers, I was often told early on that writers should write more and publish less. (Somebody famous said that; I forget who.) Parts of me are at war over this. That publish-less thing is sort of a puritanical philosophy, like we all need to suffer to be worthy, and I know there are times when I rush off poems and essays for publication before they’re ready. (I can only hope they get rejected.) I also know that I’m 57 years old and don’t have the luxury of time that I felt in my 20s or 30s. And I sort of feel like, if I can’t rush to publication when I’m pushing 60, when exactly do I get to that? And I laugh, because writing is all about joy and not about rules. And I know I need to just keep writing and send out what I like.<br />
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<b>On to 100?</b><br />
I guess this was a success, since I’m already planning how to get more rejections in 2020***. But as always, I was surprised during this year of rejections by the way some of them broke my heart and others rolled right off me. In general, the 100-rejections practice helped take the sting out of them; when collecting them was a goal, it changed my feelings about them a little. ("Rejection? Great! Put it on the list!") That said, it didn’t mean I enjoyed getting rejecting any more than usual. This system is not a magic antidote; it’s more like desensitization. But, as I always tell young writers when I do presentations for them, this kind of desensitization is your friend. If you’re the kind who wants to rip up every rejection letter and mail it back to the editor in a Sharpie-scrawled envelope, you’re going to get very tired of doing that when they’re coming in at this rate. You log them in and move on and send out more, and that’s what takes up a lot of time in a writer's daily life.<br />
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Which brings up the question: When do you have time to write when you’re beating your brains out sending out all those submissions? I didn’t actually find that to be a problem; I continued my usual practice of doing two month-long writing marathons in April and August, and I sent out fewer submissions during those months because I was concentrating on a lot of writing. Through the rest of the year, I wrote about the same number of poems as usual, as well as some essays. So I guess the answer is that the writing still takes first priority; the submitting time, for me, ended up pushing something else out of the way, like Netflix or yard work. Which reminds me, please steer clear of my yard. While I was sending out submissions, I think skunks moved in there.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I tracked submissions, not individual poems or pieces of writing. And note that the “submissions sent out” is just the sum of acceptances and rejections received during 2019; some were submitted in 2018, and I think a couple of publishers sat on them longer than that.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** I love it when writers tell you how much they make, don't you? The great taboo. This figure only tracks journal payments and contest wins, not book sales or honoraria at readings.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*** I'll try to be more methodical, like make lists of journals I want to be in and then actually go down the list and send poems to them. So far, I've been very good about making the lists. Not so good about the sending part.</span><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-70232740758964287922019-10-18T16:28:00.001-07:002019-10-18T16:47:59.503-07:00Writers & One-Nighters<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik9a3TQvVblBewzoslh8J7pe1mttykDAug6YnmI1kjthGmG-8CcTF2t2y3O1kAHHVwcnXoXZw8t39ATQEPJOSochPAPa_aZCymojiU9_0b8AKW9woGMkR3z3jrAQov4VUvYLgAK1VBz54/s1600/IMG_4402.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik9a3TQvVblBewzoslh8J7pe1mttykDAug6YnmI1kjthGmG-8CcTF2t2y3O1kAHHVwcnXoXZw8t39ATQEPJOSochPAPa_aZCymojiU9_0b8AKW9woGMkR3z3jrAQov4VUvYLgAK1VBz54/s320/IMG_4402.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poetry night at the Barkin’ Dog Grill, Modesto. A warm <br />
room with fellow featured poet Paul Neumann and<br />
gracious series host Stella Beratlis at the mike.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Earlier this week I took a quick road trip to central
California to read at the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center’s Second Tuesday poetry series. I was reading with Paul
Neumann, a former professor at Modesto Junior College, at the Barkin’ Dog Grill in downtown Modesto in this long-running
series that was founded by poet Gillian Wegener and is now hosted by Modesto’s
city poet laureate, Stella Beratlis. </div>
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That is one healthy reading series; when I
got to the Barkin’ Dog Grill, the place was packed, and as soon as Stella and
Gillian arrived, I realized that they were waving at or hugging almost everyone
in the restaurant—all these folks were there to see the reading (empty-house
nightmare averted!). The audience was lively and engaged, with the kind of rapt
faces that I always enjoy reading to.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-T1Ir2h59y6jLR0gXCXEvB_SuDmzhru97KmGf3YcV4fXopa9QThFs7QHcpYOQLMQmA1viPEdJ6G1mQxgeESlQxS1Knts2SrWLsUoTqmvsQxvl5lU0GYE784atvW9wSdsNZgoRcmqocEk/s1600/IMG_4401+cropped.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="688" data-original-width="1197" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-T1Ir2h59y6jLR0gXCXEvB_SuDmzhru97KmGf3YcV4fXopa9QThFs7QHcpYOQLMQmA1viPEdJ6G1mQxgeESlQxS1Knts2SrWLsUoTqmvsQxvl5lU0GYE784atvW9wSdsNZgoRcmqocEk/s320/IMG_4401+cropped.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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And I would just like to say: This was the first reading I’ve
ever done where the audience was eating dinner. And I loved that, and now I’ll
always want people to be eating. There was something wonderfully assuring about
the clink of forks and the light glinting off wineglasses while I read my
work; some little existential cell inside me was happy that these people were
getting sustenance. I have a longstanding blood-sugar issue—an aftereffect from
a scary health crisis about 12 years ago—and I tend to get glucose crashes at
inconvenient moments, like right in the middle of a reading*. So I’m obsessive
about eating a solid meal before doing a reading. At the Barkin’ Dog I was able
to order a full sit-down meal (and a giant glass of iced tea), and then ate
half of it while the first reader performed. This was pretty much a perfect
scenario; by the time I got to read, I was warm and tanked up, and there was still food left to polish off after my show was over. All the eating
and waitstaff did make for a little extra noise during the reading, but it was nothing
a seasoned open mike veteran can’t handle. (What poet hasn’t had to shout over a growling
cappuccino machine or a phone ringing or a fight breaking out in the bar?)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF01UthI4cMmTI9vNhxeh0NpmgWnN98BvDQjR7dW5N5e_zXWWeOTwq60c95VTvkZu5B-y1q5tGQyItr7WcC-sWGSoaVYVRI_3HEwUiC-YbBACYfRdAJtJwdkRZdgZUanZBeGxh9gjzDHc/s1600/IMG_4416.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="720" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgF01UthI4cMmTI9vNhxeh0NpmgWnN98BvDQjR7dW5N5e_zXWWeOTwq60c95VTvkZu5B-y1q5tGQyItr7WcC-sWGSoaVYVRI_3HEwUiC-YbBACYfRdAJtJwdkRZdgZUanZBeGxh9gjzDHc/s320/IMG_4416.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Did you know Lodi is full of wineries and has miles<br />
and miles of vineyards? I didn’t.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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When I was planning this little road trip, it seemed like an
awfully long drive (about six hours) to do in a day, only to return home the
next day; I generally turn into a pumpkin after three hours in the car. But my
17-year-old cat had a tough summer healthwise, and I didn’t want to leave him
alone too long. So I decided to just see how this whirlwind, long-drive
one-nighter went. And it went fine. Great, in fact. To my surprise, I enjoyed
the driving and even took a longer route the second day, adding about a
half-hour to the trip home**. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3OxriBNsM99evUBR2QNX-R3AqOVGigT3ZxHNHO_wZLXeFVcsQrUb9kZQapIlyidiHlvbbsgi0f2U139YWAhuz-POoeJTPVb_iZzCJepepncZ_uT1WUkrx-3uwlsSwZuo9geidnDa_x5o/s1600/IMG_4398LR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="720" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3OxriBNsM99evUBR2QNX-R3AqOVGigT3ZxHNHO_wZLXeFVcsQrUb9kZQapIlyidiHlvbbsgi0f2U139YWAhuz-POoeJTPVb_iZzCJepepncZ_uT1WUkrx-3uwlsSwZuo9geidnDa_x5o/s320/IMG_4398LR.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Best Western in Lodi is right by the truck stop, but <br />
actually really nice. Tiniest lap pool I have ever seen.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Over the last two years I’ve done more than 10 road trips to support my new book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Trouble with New England Girls</i>. This has made me ponder a lot about the economics and
logistics of out-of-town readings, since I live in southern Oregon, a long way
from everywhere. Pretty much every out-of-town reading requires an overnight
stay, so I experimented with one-nighters and two-nighters, and even a three-nighter,
to see what felt best for me. To my surprise, I prefer one-nighters and long
drives over two-nighters and shorter, broken-up drives. It may be because I’ve
had two high-maintenance cats the past few years (one with diabetes), but
staying away a single night is much easier on me psychologically than arranging
to be away for two or three nights. And I’m always amazed at how much I pack in during a
one-night, two-day trip; when I get back home, I always feel like I’ve been
away much longer. And the longer drives are (counterintuitively) bothering me less as I get older.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimUET7zMlgzYSiXDMQWx9rdDDI8icX9cguKLnoTl0VdGoPboNPU-sm5Y8S4ia-D3wxMoIMZ8VY2BjIuuyMTmQkfB1-TLu8KP5OdP8iQJ5fBp_6hyYUvQQyfbTCAVRiiRf_wCaPbpkyuw/s1600/IMG_4424.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="1080" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgimUET7zMlgzYSiXDMQWx9rdDDI8icX9cguKLnoTl0VdGoPboNPU-sm5Y8S4ia-D3wxMoIMZ8VY2BjIuuyMTmQkfB1-TLu8KP5OdP8iQJ5fBp_6hyYUvQQyfbTCAVRiiRf_wCaPbpkyuw/s320/IMG_4424.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And did you know the Deshmesh Darbar Sikh Temple<br />
is also in Lodi?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And then there’s the money side of it; of course one night
in a hotel is half the price of two nights. We writers have to think about this
stuff. Out-of-town readings sometimes don’t pay for themselves. But sometimes
they do; sometimes you even turn a profit. In the long run it feels like a wash, and that’s fine.
And there are many intangible benefits to doing these readings: meeting
interesting people, seeing fascinating places I never expected to run across,
and making connections with other writers that often lead to readings and
opportunities later on. (For instance, I met Stella Beratlis last year when I
read with her at another series in California.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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So here’s to the one-nighters, and pistachios fresh from the
orchard, and the Sikh Temple in Lodi, and chickens in the road, and the modern
Gold Rush feel of Marysville, and Mt. Shasta with its lenticular clouds. And poets traveling through it
all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFt3B20SO4MflpoPF0ziZigNKrAEiWp27FSKTIKeGTJoMmvV5DjnUWGHzAV-FnHq_C5X2mlu3KpicMQCcBxla9TyQTbjft8M6AccLtmH6WYoeLct0fiqzcV9JNj8PjfMhbq7Ked8sQatc/s1600/IMG_4468LR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="540" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFt3B20SO4MflpoPF0ziZigNKrAEiWp27FSKTIKeGTJoMmvV5DjnUWGHzAV-FnHq_C5X2mlu3KpicMQCcBxla9TyQTbjft8M6AccLtmH6WYoeLct0fiqzcV9JNj8PjfMhbq7Ked8sQatc/s320/IMG_4468LR.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We don’t have a Cost Plus in southern Oregon,<br />
so I got a German food fix in Stockton. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh65THHvHGeMth3Bj3b56ymikD-RxvnId8widSECaZtOd6pVbOk36AVukWFbY4LbfHlXTw-faZYYnuK3vE2hg4wIu5i2dJir0wUNL7n1mgRRz1zd2GqpOHU-aVHhPpN8PvY2pH8FN1XpXQ/s1600/IMG_4428.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="540" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh65THHvHGeMth3Bj3b56ymikD-RxvnId8widSECaZtOd6pVbOk36AVukWFbY4LbfHlXTw-faZYYnuK3vE2hg4wIu5i2dJir0wUNL7n1mgRRz1zd2GqpOHU-aVHhPpN8PvY2pH8FN1XpXQ/s320/IMG_4428.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And here I thought Red Bluff's claim to fame<br />
was consecutive days over 100 degrees.<br />
Not so! They have some fantastic orchards<br />
and roadside fruit stands.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFpPUV57ZsGmmIz15VSog2Z-gQbLhSQYB92wOMHUB5cHIDtc3ITjAXw9S-SGaawL8QTpbne-RPd8oj-ra3EaTAShLJAznG43p5mVUf3FwCIqOFE66hfUYbZW5H994TPjBc9QS0a9_SC3Y/s1600/IMG_4450.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="452" data-original-width="1080" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFpPUV57ZsGmmIz15VSog2Z-gQbLhSQYB92wOMHUB5cHIDtc3ITjAXw9S-SGaawL8QTpbne-RPd8oj-ra3EaTAShLJAznG43p5mVUf3FwCIqOFE66hfUYbZW5H994TPjBc9QS0a9_SC3Y/s400/IMG_4450.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The massive burn scar from the Delta fire north<br />
of Shasta Lake is still horrifying a year later. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1078T7Qc1xJId0Xw3K4aSop43WKkVi6-KYjNDOPWH3sq-iKc1_5caQyjKzUAI0mID7gSHMN4WEHgTxef6eWtmOR5YT-tmBK6j9G1FCxNwWsgVhS0cu2B4C46UtJ93dINKaMTlRAlA6EM/s1600/IMG_4463.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="1080" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1078T7Qc1xJId0Xw3K4aSop43WKkVi6-KYjNDOPWH3sq-iKc1_5caQyjKzUAI0mID7gSHMN4WEHgTxef6eWtmOR5YT-tmBK6j9G1FCxNwWsgVhS0cu2B4C46UtJ93dINKaMTlRAlA6EM/s400/IMG_4463.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I still maintain that the Weed airport, just north <br />
of Mt. Shasta, has the best rest stop on I-5.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* If anyone was at my reading with John Sibley Williams a couple of months ago in Medford, that was why I rudely left the podium for a moment during the Q&A, went to my seat, and brought back a Tootsie Roll and a protein shake I’d stowed in my purse. In the past I would have just suffered, but I could see you were all friends. So I just ate the damn Tootsie Roll and felt much better in a few minutes.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Southern Oregonians, take note: To bypass that 2-1/2-hour stretch of I-5 from Sacramento to Red Bluff that I always find a bit depressing, take highway 99 north out of Sacramento, bear east onto highway 70 through Marysville, and hook up with 99 past Chico and into Red Bluff. Miles of orchards, rolling hills, and roadside fruit stands. An unsettling view of Oroville Dam high on a plateau. Great vistas that will answer the question of how Butte County got its name. Way fewer semis.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-76069566182803466132019-09-14T17:33:00.000-07:002019-09-14T17:57:45.898-07:00August Poetry Postcard Fest 2019 Wrap-up: Fresh Horses<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcJLxFXzPRhfRwBlzK6jS2bY1wfHjukjbW4fhx8cu4ljPS9Y37bAl23Ep4DyupcCj0NRvZLp4P4AN1iveZRy_MVAmfaBDDUpF7tT-xxo9awhwEshk2EFqpsXWOesDnbYDJRb3Ntabdyak/s1600/IMG_4232LR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="486" data-original-width="576" height="270" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcJLxFXzPRhfRwBlzK6jS2bY1wfHjukjbW4fhx8cu4ljPS9Y37bAl23Ep4DyupcCj0NRvZLp4P4AN1iveZRy_MVAmfaBDDUpF7tT-xxo9awhwEshk2EFqpsXWOesDnbYDJRb3Ntabdyak/s320/IMG_4232LR.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All the postcards I received for the <br />
2019 Postcard Fest. Fist bump, Group 5!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
OK—the dust has settled, the postcards are mailed. The total: 36 poems written in 31 days. That’s a lot for me, a new record.<br />
That’s my final tally for this year’s August Poetry Postcard Fest, a month-long writing marathon that I’ve been doing each August for the past seven years. This is the one where about 300 people from around the U.S. (and a few overseas) write a poem each day on a postcard and mail it to some other participant. This is one of two month-long writing marathons I do each year (the other being NaPoWriMo), and I’ve become dependent on these mini-writing retreats to generate new material and focus on cycles of poems, projects that sometimes only come together in the white-hot forge of a daily writing discipline. I lack that discipline the rest of the year, for all the usual excuses (full-time job, too tired, life…), so I really try to make the most of these 30-day pushes.<br />
<br />
<b>Just fill in the box</b><br />
Okay, so—in this, the seventh year of doing this postcard-poem marathon, did I beat my previous record because this writing-marathon thing is getting easier? Well, maybe. Even though I find most poem-a-day marathons daunting (at some point I'm always staring at a blank page, thinking <i>Why why WHY do I sign up for these things?</i>), this year’s Fest seemed surprisingly breezy. Pretty much every time I sat down to write a poem, I wrote one. Or two, or three. I wrote in batches again (which works well for me when writing short poems), and once again I often found that the second and third poem of the night were better than the first one, like the pump had to be primed before the clearer water could come out.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTuUFMMtY8k8yP5cX9KL3y354eUiBYEaukhYihKF45EaTsagj5qG3b9FiHxTpJ22KStm7Gj1z2wxexdfBhVVJAcKHBLW35_gsK1xcZMyD4xTm-2Xba6-O-4npuGItRiVtrqVpPb1PtHHg/s1600/IMG_4228LR.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="445" data-original-width="576" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTuUFMMtY8k8yP5cX9KL3y354eUiBYEaukhYihKF45EaTsagj5qG3b9FiHxTpJ22KStm7Gj1z2wxexdfBhVVJAcKHBLW35_gsK1xcZMyD4xTm-2Xba6-O-4npuGItRiVtrqVpPb1PtHHg/s320/IMG_4228LR.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The notebook with the boxes drawn into it.<br />
I'm assuming this will not count as publishing<br />
these poems because there's no way in hell<br />
you can read my handwriting.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This time I always wrote at night, taking the hour or so when I would normally read before bedtime, and I wrote all but three of the poems by hand in a notebook that I’d sketched boxes into, approximately postcard-size. The notebook thing was unusual; recently I’ve been writing much more on a Bluetooth keyboard than by hand. But for some reason, this year I kept reaching for that notebook; there was something soothing about its quietness in the evening with the crickets* singing outside, and the pre-drawn boxes made the writing seem less intimidating—surely I could fill that little space. I did, however, break my lucky 1980s PaperMate pen, and I think it’s a goner. But then I wrote some decent poems with a cheap hotel pen. (I steal those when I do out-of-town readings; they seem to be lucky too.) After all that analog writing, my hand hurt and my handwriting was barely legible, but old-school was working so I stuck with it.<br />
<br />
<b>Release the horses</b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hackney pony (Breyer mold #496). </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
One of the keys, I think, to how smoothly this year’s Fest went was the fact that I settled onto a theme early: the horses I see every day on my way to work. This was a bit of an indulgence; although horses creep into my writing a lot (I grew up around them), horses are a tricky subject because the poems can often go too soft and sticky, or too hackneyed (horse pun!). In their way, they’re as dangerous as cat poems. But I’d been thinking about those horses by the road a lot—I have the world’s most beautiful commute—so I decided to give myself a challenge: write horse poems that did something I wasn’t expecting, whatever that would turn out to be. I ended up working a lot of mythology and religion into the poems, and found horses often standing in for other aspects of nature vanishing from our world. In the end, about half of the month’s poems were about horses, so that may make a chapbook or something down the road.<br />
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<b>Lake effect</b><br />
The other half of the poems were a bit more random, although a kayak outing on a mile-high alpine lake provided almost a week’s worth of poems. That lake really got under my skin; the clear water, harsh landscape, and volcanic mountain looming over it permeated my writing for several days, much like a trip down the Rogue River three years ago formed the basis for my chapbook <i><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/532f3da4e4b025b2a0833bf9/t/5808f65fe58c62d4801a95b9/1476982368093/I+Am+on+a+River+and+Cannot+Answer-Amy+Miller.pdf" target="_blank">I Am on a River and Cannot Answer</a></i>.<br />
Some themes, though, pop up every year in my August postcard poems. As usual, there was a poem about crickets. And the obligatory August skunks. And many of them were about place, perhaps because I associate postcards with traveling. Postcards make me think of big places and long distances, and that gets reflected in the poems.<br />
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<b>Oh, right—the postcards</b><br />
I like art. I was an art major for a year in college. But I’m not an artist like some of the participants in the PoPo Fest; a quick browse through the Fest’s Facebook page shows dozens of beautiful original collages, watercolors, drawings, and photos that participants used for the picture side of their postcards. For me, although I love seeing other people’s postcard art, the Fest is mostly about generating new poems. So this year I just scoured the house for leftover postcards from past Fests—about 20 from last year with a photo of one of my own linocuts (I had the cards made online at VistaPrint, which I highly recommend), along with a few giveaways from local restaurants (thank you, Caldera and Standing Stone!) and some tourist-y ones (Rogue River, Crater Lake) that I had stashed away. I didn’t spend a cent on cards this year, nor did I think about them very much. And that was fine.<br />
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<b>Bottom line</b><br />
So, as a generative writing exercise, was this a success? I think I always say, oh sure, it was worthwhile—justifying the time and energy I put in on these writing marathons that some other writers, frankly, look down upon. But this year I ended up with about 15 poems that I think I can get something out of. Normally I might get 5 (which I consider a good return on a month’s work), so this is a much higher number than normal. Of course I may look at them differently a month from now (“What was I thinking?”), but I felt like the horse theme turned out to be very fertile ground; I had a lot of unresolved issues to work through in those poems, and of course for poets, that’s literary gold. I was also trying hard to surprise myself with each poem; I was really working on that discipline all month.<br />
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Sign-ups for next year’s August Poetry Postcard Fest are already happening; <a href="http://paulenelson.com/august-poetry-postcard-fest/" target="_blank">click here to see what it’s all about</a>. Also check out the fascinating <a href="https://www.rattle.com/the-joy-of-postcards/" target="_blank">essay that Fest founder Paul Nelson recently wrote for <i>Rattle</i></a>; the journal will have a special feature next year devoted to postcard poetry.<br />
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And here are my own reports from past Postcard Fests:<br />
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<a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2018/09/smokin-august-poetry-postcard-fest-wrap.html" target="_blank">Smokin’ August Poetry Postcard Fest Wrap-Up</a> (2018—oh lordy, the one with all the fires and smoke)<br />
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<a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2016/09/august-postcard-poetry-fest-2016-wrap-up.html" target="_blank">August Postcard Poetry Fest 2016 wrap-up</a> (the first year I made my own cards)<br />
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<a href="http://writers-island.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-long-and-short-of-postcard-poems.html" target="_blank">The Long and Short of Postcard Poems</a> (2015)<br />
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I guess I was a slacker in 2017 and didn’t write a wrap-up.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* And skunks, who do not sing but chatter.</span><br />
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Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-46367134135678059002019-04-30T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-30T09:31:50.900-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 30: “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6EgjcaUY4zctcTtdQ6N6BiHF5S1tIj9xVfPfrWFSh8ojy-0uVCxMpJDjzt5D0VbVyXXIcObtycHU8E643jRp_TZFvoc2EmFRhM7HMubh8051Oup2WJb6CqCIcntSjdMXe-oYhyphenhyphen3t08lU/s1600/Frost+-+Poetry+of.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="332" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6EgjcaUY4zctcTtdQ6N6BiHF5S1tIj9xVfPfrWFSh8ojy-0uVCxMpJDjzt5D0VbVyXXIcObtycHU8E643jRp_TZFvoc2EmFRhM7HMubh8051Oup2WJb6CqCIcntSjdMXe-oYhyphenhyphen3t08lU/s200/Frost+-+Poetry+of.jpg" width="132" /></a>This one’s in the public domain, so I’ll put it right here.<br />
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<b>After Apple-Picking</b><br />
<i>by Robert Frost</i><br />
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My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree<br />
Toward heaven still,<br />
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill<br />
Beside it, and there may be two or three<br />
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.<br />
But I am done with apple-picking now.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMOrDFIH9pFY4iynTdR3WBDJyi58Stq-nrfZrVp1-FZ-us0FhUU80MkEnHcRdd_cBqLiSoJlnmPyQI8reKzem1-RA4w6OhVeW3ZbCFH0Ywxj6wcO0yNyCqiFCB5IqgacB9Pb71mJDpqX0/s1600/Frost+-+North+of+Boston.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMOrDFIH9pFY4iynTdR3WBDJyi58Stq-nrfZrVp1-FZ-us0FhUU80MkEnHcRdd_cBqLiSoJlnmPyQI8reKzem1-RA4w6OhVeW3ZbCFH0Ywxj6wcO0yNyCqiFCB5IqgacB9Pb71mJDpqX0/s200/Frost+-+North+of+Boston.jpg" width="133" /></a>Essence of winter sleep is on the night,<br />
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.<br />
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight<br />
I got from looking through a pane of glass<br />
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough<br />
And held against the world of hoary grass.<br />
It melted, and I let it fall and break.<br />
But I was well<br />
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,<br />
And I could tell<br />
What form my dreaming was about to take.<br />
Magnified apples appear and disappear,<br />
Stem end and blossom end,<br />
And every fleck of russet showing clear.<br />
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,<br />
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.<br />
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.<br />
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin<br />
The rumbling sound<br />
Of load on load of apples coming in.<br />
For I have had too much<br />
Of apple-picking: I am overtired<br />
Of the great harvest I myself desired.<br />
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,<br />
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.<br />
For all<br />
That struck the earth,<br />
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,<br />
Went surely to the cider-apple heap<br />
As of no worth.<br />
One can see what will trouble<br />
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.<br />
Were he not gone,<br />
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his<br />
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,<br />
Or just some human sleep.<br />
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When pondering what to post today, the last day of April and therefore the last post in this series of Great Poems for April—no pressure!—I realized a strange thing. Even though I’d been concentrating on going through my own trove of favorite poems through the month, I hadn’t really thought about which one poem is my very favorite. You know, that one that accompanies you through life, whose lines remain with you like bits of a song that you find yourself humming while doing dishes or driving to work. As soon as I thought that, I immediately knew which one was my favorite: “After Apple-Picking.”<br />
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What I love most about this poem is its unusual rhyme scheme. This being Frost, of course there’s a pattern. But it’s so erratic, so—dare I say—rebellious that I wonder if Frost was thinking, screw the establishment; I’m gonna go all Picasso on the old end rhyme. And he was a <i>master</i> of the old end rhyme. And yet he was young when he wrote this. And probably somebody out there knows what that was all about, but I’m kind of glad I don’t know, in the same way I’m glad I don’t know for sure what the different kinds of sleep are that he talks about. Or whether this is about the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the banishment from Eden. Or about the burdens of fame (that’s my go-to—“I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired”—but again, he was young, so I’m not so sure). And if you want to see what other people think about all those things, spend an amusing hour or so surfing the internet, looking at the different theories. Those people are all so sure they know what this poem means.<br />
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What I do know about this poem is that it’s beautiful. Phrases of this poem are, I think, among the best in American poetry (“ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,” “load on load of apples coming in,” and that low-geared, four-word musical breakdown of a line, “As of no worth”). I love the way he changes up the rhythm and sentence length, and of course those erratic line lengths that sneak the rhymes in there among all the truncation where you can barely hear it. The phrasing is so memorable that I literally can’t pick up a stepladder without whispering “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still,” or cut open an apple without thinking “Stem end and blossom end.” And this line—“Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.” I can go back and read that for a lifetime and never get tired of it.<br />
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Every year that I reread this poem, it means something different to me; I find some small part I hadn’t thought much about before. (Right now it’s the "pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough”—can’t you see it? Don’t you sometimes go a whole day, unable to rub that strangeness from your sight?) Loving a good poem is like a friendship. You go through time together, and even though you never know everything about that poem, you keep discovering things that it didn’t tell you before. And your relationship with it changes too. If it’s really a great poem, the poem weathers the changes. And so do you.<br />
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Readers, it’s been great fun this month to write about these 30 poems I love. Thank you for all the likes and comments on social media; I hope you’ve had as good a time as I have.<br />
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Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-25422351077321775072019-04-29T07:59:00.000-07:002019-04-29T07:59:31.452-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 29: “Poem Written in the Sixth Month of My Wife’s Illness” by Ellen Bass<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr4pLkCMFbf6CTwG6ZdGqGcIUrWD66JtoGr_dOpdhJMf4WBK09eaizLpziTmtkEQZj4WAnwdZdv4A7Hkj4Ka5dsg79Cxdt_KupRPPxwY8PM-xUT8pZmYsyj4-mEArcxRlYoaEdezVcH_o/s1600/Bass+-+Like+a+Beggar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr4pLkCMFbf6CTwG6ZdGqGcIUrWD66JtoGr_dOpdhJMf4WBK09eaizLpziTmtkEQZj4WAnwdZdv4A7Hkj4Ka5dsg79Cxdt_KupRPPxwY8PM-xUT8pZmYsyj4-mEArcxRlYoaEdezVcH_o/s200/Bass+-+Like+a+Beggar.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://www.rattle.com/poem-written-in-the-sixth-month-of-my-wifes-illness-by-ellen-bass/" target="_blank">Read “Poem Written in the Sixth Month of My Wife’s Illness” in the literary journal <i>Rattle</i> here.</a><br />
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This poem, to me, feels like a master class in how to write moving moments. How to stay with each moment just long enough to sink it into the reader’s skin, not unlike that indelible image that has stuck in my mind ever since I first read this poem in 2016: “setting the straps in the grooves on her shoulders, / reins for the journey.” And then the image of the “crumpled bills, steeped in the smells / of the lives who’d handled them.” And then the smells themselves, this egalitarian sense that everyone goes into a liquor store at some point in their lives, just as everyone at some time or another will sit in a diner, and everyone grieves, and everyone dies.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSNuODyiF76cmXahj4VxsYRyOevwceB46uhO93B5-UE4FDaa6LCiNPtrIVH0ZOOYORfsP5H9BG8Xja_J5Zy-mLcSOJUEpizl8GVCBtWkAEKzgviWlwKjUOGMoK9h7JmTEkbl0RtdHMpXs/s1600/Bass+-+Human+Line.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="331" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSNuODyiF76cmXahj4VxsYRyOevwceB46uhO93B5-UE4FDaa6LCiNPtrIVH0ZOOYORfsP5H9BG8Xja_J5Zy-mLcSOJUEpizl8GVCBtWkAEKzgviWlwKjUOGMoK9h7JmTEkbl0RtdHMpXs/s200/Bass+-+Human+Line.jpg" width="132" /></a><br />
Ellen Bass has a way of telling stories, of adding just the right detail to let you in on a bit of backstory without overburdening the poem with it. For instance, look at the line about the father in the hospital: “this time / they didn’t know if he’d pull through.” <i>This</i> <i>time</i>—so this has been a long process. <i>They</i> didn’t know—implying an impersonal system of doctors, and also the maddening uncertainty of medicine. So much information packed into a simple phrase. And then of course the image at the end, this waitress who seems to understand, if only that this other working woman needs some time to herself.<br />
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In this poem, there are four women—the mother, the waitress, the speaker, and her wife, who is only mentioned in the title. And with that title, again, Bass is building you a window onto the larger story that you can look through briefly; there is an ill wife in this story, and a worried speaker, and an echo back to the father in the hospital, and to the diner and crying over the cup of coffee. Such deft connections, so carefully built, between these scenes that aren’t exactly parallel, but that deeply speak to each other across time.<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-72549738479113887332019-04-28T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-28T07:00:10.566-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 28: “A Blessing” by James Wright<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikrSRXakE52ofiFNchyVURSfeAVfmJbl3cFANnIETkGyjgFfyDdtivU72jt5s7YdzRpSf25v36S40L8L7TFISE2_WjPch4iYH8tx0xDk2DRhLCAwbPU41Wa1fngv_P62rnFRuaw8PwVsA/s1600/Wright+-+Selected.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikrSRXakE52ofiFNchyVURSfeAVfmJbl3cFANnIETkGyjgFfyDdtivU72jt5s7YdzRpSf25v36S40L8L7TFISE2_WjPch4iYH8tx0xDk2DRhLCAwbPU41Wa1fngv_P62rnFRuaw8PwVsA/s200/Wright+-+Selected.jpg" width="129" /></a><a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/blessing" target="_blank">Read “A Blessing” on the Academy of American Poets site here.</a><br />
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People, I warned you about the horses.<br />
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Sometimes you need pure happiness. And, you know, that’s rare in poetry. At least, in <i>good</i> poetry. It’s hard to say, <i>Okay, I’m going to lift you up and keep you there in ecstasy</i>, and then deliver on it. Really. Freakin’. Hard. If I knew how to do that, I’d write a happy poem every day.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1912W2PPmF1zeEoeRQsJDqOle1MqTcn5YQeujbNsp_hyf_Va8hd399bp8cgPpju5l7H_qhWSy4zePOpG5LU64YNpLmcavJ0FDDcOgkPICXquzL8pM_fJymGQdw_s3hy6UUUwfnMBhyphenhyphenWA/s1600/Wright+-+Above.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1912W2PPmF1zeEoeRQsJDqOle1MqTcn5YQeujbNsp_hyf_Va8hd399bp8cgPpju5l7H_qhWSy4zePOpG5LU64YNpLmcavJ0FDDcOgkPICXquzL8pM_fJymGQdw_s3hy6UUUwfnMBhyphenhyphenWA/s200/Wright+-+Above.jpg" width="129" /></a>I first encountered this poem, as I think a lot of people did, in high school in the 1970s. And what a great way to introduce a small-town kid to poetry. I <i>knew</i> these Indian ponies; I had seen that ripple and felt that “long ear / That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.” I didn’t realize it at the time (or perhaps the teacher, probably Mr. Flynn, explained this and I promptly forgot), but the sounds all through this poem are doing quiet work, lulling you into peace. All the “s” sounds, all the trochees—the two-syllable words with a stress on the first—<i>darken, kindness, welcome, nuzzled</i>. And the triplets, again with first syllables stressed—<i>happiness, loneliness, slenderer, delicate</i>. All such graceful words, strung together like a narcotic necklace. And good lord, he gets away with “happiness” and “loneliness” in the same damned poem! Nobody does that!<br />
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And I know it may be just because I learned this poem as a teenager, so I’ve had it in my head for 40-ish years, but there it is, right in the front of my mind, whenever I pass a horse pasture, which is pretty much every day here in southern Oregon. “They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.”<br />
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And then of course the last three lines. Does anyone who reads those lines when young ever forget them?<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-86889093288341642602019-04-27T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-27T07:00:10.628-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 27: “Fences” by Austin Smith<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipDNRKtaqCm_8cL73ty5kDAEMhTSjRes1OH7uz-mq_-rNGdPqm2iN4CaMtroau2K9yFoh9nU3hzPqwDhcZ80NrG2VQ5ma-n4WtYxbaPHO9OEBMByyc04RYazzXAiC_hMvO9d2cFXCg0dI/s1600/Smith+-+Flyover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="331" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipDNRKtaqCm_8cL73ty5kDAEMhTSjRes1OH7uz-mq_-rNGdPqm2iN4CaMtroau2K9yFoh9nU3hzPqwDhcZ80NrG2VQ5ma-n4WtYxbaPHO9OEBMByyc04RYazzXAiC_hMvO9d2cFXCg0dI/s200/Smith+-+Flyover.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="http://poems.com/poem.php?date=17821" target="_blank">Read “Fences” on Poetry Daily here.</a><br />
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Just look at these muscular words: <i>scolded, driven, lean, forced, march, swallow, taut</i>. Austin Smith packs all of these into this very lean poem. All through it, there’s a sense of almost futile work, hard labor under brutal circumstances, and then these acceptances of what’s given but not wanted, things that actually harm over time: swallowing the wire, taking it in, bit by bit. By the end of this poem, you know it’s about a kind of living, not about fences at all.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Gl1mnUoQNL13deDu37urepXA6J_F-a2bpGqWsx7hTWD2jSBPa5dcZ1PYx-OLkhL1fEegT6Q1wx03c-qiGXEdUIQGU-_kDFlNz3fJ8Zy-1Rfia3DXiw7PBonqyrUb3HJyLWnhuLBmGZ8/s1600/Smith+-+Almanac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8Gl1mnUoQNL13deDu37urepXA6J_F-a2bpGqWsx7hTWD2jSBPa5dcZ1PYx-OLkhL1fEegT6Q1wx03c-qiGXEdUIQGU-_kDFlNz3fJ8Zy-1Rfia3DXiw7PBonqyrUb3HJyLWnhuLBmGZ8/s200/Smith+-+Almanac.jpg" width="133" /></a>Sometimes I love poems because they’re not at all like something I’d write. Others, like this one, I love because they’re poems I wish I’d written. This spare, and yet this expansive. And he piles on the sentence fragments, which makes each short line cut to the chase even faster. Startling, insidious, this poem drives its message into you gradually, the way barbed wire violates a tree.<br />
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Down at the bottom of the Poetry Daily page is an intriguing description of Smith’s book <i><a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13241.html" target="_blank">Flyover Country</a></i>, from which this poem comes. Looks like great reading.<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-36979745618353899182019-04-26T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-26T07:00:10.541-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 26: “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” by Donald Justice<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUOu8vCDo_myRp-15260nIrec977fJ5nYhtS_64AdupVKOsw17rJsVV-PQxR6PQ9Qsm5QSJFYQu3yi0U3AkZKlcB5MPTHdyA27v9U5Pxk4cs8CAuz-0J3H-XPSGo1NFsHywbxIl8do3-g/s1600/Justice+-+Collected.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="430" data-original-width="400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUOu8vCDo_myRp-15260nIrec977fJ5nYhtS_64AdupVKOsw17rJsVV-PQxR6PQ9Qsm5QSJFYQu3yi0U3AkZKlcB5MPTHdyA27v9U5Pxk4cs8CAuz-0J3H-XPSGo1NFsHywbxIl8do3-g/s200/Justice+-+Collected.jpg" width="185" /></a><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58078/on-the-death-of-friends-in-childhood" target="_blank">Read “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” on the Poetry Foundation site here.</a><br />
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I developed a crush on Donald Justice in my 30s, when I had stopped writing. I hadn’t really stopped writing on purpose; I just hadn’t yet realized that having my work rejected so much in my 20s had taken its toll, and I had gradually quit the whole business, unbeknownst even to myself, just to avoid the pain of sending my work out. Instead, during that decade I immersed myself in reading poetry*—which, in retrospect, was a really good thing. One poet I read a lot back then was Donald Justice.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGjBQJwsGOlicClpd1xoNv5cfRSHXzQTPJQfAzvnTIZGLCPfcKC1w47lbDyeGbYJh6tpiH4eKHhB53X3EYfFkyWaHR_RTOV2f2AbVwTscuPmpa-AwWf_kYC3gyOKd4q8ZTKLbkMQQpuAM/s1600/Justice+-+Orpheus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="474" data-original-width="297" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGjBQJwsGOlicClpd1xoNv5cfRSHXzQTPJQfAzvnTIZGLCPfcKC1w47lbDyeGbYJh6tpiH4eKHhB53X3EYfFkyWaHR_RTOV2f2AbVwTscuPmpa-AwWf_kYC3gyOKd4q8ZTKLbkMQQpuAM/s200/Justice+-+Orpheus.jpg" width="125" /></a>OK, let’s just look at one thing about this poem: It’s short.<i> Really </i>short. And really good. Every time I read this poem (and I do often, because how can you not? “... joining hands / In games whose very names we have forgotten...”), it reminds me that it is possible to just ring that bell even with a very short poem. Every year, I participate in a couple of month-long writing marathons, and I have to read this poem periodically to remind myself that I don’t have to write a whole page to get a good poem. And of course that’s just so much whistling in the dark, because writing short is easy—but writing short and <i>good</i> is one of the hardest things to do with poetry. Ask any haiku expert about that.<br />
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I lost only one friend in childhood, a kid in my class in 5th grade who had an asthma attack while playing little league baseball. And yes, there’s no other way for me to picture Ross; it’s strange to think that he’ll never be old in anyone’s mind, that he’ll always be 10 years old, a little on the short side and black-haired. Justice has that exactly right.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* One great advantage I had during that non-writing decade was a musician boyfriend who played regular gigs at a Borders bookstore, where he got paid in store credit. So we’d drive up to San Rafael, he’d play a jazz set or two, and then we’d go shopping for CDs (him) and poetry books (me). His generosity stocked my poetry bookshelves. Thank you, Ernie.</span><br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<i><br /></i>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-41890127950897124972019-04-25T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-25T07:00:05.663-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 25: “Artifact” by Claudia Emerson<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWoiKOpmjrVe4rhiNX94kdUYb0gyW9msIclA2QiH_LliwmZZrAyZK1krE_u9UYvJz1WJ3ET6CVxaGS2D8S4xYHSxwGbBw5cuc73jCPAR253U23fQ_esBI0FqH_mI7WBcg_aE_Oh_o4wXc/s1600/Emerson+-+Late+Wife.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWoiKOpmjrVe4rhiNX94kdUYb0gyW9msIclA2QiH_LliwmZZrAyZK1krE_u9UYvJz1WJ3ET6CVxaGS2D8S4xYHSxwGbBw5cuc73jCPAR253U23fQ_esBI0FqH_mI7WBcg_aE_Oh_o4wXc/s200/Emerson+-+Late+Wife.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=178&issue=3&page=27" target="_blank">Read “Artifact” on the Poetry Foundation site here.</a><br />
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Claudia Emerson may be my favorite modern poet, and this poem is a prime example of why. The form is a sonnet, of course, but it’s a soft one; at times the lines rhyme exactly, while others almost don’t at all. The meter, similarly, is sometimes iambic, but mostly there are rolls and lilts that bend the rhythm into more of a meander than a march.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNNTMTc5gGvZuSvegRLBKm89ZkCXDT9-Iwut4i11phWMdze25hfbs7FvNH0uZ-jUfrKa4sq0c0nwdy7sANEgygouMatRX-nouQzJpPkQMEKFVgWsebUvFjr6E6kB3XXBjWn0k4Qj0t6iA/s1600/Emerson+-+Claude.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNNTMTc5gGvZuSvegRLBKm89ZkCXDT9-Iwut4i11phWMdze25hfbs7FvNH0uZ-jUfrKa4sq0c0nwdy7sANEgygouMatRX-nouQzJpPkQMEKFVgWsebUvFjr6E6kB3XXBjWn0k4Qj0t6iA/s200/Emerson+-+Claude.jpg" width="133" /></a>And then of course there’s the story, the outline of which you get in the first line and half. But with each graceful detail, Emerson layers the paint until the fuller picture comes into view, covered at last by that quilt at the end—which turns out to be much more than just a quilt. But in this house, everything that belonged to the former wife is more than what it appears. I love the way this poem imbues objects with spirit just because of what the speaker knows of their past, and because of her place in their world. This poem is from Emerson’s book <i>Late Wife</i>, which won the Putlizer Prize in 2006.<br />
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Emerson’s poems always had a weightiness, a gravity that seemed wise beyond her years, or really, anyone’s years. And since her death in 2014 at the too-young age of 57 (I say that completely without irony because I’m 57 now), her poems, to me, have taken on a different kind of prescience. Many of them have always choked me up, but they seem all the more brilliant, all the more hard-won now.<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-85804160552548852102019-04-24T11:17:00.001-07:002019-04-24T11:17:21.332-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 24: “Gloves” by José Angel Araguz<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeIgcFhDMTMk6zBhD0RB5jk-O1OnLohxc7CKjOyRttTY7tL76snCa8_Yn1obE-bM5KTEqGXH5NPBpWUD2Ea-EDtFDmiBE0AtU8Jro8AaRduaEHUUqyfYAobD1X3vSb03rtd8O9PjzUiCs/s1600/Araguz+-+Until+We.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeIgcFhDMTMk6zBhD0RB5jk-O1OnLohxc7CKjOyRttTY7tL76snCa8_Yn1obE-bM5KTEqGXH5NPBpWUD2Ea-EDtFDmiBE0AtU8Jro8AaRduaEHUUqyfYAobD1X3vSb03rtd8O9PjzUiCs/s200/Araguz+-+Until+We.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/detail/196" target="_blank">Read “Gloves” on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry series here.</a><br />
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I first encountered José Angel Araguz and his work at a writers’ conference where he presented a fascinating workshop on erasure poetry. José was soft-spoken, down to earth, direct, and funny; he’s taught for the past few years at Linfield College in Oregon, and I can only imagine how many students think of him as their favorite professor. That was the first time I’d seen an instructor incorporate Instagram poets into a conference workshop, and it was enlightening; I have to admit that most of my opinions about Instagram poetry came from crotchety comments from older writers, whose experience with it pretty much began and ended with Rupi Kaur.<br />
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José’s poem “Gloves” isn’t an erasure poem, but like an erasure poem, it’s pared down to only what it wants to impart, small packets of information that leave the rest for the reader to fill in. It starts like a fable or myth, a made-up story, which gives it a childlike feel, almost a nursery rhyme with its short length and short lines. But this no nursery rhyme; we quickly learn there’s a father, and a prison, and these mythical gloves that become symbols of what’s missing in these two lives—letters, conversations, comminication, the father seeing the son grow up. And then those last two stanzas—again, could they be any more distilled?—where we see the father’s hand in the child’s glove, which still bears the imprint of the child, just a trace. What an amazing image.<br />
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José’s recent book <i>Until We Are Level Again</i> was a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Recently he announced that he’s moving to Boston to teach at Suffolk University—where, I’m sure, a whole new crop of students will call him their favorite professor. Lucky them.<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-17570868321348850292019-04-23T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-23T07:00:06.749-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 23: “There Are Birds Here” by Jamaal May<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUnrF9SmE7BgItiashN82bVnZq_ae0W359ksgyl6rl6zJGS8Cp3p4QlVycFPxOxLJ5j7TGk8guSZ66ONBRF7I0wmBtBTTaV0zIOoTJa6P_V67UTULFr2smuwAlyzDk-uiwnhZ6kxdvEuk/s1600/May+-+Big+Book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="375" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUnrF9SmE7BgItiashN82bVnZq_ae0W359ksgyl6rl6zJGS8Cp3p4QlVycFPxOxLJ5j7TGk8guSZ66ONBRF7I0wmBtBTTaV0zIOoTJa6P_V67UTULFr2smuwAlyzDk-uiwnhZ6kxdvEuk/s200/May+-+Big+Book.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56764/there-are-birds-here" target="_blank">Read “There Are Birds Here” on the Poetry Foundation site here.</a><br />
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A couple of years ago, I was in a workshop group that had a great holiday tradition: For our December meeting, rather than workshop each other’s poems as usual, we each brought a stack of poems by other people that we’d read during the past year, poems that had made a great impression on us*. One of the poems I brought was this one by Jamaal May.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrP3G8E6ChFaMnfQTCmvIsfsz7WP9qShyphenhyphenL5gJItuxIplMjEzdJhLQtSsT8Et3XzKsZyWFkbTHiLMODwh_cvXEmId7aZaRQEWVAPkVwCsGMeq87Wlt612I_ZQfxmFCysE9GYPoWgSekND0/s1600/May+-+Hum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="335" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrP3G8E6ChFaMnfQTCmvIsfsz7WP9qShyphenhyphenL5gJItuxIplMjEzdJhLQtSsT8Et3XzKsZyWFkbTHiLMODwh_cvXEmId7aZaRQEWVAPkVwCsGMeq87Wlt612I_ZQfxmFCysE9GYPoWgSekND0/s200/May+-+Hum.jpg" width="133" /></a>Reading it out loud to that roomful of people, I realized that one of the great strengths of this poem is that each line ends at a spot where you’d pause or<br />
take a breath. This poem <i>talks</i>, like the poet is sitting next to you in a café and relating this story. And the way he tells it, it’s one remembered assertion after another, just as you’d say it to someone: “No, / I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton, / I said confetti, and no / not like the confetti / a tank can make of a building.”<br />
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Every time I read this poem, I think about how many conversations we have like this on a national scale, in our jobs, and in our personal lives. How many white people are going around saying they know how things are and how to fix them, when they don’t know the reality at all? And how often are misinformed people trying, and succeeding, to control the narrative when they don’t know what they’re talking about? Whitesplaining (as in this poem), mansplaining, a whole lot of other splaining. When really, what they should be internalizing is “Shut up and let someone else do the talking while you listen.” This poem says that, beautifully. What a gift.<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’</i><i>m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I think every workshop group should do this**. And honestly, I get tired of workshopping, and sometimes I’d rather be in a poetry group that did <i>only</i> this, this celebration of other poets and other poems. What a great way to be introduced to poets you may not have read before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** I also think all workshop groups should serve wine. None of mine ever do. Maybe that’s why I’m tired of workshopping.</span></div>
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Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-68566475870842262502019-04-22T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-22T07:00:02.708-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 22: “Thanksgiving” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVOb3JUxx8GYj9a7-TFRNNUORgC9XSztgR3QoLzdGE1_w20BxHLnKq3uS_II6nXrUuNiIT3pR7ZZqsAn35HAObySArl2bioaFAK1Z4FZofvcuN3Z690vq9olCejuXFuXTGICt9bHSCNw/s1600/Nezhu+-+Oceanic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoVOb3JUxx8GYj9a7-TFRNNUORgC9XSztgR3QoLzdGE1_w20BxHLnKq3uS_II6nXrUuNiIT3pR7ZZqsAn35HAObySArl2bioaFAK1Z4FZofvcuN3Z690vq9olCejuXFuXTGICt9bHSCNw/s200/Nezhu+-+Oceanic.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://lithub.com/thanksgiving/" target="_blank">Read “Thanksgiving” in the online journal <i>Literary Hub</i> here.</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHZvmYu0CJWuy_bVL7-tCSiIUsJUcscVOkKHbQfOK-bVeQ6RCFoFad_w6MIA-yXqLPC8EcrhjEAztGe88hCnwP4-EIatlSnHwG3B_FtpbLf9f3hkaoacC81Phuu3gA1rOwbeV6RHxw7DU/s1600/Nezhu+-+Lucky+Fish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="342" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHZvmYu0CJWuy_bVL7-tCSiIUsJUcscVOkKHbQfOK-bVeQ6RCFoFad_w6MIA-yXqLPC8EcrhjEAztGe88hCnwP4-EIatlSnHwG3B_FtpbLf9f3hkaoacC81Phuu3gA1rOwbeV6RHxw7DU/s200/Nezhu+-+Lucky+Fish.jpg" width="136" /></a>This is a recent poem; it came out this past November in <i>Literary Hub</i>, and it became yet another Aimee Nezhukumatathil poem that I love. I especially like the feel of an incantation or chant early on, a bit like a prayer with all the “blessed”s. All those details, with perhaps my favorite being one of the most intimate: “I’ve committed the soap / and clean blade of his neck to memory”—the very kind of detail you remember about someone who catches your interest. And there’s a feeling of laughter, loud talk, even of awkwardness in this circle of friends or acquaintances (we’re never really told which). And the whole poem has the feeling of a chance encounter; I mean, don’t you read this poem and think that love can happen, even at a dinner party you maybe didn’t want to go to? There’s a feeling that life opens out this way, unexpectedly.<br />
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But my favorite thing about the poem is how unresolved it is at the end, how it stops in mid-story, which we realize is the most important moment, the true revelation. The man just “grew quiet. Concerned.” And then we know why, and we also know that the speaker probably didn’t know at the time why he grew quiet. But she knows now, and she lets us know; we’re in on the beautiful secret. But he doesn’t take action; there’s no fight; we don’t see them leaving the party and exchanging phone numbers on the driveway. The rest, as they say, is history. “Married” is all we know or need to know.<br />
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All the details here are just right: the holiday, food, decor, the newness of these people, the intimations of the future. The tightly focused lens of memory and what it remembers and what it leaves out. This poem is probably too new to be in a book yet, but I’ll be buying that book when it comes out.<br />
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<i>[All through April, I’</i><i>m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<i><br /></i>Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-59316128340751198172019-04-21T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-21T07:00:05.855-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 21: “A Brief History of Mine” by Nancy Carol Moody<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkZt6zry6t-g5qlfOEu_eAl_nW81-aakw0Z0mP3zxMsAua4bcpbgyQ0PogW1TlBftc_BTgf_oVCDqcyst0cns1vPMvWtra3-lSJUU-EnJZgcqyEELkktfFnUAPJjCqTCvOATB2uRqsU5Y/s1600/Moody+House.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkZt6zry6t-g5qlfOEu_eAl_nW81-aakw0Z0mP3zxMsAua4bcpbgyQ0PogW1TlBftc_BTgf_oVCDqcyst0cns1vPMvWtra3-lSJUU-EnJZgcqyEELkktfFnUAPJjCqTCvOATB2uRqsU5Y/s200/Moody+House.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://ciderpressreview.com/cpr-volume-16-3/a-brief-history-of-mine/#.XFYEYGaZPUI" target="_blank">Read “A Brief History of Mine” in <i>Cider Press Review</i> here.</a><br />
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Nancy Carol Moody is an Oregon poet whose work often leaps between everyday language and surreal imagery, and this poem is a prime example. The first three lines are firmly rooted in the real world, but by the time we get to that fourth line—“a 70-mile-per-hour egg, and I am its yolk,” we feel this truck is no longer on the road we thought it was on. Or perhaps we ourselves are veering out of the truck.<br />
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Eventually truck and everything in it are the speaker, hurtling through the night, and the night itself has also become something else. And by the end, Moody has even tossed in a word I could have sworn was made up (<i>transpicuous</i>: transparent; easily understood, lucid)—but, like the rest of the poem, it only seems unreal, walking a line between what we expect to see and what we don’t. Packed with Moody’s signature mix of playfulness and acerbic wit, this poem makes me want to take a whole workshop on “Self-portrait as a ______________.”<br />
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<i>[All through April, I'm featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-35375361403641591272019-04-20T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-20T11:12:12.408-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 20: “Emergency Haying” by Hayden Carruth<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqSaJf-lyuR5ylQjEHfrUOTruv2IcMXx1S59PYIzAPSfyxTyWFKhd4fkZJdwr-Zps9d4V0js5v3y6TKGKcYIideNSG8fa0hjlQe9losw7WgEhlwapmT30KdEbZQVJ3Vy3O6dGoxpeWM40/s1600/Carruth+Toward+the+Distant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="369" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqSaJf-lyuR5ylQjEHfrUOTruv2IcMXx1S59PYIzAPSfyxTyWFKhd4fkZJdwr-Zps9d4V0js5v3y6TKGKcYIideNSG8fa0hjlQe9losw7WgEhlwapmT30KdEbZQVJ3Vy3O6dGoxpeWM40/s200/Carruth+Toward+the+Distant.jpg" width="147" /></a><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51736/emergency-haying" target="_blank">Read “Emergency Haying”<span id="goog_2118573812"></span><span id="goog_2118573813"></span> on the Poetry Foundation site here.</a><br />
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This is one of my all-time favorite poems, easily in the top 10. Maybe the top 5. I go back and read this several times a year, and it hooks me in every time. Every stanza, every line, is doing something fascinating.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBaD5fhaql_ZLjgcuPfhObyk4PC943k8xOTots7M68kyIWatLC24hYd3Y5g3Gsj_4hQxyKtk1QyqSr0i9nRC54u9fAJLGlUAJc0Xu_555pw1zuPDJvAqcl4wL0RMoX_p-zTkT1eNBpm_U/s1600/Carruth+Last+Poems.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBaD5fhaql_ZLjgcuPfhObyk4PC943k8xOTots7M68kyIWatLC24hYd3Y5g3Gsj_4hQxyKtk1QyqSr0i9nRC54u9fAJLGlUAJc0Xu_555pw1zuPDJvAqcl4wL0RMoX_p-zTkT1eNBpm_U/s200/Carruth+Last+Poems.jpg" width="129" /></a>I’m noticing a theme emerging in this monthlong gathering of favorite poems: I love poems about work*. I love poems written by people who have actually <i>done</i> the work. And I love the honesty of this poem, the acknowledgment that this speaker doesn’t do this work for a living—he’s just helping a neighbor—which makes the images of the physical hardship especially vivid; my hands actually sting when I read this poem.<br />
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The religious images, honestly, go right by me. And I know, that’s sad; they’re probably the heart of this poem, so who knows what I’m missing. But let’s just say the Bible is my worst category on <i>Jeopardy!</i>, along with British monarchs and Roman numerals. So I have to set aside the Jesus imagery for someone to explain who is more schooled in it. I’m all about the work itself, and the slightly hallucinatory exhaustion afterward, because I’ve done that, I remember that; I worked so hard (ranch hand, long ago) and got so dirty that the bathwater hurt at the end of the day and literally ran like mud down the drain.<br />
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And then Carruth takes us back into the history of field work, of forced labor and slavery, and his images are still raw and immediate—everything that happens to those hands! And by the end, there’s his defiance, a sort of punch-drunk triumph, a strength (even momentary) in being the person who does the work, one of those who actually did the haying and the lifting, the digging and the building. There’s a little discomfort here—he’s already admitted he’s a “desk-servant, word-worker”—but any poet who can help out for a day of haying and go home and write a poem like this is also doing great work.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Recently I was talking with the poet Tim Applegate, who has written a lot about work that he used to do, which was wood refinishing for hotels and cruise ships—a fascinating topic that you should ask him about if you ever meet him. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blueprints-Tim-Applegate/dp/0692436871" target="_blank">(See his book <i>Blueprints</i> here.)</a> I mentioned that I rarely see books entirely devoted to the poetry of work, and he said (rightly so) that most “work” poems are about manual labor. We talked about how tactile and kinetic physical work is as opposed to, say, desk work. So I get extra excited about poems that are about the kind of work I do these days, which basically amounts to sitting in a chair and making little clicky-click noises on a keyboard all day (which weirds me out sometimes). Memorably, Stephanie Lenox, whose work is always witty and unexpected, won the 2015 Colorado Prize for Poetry for <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Business-Colorado-Prize-Poetry/dp/1885635478" target="_blank">her book about office work, <i>The Business</i></a>.</span><br />
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8645257820286049979.post-78351028313493073712019-04-19T07:00:00.000-07:002019-04-19T07:00:00.135-07:0030 Great Poems for April, Day 19: “Mermaids” by Angela Howe Decker<div class="MsoNormal">
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Disclaimer: Angela Decker and I have known each other a
<i>really</i> long time*. Her work has an inherent goodness about it, even if the
subject matter is dark or angry; her empathy for her fellow humans is always in
there. In this poem, she tells the tale of a woman working a very odd job, but
one that sparked Angela’s imagination and does the same for the reader.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This poem keeps up a juggling act of tones. It’s
laugh-out-loud funny (“like she was a cousin or something”), but also
melancholy and—yes, this is in there too—a little ridiculous, a hint of standing back and whispering to the reader, “Can you belive this?” It’s never
disrespectful, but it’s always rooted in the real world, so we trust this
narrator. Angela’s writing is like that; she will entertain you, but she’ll also tell you the truth. She will give you the goods.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/splendid-catastrophe-by-angela-decker/" style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 12pt;" target="_blank">Buy Angela’s chapbook <i>Splendid Catastrophe</i> here.</a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* When I decided to do this poem-a-day feature, I knew I wanted to include some poets I know personally. But as I started to think about whom to feature, it became like the story my parents used to tell of planning their wedding—“If we invited these people, we had to invite these other people. And if we invited person A, person B would be mad to be left out.” (They couldn't figure it out and ended up eloping.) This thing with friends' poems became a similar diplomatic tangle, the kind we run into a lot in the poetry world. Whom to invite to do a reading? Whom to solicit work from for the journal? Who gets to be in this workshop group? I don’t have an answer to all that, but it occasionally snags our vitally important network of friends and tears at it a little. I’ve been that person with their nose out of joint because I didn’t get picked. I’ve also been the one doing the picking that somebody got angry with. My mantra about all this is an annoyingly simple one that works most of the time: “Let it go. Keep writing.”</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Calibri; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[</span>All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLGruvsp8w4QgXc9ID28k5xX4SRK98OqvuIdp1Yf8cdKe5Zy4WBfyvNb2uUokYZBr2CB3OEIdfmcs8C4tM9TFuMyLxiUODnV9GDBG39buFjWEb8W4M4JNfooakAN946fGZpUIHkmtEFdY/s1600/Gomez_Punishment_Cov-1200h.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="409" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLGruvsp8w4QgXc9ID28k5xX4SRK98OqvuIdp1Yf8cdKe5Zy4WBfyvNb2uUokYZBr2CB3OEIdfmcs8C4tM9TFuMyLxiUODnV9GDBG39buFjWEb8W4M4JNfooakAN946fGZpUIHkmtEFdY/s200/Gomez_Punishment_Cov-1200h.jpg" width="163" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.rattle.com/invoking-the-muse-in-cell-block-b-by-nancy-miller-gomez/" target="_blank">Read “Invoking the Muse in Cell Block B” in the literary journal <i>Rattle</i> here.</a><br />
<br />
This poem is from Nancy Miller Gomez’s chapbook <i>Punishment</i>,
which won the <i>Rattle</i> chapbook prize* last year and details her life teaching
writing workshops in prisons. When I got the chapbook in the mail, I had some
trepidation, expecting it to be relentlessly grim. But while the book is
powerful (as this poem is) all the way through, Gomez has such a deft touch
that she can show you facets of the experience you never expected to see—images
like the “Doppler shift of footsteps / as guards come and go, their shapeless
voices rising / and falling in the halls.” Or that “greenish paint slopped onto
cinderblock / so thick it looks like molded cheese.” Sights, sounds, smells—she
really puts you in these places, distracted by the details as if you’re sitting
there with her. And the people she’s teaching are, well…people. Flawed,
vulnerable, sometimes funny. Not monolithic, which, I think, is one of the points she subtly makes.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I particularly like the way she doesn’t try to end the story
in this poem; she’s doesn’t look for closure when describing the men in her
workshop and the painful circumstances that brought them here: “Each scar
provides its own dark facts. / What if the thesis is a bottle smashed / on a
body? What if the body / can’t grow wings?” She knows better than to try to
tell their tales or predict how their lives might turn out; she’s really just
telling her own story of what this world looks like, specifically to her. </div>
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This poem, and others in the book, walk up to that distasteful line that some poems of witness violate—the
line of appropriating other people’s stories, mining them for emotion that is
second- or third-hand and shouldn’t have been borrowed in the first place. But
this poem and this book don’t cross that line. As the reader, you never forget
that this writer is a stranger in this land, and that she gets to leave it whenever she wants, and she knows that that privilege sets her apart. And yet
we’re not clubbed with that message; the message is embedded, along with a bounty of humanity, in these
remarkably graceful poems.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/punishment/" target="_blank">You can buy <i>Punishment</i> right here.</a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* A tough feat, since that contest gets more than 1,500
chapbook manuscripts submitted each year. I lost again this year and am in good company.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]</i><br />
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<br />Amy Millerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01672520750241438143noreply@blogger.com0