Verse novels and agents

Haven't posted in years. Might as well dump a thought or two.

Since there's no money in poetry, I've written a verse novel. There is a demonstrated market for verse novels (Crank and Inside Out and Back Again) and experimental narratives (ttfn) in YA. I've covered that already somewhere in the archives.

I know this is a silly longshot. But meh. I like silly longshots.

What interests me is the finding of an agent. Like back in the day when I was querying agents for my epic poem 1779 (like a verse novella maybe? 150 pages or so) I have gotten a lot of "this is great but I don't know how to sell it" responses.

It's important to say how encouraging that is.

So I'm saying it.

Not sure what I'm going to do with this space right here, but for now I want to say thanks for the encouragement.

Poetry Isn't Safe: a new kickstarter!

Hello everyone!

Please check out my newest project:

Poetry Isn't Safe

Please share and support the film!

We Real Cool Vampires: Happy Halloween!

I stole this idea from David Hernandez at the Rumpus via Tara Skurtu. Oh the cheezy fun!
THANKS Y'ALL!

We Real Cool Vampires
 
VAMPIRES HAVE EATEN THE POOL PLAYERS.
MURDERED SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We fly in the night 'cause we
Left school. We hunt in a pack and we

Lurk late. We sharpen our teeth--our claws
Strike straight. We raise Hell when we

Sing sin. We drink bloody girls who taste of
Thin gin. We rock Ann and roll Jill and

Jazz June. We're coming for you--you're gonna
Die soon.

Margaret's Song

Here's my song for Margaret.

Alissa Nutting: Tampa loves Strong Verse

So if you're one of the 8 people who didn't read Alissa Nutting's Tampa this summer, let me point you to my Amazon Review. It's a fun book if you can have fun reading a disturbing topic (note: I can!).

Alissa picked up a copy of With Rough Gods recently and had this to say about it:

Everything you love about reading ancient myths, rendered in lucid, incredible poems--a clear winner! As an enormous fan of fairy tales, origin stories, and mythology, I found this book to be essential and enjoyable.

Short, lovely, and to the point! As she was a former editor of the incomparable Fairy Tale Review, I couldn't be happier with it.

Thanks, Alissa!

Review of Annie Finch's Spells at Critical Flame

Let's talk about Beck!

Review With Rough Gods

Hi all!

If you already have With Rough Gods, I'd love it if you took a moment to say something nice about it at the following places:

Book Digits

Goodreads

Amazon

If you don't have it, GET IT!

Thanks!

Haiku for Margaret & loss

Over at Lutheran Surrealism (see the links list) there's a haiku contest up. Much of the commentary is, fortunately or un-, not haiku. Ah well. I've been taking the opportunity to write some emotionally healing one-offs to deal with the loss of my youngest.

Here they are. I'll update if more get written before Sunday. Enjoy!

A missing daughter
Summer fades into autumn
And silenced laughter


Indefinite In Context


impossible loss

words unravel like a tear

winds abrading me

Not a crook

My wrinkled thumb stumps
air now no weight is there my
arm cradles absence.

Holy Matrimony

We are wound by God
to breed immortal children
even though they die.
Loss/Lost

A sunken island
wishes to unmoor itself
and drift, forgotten.

Elegy for Margaret by Michael P. Bobbitt

Elegy for Margaret                                                                                                         

“Is her still dead?”

A 3-year old big sister giving voice

To a very grown-up confusion—

Baby Margaret, blameless and perfect in her mother’s embrace,

Swaddled in the arms of death.

Surely there’s been some mistake,

The Reaper with a wrong address

Or a God distracted by beauty elsewhere in creation

To let this happen.

“Why is she so cold, daddy?”

“Because this is just her body, sweetheart. Her spirit lives in our hearts now.”

And yet there are still forms to sign,

Flowers and dinners and details to arrange—

All the things that people do—

Well-meaning friends grasping for something to say

When no poet or minister

Could ever find a single comforting word

That would but wither in the face of this despair.

A family strewn instantly against the rocks, irreparably broken.

Because we’re not starfish or lizards.

When you cut away a part of us

The empty space is there forever,

A phantom chord ringing unresolved in our ear—

A one/three clamoring for a five

Or even the sting of a minor seventh—

Anything but these missing notes.

When already her song

Was the joyful refrain for so many,

The unfinished symphony of a life unlived.

Mother and Father must go on shepherding,

Encouraged by the Christ story

Because Resurrection is yet possible:

That a baby’s light cannot be entombed,

Shining still on a family that refuses to go dark.

On her sisters that must bear this loss together.

In the carefree affection of Genevieve,

In the calculating whimsy of Josephine,

In the grace and poise of Cordelia.

In all of us

Who resolve to carry on in the midst of sorrow.

To sing into the stillness of heartbreak.

To answer the impermanence of life

With the eternal promise of love.

Suffer the little children…

For of such is the kingdom of heaven,

But suffer one another as well, friends—

Because the kingdom of Earth

Holds but small refuge

Beyond each other.

And the hopefully frequent memories

Of this sweet child—

Wide-eyed and laughing—

A peace in the hearts of men.

For Margaret Palmer by A.E. Stallings

For Margaret Palmer

who died suddenly at two months old

Life is brief and grief is long,

Joy is deep and sorrow wide,

Love is heavier than song,

Life is brief and grief is long.

The lullaby is right, is wrong:

Hunger, kisses, milk, and sleep.

Life is brief and grief is long,

Sorrow wide as joy is deep.

     A.E. Stallings

Interrobang by Jessica Piazza

This is not a review.

I was going to write a review of Jessica Piazza's wonderful book Interrobang but my youngest daughter Margaret died suddenly on Monday, August 5th. Instead I will leave this poem which was my favorite in the book when I first read it two weeks ago and is now far more important to me. Please buy Jess's book. Anyone who can write this deserves your patronage.

Pediophilia
Love of dolls

The week her daughter died, the room her girl
had occupied became a home for dolls.
The first an angel: fearsome, glass-gazed gift
to dull a mother's utter grief; the next
a paint and porcelain she numbly bought
from QVC. It looked like her. And now
she sees her small grandchildren grow, and knows
it's good. But they can't guess each small dress
arranged by day comes into disarray
by night. They bring her more, naive. Don't know
she weeps in the overflowing sea of limbs
that manage, year by year, to commandeer
the bed, the floor, and more. An orphanage
of girls. A thousand eyes that cannot shut.

What's Wrong With A.E. Stallings?

Perhaps the answer is nothing.

As evidenced by her two new poems in this month's issue of Poetry, "Sestina: Like" and "The Rosehead Nail," Stallings maintains my claim that she is the best American poet since Sylvia Plath. Her poems seem specifically calculated to make me swoon.

By "me" I mean anyone with a serious education (traditional or autodidact) in the classics, poetry, and poetics. If you're the kind of person who owns an OED and for whom "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" holds a dear place in your heart, you're going to love A.E. Stallings' poetry (if you don't already).

And yet I wonder.

Look at the vocabulary of both poems. "Sestina" uses "desuetude" and "Nail" "quincunx." While I love the challenge of both finding and providing unfamiliar words (especially ones that sound so lovely: see "indehiscent" in her poem "Olives") I know from experience both reading and teaching that vocabulary can be a huge turn-off for some folks.

And that's sort of the crux of the question. In a world with a triple division of poetry: popular, traditional, and obfuscatory, I would like to know what the uninitate thinks of the average Stallings poem. Is she merely a "poet's poet"? Worse, is she merely this "poet's poet"? Most of me doesn't think so, though in reading contemporary poetry with my students I've gotten a lot more traction with the poems of Jill Alexander Essbaum or Joshua Mehigan or Brian McGackin than I have with Stallings' poems.

Maybe it's not her it's me?

Perhaps I see Stallings' poems and see exemplars for what I have tried to write. Lord knows reading her "Three Poems to Psyche" so soon after the publication of With Rough Gods was incredibly unsettling. But I don't think I'm unrealistic about the potential audience for poetry. That is, I know big words scare people. Someone once told me that I was writing poetry for the intellectual crowd as well. Somehow I didn't see this (like seriously, my first book is about Greek Mythology--who ELSE was I writing for?) and was taken a bit aback.

Artists always need to balance their desire to communicate with the ability of the audience to comprehend. While I agree with both Dante and Eliot that the experience trumps the understanding, the possibility of comprehension must exist. It clearly does in Stallings' work--so is there a problem?

Maybe it's everyone else?

I am unsettled still when I read her work and am concerned about its reach to a broader audience. As I count her among my favorite poets and among our best poets, that concern bleeds into a more general concern for poetry.

Why is it that difficulty in poetry should stop an audience cold when this is not the case for other forms of art? Folks loved Inception. LOVED IT. Lost, too. I hear both students and adults debate the complexity of this song, that lyric--the complexity of some puzzling video game.

Why have they lost the ability to appreciate such puzzles in poetry?

There are plenty of answers but I think I am more interested in this question: what do we as poets do if we acknowledge this disparity?

Is it a compromise of art to acknowledge and adjust your work to accommodate the limitations of your broader audience or do you accept that your art--by its nature--limits its own audience?

A.E. Stallings work thus far gives her a solid claim to be the best poet of our age. But will she be our age's favorite poet? What value is there in either honorific? In any honorific? Laurels are just leaves, after all.

Scholarship in poetics: is it really that hard?

So twitter showed me a new article at Harriet today:

Rhyme by Anthony Madrid

In it, Mr. Madrid makes the claim that non-visual rhymes (tough and fluff) are better than visual rhymes (blow and show) because they create cognitive dissonance.

That would be nice if it weren't untrue (indeed, maybe they do on a second, third, fifteenth reading--but that's not what he's getting at in his article).

We "hear" what we read. It's one of the reasons poetry has to "sound good" even if it's "closet verse."

But asking the average poetry scholar to know about cognitive science appears to be a losing battle. I wish it weren't so.

Overrated Writers and You

So Anis Shivani has a HuffPo article on the 15 Most Overrated American Writers.

On the one hand, we probably spend too much time tearing folks down. On the other hand, this is funny stuff--and while I like one poem from almost every poet he mentions, that's the only poem of theirs I like.

On the other-other hand, I wonder if I should start throwing up articles on Huff and see who reposts them.

BRE at AWP13

Everyone! Come to The Best Reading (and after-party) Ever at AWP13!

Thanks to all who helped with the Kickstarter, this reading will be recorded!
The film is slated for release in May.

Readers will feature:


Annie Finch
Erica Dawson
G.M. Palmer
Heather O'Neill
Jessica Piazza
Michael Bobbitt
Nick Courtright
Rebecca Lindenberg
Tara Skurtu
Thaddeus Gunn

To get your invite and the location, email AWPsBestReading AT gmail!

Without Definition

"Without definitions, poetry is impossible."

When theory discussions are relevant to the presentation of poetry, you'll find them on Theory Tuesdays at Literary Magnet.

Enjoy and discuss!

Just what is poetry, anyway?

So after someone telling me that Homer and Tennyson didn't write poetry I'm wondering what it is I do then?

Not that I'm Homer and Tennyson-class--but you get the idea. Poetry has become something either indefinable or unimportant or both.

Perhaps that's why this blog (and the magazine it came from) is called "Strong Verse" not "Strong Poetry." I'm interested in the craft of writing verse, not slapping a silly "it's automatically art" label on some words.

More to it though, what's the delivery system of poetry?

Back when poetry was first created in those good old prehistorical times folks didn't read nor write--so they had to listen to a poet chant. Maybe they did it around a fire, maybe in what would become an amphitheater.

At any rate is was the voice that mattered. Folks could only see large gestures--so there could and likely would have been some motion--but an emphasis on that was what drove us to drama (the first split from poetry?).

Then along came the historical world. Folks could read--well, some of them--but performance was still king (at least if your audience was more than the king who could read anyway). But poets, who now could rely on the exobrain of paper for memorization, could devote more time to versecraft. Hence the rigor of national poetic forms.

Then came printing and the rise of literacy.

Here you have the ability of verse to reach the person interested in poetry before the poet. This creates a few problems, notably the difficulty of transmitting inflection and performance. The Beatles could create "concerts" with their Pepper-and-on albums but that's because they could record. Printed words don't carry the same weight.

Which speaking of, the rise of printing mirrored the rise of musical notation which could carry the same weight as performance. Unfortunately no such easy guide was given to the written word. Readers had to rely on a knowledge of rhyme and meter to eke out how a poem should be read (unless they were lucky enough to catch the poet--and how often did that happen? Legit question, btw).

Also now the music of poetry had to compete with the standardized (and far more performed) music of music. And drama and and and.

Then came sound recording and broadcast capabilities. While wax recordings of Tennyson exist, what is clear in them is that there's no notion of performance. He intones and warbles "Haalf a leeeague, haalf a leeague" in a rhythm familiar to many who attend contemporary poetry readings. Even the reportedly gorgeous and vivacious Edna St. Vincent Millay reads her poetry as if she's at a funeral.

Why do we think people want to listen to this?

Who has effectively recorded poetry (without music)? Garrison Keillor?

Is it really that hard or is it simply unlearned?

At any rate it hardly matters because TV (and more importantly internet distribution of video).

But where are the poets of TV? Of film?

Why did we stop in the 19th century and leave well enough alone? Did all of the folks who would have been our greatest poets just become song- and screenwriters?

Aural storytelling is powerful. Visual storytelling is powerful. Why not have some animated or even live-action recreations of poems?

We must rethink our delivery methods. Print is wonderful and powerful but we can't leave performance poetry to the performance poets and visual poetry to the avant garde.

What do you want to see as a poem?

Poetry off the Page

Literally.

What does the world of writing look like when you can pick up your poem and pass it around?

Developments like this will rend the veil between purely visual and purely linguistic art (it's difficult at this point to call such theoretical work "aural" though one would assume the proper areas of the brain will still be activated).

Who will be the first visual poet to make art from this?

Amorak Huey's "Dungeon Master's Guide. . ." in The Collagist

So I love learning about new publications and new poets.

Saw this lovely poem in The Collagist (thanks, Sun Dog Lit!) and I had to share:

The lunchroom is an unguarded wilderness
of potential humiliation. So is conversation.
This is when every girl is out of your league,
when you realize such leagues even exist.

You know, I was that boy. Were you?

Met only in words: Sylvia Plath, 50 years later

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Here is a brief article on Sylvia Plath's final days.

I put that here, at the beginning, because it's not the drama of suicide that is important in Plath's death. Suicide is indeed terrible. Please ask someone for help. No one wants you to die.

What we lost, however, was our finest modern practitioner of the sound of the English language. Had she not killed herself, Plath would still be with us, alive and likely kicking at the ripe old age of 80.

What we have instead is a controversial collection of Plath's last work, butchered by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, and "restored" by her daughter, Frieda. While I prefer vastly the thematic arc of her original intent (moving from "Morning Song" to The Bee Cycle, specifically ending with "Wintering": from "love" to "spring"), the "manic woman" that Plath became in the American consciousness was, essentially, cemented by Hughes. 

This results in an awful lot of eye rolling when I name Plath as a great poet. People know her, if at all, as a violent, lost soul, the author of "Daddy" or "Lady Lazarus." 

At Literary Magnet, my new literary magazine, I've said a bit more about the way I learned to love Sylvia Plath.

What I'd like to say here, though, is that as poets and lovers of poetry, remember the words Plath placed together. Study them. Live within those sounds--the only place she remains.

As people, simply love each other and don't, in the words of Jillian Becker, "endure long remorse" for something that could have been done.