I’ve always felt that to hire an editor to work with me on a poetry manuscript would be something like admitting defeat. So the experience of working with an editor was illuminating. It wasn’t humbling in the way I thought, rather it made me want to expand my horizons, take more workshops, read more widely, work harder, and take more time with the publishing process. It also gave me better ideas about the marketing of…
Mike Chasar’s excellent Poetry & Popular Culture blog has a guest entry up on Gumball Poetry, my little contribution. Writing it made me nostalgic for the audacious idea of combining poems and gumballs, one of the most original approaches to popularizing the art I’ve ever heard of. Alas, Gumball Poetry, and its cool poem-in-a-gumball machines, are defunct. We can only hope that someone will revive this idea. In the meantime, I still have three poem-gumballs…
Editor Bryan Roth used my poetry manuscript, Gods of Water and Air, as the text for a half-hour discussion of editing an entire poetry collection. Structural unity, titles, principles of organization, the need for professional editing, are all discussed. And four of my poems were read on air to illustrate these topics. Here’s a link to the page of my website where you can listen to the radio show. The sound files are posted in…
Why would a poet, whose business is language, seek outside help with putting together a poetry manuscript? For me, the answer is complicated, but I can readily think of a one-word answer: contests. David Alpaugh, in his essay “What’s Really Wrong with Poetry Contests?” cited discouraging statistics. Your manuscript, in each contest, may go up against 500 others, each more carefully groomed than the next. A misspelling, inexact punctuation, or grammatical error in the first…
“Good title!” says the young William Shakespeare everywhere he goes, whenever he hears a bon mot, in Tom Stoppard’s witty movie, Shakespeare in Love. Out of ideas, short of cash, Shakespeare is adept at pilfering – mostly stealing ideas from surrounding life. His own titles are abysmal, for example, “Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter.” We all know how that one turned out. According to Stoppard, it wasn’t Will who came up with the right…
Saw a poem by Dorianne Laux that speaks to today’s remembrance of 9/11. It’s on a new poetry blog I just found, Joshua Robbins’ Little Epic Against Oblivion. Joshua teaches at the University of Tennessee and is the poetry editor for their print annual Grist. Fringe has a new fall issue up. “The noun that verbs your world” continues to publish work that sizzles. I love the prose poem in this issue, “Things I Thought…
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might want to cross a bridge or two for your next poetry fix. The venerable Second Sunday Poetry Reading Series at Valona Deli in Crockett, which I believe has been going strong for more than twenty years, has a great fall lineup of featured readers: September 13, 2009 Kim Addonizio October 11, 2009 John Amen November 8, 2009 Peter Tamases December 13, 2009 Kit Kennedy and…
Poetry being high on my list, but instead I’m cruising the Net and reading fascinating and quirky articles such as this one on how Mad Men’s Don Draper could teach President Obama how to sell healthcare reform. What? You don’t know who Don Draper is? He’s in Wikipedia, which is pretty good for a fictional character. Mad Men is not to be missed, even if you can’t remember the 1950s. Or don’t want to. This,…
Just got two new poetry books: The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go by Eliot Khalil Wilson and Ka-Ching by Denise Duhamel. Also ordered Lynn Emanuel’s The Dig and Hotel Fiesta. Wilson’s, a first book, is subtle and wide-ranging in topics and images. He has traveled, benefits from a layered heritage as a Lebanese American, and writes with generous humanity about a wide range of people and generations. It’s a quietly rich book, one that…
Thinking about this new form, in which video art and poetry combine to create a mini-theatrical or film experience. Two sites have interested me in this light. Blue’s Cruzio Cafe, the brainchild of JJ Webb, uses animations of cartoons and artwork to combine with audio readings for a kind of graphic novel effect. Entertaining and light-hearted. Another take, a more filmic one, on this evolving form is Dave Bonta’s Moving Poems. The site has a…