Big Poetry Giveaway and Other Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month

Happy National Poetry Month! Yes, April is busy, and yes, I'd prefer we have National Poetry Month in January, but since the month now has momentum of its own, we'll celebrate!

Kelli Russell Agodon has launched her wonderful Big Poetry Giveaway for 2011. Go here for complete details. You've got lots of chances to win books; go here for the updated list of who's participating; Kelli's even taken the time to link to the blogs. Basically, all you have to do to be entered is to leave a comment, and if you're commenting as Anonymous, you'll need to leave a way to get in touch with you. On May 2 or 3, I'll put all the names in a bread bowl, and I'll draw out some winners. I'm also likely to have some surprise winners, more than 2, for books yet to be announced, so stay tuned! One book that I've really been enjoying this month has been my friend Shefali Choksi's new book, Frontier Literature. She writes amazing poetry, the kind that makes me shake my head in wonder at the connections she makes. If you're the kind of person who loves allusions to fairy tales and mythology, she's the poet for you. Plus, she uses both western fairy tales/mythology and fairy tales/mythology from her native India. She's remarkable, and I'm happy to share her work with you.

The second book that I will give away is a copy of my first chapbook, pictured below.

What else am I planning for National Poetry Month? I need to work on promoting my forthcoming chapbook, I Stand Here Shredding Documents. The amount of copies sold in this prepublication period determines how many copies overall will be printed, so I need to work on generating sales (go here to order; I'll be happy to sign it for you later, and I'll pay for the postage it will take to get you that signature). I'm also going to read a book of poems a week along with Dave Bonta and others, and participate in a phone interview with each poet and Dave that will later be available as a podcast. For the schedule, go here. And for those of you writing a poem each day, here's Kelli's list of all new prompts, and here's my list of prompts that I created last year. Happy National Poetry Month everyone--may you enjoy poems, either those that you write or those that you read. May your month be filled with happy surprises and wonder.

Introducing Book Trailer #2: Your Input Needed

Soon, I'm off to St. Petersburg for the College English Association Conference. While I'm driving across the Sunshine State, I thought you might like to look at a rough draft of Book Trailer #2.

I'm most concerned with the last frame. I still haven't figured out a way to make music fade in and out, so I've just let the music play with the ordering information on a black screen. I suspect it goes on too long, but is that better than having the music come to a screeching and non-natural halt? Would it be better if the images behind ordering information changed? It certainly gives people enough of a chance to cut and paste into a browser window, which worried me about the first book trailer.



So, let me know what you think--no guarantees that I can fix it, but I'll try. I love creating these, but I'm often frustrated at what I still don't know about what the program can do.

I won't be gone long; on Friday, I'll unveil my contribution to Kelli's Big Poetry Giveaway!

Coping in the Half Light

Last night, we went out with friends to a French restaurant--the entrees were buy one, get one free, and each bottle of wine was half price. Amazing. Again, one wonders, why does anyone ever pay full price (for clothes, for dinners, for anything, really)? I suppose one reason is that date night is traditionally Saturday, when restaurants charge full price. This is why I can never re-enter the dating life (well, this and my spouse): I would invite people out on Monday, when things are cheaper, and I can afford an extra bottle of wine and dessert too! While we were eating, apocalyptic rains swept through the region. It seems even more apocalyptic since we're in the dry season, and we don't usually have flooding rains in March. Of course, our weather has shifted back into summer, so maybe I shouldn't have found it so unusual.

This morning, some of the lights in my study aren't working, but I'm too afraid of the circuit breaker box and the dark laundry room (which is attached to the house, but I have to go outside to get to it, and there's always the possibility of animals in the dark) to try to fix it. I'm sitting in the study thinking, there's enough light to get done what needs to get done. I can cope with this amount of light.

It's a fitting metaphor for the publishing ideas that have been in my brain in the last few weeks. At one point, I'd have said that I didn't have enough knowledge and/or skills to do anything more with publishing than the traditional, let the publisher handle everything route. But lately, I'm thinking that there might be enough light for us to consider other options.

The ever-wonderful Nic Sebastian has a post that links to her nanopress experience. There's lots to read, especially if you work through the links and the comments, which you should.

What I love most about this post is that she reminds us that we don't have to choose one publishing format. If we control our work, if we're our own publisher, we can publish in all formats at once: paper, e-readers of all sorts, PDF files for those of us who don't have e-readers,CDs. Why not do them all? Nic also offers stats, which she promises to update, which tells us how many readers are choosing which formats.

The whole e-publishing trajectory is dizzying. Last week, I also came across this interview, via Jane Friedman's blog. It asks the question, "What would convince you to walk away from a half million dollar advance from a big publisher?" It's got very interesting thoughts about electronic rights and why we as writers shouldn't just be giving them away (or letting the publisher take the share that's so much more huge that we may as well just be giving them away).

I hear some snide remarks out there. You might be saying, "Yeah, but you're a poet. No one's making big bucks on you."

Perhaps. But like many poets, I also write in other genres, and I have hopes for other writing projects. For example, I have lots of creative writing exercises which also can translate well into the Composition classroom. And since so many of us are going to be teaching endless Composition classes, even though we went to MFA programs hoping to teach Creative Writing, I think there could be a market.

So, in older days, I'd have started scouting for a publisher. But now, I'm wondering if self-publishing might not be a smarter way to go.

On a similar note, I'd be interested in interviewing people, poets and women especially, about their creative processes. I'd love to publish these on my blog, and later, I'd like to collect them all. Would people pay for a collection (either electronic or paper) if it was all available online? If they went online, it would take a lot of clicking to get to all the various interviews. Would people pay a few dollars for the convenience of having all the interviews already assembled?

I set the price at a few dollars in the above paragraph because there's a school of thought that people will buy all sorts of things if the price is between 99 cents and a few dollars. Once you get into the $8 range and above, people aren't as likely to hit that purchase button. Is this dynamic similar to the French restaurant dynamic? At half-price prices, I'll go to the restaurant, but charge me full price, and I'll cook at home. And where does giving our work away for free fit in? That's a topic for a different post, since this one is getting long.

I'm also aware that I'm writing this during the week where The New York Times begins its own experiment with charging fees. If they weren't charging fees, I'd link to a story that I saw on Sunday about a best-selling, self-publishing (via e-books) author who writes for young adults. She's just decided to take an offer from a mainstream publisher (St. Martin's?)--she says she was spending over 40 hours a week doing all the things that her publisher will now do (book design, cover choices, dealing with the technology). She wants that time to write.

Of course, many of us won't face these choices; many of us won't have publishers beating down our doors and trying to outbid each other as they compete for our work. Insert a heavy sigh here.

I've always thought about self-publishing, even when it wasn't as easy, even when the technology wasn't there. I've always been intrigued by the numbers of writers who self-published or formed themselves into publishing collectives. Today, Walt Whitman is generally considered to be one of our great American writers, but we wouldn't know about him if he hadn't believed in himself enough to self-publish. What other poets and writers might we be losing? In what ways do we need to be brave and believe in our own work and worth? How do we best harness the technology?

Crunch Time

I will write more as the week progresses, except for when I'm writing less. On Thursday, I'm presenting a paper at the College English Association conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. My presentation is at 8:00 a.m., so I'll head across the state on Wednesday, leaving my spouse behind to hold down the South Florida fort. I plan to give more of a talk than to read a paper. I hate those conferences when people read their 10 page papers in a monotone voice. I'm discussing the ways that modern female poets use fairy tales, which surprisingly, hasn't changed as much as I thought it might have. Not as much exploration of workplace issues using fairy tales. Even in my own work, I tend to use mythology when talking about the workplace, fairy tales when exploring relationship issues. Is this a wider trend than me? Still thinking about that one.

Friday is also when I have a big writing due date: I've been commissioned to write 7 meditations like the kind that I write weekly for my theology blog (go here for an example). I'm not anticipating problems, except that the meditations needed for the project are shorter than what I usually write. It's always a good exercise for me to see what's most essential, to boil down, to condense.

But first things first: spin class, then checking in at work, which will include a training session on student appeals. One of our deans will be absent next week, and I'll be trying to fill his shoes, hearing from students who want to appeal their dismissal. It's not a simple matter of hearing their sad tales of woe. There's a worksheet, where we determine whether or not they'll actually be able to get back on track. Some students have gone so far astray that it simply isn't possible for them to ever meet graduation requirements.

Varicolored Vagendas

First, let me give Kathleen Kirk full credit for this word, which I saw her use in this post, which comes from the show Fringe. What a cool word.

I thought of it again last night as my friend, her teenage daughter, and I went to see a college production of The Vagina Monologues. My friend and I had seen it before, but her daughter hadn't. Her daughter is a drama person--the kind of teenager who can argue about which Shakespeare comedy is overrated, the kind who shapes the drama troupe. She said, "I don't know what to expect. It's just monologues?" At the end, I could tell she needed some time to ponder what she had just seen, but she said, as if to reassure us, "I didn't dislike it."

I tried to think about what it would be like to see the play if I hadn't been steeped in several decades of feminist theory. I wonder if seeing the play is a similar experience to the day I discovered Our Bodies, Ourselves on the shelves of my college library. I was both shocked and thrilled that people would discuss such things in public.

Of course, that was before the Internet became as widespread. Heck, I knew people who still couldn't get cable, even if they wanted to afford it! I really am a dinosaur.

I loved being back on a college campus that had students who wanted to put on a play. Long ago, I used to teach at that campus--best teaching job ever, except that I was an adjunct, so I didn't have job security or much pay. But I taught upper-level British Lit classes to students who were English majors. Fantastic! It's the only time I've taught students who came to class having read the work--sometimes twice!

But then I got my full-time job, and it became increasingly difficult to teach at both places, just from a scheduling point of view. One was on a semester system, one on a quarter. One had classes that met two or three times a week, one had classes that met once a week for 3 hours at a time. And then, when I did the family taxes, I realized that I was teaching the Brit Lit classes basically just to pay the increased taxes for the tax bracket into which the extra classes catapulted us.

Last night, I felt a bit of sorrow/nostalgia for all the places I've taught, all the classes I no longer teach. I also missed my younger self who would have seen this play as being radical--but now, while I am full of respect and awe for what Eve Ensler has done and the movements she has sparked, it doesn't seem as radical.

I hate to say this, but there are times when I grow weary of a culture that seems to be in permanent consciousness raising status. But of course, that's easy for me to say, as someone who has had the benefit of all this conversation. I can't imagine what it would be like to come of age in a time before feminists had started to change the world--well, I can, and I wouldn't want to live in a world where women didn't know their bodies and didn't have many employment opportunities and couldn't demand justice when violence was done to them. We're still not in an ideal world, in terms of gender equality, but we're much closer than we were in the 1950's.

After the show, the teenage daughter of my friend said that she found it interesting, but not interesting enough to have all those conversations with women that Eve Ensler had had. That led us to wonder what topic would be most interesting. Even if we didn't want to write a play in the style of Ensler or Anna Deveare Smith, even if we didn't want to be a documentarian/sociologist like Studs Terkel, what conversation would interest us enough to have year after year of it with person after person?

We didn't have immediate answers, but as I've thought about it, I would have to say I continue to be interested in the question of having a creative life and how we manage the demands of our creative lives with the other elements of our lives, like work and family. I'm also fascinated by the intersections of creativity and spirituality (especially Christianity, since I'm Lutheran and understand Christianity more than, say, Hinduism).

After the play, we went to an Indian restaurant--what a joyful place. Even at 9:20, it was packed, with lots of families with small, energy-filled children. We had come intending to have ice cream, but we had a small meal, a late supper. Delish!

I thought back to my own adolescence, to all those plays my parents took us to, many of which were put on by the local university--thank God for university drama departments which put on quality productions at prices so affordable that the whole family can go. Afterwards, we'd go out for ice cream or frozen yogurt--remember when frozen yogurt was seen as exotic? Yes, again, I'm outing myself as a dinosaur. And then I reflected on the evening, the diversity of the audience and the acting troupe, the fact that we could have gone out to enjoy a meal from just about any culture I wanted. Yes, the world has changed, and not just in the way we discuss our vaginas. And despite my nostalgia for times gone by, I wouldn't want to go back. I'm mostly happy where I am.

All Our Central American Nightmares

On this day, 31 years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated as he celebrated Mass; for those of you who would like to read a more theological meditation on this event, go to this post on my theology blog.

Central America was part of the fabric of my college years, much the same as Iraq/Afghanistan region must be for recent college grads. There was real talk of invading Nicaragua during the 1980's, which led to many late-night discussions about what we would do if a draft was enacted. I met many Central American refugees during that time, some here legally, most here illegally. Like many Americans, at first I had difficulty understanding why we would support one Central American country and not another one.

I remember that Ronald Reagan said we had to be ever more deeply involved in Central America, because if we weren't, we would wake up one morning to find Communists invading the country from the south. And I thought, Communists crossing the Rio Grande? Well, let the Texans handle that; they're well-armed, and I have faith in them.

In the midst of the geo-political arguments, I also got my first hearing/reading of liberation theology, a pattern of thought that would change my life. Liberation Theology introduced me to a radical Jesus, a Jesus who demanded justice for the poor and the oppressed, a Jesus who was crucified not because of my individual sin but because he challenged the Roman power structure. This Jesus was not one I had met in the suburban, Southern churches of my youth.

Henri Nouwen was also inspired by the liberation movements in Latin America. As part of my Lenten discipline, I'm reading Show Me the Way: Readings for Each Day of Lent. Here's a quote from today's reading, which originally appeared in his book Out of Solitude: "When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers" (page 52).

Those of us who have a vision of social justice must remember that the world is not set up to reward those of us who call for a more just word. Sure, some of us may get acclaim, but the world tends to reward social justice visionaries with jail or martyrdom. But the vision is important, and it's vital that we demand it. Think of how different the world would be if people like Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Romero, Martin Luther King, the Mirabal sisters--if these people had just sat idly by and said, "Well, I have my nice comfortable life. I'm not going to look out for the poor and the oppressed. Let them help themselves."

My favorite Oliver Stone movie is Salvador, a movie which isn't always faithful to the facts, but is faithful to the truth. It's a movie that manages to have a serious conversation about faith and the demands of faith--and I use that word faith in its many-dimensioned splendor. It's a movie with a graphic rape scene that is one of the few rape scenes I can think of that doesn't eroticize the act, not one bit. I tend not to watch movies with rape scenes these days because they disgust me on so many levels, and they make me afraid to live in this world as a woman, and I can't afford that fear. I'm not foolish about my safety, don't get me wrong. But I don't need those violent images in my head as I move around in the world. If you're like me, and you'd like to watch the movie, but the rape scene is a stumbling block, just know that it's about to happen when the van of nuns sets out from the airport; close your eyes and hit fast forward. It's a great movie, and you shouldn't miss it.

Below is an inspiration card that I made back in January, when I was having fun with collage. I have always viewed Romero as one of my heroes, and it was fun to make this card.

The True Pattern: Of Mayan Weavers' Prayers and Butterflies

On Monday night, Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat met to discuss In the Time of the Butterflies. It was an amazing conversation. I scribbled down the choice bits in my notebook, and I can’t resist sharing them here.

I’ll follow the journalist’s dictate to put the strongest material first. Edwidge Danticat asked Julia Alvarez about her writing routines and rituals. She said she starts each day with the Mayan weaver’s prayer. She explained that Mayan weavers begin the day with whatever is on hand, whatever thread, whatever dye—but with no pattern.

Here’s the prayer: “Grant me the intelligence and the patience to find the true pattern.”

With both women coming from an island which has seen such violence at the hands of dictators, and with the novel dealing with the brave resistance of Dominicans (including the Mirabal sisters, the protagonists), it was inevitable that the discussion turned to social justice. Edwidge Danticat said that memory can save us, that memory can be a powerful tool in our quest for justice.

Julia Alvarez talked about the slow, incremental pace of change, but she reminded us that social change does happen—often this change begins in our every day relationships. She quoted a Seamus Heaney poem, “The Cure at Troy”:

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

Alvarez went on to say that testimonial is a way that so many Latin American cultures have coped with what has been dealt to them by the dictators who ruled them—something to think about as we mark the death of Archbishop Romero tomorrow.

Even though the talk turned to social justice and the miscarriage of social justice, the discussion ended on an upbeat note, with the reminder that any one of us could be the one that helps usher in the change. If you went back in time and suggested that 4 sisters could bring down the entrenched Trujillo regime, people would scoff. Yet that’s exactly what happened.

We might say, “Yes, but we don’t want to have to sacrifice our lives.” The evening’s discussion didn’t go this route, but I would point out that martyrdom is not the only route of resistance. There’s a long tradition of artists working for, and achieving, social change. Likewise mothers and workers and all sorts of others—choose your favorite oppressed group.

During the question and answer period, I asked Julia Alvarez if she still writes poetry, since I still love her 2 volumes of poetry. Her face softened, she smiled, and she said that poetry is still her first love. She said that after she finishes each novel, she returns to a period of poetry writing, and she’s always reading the poetry of others. In fact, she begins every day reading poetry, which she compared to a choir that sings and holds the same note at a perfect pitch.

The event was webcast, and at some point, I expect you'll be able to see it here.