Patron Saint of Diarists (and Bloggers?)

Today is the birthday of Samuel Pepys, perhaps one of the most famous diarists ever. Much of what we know about the English time period of the Restoration we know because we have his diary. He wrote about the Coronation of Charles II, the plague years, and of course, the Great Fire. He also wrote about his sex life and other details of regular life. He wrote for 10 years and his journal fills nine volumes.

I used to think that it would be exhausting to write that much. I used to think that I could never fill nine volumes. Now, of course, I can't imagine transcribing all those journals into electronic form. I have a box of journals, which will probably moulder away, because I simply don't want to type them all into a computer. Let some graduate student do it several hundred years from now, if my life is deemed that important.

I've said this several times on this blog, but I do wonder how historians and scholars will use the blogs that so many of us are keeping now. Will some poor graduate student not only have to consider my paper journal, but also my blog? And then there's all the rough drafts that I can't bring myself to throw away.

Are there authors who don't have to worry about future employers who can be completely free and open in their blogs? Can any of us really be completely free and open, knowing that at some point, those writings (whether in a blog or a paper journal or in a landfill) will likely be seen by others?

And of course, I wonder about how long we'll all be able to blog for free. How much storage space is there really out here in cloudland? The scholar in me mourns all the data that will be lost as we work out new protocols.

I wonder about all the people who have kept journals in the past, and how they would have responded to this brave new world of blogging. To me, blogging is a somewhat different medium than my old-fashioned paper journal. There's the privacy issue, of course. But there's also the linking aspect, which I love. Of course, I used to do this with my paper journal, where I'd keep book or record reviews or articles that spoke to me in some way. There's the aspect of blogging where I can include pictures, photos, and videos. Long ago I kept a scrapbook (back before scrapbooking became such a hot hobby, back when scrapbooking was just gluing stuff in a larger book). It feels similar.

Yesterday I spent a bit more time thinking about book trailers and video poems. I discovered that my work computer has Movie Maker on it, but I didn't have much time to play. It's work, after all.

Well, now I feel stupid. I just checked, and my home computer has Movie Maker. I wonder if I can make a poem with no sound, since recording has always been my downfall. Maybe Movie Maker makes it easier (then I'll really feel like a dolt, having never realized that the solution was right there). I wonder if I can use my own photos to go along with my poems. I know that Sandra Beasley uses iStockphoto, and lots of other people do too. But maybe for my first experiment, I'll just use my own photos.

What fun! But kind of terrifying too. I've been playing with the idea of collage for several years now, although my first collaging was in the world of fiber arts, not words. This week I've been playing with the idea of collage in poetry, which I'll say more about tomorrow. I can't help but see poetry videos and book trailers as a type of collage.

Facebook vs. Blogs: Epistemological Questions for your Sunday

I've been thinking about Jeannine Hall Gailey's blog posting where she talks about why she likes blogs more than Facebook: "Facebook is like seeing a bunch of people at a party; a blog is like going for coffee with someone you're really interested in."

I see her analysis as exactly right, but with one caveat. Facebook has allowed me to keep in touch with lots of people with whom I'd lost touch through the years (and yes, it's still probably more like a party than like coffee). At one point, I would have sung the praises of e-mail, because people will write e-mails, but not write/mail letters the old fashioned way. But these days, I've noticed that I keep in touch via e-mail with an even smaller number of people each year.

Facebook allows us to stay in touch, even when we only have time to write a sentence or two. I'll confess that some (most?) of my daily activities don't warrant a full e-mail. I don't want to write a long e-mail about how my life hasn't changed. I'm also interested in how people will choose that one nugget from the day to create the update. I'd expect poets to be good at this, but so are non-poets. It seems there's a poetry exercise in here somewhere.

I've loved blogs because I feel like I'm getting to know people, especially once I got bold enough to write comments and start my own blog. But now I'm also getting to know people through Facebook. When I first started my Facebook account, I thought that I'd only respond to Friend requests from people I had actually known. But I'm glad that I eventually gave in and BeFriended people whom I hadn't actually known in person. Just yesterday, I had 2 poems accepted in a journal that had a call for submissions from South Florida poets; I knew about that call for submissions because of a new Facebook friendship with a poet whom I've never met in real life.

Now I'm curious about whether or not these online friendships with people I've never met in person would survive a real-life encounter. I suspect they would. I think of the Miami Book Fair, and the fact that my house is only a county away, a thirty mile drive if the traffic is tame that day. I wonder about the wisdom of inviting these online poet friends with books coming out this year to send their press packets to the Miami Book Fair, and to look me up for coffee. That's not exactly an act of bravery. Could I be brave enough to say, "I'm near the major airports. I'll pick you up. You'll have a friendly face at the end of your plane ride." Could I be really brave? Could I say, "I have a guest room. Stay with me if you can't afford a hotel."

Here, too, is a difference between blogging and Facebook. With a blogger (the kind who writes a real post, as opposed to a collection of links, at least several times a week), I feel like I know people well enough to make some of those offers. I feel sure enough that those bloggers aren't secret, serial killers. It would take some kind of commitment to start a blog on the off chance that your serial killer plans would come to fruition. With Facebook, I'm not as sure that I know these new Friends whom I've never met in person.

Of course, I'm fairly new to Facebook, and I don't read/post there as regularly. Maybe in a few years, I'll change my mind.

And my inner Philosopher just needs to ask, "Do we ever really know anyone?" I think that I know these people I went to school with decades ago, but do I? They could have changed rather radically too. Or do we change that radically? Is there some essential Kristin-ness that was there when I was 9, there when I was 19, there when I approached the middle years of my life, that time and circumstance will never strip away?

O.K., I'll stop now. It's a nice normal Sunday in most of the nation: no blizzards howling in until tonight, no scary storms, perhaps the sun is even peeking through. Back to your coffee and breakfast foods. Back to the Sunday papers, which for the most part, won't trouble you with these epistemological and ontological questions (and big words that you have to look up! big words which perhaps I didn't even use properly! except that I did, because I doublechecked with my husband, who has an MA in Philosophy).

Enjoy your Sunday, whether you spend it reading blogs and/or Facebook, dreaming of the Miami Book Fair, wrestling with philosophical questions, or pondering theology, which once was a Sunday staple.

Will My Next Computer Be a Mac?

I don't really need a new computer yet--or do I?

I used to think that computing power is wasted on me. I have always used the computer primarily as a giant typewriter--but a typewriter with glorious time-saving power when it comes to revising and printing out new copies.

In later years, I've come to appreciate the ability to store numerous photos in one place, a place where they might not turn yellow with age (but they might disappear in a big electronic goof--a definite downside).

And of course, there's Internet use, which now probably accounts for much of my computer time, once we subtract work related e-mailing. I was early-ish to the Internet. I remember a time when there was no World Wide Web--no pictures, no video, not much commerce. I remember discussion boards and online games that required readers/players to use their imaginations to envision the virtual world. I was late to blogging, late to having my own website.

I don't think the fact that I was so late to blogging and having my own website hurt the book sales of my chapbook, but I'll never be sure. If I had been writing a blog when my chapbook was published, would I have had more sales?

I've certainly bought my share of poetry books because I loved the blogging voice of the poet. So, it's hard to say.

I've begun thinking about publicity for my next book, even before I've had a next book accepted for publication (the best time to do this thinking, I think). I've been reading about poem videos (on Sandra Beasley's blog here, here, here, and here) and book trailers (on Diane Lockward's blog here and here). I've been thinking about the fact that so much of this video work seems to be done on a Mac.

I've tried to do some basic recording on my Windows based computer and it was a complete disaster. Sigh. I tend to blame my own incompetency, but perhaps it's not me, but my equipment. And if the Mac comes preloaded with all this nifty stuff, that might justify the higher price. That, and the fact that Macs are easier to use, that my first love was a Mac, that Macs are less vulnerable to viruses and other Internet nasties, and I've never heard anyone voice regrets with a Mac purchase.

Maybe I should just blame Kelli Russell Agodon. I've been thinking about this possibility more intensely since she wrote this post on her blog.

Of course, it may be months or years before I actually make the switch. I tend to think about possibilities and research possibilities, but to have a hard time plunking down the money, especially when it comes to computer decisions, which seem fraught with peril.

But one thing that might tempt me to make the plunge earlier rather than later is that I feel this ever more pressing need to learn how to do some video creating--and I'm pretty sure that I can't do it on my old computer.

So, here's a creativity resolution. I'll give it a try on this rickety old computer . Let me see if it's really as useless as I think. And then I'll revisit this idea of buying a Mac sooner rather than later.

Happy Birthday Carson McCullers

I have this vague memory of watching a television version of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in high school with my mom. I have a memory of both of us weeping on the sofa. My mom, a former English major herself, was always turning me on to good books, and we shared a love of Carson McCullers.

Carson McCullers is the perfect writer for females who feel isolated and alienated in high school. Perhaps she's also the perfect writer for males who feel isolated and alienated in high school, but I haven't met the males who fell in love with McCullers. The men I know who felt isolated in high school tend to have drowned their sorrows in Salinger or Hunter S. Thompson.

My mother and I could both so relate to Frankie, who was so lonely, who so wanted to be part of a family. I wonder what that says about us. I suspect it says something about the human condition, that so many of us feel alienated and isolated and alone--even when we have perfectly good friends and family members who love us.

I haven't returned to that book as an adult. I think of Frankie as a character like Scout, but I've returned to To Kill a Mockingbird several times in the last few years as I've written an academic paper. I've loved her just as much as an adult.

Maybe I'll pick up a copy of The Member of the Wedding. As I recall, it's a short book, a quick read (probably a reason why both my mom and I were able to read it at such varied points in our individual lives).

I'm so happy to have had parents who gave me fairly free run of their bookshelves and who encouraged my love of reading--often, by reading what I was reading, or by having what seemed to me at the time to be fairly sophisticated conversations about the ideas in the books. My parents were fairly fierce censors of what we could see on film or television, but they'd let me read just about whatever I wanted. I remember that there was a television show about the Holocaust that aired when I was in the 7th grade, and we had bitter arguments about whether or not I should be allowed to watch the show--it was on network television in 1978, and I imagine that if we saw it today, it would look fairly tame.

Now, I'm willing to admit my parents were right. I try to be careful about what images I let into my brain. Words I can work with. Images tend to take over.

My mom gave me a copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for Christmas the year after we watched it together, even though we'd already read the battered copy that lived on the family bookshelves, and so didn't technically need a new copy. Let me see if I can find it today. If my parents weren't trying to downsize, I'd buy her a copy for her upcoming birthday. Maybe I will anyway. It's a small book, after all.

Loose Limbed Poems and Words We Fear to Hear

In this blog posting Sandy Longhorn talks about a rejection note from an editor and says, "Let me here admit that I received a rejection this week that cast me off track a bit. This rejection note included a specific reason the editor wasn't accepting the poems, and usually that is encouraging to me, knowing how busy and over-worked editors are and knowing that someone took the time to try to help me make my poems better. However, this comment had to do with syntax and style and included a phrase that I live in fear of hearing about my own work."

No, she never tells us what that phrase is. But her post took me back to a rejection letter experience of my own.

An editor wrote, "Your poems certainly are accessible, aren't they?"

My non-writer friends saw that comment as a good thing. I heard a sneering tone. I've heard people talk about Billy Collins. I know how they use that word.

Let me just clarify: I LOVE Billy Collins. Some of his poems just blow me away. I suspect that the critics who hurl the accessibility label at him haven't even read his work. They jealously study his book sales and his poetry readings that are standing room only, and they assume he can't be writing good poems.

I've had more than one person tell me that they like my poems because they understand them. They don't say this dismissively. In the same breath, they say something like, "But how did you think to link nuclear deterrence to a love poem? I would have never thought of that." It's the way my poet mind works. It's those surprising linkages that I love about poems, both mine and other people's.

My thinking about the issue of accessibility led me to write this poem, which appeared in both The Xavier Review and The Worcester Review :

Accessibility


He says the poems are accessible,
as if it is a bad thing, as if loose
limbed poems spread open their legs
to anyone who gives them a glance.
Those poems don’t even demand drinks
and dinner first. Slutty poems. Ruint.

Perhaps he wants a sulky
poem, one that lets itself be petted, who pretends
to like him, but always holds a part
of itself back while he tortures
himself with evidence of his poem’s infidelities:
other people, plainer than him, who profess
to understand this poem when he cannot.

Perhaps he prefers poems that ignore
laws of accessibility, that barricade themselves behind bars
and up stairs and through perilous mazes.
After tunneling through to the heart
of the poem, he’s so disoriented
that he can’t hold his head upright.

Better yet, poems that speak a language
of their own creation; only a very
few in the world understand how the words
are strung together in this idiom.
Instead of seeing it for the dying language
that it is, he proclaims its linguistic
complexity and pretends to understand.

Season of Ash and Somber Penitence

Here's a picture of the painting that I made on Monday. I had Ash Wednesday on the brain (for those of you who didn't grow up with this liturgical tradition, Ash Wednesday is the day when we have our forehead smudged with ash, which symbolizes how quickly we return to the dust from which we are made). I painted a canvas board with gray and black paint, and then used real ashes from the fireplace. I like how the black wispy pieces look like birds or black butterflies. For more on this painting, and how it ties in symbolically to the theology of Ash Wednesday, go to this blog posting on my theology blog.

Looking back over my writing life, I'm surprised at how often I see the themes of ash and penitence in my writing. As a younger person, I hated Ash Wednesday and all its morbid themes. As an older person, I keep returning to that well--or should I say ash pit?

The haunting words of Ash Wednesday--"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return"--often provide powerful motivation to get that writing done (or in the words of Andrew Marvell, "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near"). In his book The Lie That Tells a Truth, John Dufresne says, "But death is the central truth of our existence--the sadness at our core. Everything we love will vanish. We can't hold on to anything. It is this tragedy that accounts as well for the beauty and nobility of our lives because in the face of this knowledge, we go right on loving, trying to hold on to what we cherish, defying death with hubris and with faith" (page 61).

On a related note, Ash Wednesday also reminds me of unfinished projects. Once, years ago, I wanted to learn to write using rhythm and meter. My good friend and poet Catherine Tufariello recommended that I use poems already in existence as a model while I tried to write similar sounding lines. Those poets had already worked out the rhythm and meter, so I could take this shortcut. This process worked more smoothly with some poems than with others. Suffice it to say, I will never be the poet who automatically writes in iambic pentameter, without having to count on my fingers. But at least I now understand rhythm and meter.

I've always loved John Keats, and like many literary critics, I consider "To Autumn" one of the best poems in the English language. I started with his first line: "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." I came up with "Season of ash and somber penitence," but never got any further.

So for those of you who want an Ash Wednesday writing prompt, I give you that line. See what you can do. May you be more successful than I have been in the past nine years (nine years--yikes!) since I came up with it.

Revisiting My Art Supplies

The other day, one of our new adjuncts looked at the walls of my office and exclaimed, "You did these things? You're a real artist!"

I immediately felt a bit bad, because I don't do much visual art these days. I have some of my paintings and fabric art on my walls, not because I think they're so fabulous, but because I needed something to tone down the starkness of those white walls.

Actually, I do like my paintings and my fabric art. Are they "REAL ART"? I don't pretend to know. I look at some of the art done by people who have MFA's and are presumably professionally trained, and I think that some of my art could compare to theirs. Am I Picasso, Monet, or Matisse? No, of course not.

But here's my radical thought: I could be, if I devoted myself to the visual arts, the way that they did. I'm more committed to my poetry, so I have my eyes on a different prize.

I'm not a big believer in innate talent. I believe in practice. We get talented at whatever skills we practice regularly.

I've always loved the visual arts, but I stopped doing them at some point during high school. I returned to them in 1996, after a friend and I went to an exhibit of Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the High Museum in Atlanta. Nothing makes me want to paint like seeing paintings. We were in Atlanta, so we went to one of the Pearl art supply stores there.

What a delirious experience. I didn't have lots of money, so I had to be judicious. I bought a set of liquid watercolors that were on sale, and a set of paintbrushes, also on sale. I probably also bought some paper.

For weeks, I was paralyzed. I didn't want to mess up my art supplies. I didn't want to use them up--then they'd be gone! Eventually, I broke open the paints and had fun with color. I bought different types of paints and experimented. I worked on really seeing the world. Amazed, I realized that I really could draw, if I stayed present and concentrated on what I really saw before me, instead of what I thought I was seeing.

For example, I used to draw people with arms down to their knees. My spouse stood before me and said, "Look at my arms--how low down my body do they really go?" Shocking! Just down to the top of their thighs. I'd been thinking of human beings all wrong.

I also learned to look at negative space, as well as looking at what was there, filling up the space. I read countless books on art and theory and what to do with the pencil or paintbrush in your hand. I painted, painted, painted. It was exhilarating. I miss it.

A few years ago, I started experimenting with fabrics, threads, yarns, and layering techniques to keep them all together. I played with beads. I made one creation a week. I'm not sure what to do with them. At least poems don't take up the same kind of space.

One of my goals for Lent is to return to the visual arts by making a visual art creation each week. Yesterday, with a school holiday, I decided to get started. I had a great day off. This week is a heavy week at work, with accreditors in town, so I made a pot of broccoli cheddar cheese soup and a pot of beef stroganoff. It will be good to have meal prep done for the week. I also did laundry. And I had time to read and to paint and to write. My spouse spent hours playing the violin, while I painted. It was much more peaceful than it might sound.

I'm a grown up now, aren't I? My idea of a good day off: to get caught up on household chores and to enjoy a cozy domesticity with time for creative endeavors.

If I'm honest, that's how I've always preferred to spend my time: cooking and creating and companionship. Let other people go to distant sites to enjoy drunken Carnival and Mardi Gras festivals. I'll stay home to paint and write poems.