Monthly Archives: November 2010

The Poetics of Prose

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I’m trying to title this blog post first, but let’s see if I end up even really sticking on the topic which you guys wanted: prose poems versus poetic prose. What is the difference? How do you tell? Etc.

This is probably already off topic but I wrote a post previously about using “character” in other genres but since it is from July of 2009 why not post a link again?

I’ve been debating how to go about writing this post because I wrote an extensive article for Form 21 about this very topic so I hope you’ll stop by that article to do some additional reading on the topic then come back to ask me any other questions that perhaps I didn’t answer.

The latest developments for me with prose poetry are these: I occasionally find poems that I realize have more of a “story” element to them versus being an in the moment poem so I try to turn them into flash fiction pieces AND, as many of you know, I am working on a project called ABC which contains mostly prose poems. Reading critiques of one right now called “Eros”

So let’s start the discussion. Prose or poetry? Prose poem? Poetic prose? Flash fiction? What do you like or dislike about these “forms” or the discussion of them?

Monday Shout Outs

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Here I go on the late Monday posting again! After class this morning I met up with my sister to do a little girl shopping and then some lunch. We were very well behaved but now VERY tired so here I go to play catch up!

  • Great issue of Poets & Writers magazine arrived in my snail box recently. From one article I pulled this great quote, “Concentration is no longer a given” (Agni editor Sven Birkerts.” Are we all spread to thin? I shall discuss that more.
  • Next up. My husband was on his day off the other day which meant he still received phone calls. One was to check their new HD .2 channel (Do I have to explain all that? Is it pertinent?) which is called LiveWell. We watched a bit of it to make sure all the commercials were running well and I was intrigued by a book called The Carb Lovers Diet because it sounded similar to the natural way I eat. It is actually a pretty good book. Good nutrition details although I disagree with doing 1200 calories to start. Think it is better to do about 1600 or more if dieting so you can go down to lower calories later as you lose weight. Also, the before and after pictures are laughable cause the people are obviously just in nicer clothes! But some good solid material in here.
  • I have to give a big shout out to Sibling Rivalry press. I am WAY behind on my reading so I just now had a chance to read Sibling’s first chapbook project, the anthology: Fat Hag: A Scandalous Chapbook of Fabulously-Codependent Poetry in which one of my Fat Girl poems appear. I know some of my readers will be like – whoa- not for me but seriously if you have a liberal bent you are gonna enjoy this little chapbook, although as Tel put it, you might need a cold shower afterwards….
  • In fun news regarding Folded Word Press I am happy to announce that there are now $5 issues of all Folded Word chapbooks! These don’t have the same cardstock hand made look to them but at $5? Great holiday giving! They are even running a special where if you buy a copy of my book you get a free copy of a “green edition”!!
  • And last up would be a really great set of short stories I read in Metazen.  I love reading online journals and blogs but I am having to drastically scale back to only subscribing to a few via email instead of my blog reader cause I can’t keep up. That’s mean I’m also going to scale back subscribing to individual blogs as well which I’m not happy about :( but I will go to the blogs of those who comment here!

It is already an hour past when I started typing this up and still so much to do today so I say adieu for now!

Friday Wrap-Up

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I’m very late getting to the Friday Wrap-up because my husband was off from work yesterday and today. I’ve gotten to where I need to be alone in the house to work or I have to be in a crowd of strangers at like a coffee house or something so I only checked in a few times on my phone but no time to post or really do the meet of writerly work.

Till now!

  • S:  1 essay and 1 set of photos (yep trying to submit photos again)
  • A:
  • R:  my long poem was rejected

I’m a bit overwhelmed with this week and I have a ton of windows and documents open right now in the hopes that I can clean up my to do list which has really, really gotten away from me. Perhaps that is why little subbing going on? Also little writing and with few rejections nothing coming back to revise!

Hope everyone else had a good writerly week. As always, I love to hear from you with your thoughts on writing and questions so I can come up with other blog posts!

Have a great weekend!

So You Want to Write a Book (Poetry)

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Many of you have asked that I complete a post about putting together a manuscript. I was having a hard time deciding if I wanted to do so because I have talked about the process of putting a manuscript together quite a few times on this website. But, since you guys asked; I am going to try to recap the various processes involved with putting together a manuscript, including linking back to many of the blog posts I’ve done over the years on the topic.

First issue: self-publish versus finding a traditional publisher. I go back and forth on the issue myself and I even have a chapbook collection I am working on that I think will be a self-published project (online). Back in 2008 I did blog about the issue of self-publishing as it particularly applies to me and future academic employment.

So, if you think you have a book and you want to self-publish certainly think about it but ask yourself these questions:

  1. Who is your audience? Open mikes? Bookstores? Friends and family? If you just want friends and family or to sell at open mikes go for it. Bookstores? Self-pubbed in bookstores WAY HARD
  2. Do I want to find a job later that will look at my publication history? Don’t self-publish often.
  3. Are the individual poems published? If none of your individual poems are published then pause and think – why is that? – are you going to be putting out a book you might regret later?

In this post from the fall of 2008 I’ve recently found out my first chapbook would be published and now I am trying to put together my thesis. What I think is interesting about this post is the point that you don’t want to publish a chapbook too quickly unless it is a specific series or theme because you might just have enough poems, if you keep writing, to form a full length book later. I also tough on it several months later in the spring of 2009.

Later in the spring of 2009 I go into more detail about my chapbooks and how I started thinking more about a full length collection, especially the idea of reading first collections by other poets so you can analyze how they are put together. This next post is even more detailed, talking about the physical process of each reading that I would take of the manuscript and how I’d start pulling and organizing poems. I also have other posts that talk about ways to organize your piles of poems and other ways to label. And then more thoughts of what project to work on next? As I tried to decide individual poem? chapbook? manuscript? More on chapbooks specifically as well as an interview about them.

As 2009 was finishing up you see me working through “Paper House” after I knew it was going to be published. Sometimes your book isn’t even done when you find a publisher! If you go the contest route, publishers often expect a “done” book but not so much if you find a small press outside of a contest who is interested in your work. I kept working on it and the other chapbooks I had pending. I also hear the book Ordering the Storm is a good resource as it gives you ideas of how to put a book together.

So this is rather a long summary of some of the process I have gone through in putting a book of poems together (as well as chapbooks) but I think it would serve you all better if you ask specific questions that perhaps I didn’t touch on in these posts so fire away!

 

 

 

-also idea of doing more about puttnig manuscripts together. how do you fill in the blanks. the world of the book idea from DA Powell

NCWN Fall Conference 2010

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I first became aware of the North Carolina Writer’s Network back in 2006 when I returned to writing after my about 5 year absence. Thank goodness for the internet because I learned about all kinds of organizations. I attended their spring conference at UNC-Greensboro (where I was an undergrad) in the April of 2007 and found it amazing but given that I also started my MFA in 2007 – I never went to a fall conference until this year!

Man, I’ve been missing out.

This first image is actually from the last day. As a faculty member for the conference, I was able to attend other sessions but I made a rule that I wouldn’t stay if there were limited seats etc and Kevin Winchester’s lecture on character was definitely too packed (yay for Kevin!) so I instead went and hung with some of the exhibitors. There were reps from my MFA program there as well as many NC based publishing companies and authors.

But, let’s go back a bit.

The first day of the conference was actually Friday night. I didn’t want to deal with paying $20 to park downtown (or as they call it in Charlotte – uptown) so I decided to drive the two miles to a park and ride. Discovered the park and ride isn’t really a great option because the park and ride is really only for the express and you have to walk further over (or park at Panera which I’m sure they don’t like!) to take the regular buses. It was an interesting experience but I was glad my husband’s nighttime freelance job was only a few blocks away from the Omni where the event was held so I could just catch a ride with him back to my car.

I didn’t stay for everything Friday night but there was some great stuff including a talk by fiction writer Michael Malone.

Saturday – I took the train. I was up WAY WAY early but I still didn’t quite make it in in time for the early morning panel. I look forward to attending a conference where I’m actually staying at the conference hotel so I can attend more of the events. I did have a chance to sit in on two poetry workshops that were great! One was titled “The Passing Moment” in which I drafted a poem and the second was “Story in Poetry” which I couldn’t stay for the whole thing because I met up with my husband for lunch.

Which means I also missed the luncheon with a talk and literary walk through Charlotte. I heard terrific things about all of these! I stayed around for a regional rep meeting (of which I am one) and the faculty readings at 5pm (which I read in). I really had a great reading! It can be disheartening – at times – to read and then have no one pick up your books but *sigh* that’s just the way it goes sometimes. It really made me love my books again. I had been growing tired of reading from them but there was such a great energy in the room and on Sunday I did sign a few copies of things so YAY!

I wish I had taken more pictures but I got caught up in running around trying to see people and balance being local so wanting to do some grading and such (it never ends). I taught my workshop on Sunday. I was one of the last presenters but I still had about 9 people who showed up and they were very engaged. I was able to do some lecture/discussion then discussion/critiquing of poems people had brought with them before giving some writing prompts. The whole workshop I taught came out of a blog post titled I vs Eye which you can go back and read for a gist of what I covered in the workshop.

I can’t say enough about how well the conference was run and put together and I’ve been to bigger conferences such as AWP. If you have conferences in your state or local area, look into them. Sometimes they have scholarships! NCWN does as well as additional services I didn’t need this time around such as the Manuscript Mart and Critique Services. There were also Master classes that you could apply for such as the one taught by NC Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers who also gave a dinner time talk on Saturday.

I’m still decompressing and taking everything that I learned in. Feel free to send me questions about the conference, the NCWN etc etc and I’d be happy to help!

Only negative? This reminded me just how much I love teaching creative writing; how much I wish that was what I did all day everyday :)

For all the photos click here.

Monday Shout Outs

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Taught some poetry in my composition class this morning, completed a mall walk and met my husband for an early lunch (he had to work on an install from 3am – about 10am! YUCK!), then went back to campus for a two training session soooo yeah it is almost 4pm and I’m just now digging into the email, blogging etc. Sorry!

  • Thursday is Jackson’s Java Open Mike at 8pm in North Charlotte. Glad a friend reminded me because I didn’t have it on my calendar!
  • I’ve previously had work published in Diverse Voices Quarterly and they continue to put out really great issues. The file is a PDF but really look for the story “I Want to Clean My House.”
  • I recently finished Eric Beeny’s chapbook “Snowing Fireflies” which is part of Folded Word’s signature series (of which my chapbook ‘The Wait of Atom” was a part). It is a really terrific collection but I’m not sure if I should call it poetry or prose. Some of the pieces felt more like flash fiction and some seemed more poetry…always an interesting discussion: the line between poetry and prose. But, in either class, I’d highly recommend this beautiful little book if, for nothing else, but this line “She carries the sky, collapsed into its own shadow” from “Picnic Lid, Lifting.”
  • I am also still behind in my reading but I really enjoyed the 2005 issue of The Best American Nonrequired Reading which I had picked up at a used book store a while back. One of my favorite parts about it, is that it is sometimes hard to tell if what is published is fiction or non-fiction. Makes the reading even more interesting!
  • And last on this week’s list is that I finally read the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of one of my favorite lit mags: 32 Poems. There were a lot of terrific poems in there including two by Joe Milford who I had a lovely chat with when he interviewed me for his BlogTalkRadio Show.

And for a bonus. How about a video? Of poets doing more than just poetry. Amazing presentation by the young poet Maya Ganesan

Hope everyone has a terrific week! I plan to recap the writer’s conference I attended and led a workshop at over the weekend tomorrow (or Wednesday if I don’t get caught up!) so at least you know there is something waiting for you around the bend :)