Technical difficulties

Over the next few days, I am going to be trying to switch my domaiin over to wordpress. Please bear with me as it may create some technical difficulties. (Not to jinx it or anything.)

Edgar and Annie, Sitting...

..on my desk. Edgar Allen Poe and Annabel Lee were a Christmas gift and now they're watching me type. I was so excited when I got them on Monday, that I kept telling people how Annie sleeps in a sepulchre by the sea. Yes, I know they're just dolls. But, I hope they come out with more in this series. Below is Poe's poem, which inspired the dolls and my inner dorkiness this past week.

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

What I've Been Up To: A Pictoral Guide

Visiting my in-laws in Nebraska (2 days of driving, 2 days of visiting)...

Eating Holiday Goodies...

Finishing the Third Season of Lost and theorizing...

Hibernating...

I'm hoping to find some writing time, in between all of this and work, too.

My Husband Called Me a Genius This Morning

...based on this highly scientific test. I took it a while ago, when ...deb and Whirling Dervish posted it on their site. It told me I was undergrad level, so I got so much smarter. I decided to grab it now, before I get dumberer again.

Master of My Domains

Whew! It's finally working. After a little drama with the conversion, both this blog and Asphalt Sky have switched over into www land. So, the new address for this blog is www.9to5poet.com and the new address for Asphalt Sky is www.asphaltsky.com. Please update your bookmarks. Thanks!

5-10 Question Meme

I just read this memeover on Stoney Moss. Both Whirling Dervish and ...deb had some really interesting answers to the following questions, which of course, encouraged me to try it out. They originally found the meme on Poefrika, Rethabile's site. If you try it out on your own blog, be sure to leave Rethabile a comment.

1. Who's your hero? Why (Not necessarily a writer -- do not include deities or family)?

Since I just wroteabout Ani DiFranco yesterday, so I'm not choosing her, although she definitely is one of my heroes.

Other than her, I would have to say that my advisor from graduate school is one of my heroes. Deborah Keenan is a wonderful example of how a woman can be a wife, mother, poet, and teacher in an honorable and honoring way. She spends so many hours working on other people's writing, through her role as professor and theater advisor, yet still has time to raise her kids, write her poetry, and have a semblance of a life. Although I'm not sure if she would agree that it is as easy as she makes it look.

2. Who's your favourite dead poet? Which of their poem do you like best?

So many dead poets to choose from! I would have to say that Sylvia Plath has to be one of my favorite poets of all time. Not because of her dramatic life, although that is interesting, but because she was a technical genius. While I love many of her poems, I would have to say that Tulips is one of my favorites. She extends this beautiful and grotesque image of the tulips as mouths which is just haunting.

3. What well-known poet/writer have you met? What was the occasion?

I have been pretty lucky in my young adult life to meet several poets, mostly through my undergraduate school's excellent English Department. (Hooray for small hippie liberal art colleges with excellent visiting writer programs.) Two instances really stick out in my life.

First, as a junior, Denise Levertov was a visiting writer for a semester, and I took a class with her. This was maybe 6-8 months before she passed away from cancer. Not to speak ill of the dead, but she was both brilliant and terrifying.

She asked to read our poems and then met with us all individually to give us a critique. I turned in several poems, including a couple of attempts at sestinas. (I was so proud that I was able to use all 6 words at the end of each line in each stanza -- it took me days.) When I arrived to my meeting, she was mostly kind to me, until we got to the sestinas. She said, "Well, these are almost sestinas," and handed them back to me dismissively. I went home and looked up the form, only to realize that I didn't use the super special order for each of the end words; I just stuck them in when they worked. Despite her slight callousness, she taught me so much about metrics and reading poetry, that I still read back on her essays to this day.

Secondly, when I was a senior, Quincy Troupe came to a reading at our school and I was selected, along with a friend, to have dinner with him and one other student and the entire English faculty. I read his book, Avalanche, as a way to prepare. I was so knocked away by his book that I became incredibly intimidated as the time came for the dinner. During the dinner, I was dumbstruck, as was my friend. The third students monopolized the conversation, and really networked quite well, in retrospect. I only said one word to him, the entire night. Minneapolis. This was after he asked me where I was from, as we were leaving the restaurant. He commented that it was a lovely city, and that he had read at the Loft several times. That was the entire conversation.


4. How do you recognise a bad poem? What are its characteristics?

I hate to sound relativist, but I don't know if there are bad poems. Certainly, I have read and written some clunkers, filled with cliche, stilted, awkward language and mixed metaphors. However, I think that poetic expression is so fleeting these days that any attempt at elevating our language to the poetic is a risk and a challenge, and should be honored. Therefore, I will skirt the question to say that there are a) poems that don't appeal to me personally but may appeal to others, b) poems that have a burning ember of quality, covered in layers and layers of bad or sloppy language, or c) poems that have good language but not a great idea.

Recognizing the first one is easy. I can identify the qualities that make it a good poem to others (fresh language, interesting metrical tools) but I might not care for the subject or the style. I take it as a learning experience and move on, both as a writer and reader.

Recognizing the second kind is more difficult. I can see the idea, even for a fleeting second, but can be distracted from the sloppiness or poor language or convoluted imagery. When it is my own, I feel like I need to dust off the layers of thought and language, to reveal what lies beneath. Hopefully, if I can see the initial impulse for the poem, I can reconnect with the meaning and rebuild.

The third kind is my least favorite as a writer, because I can spend the most amount of time on them. I call this polishing a turd. I will take that poem, that seems to have some sort of freshness or creativity to it, and continuously rework it, in the hopes that it becomes good. It never does, because frankly, not all of my initial impulses are genius. Sometimes, I have crappy ideas. :)

5. Why are some poems entitled untitled? What's your take on that?

Personally, I like to title my poems, as a tool for the reader to add another layer of meaning. However, I hate the act of titling my poems, because it's hard. I often over-title and show my hand way too early. This is an awful habit to break.

One of my favorite all time poets, Emily Dickinson, never titled any of her poems. She either didn't need to or didn't want to, and frankly her meaning is clear without them. A title would just way them down.

From a marketing point of view, a title on a poem is a tool. It's so we don't have to say, "this is my one about..." at readings and in cover letters to journals.

The Paperless Doctrine of 2152

My husband, a budding science fiction writer and author of The Soulless Machine Review blog, recently got published in a journal called rock, paper, scissors. As part of this publication experience, he got to read his story for the CD version of the journal. (Click here to see a really cute picture that I took of him that night.) And, he will be doing a live reading with some other authors published in the journal at the end of the month.

If you are in the Twin Cities area and intersted in hearing some great literature read aloud, here is the information:

JITTERS AT THE TIMES (205 E HENNEPIN AVE, MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55414-1013)

COME CELEBRATE THE 1ST EDITION OF rock, paper, scissors, WESTEGG’S STUDENT-RUN LITERARY JOURNAL, FEATURING THE DIVERSE VOICES OF HAMLINE’S GLS STUDENTS. MUSIC BY BATTLE CATE, READING.

COME LISTEN, CELEBRATE, GET YOUR COPYOF rps (the journal or CD version!!!) HOT OFF THE PRESSES.

Chain Letter Meme

My husband, bless his heart, tagged me with this chain letter meme thing... so I've got to spread the love. Sorry to those that I afflict. :)

Start Copy-

It’s very simple. When this is passed on to you, copy the whole thing, skim the list and put a * star beside those that you like. (Check out especially the * starred ones.)

Add the next number (1. 2. 3. 4. 5., etc.) and write your own blogging tip for other bloggers. Try to make your tip general.

After that, tag 10 other people. Link love some friends!

Just think- if 10 people start this, the 10 people pass it onto another 10 people, you have 100 links already!

1. Look, read, and learn. ***
-http://www.neonscent.com/

2. Be, EXCELLENT to each other. **
-http://www.bushmackel.com/

3. Don’t let money change ya! *
-http://www.therandomforest.info/

4. Always reply to your comments. *****
-http://chattiekat.com/

5. Link liberally — it keeps you and your friends afloat in the Sea of Technorati. **
-http://chipsquips.com/

6. Don’t give up - persistence is fertile. **
-http://www.velcro-city.co.uk/

7. Give link credit where credit is due. *****
-http://www.sfsignal.com/

8. Pictures say a thousand words and can usually add to any post.***
-http://scifichick.com/

9. Participating in ‘memes’ is a destructive habit and should be avoided at all costs. **
-http://nethspace.blogspot.com/

10. Don’t hold back.*
-http://www.aidanmoher.com/blog

11. Short Fiction is the bomb!*
-http://soullessmachine.blogspot.com/

12. Redesign your site often. Visual boredom breeds textual complacency.
-http://9to5poet.blogspot.com

-End Copy-

I tag: Poet With a Day Job, ...deb, Jeannine, Marie, and Sasha. Have fun!

I'm back!

I am back from vacation in Jamaica. While I had a wonderful time with my mom, I'm glad to be back home. If you would like to see more pictures of Jamaica, here is a link to my Flickr page.

I have a lot of things to share about what Jamaica is like, which I will add in the next couple of days. I also want to post some business stuff, like the next book for the Poetry Book Club, which I will do later today. But for now, I'm still unpacking and settling back in. Enjoy the pics!

Instead of Verb, I Decorate

I made a couple of changes to my blog, mostly in the layout. I feel like I need to change the look every couple of months to keep myself engaged. It took me forever to decide on the colors, and I spent two days asking my husband which blue he likes the best. "Do you like periwinkle, honey? Do you like cobalt better, sweetie? Yes, they're both blue, but ones blue-er. Honey?"

I am most proud of the banner, which I designed myself from some digital pics I took with my old camera and my new camera.



The first picture is an inverse of the poet=verb snapshot I took back in April. (Wow, time flies.) Speaking of poet=verb, I didn't post my poetic verbs this week. I'm rethinking the concept of just posting my verbs. I think I'm still going to keep track of them, but I think I'd like to transform those posts into more weekly or biweekly ruminations on poetry as an action and how it affects my writing life. Those will resume after my vacation.



The second picture is an inverse of a closeup I took of my journal. I'm hoping to make a cover for a new journal before I leave on my trip, because this one is getting old and full. Which is a good thing.



The third picture is an inverse closeup of the fluorescent lights above my cube in my office. It haunts me, with its sickly white glare.

Please let me know what you think of the redesign, so I don't have to bother my husband anymore. He thanks you in advance.

You Know You're A Poet, When...

...you watch the movie Marie Antoinette, which is secretly pretty good despite getting panned by the critics, and all you can think of is The Great Palaces of Versailles by Rita Dove.

If I live to be a hundred, I may never get to write an image as memorable as that. But I can try.

Two Articles for a Saturday Morning

This morning, as soon as I woke up, I had two really good articles in my inbox. I didn't know which one to blog about, so I'll do both.



Sassy Magazine

The first is about a beloved and short lived magazine that helped formed by identity. I'm not kidding. It was called Sassy magazine.

Do you remember Sassy? It was like a love letter to all girls who didn't fit into the YM/Seventeen demographic. It was for girls who listened to punk music (or wanted to listen to punk music), girls who thought about politics, and girls who were creative and wanted to do something. Sassy helped give publicity to the 'zine craze of the mid-90's (a precursor to blogs if there ever was one) and helped create a social identity for anyone who was different. In college, I knew who I could be friends with by virtue of their knowledge of Sassy.

My dad, who sent me this article, introduced me to Sassy in the very first issue, because he had a job interview with the creator before they launched. I read almost every issue since then. This article is about a new book about the rise and fall of this magazine, because apparently it never made money.



"Go home and write
a page tonight
and let that page come out of you --
Then, it will be true."

Theme for English B by Langston Hughes

The next article is not as joyful -- it's actually quite scary. When I think about it, I don't know where I fall. According to the LA Times, there is a student in a suburb of Illinois who has been arrested for a creative writing assignment that includes fantasies of a killing spree in his high school. In the killing spree, he obviously kills students, but then also has sex with their dead bodies.

The things that disturb me about this article...
1) The article implies that this scene was written in response to the English teacher's instructions to "not censor yourself, keep writing, write whatever comes to your mind." This is pretty typical creative writing guidelines, especially in high school when students don't enjoy writing.

2) The student, who was referred to the police, apparently didn't fit the profile of a teen killer and so is now being lionized in the article. He may lose his ability to join the Marines.

3)I find myself alternatively feeling bad for this student and getting mad at this student. On one hand, students should be able to write whatever they want without fear of censure or censorship. On the other hand, this paper is tantamount to a bomb threat, which doesn't fall under any free speech protections. How careless could he be? I find myself swinging between these two extremes, one of which agrees with article, the other of which loathes it.

Happy reading!

Thought this was fun...

You can try this out with your own website, by going to http://www.snapshirts.com/custom.php .