from the archives: bread loaf, afternoon talk on publishing poetry

originally posted on independent study, 8/14/09

Martha Rhodes of Four Way Books stopped in to talk to the poets about "publishing," which is another one of those gut roiling conversations. Much of what was asked, I knew the answer for, partly from experience editing for Dislocate, but also from other sources, from meek personal experience. So what I have jotted in my notebook may not be useful to every reader as it was for me:

- There is no longer a need to be wary of reading fees. Funding for publishing houses is tight.
- In ordering a manuscript, follow your intuition--make the book the tightest book you can. "I will find the weak poems. They can't hide behind the stronger ones."
- On thematic links within ms: "There has to be some reason why these poems have to be together."
- Consider temperature, thermostatic control--hot poems and cold poems
- (Don't give the editor whiplash)
- Places to search for reputable publishers: AWP, New Pages, CLMP
- It's nice to have a manuscript clipped together (rather than stapled or in a folder, etc.) and mailed in a protected envelope
- Find good readers who are unfamiliar with your work to read through the ms--they won't be as invested and won't already know your "tricks"
- Make sure the contract is legit--run it by someone who might be familiar--know how many books will be published, if it will be kept in print, what the dates and deadlines are, what the marketing plan is, what kind of production input you might have

Her big emphasis was this:
Don't define yourself by the "career stuff"--the bile will rise. If you feel that bile rising, write poems. Focus on writing and growing as a writer. She cited an example of a poet who had all sorts of prestigious awards but shopped his book around for seven years (he ended up winning the Bakeless Prize) and in those seven years, instead of shuffling and reshuffling and focusing on that one book, he kept writing, so that when the ms. was finally accepted, he had three more manuscripts ready to go and has since published a total of five books of poetry. Don't let those other books go because you are being driven to distraction trying to get published.

This is my mother when she was pregnant with me.  Isn't she beautiful?  I remember this photograph.  We were looking for baby photos of me, to compare to my own children, and for my mother to attempt to embarrass me with my husband, those bare-bottomed photographs, maybe the ones where I wear my father's dress socks hiked to my hips, no underwear, some strange woolen hat on my head.

When I began to write what is currently called Tethering (previously was P I N E, and before that, nicknames, like (in)fertility book, and I hope a better title crashes into me soon because Tethering isn't quite electrifying me either), it was just going to be about my body as medical object and the journey would convey from there.  But my mother, who also has (had) PCOS, began to creep in.  And my relationship with my mother, which had blips that were difficult in ways that are relevant to the book.  There's none of our high school years screaming up and down the stairs, none of the lock-myself-in-the-bathroom poems, but maybe one day, when I have teenagers instead of toddlers, I'll write those poems.  For now, I am thinking a lot about my own mother's journey to parenthood.  I thought a lot about it when I read Ghost in the House, which is about depression and parenting and began to understand why things happened the way they did and how I can try to control my(self) relationship with my own children in a positive way.  I begin to understand self through the lens of other.

So the book is still about that (in)fertility journey of my own, but there's also how I learned about womanhood through her, how I learned about the body.  The mother is the source of all that.

In some ways, I question myself for wanting to generate again.  This book could be many, many times the size it actually is, and I'm grateful that it is not.  So many poems have to be written to get to the actual manuscript.  So much needs to be discarded.  I always told my students that writing exercises are as relevant as theatrical rehearsals or sports practice or anything else you could compare this to.  You must keep your brain a-buzzin' and you have to be ready to let go of so much work because it won't all make it to the end.  And that's OK.  Because what you'll have in the end, at least I hope, with Tethering, will be something to be proud of.

This one will come from a sequence of questions I asked my mother, and she kindly responded.  I hadn't thought to do this interview until I was sitting in workshop with Susan Power, who had us create interviews for fictional characters, just to see where it would lead us.  Mine led me to pushing my own mother to help me generate material.  I wanted to create a more three-dimensional mother; who else to help me do that than the person herself?

OK, new poem, I'm coming for you.

what i've been reading lately

(Finnegan, three months.)

In graduate school, of which Sarah Fox (below, her book First Flag) was a peer, I gained, over three years, insight into contemporary poetic movements.  I think, before, I read what I liked, and I was highly influenced by my first true professor of poetry, Michael Dennis Browne.  From him, I learned to love Anna Akhmatova, James Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall.  I came into his classroom loving Sharon Olds, Carolyn Forche.  Of course, Plath and Sexton.  William Carlos Williams.  Li-Young Lee.  Poets with deft use of narrative and image.  Many uses of the self, of lovers and family, not always confessional, but certainly personal. 

So when I met my cohort and the one following mine, I also learned many new names:  Chelsey Minnis, the Gurlesque, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Alice Fulton and Alice Notley.  I had trouble reading Hiromi Ito's Killing Kanoko, though I wouldn't mind giving it a second chance.  SF had a good conversation about it on Rain Taxi.  I scrunched my brow at some of the poems that crossed my desk in workshop, read Montevidayo and wondered why I wasn't entering this new poetics as gleefully as I might have years ago:  was I too stodgy?  Did my preference for the elegant, the image, the story preclude me from appreciating the flashy, the grotesque?

There were words I struggled to separate:  experimental versus avante garde versus conceptual versus postmodern.  Where did they intercede, intersect, overlap, snuggle with one another in a messy heap?

I'd learned that I loved the hybrid poem-essay.  I read Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and swooned.  At AWP in Denver, I borrowed my friend's copy of Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal and wanted to immediately read it again.

Not long after, my dear friend Opal published her thesis essay, re-visioned:  Surge: An Oral Poetics.  I swooned and read it again and licked my fingers when I was done.

I was beginning to understand my tastes, how all of this box-making I was doing was preventing from me letting my own convergence occur.  I love the elegant and the liquid.  I love the lineated and the great scramble.  I love images still, yes, and I love powerfulness (I nearly wrote power, but that's not quite right) and confidence and the ability to be humble and blushes and passion and the exact right word and verbs and breath.  And breath.

Recently, a convergence of reading, along with a good discussion with my dear friend Meryl about these labels and, essentially, the goals of some of the movements, allowed me to read and begin to fall in love.

It's so strange, because I didn't understand much of what was popular for my peers, which made me feel a bit on the outside of things, but I always knew and wanted to find my place in it.  And I have been getting walloped by falling in love with poetry lately:  Love, An Index and The Lifting Dress and At the Drive-In Volcano and Exit, Civilian in a row and SWOON, but I would have swooned a decade ago too.  This swoon isn't new to me, even if it feels that way when I do so.  And then:  pieces of Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water; and Christine Hume's Ventifacts (which I read on a delightfully windy day at the park), which became the model for much of what my own hybrid-thing has become; and then a package from Noemi Press arrived with Danielle Pafunda's Iatrogenic, and I thought, Those poems, I wrote some like that during my infertility treatments and early pregnancy, exactly.like.that; and Sarah Vap's The End of Sentimentality, which went ahead and finished me off, a poem-essay that bandies the words irony and sentimentality (and easy and difficult) around and helped me deal with the use of certain language in order to convey meaning.  Confront what had been discomfort and translate it to experience, meaning beyond our typical associations.  Not reclaiming the word.  That's been done.  But rewriting.

I'm glad these things have cracked this part of my reading-life open.  I wanted the doors to open.

 In keyword-searching The Poetry Foundation, came upon this.  Have been thinking about the title Nestuary, and was going to write a dictionary-poem with nest and sanctuary.  Wanting to read this one by Coleman a few times over, and Boruch, curl up inside it.

(in)fertility m/essay

Inspired by reading all sorts of good things and a recent call for a lyric-hybrid essay, I have begun writing something new.  I'm never sure when a first draft becomes a second or third.  I know it's young, but it's starting to feel awfully solid.  I'd been calling it my (in)fertility m/essay, but I'm thinking about calling it drawing down the moon.  I've got a few places in mind to send it, one in very-particular, but I'll keep that hush-hush so when it does find a home, that home won't get jealous of first crushes.  I've been itching to write something that doesn't slide into genre very neatly and I'd been auditioning projects like some kind of manic monkey (something spiritual and freeing in Alaska! something witchy involving burning in the Appalachians!) (and those projects are still in the works but very much so toe-in-the-water) for a while.  I feel a little heady about it.  Perhaps I did this now because I'm bucking against that month-of-30/30-poems for Tupelo (which was hugely successful and I'll write about that soon and I'm so pleased about it) / (which was exhausting).  I've already had one brilliant mind give it a read and I've since injected it with some goddesses and some celebration and about a thousand more words.  (I'm counting words!  That's not how poets do it!)  All I know is I keep getting drawn back to this humble laptop to adjust some more.  My poetry collective might knee me in the boobs if I don't stop emailing them revised versions.

Right now, I've finished:  The First Flag and am reading:  Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies.  My brain is rattling its cage.

book launch: the first flag by sarah fox

I picked up a copy of The First Flag at the Strand in Manhattan, actually, and had been exploring its strangeness--as object, as word--periodically since.  Not one full plunge, that would come later.  This night was really about giving Meryl and myself a chance for a poetry-date; a practice I vowed we'd do once a month now, to keep ourselves from looking at one another and saying has it really been that long?.  We had Thai.  We came to Honey at Ginger Hop.  She had bourbon.  I took photographs.

(Above:  Chris Fischbach, editor at Coffee House Press, introduces Sarah.)

In fact, the placenta of the pharaoh was placed on a pole and carried into battle.  This is history's first flag.

- Llyod DeMause, "The Fetal Origins of History"

 The book and the event line up:  phantasmagoric.  Is this a word used on the promotion for the event?  Fortune telling, musicians, a lit-up deer plugged into the stage nodding and unnodding along.  A stream-of-consciousness band.  Recordings, visitations from Sao Paolo, photographs, charts.  A book trailer.  An accordion, a tie-dyed flag, choral readers. 

I was a bird brothel.  (2)

My hands work / better than a trowel to feel for the root / tails, snapping them up like a hem seam (9)

rapemines (43)

[my daughter] / whose residence inside me was my favorite of all / the epochs of being an animal body (58)

All the bones yarn up.  (69)

To have an abortion (subtraction) / in Michigan, you must hurl the word VAGINA back and forth / without breaking it (117)

It was strange and wonderful to read these poems, some of which I'd read in early draft form in our thesis seminar.  And there it is, this book that become more of a book as time progressed.  The photographs of the dead deer she found in Wisconsin and I saw on her Facebook page for a time, fascinated.  Thinking of my own deer and the poem I wrote about her. 

There's a kinship in the subjects Sarah possesses:  the woman's body, the spiritual (though I've been shy about this, and growing rapidly less shy), the horrors of a body in trauma, the pleasures of baby-having and fascination at what the body can do (her object of interest is the placenta, whereas mine seems to be that ridiculous production of milkmilkmilk).  Also the roots of the world and the fungus and the woody stems and finding ourselves feral.

Her launch had a kind of ... oh, what's the right word?  There was chaos and many people involved, sometimes not knowing who does what, not that perfect rehearsal but ritual still, and mostly, a way of thanking so many people who helped this book become a book.  (She did a shout-out to the sons of mothers in the room, and the list read like a haphazard version of what was on my name-list when I was pregnant; Finn was the last name read and I blushed.)  And the book itself is that way too:  Sarah doesn't shy from saying thank you to those who influenced her.  There are footnotes abound and after so-and-so and for so-and-so and I think about how much goes into the making of a book, how meager that thank you list can feel.  I think too of E's book and how her dedication page is a sequence of initials--those who are among the initialed know and that's enough too.

Once we reached a certain point in the evening, and it went on as we were leaving, my milk began to let down, maybe when the slide of the woman nursing a wolf (dog?) came up, maybe the images of placenta at birth, maybe a note during the songs, but probably nothing, just a thought of him maybe. 

It was a bewildering pleasure to witness.  I appreciate the exuberance and the presence.  The book and the event--have I mentioned this? yes, I know--they fit together so well.

weekend seminar with susan power

I've done an awful job transcribing notes from my experiences with the Loft mentorship, so I will start here, with our last meeting with fiction writer Susan Power.  And I must say, before I delve into my notebook, that I highly recommend her work.  We read Roofwalker for our mentorship group and all of us absolutely loved it.

This was a reading weekend, and at the Q&A, she spoke of how there's that saying write what you know, but a writer once told her she ought to write what you need to know instead.  (I love this; it's so critical to what I'm in the thick of Right Now.)

When asked about writing pain, she confessed she's attracted to the juicier parts, so she writes those first, leaving the connective tissue to writing later.

On the business of writing
- In thinking of change or letting a book go:  "I'm not going to give up on my characters.  I'm not going to give up on my stories."
- As a judge, she's concerned about carelessness.
- Never forget what you are serving, first and foremost.  Portrayal of authenticity / clear vision backed with reason.  In creation process, simply follows, doesn't understand reasons at the time, but in revision.  Often stands ground when she feels she is being edited culturally.  Watch when we / our work is being treated as a product.  What we do is sacred.
- Manage expectations.  Aim for the world, but don't expect the world.  Always be on guard for agendas of others--pressures from business or even family members.  Know what is reasonable for you.  Remember that your job is to be as authentic as you can be about your writing.  Don't apologize for your process, your journey.  Each writer, each project is different.  Realize you are called to do different things and each needs something different.  (Be OK with that.)
- One writer, when talking about the way we compare ourselves to other writers (or reviewers do):  "It's like there's no more room at the table."
- Another writer said she "enjoys the ancestry," and that it "causes [her] to feel less alone."
- Somewhere in there, we talked about the conversations we have with books--about how, when we are pushing to do something unique, to think of our work as conversing with what came before, and know that everything on the shelf is speaking to something else on the shelf.

I wrote to myself:  This discussion of Getting A Book exhausts and depresses me, this honesty and wishing.  I think it's because I've been wishing so hard and long for my full-length.  I'm worrying about so many things.

We had two writing exercises:

- Interviewing.  This one can be adapted in many ways, but Susan uses it to help jumpstart a stuck place.  Often she'll set up an interview for one of her characters to get at answers she cannot logically come to on her own.  Sometimes, as in a piece she's worked on recently, another character entirely shows up to answer the questions.  The response was complicated, but good.  It can be a generative exercise:  write ten general questions and see how they get answered by a character, a not-even-a-seed character, no-one in mind.  Just go.  Or, if you are writing nonfiction, a way to imagine how someone might have answered those questions, or someone else, just to get a better understand of the situation.  Another way to do this is to do it in role-playing with a writing partner.  For me, during the exercise, what called me was to really follow the development of the questions themselves; I'd like to interview my mother about her attitudes towards her pregnancy with me and my sister to see what it might do to my current poetry manuscript.

One student suggested writing with a non-dominant hand.  She said she was surprised at some of the results she got.  Another writer spoke of how she would let herself lose complete control in freewriting and once dreamed up a daughter for couple-friends who had no plans for children and were heading into unbearing years and not long after, that friend called with News.

Other exercise suggestions:
- Create a list of characters such as the patron saint of liars (after Ann Patchett) and see what roles come out.
- What if your character walked to the "wrong" end of the rainbow?  Let the character contend with that object.  (Not a "wrong" object--but, say, a baby)
- Another writer suggested the technique of mind-mapping

Each session we've had with Susan, I've come away rethinking my manuscript deeply, and that surprised me.  I thought, perhaps, nonfiction would influence me--after all, this is confessional, very naval-gazing stuff, but fiction certainly isn't a realm I'm comfortable in.  But, as with many things, it does depend on the instructor and her ability to draw in students.  I found her energy inspiring--she looks to opening yourself up to receiving your creative impulses.  Characters arrive and speak to her.  She follows, doesn't question.  Generation is a magical thing.