feral

Monday, October 31, 2005

The November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine celebrates 18 "debut poets" and includes brief interviews with each. I was taken with the spectrum of their ages and backgrounds. Some examples:

Slope Editions just published

Like Wind Loves a Window by Andrea Baker. It's her first book. She's 29, has no graduate degree, and is described as a "small business owner." She spent 10 years writing this book.

Christian Barter just published his first, too—The Singers I Prefer (CavanKerry Press). He's 36, has an MFA, and is a trail crew supervisor at Acadia National Park. He worked on this book for eight years. His advice to poets seeking publication:

...Be patient. Give patience a new meaning, something more like forgetting.

Full-time mom Leslie Bumstead, 38, spent 10 years working on Cipher/Civilian (Edge Books).

I see people...getting all worked up about their worth as a poet in terms of whether or not they've published a book. This is stupid. A poet is a person who makes poems, whether or not they get published in magazines or books. We all know this, and yet it's easy to get caught up in the other bullshit.

K. E. Duffin, who just published her first book of poems, King Vulture (University of Arkansas Press), has no graduate degree. She's a part-time editor and writing tutor, "older than a prodigy but younger than Stanley Kunitz," and she advises,

Read widely and cultivate a lifelong immersion in the work of the masters—not in the academic, quiz-show sense, but as a seeker of comfort and thrill, moments of ratification and surprise that exist outside of time. Follow quirky passions, because they will lead to your own distinctive strangeness. Trust the ear. Remember what Mallarmé said to Degas: "Poems are made with words, not ideas." There are three necessities for the life of poetry in the world: an instinctive, fatalistic love of the art; near-psychotic persistence; and a willingness to alienate all others in finding your own way.

(Emphasis mine.)
Sample:

Your story is cracking open without any thunder,
hatching the unformed darkness in which you see
your shadow bob and dissolve as light puts its hand
on your shoulder for the last time.
And you slide under...

Thomas Sayers Ellis's first book of poems The Maverick Room just came out from Gray Wolf. Ellis, 42, has an MFA and teaches. His advice:

Practice all forms of literacy—visual and emotional, too. Admit that there's more than one of you, and surprise and embarrass all your selves.

L.A. poet Dana Goodyear (Honey and Junk, Norton), 29, is an editor at the New Yorker. She has no graduate degree. I like her advice very much, too:

Wear sunglasses to the post office. In other words, try to protect yourself from other people's disbelief.

Corinne Lee, 43, won the 2004 National Poetry Series Award for her first book of poems, Pyx (Penguin), which took her three weeks to write, it says here...

Twenty-eight-year-old Matthew Shenoda (Somewhere Else, Coffee House Press) says,

...Too many young poets are seduced by Hollywood notions of fame, forgetting the healing and cultural properties of poetry. We must not forget the ancestral struggles that come with being a poet, a griot, a singer, a story-speaker.

Texas Tech University Press has just released Slag, a first book by legal assistant Mark Sullivan, 44. He spent 10 years on the manuscript and advises poets to

...engage in the literary world in some way that isn't about your own career, whether it's buying poetry books, subscribing to journals, teaching, or volunteering at a journal.

Finally, Catherine Wing, 33, a teacher and waitress from Seattle, has published Enter Invisible (Sarabande Books). She responded at some length in the advice section, and I think her words are worth considering and reconsidering, inasmuch as they express an ideal philosophy I continually lose touch with:

If you want to be a writer of any kind, you have to make choices in life that will allow you the time to write. In a recent New York Times article about Chris Jordan, the former-corporate-lawyer-now-photographer, Philip Gefter wrote: "When [Jordan] finallyt left his job, he went to the trouble of resigning from the bar, intentionally dismantling the safety net that his legal experience would provide should photography not be an adequate livelihood." ... My advice is to dismantle the safety net. If you want to write, make the choices that will allow you to do so.

Hear, hear.

11:56:46 PM

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Arrived early to the store, but not very bright, I'm afraid. Phone call dragged me from what was promising to be a very deep sleep around 11:10pm, and I didn't find sleep again until 2, so I'm not exactly a spark today; more like an ember. After another unsuccessful search for inexpensive (or 30-day demo) book cataloging software that will work on a Mac, I gave up and turned to stencils. Actually, I did find the perfect database program, and downloaded the demo and started learning it, but that's when I found out that it wasn't a 30-trial, but instead had a 50-book limit—useless. Thirty days would let me budget its cost in down the line. I'll just have to dig out my ancient FileMaker Pro floppies, I guess, and hope for the best for now.

I've been printing out and cutting stencils for about four hours. Fingers are tired. And I forgot my close-work glasses.

Ah! I remember—I must, while I'm cutting, print out the subject cards to tack up around the room.

Brian hasn't come back from his Halloween party. I forge ahead. Maybe I should stencil a window and leave it unfinished at "BOO"....

A picture named stencils.jpg
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