Notes on Student Poems

• Streamline. How to say something more clearly. 
• More humor. Jazzy titles
• How can the reader know what you know? Readers respond to image, narrative, the unexpected, a different point of view.
• Abandon centering. Think about using stanzas/space to create clearer meaning.
• Rhyme is doing you no favor.
• OK. I like all this where the familiar tale is being mixed with other things and given new particulars. But then in last two lines back to usual--why?
• Too pretty sounding?
• I like this incremental repetition but I want more. Push harder.
• Combination of two things can increase interest, effectiveness.
• Read aloud for rhythm, clarity, necessity.
• What I want most is for you to experiment with not centering--will change feeling of lines.
• Cutting always good.
• Language--what is the ratio of complexity to clarity. Think about necessity. Deliberately making it more difficult and I can be fine with that if it has a purpose--re-seeing?
• Maybe un-sentencing would help.
• This sounds funny.
• A little falling off towards the end where earlier there's all this great, various stuff. Think about order.
• Think about line breaks to shake up usual way of reading and emphasizing words.
• Doesn't hang together in interesting or directive way like what follows.
• Not clear to me why this enters the poem.
• This is a great quote but it seems sassier than the poem itself.
• Think about order--clusters of idea/messages.
• Why so many commas?

Grading Poems

This is a difficult thing.

Ideas of surprise, cliche, originality, even music are affected by how much one reads and, I guess, in what century. But if your instructor writes notes suggesting many changes and none are made--well? If your poems do not lift off the page, even a little, even like a chicken with clipped wings--well.

I realize it's paradoxical to say at the same time in the same conference make it longer and make it shorter--develop and delete, but people who have been practicing a while understand that there's so much chaff that drifts out of our figurative poetic mouths. Let the great wind of revision blow those unnecessary, already understood-from-context words away.

Some of my students have made me happy by finally furnishing titles that are not labels. Some have purged but not opened wider. Some have not turned their portfolios in. Some have stopped centering the text. Some have not corrected the spelling errors. How much weight to be given to ambition?

What ends with a period does not have to be a sentence. Maybe there don't have to be any periods at all. When is a fragment too fragmentary? Answer this question with the body of the poem: How can the reader know what I know?Why are you stopping too soon?

The good news is that these are only midterm grades--short-term markers of how flexible and calisthenic are the poet/poems.

In other news, I'm thinking that there should be poetry flash mobs across the land. What poem would they recite in unison? Also, cogitating the idea of a group poem whose primary worth would be in sound and performance.

Final Drafting: Send Off Time

Working on the ms. this weekend.

• I put back two words that I'd taken out last time
• I reordered the last two stanzas in a poem--moving away from finality
• I took the stand alone poem away from the beginning of the book (before Part I) and put it into the midst of Part III
• Part IV (last part) didn't seem lumpy as it had on last read-though
• I fixed the page numbers and the Tof C
• I updated the acknowledgments page

I think that maybe this is it and that I'll start sending it out which is a good thing because I have some ideas for other work curling up like tendrils, like morning glory vines.

I also worked on the third part of a poem (which will actually come first), zoning in on the last two lines of it, questioning the language which turned out to be a big plus. From my notes on this: "I don’t like the contradiction of lay/moved. Maybe I shouldn’t say 'Lay' although it’s a nice rep. What did we do if not lay? cringe? yearn? sat? paused. But I guess part of the problem is that the beach = the world.  We tarried (only if I was from another century!)."  Problem solved I think. It wasn't just the contradiction of those two words but also their relative colorlessness.

Who Decides This Stuff?

Working on a 3-part poem today, maybe. Am I done with my manuscript? Yesterday, I did a T of C page number check and reviewed Section 4. Section 4--is there a rhythm problem? Should I reorder a little bit between more flattened, end-stopped and more flowing (not to say verbose) stanza poems? What does the subject matter say? I also deleted 3 words out of one poem.  It's true I can still send it out if I have a few doubts of the miniscule, obsessive variety.Will I really be daubing at this thing through these longest days of the year?

(Have I mentioned that I love electronic submissions of whole manuscripts?)

The poem I'm thinking of working on today has the strange problem of having the most fantastic title in the world. (I'm serious.) As soon as that happens, the stanzas get a little self-conscious. Do they stand up as tall as that title? Does that title represent?

Also, it seems I'm writing with line breaks again. Who decides this stuff? Isn't it supposed to be me? I think the line break has to do with the rhythm of the sentences. Maybe I'm becoming more cohesive and less stuttery? Maybe before I get sucked back into the study of perfect end words, I should spend some time in an open field/tab/use of white space in a big way experiment. Although not with this poem which needs to be small on the page, its parts contained.

I began reading submissions for Barn Owl Review on June 1st. They're piling up fast and I'm not yet into the rhythm. I like seeing what's out there especially in terms of new perspectives/approaches. Also finishing a book review of Mark Haddon's The Red House.

Standing Back for a Better View

I'm writing a book review right now (only notes so far), but after I send it away Sunday, I'm going to focus on last tweaks of the manuscript. I found an old list of things to think about from when this book was only half done. I also was trying to get a handle on what this book was at the time:

• about danger as well as death, as in the dead have it easy now?
• a teensy bit of self-mockery? maybe only applied to extremity of feeling?
• when exuberant to the extreme
• when more pierce-y
• if 25, need 23 more (22 if aphoristic works--surely a two-pager)
• meaningful but not instructive
• gesturing toward the unknown
• the "letting go" of control of voice's exuberance is new to book
• the non-lineation is new to book
• the a-sentence is not new but feels newer because no line breaks?
• the going against an end is not new but maybe more pronounced here--closer to non sequitur but not
• more humor?
• some more lyric, some more stuttery within stanza. Is there the same quality of language in each? quality of image? Does it depend on whether poem of condition or poem of incident?
• to make subject matter less threatening become off-hand or jokey
• the devolution of the past
• some swagger-y, some serious
• lots of birds
• a poem about beauty redefined as suggested in "Watching Me" 
• think about if poems have flaw, not commercially but intrinsically

Imaginary Geography (or do I mean landscape?)

When I was young, my sister and I played a game called Good Land and Bad Land. Good Land was on the right side of my grandmother's backyard which had a giant sycamore tree. Bad Land was on the left; it was narrower and had the garage (always a place of potential menace/discomfort). I don't fully remember what happened in this game, except that we would sometimes move from one side of the yard to the other by walking on the grass and whatnot growing in the cracks of the walkway. Both sides had a border of rosebushes. (OK, we used to be Catholic. That probably explains a lot.)

I was thinking about this only because in my class I've been asking students about their good lines and bad lines.I think I have a pretty good eye/ear for this. Unlike my childhood game, the point here is to eradicate Bad Land and live only in the good lines--lines that sing (I'm sorry, they do) exploding our consciousness with their imagistic wildness. Lines that are bold and long and unabstract. Lines that are clipped as if each new phrasing were held in small hands. Lines like diving boards or knives or fragrant combs of honey. Lines that no one else could find the words to say. Lines like ripples in a pool or waves in the ocean. Lines that will not let you alone. They grip you as should each title,each word, each first line, each last. Lines that break you apart and put you together new.

(My sister remembers Good Land and Bad Land as being played at our house on Mapledale as well which could kick off a great discussion of the reliability of past senses [or as we know it--memory].)

The Good News

The good news is that I've written another poem for the manuscript--"Clamshell, Get Back"-- and even figured out a pretty terrific place for it to nestle in the ms. I think it goes, but somehow it feels unbalanced in comparison. I think it's the cheese factor--you know, it hasn't aged enough--or it hasn't somehow pushed into my brain asserting its rightness as a poem will do. For instance, I'm still fiddling around with the order of the last four stanzas. I notice I like to have a stanza that is a short, gritty list as a kind of "turn" stanza towards the end.

I'm pleased about this poem because it came from a number of notes I took when I was sitting and resting my feet at AWP (OK and in a few panels/readings, too) which makes all time spent in the pursuit of poetry just that much more worthwhile.

I've been getting some acceptances (keep your eye out!) and some rejections lately. This must mean it's time for another giant outpouring of work into the great maws of lit magazines everywhere. I just sent to Chagrin River Review (which is new and local to me) and I see next on my list is Conte (where they have liked me before). Think of me tomorrow morning hustling at the keyboard. (Electronic submissions are the best.)

So plans for the weekend--send poems out, last edits and table of contents fiddle on manuscript, make ms. submission list, maybe send the remaining chapbook out as well.

(My quotation for this last week's class: "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary." --Picasso.)

How We Think in My Head

Here's my informal (post-it) list thinking about the ms:
sound--I used to only be able to revise if the new line had the same rhythm as the old
image
intention--the poem's? mine? both?
meaning-ability--or as a poet-friend calls it "aboutness"
end
interest
coherence (web of)
repeating words

also, order
arc?
neighborliness
short/long or maybe density/relief

Usually, by the time I've gotten to the point of putting a manuscript together, I've already banged on the poems and held them up to the light. But there are still little sore spots that I hope can be fixed and the quandaries caused by good criticism. So these are the things I think about, not in the order of importance.

This morning I was mulling over the first three poems. The first poem standing alone outside a section--should I do that? (yes) Deleted 4 words over two poems. Revisited a discussion about the end of "The Lost Predella": I don't dislike either of these [stanzas] but they don't feel like an end. Maybe this [stanza] belongs to another poem? Is it too soft? Should the poem be left in early turmoil? (turmoil--such a great word). . . . Literalizing it is ruining it.