It might be over, but it ain't over (Chicago world edition)

Well, swine flu's here.

The Tribune covered the departure of the current managing editor at Bookslut.com. Chi-town is out of "energy".

And Chicago, like the rest of the country, sure could use some more bad news!

But--wait--first female poet laureate in the UK.

The End of National Poetry Month!

Thank you, Cheebus.

So I've taken down the decorations, as it were. Now that the month is over, it is time to step away, reconsider, maybe revise. I was going to try and post a last poem today. I was going to write poems to make up for the days I missed. But I am tired. So here's a haiku instead:

Don't let the door hit
National Poetry Month
on its way out. Word.

I think that just about sums it up.

P is for PhD!: An Update

If you know me, you know I accepted OU's PhD offer three weeks ago. Today I finally received word via email from FSU:

April 28, 2009

Dear Applicant,

I regret to inform you that the Department of English has not recommended your acceptance into our graduate program at Florida State University. Like many graduate programs around the country, we are limiting our enrollments in light of budget constraints and of prospects for placement of our students upon completion of their degrees. Competition for the available spaces in our program was especially keen this year, and we have been forced to deny many applicants with solid credentials. At this time we have already accepted our maximum number of students into the program.

We do wish you success in your future endeavors. Thank you for your interest in our program.

Sincerely,

Dr. Stan E. Gontarski
Director of Graduate Studies

Tara M. Stamm
Graduate Program Assistant
English Department

My understanding is that if I made it this far, then I was under serious consideration, which is nice, even if no cigar. Last year I was rejected in February. Word on the street FSU only had 2 spots this year instead of the usual “5 or 6.” That I made the inner circle is a huge compliment.

Yet, let us compare my email to the one sent Jackson Bliss, a fellow PhDer (who will be attending USC and with whom I *might* be cohosting a AWP panel on the creative writing PhD.)

And I quote from his live journal:

“Here's my gracious rejection email from Julianna Baggot at FSU, one of the final emails in a series of conversations we had:

Jackson,

It's a combination.

We usually overbook, meaning we usually accept more people than we actually expect to accept. We're trying to hit a target -- if we go over, well, we go over. But this year there was no margin to go over. At all. We could only accept as many as we had spots for. So it was tighter than usual. And then I was told one fewer and other wrenches. We had to wait. And wait. And now more folks -- from that tight offer batch -- have said yes than expected. So that's where we are.

The top seven-ten in both the PhD and MFA file in fiction, I felt like I would be honored to teach any of those students. Honored. The work was really stunning. Yours included. From there, it's a group decision. And it was painful for all of us. The work was really strong -- and varied. And the decision-making was so hard. You are hugely talented. You'll do great things. And I don't say any of this to make this easier.

All my best,

j."

I can’t help but feel a little jealous. Did I receive intimate fuzzy emails from Julianna Baggott? Engage in gracious correspondence? You know, emails employing words such as “stunning” and “honored,” signed with an adorably diminutive lower case “j”? Of course, I’m a good girl dumbass too terrified to contact an actual faculty member. I contacted the overwhelmed administrative assistant, who is undoubtedly three manila folders away from ovarian cancer. This email exchange isn't FSU's fault, but my fault, because I'm a contact-phobe.

Oh well, no is no, no matter how nicely worded. In the end, no is the final word that counts.

This week on the interweb, MFA style

1. "These days, Big Brother isn't just watching you — he wants to know your superpower and the name of your childhood pet. And he already knows you like to Google yourself, so don't try to deny it."
   
   
2. "Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization." Another hard-nosed look at graduate programs here.
   
   
3. In the new issue of Third Coast, the essay entitled "How Not to Write a Personal Essay for Freshman Composition." And some poems by a recent Montana MFA grad (Brandon Shimoda) and a current Montana MFAer (Scott Alexander Jones).
   
   
4. Edgar Allen Poe is enjoying a wealth of scholarship for his 200th b-day year. Turns out, he was quite the liar/exaggerator. He gets his own square. And everyone has decided he died of rabies.
   

Sex and Food

This morning I visited the mental_floss website and found one of my old articles posted, 10 Foods You Wouldn't Want to Catch Your Parents Eating, an article on aphrodisiacs. Whoah. I'm archived.

I reread it and didn't cringe hardly at all. Although it was a little scary, because I don't remember any of the information I supposedly wrote about with great authority.

Off to Jazz Fest and my quest for crawfish bread. It occurs to me the entire city of Nola is an aphrodisiac. Oysters. Heat. Deep fried goodness. Sweat. Booty funk. Today I love you.

"Each poem, in its way, demonstrates poetry's power to undermine the numb complacency of merely customary, unreflecting life and language."

Brian Kevin Has a Book Out

Fellow Montana MFA-er (nonfiction) Brian Kevin has a book coming out and it's on the Powells website!

Synopsis of Compas American Guide: Yellowstone and Grand Teton: Fodor's has given the Compass American Guides series a major makeover, with a fresh, dynamic design, full-color photography, and inspiring, personal writing. A locally unique look and tone makes this handbook appealing to active travelers and armchair travelers alike.



Huzzah!

Down in the Hole

As a fellow Irish friend observed recently, Irish sober = not so interesting. (A toast to which we raised our double shots of Bushmills.) And that’s why as I began The Wire, season 5 last night, I was schadenfreudenly pleased to find Jimmy McNulty off the wagon and whoring.

Of course, while McNulty’s wiener-capades delight us, they wouldn’t be so great if these hookups weren’t based on character, and if the fucking didn’t take place against the greater landscape of an urban dystopia. It’s The Wire’s willingness to tackle huge issues, that makes it rise above the regular cop show, and Season 5 takes on the decline of the paper.

And so we finally we reach the point of this post. And here I shall employ another lazy-ass Chuck Klosterman post-modern self-aware transition (I’m out of coffee, ok?):

ANYWAY

I was struck by how The Wire through fiction explores the same points made by this article in The Nation, The Death and Life of American Newspapers.

Among other points, The Wire and The Nation make the case that papers are failing because in the interest of short term profits, they did not cultivate (read: pay) their talent. As the writing deteriorated in quality, new readership (i.e. young readership) failed to develop.

Conversation in Episode 3 between editor Augustus "Gus" Haynes (trying to save the paper) and skilled, veteran reporter Roger Twigg, (getting the shaft):

Haynes: “You know my father worked over at Armco, right? And every morning before he went to work he’d sit at the table reading the paper with a cup of coffee and no one could interrupt him for that fifteen minutes before he walked out the door. And I remember watching him thinking, what the hell is so important about that damn paper. I want to be a part of that. It made me want to be a newspaperman.”

Twigg: “One day I was cuttin’ class at Patterson and there was this man on the downtown bus folding his broadsheet just so. And the way that man folded that paper and concentrated on reading those pages made him look like the smartest son of the bitch on the bus. It was just one of those moments.”

I possess dim memories of these good old days, when the paper mattered. Sundays we all read the paper, passing sections around, and my parents still subscribe — they simply are of that era. Paper: It’s what you do. God bless them for it because The Tuscaloosa News is truly awful. (Sports = football. Front page = stadium construction news. Religion = the coach and his wife went to church. Life = the coach’s wife reupholstered her sofa. Metro = there's boxing until football season in six more months.)

Now, I’m not sure I could document a decline exactly of The Tuscaloosa News, but I can safely say it has gotten even worse because of all the outsourced articles, which destroyed the local character. The paper used to, at least, have some personality.

Not so long ago it seemed many great writers whetted their pens at their local paper (and actually Lee Smith worked for T-town news in the 70s). Maybe these writers didn’t stay in journalism, but it was considered an honorable phase, and “reporter” (as the job was called back then), did have the aura of a glamorous profession. But as more papers came to read like canned copy, writers lost interest. We writers need at least a little romance to keep us going. Maybe it wasn’t the pay so much as the harness. Perhaps the decline in newsprint journalism has birthed creative nonfiction as a genre to compensate.

Is it too late for the paper? Probably, Has anyone learned that short term profits lead to increasingly poor product and eventually, bankruptcy? Doubtful. But I like to think there is some moral victory in that (at least partially) the pending failure of the local paper lies in that the owners should have freaking developed their writers.

The MFA, uh, pyramid scheme?

Reviewing two creative writing program-related new books last week, the NYTimes uses the word "Ponzi". In the headline.

From the review, on Mark McGurl's The Program Era:

The actual process of tuition is hard to generalize about, so his book is, instead, full of incomprehensible diagrams, theoretical analysis and sentences like “Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis."

The review is a little more forgiving for Tin House's The Writer's Notebook.

Review of Isaiah Vianese’s Stopping on the Old Highway

A friend of the Three Ps recently released a poetry collection with recycled karma press. It is available here. In celebration of his work and National Poetry Month I thought I'd offer my take on the collection (see full disclosure footnote at the end of my review for more information). It's even interactive...


Isaiah Vianese’s Stopping on the Old Highway
(recycled karma press, 2009)

In a recent article for the Poetry Foundation online, Matthew Zapruder clarifies the role of poetry critic. More specifically, he clarifies useful distinctions for a critic to make when discussing a work under review. No longer useful (or perhaps never useful to begin with) are the old signifiers used to lump together schools of thought in poetry:

So if not abstraction and representation, and if not narrative and lyric, what would be an example of a useful distinction? I propose the following: Does the poem have a single, particular, specified consciousness, speaking in a relatively identifiable situation? Or does the poem have a less defined consciousness, speaking without need of or reference to a particular situation?1

I found Zapruder’s distinction useful when reading Isaiah Vianese collection Stopping on the Old Highway (recycled karma press, 2009).2 Zapruder’s two distinctions, seemingly in opposition to one another, are both present in Vianese’s work.

Many of Vianese’s poems in this 45-page collection, a mix of prose poems and lineated free verse, have a narrator planted firmly in familiar settings. That is, setting is clarified as the speaker(s) describe and comment on the surroundings. As this happens, the location (sometimes named in the title, sometimes now) slowly becomes familiar to a newly arrived reader.

We often find ourselves inside a home, in a domestic space surrounded by female relatives, or outside in a rural setting. Here, in this well-known place (Zapruder’s “identifiable situation”), the speaker may sit with a relative, to “watch the last / of the mothers nest in the brush” (“The Mothers”, 6) or

wake up early to hear
my father slump down the creaky stairs,
my mother calling the dog out to pee
in the cold, then starting the coffee. (“Our Tradition”, 13)

Soon, however, Vianese’s speaker reflects from within these familiar settings with what Zapruder calls “a less defined consciousness…without reference to a particular situation”. The speaker begins to transcend the prescribed setting by conjuring either the ghosts of other poets and poems or setting new conditions for the manner in which the speaker will seek spiritual enlightenment from the natural world.

In “Burying the Queen”, the speaker observes a beekeeper worried over the job of removing the dead queen bee to bury it. Because of the ceremony of bees inside the colony, the speaker first understands that “this is not normal procedure”, as the burial could very well disrupt the planned ceremony (35). In the previous poem, “Our Secrets”, the queen bee acts ceremoniously, as “she accepts offerings, fat on royal jelly, her brown sack turning out each gentle egg like a spell” (34).

Here, I recalled Robert Frost’s “Directive” and the goblet in the children’s playhouse. Frost’s wooded setting protects the magic of a child’s playhouse and reveals the earth’s ravenous appetite for the playhouse and its belongings only to an attentive and meditative speaker, just as the deceased queen bee will not reveal its mystery to just anyone.

The influence of Frost can also been seen in “Stopping On the Old Highway”, a lament and celebration of a year’s end and homecoming. The poem ends with “and there are miles yet to drive— / an hour or two before I can sleep” (19), echoing the penultimate (and ultimate) line in Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”.

Vianese invokes another well-loved modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, in “The Wheelbarrow, The Plum”. Here, the speaker decries the stuffy and controlling directive that prevents the collective “you” from writing “about love” by allowing only a written account of such things as “the wheelbarrow full of stones, / the plum wrapped in maroon skin like a heart” (15). Here, the poem moves to deepen and make explicit the longing for love touched on in Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This is Just to Say”.

Vianese’s poems, in whatever register, always delight in the mystery of the natural world. This world is not tarnished by overly analytical labels or digression. The tone is always hushed and reverent, even when urging action (for when you are quiet, people must listen all the more intently to hear). It is a celebration Vianese consistently maintains, even as the speaker navigates around a “car covered in shit, leaves, frost” (9) or a clearing inhospitable to new growth (25). After this, the speaker is left to find cousins gathering twigs—in the poem “Currency”—“that we would ignite with a Bic Lighter / and then recite false incantations, / ask the stones to speak”.

________________________
1. Zapruder, Matthew. “Show Your Work!: A poet calls for a new kind of poetry criticism, and a new kind of critic.” Poetry Foundation online. March 2009. 16 April 2009 .
2. Full Disclosure: As an undergraduate at Elmira College, I had the fortune to meet Isaiah Vianese, a fellow student, through shared involvement in extracurricular activities that included the literary magazine, Sibyl, the newspaper, The Octagon. We were also both students in poet MaryJo Mahoney’s stellar modern poetry course. I hope these facts serve useful for the reader to understand my appreciation and understanding for his craft—and my observation of the possible sources of its genesis.

Michael Chabon: Secret Poet

Michael Chabon is a poet. He revealed all last night at his presentation/talk/discussion/lecture at Northwestern U, when introducing his audience to his personal obsession with Edgar Allen Poe.

E.P., he pointed out, was one letter away (“t”) from having a very meta last name.

M.C. knows that when asked straight out “Do you write poetry?” to kindly—against instinct—answer “well…I used to dabble in high school and college.” What he really wants to scream is “Yes, yes I do! I do it every time I write a sentence.” It turns out he can’t resist E.P. for just that reason. He's obsessed with language. I love it.

M.C. spoke at length about and quoted E.P.’s poem “Ulalume” (you can enjoy Jeff Buckley’s reading here) to frame his discussion about the use of "horror" in his work. What instills horror in an adult reader is not the talking hearts, the cannibalism or the messy tombs but the ambiguity of a narrator’s feelings (and I’m freely paraphrasing here)

1. against and simultaneously for a beloved (revulsion/adoration)
2. of disdain for someone else who exhibits the same qualities the narrator dislikes about him/herself
3. about whiling away time without completing or being scared of accomplishing the remarkable or conquering a fear to avoid disappointment and/or regret and/or more fear.

In addition to the content of his discussion, there were ample environmental conditions to remark on.

Sitting in the last row in an auditorium filled with at least 1000 people affords you either a welcome break from scrutiny aimed at your neck or heightens the attention paid to all the fidgety students ahead of you. There was hair twirling. There was the person who played with the bottom of their boots—that is, fingers picked at the tread of the boot. Yes, that part that touches the ground when one walks… There was the student obsessed over a blackberry, using facebook, google and I’m pretty sure some kind of stock tracker all while making eye contact as M.C. spoke AND, it turned out, waiting “patiently” for Significant Other to get there to take the saved seat, a seat saved with not just one paperback of M.C.’s but two (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). This person was clearly a big fan, so I'll let it slide.

I digress: When I chose nearly the backmost seat (row three or four, in this case) for the Myopic bookstore poetry reading earlier this month, Donna Stonecipher entreated us lackeys (generally and without eye contact—in the most nonoffensive way, really) to move on up front to close the gaps in the seating area. She said she felt too much like a teacher in that case. Well…that made me the student prone to text messages and reading the school newspaper in class. No such accommodations were possible last night. M.C. packed the house.

Maybe this makes me a bit rude. Nevertheless, I think it illustrates a common occurrence in large groups. You’re largely anonymous and you sure can get distracted by all the cuticle chewing and hair twirling. For any given 30 min. period, I’d say 7 minutes are zoning out minutes. Sorry. It's true.

While M.C.—as ANY reader might have—would lose a few listeners here and there to the suddenly captivating little nick in the plastic of the seat back directly in front of the lost listener, this large audience was with M.C. all the way. He had rehearsed the subtle laugh lines and the audience responded immediately. This speaks, too, to M.C.’s enviable reading voice. He made “Ulalume” sound exactly what it is—lush and beautifully metered verse. He spoke at length about E.P.’s prose, the successes and failures as an awkward adolescent (M.C.’s and E.P.’s alike), and publishing when publishing meant survival. And how that's a wee bit scary.

Speaking of which: Edgar P.'s first novel only sold 100 copies its first run.

The Sand Mantis

I'm doing some freelance writing work for a scientist. Research for said writing often involves stumbling upon amazing inventions. This is one such invention. Not only in the headline worthy of accolades, this darned thing uses sapphires in the opening to "polish" the offending waste.