Wonder Wheeler

Poet Lesley Wheeler, author of Heterotopia (Barrow Street, 2010), shares her experiences on writing, teaching, the VIDA count, and Wom-po.

When I reviewed Lesley Wheeler’s Scholarship Girl(Finishing Line Press, 2007) for Prairie Schooner in 2009, what struck me about the collection was its resonance with my own experience of being the child of immigrants. What could this collection of poems about Liverpool via Virginia possibly have to do with a Cuban-American who grew up in Miami? I was mesmerized by Wheeler’s tactile memory of a time and place she had not experienced firsthand. The poems from this early collection attempt to recreate the life of her mother in 1950’s Liverpool, but their central metaphor is the author’s own quest for self-definition. They haunt me still.

Wheeler revisits Liverpool in a new collection, Heterotopia (Barrow Street Press, 2010), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Despite the scant three years between these, Wheeler has expanded her repertoire of tricks. The collection features the fourteen-sonnet crown “The Calderstones” at its center, and ranges in tone and style from straightforward narrative poems like “The Dead Man, 1958” to stylistically striking poems like “Split, 1940,” establishing Wheeler as a poet not just of sound and sense, but as a master of form. At the center of this collection is Michel Foucault’s concept. For Foucault, heterotopia is “a real or imagined space of escape, transformation, or revelation.”

Wheeler’s work continues to fascinate me, not just as a poet, but as an academic. The fruitfulness of her imagination is evident in her prolific output. Between Scholarship Girl and Heterotopia, there were  Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2008),  the groundbreaking anthology of poems from the Wom-po listserv, which she co-edited with Moira Richards and Rosemary Starace, and which I am so happy to be part of; Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920's to the Present (Cornell University Press, 2008), a collection of essays exploring the concept of voice in American poetry; and Heathen (C&R Press, 2009), another collection of poems. She is currently on a Fulbright in New Zealand but will return to Virginia in July, where she teaches at Washington and Lee University. Obviously, here is a poet/writer/scholar/critic/editor/teacher/wife/mother/woman/human who’s tapped into something we all wish we could grasp. In her own words:

Q:           Some of the poems in Heterotopia first appeared in the chapbook Scholarship Girl. Could you comment on the journey from one to the other? How did the project evolve?

A:            I’ve wanted to write about my mother’s childhood in postwar Liverpool since I was twenty—I knew I had inherited some powerful stories—but although I had a couple of small pieces that seemed to work, I just couldn’t figure out how to approach the material successfully. The manuscript that became my first full-length collection, Heathen (C & R, 2009), was stuck at a perpetual contest-finalist stage, and I was feeling despair about that, so at the advice of friends I threw myself into a new project, a much more tightly-focused plan to develop these tales and experiences into a sequence of poems. During 2007 I realized that I had a chapbook-length group that I felt good about and that chapbook publication might be a good inroad to publishing generally. I started sending it to a few contests, it was accepted fairly quickly by Finishing Line Press, and Scholarship Girl was out by the end of the year. In the same year that packet of poems earned me a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Those events increased my confidence in the central idea, so I kept writing and reading and thinking until that core sequence was fleshed out into a book-length creature. The additional work gave me time and space to approach the topic from different angles, too—more philosophically in some poems, more personally sometimes, too. It became a book not just about one family but, I hope, about memory, heritage, and place in larger ways. Heterotopia found a home rapidly. I respect Barrow Street greatly so theirs was one of the first contests I tried.

Although I had been writing and reading seriously since high school, I had limited magazine publishing success until a pivotal Kenyon Writers Workshop in 2003 with the brilliant Janet McAdams. Then, for a few years, I got stuck again on the transition from lyric to book. It still amazes me how, starting in 2007, everything began to click. I had done the work but there’s always some luck involved, too, unless you have some high-powered connection who nudges you onto the fast track.

Q:           David Wojahn, who judged the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize Heterotopia won, found it "refreshing to encounter a writer who works with such considerable facility in several different modes--deeply felt personal lyrics, challenging sonnet sequences, and documentary-historical poems of intelligence and depth." In this collection, you have traditional narrative poems side by side with more formally experimental poems like "Split, 1940," in which you use space and lineation to add meaning. How do you feel about writing different styles of poetry? Do you consciously seek new forms of expression?

A:            Yes, I love experimenting with a new form or rhythm or mode. I don’t always pull it off, but I’d like to keep testing myself. The title poem of “Heterotopia” felt idiosyncratic at the time, more of a thought experiment than anything anyone would want to publish. That it works for some readers was a revelation to me: I’m allowed to be this person in poetry, too? I’ve been producing more long poems and lyric sequences lately and I am really enjoying their demands, as well as appreciating space for fuller exploration of a cluster of ideas. Thinking through verse is different than thinking through prose—less linear, more about associations than answers, more physical and emotional.

I fear getting too comfortable, too, because the most interesting work is risky and surprising, isn’t it? I worry about smoothing things out too much, overdoing the closure before I’ve played out the possibilities. I enjoy writing sonnets, and that’s often the first form that comes back when I’ve had a few weeks of not being able to generate work, but often wonder if those narrow rooms are bad for me.

Q:           You are both a poet and an accomplished academic. What is the relationship between your academic writing and your poetry like for you, especially given that Heterotopia is based on Michel Foucault's concept? Do you have any advice for young poets contemplating a simultaneous academic career?

A:            Both poetry-writing and the teacher-scholar career are all-consuming so they’re hard to do simultaneously; I sometimes feel like I’m short-changing both, never mind my children, spouse, friends, family, and larger obligations to myself and the world. Honestly, though, most poets I know are overextended and stressed out, no matter how they pay the rent. I also know that I’m bad at compartmentalizing so I might as well try for synergy. Certainly I get ideas for poems from my research and vice versa. I alternate between both forms of writing and one makes me smarter about the other. It’s a great and rare privilege to be able to talk and write about poetry as part of your job. I love teaching. Still, I’m glad there are poet-accountants and poet-house-cleaners and poet-painters—poetry would be more insular and less exciting if writers didn’t negotiate various worlds.

Advice: do an advanced degree in literary study or creative writing only if you passionately want to and think the effort is worthwhile in itself, whether it ever leads to a job or not. Most people who complete such degrees don’t ever secure academic employment, much less tenure, and even if you do the costs are huge: you earn less than peers who have made similar educational investments, you have very little control over where you end up living (meaning tough family/ relationship choices), you work around the clock, and there’s much less flexibility than there seems to be from the outside. If you don’t feel driven enough to accept those risks and costs, that’s good—better to know what makes you happy and take your own path. If you do have the requisite level of reckless irrational obsession, I’d say go for it, take every opportunity you can without racking up major debt, get to know your professors and classmates even if you struggle against shyness, and make the most of every expensive minute. Many people who deserve that luxury won’t get it.

Q:           The recent statistics from the VIDA organization have many writers rethinking the role of gender in the industry. Could you comment, as a critic, editor, writer, and woman on how you place your work in this discussion?

A:            I have always thought that prejudice controlled resources and opportunities more than most would admit, so VIDA’s statistics don’t surprise me. I’m grateful to those women for publicizing the issues. To me, feminism means an obligation to notice and redress gender inequities however you can. Well, human decency requires that, too! Parallel institutions of support are crucial—presses, journals, mentoring programs—as well as changing institutional cultures from within. I try to be a feminist scholar, poet, and teacher, though sometimes you just get so tired of fighting these old battles and you just want to hunker down with your anapests.

I keep saying I’m lucky and privileged and I mean it; I know I’ve been denied opportunities, lost money, because of my sex, but I know others who have fared much worse, and intersecting prejudices involving gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and other factors can be huge obstacles for some writers. Look at incredibly gifted Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson. Her experience made her work urgent and vivid—a disproportionate amount of the most powerful twentieth-century poetry in English was written by women, by people of color, by gay and lesbian writers, by those who didn’t see their lives and concerns reflected in mainstream culture. However, she also stopped publishing and largely stopped writing. To continue would have required more drive and resilience than most people have or need. Everybody has to work to change these conditions so poetry publishing is as close to merit-based as possible, although it’s just as important to be open-minded about what constitutes “merit.” I don’t want to keep losing decades of work by Helene Johnsons.

Q:           You are also one of the editors of Letters to the World. What does Wom-po mean to you, and how would you describe it to someone who has never heard of it?

A:            Wom-po (The Discussion of Women’s Poetry List) is one of those parallel institutions that tries to make an advantage out of exclusion by providing a professional network for women poets. I’ve put myself in the business of describing it by drafting an article about it (now under consideration), because I think literary scholars need to assess its influence. I say it’s an “old girls’ network” by design, a democratic and open virtual community founded in 1997, now enrolling about 800 people from across the world, and it’s important to clarify for people that it’s a space for discussing poetry and not workshopping it.

Wom-po isn’t perfect. It aspires to be a transnational community but the North American focus can sometimes seem relentless; I’ve seen lots of prejudices emerge in conversations there; members don’t all benefit equally from participation. It includes a great diversity of voices, but it’s still affected by real-world poetry hierarchies. I’m not sure that it has had a substantial influence on the kind of poetry its participants produce—that’s something I’m still looking for examples of. I am confident, however, that Wom-po is affecting careers through providing information and connections. Gender is important there but so is virtuality. I suspect women writers are often less mobile than their male counterparts, less able to make a splash in metropolitan centers or at elite residencies. This relatively new mode of affiliation can be seriously empowering, especially when electronic acquaintance is deepened through backchannels and in-person meetings. It’s how I “met” you, right?

Right! My thanks to Lesley for taking the time to answer these questions. Though we have never “met,” I feel a deep admiration for her work and an equally deep sense of consorority born not just of our common years in the thought community of Wom-po, but of her poetry, which speaks to me in so many ways.

The Winners of the 2011 Big Poetry Giveaway

As promised, I have just selected the two winners of the 2011 Big Poetry Giveaway at my blog via random number generator. The winning entries were 1 and 13, Yazmin Andino of Miami, Florida and Michael Wells of Independence, Missouri. Yazmin will receive a copy of my chapbook, Shapeshifting,  and Michael will receive a copy of Ann E. Michael's The Capable Heart. My hearty congratulations to you both, and my deepest gratitude to all of you who participated. I hope you'll come back next year for the 2012 BPG, unless of course the Mayans are right and we're all space kibble by then.

Well, I don't appear to have won any free books myself, but I'm holding out hope that maybe some of the giveaways I entered haven't been decided yet. I entered so many I didn't quite keep track, so.

The giveaway was really good for my baby blog. I doubled the amount of readers I had and I'm very grateful to Kelli Russell Agodon of The Book of Kells for the opportunity to participate, and to all of you who linked back to Writing with Celia and brought me new readers. I hope some of you will now keep reading. I hereby declare (sorry, the extra traffic has gone to my head) May as National Revision Month. What better way to follow up National Poetry Month than by revising all those poems you wrote in April? I'll try to post some of my best revision ideas this May.

But what I am most grateful for is the opportunity to pass on Ann E. Michael's beautiful new collection. Michael, I hope you like it.

Feeling in Forms

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Ekphrasis: Exercises in Ecstasy

I’m not the biggest fan of “poetry prompts,” little exercises meant to stretch your poetic muscles, such as writing down random words and making a poem out of them on an equally random topic. Some people respond to these really well, and some people just don’t, and I’m one of the latter (it might have something to do with my overall allergy to exercise of any sort). Occasionally, a prompt will move me to write something funky I would not have thought of before, but more often my attempts at writing from prompts only result in contrived lines that show the prompt from a mile away. For this reason, I don’t often use them, but I am very intrigued by them, and there have been many great prompts collected this month. Some of my favorites this year are at Kelly Russell Agodon’s Book of Kells and Big Tent Poetry.

Ekphrasis is not really a “prompt,” but it’s a tradition that can work as such. From the Greek ek and phrasis, out and speak, “ekphrasis” basically refers to any type of art based on another medium. (For a more complete definition, including an excellent bibliography, read here.) Ekphrastic poetry, then, is poetry that is based on other works of art, such as a painting, a sculpture, or a song. What I love about ekphrasis is that, unlike a random prompt not based on an existing work of art, ekphrasis can help you connect to another artist’s vision, and is thus by definition an act of inspiration, a mooching, if you will, off another artist’s creation. If you’ve ever stood transfixed in front of a painting or a statue, you have experienced the moment that can begin an ekphrastic creation, a kind of ecstasy, also from the Greek ek (out) and histanai (to stand, as in place or set). The work of art takes you outside yourself to a new place.

Perhaps one of the most famous works of ekphrasis is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the static figures on the ancient piece of art inspire him to contemplate the timelessness of beauty:

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;

One of the best results of the ekphrastic effort is that it’s an excellent antidote to abstraction, the vilest enemy of good poetry. Moved, as Keats was, by the passage of time, the figures on the urn ground his feelings in the material and produce one of the most treasured English poems of all time.

J. P. Dancing Bear, who writes beautiful ekphrastic poems (see his “New Age,” based on the painting Promise by Yu Sugawara), puts it thus: “I tend to get inside the picture and look around. Sometimes I see things outside the frame and I'm not afraid to explore that. After a while, I either become one of the beings in the painting or I become an observer (first person, second person, third person). I note all phrases that come into my mind. Words too. Then I begin to construct the narrative of the painting. I pay little attention to titles, I care very little for what the artist says about the work, or the artist's techniques. The artist has provided a window, and I climb through it.”

Thanks to the Internet, climbing through windows has never been so easy. Right here and now, on whichever device you are using to read this blog, you can contemplate at length and absolutely free the greatest works of art humanity has produced from ancient times to the present. Of course, there is something to be lost, some aura, as Walter Benjamin would have it, in the transaction. Should you have access to a museum, a gallery, an opera house—use it. But the trick is not so much to have that coveted access to the work of art itself, but rather the ability to find art that moves you, that jars you, that takes you outside yourself and slams you down on the other side: ek histanai.

No pictures of sunsets, no puppy portraits. Cliché images make cliché poetry.

I prefer images that freak me out a little. I’m mesmerized, for example, by this series of portraits from artist Julie Blackmon called Domestic Vacations. Note how she is able to evoke emotions and ideas simply with pictures. Try to reproduce this effect in words. Choose one of the portraits in the collection and describe the scene it depicts. Attempt to convey whatever it is you felt when looking at the portrait simply through the selection and placement of detail. Do not reveal the emotion you are attempting to convey. Avoid using abstract adjectives, like “freaky” umbrellas.

Or try focusing on a work of art that speaks to some issue that is already on your mind. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about street harassment lately, ever since I read this excellent post by Louise Melling on the ACLU blog. Immediately I thought of the famous photograph by Ruth Orkin, “American Girl in Italy,” which I first saw some years ago in an Italian restaurant. I’m still working on it, but I think this is going to be a good poem, the mixture of the issue, the old photo, my memory of first having seen it, my own experiences of street harassment. You’re welcome to beat me to the punch, but what I want you to get from this romp through my head is the way a poem can come together. You can rely on your own experiences, your own notes, or you can research. You might think poetry and research are at odds, but the academic in me thrives on the accumulation of tidbits. An experience here, a blog post there, a famous photograph, and boom! A poem springs from the rock.

Sometimes ekphrastic inspiration springs from the unlikeliest of places. One of my favorite poetry collections is Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s Unbound & Branded (Finishing Line Press, 2006), which I reviewed for Prairie Schooner in 2008. The collection is about supermodel Kate Moss, but the poems are based on a photo spread of Moss for a 2003 issue of W magazine. Each photo in the spread inspires a poem, and the collection as a whole, as the title implies, explores Moss’s career as a vessel for other artists and advertisers. Stewart-Nuñez could have written about Moss without the W spread, but the photos are intrinsic to her exploration of Moss’s role in the creation of this phenomenon we call beauty.

Another unlikely place to find poetry is Facebook or whatever social medium you prefer. One of the good things about being a writer and a teacher is that you quickly accumulate many FBFs, only a small percentage with whom you would normally share pictures. On any given day on Facebook I see pictures of people’s trips to Italy, of their children eating ice cream at Disney World, or their own versions of themselves as supermodels posing for their friends. Unlike professional photographs, these images are raw, unmediated. They are an excellent source of stories, attitudes, and the daily dilemmas that make great poetry. Oh, and don’t worry. Not all ekphrastic poetry is so enmeshed in the original work of art that it requires disclosure. Sometimes a poem begins as ekphrasis and ends just as a poem, so far away from its source as to be virtually unrelated to it. Some ekphrastic poetry—the truest ekphrasis, one could argue—cannot be fully appreciated or even understood without its source. But some can stand alone, and the reader can experience it with or without its source. Should your source be a picture of someone you barely know on Facebook, perhaps it would be best to leave the source behind as much as possible. All kidding aside, however, do be aware of copyright issues, and acknowledge them appropriately.

Be open to pretty much anything as a source for ekphrasis. One of my favorite Anne Sexton poems is “Some Foreign Letters,” in which she attempts to reconstruct the early life of her beloved great-aunt Elizabeth. The poem is so rich in images it may have well have been based on photographs, and says much about the lost art of letter-writing in that Sexton was able to so vividly picture her aunt’s life through her letters. Old letters can be difficult to work with, in that they already come to you in words, thus stealing something from the process of transmogrification that defines the essence of ekphrasis. Nevertheless, the conversation can be gratifying. Some of my favorite poems are based on other poems, like Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch,” which is based on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Hecht’s poem is arguably parody, or satire, but ultimately ekphrasis. Call it what you will—it’s freaking great.

Here’s the final trick, whatever source you riff off of: make it yours. Ekphrasis can be many things, but never imitation. The source is the point of departure, but the destination must be yours.

Advice to a Young Poet from a Not-So-Young-Anymore Poet

There’s been a rash of advice given the month. Jeannine Hall Gailey has an excellent post at her blog, with links to a few more. Here is mine. It’s not intended for poets who are mainly thinking of poetry as a hobby, although you might get something out of it if so. Mostly, I’m thinking of the YP (Young Poet) who wants more—a “career.”

1.       Overcome the amateur circuit.

For some, cutting your teeth at the local open mic event is a catalyst. You wrote a few poems you were unsure anyone would like, you took a deep breath, read them to strangers, and yay! They loved them. They clapped for you. You got a high. You might get the same experience from posting your poem online somewhere, some site that has no editorial process. Anyone can post. Thousands—thousands—of people have clicked and rated your poem as wonderful. This gave you confidence, and you went on from there to pursue your poetry elsewhere.

For others, the amateur circuit of endless open mics and countless open sites is the death of their growth as a YP. You get hooked on the guaranteed praise, and you can’t give it up. You’re like that teacher’s pet at the end of kindergarten who pitched a fit because he wasn’t sure the first grade teacher would let him be the one who banged the erasers. Don’t stick around the amateur circuit too long. Get what you can from it as quickly as possible and get out, or bypass it altogether. Remember that the only place where everyone always does a good job and gets a cookie is kindergarten.

2.       Beware of sharks.

Your next logical step is seeking publication, and here is where there are millions of poetic equivalents to ambulance chasers waiting to pounce on your wallet. Beware of contests where everybody wins, or where there are many winners or too much prize money or washed-up, non-poetic celebrities involved. Investigate. Who is judging the contest, and what is his or her publishing pedigree? Is the contest affiliated with a reputable publisher or institution, such as a college or university? Fishing out a bogus contest can be very tricky. For one thing, none of them are actually illegal. There is indeed always a winner or winners, and these do get the promised prizes. But so do the people who win Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, and you don’t fall for that, do you?

Similarly, there are many publishers who are eager to publish your manuscript, for a fee. In the past, this used to be called “vanity publishing,” and carried a heavy stigma. Nobody wanted to publish your poetry but you. Who was the fool? The editor who didn’t recognize your talent, or you, who didn’t recognize your lack of it? Now, that attitude is shifting. More people refer to this practice as “self-publishing,” and many fine writers in all genres are making it work for them. But they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s hard. You have to know about as much about business as you do about poetry to make it work, to get your book into the hands of readers and critics who will look beyond the self-published label and give you credit on par with that automatically conferred on writers who are published traditionally. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something. I do not recommend self-publishing to the YP.

And no, you don’t need an agent. Most poets don’t have one, including fairly well-established poets with many publications. Only a tiny handful of poets already at the very top have agents.

Two organizations that can help you sift through the sharks are Poets & Writers and the CLMP, Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. They both keep directories of magazines, journals, publishers, and presses guaranteed to be the real thing. Frankly, however, you should not seek publication too early. It’s difficult to determine when your poetry is ready for publication, especially if you’re truly young, meaning still in high school or even earlier. You have no access to professional opinions. How far can you trust mom, the boyfriend, the BFF, or the teacher who is overjoyed by the mere fact that you wrote something that actually made sense? That’s how you wind up at an open mic, searching for that confirmation. Sometimes, you have to give it to yourself. When you can look at one of your poems side by side with one published in a book, journal, or magazine you know to be reputable and say, “by golly, that’s just as good!” you might be ready to send work out. But, in order to be able to make that judgment, you need to take another crucial step.

3.       Study.

What I mean by study is more than just reading for pleasure. You have to seek out good poetry—it won’t come to you. It’s not taught enough in the schools, and you’re not going to find it on the magazine rack at the dentist’s, or even at most book stores. Go to Poets and Writers, the CLMP, to poets.org or Poetry Daily. Write down names, hunt down books and similar writers. Make a point of learning about different styles and schools, read criticism. Subscribe to a few journals. Make sure your reading list is over 75% current, living authors. Go to readings (not open mics), take a class. Ideally, go to college and major in English, but pick a school large enough to offer at least a few classes exclusively on current poetry. Many English departments are watered down to survey courses, or courses in the novel, or the Romantic poets, who are all long dead. I don’t like creative writing programs that are mostly workshops and require little literary study. Writing is both an art and a craft. You learn the craft part by practicing it in workshop, but you learn the art part by studying it in class.

Model the work of poets you admire. Don’t worry about originality, or losing your voice. That’s literally impossible. Eventually, all your mimicking will mesh and evolve into something uniquely your own. That’s how you learned to talk, remember? You listened to your parents, to the television, and suddenly you spoke, and sounded like no one but yourself.

4.       Cultivate both confidence and humility.

The whole point of overcoming the amateur circuit is to find feedback you can trust, and now that you are studying, whether on your own, through a group, or in a class, you are going to get some, maybe even in the form of a rejection from an editor. How do you process rejection?

There is no such thing as a writer who is immune to rejection. The trick is to get past the initial moment where you crumple up the slip and throw it at the wall (or print the rejection, and then crumple it up and throw it at the wall). To respond to it professionally, intellectually, critically. You must always ask yourself what the rejection or criticism means. Say you sent the poem to a journal and it got rejected. Maybe the poem sucks. That’s okay. Just because one—or ten, or twenty—of your poems suck doesn’t mean all your poems suck or will suck. But that’s not the only reason why a poem might get rejected. Maybe it doesn’t fit the style of that journal, or that issue. Maybe there was already a poem about French toast they had agreed to publish. Have the confidence to believe not in your writing, but in your critical judgment, which you have struggled to cultivate. You once honestly believed the poem was good enough to send out. You are a well-educated critic. Why should someone else’s opinion—even an equally cultivated opinion—change your mind?

But you must also have humility, especially as a YP. Say you are in workshop, and someone says your poem is full of clichés. You didn’t think so. Well, who does? Has that person said intelligent things about other workshopped pieces? Have you agreed with his or her criticisms in the past? If the critic is just some schmuck who pooh-poohs everything, who cares? But if it’s someone who is a good critic—now that you’ve studied you know who is and who isn’t—you should have the humility to at least reevaluate your work. Perhaps there is something you missed. If all you will accept from others is praise, you might as well go back to kindergarten.

5.       Work for money.

This one’s tough. You need money. Duh. Don’t expect to make it writing poems. There is hardly a poet in the US (and I bet we’re not alone) who lives exclusively off book royalties. Heck, there are hardly any writers at all who do. But at least there are some, popular novelists who get their books turned into movies (when was the last time you saw a poem get turned into a movie?), or genre novelists, scriptwriters. Not poets. Go ahead, I dare you. Pick random poets off the poets.org database and see how many you can find whose bios don’t include some other job. Most are academics, professors here or there whose teaching pays the bills. They got the teaching job because of being poets, but they could not be poets without the teaching job. Some have any other job—they are lawyers, politicians, pool sharks, whatever. The more successful ones have grants and awards that pay the bills, not royalties. The even more successful ones make money giving speeches and whatnot.

So you need a job. What kind? You can be an academic. With a BA, you can teach school, or you can teach at a college or university with a graduate degree. For some, this is perfect, because the teaching feeds into the writing. For some, however, this is a bad idea. Teaching is hard work, and teaching writing or literature—the obvious choice—can backfire. It can be sort of like taking someone who loves animals and making her work at a slaughterhouse. How excited will you be to teach poetry when the mere mention of it draws groans from a class full of students who don’t want to be there and hate poetry and writing, and, by extension, you? If this thought makes you love poetry more—“I will fight to make them love it!” you think—go into teaching, at whatever level you prefer. But if you’re the type who gets spitting mad when you see a typo in a headline and thinks anyone who doesn’t know who Milton is should be exiled from the planet, look into that pool shark option. You want a job that will give you the money you need and, if not feed your creativity, at least not drain you of it.

People worry too much about the “should I get an MFA?” question. The value of an MFA in creative writing only comes into question comparatively, and the correct answer is always personal. Should I get an MFA, or an MBA? Should I get an MFA, or backpack through Europe? Should I get an MFA, or a husband? The answers to these questions have nothing to do with an MFA. These are personal happiness questions. Do you want money? Well, no teaching job is going to make you rich, MFA-related or otherwise. Do you want experience? An MFA will get you that, but so will backpacking nowhere and buckling down to read some good stuff on your own. I met my husband when I was getting my MFA, but I don’t know if this happens at all MFA programs.

The truth is an MFA is a fine degree. You will learn. I’ve heard some people claim that MFA programs teach everyone to write the same way. I think that has more to do with you and your propensity to be a lump of clay than it does with any program, however. But does it pay off, people ask. Sure. With an MFA—and at least one book-length publication—you can get a job at a college or university. Unlike the MA, which is really just a stop on the road to a PhD, an MFA is a terminal degree. If that is what you mean by whether it pays, the answer is yes. If what you want is some sort of comparison between an MFA and a law or medical degree, that’s pretty silly. No degree “pays,” in a sense. There is always a certain amount of luck involved in turning a piece of paper into a job, and huge discrepancies in wages not just between fields but within them. For every rich lawyer in a mansion there’s at least 100 traffic ticket lawyers living in a tiny apartment with a poet for a roommate. There are many schools now offering PhD’s in creative writing as well. These are great. You study more theory, usually, are more poet-critic than poet-writer. Get that too if you can swing it. Get it into your head that there is no such thing as useless studying.

6.       Work for poetry.

At the same time, do not allow your poetry to take a back seat to your work. Whether you choose to be an academic or an accountant, don’t forget the poetry. Know a distraction when you see one. You’re offered a great promotion, for example, but it’s one of those work-all-day-and-then-some-more-at-night-and-every-weekend promotions. Do you really need it? What will you do with the extra money? If it’s feed and clothe your five hungry, naked children, go ahead and take it, please. But if it’s get a better car, better clothes, or a bigger apartment, realize that you’re paying for it with poetry. Poets don’t drive nice cars, wear fancy clothes, or live in big apartments. That doesn’t mean you have to be a Starving Artist. It simply means you have other priorities. Most people won’t understand why you don’t have an iPhone, iPad, or iAnything. There is no iPoetry.

7.       Pursue publication diligently and meticulously.

Once you are ready to start publishing, always have something out. Don’t leave it for later, don’t wait until you have a full or a better manuscript, and don’t expect anyone else to do it for you. When the rejected stuff comes back, send it right back out again the very next week. Find a system that works and keep it. Send things out the minute they are done, once a day, week, or month. But do it regularly—this is what makes you a poet more so than any degree or even the writing itself. Get it out.

Target your publishing efforts, especially if you have your eye on your academic résumé. Don’t just send your work willy-nilly anywhere. Send to places you respect, and read. Match your poems to the target’s “voice.” Don’t just enter contests. A certain amount of these is fine for your best work, but you should also send poems and manuscripts during regular reading periods.

Keep good records. Find a way. There’s software for this, but you don’t really need it. You can devise your own system. You don’t want to send the same poem or manuscript to several places at once unless they strictly say that simultaneous submissions are okay. If they don’t say so, write, email, or call to ask. Don’t sweat the cover letter. Many places are using submission software now, and you submit your work online with hardly any space for extra comment (some have none at all). I don’t think a cover letter will make an editor look at your work any differently. What matters is the poetry. The cover letter is a business letter, not some cockamamie attempt to showcase your talent. That’s what the poetry is for. Tell them what you’re sending them in the first paragraph (just titles, not lengthy explanations), and who you are in the second: where you’re from, your last three publications if you have them, or where you’ve studied if you don’t, or nothing more if neither. Say thank you and give your contact information clearly. Anything else is unnecessary. Follow any rules they give you to the letter. If they want you to submit your work as a .txt file, don’t send them a .doc. If they want you to include a 50-word bio with your submission, don’t send them a 500-word opus.

Hmm. That seems like an odd last word, but it isn’t. At the end of the day, what YPs need is demystification. The truth about poetry is that it comes down to the mundane, as all things do. Nothing is exempt from the basics of life: work and pay the bills. Not even poetry. Perhaps a better final thought might be this: don’t romanticize the thing. If I tell you poetry is a matter of correctly formatted submissions and it makes you cringe, you might have too hard a road ahead. But if you read that and love the thing anyway, looked out the window at the cherry bush and thought, “I can turn that into a .txt file,” you might be a poet already.

How to Meet Your Muse

“I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.”

—Denise Duhamel, from CHIMERA: an interview with Denise Duhamel by Karla Huston

The Shadow of Sirius,
the latest book from
current US Poet Laureate
W. S. Merwin

Do you know who the current US Poet Laureate is? Of your state? (Or, if you are one of my mysterious Denmark readers, the analogous position for you?) Can you name any poets who live in your city? Most people who live near celebrities (here in Miami, we have more than a few) know about them and find it a point of pride, but poets live in relative obscurity. Yet, there’s something about knowing your local poets that’s . . . alive. There’s a reason why Plato expelled poets in The Republic. Your local poets are tapped into your hometown in a way no one else is. They know things!

As we enter the second week of National Poetry Month, take the time to find out whom your local poets are. During this month, there’s more going on than usual, and you may get the chance to attend readings and events not available later. There’s something about hearing and seeing poetry read right in front of you that’s impossible to grasp on your own. Poetry is more of a performing art than prose is—to hear the way a poet delivers a poem is always interesting. Most readings also have Q&A sessions afterward where you can actually talk to the poet, ask her or him anything you want. How cool is that? If you’re unsure where live events are taking place, poets.org has a calendar searchable by state here. You can also check your local newspaper, your local bookstore (especially independent ones), libraries, and surrounding universities. If all else fails, try Google.



Kinky (Orchises, 1997)

One of my favorite locals is Denise Duhamel. She teaches at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood (Florida, not Cali). I met her once at the Miami Book Fair. Made a complete ass of myself. Went up to her after the reading, offered her my sweaty palm, and said, “You read my favorite poem of yours!” (which is “Kinky”). Then I laughed and scuttled away before she could reply. But it was so cool to hear her read. Her poetry is very messy on the page, hard to hear without her breathy delivery. There are a few YouTube videos of her reading, but they are mostly all very bad quality, seemingly recorded by someone in the audience with some kind of unsatisfying gadget. Hearing her read made me appreciate her poems better. Since then, I’ve made her a staple of my creative writing classes. Young students like her organic meditations on pop culture, and, since most of my students are locals, they stand a good chance to catch her live at a local event.

Duhamel’s poetry is often described as “ultra-talk.” To learn more about ultra-talk poetry, you should read David Graham’s excellent article at Valparaiso Poetry Review. The way I try to make it simple for beginning students, however, is to describe it as deceptively chatty. It seems like the poet is just rambling, but that’s an illusion. Behind the chatty presentation is accumulated significant detail that culminates in a surprising, serious message. Graham also discusses the following qualities: highly discursive, or “hyperjunctive”; garrulous; self-reflexive, associative, humorous; concerned with pop culture; accessible; workaday; expository; having an “anti-leap aesthetic.”

Perhaps the best way to grasp the style is to look at one of Duhamel’s poems. Here are the opening lines from “Sex with a Famous Poet” (you can read the whole poem here):

I had sex with a famous poet last night

and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

because I was married to someone else,

because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,

because I was in fancy hotel room

I didn't recognize. I would have told you

right off this was a dream, but recently

a friend told me, write about a dream,

lose a reader and I didn't want to lose you

You can see how she appears to be just chatting, just thinking of these lines as they come to her, almost like she’s writing about writing instead of writing, a kind of meta-poetry. She addresses you, the reader, directly, telling you of her desire to keep you. The lines are ragged, with no meter or rhyme, and this and many of her poems have no stanza breaks. The poem continues meditating on the guilt over the dream given the fact that she is happily married, and given also that she did not particularly approve of this famous poet the one time they met:

 . . . He disgusted me

with his disparaging remarks about women.

He even used the word "Jap"

which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

After a series of seemingly rambling memories concerning her husband’s dreams and her suspicion that we are trying to guess the identity of the famous poet, she culminates in the following:

but how much fame can an American poet

really have, let's say, compared to a rock star

or film director of equal talent? Not that much,

and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not

truly given his due. Knows that many

of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

are only pretending to have read all his books.

But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

Unexpectedly, the poem has taken a serious turn, even within the humorous content of dream interpretation in which she places it—this seemingly quirky “chat” is really a meditation on the state of American poetry, on her unrealistic desire to be famous despite her own disdain for the wish.

It’s a particularly satisfying kind of poetry, especially for the reader who prefers poems and poets who do not take themselves too seriously or pretend to deliver The Great Truths in their poems. Duhamel’s poetry has somewhat of the same appeal as Billy Collins’s, in that respect, minus the osso bucco and French wine trappings that can be a turnoff to the pop culture crowd. In the everyday moments, in Barbie, Snow White, and Sean Penn, Duhamel finds revealing and often poignant messages that spring from the self but speak to all of us.

It’s no wonder she’s a cult favorite. You can read more about her at poets.org, and join her fan club on Facebook, Fans of Denise Duhamel OR A Group of Duhamalites. Meantime, I have an exercise for you. Read Duhamel’s poem, “On Being Born The Same Exact Day Of The Same Exact Year As Boy George,” which you can find here.

Then, write a poem called "I Google My Birthday and Find Out _____" (you fill in the blank with whatever it is you have found out; it could be a fact about something or about yourself). Actually do this. Carefully, meticulously record your thoughts and feelings and any actions that you take (including clicking, reading, or answering the phone) while you are doing this. Focus on detail. In your poem, narrate these details as if they were happening as the poem unfolds. Use natural line breaks that emphasize where you would pause while reading. End your poem by arriving at an oblique revelation or epiphany. Take care not to abandon the "ultra-talk" mode by becoming too abstract or philosophical. Use an action, like Duhamel does by writing to Boy George at the end of her poem, to reveal this final thought.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and one of the best ways to expand your poetry repertoire. One of the great things about sampling a wide variety of styles in your reading is that it helps you grow, to try new things. As you continue your poetry quest this month, try to read as many different styles of poetry as you can. They will stay with you, and eventually help you shape your own. And don’t forget to sign up for the Big Poetry Giveaway—there’s still plenty of time to enter to win, and, who knows, maybe meet a new muse.

The 2011 Big Poetry Giveaway

Thanks to Kelli Russell Agodon at The Book of Kells, poets everywhere are giving poetry books away for free!

Yep: FREE!

In this exciting campaign, meant to promote the poetry we love during National Poetry Month, participating poets are giving away a book of their own and one of a poet they admire. All you have to do is leave a comment below by midnight, April 30, with your name and contact information (at least an email address), and I will choose two winners at the end of the month to receive the free books via random number generator. That's it! I will send the book to you absolutely free, including shipping, anywhere in the world you may be.

Here are the books I'm giving away:

Shapeshifting (Spire Press, 2006)

This is my debut collection of poetry. It won the Spire Press award in 2005, and contains poems, as the title implies, that address the shifting aspects of my identity. Poems from this collection have appeared in the Iodine Poetry Journal, Tar Wolf Review, and The Powhatan Review.

The Capable Heart by Ann E. Michael (Foothills, 2011)

I pretty much owe my poetry career to Ann E. Michael, who chose Shapeshifting as the winner of the Spire contest. Imagine my delight when I discovered her to be a hauntingly beautiful poet. Since that fateful event, I have become a Michael groupie. This latest collection is a tight exploration of female identity centered on the symbolism of horses, on their--and our--"capable hearts."

Good luck, people! I will announce the winners of the giveaway on May 1. If you would like to see other poets who are participating in this event and learn more about it, please visit Agodon's blog, The Book of Kells.