• The secret origin of the Grind
• Why We Grind, Part One

We Grind to push ourselves past what we knew we could do. Most people enter a month of the Grind ready and willing to do the work, and they generally have some ideas or notes that they think will carry them through the month. And occasionally, they do just that. Several chapbook-length products have come from a month of the Grind, and a few folks have finished large swaths of their novels during a month. But for most of us, those ideas and notes carry us through about five days, after which time we’re on our own, producing without an agenda. And I won’t lie: that aimlessness leads to a lot of bad drafts. A whole lot. But it also leads to restlessness followed by bouts of intense experimentation. It leads to self-imposed formal challenges. It leads to topics we wouldn’t have dared tackle if we’d had more time to think things over. It leads the eye to light on the unexpected. It leads to work so raw that it cuts, but sometimes that cutting is what survives into the second or eighth or final draft.

We Grind to be part of a community. The original Grind was just four of us, and I knew all the participants, so it didn’t occur to me that what was gestating in that first month was a community that would evolve into something unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The Grind requires a writer to be willing to be vulnerable for a group of folks, perhaps some friends but, more than likely, mostly strangers. The rules of the Grind ask a writer to finish something every day, but everyone involved knows that the products created in the Grind are seldom finished. They’re usually sloppy, unwieldy, awkward and ugly drafts. The kind of thing that you wouldn’t ever want to see the light of day. And then, because the Grind recognizes that every aspect of the creative process is a risk, you send it to that group that includes a bunch of people you’ve never met. And they don’t speak about that work. They don’t make comments, they don’t share it. It wouldn’t seem to be a great community-builder, but what happens over the course of the month is that the pieces themselves begin to speak to each other over the month. Writers borrow from each other. Writers study each others’ habits, structures, images, and obsessions. Writers’ come to know each others’ minds. When you put it that way, how could you not develop some community?

We Grind for inspiration. Watching another writer reach deep, watching another writer push through the dry spell or conjure the draft that has perhaps been waiting for them for some time… these moments are magnificent. The Grind gives us the opportunity not only to see the work but to see how it is created, to see it in its nascent stages.  I can’t tell you the number of times that I have seen writers circle an idea without knowing it, only to have the thought crystallize after a few days or even a few months, and a terrific draft is born.  I think anyone privy to that process feels privileged.  Watching your Grind-group succeed is confirmation that writing– however difficult, however tortured– is a process we cannot give up on.

We Grind to be held accountable.  I will be the first to admit: I am lazy. My friend Jessica gave voice to a philosophy I never truly knew I had today on Twitter.  She said, “I believe whole-heartedly in procrastination when it doesn’t fuck anyone over.” And let’s face it– in a writer’s mind, there is no more victimless a crime than the crime of not writing.  But by its construction, the Grind removes that excuse, and all excuses for procrastinating.  When a group of writers is out there in cyberspace, toiling through difficult and sometimes hopeless drafts, and they’re faithfully sending them your way by midnight, how can you not reciprocate?  When they rely on your commitment to the process, is there any more of a dick move than not sending something, sending anything?

We Grind to fool our own minds. So maybe you already felt accountable to yourself, and you find yourself writing every day.  But you’re still not getting anything done.  Our minds are fickle things, but they are so easily swayed by new incentives. Entering the Grind, making the commitment to finish something every day and send it to a small group (which sometimes includes– gasp!– strangers) would scare the dickens out of most mortals, but for a few of us, it provides us with something we desperately needed: permission to fail.  Plenty of writers are writing every day but find themselves in ruts because they are unwilling to move on before the sentence is perfect, the stanza is polished, the dialog sparkles, and the image is immaculate.  But writing doesn’t work that way, people.  It’s an ugly process and it’s filled with missteps and mistakes that you have to be willing to make.  If your brain is telling you you’re no longer allowed to make mistakes, the Grind can be a godsend, because it not only gives you permission, the “finish something every day” dictum practically demands it.

We Grind to puncture the subconscious.  When you’re desperate to write something, anything, before midnight, you’ll unlock pieces of yourself you didn’t know were there.

Inspired by our sublime dinner at an Atlanta-area Steak & Ale, poet Emma Bolden and I undertook our first NaPoWriMo in 2007 using the aliases Steak and Ale.  We used aliases so we could deny to anyone that the poems being thrown up on the blog were ours.  We took the poems down after a day or two, leaving just the titles and a couple of lines, because we didn’t want them to be considered previously published and figured that if Google’s bots didn’t have a chance to pick them up, we’d be in pretty good shape.

It was an exhilarating month.  Emma and I routinely wrote poems which answered a thought that had shown up in the other’s poem that day, or the day before, and we had one of the most productive creative exchanges I’d ever been part of.  We veered in surprising directions.  We had days where the poems flowed freely, and days where we each professed that the exercise had been akin to prying meat from the jaws of a wolverine.  We went multimedia, posting photos and silly links along with the day’s poem, and created in Steak and Ale a set of characters that were sloppily hedonistic famous poets.  Steak would write about visiting her chalet or being featured in the National Enquirer, Ale would write about writing poems in the sauna or receiving a $10,000 haircut.  The personae became as much fun as the poems themselves some days.

But the poems… wow. My initial recollection was that I didn’t get many decent poems out of the month.  But that was entirely wrong; when I reviewed the blog this week, I counted three that have been published and another three that I saw through to completion and began sending out eventually.

I tried the exercise again in June 2007 with Ruba Ahmed, only instead of posting the poems in a blog, we simply traded by e-mail.  And we didn’t do lavish explanations, we simply sent a poem a day, every day, for a month.  The idea was that we each wanted to feel accountable to the other to produce new work.  We didn’t make comments on the work, though at our July residency at Warren Wilson, we each picked a handful of poems and sat down and discussed them with each other.  But the point was to be relentless about producing something every day, and we did, and it felt good.

So in October 2007, I was ready to try it again, and this time, Ruba, Matthew Olzmann, Zena Cardman and I made a small group out of it.  Knowing from our previous experiences with the exercise how brutal it could feel at times, Ruba and I described it to Matthew and Zena as “a grind.”

On October 1, 2007, I sent an e-mail to that group, with short bios that I had written by Googling my friends, and here were the “rules” that I outlined then:

• Write one poem every day. No skipping a day and making it up later. Zena has called the one exemption — for her birthday on the 26th.
• Poems must be sent to all participants by midnight.
• No restrictions on form and no minimum line length. A one-line poem will suffice just as nicely as a 28-page masterpiece.
• Some days will be rotten, and so will some poems; no excuses. Write something– anything– every day or suffer the mockery, derision, and eternal scorn of the other three poets.
• Feedback isn’t part of the equation– if we get all self-congratulatory for good first drafts, the silence surrounding the bad stuff will start to sting. So, if you really love a poem, feel free to say something, but don’t feel like you need to (or should) comment on poems daily. We’re not sending to each other to congratulate, but to feel (and be) accountable to the process and try something we might not have otherwise tried.
• Poems about Desperate Housewives are strictly forbidden, unless written by Matthew. Otherwise, no content restrictions apply.

And we were off.  If writing with one other person was exhilarating, writing with three was an incredible shock to the system.  I’ve read about the Polar Bear Club, where people race into the frigid Atlantic waters at Coney Island on New Year’s Day, and how participants say that getting into ice-cold water makes you feel more alive than you have ever felt.  I suppose October 2007 was like my poetic Polar Bear Club.  I loved it. Imagine how delighted I was when Matthew announced he’d be doing it again in November with his wife, Vievee Francis, and we recruited Megan Levad, Carly Harschlip, and Rosalynde Vas Dias along for the ride.

The Grind Daily Writing Series has been running without interruption for four and a half years.  The “rules” have evolved a little bit, but they’re still basically the same: write a poem a day.   It’s expanded to include fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and even notes on craft and structure. The Grind has had over 200 participants (sometimes more than 40 at a time), has gone international, and poems drafted in the Grind have showed up in the best journals in the country, in books from amazing publishers, and in anthologies recognizing some of the best poetry in the country.  In June, we’ll publish Another and Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series, an anthology that captures the first two years of the Grind and showcases some of the best poems drafted using this process.

In the next few weeks– hopefully before NaPoWriMo is over– I’ll add a few more thoughts on the genesis of the Grind and where it’s taken us.

Comments welcome, especially from you Grinders.

What follows is my thoughts on cover letters.  Keep in mind that I’m just one editor, and everyone is going to have different views on the subject. But I’ve heard this conversation quite a bit over the years, and I don’t think you’ll find my views are too far from the mainstream.

The first thing you should know is that cover letters don’t mean much.  They were something of a necessity in the days of submissions by mail, but electronic submissions capture the needed information in other ways.  Nonetheless, I still find myself

A lot of editors don’t even read cover letters unless something in the submission really grabs their fancy.  I generally do read the cover letters, because I’m intrigued about who’s sending to my magazine– I learn a lot about our readers and our marketing strategy by reading them.  But I don’t read the cover letter until I’ve read the submission and am ready to act on it.

So sending something other than the cover letter is unnecessary.  I’ve had one writer send watercolors, another has sent collages.  Several writers have sent glitter or those little shiny stars in the envelope, which, while it was certainly well-intentioned, made a mess and was kind of annoying.

Be professional.  Or, don’t be crazy.  I doubt seriously if a good cover letter ever convinced an editor to publish a poem or story, but I can tell you with some conviction that a horrible, crazy-sounding cover letter can convince someone that you’re more trouble than you’re worth.

Cover letters don’t need to include a whole lot of information; you’re really just trying to give the editor some basic stuff they will need to respond to you.

I find it useful to include the following:

Contact information.  I include my snail mail address, e-mail address, and cell phone number.  Only a few editors will call with acceptances, but if you’ve ever gotten one of those calls, it’s a thrilling moment and classy touch.  Give the editor the tools to contact you using the method that’s most comfortable for them.  Make sure it’s an e-mail address you check regularly!

Simultaneous submission notification.  If the journal you’re sending to allows sim-subs, let them know that you’re submitting your work elsewhere if that’s the case.  Don’t bully or threaten; a statement like “These poems have been simultaneously submitted to other journals” will suffice.  I don’t do sim-subs, personally, because I’ve had writers withdraw poems just as I was about to accept them, and it broke my heart.  (It was worse when they said the poems had been accepted elsewhere, since my magazine has a “no simultaneous submissions” policy for poems.)  So I tell editors, “These poems are unpublished and will not be submitted elsewhere.”

List of the titles of the work being submitted.  This is especially true if the journal asks that you not include your contact information on the work itself.  It’s less important on electronic submissions, which don’t usually become decoupled from your contact information at any point in the process.

Short bio.  Not all editors care about this at all, but if your submission is accepted, it’s nice when they have your bio to include in the magazine and don’t need to come back and ask for additional information.  Most will still ask for a bio upon acceptance, since you’ve probably won awards and published books since you sent your submission in.  Right?

One note on bios: It’s OK if you haven’t published work before. You don’t need to make it sound like you’re a well-published author if you’re not.  A lot of magazines are thrilled to be the one to discover a new voice.  If your poems or stories are incredible and fit the journal’s aesthetic, the editor will want them regardless of who you are or where you came from.

A word of thanks.  Thanking people for their time or consideration is cool.  Editors work hard, and they really do want you to be successful!

–

Now, it’s worth noting that any of the above may be wrong for a particular editor.  The best thing you can do when submitting is read the submissions guidelines.  If an editor doesn’t want a cover letter, please don’t send one!

I hope this information is useful, and happy submitting!  Please feel free to leave comments with your thoughts on cover letters.

“Hope you don’t mind a submitter-type question. There are a couple of journals that I’ve been rejected by more than once. I’d like to keep submitting there because these are journals I admire and where I think my work (in general) kind of fits, but I wonder if journals have an “oh no not her again pile” for folks who submit more than once with no success. I mean my submissions are normal — I don’t put anything about the story in the cover letter and I don’t send peanut butter sandwiches — but I still wonder if there is an “auto reject” pile that someone might go in, at say, The ____ Review, after a couple of rejections. What are your thoughts? Thanks for your perspective on this….”

I asked her if I could post her question, since I hear variations on this a lot.  Here’s my response:

“In short: I wouldn’t worry too hard. We get so many submissions that we mostly only remember the crazies. I do know a couple of names of frequent submitters who aren’t crazy; those are people who have new stories or poems in within 48 hours of their most recent rejection. I think that constitutes “a bit much” (though, being the softie I am, I’m still rooting for them to land one).

Journals that use electronic submissions can track all your old submissions when you send them stuff, and can even go back and read comments on your previous stories to see if you’re coming along or if your stories are getting worse.

I’d say a good rule of thumb is that unless the magazine has a policy to the contrary, waiting 3-4 months after your most recent rejection to send again is the most appropriate course of action. (Unless they’re sending personal rejections encouraging another submission.)”

–

So, what do you think?  Comments welcome.

We’ve just finished A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, though we’ll come back to it toward the end of class, when students begin thinking about how collections of poems work.  Response to the book was terrific… though a couple students were skeptical when they first finished it, I think most had come around by the time they’d written papers on it.  A couple listed it as the best thing they’ve read in class on their midterm evaluations.  (Brigit Pegeen Kelly showed up on that list a lot, as did Zbigniew Herbert and Mark Jarman.)

Reading list #4 came out today; here’s what’s on it.

Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place
Charles Simic, Charon’s Cosmology
Kara Candito, Taste of Cherry
Dan Albergotti, The Boatloads
Donald Hall, Without
Mary Oliver, American Primitive
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden
William Matthews, Time & Money
Nickole Brown, Sister
Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Donald Justice, The Sunset Maker
Ross Gay, Against Which
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Geri Doran, Resin
Thomas Lux, God Particles
William Matthews, Flood

My students continue to make really interesting and bold choices.  (They request five books they’re interested in; I assign one.) A couple of these books didn’t appear on request lists but will be really helpful to the students who got them, but most were directly requested by students.  I was really pleased to see Ross Gay’s name pop back up.  After reading one of his essays and his poem “Jet” in class, Tony Hoagland’s name was on many of the lists this time around.  Hey, UNC faculty member who has had all of Tony’s work checked out since the beginning of the semester and doesn’t have to return them until 2-23-10, get over yourself and return these books to the library so I can assign them! One student had to resort to saying, “I’ll buy the book if you’ll just assign it to me.”

Some of the old favorites have made it to the list this time.  It always seems to work out that I’m able to include one book that I have not yet read; this time, it was one by an author with whom I was pretty familiar.

Here’s the list:

Linda Pastan, The Last Uncle
Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son & Other Poems
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Song
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
Jennifer Grotz, Cusp
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River
Thomas Lux, God Particles
Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Vievee Francis, Blue-Tail Fly
Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived
Billy Collins, Questions About Angels
Donald Justice, Departures
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Update: I left one out!  Paul Otremba, The Currency

Obviously, I have more work to do, much more work to do.  I’ve got to finish the book, and I’ve got a lot more listening to do– both to the music collection with which I have a new tool to work, and to a million and a half poems.  But it was an exciting morning, because I was hearing new things in familiar songs, or rather, recontextualizing things I’ve already heard many times before.

Next up today: Beatles Rock Band (and how participation also changes the way one hears the familiar) and my first read of student poems.

Keeping true to my general rule, I assigned one book that I had not yet read, though I have finished reading it since the assignments went out and I think it will be very helpful to the student who requested it.

William Matthews, After All
Weldon Kees, The Fall of the Magicians
Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived
Robert Hass, Time and Materials
2 x Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard
Kay Ryan, Say Uncle
Ellen Bryant Voigt, The Lotus Flowers
2 x Carl Dennis, Practical Gods
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles
Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence
Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
Richard Wilbur, Things of This World
Ross Gay, Against Which

So, if one looks at the list above, is it painfully obvious which books were directly requested and which I suggested to students who chose largely traditional books?  The first round is the hardest– I have not yet seen student work to inform the decision, so I was forced to go by their early comments in class (if they have made any) and the poem that they brought in as exemplary.  Really, the biggest determinant was the five books they requested.  Only three students did not get an author they requested; two students ended up with an author they requested but not one of the specific books on their list. The big surprise from the students: no one requested any beat poets.  I think that’s the first time that’s happened in the first round.

How many of my old favorites for this assignment didn’t make the cut this time?  (For example, when was the last time I did an independent reading assignment without Donald Justice?)  Some of them were requested but not available in the library, some weren’t sniffed at.  This will change.  By the time the second assignment rolls around, they’ll be making spectacular requests.  We just need more time together.

In my Intro to Poetry class, we spent some time last week on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” giving it a close reading and looking for ways that the sonnet form provides some tension with the content of the poem.  I tend to be somewhat conservative when teaching my poetry classes, in that I tend to do close readings only of poems that I’m really, really comfortable with: poems that I’ve written about critically and therefore spent hours or days dissecting, or poems that I have read closely in other classes (sometimes classes taught by someone else) or long discussions.

“Ozymandias” was a last-minute choice.  I first encountered the poem in high school but never gave it a great deal of thought, and it’s been circling around the work I’ve done for a couple years now.  It’s made an appearance in the assigned reading in my other classes but I never looked at it with students during our class period together.  The context provided by our textbook always seemed sufficient for what I hoped students would gain from the poem.

But as I reviewed the assigned reading this time, I ditched my initial choice of a William Matthews poem for Shelley.  I spent a little time with it the night before class and then another chunk of time with it the day of.  But, of course, it wasn’t until I was in the classroom, in the middle of the conversation, that I was able to articulate the strategy that must have drawn me to the poem so keenly in the eleventh hour: the layering of voice.  Take a look:

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Look at the distance between the speaker and the spoken.  The speaker (1) meets a traveler (2), who says that an artist (3) built a statue that quotes Ozymandias (4 – it’s the only direct quote of the poem, but is attributable to both the artist and Ozymandias, which is another nice complexity).  Of note: the speaker does not put the traveler’s words in quotes, suggesting that the made-ness of the iambic pentameter belongs to the speaker (and, for two lines, the artist/Ozymandias tag-team).  It’s in this distance that the tension between form and content– the intense made-ness of the poem contrasted with the futility of making– is fully realized.

Sadly, I’ve since gone looking for this poem in places other than the textbook, and sometimes the traveler’s speech is put in quotes!  Well, that sure changes my infatuation with this poem.  Not much, but some.

I always feel a little silly writing discoveries like this in my blog.  Someone else has had them before and articulated them more eloquently.

My favorite thing about teaching it is the inevitable flurry of “This is Just to Say”-related humor that follows.  Perhaps you remember this post.  This time around, I tweeted that I had taught the poem, and got this message on Facebook a couple days later from a friend:

This is Just to Say

I have stolen
the Manguso
that you
leant me

and which
I meant to return
on the drive
home

Forgive me
it’s wonderful
so smart
and so funny

In Dispraise Of Poetry

When the King of Siam disliked a courtier,
he gave him a beautiful white elephant.
The miracle beast deserved such ritual
that to care for him properly meant ruin.
Yet to care for him improperly was worse.
It appears the gift could not be refused.

–Jack Gilbert

An unsuccessful short poem, however, can do all of those things and still fail. Where I see many short poems go awry is that they describe but never illuminate; they represent a thing but do it no service; they present truth in entirely truthful terms. Where’s the fun in that? Why represent a thing exactly as we know it all to be? These short poems fail to take advantage of trope or figure, fail to imagine their subject in a subjective light, fail to make the objective truth more accessible through the tenacity and frailty of words, or fail to recognize their own flaws as representative descriptions. At their best, the Objectivists understood at least the difficulty of getting it right in a way that was doomed to be wrong: not the thing itself, but the thing captured for a moment on the page; not the thing itself but the essence of the thing communicated in words. Such poems, even when willfully obscuring the speaker, must reveal the speaker in the details chosen to describe the thing…

The idea of intentional fallacy seems to me inescapable in some ways, though the essay gives me some more context for how it might be better avoided in many of the annotations (and, moving forward, in the class). I think my problem stems from the constant talk about tone in any critical setting. We talk a lot about tone at WWC. I cannot see how any discussion of a speaker’s emotional state can be anything but subjective on the part of the critic and therefore subject to some of the same flaws as the intentional fallacy.

I recognize the difference to a limited degree. The intentional fallacy occurs when the reader supposes that the work’s merit is in some way tied to what the author hoped to accomplish. Tone is focused on the text and not on the author.

But it seems to me that judgment of tone is still wholly subjective. A poem which says “I hate cereal” could be judged by different readers to have wholly different tones. One might think that the speaker is dead serious, that his hatred of cereal is withering and consuming; another might think the speaker prone to hyperbole; another might think the speaker sarcastic. Of course, these interpretations are subject to context, but isn’t any interpretation drawn from the critic’s own experience, as applied to the body of the poem, and therefore suspect? Can’t we then throw out tone entirely as a measurable or observable element of a poem due to that suspicion?

I tend to feel the same way when hearing people talk about the effects of syllabics. It’s wholly subjective; iambs feel no more aggressive to me, by design, than trochees or dactyls. But I feel like I hear statements like that all the time, and if the critic is careful to attribute those emotions to the poem and not to the poet, it passes as valid observation.

How are we to consider, to evaluate a poem without constant self-reference? And how are we to observe when we have first read the poem as a reader, a voracious entity with both an intellectual and emotional appetite, then later attempt to “observe and describe” as though we hadn’t already interacted with, loved or hated or been stymied by or fought with before acquiescing to, a poem? A critic attempts to be a scientist only after he’s had an affair with the subject. We do not, we cannot, read poems as objective scientists, not ever. And once committed to the work as a biased, human, and very fallible reader, it almost seems foolish to bother with a hierarchy of fallibility, where intentional fallacy is bad but emotional or presumptive fallacies are fine.

So that’s where I’m struggling; I feel like the annotation process asks me to be that scientist and I’m never going to be able; I cannot measure the effect of the work without some flavor of informal fallacy. (Obviously, my early annotations, which say “the poem does x to the reader” were poorly veiled references to what the poem did to me; I am the only reader who will ever be relevant to the annotations so it didn’t seem such a rotten linguistic substitution. But I see the necessity for the purposes of awarding credit to the exercise of removing those kinds of statements, and don’t have a problem doing so. It seems a bit askew to ask students to focus on an aspect of the work that they feel they need—and are therefore emotionally committed to—and then ask them not to engage with the work at that level. Beyond concatenating the words, counting the syllables, and observing pattern and deviation, there’s not much one might say without committing some level of autobiography to the page. And simple counting and observing doesn’t seem sufficient to address issues in the writer’s own work; word and syllable counts are hardly teaching tools. So some interpretive fallacy will be necessary to draw any creative fuel from the process, whether it be converse fallacy of accident, non sequitur, or consequent fallacy.)

The Distance

Two women are hugging each other goodbye
On the sidewalk in the tree-shadow
Of a late spring afternoon. It is not
Sexual, though both are beautiful.
And thought both are tall and lithe
Under their dark hair, the differences
Between them are infinite
And support one another. Behind them,
In the distance, buildings
Tangential to the sun catch fire a moment,
Then darken. A young man, hands
In his pockets, is coming toward them.
The women are crying.
They are not yet ready to part.
And it is not sexual.
Even the young man, who is surely lonely,
Slows as he approaches them,
Feeling a sudden reverence
He wouldn’t have thought himself capable of.
He stops half a block away.
The women part. They part
Like drapes drawn open
To catch the last light.
One of the women gets into a car
And drives away; the other
Waves, then turns back across the grass,
Perhaps to her apartment. And the young man
Walks on into the gathering
City twilight, which will be
More beautiful and lonely for him
When he looks up. His whole self is focused
On the precise spot of the women’s
Parting. When he reaches the spot,
He stands there. Just stands there
Transformed in the vivid air of their absence.

–Joe Bolton

The intention of the petition is to demonstrate that you have 12-15 pages of completed material, which is difficult for me because I have discovered in the past few years that I never stop revising poems. I really don’t. At any moment, a poem that seemed finished for some length of time is subject to go back on the chopping block. It’s kind of frustrating, actually; when I was younger, I would revise a poem two or three times and then stop, but as I get older, everything’s open for discussion. Even if the poem’s been published, that doesn’t seem to curb the urge.

But tonight’s version of the petition is satisfying– at least for the moment– because I think it shows off some of my good habits and declines to reveal some of my bad ones. Some statistics:

• total poems: 12
• poems in which humans turn into animals: 0
• poems in which animals turn into other animals: 1
• poems in which no metamorphosis occurs but two or more animals are combined: 0
• poems in which people see animals in the sky: 2
• poems about robots: 0
• poems about comic books: 1
• poems about video games: 1
• received forms: 1 (ghazal)
• deeply religious poems: 3
• percentage of all my deeply religious poems represented in this petition: 100
• poems in tercets: 3 (naturally)
• poems in couplets: 2 (naturally)
• prose poems: 2
• poems in the first person singular: 6
• poems I would admit to writing if I were in a crowded bar and someone spontaneously read them aloud: 12

Yeah.

RELICS WITH OLD BLUE MEDICINE-TYPE BOTTLE: TO X

This old blue medicine-type bottle, unburied
From your garden last year’s the perfect centerpiece
To suit our supper—the totem-trope we need
Across this kitchen table, to show how dangerous

It is where we sit (knees near touching at times)
Dawdling and playing with our silverware,
Tapping teacups, tired and satisfied and prime
From a stint in that garden: in a few hours

We’ll find ourselves in bed, but we don’t know that now,
Do we—we’re still exchanging histories,
(It’s only my something visit to your house)
Just sorting out the portions of who, when, how—

Numbering the decades and the romances
That went bad, the faces that faded on us,
Though nothing too personal at first, just pain;
Divorces, liaisons, estrangements, fixations—

Of course our brows hurry away from hurt:
Anecdotes begun in wince end in wrinkly;
Our woeful tales go told through a mode that’s mostly
A kind of moue, comic attitude, which flirts

With grimace-smiles, jokes, the mocking of those choices,
Those great mismatings: funny how it seems of late
Both of us have been alone, celibate . . .
Collating, getting our dates right, our voices

Shed their list of affairs, entanglements, crises:
So we accord the past its poisons, and theorize
That even this old blue bottle here, stored poisons
Before we were born:—followed by suggestions

That the toxin of those heartbreaks is gone
After this long, their vitriol has fizzed out,
And we could, given an occasion, again
Consume the spirit that killed us once, if not

The letter: confessions used as cue-cards to prompt
Mutual responses of empathy or hope:
No former hemlock can harm us now—we’re immune
By now—don’t you agree—because what happens

Ripens in retrospect; each sour memory
Blossoming like the flowers you sometimes spruce
This bottle’s corroded throat with. We certainly
Are not eating much, are we, but we don’t notice—

Can’t we see how our fingers will likewise bloom
From off these knives and forks and force their field,
Interlocking like tugged-at roots . . . Untombed
Of its venom, this blue vial vigils our held

Glances. Sieved in its acid, its distilled mirror,
Would we (almost as soiled as it by time) appear
A beauty, a scarred heirloom any collector
Might stuff high on a shelf amid simulacra—

Somber still, it approbates that emptiness
We must be preparing to fill with each other—
It foretells the coiled taste, the bite unearthed
In the antiquity of a sudden, wild kiss

Whose disclosure will surprise us, as if
We have not been wholly inured by the years,
The stories we bare here across the rice, the life
Stories bittersweet, neutered, too well-rehearsed.

Will deadlier words then surface—their potency
Dis-elixired, drawn; decanted so often
That by our courteous age they’ve turned as grimy
And bunged with dust as this blue glass was when

Your shovel showed it that summer morning, and
My phrases here are (surely) just as corrupt—
What matter its sharpness, no metaphor can
Pare the ground from us as hard as we try to dig up,

To excavate feelings a bottomless need for
Soars as we toss the salad greens and pour
Dressing dripping down their fineleaved freshness
Starting to wilt already around the edges,

To rot back to that mulch they burst from. Such decay
Preserves some artifacts, if not us: they lie in
Graves contrived to obviate the skeleton
They survive beside, they strive to deny

The obvious, the crepitude fate-of-flesh bleak
Facts of our demise, obdurate bricabrac knickknacks
Laid by ancients in the coffin to propitiate
Ancestors, to aid, via these vain trinkets,

(Are we the ‘subjective correlatives’ of these
Objects, this chthonic junk the tomb-robbers missed,
Tools and talismans, amulets, a corpse-cache
Gear for ghosts, props to assist the posthumous)

Some afterworld sojourn of the soul entering
Itself, self dying to carpe diem one more day.
Refocus us on this figure, this table-centering
Blue bottle. Whose future dye indigos our day.

Dulled, we ignore these darker, gnawing warnings—
Our own skull-and-crossbone labels long since skinned—
We poke at our plates, we pat our napkins.
What antidote waits, withering, within

Against that great granulate upheaval of
Fields whose depths have grown archeological—
Filled by fucked relics and by that above-all
Most subterranean of discoveries, love?

–Bill Knott

Knott has posted every poem he’s written to his web site.  We are insanely lucky to have him, griping and all.

Logical Games for the Unbeliever

All night I kept solving for G.
Now, through this dark morning,
the equation escapes
at the set speed of light.

There are so many things I don’t understand. The future
comes and it’s no longer excited
to be here.

There are so many things I can’t know. My old friends,
are they happy?

That small square of light

I went and sat inside it
and my heart lifted,
I swear it.

–Olena Kalytiak Davis

Your poem’s title is like the first jab in a boxing match– you don’t have to knock the reader out, but you had better establish yourself as a formidable presence in the ring. A poem which is sharp, precise, and economical deserves a title to match. Sloppy, awkward, and abstract titles always raise the hairs on the back of my neck. Tight, concrete titles that locate me immediately in what is happening in the poem make me happy.

If there’s a clunky detail in your first stanza, it might be information that could be better conveyed to the reader in the title. Excess narrative information in the body of a poem, particularly early, irritates me– because they suck the poetry out of the poem. Titles that convey that information in a plain style remove the burden of exposition. Specific dates, locations, or people show up in titles for this reason.

Nobody wants to be told what to feel. People want the emotional stakes of the poem to be earned. So, if the poem is titled “Happiness” and goes on to describe happiness, that’s pretty lame. If the poem is titled “Happiness” and goes on to challenge the reader’s perception of happiness, carry on.

Don’t make every title the same. Pearl Jam’s first album has eleven songs, right? But take a look at the track list, and it’s mind-numbingly similar. When titling a poem, look at your related work, and see if you have any nasty habits when titling. If you find that every title is one word, or includes the setting of the poem, or is a borrowed line from Plath, vary it up. (It’s worth noting that, if you are looking at manuscript shapes, and you find a conscious and strongly patterned repetitive urge, that’s worth exploring. You may not want to ditch it too soon.)

A simple title can plug your poem into a much larger tradition very quickly. “Aubade” or “Alba” says a lot. (A funny aside– Wikipedia lists Eagle Eye Cherry’s crappy song “Save Tonight” as a modern example of aubade. Apparently, aside from one Philip Larkin poem, there are no other possible examples. This is what I get for being so fascinated with Wikipedia.)

Don’t telegraph the end of the poem in the title. I hate to be the guy who gives examples from his own work, but here’s one: if you’re going to have the speaker disappear at the end of the poem, a title like “Disappearing Act” or “The Vanishing” might announce your intention a little too much.

Great! Now that we’ve had this discussion, I hope never to see poems with titles like “My Mother Washes the Dishes, Folds the Laundry, and Loves Us Unconditionally” or “Childhood” ever again. At least not from the likes of you.

So what’s wrong with this entry? Check out that title! All the information within is repeated in the first couple lines of the blog post! It’s clunky and tiresome. It personalizes the entry, which isn’t mean to be entirely personalized.

What would a better title be? Comments are open!