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Food • Writing • Poetry

Double-barrelled week for me, this. I missed last week’s class on sonnets and am plunging in to the one on oulipo. Thought I’d catch up on last week by reading the always readable Don Paterson‘s introduction to his anthology, 101 Sonnets. He did not disappoint:

“Academics, in particular, have talked an awful lot of rubbish on the subject of rhyme; they often make the crucial error of failing to understand that the poem ends up on the page as a result of a messy and unique process, not a single operation.”

“Rhyme always unifies sense, and can make sense out of nonsense; it can trick a logic from the shadows where one would not have otherwise existed.”

“…[the sonnet is] a box for [poets’] dreams, and represents one of the most characteristic shapes human thought can take. Poets write sonnets because it makes poems easier to write. Readers read them because it makes their lives easier to bear.”

And the anthology is a little treasure, not least because of Paterson’s brief notes on each piece tucked away at the back of the book. So helpful to have had someone else do the brow-clutching and rhyme analysis for us.

I also enjoyed reading the American queen of formalism, Marilyn Hacker, who wrote the chapter on sonnets in An Exaltation of Forms. She notes that the North American rant against form often uses the sonnet as its kicking post, and that this scale of objection is absent from British and Irish debate “perhaps because the sonnet, if an ‘interloper’ from the Romance languages, nonetheless has five hundred years of history in their literature…” And nonetheless herself finds early and perhaps unexpected examples in American literature: Ezra Pound, H.D. and Gwendolyn Brooks.

What both poets say is that sonnets have had a bad rap, to be tagged as difficult and constricting. But poets, it seems – if the Oulipians are anything to go by – not only thrive on difficulty but invent it if it appears to be lacking in their lives:

Raymond Queneau, Oulipo’s co-founder: Oulipians are “Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.”

As for eats, this week has been a wash since return from foodsville, TX. Not least because there’s been no time to get to the grocery store and I’ve been surviving on things I stashed in the freezer before I left, and a few limp vegetables that survived my absence. I did attempt cajun blackened ribs last night, but although they were acceptably spicy, I’d call them undistinguished. I think I prefer tomato-based rib recipes. The spice mix will be employed in further experimentation once the weather warms enough to bring out the barbecue.

Anyway, Anton the awesome is returning for indefinite stay tomorrow. Maybe I’ll make him some Flea Fighting Biscuits to welcome him home? These rely heavily on garlic and brewer’s yeast to work their magic. Gives dog breath a whole new dimension…

Here’s another quote from the Don’t Ask Me What I Mean anthology:

“The poet only speaks one way. He hears nothing back. His words as he utters them are not conditioned by a real ear replying from the other side… He never knows who will collide with [the poem] and maybe even use it as a different utensil from what he intended.” —W.S. Graham

A good ‘un for anyone who’s had their poems workshopped or reviewed… or indeed even had their poem used in a sermon. Which was my experience: a friend googled me a few years ago and discovered the text of a Mother’s Day sermon based upon my poem The Boston School of Cooking Cookbook. I wondered how the sermonizer had found it (he was from the Unitarian Universalist Church, in Chandler, Arizona) until another friend mentioned she’d seen my name in a women’s poetry anthology, Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry, which I discovered came out in 1996. I bought my contributor’s copy from Abe last year. According to the permissions listed in the book, the poem appears courtesy of Iris, where it first appeared, and from whom I never received a contributor’s copy either. Who knows why. I’d probably moved by the time the poem appeared in the journal. That all happened back before googling and email made it easier to track people down I guess.

I’d also had to buy my own contributor’s copy when I discovered (by googling myself this time) that my poem Circle Game appeared in Thru the Smoky End Boards: Canadian Poetry About Sport & Games . But that was after a few fruitless go-rounds from my publisher to them at Polestar / Raincoast. I’m always charmed to appear in anthologies, but it gets tiresome when it actually costs me money to have my poems published.

The well-travelled poet Glen Sorestad has just returned to Saskatoon from a different part of Texas. We’ve been doing a kind of long distance duet lately: I went to Saskatoon a couple of days before he left for Victoria. He returned from Victoria the day I left for Victoria. And we both left for Texas the same week. Down in Brownsville he was part of a reading which to his surprise and delight the local paper actually reviewed. Good on them. What kind of world could this be if we were able to get poetry books reviewed in our newspapers, and readings too?

Phew, so much everything to get back to after Austin. My millions of things to do are scattered twig-like all over the floor of my life. Much thinking involved, very tiring.

One meantime item is news from my UK correspondent about a fine poet friend, Stephen Watts, who has secured a dandy position as an Embedded Poet in Inverness. Who could imagine having so many new roles to aspire to in one’s lifetime?

Been thinking a lot about AWP, and the nationalistic tendencies of poetry that I certainly grew up with. AWP opens up a whole world of American poetry to me that has been completely out of the sphere of my experience both in Canada and England. My experience of the UK poetry scene opened up another such world to me in the nineties. And now I find I know, for example, the name of Mimi Khalvati as fluently as that of Lorna Crozier as fluently as that of Maxine Kumin, and yet (with a few exceptions of course) none of these names evokes the smallest flinch of recognition if uttered to well-read poetry readers outside the countries in which those poets are stars.

There are issues around publishing and distribution of course. Canada is understandably protectionist in its cultural business: a choice between keeping a culture alive or being swamped by the giant next door. So we focus as best we can on supporting our local cultural icons and building a natural literature. Not all that our writers address in their work is going to be of interest or relevance to those outside our borders, though more of it could be than manages to disperse itself. The internet is offering that much at least.

But I suspect it could be also as simple a barrier as time? Who has time to keep up with world poetry? I am awash in books I’ll never manage to read in my lifetime and feel I will hardly be able to absorb more. I’m having enough trouble catching up on what happened in Canadian poetry the 13 years I was away, staying up to date with British poetry, let alone approaching the poetry of other nations. But I’ll keep trying.

What was interesting at AWP were the amero-centralist attitudes you encountered everywhere. AWP I think aspires to present itself as an international body but doesn’t seem to me to really acknowledge its position as a predominantly American institution whose issues will be unknown elsewhere. People I’d never heard of were repeatedly described by panel moderators as “needing no introduction”. The poetry competition scandals and passionate debates about anthologies I heard reported are about American poetry competitions and American anthologies. Those scandals and debates mean zip to poets outside the US, because the competitions, anthologies and participants are unknown outside that country.

A number of the individuals staffing book fair stands of major US literary magazines asked me what the perception of their magazine was in Canada. Nil, I had to reply: nobody I know knows who you are. Survey a room of writers in Canada and you’d barely get a flicker if you mentioned journal names like Ploughshares, or Kenyon Review or even Poetry Magazine. Just as I have no doubt you’d get blank looks if you surveyed outside Canada the titles Malahat Review, Descant and Fiddlehead. I only encountered the US titles by reading the lists in the back of The Best American Poetry anthology series, to which I am hopelessly addicted. And my addiction is purely rooted in the contributor comments that mostly follow their bios: those contextual offerings are the next best thing to a poetry reading.

Well it was a delicious last day in Austin. We braved temps in the high twenties (while it was snowing in Victoria??) to get to the conference centre for the last day of AWP panels. I slipped into the book fair for a final decisive purchase: Robin Skelton’s The Shapes of Our Singing which I hadn’t realised was even in print. Very succinct and comprehensive – not to mention conveniently alphabetical – listing of forms both common and obscure.

As if I’d invoked him, Skelton’s name was mentioned early in the first panel I went to: The Poetic Sequence, when Madeline de Frees confessed to having taught at one time at UVic when he was still at the helm, and said he’d told her poetic sequences mean never running out of things to write about. We heard also from Chase Twichell, attending AWP as both publisher and writer, reading – too briefly for me – from Dog Language which I’d picked up earlier at the Copper Canyon stand(–hey, she owns an Australian Shepherd/Border Collie mix: she must have *some* excess energy!) ; Matthew Zapruder; Gregory Orr; and Erin Belieu, who gave us a hilarious introduction to her ferociously angry sequence, In the Red Dress I Wear to your Funeral.

The arguments given for the poetic sequence seemed at times to be similar to those for writing novels: lots more room to explore your topic, scope for making giant leaps and conjoining disparate ideas. And an opportunity to scope out some formal challenges: Orr, on the subject of his Orpheus & Eurydice, talked about using myth as a known narrative against which he could pose lyric moments to illustrate points of crisis in the story – a kind of “between the lines” approach to the subject that touched some sympathetic nerve in me and made me think this might be a good touchstone. Zapruder used a repeating name in a descending position in each of twenty 20-line poems as a response to grief. De Frees quoted Arthur Koestler who suggested the laws of association are multiple and varied: if two things occur to you at more or less the same time, they are connected, and you as the poet become the connection’s vehicle.

Moving right along I went to Blogs, Boards and Online Journals: Salons for the 21st Century. We had some big names in blogging: Ron Hogan (Beatrice.com, one of the oldest poetry blogs around), Rodney Shankar (Drunken Boat), Tony Tost (Unquiet Grave), Joshua Corey (Cahiers de Corey), and Poets.org editor Robin Beth Schaer moderating. Lots of ground covered: blogging every day will improve all areas of your writing; aspects of engaging in the dialogue with other bloggers – pro and con; differences between the way online journals, listservs and blogs shape a dialogue (differing in the amount, type and direction of the communication); corporate uptake of blogs (“now HarperCollins has started a poetry blog, is the end in sight?”); the way that online journals have separated poetry publishing from “prestige journals” and offered a forum for publishing writers from around the world who might never have found their way into US print journals. And more and more.

For my interests it was rather too male dominated, which I hadn’t realised was bothering me until the chasm was opened by a late question/comment from a woman blogger who said (contrary to earlier discussion about blogs being a primarily male domain and not much participated in by women) that she knew a lot of women bloggers, and that they were writing to keep in touch with one another’s lives rather than to air opinions or theories. That she knows women who’ve unsubscribed to listservs that get taken over by male argument. That the blogs of women she knows are not single-focused (e.g. purely on writing), but sprawl across the whole of their lives, so might include writing, parenting, work and (yes!) dinner. And that because they are just “my blog” and not “THE (or A) blog, on xyz” they may simply be passing beneath the radar of male bloggers who focus on and read the more specific blogs (as her husband does) and go unremarked in more academic links. It seemed an extension of male/female attitudes to compartmentalisation, agreed one of the panellists. The topic of women’s literary (and whatever) blogs seems to be a panel topic in search of a conference.. Meanwhile, there is WOMPO, a listserv devoted to the discussion of women’s poetry.

On I went to Low-Residency MFA Programs and the Pedagogy of Online Classes, which was a panel from the University of New Orleans. Because they were up on their distance ed methods, and the residency parts of their programs are taught in Spain, Italy and so forth, they suffered less than many of the other faculties when Katrina hit. Yeah, tempting program (though apparently they lose a few students during the running of the bulls at the Fiesta of San Fermin each year)!

In the online courses, they do online workshopping and the instructors present had conflicting policies on whether to allow or require students to edit their posts, and whether to delete posts or not for example in the case of personal attacks. They found students were typically very careful and sensitive in their comments on their classmates’ work, though discussions sometimes got heated.

One of the former students said low-residency programs were a very different experience depending on whether you started with the residency or plunged straight into online, but felt they were a good model for a writing life, because staying on track with the workload imposed a solitary discipline that was helpful down the line. She thought there was less of the sense of loss that residency MFA program grads might experience after a year or two of close contact, as low-res students were already used to staying in touch over distance. Another former student offered some suggestions for building community in online classrooms: add a forum for the kind of idle chitchat that takes place in face to face classes; post pictures of students to personalise the dialogue; include an opportunity for students to introduce themselves; ensure students have some basic html to make posting easier (how to add italics, links etc.); encourage face to face meetings at conferences etc.

One discussion came up about the expectations, on the part of students, that instructors would respond instantly to questions and were sometimes kept waiting too long (e.g. for technical questions); vs. instructors who had let the online workshop take over their lives. One instructor commented that a couple of hours in a face to face workshop seemed a positive luxury over the 20-30 hours per week they were spending teaching online ones. But on the other hand, online gave them the luxury of considering and revising their responses to creative work and to posts.

And then for something completely different I tried Ballads vs Ballads: Poetry and Songwriting. For me the two most interesting discussions were those of Charlotte Pence, who teaches in Nashville, and songwriter Tim Jenkins. Pence said that a quarter of her students were music majors so songwriting was central to them, and she studies song lyrics with them as a bridge to a study of literary lyrics. She discussed a theory that compares the structure and rhetorical techniques of country and western song lyrics to Shakespearean sonnets and referred us to an article by Jill Tedford Jones for more on that topic.

Jenkins told us about the process used in songwriting workshops, which sounded not unlike poetry workshopping – same but different. They start by determining the structure (rhyme scheme, chorus use/not etc.) and whether the song follows and acknowledges the expectations and history of its structure. They go through the musical/lyrical stress lines, matching the stresses in the music to those in the words (are they natural, appropriate). They look at the “genre goals” – does the song follow the rules of its form (for example, in country and western, you need to introduce all the characters in the first couple of lines). Then the rhetorical situation: who’s going to be singing this, you or someone else, because that affects a number of things about it. They look at the use of words as instruments for singers: vowel sounds for emotional impact (e.g. a long “e” held over time tends to make a singer sound strangled). He demonstrated live with his guitar which was a nice change from straight panel discussions. They recommended Pat Pattison’s books, and commented briefly about transporting poems into songs (Jenkins says he loves doing this, but will almost always have to “tweak” a bit – maneuvering rhymes and sometimes restructuring lyrics to make them work with the melody). A comment came up about cliche as a communal sense of emotion in song lyrics: part of an emotional register that works in song rather than poetry, and part of why country and western songs include, or perhaps require, puns and cliche.

The final session was Prosody for the 21st Century. The panel was Annie Finch, Timothy Steele, Marilyn Taylor and Thomas Cable. Impossible now to summarise but the message – both from the panellists and from the size of the audience (I counted about 100) seemed to be that there’s a lot of metrics about, whether deliberate or instinctive, and that we need more than iambic pentameter to fill the gap. There was talk of Derek Attridge’s Rhythms of English Poetry, and his alternative scansion of beats and off-beats rather than conventional foot scansion, which seems to work better with freer verse forms. The point was made that you can of course scan anything, but what makes something metrical is repetition with pattern.

After a last sweep of the book fair, we headed to Tesoros for some focused browsing of a whole lot of everything and slipped out when the store closed. For food du jour we went back to Cuba Libre for Sopa de Poblano – fabulous, with a side of fresh chopped tomato, cilantro, tiny cheese cubes, fried tortilla strips to add – followed by coconut shrimp with a jicama sweet pepper salad (I wouldn’t call it slaw as the menu did). Judy had black bean soup with plantain chips and a pair of dense, rich crabcakes. We sprinted back to the Hilton on mojito moccasins and caught the end of Timothy O’Brien’s lecture and finally what was left of the Academy American Poets Poetry Extravaganza – the end of Mark Jarman’s reading (particularly wanted to hear him if only to rid myself of longstanding confusion seeing his name and thinking of Canada’s Mark Anthony Jarman); Marilyn Nelson’s triolets charmed me, and I found her a dab hand at rhyme in other pieces she read.

And that – other than packing a small but incredibly heavy library of acquisitions into the suitcases – was that.

An easier pace yesterday; I only attended three sessions at the AWP conference, and had it not been for a regrettable lack of wisdom in touring the book fair when I had two hours to spare, I would have emerged with much lighter bags and heavier purse.

I started my morning with a panel on the Pros and Cons of Poetry and Fiction Contests. These are hugely important in American literary publishing: more than one panellist observed that there would be very little, if any, poetry published in the US without them, as contest income makes up a huge part of small press production costs. Scott Cairns, who runs the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, admitted to entering at least 100 competitions himself before having his first poetry collection published. He speculated that some 10,000 manuscripts hit the floors of American literary competitions each year, of which maybe 1000 are published. “The scandal and embarrassment,” he said, “is that those few who are published are subsidised by those thousands who’ll never win.”

Cairns’ judging process is instructive: he first reads the nearly 500 manuscripts entered in his competition for “style and linguistic density”: basic competence, really, which reduces the number by half. He then employs his own biases and preferences for lineation, which brings numbers down to about 100. He then looks for a narrative arc, or some coherence as a book, leaving him with 40-50 publishable manuscripts. These he must – somewhat arbitrarily – prune down to no more than 10-12 manuscripts to hand on to the judge.

Next stop was The Art of the Anthology. The editors of the now (in American poetry circles) notorious anthology, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Cate Marvin and Michael Dumanis, did not explain to the cognoscenti present what I learned later, that their anthology had been the subject of anonymous vitriolic personal attacks on blogs. Kevin Prufer, whose The New Young American Poets anthology had inspired them, opined that “any good anthology will make people angry” – though of course what Marvin and Dumanis experienced sounds more like craziness than critical rage. An interesting group of editors made up the rest of the panel. Veteran anthologist Alan Michael Parker talked about his eccentric The Imaginary Poets project which required contributors to translate and gloss a poet they’d made up; Denise Duhamel was readying Saints of Hysteria anthology of collaborative poetry for launch; and Arielle Greenberg was looking for a new publisher for her anthology of essays about women poet mentors, written by women poets, after her first one backed out on the grounds it was not academic enough. They were surprisingly unified on the subject of paying minimal or no fees for including poets in their anthologies, on the grounds the poets would sell more books through the anthology’s promotion. They also pointed out that they were writers too, and were sacrificing a year or more of their own writing to put an anthology together.

Accidental Dominance: The State of Small Press Publishing was a panel of young publishers of independent, alternative presses – Fence Books, Nightboat Books, Ugly Duckling Press and Action Books. They talked about the collaborative nature of their work and the community they are building through publishing and cooperating.

After that, there was an excellent reading by American poetry stars Donald Hall and Jane Hirschfield, and we stepped back into the blasting early evening heat to find a restaurant. Today’s pick was Sol y Luna, a terrific Mexican restaurant on our favourite street, South Congress. My chicken chipotle plate was delectable, and so were Judy’s eggs with plantain. I’d had a sliced pork sandwich from my bbq mecca, Ironworks, for lunch, and I loved the pork as much as the beef I had on my first visit there: it was spicy, smoky and pepper-crusted.

But our biggest thrill of the day was being offered seats (ma’am!) on the bus by a chorus of young men who leapt to their feet at our burdensome approach. Too many’s the time I’ve watched Canadian and British beardless youths slump into their headsets when elderly or overwhelmed passengers get on public transport: nine times out of ten it’s the women who step up. But it’s no surprise here. All round, we’ve been absolutely knocked out by how friendly and helpful everyone we meet here is. These Texans are somethin’!

Off we go to start our third and final day at the races.