Lit Readings and Candy

I feel like I have so much news to report!! As the first order of business, I have definitely used up my quota of exclamation points for the year, and it's only February. That means it's gonna be a good year.

Aside from the fact that I just scarfed down four "fun sized" candy bars (they are so scarfable), I have been a busy little beaver (are there busy big beavers?). It seems that the more I read and write, the more interested I am in participating in the wider community of literature. One of my goals at the current moment is to continue to actively use my planner, which is great, because I enjoy writing things down (and crossing things off!), and because I'm less likely to forget about appointments or events I'd like to attend if I have written them down. While I sometimes use the calendar feature on my phone, I prefer writing my life down. It feels more satisfying to me that way. All this to say, I checked back on the past few weeks of my life and saw that I attended three poetry readings.

Will and I went to a reading at the Triple Rock Social Club called Irregular Readings, and got to see John Jodzio and Matt Rasmussen read. It was a relatively small gathering. John read a hilarious story about a kid with a job at a drug testing facility (there were lots of stories and poems about drugs).

I just ate three more candy bars.

Here is Mark being a badass poet guy.

The second reading was Mark Wunderlich's book launch at The Loft with Graywolf Press. His new book, The Earth Avails, is gorgeous and haunting. My favorite poem he read was a long, dreamy elegy for a home that no longer exists, and which is aptly titled "Driftless Elegy." I had Mark sign a copy of the book, and the rumors are true: his penmanship is almost literally to die for.

The last reading I went to was at a little place called Maeve's Cafe. I guess there are readings there every other month or so. From what I can gather, they seem to showcase a wide variety of local talents. It was so wonderful to see Kristin Fitzsimmons of Our Flow Is Hard read her poems.

Oops I just spent 45 minutes watching videos on What Did You Look Up On Wikipedia?, the website that Kristin co-owns with somebody else named Sally.

I have other things to report, but I will save said other things for another time. Right now I have some more candy/videos to attend to. And I should probably do some actual work, too, but we'll see how much of this candy work I get accomplished first.

January Wrap-Up

January's gone, so I thought I might do a January wrap-up post where I talk about some of the books/movies I've consumed this month. I read 18 books:

Jack Gilbert Collected (technically one book, technically six books)
- Views of Jeopardy
- Monolithos
- The Great Fires
- Refusing Heaven
- The Dance Most of All
- Uncollected

If you haven't read Jack Gilbert, you're seriously missing out. There's this way he has, of making small observations about humans, and making them really count. Or he will paint a small scene and put you in it. He can write a poem about cooking fish with lemons and it's perfect. It also makes me want to eat fish with lemons.

I traveled throughout the first week or so of January, and I got to see Russ Woods and Jeannette Gomes. We played a lot of Mad Libs and drank a lot of tea, and Russ gave me a few books to read:

NODS - Carrie Lorig
Root Poems - Carrie Lorig & Russ Woods

These are worth reading. In Russ's words, he said, "I feel like we're almost daring editors to like us."

You can probably tell that I read a lot of poetry.

More Books I Read in January

Among Women - Jason Shinder
Rare Earth - Bradford Tice
Sleeping With the Dictionary - Harryette Mullen
Ghost Fargo - Paula Cisewski
The Pajamaist - Matthew Zapruder
Last Night Was Worth Talking About - Gregory Sherl
Chapbook - Zach Haber
Thin Kimono - Michael Earl Craig
Bird Eating Bird - Kristen Naca
The Vital System - CM Burroughs

Of these books, the ones I loved most intensely were Among Women, Sleeping With the Dictionary, Ghost Fargo, and The Vital System. I wrote a whole post about Sleeping With the Dictionary a week or two ago, so I won't say any more about that aside from READ IT. I will say about the Shinder book that it broke my heart, and I just finished The Vital System a few days ago and I'm still thinking about it. Ghost Fargo is exactly the kind of book I needed to read this month--it's about love and loss of a physical place as home, as a place for memories. It made me so sad, wistful, made me ache for the place where I grew up, which is great because I'm trying to write about that now anyway.

I saw Bradford Tice read from his book in November at the New Rivers Press event where my friend Joe Stracci's book, Whitney, was also released, and I had to buy Rare Earth. He uses such a rich vocabulary, which can sometimes be distracting for me in poetry, especially if I don't know what certain words mean (I have to look up a lot of things all the time), but the richness of Tice's vocabulary isn't at all distracting. It beefs up the flavor of the poems, to use a phrase I hate ("beef up").

In addition to noting the books I read this month, I also wrote down all the ways I wasted my time watching a screen. Here are the movies/TV shows I watched in January:

Inside Llewyn Davis
Fargo (rewatch)
The Story of Film (we're ten episodes in, five to go)
Veronica Mars (Season 1)
Return of the Jedi
But I'm a Cheerleader
The Graduate
Kissing Jessica Stein
Pickpocket
High Fidelity (rewatch)
I also watched a few stray episodes of X-files, Supernatural, and Undeclared.

I could rewatch High Fidelity a million times. It's definitely on my top five desert island list of movies. Fargo is pretty good, too, but not on my top five. Maybe top twenty.

Watching The Story of Film is very interesting. At first, we turned it off because the narrator's voice is so grating. Everything he says sounds like a question, and sometimes he'll go into bouts of metaphor spewing (he really likes calling Hollywood a "bauble") that are somewhat obnoxious. But his critique of films is spot on, and he knows his stuff. I've put a number of movies on my list to watch based on his analysis of the films and why they're important. This is a big reason we watched Pickpocket, which Will described as a cross between The Stranger and Crime and Punishment. Very good.

Read Things! Or, Listen to Me Go On and On About Sleeping With the Dictionary

I'm coming strong into my fourth week of quitting internet games cold turkey. No Candy Crush. No Bubble Safari. I blocked all games and game request features on Facebook and I am too dumb to figure out how to unblock them, which is definitely for the best. I told Will that if I say something about internet games, he has to come and forcibly remove my computer from in front of me. I say this because the past four weeks have been productive in ways that I wasn't productive last year. I'm sick of wasting my time doing things that don't serve me.

Since the first of the year, I've already read thirteen books--which, shamefully, is just under the total number I finished last year. I don't want to jinx myself, but jinxing yourself is a chance you've got to take sometimes--high jinx!

Of the ones I've read so far this month, I'm still inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) flipping my lid over one of them: Sleeping With the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen.

The way I came into this book is magical in itself. I was on the phone yesterday with Erica, who's at her very first residency out at Bennington's MFA program (!!), and she told me that one of their workshop prompts was to write a poem in the style of Harryette Mullen. I said to her, "I don't know who Harryette Mullen is." As she was saying these words: "Harryette Mullen wrote a book called Sleeping With the Dictionary," Will came scooting into the bedroom and tossed Sleeping With the Dictionary into my hands. It took me a second to realize what was going on; it was one of those strange moments that is simultaneously mundane and mysterious. Will had checked the book out of the library while I was away a few weeks ago. I took it as a sign.

I spent all day with the book, and it took me a few poems to catch on to what was happening there. The way that Mullen uses language made me literally scream a few times. I read most of the poems aloud, and I didn't want it to end. I'm not surprised at all that Sleeping With the Dictionary was nominated for the National Book Award when it came out in 2002. And about that: how did you, my friends, let me go so long without reading this? Shame on you all! Shame! (I have used up all of my exclamation points for the year in this one blog post.)

The poem I liked most is called Kirstenography, which I assume is written for Mullen's sister. The whole poem is written like the game Mad Gab, or like a child who is imitating language she hasn't quite picked up yet, or like a secret language between the sisters:

When her smoother and farther wrought her chrome from the hose spittle, her cistern fought the piddle ably was a girly heeded bawl. 

It's a story of a family, of two girls. The prose poem goes on like this for a page and a half. I can't even tell you how many times I read it. Over and over.

You should definitely read the book for yourself. Mullen uses language in so many surprising, inventive ways, I felt as if I were being let into somebody's secret world, which is probably just one aim of Sleeping With the Dictionary.

Anyway, I'm done rambling about this book, though I could say much more. Find it in your library or buy it from a bookstore. I'll probably end up purchasing it for myself sometime in the near future.

Some Thoughts on Plagiarism

Somebody even typed & scanned this bad boy.

Many of you probably know that I wrote a very short poem in graduate school that was co-opted by a group of who I assume to be teenage girls. It was reblogged all over Tumblr, and I didn't know until one afternoon when Will yelled "Holy crap, come look at this!"

I was super flattered, of course, and still am. But I guess all these people have been plagiarizing that poem. The sentiment of the poem is basic. I'm sure other people have had the same thought, but the ripoffs are blatant. And terrible, at that.

I never thought that this would be a problem I have. I call it a problem, but it's not really a problem. It's more of a nuisance. My mom used to tell me and my sister (and told me again on the phone the other day) that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. But I can think of flattering things to do that are way better than plagiarizing my poem.

For instance, send me a dollar. Or a muffin.

Being Rejected

Here I am, almost two weeks into this new year we have. I am drinking a Coke Zero and neglecting to water my cactus. What are you doing?

I have the idea that if I blog more this year, I will be more likely to stick with my other goals, like writing more (at least 200 poems this year, I hope), reading more (at least 52 books this year, I hope), and submitting more poems for publication.

Over the past few months (okay, let's be realistic--years) I've let myself get lazy. I looked at my Submittable account and realized that I had ZERO outstanding magazine submissions. A few years ago I undertook a project with my friend Tanya to try and garner 100 rejections throughout the "submission year," which meant starting September 1 and ending August 31 of the following year. This year, it's my goal to get 100 rejections again, but during the calendar year.

It's tough hearing people say no to you. It reminds me of when I was a kid and wanted so badly to have friends sleep over, and would get very excited but was told no. How sad, right? I just wanted to paint nails and braid hair and talk about boys. Okay, I never did those things. My friends and I recorded fart noises on my Talkboy and played them back in slow motion while strangers walked by.

Either way, good thoughts for this year of being told no a lot. I've already sent out around twenty submissions this year, and have been told no three times so far. Here's to rejection!

Thoughts on New Beginnings

Every time I write, I find myself writing about the passage of time. It's this day, it's this month, it's this new year. Arbitrary, maybe. But that's what happens. I go to the fridge and I look at the expiration dates. Most of the things are past the expiration dates. I eat the things anyway. I get sick.

I was on the road for so long, I forgot how it felt to be in my own bed. I can't believe the people I know. And I really can't believe they put up with me.

It's the new year, and so I'm making promises to myself I likely won't keep. I think it's good to have goals. And sometimes, I think it's just as well we give up on them.

I Haven't Been Making Anything With My Hands, or (I Think What I Mean)

I want to create something meaningful.

But I think what I mean when I say that I want to create something meaningful is really I want to mean something. 

How do you make your life mean something? I guess for me, it means I create things.

So, I want to create something meaningful.

But I think what I mean...