Using Diane Williams' lines as writing prompts any damned day of the week.

I think you can read any line from piece by Diane Williams and use it as a starting point for something—poem, essay, fiction, hybrid, Girl Scout cookie slogan, empowerment-feminism speech delivered in a garden of heirloom roses…. But I also think studying her lines is instructive. So I did.

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Example 1: “He had dragged me along to this refined filth of a hotel, which aroused my truest false feelings.”

This line from “Speech” does the magic thing twice! Williams lays opposites side by side in a description, so the “refined filth” makes the hotel feel even filthier, like the afterbirth of a Stanislaw Lem story on the linoleum. And then “my truest false feelings” make the feelings feel even faker. When coupling opposites, it appears that the subject sinks beneath the lowest common denominator.

Example 2: “…the redness and the whiteness of a fine radish.”

This brief image appears in “Gods of the Earth At Home,” where it sticks to the mind and shimmers. Williams does this suffixing often, adding a -ness to an adjective to make it a noun, to wrap the object in a condition or quality rather than a simple description. So the red and white radish becomes redness itself, whiteness itself, two separate, divided conditions. Notice how red and white evokes the colors of objects while the redness and the whiteness evokes their condition, their aura. Hence luminosity, shimmering.

Example 3: “I say yes yes. I say my excitement is so great, so huge.”

Again, from “Gods of the Earth At Home,” Williams reveals how a series of enthusiastic superlatives actually makes the enthusiasm, itself, incredible, and suspect.

Example 4: “I am the dark one, the short one, the thick one, the coarse one, who is so unsatisfied with all of my suggestions.”

This is the second paragraph in “Desperately Trying to Lie Down.” I love how one can watch the narrative voice distance itself from the intimacy of the “I” as if by striptease; each additional qualification tells us less and less about the speaker. And each “one” moves us further away from the single person we are trying to understand. What if taking off all our clothes made us invisible rather than naked? Is nakedness and earnesty, itself, a facet of invisibility? Sometimes Williams seems to suggest this in “I” statements.

Example 5: “Rather, it is from the blather, rather I am made. I parade around plenty, which means I do have the globular breasts. Yet, I am watched.”

The final two paragraphs of “Her Hair Is Red”—and so many Williams’ in these sentences. I will focus on the use of rhyme to bind lines and create motion forward through sonic effects rather than plot. Rather/blather rhymes, and then repeats. Then made/parade link arms across the punctuation mark. Notice how the “t” sounds accumulate and only really prick up their eats in the last sentence, where the rather/blather/plenty/breasts rub against the “Yet”. I kept hearing the “Yet” as “Yes”—and I suspect the purpose of this short story lies in the unlatched friction between Yet/Yes right there. Yet, I suspect because I am suspicious. And wow.

Example 6: “There is a slim chance that anything is unable to be unmoved.”

The last line of “Actual People Whose Behavior I Was Able to Observe,” a destabilization accomplished by attaching the prefix -un to two verbs, and then using one to define the other. Williams could have written this as: Everything can be moved a little, but that’s not quite what she means. What she means is that negation is related to motion, and the prefixes render the sentence prismatic, the promise that “There is” complicated by the double -un.

Just because bars are fascinating. And prompts are bars, re-visioned. So do whatever with the iron below. I just used to it to free-write.

Prompt 1: “How about the deity responsible for me?—why should it not move me through the realm, escort me to the other side of the predicament?” (from “Upright Pearl”)

Prompt 2: “Get myself endeared I should, endorsed with a day in mind. This day in Wednesday.” (from “Madder Lake”)

Prompt 3: “An entire formula for feeling good….”

She was jealous of people with sea green or lavender scooters who had grown up in small towns with singular traffic lights. The arrogance of rural intimacy was the highest emotional connection she imagined when trimming her hair with nail clippers over the expired Confederate gravestones.

Where had the nail clippers come from, anyway?

It was Long Rod who urged the clandestine. He had family in Uruguay he couldn’t talk about at all. Or under any condition. But no children. “I love knives too much to be a father,” he had announced. They met at a sword conference by mistakes.

Both had similar, variant deficits in their peripheral attention spans, which caused them to see sword when what happened was a Swordfish Convention. Neither had ever fished. Failure felt like bondage when he touched her arm with his mind and she used the word swords and love in the same unbuckled sentence.

“Believe in the extended metaphor of us,” he had whispered the following morning in the hallway of her apartment near the poster of the Dalai Lama she’d inherited from a professor, disgraced. Sacked, shamed, and gone—all his stuff left to scald the walls of his large university office.

“I have come to collect his spiritual influence,” she told the secretary who shrugged. Just take it. Take it all. Like a 90’s indie record song lyric.

She dreamt taxis had wings hidden beneath their yellow hoods.

But they did not develop eyes and entire formula of flight was useless.

“Believe in the extension rod,” the professor once said while holding white chalk. She lost the nail clippers after pitching a multi-modal review essay to an editor she knew from grad school. But he was married and not interested.

You think it’s easy to be noisy and quiet, but the pillow in the taxi’s backseat was put there on purpose. Someone made plans.

Last-page blues.

1.

I felt emptied this weekend when finishing Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale). I always feel this way at the end of something incredible.

The last-past blues: that horrible, narrowing dread which signals the finitude of a book’s world, the cessation of a voyage, the reentry into everyday life.

I renounce it.

I grind my teeth and refusenik the ending with a pen. Sometimes I dash off a review, but mostly I save it for the room of the notebook, the particular room of endings where last lines and final images are collected, treasured, preserved—and revisited as thresholds for reentry.

2.

Backwards can be a way into things. I thought of this when reading Robert Walser this weekend, and reconsidering The Walk in light of one of my favorite book-musers, Joseph Schreiber, who summarizes the feel and texture so well:

The narrator is a writer and a self-styled flâneur whose environment is not the bustling metropolis, but a semi-rural/semi-suburban setting featuring bucolic scenery and peopled with eccentric characters. The novella opens with our hero leaving the gloomy isolation of his daily confrontation with the empty page, to set off on a series of errands. He is in a jaunty, positive mood. It’s evident that being out on the street is where he feels most free, confident, and at ease. Opinionated, observant, and self-conscious, the narrative that unfolds is marked by an excessive chattiness. Whether he is addressing the reader or someone he encounters, a certain manic energy drives the perambulator’s account….

The walk, itself, is deeply significant for Walser—who acknowledges the important of walking to his own writing. The walk is where one collects the details which turn into words—the impressions which become images, the clothing which signals social status, the world.

Maira Kalman’s “Thoughts on Robert Walser” (included in New Directions’ Christine Burgin series-version of Microscripts) is an ending that feels like a beginning, or a bouquet which gathers Walser without burying him, without marking a grave.

It is not wrong to begin without knowing where one is going.

Many of us follow the footprints which fascinate us into the forest of impossible things and emerge with our own story—a story that doesn’t replicate the feet which led us there.

What do I mean by any of this?

How is this connected?

What is connection when it feels most palpable with the dead?

“Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?” I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand.

This is second-to-last line of Robert Walser’s The Walk (translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton).

But it is also the beginning of an essay or a story. The flowers fell on a flagstone, the place where he asked me to meet him. His grandfather’s name chiseled across the top. And a new message written in black Sharpie which the rain had mostly washed-off.

My endings notebook is filled with these, and for me, they are writing prompts. The endings are the best beginnings, the most luscious counterpoints already keyed on the metronome, ready to be subverted, destabilized, stirred into stew or marble.

If you find yourself looking for a way into something, pick up your favorite books—the ones you love in unfathomable ways—and scour the last page for a line that feels like a gauntlet. A line that wants to become a bone in a necklace.

Don’t continue the book or create a serial (that’s a different prompt, a different way of dealing with loss, a different relationship to temporality). Instead, start something from that line in the key of X…. Start in the unforgettable key and see what happens.

21 ways to end a poem or leave your lover

1.

With a final action that echoes outside the poem, a closure with sensual details that stick to the skull and stay in the room. I think of how Mary Ruefle ends "Lightly, Very Lightly" with this picture of a woman listening to the slow tick of a clock hidden inside a drawer, a mysterious count-down that is both intimate and unexplained:

somewhere the lady of the house
puts the alarm clock in a drawer
where she cannot hear it
then tells the children to be quiet
and stands there listening
to its tick.

2.

With an image that undermines a prior assertion or statement, thus casting doubt over everything you promised. Deborah Digges ends "The Wind Blows Through the Doors Of My Heart" with the invitation of "quiet, a quilt spread on soil", followed by the statement:

But we will never lie down again.

A poem that sets up this image of a peaceful quilt, a respite, and then denies access.

3.

With a statement that circles back around to the poem's first tentative breath while amplifying the pressure of that breath until you wince. The fingernails have been pressing into your palm the whole time and you didn't realize it. How could you have known Minne Bruce Pratt would leave you with:

The poem as the locked room.

(See "The Relation Between Words and People: After KR Rilke", American Poetry Review.)

4.

With a short question that is answered in a fashion that echolocutes its way through the poem. I'm thinking of complex, numinous way in Kayleb Rae Candrilli ends the lengthy, three-column poem titled “You've Heard This Before, The Only Way Out Is Through" with: 

there is a razor in the apple
and the apple is the earth. Listen,
my nightmares are dreams in which
everyone walks in the same direction--
that rhythmic lockstep. Both of my
grandmothers considered abortion.
And can you imagine?
Being so close to nothing?

5.

With an inclusive question that invites the reader in deeper, as in Aimee Nezhukumatahil's sonnet, "Naming the Heartbeats", which ends in this expansive “we “ that binds the reader's reverie to the speaker’s:

And what is the name for movement we make when
we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying
to remember a path or a river we've only visited in our dreams?

6.

With a powerful image that reinforces or weaves together previous images in the poem. I’m thinking of the sonic boom that ends Wanda Coleman’s “Etheridge,” and how last line’s image—and the action in this image—feels like a speech-act or a sound-act or a space between the flesh and the portrait, and how sacredness inhabits this image by offering a subversive iconography that leans (loosely) on biblical lexicons:

he kissed the reefer burning his thief’s fingers
leaned against that bitcoin’ hood and blimped the itch

his blaze interrupted the sermon and singed and singed the robes

7.

With a pivot word (or words) whose re-definition that brackets the conflict in the poem by flipping it, fleshing-out the synonyms intimately. As in synonyms for what touches us become intimacy. I'm thinking of what Jericho Brown does at the end of "Hero" with black and dark, and how it refers back to gratitude. Starting with the sixth line of this poem because it what Brown does is incredible:

I am most interested in people who declare gratitude
For their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave,
Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.
That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be—
No one on earth knows how many abortions happened
Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name, 
By taking it to breast. I don’t know why I am alive now
That I still cannot impress the woman who whipped me 
Into being. I turned my mother into a grandmother. She thanks me 
By kissing my sons. Gratitude is black—
Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death.
Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

8.

Ending with an I statement that repositions the poem's direction. The poem plods along and then turns, ending in a strange action with repositions the narrator or the subject in an interesting way. It alters the light of the poem. I’m thinking of Gerald Stern’s “The Far Edge of Kilmer,” which ends with a statement:

I am holding open the burnt door.

Or Johanne Dubrow’s ending of a poem with “I hold this punctured story to the light.” Notice how the 'I' statements assert something about the future as related to the present, and engage the use of poetry itself. Often this sort of ending can have a metaphysical touch; there is a sense of mystery opened in action which makes the closing feel less like closure.

9.

With a question that affirms the value of uncertainty. Mary Oliver's poem, "How Would You Live Then?", is composed entirely of questions from start to finish. She ends on a question that underscores the sense of wonder in both tone and form:

What if you finally saw
that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day,
and every day--who knows how, but they do it--were
more precious, more meaningful than gold?

10.

With a prophetic statement, repeated for emphasis. The way Czeslaw Milosz ends his "A Song On the End of the World" (as translated by his son, Anthony Milosz) makes the repetition feel like a doubling, not quite a repetition so much as an enlargement of the space in which the first admonition operated:

There will be no other end of the world.
There will be no other end of the world.

11.

With an object that comes to mind after various verbal acts of refusal. In a poem about refusing. Practice saying NO at different pitches. In different places. With different props. Insist with Anne Boyer that you are "Not Writing". Or not missing. Or not overwatering the flowers in an urge to save the world. Develop a rich tapestry of no's that you can't resist. Aim for the most irresistible no you can manage, and give it texture, sonics, beat, passion, lyric. The most magic no. Learn from Anne Boyer's "No". But end with an evocative (and solid) object.

12.

In a liminal, haunted space that re-visions the skeletal. See: leaves disembodied by dusk. There are no bodies between shades of light, in the space inter day and night. And yet this space is less liminal than that of the cardboard flower hatbox on the top shelf of the closet. Ghosts. Every poet needs one to have the last word. Once. I feel like what I mean to suggest here is cryptic. And there is something very odd about quoting the crypt, so I won’t.

13.

With a couplet of doubled metaphors, especially if the lines enact a light parallelism by beginning with the same word or article. I’m think of Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Daily”, which ends so beautifully (I can’t even talk):

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

14.

With the title of a painting or an opera or a musical composition. Zach Savich does this in his prose poem, "Chestnut City", which ends the first stanza with a quote from Cocteau and then ends the second stanza--and the poem--with the title of a painting:

Could go to sleep in the bushes and wake and it will be like a fairy tale only nothing will 
change. "Path Before the Bride Appears."

15.

With a culmination, an escalating crescendo effect. See Deborah Digges' "To Science", in which the extended metaphor climbs, spirals, and culminates in a sort of evasive conclusion:

for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

16.

 With an ending that explains or qualifies the title. This is a motion that swerves back around and returns to the beginning. It usually requires a title abstract enough to demand unpacking. For example, Heather McHugh's "Meantime" suggests a sort of time; it begins in the past tense to describe 'how things were', which it does for three stanzas before ending in a single-word, separated, set apart:

thirteen.

This word converses with "Meantime," and expands on the temporality (not to mention that it packs the power of a two-syllable last line, alone, revelatory.)

17.

Ending in exclamation or ecstasy. How Gerald Stern ends “The Dancing” with a sort of exhalation, a creative and spiritual breath related to the invocation of deity:

oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

The dissimilarity of the words wild and mercy do so much to heighten this effect.

18.

 With a precise, complicated simile. I love how L. Eric Greinke ends “SONNET XI. Even as the poem bends” (from his Sonnets for Ted Berrigan) with a precise and complicated simile:

Like your thighs upon the sheet.

19.

With a command or imperative, instructing the reader (or the You) to do something. I’m thinking of Sharon Olds in “I Go Back to May 1937,” where the final line shifts the stakes and alters the emotional valence into a sort of wistfulness:

I want to live. I   
take them up like the male and female   
paper dolls and bang them together   
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell you about it.

There is no closure because the next action depends on something external to the poem, namely, the You. I feel like Louise Gluck uses this strategy often, and it creates suspense or mystery which hinges on implication.

20.

With gorgeous alliteration and maybe ellipses. Even though ellipses seem to be on the wane, I know a few editors miss them. And some poets have made them magnificent; have used them in ways that change the breath at the end of the poem, or even change what we allow ourselves to have received from it. I’m thinking of how Gwendolyn Brooks ends “Jessie Mitchell’s Mother” with this sequence of slant end-rhymes and then the alliteration in the last line followed by ellipses:

Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,   
Refueled
Triumphant long-exhaled breaths.
Her exquisite yellow youth . . 

21.

With a last line composed of monosyllabic words that change the speed and motion of the poem by sharpening it. I’m thinking of Louise Bogan’s “Women,” which ends:

As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Eleven poetry writing prompts for pandemiacs

1.

From Venezuelan poet Natasha Tiniacos: "What is the body in the digital world...there is touching the screen of the computer to grasp the other one, the loved one, the missing one.... Is our online presence making us feel less or differently? Write about that.... Is a selfie autobiographical? Why don't you try to write a poem instead of taking a selfie, or take your selfie and make a translation in poetry? Ask yourself this: Is a selfie a projection of a person we want to be?"

2.

From Bob Hicok’s note for Best American Poetry 2010: "....there's a bacteria that eats plutonium. This amazes me, but I've never recovered from either the pinwheel or the whirligig. How they spin. How I spin. How every atom spins." A self-portrait with a particular bacteria. Or a portrait of the self as a particular bacteria with details about that bacteria’s existential dilemmas.

3.

A secret word, a favorite. And then a poem which dances around this word without ever disclosing it so that formally, for example, any end rhymes would rhyme with the word you can’t write. The withheld word poem.

4.

I remember that weightless summer after 1989 spent wandering around Europe with feta-cheese sandwiches and Romanian-speaking parents. I remember the first time I realized I could choose whether to present myself as an American or a Romanian to strangers in Paris. Identity could be renounced or re-programmed at will, hence the kindness of strangers who agree to play along with the presentation.

A poem about a part of your identity that feels slippery, that lacks roots in belonging, and maybe set this in childhood or a moment when you realized this. For example, being a Braves fan when visiting family in Georgia. Poem from the innocence rather than the fury that came later, the fury of never being anyone, of always being insufficient or half.

5.

From D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love: “And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

An epistolary poem to Lawrence that flips the metaphor and makes him the horse. Ride that metaphor into the ground.

6.

From Dan Beach-Quick: “Two types of poems (among many others): those whose lines build one on top of another as if to build into a tower (Kafka: the Tower of Babel would have been allowed if one did not need to ascend it in order to build it), and those that in every line dig down (Thoreau: My head is an organ for burrowing). No poem simply flat in the page; there are dimensions, expansions, progressions.”

Pick a subject, anything, a local gas station, a bench at the park, a favorite yogurt, and write a poem about it, a sketch. Make two versions: one a tower and the other a tunnel. Then read other draft poems and see if they are moving in the wrong direction or dimension. Run a little dimensionality check on drafts.

7.

From C.D. Wright’s personal instructional on compound words: “Although I take a special pleasure in compounds, whether or not they have been duly authorized: silverback, deepstep, lovegreen, pothead, eyestring, closeburn, shirttail, boneman, wristwatch, no words please me so much as the one or two-syllable noun. It appears at its best left unaccompanied by an article. At its best, shed of adjective.

A poem titled after an unduly authorized compound word that you want to explore. You can pull a Celanian twist and hyphenate the word (see “breath-turn”) to thicken it’s resonance in a way that refuses to be unpacked, or you can unpack the created compound in the poem itself.

8.

The subject of a scientific case study is unique and therefore not replicable. The study must include enough detail to document observations that enable other researchers to draw conclusions. A poem in the form of a case study.

9.

Joan Didion’s essay on notebooks alternates a passage from her notebook with explanation of her original motives for noting it. In this sense, she annotates herself. Annotations consist of explanatory notes. To annotate one's self is a dialogue, or an intimacy, when part of a poem. A poem or lyric essay in two columns where the right margin annotates the left.

10.

A poem addressed to an exterminator.

11.

An ode to a goat that is not inhabited by anthropomorphism, or by the need to humanize the goat in order to value its existence. An ode to a goat that celebrates what is goat-ness.

Melissa Febos on writing trauma

Earlier this week, Lidia Yuknavitch tweeted Melissa Febos’ essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma As a Subversive Act”, and gave me a reason to focus on the gendered discourse around trauma and memoir. Febos sets a familiar scene:

At a recent writers conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of trauma survival. One of the male editors rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on Oprah’s talk show, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don’t need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.

As if anything could be more gauche than the male writers who compliment female-identifying writers by describing their prose as “muscular” or dropping comparisons to Hemingway. As if we haven’t spent decades parsing the traumatic boredom of the American male novelist, studying its specific cocktails and alcoholisms.

Febos wrote this essay in January 2017, prior to the release of her incredible memoir, Abandon Me (in which she does exactly what she urges female writers to do, namely, tell the story that will kill you if you keep it). As Febos points out:

That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against “personal writing” is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.

Shame is at its most effective when urging silence. And shame comes to mind when I think of George Sand, who adopted the male pseudonym at the suggestion of her younger male lover, Jules Sandeau. George Sand, who dressed as a man in order to see without being seen. To protect herself from the predatory gaze leveraged against females by custom. After her death, Ivan Turgenev said: “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.” 

Febos ends her essay by sharpening the pencil and preparing it to speak. Like Dorothy Allison, she offers encouragement as antivenom to silence.

We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.

What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go of. Tell me about your drunk father and your sister who lost her mind. Give them whatever names you want.

Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.

You write it, and I will read it.

I need to hear this. And I’m heartened by this amazing episode of Brian Gesko’s Antibody Reading Series now available online. So we can all hear Lauren Van Den Berg, Melissa Febos, and Tracy O’Neill talk about writing, living—and writing.

Sun in strange places: A few notes on writing motherhood and consent

1.

We learn the world through body language. Toddlers absorb the physical gestures quickly, the socializations of averted eyes, pointed fingers, stiff smiles. Time is a character on the stage, an unspoken protagonist. Maybe time is also the narrator we write around.

2.

Here’s the thing: motherhood is the mantle of knowing your death will be devastating. Slow or sudden, there is no way to repair their world once you leave it. How many unkissed knees?

3.

From our mothers, we inherit lived minutiae. I learned how to fold shirts, make cobbler, clean the rim of a bathtub. Like Marguerite Duras, I inherited my mother's fear, her particular blend of worry, her relentless stoicism, her fear of germs, the need to disinfect. Also the "hysterical love" I pour on my children.

"We separate ourselves from people by writing," Duras observes. Our mothers represent a madness, a lunacy "that doesn't preclude love" in the child's role of witness. Growing into a mother whose fear is familiar.

4.

"I think motherhood makes you obscene," writes Duras. "A mother indulges all of her games." A mother, like her child, must survive the act of mothering.

5.

In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich articulates less gendered family roles for the future. She fleshes out a concept of community in which the child can be integrated into work, including a “new fatherhood” in which a man nurtures more. 

Seeing childcare as “enforced servitude”, Rich maintains that it can only be improved by acknowledging its value rather than debasing it. By elevating its status to something that even the high-status humans can do. 

Rich touches upon the solitary confinement of “full-time motherhood” and the “token nature of fatherhood” which gives a man rights and privileges over children toward whom he assumes only minimal responsibility. Her discussion on the “burden of emotional work” reveals the way rigid gender binaries prevent social change from happening--a nurturing father is seen to do “mother’s work”. And a mother's work is nothing.

Things have changed a little since Rich wrote this book, but only in the margins of heterosexual partnerships where this is made explicit, where this is a conscious effort.

6.

Borrowing from Barry Lopez's discussion of interior landscapes, I think Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus can be seen as an attempt to interiorize the landscape of expectancy in a world where female bodies have been rendered a form of public space.

7.

Then there’s the anger towards our mothers for looking to their husbands to fulfill their needs and making their own needs seem irresponsible or “emotional” . Examples of self-hatred include women who want sons, women who prefer male friends, women who can’t enjoy their bodies. We are steeped and socialized into this self-loathing because it is profitable. The way women hate themselves is a thriving market.

My obsession with cruelty. Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and others. A religious impulse that flowered after having children. To know that love could be Kali, eating her children. Or Medea, killing them to protect them from the father's lack of love.

8.

Jacqueline Rose: “Motherhood is not knowledge or control. It may have to make non-stop decisions, but not according to some fetuses' logic of mastery.”

The mother’s right to life and experience is challenged by the cultural assumptions of what childhood should or should not include. The crime of exposure--of abandonment of a baby--is no longer limited to the infant but now extends into the entire developing life. There is no maternal instinct--there is the choice one makes to mother. There is the ongoing seesaw of it.

9.

In Beloved, Sethe kills her daughter out of love. Toni Morrison insisted on this. She insisted that it was love to kill a child in a world that conspired to kill her slowly, torturously, for entertainment.

10.

Elena Ferrante: “Men insert their thingy inside you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside.”

Was this the task of Freud’s hysterical patients--to exhibit all the fear and anxiety for a family who can then go on acting as if they are superior? And fine. Someone has to carry the terror and anxiety. Every family has its designated vessel.

11.

I need to write against the naturalistic fallacy that often undergirds patriarchal thinking. None of this is ordained by a god or by gravity—it is, like war, a choice humans make to normalize and accept certain patterns of behavior. It is also a choice that we must make to undo the damage.

A woman hides her body, hides her pain, hides her fear, because she is guilty. Because she asked for it. She is a mother. She is learning to live in the division we’ve established.

12.

There is no virtuousness in being a mother--there is merely a road one travels which changes the idea of destination, or destiny. As Jacqueline Rose observes: "it is the demand to be one thing only--love and goodness incarnate--that is intolerable for any mother and tears her mentally and physically to shreds."

13.

Obligatory childbearing and sacrifice is what Rose calls “the slave-owning version of motherhood,” an institution that has changed little over time. The decision not to mother is a basic question of consent--to have one’s body be used as a vessel. It is many other things as well, but it is never not this one: a question of consent.

14.

I love D.A. Powell for saying: “If the poet doesn’t risk absurdity, he’s not even in the game.”

Writing motherhood is this dance with an absurdity so astonishing one is tempted to call it God.

A list of places that like book reviews

When you’ve read too many incredible books and you need to write about it or talk about it and no one else has read that book yet or wants to chat at the pitch you think it deserves, there is this thing called the book review that you can try (see Julija Sukys’ how-to).

However, it is the case that some journals do not accept unsolicited book reviews. There is not enough life left in the hourglass to be sad about this. Instead, you can submit your unsolicited reviews to the journals that welcome them. I cribbed some links from the great list at Entropy but I also found a few places to add and a few journals that no longer seem to be operating or accepting reviews. Poets & Writers also has a list of book review outlets, but most of them are for authors or publishers seeking to have a book reviewed rather than for writers trying to publish a book review. I wanted to focus on places to submit book reviews. So: I did.

General notes etc.

I hope this saves you time and makes it easier to celebrate the work of fellow writers. What follows is a brief methodology that explains what was included in this list—and a few general caveats.

• Many academic journals don’t accept summer submissions.

• Most journals are looking for reviews of books published by indie or small presses in the last year, though a few journals make exceptions for time and self-publication. I tried to note these exceptions where I found them.

• The interview has become an alternate form of book review, a collaborative conversation in which the book’s themes are discussed with the author. This is especially wonderful in you choose to review books outside your lived experience. For example, VIDA notes that reviews by white, heteronormative authors continue to predominate. That is a gauntlet that many of us need to address in our reviews. We need to review BIPoC poets even if we are worried that we can’t do their words justice. The interview or conversation is an excellent way to highlight the works of writers that we don’t feel qualified to “review” given our inherent structural biases. As a result, many lit mags are looking for interviews. I’ve added those where I found them.

• Some journals have a running list of books they would like to see reviewed. Generally, the journal or press will send you a comp version for review. For the most part, journals don’t limit themselves to the reviews on that list. But… some do.

• Many journals especially value reviews of books by under-represented or marginalized persons. See the comment about interviews above.

• If the journal compensates, I tried to add this, whether money or in journal copy. Look for a $ sign if you’re looking for dollar signs.

• Journals often have different submission methods for book reviews. I tried to include the means of submission, whether by snail mail, email, Submittable, or an online system specific to the journal itself.

• I included word limits where I found them, though book reviews can run between 800 and 3000 words, depending on the journal. Micro-reviews between 300 and 500 words are also increasingly popular.

• I also distinguished by journals that want to be queried and journals that accept the review as a submission without prior querying.

• Unless the journal specifically addressed simultaneous submissions, I assume SS were fine and didn’t mention them.

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Places to Submit Book Reviews (esp. poetry)

4squarereview: Online. Publishes poetry reviews quarterly. Send 1,000-word reviews of contemporary books of poetry to 4squarereview@gmail.com. Focus on books published by small and independent presses.

3: AM Magazine: Online. Publishes poetry reviews & general criticism. Submit by email directly to nonfiction/criticism editor, Joseph Schreiber at jmesch78@gmail.com. Special attention given to literature in translation; experimental, postmodern and innovative literature; unconventional approaches to LGBTQ themes.

32 Poems: Print & online. Submittable. Prefer reviews over 1,000 words for sustained exploration. “Avoid passive voice. (Don’t tell us what the poems are, but rather consider how they act on a reader.)”

Adroit Journal: Online. Submittable. Accepts both reviews and interviews, though currently preferring interviews. Includes a list of books the editors want reviewed. Short application for reviews and interviews here (don’t worry, it’s not a resume…just a list of questions about what you want to review as well as the request for work sample).

AGNI: Online & print. 1,500-to-3,000-word review essays “that lift us to your singular inquiry-driven vantage: show us what your chosen book reveals to you that only you can show”. Query Reviews Editor Rachel Mennies or submit review directly online through portal.

American Book Review: Online. Query by email.

American Microreviews & Interviews: Online. Query by email. 7-10 sentence reviews.

American Poetry Review: Print & online. Accepts reviews and interviews of poetry books. Submittable.

Another Chicago Magazine: Online. Accepts review of all genres. Also interested in innovative review forms. Submittable.

Apofenie: Online. Opening its book review section soon. Query or email submissions to apofeniemagazine@gmail.com. Specify genre and include a three-sentence biographical statement.

Asian Review of Books: Online. Query by email to editor@asianreviewofbooks.com with details of your experience, interests and links to writing samples.

Aster(ix) Journal: Online & print. Focus on amplifying the voices of women of color. Query editor by email on WOC-authored books.

Asymptote: Online. Query by email. Focus on recently published/ forthcoming titles translated into English.

Barcelona Review: Online. Under 3000 words. Email submissions and queries to editor Jill Addams at editor@barcelonareview.com. Be sure to follow email instructions on the website. “Material should be related in some way to the world of books and writing; creative non-fiction (e.g., personal essays) that fits with the review is welcome. Literary criticism and academic pieces are not what we're after.”

Bending Genres: Online. Accepts “microviews”, or short reviews, of poetry and hybrid chapbooks or collections. Submittable. Contact Reviews Editor Emily Bertholf for details.

Berfrois: Online. Email editor Russell Bennetts directly to submit or query.

Big Other: Online. Accepts a variety of book reviews including poetry. Submittable. 6,000 words max. Also accepts interviews under 6,000 words via Submittable.

Borderlands Texas Poetry Review: Print & online. Accepts poetry reviews. Editors partial to reviews that include more than one book. 1500 max for general review, though this can be longer for multi-book reviews. Submittable.

BOXCAR Poetry Review: Print & online. Accepts reviews of first poetry collections, no chapbooks, and interviews between poets. Submittable. Reviews should engage the text (ie. close reading) and may either be academic or personal in their nature. Between 500-1500 words. Submit reviews here. For interviews, focus is on poets who have recently published first book. Editors prefer conversations between poets who already have some familiarity with each other. Query by email at interviews@boxcarpoetry.com and indicate "interview" in the header.

Boston Review: Print & online. Accepts variety of book reviews, including poetry. No chapbooks. Submittable. 5,000 words max.

Calyx: Print & online. Focus is on reviews of books written by women. Also accepts chapbook reviews. 500-1000 words for collections and 50-100 words for chapbooks. Use online submission system.

Chattahoochee Review: Print & online. Publishes poetry reviews and pays $150 per review. Submittable for final reviews or, alternately, you can query at tcr@gsu.edu about the possibility of a particular review or review essay.

Clarion Magazine: Online. Submittable. Email the editors at clarion@bu.edu for more information.

Cleaver Magazine: Online. Open to all kinds of reviews. Contact editors directly. For fiction and nonfiction reviews and interviews contact Michelle Fost at mfost@me.com. For poetry, email  Claire Oleson at olesonc@kenyon.edu.

Cleveland Review of Books: Online. Microreviews not paid, but longer reviews receive modest compensation. Query by email. Includes a guide for pitching as well as list of possible books. Focus is on books related to Midwest or authored by Midwestern authors.

Colorado Review: Print & online. Submittable. 750-1,000 words.

Compulsive Reader: Online. Accepts reviews in all genres. Submit reviews to editor Maggie Ball by email to maggieball@compulsivereader.com.

DIAGRAM: Online. Open to short (400-600 words) and long (2,000-4,000 words) review forms. “We like reviews that play with the genre, transcend the genre, do something unusual or fun, or just plain rock. We are particularly interested in reviews using unusual or unique forms.” Submit to reviews@thediagram.com.

Diode: Online. Accepts poetry reviews and interviews year round. Submit by email to submit@diodepoetry.com. Send in .doc format.

Dublin Review of Books: Online. Send by email to info@drb.ie. Between 900 and 1500 words.

EcoTheo Review: Online. Accepts reviews of all genres. Prefers 1300-1800 words. Query and submit by email to Reviews Editor Hannah VanDerHart at hannah@ecotheo.org.

Empty Mirror: Online. Accepts a variety of book reviews and interviews, though focus is on poetry and literary fiction.. Submittable. Reviews anywhere between 300 and 3,000 words. Interviews up to 10,000 words.

Entropy: Online. Submit by email. 600-2,000 words.

Event: Print & online. Contact Reviews Editor Susan Wasserman by sending an email to event@douglascollege.ca and mentioning reviews. Have a pitch or sample ready and read the reviews on their blog to get a sense of what editors want in length and style.

Fanzine: Online. Submit review by email to submissions@thefanzine.com.

FIVE: 2: ONE: Online & print. Submittable. Under 1000 words. Submit under Nonfiction category.

Fjords Review: Online & print. Accepts reviews of multiple genres as well as interviews. Submittable.

FORMA: Online & print. Accepts poetry reviews. Put review and subject in the subject line of email and submit to FORMAmag@circeinstitute.com.

Full Stop: Online. Focuses on debuts, works in translation, and books published by small presses. Submit by email to reviews editors.

Gasher Journal: Online. Focus on book reviews for small press works only. 1,000-2,000 words. Submittable.

Gettysburg Review: Print. Only accept essay-reviews comparing multiple books.

Georgia Review: Print & online. No SS. Standard reviews which focus on one book (typically 3–5 double-spaced pages) and essay-reviews which compare multiple books on a theme (typically 10-20 double-spaced pages).

Gigantic Sequins: Print. Submittable. Pays in copy of journal.

Glass Poetry Journal: Online. Accepts reviews of poetry chapbooks, anthologies, and collections. Submit using online submissions manager and clicking “reviews” as genre.

Gravel: Online. Accepts poetry book reviews. Open during academic year for submissions. Submittable.

Green Mountains Review: Print & online. Accepts poetry and fiction book reviews. Submittable. For unsolicited reviews, make sure to include a cover letter.

Grist: Online & print. Accepts reviews of all genres published by indie or academic presses. Around 700 words. Also have lists of books they’d like reviewed. f you have an interest in reviewing for Grist, email Reviews Editor Sarah Yancy at schatela@vols.utk.edu.

Guernica: Online. Submittable. Accepts book reviews & interviews. Less than 2,500 words. Submit in Shortform Nonfiction category.

Harvard Review: Doesn’t generally accept unsolicited reviews but if you are interested in reviewing please write to reviews@harvardreview.org describing the kind of books you would be interested in reviewing and enclosing one or more recent clips.

Headcannon Magazine: Online. Email submissions.

Heavy Feather Review: Online & print. Accepts poetry reviews. Maintains list of books currently available for review. Email about any reviews or interviews.

Hoot: Online, or on the back of a postcard when possible. Less than 150 words. Must be of a recently published book (within the last year) published by an indie or small press.

Hudson Review: Print. No SS.

Identity Theory: Online. Submit by email to editor, Matt Borondy.

Iowa Review: Print & online. Submittable. Accepts unsolicited reviews during fall semester only.

KGB Bar Online Review: Online. If you would like to review a book, send a pitch to kgbbarmag@gmail.com. We encourage you to write to us before beginning to draft the review-essay. There is no strict word limit to critical reviews; depending on the title, they can range from under 1,000 words to much longer.

Kenyon Review: Online. 1,000 to 1,200 words. Written for a general-interest literary audience. $50 compensation for online publication. Submittable.

La Piccioletta Barca: Accepts interviews under 8,000 words.

Lantern Review: Print & online. Accepts reviews of recent poetry collections. Under 3,000 words. Submit via online system.

Latin American Literature Today: Print & online. Focus on reviews of contemporary Latin American literature, including poetry. 500 to 1,200 words. See book review style guide. Email reviews to Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, Book Reviews Editor, at  book.reviews.editor.lalt@ou.edu.

Little Stone Journal:  Mostly poetry reviews. Under 2,000 words. Send as many as 3 by email.

Los Angeles Review: Print & online. Accepts fiction, CNF, and poetry reviews. 800 to 1,400 words.Prefers not to publish titles that have received significant media exposure. Include the book’s title, author’s name, name of the press, publication date, and ISBN in upper left corner before review. Include short 3rd person bio of reviewer at bottom of the review. Engage the book in reflection, social commentary, and/or thoughtful critique. No summarizing or book-bashing reviews. Email reviews to reviewassist@losangelesreview.org.

Marlboro Review: Print. Snail-mail submission. Doesn’t read subs during the summer.

Michigan Quarterly Review: Online. Under 3,000 words. Submittable.

Necessary Fiction: Online. Focus is fiction. Maintains a running list of fiction books for writers to review. Contact by email with requests at reviews@necessaryfiction.com.

Nervous Breakdown: Temporarily closed for book review submissions “but check back soon.”

New Delta Review: Print & online. Accepts book reviews and interviews. Submittable.

New England Review of Books: Online. Accepts all genre reviews. Pitch or query your review directly to editors@nerobooks.org,

New Orleans Review: Online. Accepts reviews of all genres. Also interested in reviews of books that have been largely neglected (often publications from small/independent presses) in the past 5, 10, 15, or even 20 years. 500 - 1500 words. Submittable.

New Southern Fugitives: Online. Pays $50 per book review. Under 2,000 words. Submittable.

On the Seawall: Online. Accepts poetry reviews. Submit or query by email (with work attached as a Word doc) to Ron Slate at seawallsubmissions[at]gmail[dot]com. 

PANK: Online. Accepts reviews of books of all genres and author interviews. Submittable.

Periodicities: Online. Open to submissions of previously unpublished poetry-related reviews, interviews and essays. Submit as .doc with author biography to periodicityjournal@gmail.com.

Pleiades: Print & online. 800-1200 words. Accepts submissions between Dec. 1 and January 1 every year. Submit using online submission system and mark genre as “book reviews for Pleiades”. Favorable to experimental reviews—reviews that borrow from creative nonfiction, adopt a unique form, compare something new to something old, etc.—as well as “retro-reviews,” or reviews that considered books published at an earlier time through a new lens, perhaps in context with newer books. Query Reviews Editor Taneum Bambrick you are interested in doing a three-minute review for online publication only. For a sample three-minute review, click here. 

Poet’s Quarterly: Online. Accepts poetry reviews and interviews. 500-2,000 words. Email reviews to reviews@poetsquarterly.com.Email interviews to interviews@poetsquarterly.com.

Poetry: Print & online. Poetry review essays. “We strongly prefer pieces that are not single-book reviews, but rather review essays that discuss two or three books in light of larger matters.” 1,200 - 1,500 words. Submittable.

Poetry Cafe: Online. Focus is on poetry chapbooks. Query editor by email for submission guidelines at risa@thepoetrycafe.online.

Poetry Flash: Online. Snail mail. Query first.

Poetry Northwest: Print & online. Accepts reviews for poetry collections, including longford. Query editors Aaron Barrell & Erin Malone at editors(at)poetrynw.org.

Porter House Review: Online. Voice-driven reviews. Under 2,000 words.

Portland Review: Online. Between 1,200-2500 words. Submittable.

Prairie Schooner: Print & online. 1,000 words max. Submittable.

Prospectus: Online & print. Reviews of chapbooks, full-length collections of poetry, short-story collections, first novels, and art books. The piece reviewed must have been published no longer than one year before submission of the review. 250-300 words and include the publisher’s name and cost of the book. Reviews may also appear on the Prospectus website. Email to Celia Alvarez at editor@hambysterpublishing.com.

Rain Taxi: Online. Submit reviews by email. Around 500 words.

Rhythm & Bone Press: Online. Plans to start accepting book reviews. Query editor by email.

Sabotage Reviews: Online. Accepts reviews for poetry chapbooks as well as anthologies and collections. 500-1,000 words. Read submission guidelines and submit by email to appropriate editor.

Salamander: Print & online. Accepts poetry book reviews. Online submission manager and limited reading period. Query reviews editor Valerie Duff-Strautm.

Sewanee Review: Online & print. Word count: 10,000. Submittable.

Sonora Review: Online & print. 3,000 words max. Submittable or pitch by email. Also accepts interviews under 4,000 words.

Southeast Review. Print & online. Accepts reviews from all genres of books by small presses all year. Prefer single book reviews. 800- 1,200 words. Submit book reviews by email to Reviews Editor at serbookreview@gmail.com. For interview submissions, use Submittable.

Southern Humanities Review: Online. Submittable.

Southern Review of Books: Online. Accepts reviews & interviews in all genres of books related to American South. Email at editors@southernreviewofbooks.com with a link to your writing (no attachments, please). Covers new books the same month they’re published, and avoid conflicts of interest when assigning review coverage (i.e., no personal connections between critics and authors).

Split Lip Magazine: Online. Looking for smart, compelling book reviews and author interviews (or interviews of people in the publishing industry). Reviews should be roughly 800 words and are published online within a month or so of the book publication date. Interviews from 1,000 to 1,500 words. Use online query/submission form.

Stirring: Online. Accepts poetry reviews. Up to 700 words. Submit by e-mail to Katie Culligan at
stirring.reviews@gmail.com.

Tarpaulin Sky: Online & print. Email review to reviews@tarpaulinsky.com. If you have never reviewed for them before, send a brief cover letter with review history and links.

Temz Review: Print & online. Query at thetemzreview@gmail.com. Interested in reviews of Canadian small press titles and works in translation.

The Bind: Online. A review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Preference for creative review forms. Pitches, queries, or completed reviews (creative or traditional) can be emailed to the.bind.reviews [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Cafe Review: Print & online. Reviews of poetry books. Payment is two copies of journal. Prefer brief reviews under 600 words. Submit by email to mgrumbling@thecafereview.com.

The Chapbook Review: Online. Reviews chapbooks in various genres. Contact using online form to query editors.

The Festival Review: Print & online.

The Nonconformist: Online. Submit reviews by email.

The Point: Online & print. 1,500-3,000 words. Compensation for print issue.

The Puritan: Online. Submittable. Focus on Canadian literature. Submit book reviews under “Essays”. Pays $100 per review.

The Rumpus: Online. Accepts fiction/other reviews & poetry reviews. 1,200–2,500 words. Submittable. For interviews, email Monet Patrice Thomas at monet@therumpus.net.

The Rupture: Online. Direct queries to rupture.reviews@gmail.com.

The Sun: Print & online. Accepts interview pitches. Submittable. Pays $1000-$2000 for piece.

Tinderbox Poetry: Online. Accepts reviews for poetry collections and chapbooks. Submittable. 500-800 words for a chapbook/micro/nontraditional review. 750-1000 words for a full length collection review. Reviews editor Sarah Ann Winn.

Tint Journal: Online. Reviews & interviews related to ESL writers. Between 700 and 3,000 words. Email submissions.

Triangle House: Online. Seeking book reviews and interviews for our their new quarantine blog, Housebound. Pitch by email at becca@triangle.house.

Triquarterly: Print & online. Only interviews. Pays $ honoraria.

Under a Warm Green Linden: Online. Submittable. Accepts interviews and reviews of poetry books. Over 800 words. SS discouraged but journal responds in less than 3 weeks.

Vagabond City Lit: Online. Accepts poetry reviews with special interest in chapbooks. 400-800 words. Submit by email to Bob at vagabondcityliterary@gmail.com

Valparaiso Poetry Review: Print & online. Submit review by email to editor Edward Byrne at VPR@valpo.edu.

Vitni Review: Online. Submit reviews by email.

Virginia Quarterly Review: Print & online. Between 2,000-2,400 words. Pays $500.

Washington Independent Review of Books: Online. Accepts pitches for interviews, pieces about books, authors, reading, and writing formatted as essays, commentary, lists, book news, event coverage, interviews, etc. We pay $25 per accepted submission; there are no kill fees. Email pitches to: editor@washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com. No unsolicited book reviews.

Whale Road Review: Online. Accepts poetry reviews of all lengths. 300-500 words. “We want to publish reviews of poetry and short prose in whatever forms you find them: full-length books, chapbooks, anthologies, albums, other literary journals, reading series, performances, unconventional literary events, etc. We prefer to publish reviews that were written because the reviewer fell in love with the work and needed to tell others about it. Please send reviews as an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf) to whaleroadreview@gmail.com with REVIEW as the subject line.”

West Branch: Online & print. Query with a sample by email to westbranch@bucknell.edu. Reviews are compensated with money.

World Literature Today: Online & print. Send book review to book reviews editor Rob Vollmar at robvollmar@ou.edu.

A few outlets that focus on reviewing fiction

Fiction Southeast: Online. Accepts reviews of short story collections (preferably collections of flash or micro shorts). Also likes interviews with authors of short story collections. Submittable.

“It seems to me that the goal of the poetry critic is to bring certain books into the public arena, to serve as a conscientious curator to contemporary poetry.”

— Ada Limón

A few excellent ways into the poetry review

I can’t say enough about Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ list of “Poetry Questions” as a resource for reviewing books as well as individual poems. It is magic I keep close. Matthew Zapruder’s “Show Your Work” engages the specific act of “talking about” poetry on the page—and how this looks, sounds, and feels. On more immediate questions, I love Rae Armantrout’s “Poetic Silence” and Mary Ruefle’s “Notes On Tone” and Kazim Ali’s “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Binaries” and pretty much anything you find about reviewing that is available for free in the 2013 issue of This Evening Will Come devoted to reviews and reviewing.

A few inspiring & innovative ways to review or engage books

Aisha Sabatini Sloan, “Review of Renee Gladman’s Calamities” (Tsky)

Angie Sijun Lou, “Chen Chen’s Dreams: A Review of When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities” (American Poetry Review)

Anjali Enjeti, “Now You See Me: Three Asian-American Poets on Visibility” (Georgia Review)

Ander Monson, “The Skeptical Gaze” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Ander Monson, “Review of Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge” (DIAGRAM)

Austen Leah Rose, “Touching Time: The Poetry and Performance of Charles Simic” (Poetry Northwest)

Carrie Chappell, “Did Not Shave My Legs For This: A Conversation With Kristin Sanders’ Cuntry in Three Line Dances” (Fanzine)

Dana Levin, “I am Happiest, Here, Now!”: Arthur Sze’s Poetry of Witness: The Ginkgo Light” (AGNI)

Dorothy Chan, “Review of A Nail the Evening Hangs On” (Split Lip Magazine)

Francis Cannon, “Review of Taneum Baumbrick’s Vantage” (Green Mountains Review)*

Gabrielle Bates, “Review of Fanny Choi’s Soft Science” (RHINO)

Hannah VanDerHart, “Choosing Love As Asylum” (AGNI)

Jamison Crabtree, “Review of Carleen Tibbetts, DATACLYSM.jpg” (DIAGRAM)

Jane Huffman, “Dorah Malech’s Flourish” (Iowa Review)

Julia Bouwsma, “My Body Is A Holler: (Dis)embodiment and Landscape in Taneum Bambrick’s Vantage, Savannah Sipple’s WWJD and Other Poems, and Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System” (Poetry Northwest)

Julie Marie Wade, “An Atlas of Unmappables: Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems” (The Rumpus)

Laura Maher, “The Fragmented Quest: A Review of L.I. Henley’s Starshine Road (The Bind)

Madeline Wattenberg, “Mapping the Body in Jena Osman’s Motion Studies” (The Bind)

Marcos Santiago Gonsales, “Staging An Epidemic: What is AIDS to you?” (The New Inquiry)

Maria C. Goodson, “Poetry My Dad Would Like, And Why That’s a Good Thing” (Atticus Review)

Marlin M. Jenkins, “Equilibrium: Review Ending in a Found Q & A” (The Bind)

Oana Sanziana Marian, “In the Time that Remains: Reflections on the Poetry of Derek Mahon” (The Yale Review)

Sarah McCarry, “The Taiga Syndrome: Or, A Haunting” (TOR)

Sejal A. Shah, “Ritual as Resolution: Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon” (Kenyon Review)

Stacey Balkun, “Fusion & Fissures in Conjoining by Heidi Czerwiec” (The Bind)

Robert Wrigley, “The Gift: On Sylvia Plath” (Fogged Clarity)

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A few angles into reviewing poetry books (i.e. questions worth asking the mind that has become a tree stump when staring at the page)

1. Theme. What is the book about? What does the poet want to do with this book? Keep this in mind while reviewing—a review isn’t about what you want from the book but about what the book wants to give. The question is how the poet accomplishes this.

2. Title. How does the title shape or relate to the poems? Is there a conceptual relationship the poet wants to establish or challenge? Are there any algorithms or equations being set up or displaced by or in the poems? How are the individual poem titles used to advance the theme or tone of the book? Are titles used to subvert naming conventions? If so, how and why?

3. Dialogue. Is the poet in dialogue with or conversant with other poets and poems? If so, which ones? Why? What other art forms or media does the poet introduce? How do these alternate forms of media inform the poems or thematic matter?

4. Address. Are the poems addressed to a visible "you" or an invisible one? How does the direct address shape the texture of time in the poems?

5. Repetitions. Make a list of words or images that are repeated. How does the poet use or rely on these images? What does the poet ask them to carry? What connotations are carried forward and which (if any) are carefully peeled off? Why? In what context?

6. Current events. Do the poems engage any current events? If so, how? Examine the context. Then examine it again.

7. Syntax is defined as the arrangement of words by which their connection and relation in a sentence is shown. How does the poet use syntax? How are conjunctions used? How is punctuation used, and is it performative?

8. Is any particular type of expertise being depicted or challenged in these poems? Are there any discursive considerations? If so, do the challenges occur at the formal level or at the level of grammar and syntax? Why? How?

9. Who is the I? How big or restrictive is it? Are any objects or places asked to stand in for an I or a We? How so?

10. Setting. Where are the poems set--does it vary or revolve around a single place that is fleshed out? How important is setting to these poems--is there a pastoral theme, an eco-poetic involvement, a regionalism? Why?

11. Lists. What, if anything, is being inventoried or listed?

12. Time. What is absolute and what is contingent in these poems? What is capable of changing? How does this relate to tone, if at all? How is time treated, whether by tense or chronology or cracks in both?

13. Organization. If the book is divided into sections, make a brief map of each section and where it goes. Stare at the titles and epigraphs and treat them as rivulets leading into the river of the text. How do they interact with the poems? 

14. Overarching threads. Have you included at least three good quotes from the poems themselves? How have you tied those quotes to your general observations about the book?

15. If you are reviewing a minority poet, try to engage the text at the level of formal concerns. This is a conversation I keep hearing.

16. Formalist close reading. Consider reviewing from a structuralist or linguistic or semiotic lens if you are comfortable playing tennis on that court. But don’t force the game. Don’t force a formalist lens on a text if you can’t actually see through it.

17. Aim for nuance rather than generality. Save the meta for the sermons. We are flooded by so many generalities and trends that sometimes it feels impossible to see the details.

Questions for poetry revision

Inauthenticity appears in the belief that one can attend a costume party disguised as one's self.

This is the thought I measure myself against when entering the room of revisions. When straddling the multiverse between poet and persona, or the mask adopted by the author that offers a public version of the author's self, a distorted version of that self, or a fictional character.

To some degree, persona protects you by creating a distance between the voice on the page and the person living a life, failing. Ideally, revision is where the interaction between persona and poet sharpens into voice. But it’s still gruesome and difficult for me, still the most disorienting part of process. I need prodding, prompting, and encouragement when it comes to paring down and deciding what I want from the poem—or what the poem wants from the world. And how. .

So I’m sharing a few questions I give myself in revising, followed by revision resources crafted by others.

Questions for the Poet

1. Does the metaphor carry its weight? Does it feel accidental or sloppy?

2. Have you followed your fascination like a monk into the soul's monstrosity?

3. Are you skimming a pretty surface?

4. Are you writing what haunts you, even if it makes you look bad?

5. Are you writing to look good? How is that interesting or relevant to others?

6. Do the words link arms like drunks on a city street, their song tangling, rising suddenly like an accident that absolves us of money for the damned?

7. Are you wearing a costume or taking one off?

8. Did you drop freedom fries on the floorboard and hope to get away with the untouched cliche?

9. Are you all-in on glibness? Why?

10. Does your anger at the world include your role in its sustenance?

11. Is your gaze ableist or boutique-hearted?

12. Does dependency seek to present itself as the poem's golden glove?

13. Why are you whispering?

14. Why are you shouting?

15. Where do you stand in relation to the stadium?

16. Are you writing in hopes of rousing or arousing the audience? (If your mind immediately grabbed to the sexual connotation of “arousing'“, that might be a separate thing worth poeming.)

17. Would the poem still matter if you walked past a magnificent mural that said the same thing? 

18. Did you get what you wanted from the endnote? If so, did you brocade a complicated lie just to get there?

19. Is there a sequel?

20. Is there a statement when what you meant was less stable, more querulous, closer to the marvel of a question?

21. Are you subverting a form effectively? If so, why? If not, why are you clinging to the idea of form for this poem? At what point does changing the rules become a different game? What is the significance?

22. Did you remove an adverb because someone told you that good poems don’t have adverbs? Why did you believe them when so many poems you admire suffer from allegation of adverbing? If you are Catholic about adverbs, consider being a lapsed Catholic for the poem.

23. If the poem is a room, what is the background music? Is it distracting?

24. Is it a prose poem? What are you getting from its lineation? What is the poetic line in this poem—and why?

25. What makes it feel finished? It is connected to another poem? Is it the start of a series or something that stands alone?

Ultimately, I don’t believe in finished “products”—I believe in the process of poeming. Consumerism conditions us to think in terms of products, to write for a market, to manage expectations with an eye to sales. But the poem doesn’t give a damn about sales. The poem may be published in one form only to reappear in a collected works with different line breaks, syntax, white space.

The question of when a poem is “finished” is the most difficult question for me as both a writer and a reader. I think Danish poet and writer Inger Christensen lays the stakes out best with a simple question:

"Is it at all possible to learn to write poems in a way that will make them seem important to read out loud to a cockroach?"

I leave you with peace, love, life—and a few more wanton butterflies to chase down the road….

The Condition of Secrecy by Inger Christensen (New Directions Books)

“Trust Poetry: An interview with Ada Limon” (BOMB Magazine)

Nick Ripatrazone’s “In Praise of Poems That End With Questions” (The Millions)

Excerpt from Hadestown by Kim Triedman (Talking Writing)

“The Art of Negotiation” by Meghan Privitello (The Volta)

The sonic art of sentence-making: Why I love Garielle Lutz

1.

Or what I learned about honoring the sentence from Garielle Lutz.

I adore the The Paris Review. And I’ve never loved it more than I do now, under the keen eye editorial eyeof Emily Nemens. —So when it showed up on my doorstep the other day, of course I couldn’t not read Mona Simpson’s “Art of Fiction” interview with Alice McDermott.

Enter the trifling art of disclaimer required by the rise of literal Bible readings that allow people to strip a statement out of context and invent an evidence for whatever they’re claiming to know for fact. Enter, specifically, the disclaimer that says I admire Alice McDermott’s beautiful novels —and her treatment of sentence as a facet of each novel’s voice—but I’m not convinced by her disdain for “a sentence that seeks to dazzle,” a position that walks that like a stylistic preference but talks like a Sunday school ethics. To be fair and quote McDermott herself:

“As a writer, I also see sentence-making as the ultimate test of authorial ego. As soon as a sentence calls attention to itself, demonstrates how clever the author is, how astute, how talented, I know something’s gone wrong. The writer is no longer at the service of her words, the words are serving the writer. Each sentence needs to be entirely necessary to the work as a whole, and yet each sentence needs to be full of humility. A sentence that seeks to dazzle is merely annoying. A sentence that dazzles even as it deflects our amazement, graciously leading us to the next, is a sentence worth keeping.”

But it is really this easy? A good sentence is not always gracious. A good sentence may be a terrible house-guest. A good sentence may demand all the breath in one’s lungs to survive it. I’ve come to believe that a good sentence, like any invention, asks for mercy in surprising ways.

Good short stories demand sentences that exist outside the perpetuation of ambiance. I’m not sure if McDermott’s statement bothers me more as a “female” (who has learned the fine art of setting tables and whispering to be heard) or as a writer (who hopes that we risk the shitty falsetto high notes in an effort to deepen the stakes of the page). Given how Proust changed the frame as well as the syntax, I can’t even be sure “humility” describes sentence in a meaningful, continuous way.

More than any other living writer, it was Garielle Lutz who showed me how to grab a sentence’s arm and twist it until the sentence said mercy.

Enter their canonical-for-me lecture, “The Sentence Is A Lonely Place.” Note how Lutz frames the writer’s responsibility at the sentence-level:

“The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustro­phobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.”

And again, a few paragraphs of heaven later:

“…the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech….The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.”

Every single sentence should earn its right to exist on the page.

And “humble” sentences can oversell plot, and bring as much of the author into the sentence as an extravagant sentence. Is someone revealing less of their own “style” when they invite us into a minimalist bedroom rather than a baroque one?

Is it really the case that an author reveals their vanity by writing in a way that resembles a red velvet bedspread? And where would McDermott’s position leave Diane Williams or Grace Paley or Silvina Ocampo?

2.

Destabilized punctuation allows us to apply leverage at the micro-level, the half-breath, the precarious.

Lutz taught me to love the hyphen. Or, rather, they wrote a few sentences on this subject that made my embrace of the hyphen feel both natural and humanitarian in the baroquest way:

The hyphen, though, is the sweetest of punctuation marks, because it unites words into couples (and sometimes threesomes and foursomes). It’s an embracer. It does most of its most important business in front of nouns, and its business is to make things clearer. If somebody were teaching a workshop devoted to short fiction, for instance, too many people would describe it as a “short fiction workshop.” But that would mean it was a fiction workshop of brief duration. A hyphen between “short” and “fiction” would formalize the union of the two words, and they would together serve, in conjugal fashion, as a single adjective. But not all of the words in adjectival compounds preceding nouns should be hitched together with hyphens. You should never force a hyphen into the space between an adverb ending in “ly” and an adjective or a participle (“a nicely-turned phrase” is always wrong), but if the word ending in “ly” is an adjective, a hyphen is required (“a sickly-looking dog”). Things get very, very complicated when a noun is preceded by an adjectival compound whose first word is an adverb not ending in “ly.” Do you write “a once popular singer” or “a once-popular singer”? A few years ago, trying to recover from a traumatic breakup, I made a study of hyphenation patterns in the New Yorker magazine back when William Shawn was in charge. I made the hyphen my lifeline, and I put my trust in William Shawn and his grammar genius, Eleanor Gould Packard. I noticed that the New Yorker would publish a formation like “a not too pleasant afternoon” but also “a not-quite-pleasant afternoon.” A phrase like “a once-happy child” would sport a hyphen, but “a once promising student” would not, so I concluded that you put a hyphen after “once” if it’s followed by an adjective, but you leave the phrase unhyphenated if “once” is followed by a participle. I tried my best to suss out all of the underlying patterns (I was really, really grieving, and may have been missing all the obvious points), and I compiled a biggish list. But I started finding inconsistencies: something like “an ever so delicate girl” would show up in one issue and “an ever-so-prissy girl” in another; something like “a much recorded song” in one article and “a much-visited city” in another. A further source of big trouble for me was whether to hyphenate an adjectival compound that follows a linking verb. Do you write “She is well thought of” or “She is well-thought-of”? None of the manuals addressed this matter to my satisfaction, so I again turned to the New Yorker for guidance. I eventually fell in love with somebody else and slept deeply for a while.

I think the hyphen is scary, heavy, unwieldily, prone to burlesque. I think Lutz offers us a way of learning to “handle” the tools that appear off-putting or dangerous. I think he deserves a hyphen-garland for that.

3.

Verbal frottage gives rise to “acoustical daisy chains”.

I read Lutz's short fiction, “Nothing Clarion Came of Her Either,” again and again, trying to understand its strange subject-verb juxtapositions and rattling language. How do you make words rub together like that? And why do I re-read Lutz in a way I’ve never considered re-reading McDermott?

In an interview with Ross Simonini, Lutz described the process of verbal frottage that happens inside a sentence as “largely intuitive and probably unnatural”:

“….a lot of what I seem to be doing when I try to get from one end of a sentence to the other—a crossing that can take hours, days, weeks—is introducing words to each other that in ordinary circumstance would never meet. I might pair them off because they share a throbbing interior vowel or the same consonantal shell, or because I have some other hunch that they belong together, even though anyone else might write them off as entirely incompatible. I guess I work my way through a sentence by instigating these relationships—a perverse sort of matchmaking, apparently—and then to keep the words from getting too cozy, I might reach for an uncustomary preposition that plunges the sentence into some queasy depths.“

Part of this is rooted in the discovery of “acoustical daisy chains”, which Lutz attributes to Gordon Lish. Here’s how Lutz describes an acoustical daisy chain:

“..in the most favorable of circumstances, a sentence-starting word at long last presents itself, and the language at large gets wind of this little instigation, and then whichever word in particular is feeling itself to be the most acoustically sympathetic to the first word will eventually throw itself at it, and then a third word arrives on the scene and senses an affinity with what the first two are doing and figures itself into the emerging pattern. If you can keep this up, if every word has such deep attraction to its neighbors to the left and to the right, the prose coheres and takes on a distinct character or tonality.”

This jostles the syntax, so you might find an intransitive verb being given a direct object, as Fiona Maazel does here, where the s-sounds call out for each other in that final section, the addicts begging for a strong verb like “collides” to make noise at the molecular level:

“I’ll note the odds of these people finding each other in this group; our sundry pasts and principles; the entropy that collides addicts like so many molecules".”

Natural acoustical adhesives include alliteration, assonance, a predominance of stressed syllables within each sentence, and associative linkages that mine the subterranean level of connotation and sonic charge.

4.

Sam Lipsyte’s does Lutzish things.

Justin Taylor’s “Craft Talk Nobody Asked For” which excavates Sam Lipsyte’s novels for Lutzian sentence-making, bowled right up my alley of preferences. It’s an attentive, detailed breakdown of Lipsyte’s fiction that deserves a close read by novelists.

And I’d like to include a Lipsyte-Lutz observation of my home, taken from Lipsyte’s novel, Homeland:

“Some nights,” I said, “I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.”

Breaking the lines in this short segment could easily create a poem. Notice that nothing quite follows—the motion is associative but held together tightly by syllabic rhythm and beat.

5.

Plot isn’t the only way to tell a story.

Lutz challenges the role of plot by borrowing from the eye of the camera:

“I think that movies are the ideal medium for getting characters from one place to another without making a big deal out of routine movement, and at the same time you can get the colors of the rooms or the neighborhoods, the weather, and emotionally convenient music on the soundtrack. Nobody has to come out with dulling declarations of “Then she got into the car” or “There he goes to the bathroom again.” How-to books on the short story instruct writers to block out scenes as plays in miniature. Something in me wants to counter: Then why not just write a play or movie script instead? Why not try to do in a sentence or paragraph what can’t be done in a shot or filmic sequence? Anyway, I am not one for plots—I think I recall somebody having remarked that the word “plot” itself gives off a whiff of burial dirt—and I find the concept of “cause and effect” to be tediously overrated.”

I can’t imagine reading anything by Denis Johnson and failing to notice he brings the same wandering lens to the page.

6.

Poetic prose isn’t always purple isn’t always poetry.

Lutz observes that the border erected between poetry and fiction “seems less secure than ever.”

“A lot of writing passes back and forth without anyone summoning the authorities. Some people have told me that what I write is poetry, that it could be laid out as such. But I am a sucker for the old notions of poetry and would never think of my paragraphic jitter in that light. Besides, regarding my stuff as prose is a much more cost-efficient use of paper. The reader gets a full page.”

Though Lutz refuses to grant a genre-switch, they acknowledges their sentences’ sonic relationship to poetry. And I think the incredible sonic spasm of sentences, including those of Lucia Berlin and Deb Olen Unferth and many others, often set apart the interesting from the fascinating.

Sven Bikerts compares Lutz to poet John Ashbery in an interesting way:

The overall effect of a Lutz piece is not unlike what we experience reading a John Ashbery poem, and for a similar reason. For Ashbery uses the heightened expectancy that attends the poetic event to intensify our awareness of his dreamy non-sequences, their language and their a-logical shifts. Looking for a poem, we give the words on the page extra weight, and in the resulting disequilibrium we encounter the peculiar and deeply familiar sensations of our ambient late-modernity. Lutz makes comparably cunning use of the expectations we bring to the story form and the movement of narrative to crisis and resolution. His is a similarly deflationary aesthetic.

A “deflationary aesthetic.” Though I see more similarity between Lutz and Albert Goldbarth than John Ashbery, Bikerts’ comparison identities the tonality of unmooredness that results from syntactical reversals of expectation doing the work of plot.

7.

Hug Mark Yakich.

And I would be lying through my unbrushed teeth if I didn’t admit that I cried a little when Mark Yakich blurbed my fiction collection with a special eye to my sentence-making and a nod to Lutz. I would be lying and crying.

Instead, I’m encouraging you to check out this new collection by an incredible poet and human being. Thanking the stars and seahorses for him.

18 ways to start a poem or talk to birds

1.

With an assertive statement or sweeping claim, a gauntlet you want to drop for the sake of circling it.

Tomaz Salamun begins “Totems On Back Roads” with the statement:

“There is no difference between a murderer
and a sip of wine.”

Then he proceeds to circle the gauntlet (and poke or enjamb) the next line:

“Delight in stopping
the flow of blood.”

And the reader circles it with the poet until finding one’s self encircled is the turn.

2.

In the middle of an interesting action, all senses wired to it.

Like Alice Bolin begins “Why Not Me” with:

”When I close my ears with cotton balls
all I hear is my weird brain rustling.”

3.

In an orgy of sonorous syntax that sets the beat and readies the breath.

Like Sasha West in “How To Abandon Ship”:

“Cows calve, horses foal, goats kid, but women do not child.”

West jimmies verb against adverb straight through the poem.

4.

In an epistolary entreaty to a surprising object.

Dear bird, dear branch, dear ringworm that ruined my life in second grade…

See Carmen Giminez Smith’s opening to “First Coda”:

“Dear poem. do no justice”

Or Sarah Burke’s “Dear Desert”, addressed to an improper noun made intimate:

“I expected a wasteland of dead rock
whittled to dust. Instead I found you.”

5.

With a strange memory that frames the poem and sets the stage.

Megan Peak’s poem “Sex Ed” starts straight puts the reader in the chair right away:

“I remember wondering whether hips were like cake.”

6.

With a negative assertion, on the X-is-not foot.

Like Megan Peak’s “Suburban Requiem” launches into a litany of what is buried, or what must not be the case:

“No girl-tongue in the mouth. No street of magnolias.”

None of the props integral to the place.

7.

In the middle of a memoir or diary you’ve been reading, in a space with no past and no future.

I can’t stop thinking about what Sylvia Plath journaled on July 17, 1955:

“I cannot live for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes & makes, spinning its web.”

I feel like you could pinch any small fragment from this entry and wind up face-first in a poem.

8.

As a completion or modification of the title.

Claire Wahmonholm begins her poem, “In the Land Where Everything Is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter A New Phase of My Life In Which It Would Be Very Bad If I Died”, with:

“because now there is a child and its mother is burning
with rapture and terror and has my eyes and teeth.”

Note that the poet doesn’t capitalize the first letter of the first line.

9.

With an “if” statement or hypothetical that lays down the terms of the image debate.

As in “Beyond Love” by Emma Bolden, which begins so perfectly:

“If the saints are to be believed..”

10.

In the middle of emotional sparseness, with only the bones, the rawness, the statement of facts.

See Jenny George’s exquisite “I Love You.”

11.

In the accusatory tone, with finger pointed, drawing reader into complicity.

See how Rae Armantrout does this in “Distribution”:

“You think category
isn’t sexy, isn’t
sex. Seems you’re wrong.”

Notice how the lack of question sets the tone and prepares the reader.

12.

By quoting lines from another poem.

Like Matthew Olzmann does in “Letter Beginning With Two Lines by Czeslaw Milosz”:

“You who I could not save,
Listen to me.”

13.

With a sensory ambiance that will be rubbed to elicit a refrain or a restatement.

Kwame Dawes begins “On Blindness”:

“These may be the edges of a long gloom—”

And then spends the poem filling out this long gloom, using the word again in different places so that it feels both ordinary and extraordinary. Thickening this ambiance with repetitive use of a kinned word like “shadows”. Layering the surface with a sort of blending technique that reminds me of pastel painting.

Note how the title helps the reader “see” the coming darkness.

14.

With an abstract statement that lifts the eye from the page.

Like Carl Phillips in his impeccable poem, “Civilization”:

“There’s an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and ongoingness like
that of song until at last”

Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind— losing as an art form. Note how Phillips repeats the first line at the end of the poem only to turn it. Take note of how he does this.

15.

With a bad pun.

Like Jeffrey McDaniel’s line in “Play It Again, Salmonella”:

“I’m a card-carrying member of a canceled party.”

McDaniels doesn’t start with the pun. But he could. And you can.

16.

With a matter of fact that isn’t, quite.

Like Anne Carson in “Wildly Constant”:

“Sky before dawn is blackish green.”

Carson veers back and forth between what she experiences/perceives and what something means while querying the act of signing or signaling at its root.

17.

With a title that involves a list or lays out the list a poem will attempt to provide.

Dick Allen’s “What You Have To Get Over” starts:

“Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,
the blue one, especially.”

The reader knows what Allen will do even as he switches into providing context and then going back to listing, back and forth, the movement.

18.

With an off scientific fact or statistic.

I can’t think of the title off the top of my head, but Brandon D’Amico does this in his recent collection from Gold Wake Press. …And there’s always a plentiful array of random data on the last page of Harper’s magazine.

sources & additional re/sources

Random notebook entries + this amazing list by Mike Young + Elisa Gabbert’s blog (and anything you can find by her on poetry) + Six awesome poets on how they begin a poem + “Best opening lines in poetry” +

What to add to a poem that acts "as if" it feels neglected

1. An unexpected acorn.

2. The movements of a mother’s face as she repudiates longsuffering.

3. A long-suffering velvet recliner.

4. An unexpected metaphor or description of joy. I’m thinking of when Ross Gay wrote that something “truly filled my heart with flamingos.”

5. A subversion of the word “rapacious”.

6. A hex.

7. A historic earthquake or volcanic eruption that family members have mentioned.

8. A Xerox copy of something.

9. An explicit reference to another poem in which you are referring to a poem by someone else. In the poem about colored pencils.

10. A furry mammal you haven’t anthropomorphized for the purpose of the poem or pleasure.

11. A tired O. The opposite of an ecstatic O. An O that generates suspense.

12. A line from a poem by Mary Jo Bang.

13. The word “syntax” in scare quotes. Possibly with reference to a body part.

14. A sin tax dressed up like a poll tax.

15. An I-statement that suffers from non-sequitur.

16. What Ross Gay calls “an event illegible except for its unfathomable beauty”. Which may involve fireflies.

17. An invented business establishment or office. Like the “Bureau of Sad Endings” that appears midway through a poem by David Berman.

18. The word “busted”.

19. A melting glacier. Or any effect of climate change that appears quietly, desperately, ominously in the background.

20. A risk management heat map.

21. A word from R. A. Villanueva’s “Sonnet 146”.

22. Something he said to you and never took back.

The playlist poetry challenge: "You Being Boss of the Playlist"

It just sort of happened as I was doing small, mindless tasks in the house while listening to old playlists my hubcap made when we in some wild dalliance that wasn’t legit.

The thing is: this taught me to love Bruce Springsteen…. he sort of rug-burned Bruce into my skin and I never got over it. So here’s what I did.

I made a list of all Bruce’s songs and then wrote a poem that incorporated the titles on our old playlists. And then fiddled like a fresh-rain-licked fern with all the tiny pieces…

The Playlist Poetry Challenge is so easy and fun—a perfect excuse to sit around and listen to nostalgia-inducing music on a muggy Saturday.

1. Pick an old playlist (or just pick a favorite music artist) and make a list of song titles.

2. Tell the song titles that you plan to use them as a word bank for a poem you will write. Don’t be sorry or apologetic. The songs want to be felt. You are doing those titles a favor.

3. Write a poem that makes use of those titles. You can capitalize the titles (see above) to make it clear when you’re referencing the song. Alternately, you can putz around in italics. You can even use white space to draw lines in the sand between your words and what music makes of them.

4. Title it with a name that hints at the artist or the playlist conceit.

5. If the final result is HORRENDOUS, email it to family members who think you’re a terrible poet that is wasting their time in profit-less vocation. Make sure to preface the poem with a note saying something like: “OMG tonight I wrote this poem that was just SO INTENSE. I had to share it with you because I’m really proud of it and I hope it wins a prize. Maybe someone will read it on their talk show. Family, I think this is IT.”

25 poetry prompts and exercises for summer

1. Write a chaconne.

2. Try this fantastic poetry-in-scene writing prompt by Yona Harvey (inspired by the sistuh voice of Sonia Sanchez).

3. Rejection may begin with a tendril of resentment coiled inside a color. Glacial. The way some words carry the weight of what we fear saying. Distant. Detached. The way a word that gets overburdened becomes an object, a bough. An objectification. A false innocence that depends on diminishment of something external. She’s a bitch is the hoarseness voice of not saying I’m hurt. Refusing to own the emotion. The confusion of first-generation immigrants as a descriptive tag that denotes both non-naturalized citizens, refugees, and those born to immigrant parents in the US. The melting pot of identity hunger. Write a poem that makes use of words that enact rejection.

4. The most powerful ideologies are the invisible ones, the shirts we wear to breakfast. Write a prose poem that includes all the shirts you wear to breakfast—the assumptions, the unspoken hurts, the secret biases, the imperfections, the honest rot.

5. C. D. Wright: “I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific, it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.” Write a poem that uses a “particular lexicon”. For example, see Heather McHugh’s poem, “Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies”.

6. Read Czeslaw Milosz’s “Conversations with Jeanne.” Notice how Milosz breaks the stanzas and makes use of patterned white space. Think about the effect of cutting that one line alone in the middle of the poem. Now think of friends or family with whom you maintain an ongoing disagreement about a specific ethical question (maybe divorce, abortion, end of life, etc.). Write a poem addressed to that person. Try to nurture the same level of distance that Milosz deploys in his titling of the poem as a “conversation.” As you write, think about the difference between a conversation and a dispute.

7. Write a poem about the afterlife of an object. For example, “The Afterlife of Sunscreen” or “The Afterlife of Pink Cocktail Umbrella.”

8. Read Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s favorite poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and use his prompt to angle into a sonnet. So much gorgeousness here.

9. Read Alice Walker’s “S M”. Then write a poem in response to it. Or write a poem in tandem with it. Or write a poem that bystanders it.

10. Bernadette Mayer: “Using phrases relating to one subject or idea, write about another (this is pushing metaphor and simile as far as you can), for example, steal science terms or philosophical language & write about snow or boredom.”

11. Write a poem about an awkward moment, but do so lightly, with the loosest touch, with a special attempt to apply Paul Celan’s attention to breath.

12. Tod Marshall has a poem titled “Describe Custody to an Omelet.” Following Marshall’s lead, write a poem in which you describe an abstraction to a noun.

13. Read Naomi Shabib Nye’s “Famous.” Notice how the poem is structured around the definition and circling of the title word. Write a poem that turns on the reframing of a certain word. Use that word as the title.

14. Experiment with poetic sub-genres using this prompt by Eric Pankey, inspired by W.S. Merwin.

15. The Line Break.: Play Etymological Rotisserie. First go back in time & find an Indo-European root word. (They are all in the back of the American Heritage Dictionary). List all its derivative words, & then try to get all those words into one poem. For instance, kailo-, which means “whole, uninjured, of good omen.” Its derivatives (words that came from it) are: whole, hale (as in “free from infirmity or illness”), wholesome, hail (as in “to salute or greet”), wassail, health, heal, holy, halibut, halidom, holiday, hollyhock, hallow, Allhallowmass, & Halloween.

16. Write a poem immersed in place with help from this prompt by Susan Tichy.

17. C.D. Wright once wrote: “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside of us that would be free and declare them so.” Find your zones. Explore them on the page. Don’t be surprised if you discover that it was you who authored the zoning restrictions. Write why. Reveal the barbed wire.

18. Read these three prose poems by Beth Bachmann. Think about the lack of punctuation. Consider the syntax. Use Bachmann’s technique as a scaffold or model to experiment with sparse form.

19. In “The Poetics of Disobedience”, Alice Notley writes: I've spoken in other places of the problems, too, of subjects that hadn't been broached much in poetry and of how it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one, the pregnant body, and babies for example. There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been? What are we leaving out now? Usually what's exactly in front of the eyes ears nose and mouth, in front of the mind, but it seems as if one must disobey everyone else in order to see at all. This is a persistent feeling in a poet but staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience, sense and reason is a huge task.” Find an “old poem” and rewrite it with a baby in it. Give credit to the original author.

20. Write into this quote from Clarice Lispector: “What is the weight of light?”

21. Invent places and institutions to populate a poem. Or to place it. The Room Where She Left Me. The Ferris wheel That Ate Children. The Shittiest Fair. Or David Berman’s “Bureau of Sad Endings”.

22. Read Anthony Hecht’s “Double Sonnet”. Mess around with the double sonnet form until you find a way to bend the notes just right. Listen to Lightning Hopkins as you write it.

23. Study Laynie Brown’s fascinating “Epigraphs”. Be fascinated. Write your own version in this form.

24. Now write a poem for each epigraph in previous exercise. But make sure the last line of each epigraph poem becomes the first line of the next one so that something like a sonnet corona conceit enters the picture.

25. Think about the tweet from Todd Kanecko at the top… and write or journal into it. Collect a few bones. Make them dance.

The cool girl prompt (and a bouquet for Robin Richardson)

I still remember the moment when I opened an email from Robin Richardson that accepted my story, “Toketwat”, for publication in Minola Review.

I remember the jolt of gratitude—the thrill of knowing a difficult female voice had found a home outside the perfect-mommy publishing industry. Robin’s validation encouraged me to keep writing in that raw, minor key that wound into Every Mask I Tried On.

When the print collection of Minola Review showed up in my mailbox, I sat down and literally snuggled it. Count me among the horrified, anti-cool-girl cotillion. Count me among the women who wanted to rip every seam in the garment fashioned to sell cool-girlness to a consumer society of desperate, hungry women groomed for the male gaze.

Cool Girl Writing Prompt

This prompt is simple. Read the excerpt from Robin’s introduction to the anthology (see image). Read the excerpt that defines Flynn’s “cool girl”. Then write into or about a space in which you (or someone you love) enacted her cool-girlness. Don’t write about someone you hate or resent—that’s too easy, too gratuitous, too invulnerable. Look in the mirror. Now tell us what you’ve done.

A few of the prose pieces I can’t get out of my head…

• “If You’re a Girl and You’re Going to Have Sex with Another Girl, But You’re on Your Period and You’re Wearing a Tampon, Can You Still? Do People Ever Do That?” by Kara Vernor

• “Lullaby” by T. Kira Madden

• “When My Father Left My Mother” by Meghan Rose Allen

• “This Is Not a Short Story” by Jill Talbot

• “Memory Palace” by J. A. Pak

• “Runny Young Folks” by Mariah Stovall

• “Acting Womanish” by Gay Pasley

• “Liber Monstrorum” by Sara Patterson

• “The Many Sick Mothers of My Heart” by Margeaux Feldman

• “All memories start with a bird slamming into a window which is an omen” by Sara Patterson

• “Perform” by Marianne Apostolides

And the poems that haunt me….

• “First Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by Caitlin Cowan

• “Teeth Marks” by Laura Page

• “Palm Trees, Post-Rape” by Cade Leebron

• “A Scene From Proper Spite” by Leah Umansky

• “déjà voodoo” by Adebe DeRango-Adem

• “White Paper Birds” by Shannon Bramer

• “Were I To Prepare For Your Death” by Shannon Hardwick

• “Claude Thornhill Arrangement” by Lauren Hilger

• “The Actor” by Nicole Brooks

• “[if not for the space between]” by Madeleine Wattenberg

• “The Out of Bread Poem” by Emily Schultz

• “Self-Portrait As a Pink Dressing Room” by Jenna Clarke

• “Cool Enough to Sink a Ship” by Claire Kelly

• “Diacritics” by Emily Osborne

• “This Is Not An Epistrophe But An Epistrophe Without An ‘E’” by Tanya Singh

• “Maidenwifemother Maiden” by Kate Finegan

Read Minola Review.

Purchase the print anthology.

Donate to help keep the journal alive.

Chase it on twitter.

Support writers and editors who demand a space in which women hold hands and perform for each other rather than the usual, male-dominated script.

And follow Robin Richardson to learn more about the amazing ways in which she writes and rocks the poetry world.

“Reader, sometimes I go to write a short story and just end up writing you stupid whore over and over. I once debated an English professor who required a psychological analysis of sleep teaching in Brave New World. Nobody ever believed just hearing something over and over in your sleep actually causes you to believe it. I told a friend that what I miss most about my old life is never being disappointed. She said that was the saddest thing she had ever heard. It was too familiar to me to be sad or disappointing. It just was. And yet there is an Irish saying, the thing about the past is it’s not the past.”

— Jill Talbot, "This Is Not a Short Story"

“to put some in your mouth
and find it has gone sour.
Imagine everyone decided
to wear the blue of a J-Cloth
on the same day, but you wore pink.
I leave flour on my clothes so
it looks like I’ve been touched.”

— Jenna Clarke, "Self-Portrait As a Pink Dressing Room"

“She loves the man
who clears his throat
like the sea in Beowulf.
Into the neck of the gramophone,
she sputters housewife potency.
Have her feel like she is pushing up a bay from under.
Have her bow, and have NY pet her head.
As if it’s not enough to be alive,
she wants to be guided down a staircase.
The ring of bad news is in the outline of the tree branches.
Make up an excuse for them to talk.
Factor in the keyhole of the bedroom door. Factor in they have no key.”

— Lauren Hilger, "Claude Thornhill Arrangement"

Great craft essays for writing essays, memoir, and creative nonfiction

“Yet literature insists on history — the story of a life, intimately known — and writers gamble with redemption. Surely our hope in holding a world still between the covers of a book is to make that world known, to save it from vanishing. We may be agnostics or furious atheists, but we are all religious, and we practice a faith. We probably don’t pray: prayer is always a veiled request, and writers avoid asking for directions. Writing as practice is more similar to meditation, which requests nothing. There is the same silence and the waiting, but writers are notoriously failed seekers. We watch our thoughts arise and practice attachment, fascinated by the dance of the flames. There’s a mystery to penetrate within that heat, one that defies boundaries. Writers grow up with permeable selves, and the very process of secrecy feels familiar.”

— Jayne Anne Phillips

The quote above comes from one of my favorite writer self-soothing blankets, namely, “Outlaw Heart” by Jayne Anne Phillips. I’m starting there because it cleans the room and returns me to the self who values writing more than having a clean house.

Since I’ve been working on a large batch of CNF lately—and Phillips is so helpful in that space of fear and concern— I thought I’d share other essays and resources that I’ve found to be helpful.

Starting with notebooks. And why to keep them.

Annie Dillard, “Write Till You Drop” (New York Times)

Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook” (PDF)

Susan Sontag, “On Style” (PDF)

Moving into structure and forms—how to fashion the best vehicle for the piece.

Ander Monson, “The Designed Essay: Design As Essay” (PDF)

Donald Barthelme, “Not Knowing” (PDF)

E. v. de Cleyre,” Morphology of the Essay” (Ploughshares blog)

E. v. de Cleyre, “Begin Again: On Essays in Nonfiction” (Ploughshares blog)

Erika Anderson, “I Craft, Therefore I Am: Creating a Persona Through Syntax and Style” (Hunger Mountain)

Jennifer Gravley, “White Space: An Annotation” (Brevity)

John Proctor, “7 Things I Learned From Reading 15 List Essays” (Numero Cinq)

Krys Malcolm Belk, “On ‘First Seen in Print in 1987, According to Merriam Webster’” (Black Warrior Review)

Linnie Green, “In the Mines: A Craft Essay on Creative Nonfiction” (Cleaver Magazine)

Q. Lindsey Barrett, “7 Ways to Seduce Your Reader” (Hunger Mountain)

Then voice and various voice-related techniques..

Gwendolyn Edward, “Beyond Perhapsing: “Split-Toning Techniques for Speculation in Nonfiction” (Brevity)

Jonathan Lethem, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” (Harper’s)

Karen Babine, “8 Variations on the Idea of a Sentence” (Brevity)

Kurt Vonnegut, “How to Write With Style” (PDF)

Lisa Knopp, “Perhapsing: The Use of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction” (Brevity)

Michael Downs, “Me, Myself, I: Idiosyncrasy and Structure in Nonfiction” (Triquarterly)

Michael Noll, “Apply the (Perhaps) Most Famous Fiction Exercise of All Times to Your Essays”(Brevity Nonfiction Blog)

Phillip Lopate, “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story” (The Fourth Genre)

Robert Vivian, “The Essay As An Open Field” (Numero Cinq)

Susan Hall, “Now and Then: The Binary Dimension of the Authorial Voice in Memoir” (Numero Cinq)

Finally, ways to bring yourself to the page without losing it. The complex tangles of saying what you mean without promising you will mean it forever.

In writing witness, how to convey trauma without creating a spectacle? To present violence without repugnance or reaction? What do we owe the reader? How is this balanced against what we owe ourselves and loved ones?

Ele Pawelski, “Found in Translation: How My Memoir of Life Overseas Turned Into a Novella” (Cleaver)

Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison, “Is It OK to Mine Real Relationships for Literary Material?” (New York Times)

Gina Iron, “Writing First-Personal Journalism About Trauma” (Hunger Mountain)

Joan Didion, “Why I Write”

Laura Rose-Russell, “There’s a Reason They Call it Show AND Tell: How to Reveal Thoughts, Emotions, and Motivations Without Sentimentality” (Numero Cinq)

Leslie Lindsay, “Is Memoir Automatically Therapeutic? A Craft Essay on Writing About Mental Health” (Cleaver Magazine)

Liz Stephens, “Creative Lies I Tell My Nonfiction Students” (Cleaver Magazine)

Meghan Culhaine Galbraith, “Child’s Play: How Creative Play Helped Unlock My Nonfiction Writing” (Cleaver Magazine)

Nina Puro, “Mary Karr Names Names” (The Fix)

Pam Houston, “Corn Maze” (Hunger Mountain)

Sherry Simpson, “Tiny Masters: An Artful Trick to Writing Personal Essays” (Brevity: The Craft Blog)

And a few good essays to read when you need inspiration:

Andrea Jarrell, “A Measure of Desire” (New York Times)

Beverly Donofrio, “Meanness” (Brevity)

Cheryl Strayed, “Write Like a Motherfucker” (The Rumpus)

George Orwell, “Why I Write” (PDF)

Joy Williams, “Uncanny the Singing That Comes from Certain Husks” (PDF)

Melissa Febos, “Intrusions” (Tin House)

Michelle Zauner, “Crying in H Mart” (New Yorker)

Sandra Felice Robinson, “The B Side of Blackness” (Believer)

Using hybrid form per Elisabeth Weiss

Some poems have topics that defy the usual forms. Elisabeth Weiss chose to turn her nine-part poem about memory and mental illness into a hybrid triptych form titled, appropriately, “The Anna Fragments”. I think this is a fabulous example of letting the subject find its form. The poem becomes a sort of historical dialogue between medical records, public opinion, private experience, and public health policy that situates it in American time and place. The ideological undertones of mental health policy are touched in a way that doesn’t demand resolution.

Weiss explains how the poem found its shape:

'The Anna Fragments' began as a nine-part poem. It deals with how my grandmother’s life was shaped by her times. I added the preface as sidebar commentary and then added further definitions and explanations to enlarge and expand her story. The text resembles a page of the Talmud, which is how learned rabbis argued texts across centuries. Last summer at the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York, I completed the narrative by extending it to women in the following two generations. The combination of research, poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction mirrors Anna’s schizophrenic world, but I also hope it gives voice, in many different ways, to a woman who was silenced.

Permitting wikipedia entries to speak to journal entries and old medical archives adds a circularity to this poem, an appropriate motion in narratives that remain elusive and surreal. By noting which records are absent (for example, records for Anna don’t exist from 1931 to 1936), the poet erases as she describes and depicts.

I really appreciate this form as a vehicle for depicting the erasure of a medicalized body, and the ways in which medical institutions replace individual personhood when it comes to narrative. The questions about agency and existence are left open for us to mull. There’s more to learn from Weiss at her website.

Using footnotes per Ryan Ruff Smith

In “New Neighbors,” a creative nonfiction published in Subtropics, Ryan Ruff Smith uses footnotes to enrich the authorial perspective speaking from within a relationship.

Here’s footnote 4, for example:

4. David, the editor of Subtropics, suggested that perhaps I am being a bit too hard on myself here, in a way that is symptomatic of the very tendency to be hard on myself that I diagnosed earlier, and kindly suggested that I cut the words “from a blinkered perspective.” This was a shrewd suggestion, and I’ve retained the phrase only for the purposes of this footnote.

And footnote 5 undercuts the veracity of the narrative itself:

5. This business of the night terrors is the one detail I’ve made up. So perhaps it’s not so much that I wasn’t allowed a villain as that I couldn’t abide one. Where no explanation exists, you’re sometimes
obliged to invent one, and this rings true enough for me.

David Leavitt asks him why he decided to use footnotes in this way. I’m going to quote Ryan’s response in full just to give a sense of how an improvisational tactic winds up playing an interesting and provocative role in an essay:

Is it innovative? At any rate, I had fun with them. The first one I put in was based on a comment RL made on an early draft of the manuscript, responding to my assertion that we were both very particular (that is, fussy) by suggesting that perhaps one of us was more particular than the other. It seemed to capture something of our relationship—our shared sense of humor, the nature of our repartee—that I hadn’t been able to capture through dialogue, so I wanted to put that in there. I wasn’t sure footnotes were right for the piece, and I thought that I would probably cut them later, as soon as someone told me it was a dumb idea, but as I started adding more, I realized that it was a way of highlighting one of the things the essay was about—the idea of constructing narratives, of the truth as something that needs to be edited, revised, and qualified in order to get right. Now that I think of it, the sense of self that I come to terms with in the essay, and that I’ve been trying to describe here, is itself defined, in part, by being open to revision.

The way in which the footnotes challenge the authority of the narrator only makes the narrator more reliable to me. I footnote so many of my thoughts and assertions…and I appreciate the way Smith uses this as a device to acknowledge multiple leavings of meaning in service of truth in the essay.

74 absolutely random thoughts on writing

1. Anxiety is the epidemic but belonging is the silent hunger.

2. A photo takes good notes.
   See photos above, taken with an iPhone camera.
   Jot things down in jpeg.

3. Assume the ordinary world is asking you to read it.
   If you have contact with any supernatural worlds, assume they also wish to be read.

4. Sensuality lacks a moral compass. A lie can be sweet as stealing apple lollipops, licking them fast, burning down evidence. A wedding can be an example of bright pink peony living too far forward way too fast. A sawmill can be part of hand that shouldn’t be exposed until later. An ambulance siren can be as innocent and reckless as summer kids careening across a street.

5. It is easy to dehumanize a person in less than a page. When I’m writing difficult characters, I think of something James Baldwin said in an interview: “Perhaps the turning point in one’s life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.” Writing about victimhood does not require a victim. Write your characters the way they would want to be written.

6. Sometimes you come to that point in a short story where you can’t resist anymore.  I remember watching the Alabama Symphony Orchestra perform Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scherazade, Op. 35” from our favorite seats in the choral balcony. The Tale of Prince Calendar. The hands of the harpist like wings loosed in a meadow. Becoming a wave. The kids look at me, querulous, wondering if they can dance, if they can allow themselves to do what the music begs. I say no with my mouth. Firmly. But my body says yes, oh yes you have nothing left to lose.

7. Czeslaw Milosz: "A flaw: awareness of being a child inside; i.e., a naively emotional creature constantly endangered by the coarse laughter of the grown-ups."  
   The way adults wear their disenchantment like dresses, the way they lay it down like a wool rug in the center of the room. At some point I imagine it took the tiniest fingers to weave those intricate textures that scratch the cheek.
   I lay on the wool rug alone. Like my mother before me. I know we have all come from the dreams of small children. I stretch my arms to make angel imprints and stitch wings to the leaves.  

8. Joyce Carol Oates reflects on the lure of the grotesque, the charm of the vampire as evidence that evil can be as seductive as it is repulsive—that it can render us not just victims but accomplices in its destruction. There is a sense of horror or dread bound up in the grotesque, a sense of perversion in which we can feel how something good begins rotting. 
   ”Extenuating Circumstances”, my favorite short fiction by Oates, is deeply grotesque—and propelled forward by the reader’s dread. One way Oates manages this is by refusing to use question marks at the end of questions. This adds to eeriness—the conclusion and answer have been set in stone by action.
   The story is structured as a legal apologia, with first person narrator confessing why she killed her child, and addressing it to the father. Each paragraph proceeds from “Because…” starting with “Because it was a mercy. Because God even in His cruelty will sometimes grant mercy.” It is a perfect piece.

9. On my desk, a line from Leonard Michaels’ notebooks: “The opposite of mystery is pornography.”
   And the opposite of eros is mechanics.  Are you writing the optics or the inhabitation? Be thoughtful  and deliberate in your choice.
   It's always sad when a writer winds up writing mechanistic sex unintentionally.
   Almost as sad as finding yourself in the middle of it.

10. Mona Simpson: “I think day-to-day life changes loves. It can’t stay high, if you know what I mean. Little frictions develop. Did you ever notice the way people married a long time don’t believe each other?”
    Oh gold-mine of little frictions…..

11. Triangulation in poetry is a strategy where writing builds itself on question of winning or losing, attaching certain elements of suspense, moving back and forth between characters without creating connective tissue. The movement--and expectation of movement--is part of the emotional tone. An aspect of what it feels to inhabit that moment.

12. Lucretius: "Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. The only certain thing is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain."
    The writer stays up late palpating the body for scars.

13. Sometimes poetry and fiction and nonfiction and music blur together and I feel like I’m enacting a harm by trying to separate them. Or to find a space for them on the binary. Maybe honoring genre requires us to offer it a spectrum rather than a check-box.

14. When the inability to write unsettles me, I sink into something published by Wave Books. Often Mary Ruefle or Renee Gladman.
    There’s this wonderful section in Calamities where Gladman remembers the back she took the night before: “…if I was no longer going to write, as I had begin to worry that I wouldn’t, then I should at least write about not writing. And was so struck by the idea that I rose from the tub, dripping, to jot it down, which I was now doing. I was writing down the idea ‘I no longer wish to write’ by writing down that I was writing it down. I wanted a threshold to open that would also be like a question, something that asked me about my living in such a way that I could finally understand it.”
    For some reason, this helps me sit down to write.

15. Iris Murdoch: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” As writers, we work under constant threat of rejection and wreckage. I call it “wreckoning”, that sense that my writing will destroy all that I cherish and hold dear. And then there’s the human worry of failure—the fear of bad reviews, the friends who purchase but never mention the book, the way life goes on as if the book never happened, the fear of polluting intimate relationships by asking too much of one’s readers. 

16. That feeling you’re missing something. What is the outlier? Where does the center not hold? After the short documentary film festival, we split a pitcher of cheap draft, talk about firefighting, Black Panthers, good rap, Talibans, Eastern plans, anything except the albino protagonist. A pitcher shared among Americans of every color still cannot ease the tension of race as we construct it. The box we build a box lacks a choice that acknowledges albinos.

17. To describe someone as “strange” is the greatest compliment in my arsenal of tiny love-tanks. Michael Martone is strange. I say this although I’ve only spoken to him twice (and very very briefly with kids tugging at my shirt). Martone knows how to estrange the ordinary—a superpower I covet.

18. Coveting is good.
    I covet my neighbor’s wife (and every wife, for that matter, wives in general).
    I also covet my the way my neighbor’s wife man-handles idioms.
    My heart is dark with the pleasures of covetousness.

19. Things that drip into the writer’s mind while waiting in the carpool line. Egon Schiele's rendering of human bodies and empty cityspaces, the abandonment of realism in a world where reality is a form of propaganda. His unexpected, early death in the Spanish flu epidemic preceded by the death of his wife and child from same virus, the ravage of Bohemian Vienna but not yet Hitler. The writer lists her appends her influences to include: all interwar periods, all spans of time between one bomb and another, what bourgeois americans damn apart from themselves, conversations in 24-hour gyms, female bodies. She sits on the couch between Audre Lorde and Hannah Arendt with Schiele in her head. And Syria.

20. I spend most days waiting to write. I wait for the words like a character waits for her lover, the one whose voice carries the story.

21. Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding in order to please the guests. The writer turns water into wine to show how we are powerless in the face of temptation. 

22. I write with loyalty to the things, places, and people I’ve loved. Not from nostalgia but out of respect to the mammal I was, the girl who loved them. I can love my husband and still write about loving an X because that girl is gone. Her disappearance should not be an excuse for erasure. I can love the girl while acknowledging the tree feels different. I’m talking about the sapling before the thickened trunk, the massive canopy, the curved hips of branches. I can’t discredit the yearning of the sapling while acknowledging myself as the tree. May these branches leave space for all the girls I’ve been, all the compost I’ve yet to be.

23. Sometimes it helps to follow Walker Percy’s suggestion and play the alien anthropologist to whom every gesture is a mystery and possible code. I park in the lot two streets down the mountain and watch my family move from window to window of supper. Preparations. A man and three kids crowding a bowl. Cozy if you can’t overhear the missing ingredients, the sugar lost to coffee.

24. In art, the bird’s eye view is one that foreshortens from above. Artist Egon Schiele made powerful use of the bird’s eye view to defamiliarize landscapes and towns. In his paintings and sketches, cities, streets, and trees are empty of human objects and flesh. The viewer is estranged from the view. The use of high, lofty viewpoints, fragmented motifs, simultaneous presentation of non-simultaneous states, depersonalization of motifs, and the effect of empty background deliberately removes us from the real and feel of it.

25. Sigmund Freud, 1915: "Our own death is indeed, unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it we can perceive that we really survive as spectators."
    To survive towards death.

26. My death has been spectated one thousand ways now, all of them likely, all of them met with astonishment.
    The first time you die is as surprising as the multiple others.
    Turbulence on an airplane is a terrorist. The profanity of fear, its octane metal in the mouth, I am biting and biting the bullet. Bite down at take-off and then again when we land. I can't believe. I'm alive.

27. So many poems begin in astonishment at being alive.
    But it would be silly to stop and grab my friend by the shoulders and shout “isn’t this unbelievable?”
    It would be especially ridiculous to do this as often as the thought overtakes me.
    The thing about paper is that always wants to know my astonishment.

28. Every scene needs the subtext of possible neon. I like to mull Steve Almond's critique of reality TV: It's about the careful construction of two central narratives: false actualization and authentic shame... it reflects our unrequited yearning for the authentic.
    Americans are drowning in a cesspool of fake emotion, nearly all of it aimed at getting us to buy junk. — That’s either a great story or a boring sitcom.

29. More than fifty years ago, the Higgs field emerged as an omnipresent expanse of energy that explains why some theoretically-massless particles have mass. The boson was predicted to appear when a particle interacting with the Higgs field excites it. Since physicists could not directly observe the field itself, they looked to bosons for evidence of the field's existence. Nothing is finished.

30. Phenomenologically speaking, the swan has yet to dive and its white is soundless. I am fine. Not even wet. My ears ring with crickets and uninvited bullfrog events. A disjunct between two connected places— this grimy lake and the downtown four blocks away. One being the boson to a Higgs field that proves its existence but I am too lazy to discern which.

    Again, this lake where most teens in my town get pregnant bears an invisible physical relationship the downtown clinic where they creep behind bodies to secure an abortion. To visit one is to feel potency of the other by implication. 

31. To wake up in the morning, pack lunches, and thank the cosmos for Mary Gaitskill’s “The Agonized Face”.

32. This is an argument for the value of fascination. For the mundane and extravagant act of attention in shaping what the mind makes of the eye. Georgia O’Keefe was so fascinated by the evening star that she followed it into the wide sunset space in the desert. She said ten watercolors were made from that star. One star in the desert, holding her tight. 

33. After George Sand's death, Ivan Turgenev wrote: “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.”
    There are so many stories in this, though not one leans into Hemingway’s “muscular writing.”

34. “Pain is not the only thing.” It’s not even the most interesting.

35. Susan Sontag, in her notebooks, 2/23/1970: “My idolatry: I’ve lusted after goodness. Wanting it here, now, absolutely, increasingly… I suspect now that lusting after the good isn’t what a good person really does.” Schopenhauer listed pain and boredom as the twin evils of life. What is the worst lust? What hunger lies beneath the heroin?

36. Grace Paley often reuses the same narrator. And begins in medias re. The power of her opening lines is such that it carries us straight through a story, straight into the scene, the kitchen, the room, the action of voices colliding, arguing, explaining. It is said that Paley stitched her stories together inch by inch, paragraph by paragraph, whenever time permitted. She also added scenes to stories that had been previously published, thus changing their tone and meaning. One can’t help feeling that Paley had a certain loyalty to these female characters—a loyalty so profound that she alienated readers or editors rather than the women in her kitchen. Each story is structured by rhythm of thought and conversation. 

37. How fear of death—knowledge of it—cripples life.
    A rock is not a pedestal but a possible murder weapon.
    All things turn to their endings.

38. My mother’s fear of dying young and leaving us motherless. Like her mother left her by dying young. As if dying young is lifestyle choice.
    The fear of losing family and safe ground—the fear that chased her to America, having nothing left to lose in her mother tongue. And nothing to gain except forgetting—that unique American freedom that sets up apart from history, apart from settled accounts.

39. At the local level, racial segregation was maintained by white women who wrote letters and lobbied local officials, censored textbooks, hosted essay contests for local schools, policed racial boundaries as administrators, and taught kids racial hierarchies that emphasized white over black as a natural order. No one forced them to do this.
    You don’t have to force your characters to do things as long as you allow them to respond in a way appropriate to their socialization.
    The alliance of white motherhood and white supremacist politics continues today. Iconic images of white supremacy privilege male images of violence, revenge, legislative power, or dominance. The assumption that women are maternal and progressive is a form of biological essentialism that blinds us to what women did then and what they do not. Think Roseanne, hen mother.
    The “gardeners of white supremacy” tended Lost Cause mythologies, cotillions, fear of outsiders and United Nations, sowing the seeds of white supremacy for the future. 
    Some people will not be able to accept this truth unless they read it under the guise of “fiction.”
    You can’t save the world but you write about a woman trying to save the world while destroying it.

40. Grace Paley, again. Her stories hinge on a pattern of exchange and response that is more spatially-demanding than linear. You don’t have the sense of going anywhere but you feel very alive. The events and changes are situated within a mysterious relational fluidity in which the outcome is hard to predict. What changes is not so much the character as the relational space between characters.  The re-negotiations of intimate space after love, children, war, and dinner.

41. All writing is political. There is no way to write without touching socialization. Even an article about a high school football game is political in that it presumes the existence of human bodies playing by rules that harm them in the hopes of being seen. Or respected. Or given power. Or just loved.

42. Learn how to tilt tone.

43. The Oliners interviewed 72 German bystanders to arrive at a better understanding of their reasons for not acting or speaking out against the Holocaust. Most were characterized by “constrictedness, by an eye that perceived most of the world beyond its own boundaries as peripheral. More concerned with themselves and their own needs, they were less conscious of others and less concerned with them.” Only a small minority of bystanders were true ethno-centrists who didn’t like outsiders. Most bystanders were church-going Christians active in their faith communities.
    Victoria J. Barnett called indifference “the leitmotif of the literature of the Holocaust.” The most common behavior we see during the Holocaust, whether by perpetrators, terrorized victims, or passive bystanders. Fatalism is its handmaiden. 

44. From Teju Cole’s Open City: “Look, I know this type, she said, these young men who go around as if the world is an offense to them. It is dangerous. For people to feel that they alone have suffered, it is very dangerous…. If you live as long as I do, you will see that there is an endless variety of difficulties in the world… if you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer too.”
    To write from outside the outrage of personal suffering and into the vulnerability.

45. I can’t envy belonging—I’m too grateful for the perspective nonbelonging imposes on the lonely, left-out mind. To be outside the circles, disinvited, negligible—how else to witness the absurdity of group dynamics, the lies we tell in order to sneak into a stadium? 

46. It would be easier if I could swaddle myself in cynicism or a knowing materialism. But I believe too much in beauty and passion—I’m too riveted by this life.

47. Humans change the meaning of words each day the sun rises a slightly different color. No liberalism stays fixed, no freedom is not another person’s encroachment. To call myself a “Democrat” is conservative, asserting a static construction of meaning to a category that cannot, by its nature, remain the same. What is my political position? I am firmly anti-totalitarian and anti-authoritarian, and this is grounded in a deep concern for human rights. As technology alters the nature of human rights, I can only commit to what I don’t believe we should tolerate. I can only commit to the “No.”

48. And what we want from Anne Frank is forgiveness, the cheap grace of hindsight, the blamelessness of looking back. An easy teleology which unites progressives and conservatives in their belief that history will not happen again.
    I can’t agree.
    I see no telos in life. 
    And I fight it in my short fiction.

49. I’m thinking love between brackets. Like it’s 2 am and still taking temperatures from the tongues of little mammals, the offspring of love getting sick, needing nurture. A story that demands foregrounding. Even kids become part of the stage set keeping lovers apart. And yet the memory of the face I fell involve with is edgy, dangerous, blurred as a police sketch. Jets bust open the sound barrier. Rain plinks into a metal plate in the fireplace. Parts of us cannot shut completely. A house with a mouse. And you—trying to find the entryway into our marriage. The way your eyes clench lists fists over me when time passes too fast.

50. Feminism’s collapse into the master’s tools, the overt militarism and violence, the strong sense of group belonging that makes it a crime not to Other. Not to emphasize the Otherness at the expense of the human. To manipulate fear and prejudice against these others upon which our identity is built. To pose in camos with a weapon of mass destruction. The role of my status as witness against xenophobia is not to claim fraternity with the brown bodies in deportation camps—not to pretend I know how it feels to be a slave or to be trafficked or to be desperate for acceptance. It is to speak not of my minor plights but to pass the mic to brutalized bodies—to show how skin color protects no one in the former Yugoslavia or Africa. The enemy is not solidarity and difference—the enemy is power and violence. 

51. Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Stories blurred genre between fiction and memoir by necessity. In telling stories of life in Soviet prison camps, Shalamov switches point-of-view often; and many times, he does this to inhabit the POV of a dying prisoner. To tell the story of that person’s final minutes. There is something unspeakably brutal about death in the taiga, a place so cold that the buried bodies are preserved in permafrost, never rotting into the soil and being absorbed, never composting to serve as nourishment for future life.
    The image of those frozen human statues is an ars poetica that carries us through the book, justifying the narrator’s detachment and lack of feeling.
    No, it’s not a leitmotif. That’s not what I meant. The frozen bodies are an explanation for why he is writing, a key into Shalamov’s formal choices, and an expiation for the crimes of the survivor.

52. In 1938, Simone Weil suffered from a series of acute migraines. She began to recite George Herbert’s poem “Love” while sitting in a French chapel, trying to link the pain she was feeling to the passion of Christ. She felt Christ come down and take possession of her. She said it changed her life forever. She knew. But she also refused to be baptized, refused to become one of the chosen lest that position make it harder for her to help others. And so the writer guards her marginality, and the freedom and loneliness it secures. The assurance that she cannot rest easy in the comfort of belonging. She cannot earn a stake in not saying certain things out of fear those things will alienate her from others. She stays alien. 

53. Maybe the urge to stay alien is a religious impulse.

54. The poets laureate of the Communist empire take their vacations in Florida now. It is wrong, they say, to offer false hope. It is a crime to give the desperate a choice they can’t make in good conscience. Desperation cannot make decisions. All the words we find to sanitize death still give chills when applied to insects. There is no kind extermination. 

55. In search of lost silences. The silence after losing a fishing lure in the creek, knowing you can’t fish anymore but not yet knowing what that means for the rest of the day. How the day will be transformed by loss. The silence on a Greyhound when your seat-mate watches porn on his iPad. The silence of the moment before anesthesia sets in. The silence of a city street at 4:17 am. The silence after bad sex. The silence after good sex. The silence straining across a traditional family dinner. The silence of a monastery. The silence you choose to protect others. The silence on a porch with a close friend when neither felt the need to say anything. When silence was enough. 

56. I don’t know why we think that dying is the time to say those things held deep in the dark. As if the immanence of death is not a continuous presence. I don’t know why we wait to write the revealing thing.

57. Ben Marcus says fiction has no formula—“you have to solve for x again, every time.” 
    I think of my kids, raising them, watching them defy the boxes I’ve built to protect them, boxes of purity, in a sense, boxes that preserve them from contamination. Marcus expresses the strongest appreciation for stories that do not parent, fiction that does not provide a box that relieves our anxiety. In a sense, the dread and complexity serve as a comfort, an unhidden gash. Let’s talk blood.
    Let’s say I write a story about my mother, a formidable feminist whom I prefer to keep as a talisman of strength and irrepressible will. A story that makes her victorious is a story that ignores how traumatized she must have been to defect from Romania and leave her one-year-old daughter behind not knowing if she would ever see her again. How can I write a story that ignores the PTSD required to leave a one-year-old behind as she ran to the USA, with only a story and two hundred dollars and an equally reckless, desperate spouse? The 50 percent odds. The child she almost lost by never seeing again. The baby in hidden in her belly (my sister). The name she took from her mother who died of breast cancer three months before my birth. The middle name she legally appended to keep her mother close. To bring her here. Tell me what you taste of fear.

58. It’s important to remember that pathos is integral to the kleptocratic market economy and its literary frenulum. One shouldn’t shy away from the obvious.

59. A hesitation is not a pause but an attempt to reconsider longing, to revisit hope. In dialogue, a hesitation should be distinct from a pause—should be written with poignance. Deborah Levy says the point of writing is to tell the story of hesitation, or the ways in which fictional characters try to defeat a particular longing or long-held wish. The horrible long spaces between sobs which indicate the deepening of the sob.

60. The writer does not have the option of keeping their private life to themselves. E. B. White compared essay writing to taking off one’s pants without showing one’s genitals. Margaret Atwood admitted “You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer, an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.” When my partner asked why reading was so terrifying, I told him that reading my own writings is like performing a striptease without the buffer of compartmentalization. With each word, one makes a choice that can held against you, a step in the direction of nakedness and raw vulnerability. As existential philosophers were quick to note, courage does not mean an absence of despair. Courage means an ability to move forward in spite of despair and dread. 

61. Ralph Keyes talks about “that naked feeling”, how writers tend to feel all of the time. “Those who put their words on paper for public consumption live in fear that whoever reads their words will see right through them. At the very least, readers will discover what they themselves have suspected all along: that they’re faking it.” 

62. The risk of candor is real. A candid writer risks being seen for their authentic sincere self and being deemed uninteresting. Isn’t it better to wear a mask? Keyes notes that “authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones.” And this fear leads to large pockets of silence which swell into regret or a sense of servitude, the feeling that one sacrificed truth to popularity and likableness. 

63. The estrangement of an iceberg, it’s unfamiliar use of space altering the surroundings. A horizon pulls back from icebergs and a sky rises with no intermediary—no lines of compression behind them to mark the in between. I don’t know where death begins and life ends. For a girl who loves borders, this space of death is daunting. In making this map, I sever the ties between beholding a beholden. I think the act of writing, the cartography of bars and landscapes, is a middling guide at best, and sometimes, just this trash you are reading before you return to your own.

64. While we can describe the experience of realizing that we are wrong, it is impossible to describe any sort of feeling associated with simply being wrong, or with wrongness. When we are wrong, we are mostly oblivious to it. The problem of error-blindness means that error feels normal, and the falsehoods which we invest with belief are not visible. Since it’s impossible to feel wrong when wrongness is imperceptible, we conclude that we are right. And since our brains don’t file away a category of mistakes we made, each mistake emerges as a surprise and a shock, something we can’t take as evidence or use to create a rule about our tendency to make mistakes. In essence, each mistake is an anomaly.

65. Roger Rosenblatt observes that we “exist in the fold of human failing.” And the hunger for power that creates tension in a relationship. The tension engine.

66. We tend to overwrite rejected beliefs and build amnesia for our mistakes, which makes it difficult to a accept wrongness as part of the way in which our minds work, as part of the way we arrive at knowledge. Nothing happens easily. This is an argument for slow fiction.

67. We are torn between wisdom and schedules in which a woman’s plan for life leaves little flexibility or margin for error. Maturity, the ability to defer gratification and wait for an outcome, seems close to the planning and preparation of digital dating but the risk is absent. The absolute folly of love is set aside for the predictability of good companionship. By rendering each need instantaneous, the internet makes delayed gratification look too much like weakness. As if writing is always a doormat and never a glimpse of the sky.

68. The smocked bodies or the the bodice I failed to smock, the unburdened collar, the frayed meter of the footstep. My chronic restlessness and sinking posture. A tone but not a story.

69. I’m a fan of indirect dialogue because, in my experience, humans are rarely clear or eloquent about what they want but the fragile banality of actual conversation feels stilted or bumpy or faked on the page. It’s hard to write a real conversation without losing the reader. 

70. The first line begins with what someone wants at the end, and action is how we get there. Usually the fixed desire is modified by movement across time and space, an accumulation of events and altering scenarios. You are not the same person at the end of a good story. At least, that’s the “good fiction” conceit.
    But what if you are the same person?
    What if you just agree to say different things and wear red jeans to church?
    Maybe characters aren’t that different from human beings. Maybe they look like they’ve changed for the purpose of a special moment or a Thanksgiving dinner but they’re still Trump voters inside.

71. Broken beliefs, busted ideologies. A landscape of fallen statues and broken beliefs. That's how I see post-Soviet Russia--a space in which no ideologies stayed inspiring or possible.
    Or maybe a workshop that promises too much?
    A workshop that offers the solution to all your writing problems? 

72. There’s something feeble about writing mental health challenges in a way that defines a character. Mental health can only describe us, not define us. Only for a moment and among a cornucopia of other traits and embodiments.

73. I know it's wrong to put a moral in the story... but is it wrong to twist the story's wrist until she cries "Moral!"?

74. In ongoing partnerships (as opposed to new relationships), sexual consent often hinges on interpreting emotional tone correctly. (Note: I admire those for whom the case is always a yes/no discussion, but I also acknowledge that some of us start to use other forms of language after years of yes/no together and I think nonverbal communication continues to play an important role for many decent mammals.)
    After much disclaiming, I don’t know why consent leads me into thoughts about authenticity and appropriation, but emotional tone is somewhere in that fog. It’s hard for me to write from the perspective of a war veteran because that lack of experience makes my voice too brittle and artificial to carry the heavy parts. Maybe the only emotions I can authentically bring to the table are those I’ve experienced. This isn’t rocket science, but it feels like chaos theory when you’re desperate to write from the place of people you care about. Even though you can’t. Even though it may be best to sit down and think.
    As writers, we can't speak for others if this involves replacing or erasing their voice. We can, however, speak with others and in dialogue with ourselves and social institutions--we can show support or affinity by honoring the distance between the witnessing voice and the embodied one.
    Tone should reflect (and respect) the limits of engagement. Enter reticence.
    I think reticence adds fuel to uncertainty, and uncertainty keeps the reader from getting too comfortable and missing the good parts.

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Oh, and if you’re looking for a prose poetry workshop that you can attend without having to purchase a plane ticket or find child or pet care, you should register for this February weekend workshop I’m leading for Bending Genres. I promise there will so much to take home and so much to build with and play with and explore… It’s a generative workshop with plenty of time for feedback. And I can’t wait to be somewhere in the universe with you… writing and revising prose poetry.

Allan Gurganus thinks fiction writers NEED to take things personally

“I change my mind about what a short story is nearly every day. So, then: a short story is that junkyard magnet. The form itself attracts. All the pieces of a short story — characters and lines of dialogue, events and images, setting, wild ideas — have been forged separately. Now they’re here, clinging to the one thing they have in common. In the junkyard itself, they mean nothing, a jumble. They are refuse. But once the magnet passes over they jump up and hang together, hub cap to hub cap to old pipe to wrenched-off refrigerator door. You see how they fit together, how they make a shape different from any other collection of scraps. Some of them don’t even touch the magnet: the current runs through the whole assemblage and holds it together. That story your parents always told about the early days of their marriage; the insult that ruined one of your oldest friendships; the morning news of 1962; other people’s writing; your worst memory of fourth grade. Turn on a magnet and watch them fly together. Today, anyhow, that’s what I think.”

— Elizabeth McCracken, "I’m an Award-Winning Short Story Writer and I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Either"

Elizabeth McCracken helped me through the writing doldrums today with her essay, “I’m an Award-Winning Short Story Writer and I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Either”, in Electric Literature. Of course you should read it. Why else would I leave a link?

Apart from her prompts and reassurances, McCracken also linked to a wonderful craft essay by Allan Gurganus that covers the gamut from community gardens to historical complicity as well as the AIDS crisis. I sat outside my daughter’s ballet class laughing, holding my notebook close to my chest, that stupid smile of relief patched over my not-here-to-mom-chat face.

Published in a 1989 issue of Iowa Review, while Gurganus was taking a year off from teaching to write, ’ “Garden Sermon” (properly titled, “Garden Sermon: Being the History of a History, Notes from a Journal about How to Keep a Long Long Project Alive. Or: What I Did with My Summer Vacation”) is beautiful and encouraging. Of course you should read it. Why else would I leave a link?

A few excerpts:

“What starts a romance is rarely what sustains a marriage. My novel is called Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. I consider my relation to the oldest living confederate widow my life's longest monogamous connection. What starts a young writer is not what keeps a geezer coming back for more. You begin with the sound of one voice that goes forward into nowhere and, after years and trials enough, begins to come back with an echo, dividend.”

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“We are often urged not to take things personally. A sales clerk yells at me and, shaken up by it, I tell a friend and my friend says back, "My God, you take everything so personally.” Maybe that belongs on the artist’s coat of arms. The agreement is: when you cease to take the world personally, you relinquish your credentials and your moral hold and your subject matter, and it's then that they issue you a gold card and they tell you that life is hard but that you should relax and then they send you on your way and you are utterly utterly lost—but it's okay because hey it's nothing personal. Just your life.

I want to keep it personal. I want the horrors of the daily New York Times to shake me up. This year, let's make a vow to each other—let's promise to take every thing personally. Let's help each other not be numb. "Deliver us from evil and lead us not into numbness." When I stop feeling embarrassment and rage, please take me out into the garden and bury me where Spot, and Muffy and the hundred family goldfish rest under crossed sticks. “