Monday has Rejected Me

*sigh* I don’t normally have a case of the Mondays but I think I do today.

My allergies are itching all over my eyes and it took everything out of me just to get up and get started cause I felt so SLEEPY! And then, since today is grocery day, all I could find for breakfast was a Twinkie. Which, actually, is only 180 calories so I guess it is better than nothing.  Maybe the sugar will at least wake me up!

Before, said Twinkie, the scale was mean to me and said the 2 pounds I had lost were not really true and now I am back to square one. Bad scale. Stinky scale. Maybe Jared can give me some advise on his Subway diet

And this picture has nothing to do with anything but once I was this close to being able to touch Owen Wilson’s butt. Yep, I’m taking this picture at the Cars premiere at Lowe’s Motor Speedway a few years back. If you saw a picture of me from this event I look like a wet doggie cause it rained so much, a short little chubby wet doggie.

But it is Monday and Monday still means restarts, waking up, rethinking, or just in general hoping it will rain but wait to rain until I have had a chance to get to the grocery store.

Don’t you love a rant/babble to start your day?  Well, obviously, I do. it is a way to try and make myself smile after starting the laundry and cleaning up nice fresh kitty puke. Thanks Foggy Bottoms. Now to start cleaning after I mark another note down for poems rejected by a journal.  I’ll have a nice stack of stuff to send out this week but at least I was able to retire two very unintersting poems.

Almost as uniteresting as this blog.

Almost as uninteresting as . . . well an empty Twinkie wrapper.

Keep Thinking about Manuscripts!

Even as I finished my blog yesterday and wrote a good four drafts of poems that are in the newer projects I am working on, I was still thinking about why it is I can’t seem to come up with a full length manuscript?

I mean, I did a thesis right? That was 48 pages long and I even sent it out a few times, heck it is actually technically still under consideration at a few contests but I quit sending it out because I knew it just wasn’t ready. I feel a bit overwhelmed by the thesis, and/or the older poems that are often very rooted in my childhood.  Not that they are all autobiographical but they live in that world in what some people call “juvenalia.” And I worry if I try to put that book together it is just going to be, what I sometimes term, “dead mother poems.” Because any writer who has had a parent die, especially when they were a teenager or younger, that parent is going to haunt some of their work.  And as I move on I’m not writing about it as much but the poems I really enjoy from my thesis are still in that world.

All this trying to convince myself not to work on it is all well and good but  there is still that pull where I want it to be.  There is something about saying you have a full length book. Some credibility it gives you.  I’m a goal oriented person and that goal just looms.  I’m so happy with my published chapbook and the other two I have circulating but the idea of a full length book is just so tasty!

So, after I got up this morning I looked at it again, focusing on the poems I have already had published.  I could make a manuscript, as I mentioned yesterday, but it isn’t where I want it to be.  Yet, the poems are so diverse that I don’t really feel like there are more I need to fill in or anything. Argh, what to do!

I think part of this issue is because I love to finish things and having so many “completed” poems that I am sending around to lit mags makes me feel a bit antsy. I know I could self-publish but I really like having an editor select my work and for that work to show up online and in print journals.  It is like winning a little contest or something

Ok. So I thought typing this out might make some more sense out of the whole process but it isn’t.  I think I’ll just keep working on the individual poems, sending them out and as more get published I’ll be back here again deciding what kind of future they have as a collection.

They are just not ready! I know this. I’m saying it again. But I am still scared about writing more poems and watching the pot of possible poems just grow and grow until I am having to dig myself out!

I guess there could be much worse problems to have.

Like the blank periods.

Yes, I have had them.

I need to go shop or something. To do something completely unliterary.

And maybe a sandwich could be involved.

Yum. Sandwiches.

Poems and Poems Oh My!

This has definitely been a poetry week for me, which is funny because I haven’t actually written any poems this week.

There are two reasons I haven’t written any poetry this week:

1. I always type up my handwritten poems from the month before at the first of the next month so I have been busily typing up and revising poems I wrote in July.
2. I spent a lot of time going through all my published and unpublished poems to look at re-emerging themes so I could figure out where I stood in regards to chapbook and/or full length manuscripts.

While all this was going on I did find out that one of my poems has been accpeted for publication in The Main Street Rag.  When I came back to writing in 2006, after a far too long absence, Main Street was the first place that took one of my poems so I was very happy to send them a new set and to have a poem picked.  The poem they picked had been sent out 5 times before, in various versions, and spent 9 months travelling around to these different places before it was selected. Whew! Glad it has landed

When I went back through all my pending poems I found that I had about 144 in circulation and/or published. About 24 have been published. Now some of these are poems that are in my two circulating chapbooks: Fat Girl and The Wait of Atom and a large set of 22 were written in a Form so it limits where I can send them.

What I ended up with, after thinking through themes etc, were 24 possible poems for a possible chapbook and/or longer project I am codenaming Myth and 34 poems that fit into an almost definitely longer project codenamed Autopsy.

I thought a lot of my thesis poems were finally going to come together into a manuscript called Kaliedoscope, but alas, it only came to about 45 poems at most with some overlap with other projects and I just wasn’t feeling it.

Why did I need to do all this?  Well in part, I think it is fun to look for patterns (I am a nerd!) but I also had several sets of poems that were definitely themed but since I didn’t have them all together I was losing track of the connecting images and narrative.  Now that I have them together I can move forward with developing their lyric and narrative structures (there are zombies, bats and autopsys going on – yeah )

Now to finally get up and do something with my day before I start swimming in the glory of poetry again. Not just the writing but also the wonderful reading I am doing in the Best American Poetry 2008 and Sentence magazine along with non poetry things such as King Cat Comix, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon and a chapbook whose title escapes me right now but is from Green Tower Press whom I can’t seem to find a link for online (and did I use whom correctly, it is my goal not to proof blogs  Have a great 4th!

Independence

There is so much I could potentially talk about today

• my desire and attempts to enjoy the web but not to be ruled by it
• the two year anniversarry of my last full time job
• independence in general

But instead, I am going to post a poem, that I will leave up for about a week.  I have tried to write this poem at least once in the past, back in 2006, but I abandoned the theme when I couldn’t get it to gel.  Then I felt inspired to try again during a poetry reading. So here you go guys.  Would love some comments so I can work on any revisions and then send it out into the world

October 1979

I

What I remember is the aisle of the plane. It is blue. Everyone is smiling at three year old me because, while I’m walking with no comprehension of time zones up and down the aisle, I’m not crying or yelling.  My lips move. I count the seats and rows, up to six (my brother’s age) and then back down.

II

I’m in a pool with blue, blue water.  I’m told I learned how to swim then. But back home, at 5, I had to learn again.  But, when I was three, I was in the pool with a beautiful woman who, outside of tan skin, was otherwise black – hair, swimsuit, eyebrows that made one amazing arch across her forehead.

III

“You will eat it!’ My grandfather growled.  I thought he was using his funny growl but when he reached for me it was not with a hand pretending to grab but with an open palm, a striking hand.  I ran.  There was sand.  All because I refused to eat the cold eggs on which I had poured ketchup.  For some reason I thought they might turn green.

IV

There’s a bearded man on TV.  He’s yelling, yet his body – he can only be seen from the shoulders up – doesn’t move, nor does the cloth wrapped around his head.  How does he not move?  Perhaps he was angry at me?  Could he see me through the screen like Ernie on Sesame Street did when we would sing Rubber Duckie together because within, what seemed hours, but what might have been days, we were back on the plane.  I assume.  I don’t recall the return trip.  but I did come home to grass and trees, a newborn sister and hushed voices watching the nightly news.

Goodbye Facebook!

***UPDATED**

If you Google “Facebook Disabled Me!” you will find quite a few posts, more than I anticipated.  Many are justifiable but the vast majority were people just actively using the site who were disabled because they added too many friends, or – like me – because their account got hacked.

Now, mine got hacked at least a month ago and I fixed it.

Yet, it took Facebook a while to catch this, I guess, and they now want to re-authenticate me.  They completely disabled me with no warning!  I was quite miffed but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a blessing in disguise.

I spend WAY to much time on Facebook.

So, if they ever get me my account back, I’m not rejoining. It is a nice place to get the immediacy of discussion, but that in itself is addictive and can interrupt the rest of what I am doing as I catch up on all the minutia of what everyone else is doing.  I will miss it though, and there are some people that I only connect with via Facebook – like cousins who live far away and other writers who I don’t know as well.

That being said, I am going to find as many of these people as possible on their blogs and other accounts.

I reopened my Twitter account as well, but we shall see if I decide to keep that up very long. I may also reopen my Flickr account if I take any new pictures.

I am looking forward to spending more time with my blog, and wait – maybe the real world. Or at least the real world of books

** UPDATE**

Ok, so I got my Facebook back. Not everything is there and I think I’ll leave it up so I have changed a lot of my settings so that I won’t actually be spending time on the site but I will know when someone sends me a message and such.  I think it is the only way I can stay sane and still have access to my family and friends who want to keep using the site. Compromise.  That is what I do… now if it would just stop locking up on me….

Video Wednesday

First is this weeks issue of Shape of a Box with three poems from Ellaraine Lockie. Click here if you want to see the sidebar with text of the poems:

Then me reading one of my poems and one by SC poet Terri McCord. Click here to see info on her in the sidebar of the video:

And, to finish off, a poem by Curtis Dunlap – the Tobacco Road poet -

I’m a bit bummed this morning. My Facebook account got hacked, sort of, because I was tired one day and I clicked on a link to a video in my inbox when I knew better.  I thought I had it all fixed but now Facebook has disabled my account! I have followed their instructions to reactivate it and I sent them another email to try and get the issue corrected. This is SO annoying because I am being punished for what someone else did.  I was very prompt in fixing the issue on my end when it happened quite a while back and I have no spyware etc issues on my comptuer. So I’m just annoyed.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back in and chat and play around with Mafia Wars soon.  In the meantime I’ll take my anger management out on some Solitair and typing up poems I wrote in June. Wow, starting a new month!

Book Round Up

I finished quite a few books recently but I only talk about the good ones in my round up and not the “eh” ones or the ones that I decided to not finish because they were WAY boring.

First up, let me mention a poet: Helen Losse. For those of you who might not know Helen she, not only a poet, but also the Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, a really fun online zine where I have had two sets of poems published.

Helen has been the author of several chapbooks and recently her first full length collection was released.  I had the chance to blurb the book for her and this week I finished one of her chapbooks so I thought I’d give her a shout out.  You can read her blog and find out how to get her book by visiting her here.

Next up: Some of you read my post last week about censorship.  The author who presented that video, Maureen Johnson, is a really fun to read YA author. I had already read one of her books so I decided to read the second one I was able to find The Key to the Golden Firebird.  I don’t want to give away too much here about what happens in the book, but I wish I had had a book to read like this my senior year in high school when I went through a lot of what the main character goes through who incidentally has the nickname of May (short for Mayzie) and, before I was married, my middle name was Mae .

Finally in my stack is the short story collection, Women Up on Blocks, by Mary Akers. This is a terrific short story collection. There was maybe one that I just wasn’t engrossed by.  Mary’s characters are so real and she is fearless in the subject matter she tackles.  This is a nice slim volume that I think would make a great beach read even though many would consider it literary fiction. Highly recommend you guys to pick up a copy.

So now that I have rounded up some books, I get to start some new ones and putter away at trying to get my own writing revised and out into the world.

Oh yeah, and I’m still researching that whole PhD thing.  Last time I had it down to 17 schools that specifically offer the PhD with creative dissertation but I also have notes on a few programs that are more local where I’d be involved in more of a regular Literature or Rhetoric PhD. I’ll keep you posted! And probably too posted if you are my friend on Facebook