Beyond Centauri: Another Blog Contest!

Crossposted from my Blogetary:

Hey! Hey! HEY! It’s arrived! Presenting the April 2009 issue of Beyond Centauri, which just happens to have a flash fiction (very short short) story of mine in it. In honor of its arrival I am going to have another blog contest. Just leave a comment on my Blogetary blog by May 15 and on May 16 I’ll check in and draw a name and let you know who has won!

Drollerie Press's April Blog Tour - Presenting Sarah Avery

Crossposted from Blogetary:

As anyone who reads my blog knows, poetry is important to me, and April is poetry month. In honor of poetry month, the folks at Drollerie Press are having an author blog tour where writers are asked about how poetry has influenced them and their writing. We are sharing those influences on each others blogs. It is my pleasure to host Sarah Avery on my blog today.

Sarah Avery, author of Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply, knows poetry. After all, she earned a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry before going back to her scifi/fantasy roots. After a life of travel, study, and experiences many people only think they understand, it is not surprising that she would use these two very expressive and imaginative genres for her writing.
But Sarah didn’t just get a piece of paper indicating her expertise in poetry, she also taught poetry, has seen the fear and misunderstanding some people have of poetry. She “gets” how poetry is important not just as a field of study or genre, but in every day life, as a way of expressing feelings and moments that are bigger than we are. What follows below is one of best essays I’ve read on how basic and important poetry is to everyone.

“Woof! Squeak!”

by Sarah Avery

What blew my mind the one time I got to teach a course on poetry was how terrified my students were. If my class hadn’t been specifically required for all English majors, and satisfied several requirements for the university’s core curriculum, none of those students would have chosen it. For me, poetry had been by turns a comfort, a friendly challenge, a game, and very nearly a profession–the bell before my bowl of Alpo. For most of my students, poetry had been the occasion of their worst moments in high school English classes, moments of judgment and humiliation–the buzzer before their electric shock.

What could Pavlov’s dog have to teach Skinner’s mice? To be less afraid, to perceive the thing itself despite their fears, to allow for the possibility that a poem might be delicious.

It was both more and less than I’d expected to teach them. I had a carefully balanced syllabus full of lineage, form, and technique. The day before the semester started, I’d congratulated myself on its rigor. The hour I had to face all those wide eyes in pale faces, I found myself selling it to them as a menu full of delicacies.

Things started looking up when one of the students read ahead on the syllabus and raised her hand. “You’re not really assigning Dr. Seuss, are you?”

It was the same question I’d been asked in the department copy room. One of my fellow grad students saw that I was copying pages from Green Eggs and Ham and said, “Either that’ll be the coolest thing you do all semester and they’ll talk it up for years, or it’ll blow up in your face and they’ll hate you for it. Nobody likes condescension.”

In the copy room, my impromptu answer was:

I’ll teach it flying through the air
With long lines by that dude John Clare.
I’ll teach it climbing up a tree
With paeans by that chick H.D.
I’ll teach it creeping on the ground
With Cantos penned by Ezra Pound.
To get those clueless kids to scan,
I’ll teach that book, Green Eggs and Ham.

(That's what immersion in a genre will do for you. I couldn't knock couplets off that fast now, good or bad, with my head full of novellas.)

In any case, my goofy run of couplets wasn't the answer I could give a real live student in the moment when she was deciding whether I was condescending to her or not. Instead, I said something more or less like this:

Poetry happens in the body. Everything about it is something the body does. The body has a pulse, so poetry thumps. The body breathes, so poetry pauses. What is all that sensory vividness our high school teachers wanted us to pay attention to doing in the poem? It's there because the body senses the world. If you have a body, you can get something from poetry--and bring something to poetry, too. Robert Pinsky (the Poet Laureate the year I taught the class, but long before that an undergrad at the very same big state school my students were attending), likes to say that the true medium of the art of poetry is not the page or the written word, but is rather the column of air in the body of the person speaking the poem. The instrument of the poem is the body of the reader. Dr. Seuss never tries to disguise the physicality of his poetry. That's why you get him and not e.e. cummings when you're a child first learning to read, and that's why you get him and not e.e. cummings early in the semester.

"So," I concluded, "it looks like everyone here has a body." I waited a moment. No one contradicted me. "In that case, you've all come prepared."

That was my story. I stuck to it all semester. Green Eggs and Ham, with its thumpy pulse, took all the fear out of scansion marks, which apparently had been the source of a lot of high school trauma.

The physicality of poetry is one of the things I miss. I've been writing fiction seriously for six years now, and short essays for my blog for five years. A background in poetry does help on the sentence level, and to some extent on the structural level, but the intense focus on sound and breath is very difficult to sustain in a novel-length work. You do sometimes find those weird exceptions, novels in verse, and some of them even prosper-- like Vikram Seth's charming The Golden Gate, or Toby Barlow's current werewolf hit, Sharp Teeth. But not every story wants that form, and a writer who cares about publication and audience can't expect a verse novel to find a home out in the world. I expect to return to poetry from time to time, but prose fiction's where I live now.

But back to the students. (I miss them, too.)

What could Skinner's mice have to teach Pavlov's dog?

It was something I should have known, something I'd heard and read before. The poet who mentored me often quoted Muriel Rukeyser's aphorism, "The fear of poetry is the fear." That is to say, one of the intimidating things about poetry is that, in order to understand the good stuff, you have to open yourself to it, and ours is a culture that punishes true openness. For that matter, being open to the world lets in all kinds of suffering, along with the beauty. Numbness has it advantages. The very physicality of poetry makes it that much harder to resist feeling and thinking whatever the poem offers for you to feel and think.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the memory of humiliating ignorance in front of a classroom full of peers and a judgmental high school teacher that had zapped my some of students. The ones who had been able to connect with poetry a little bit, despite their educations, had found there something that demanded they bring, and therefore find, much more of themselves than they were accustomed even to acknowledging. Prose fiction, which was much more comfortable to them, invited them to lose themselves in story. Prose fiction does that for all of us, though the good stuff drops us back off at the end with more than we embarked with. It's a sweet deal, but very different. In most poetry, especially in modern and postmodern poetry, escape is not on offer.

Now, as a fantasy writer who brazenly embraces escapism as part of what stories ought to do, I look back on my students' predicament with more sympathy than I had when I was teaching them. The tools of sound and rhythm, breath and pulse, still matter, but instead of using them to demand the body's attention, I use them to direct the body's attention into the imagined bodies of characters in some other world. What is the medium of fiction? Not the page, not words, but the reader's identity.

Poem a Day Challenge - Day 20

Crossposted from Blogetary.

So, today’s prompt at Poetic Asides was rebirth. There are so many ways you can go with rebirth, so many possibilities. In the end, I went with what was, for me, the most basic. This challenge takes a lot of creative stamina and I’m running out of ideas.

Rebirth

Renaissance

All I wanted was a best friend.
Someone to listen to me,
be with me,
love me –
no matter what.
That’s what they told me I would have.
Then they dunked me and called me
born again.

They didn’t tell me
once reborn
it never ends.
Once reborn
you constantly die
again and again and again.

Poem a Day Challenge - Day 14

Crossposted from my Blogetary.

Wow, almost halfway there! Since today was Tuesday, it was a two-fer challenge again and we got two prompts. We could do either or both, as we chose. The two prompts were Love and Anti-Love. Here was my attempt:

Love -

Is it love?

He dogs my every move -
never far away.
I see him wherever I go -
he’s constantly on my tail.
Sometimes I look up –
to meet his baleful glare.

Ignore him though I try
as he rubs his cheek against my leg
I have to wonder why…

Is it love?
Or is it food?

Anti-love

Revelation

Bubble rises in my stomach,
as the words go on and on and on and on…
“Love inspires me!”
Bubble does its job, shoving food aside -
shoving it up inside…
as you swan on…
“I’m whole when I’m in love!”
Bubble reaches my mouth and I cough,
feel food in the back of my throat
and swallow down acid.
“Being in love is the only way to be!”
The bubble bursts.

Leaning over the toilet,
burning from the inside out,
I remember what you were like
when you were in love with me.

Poem a Day Challenge Day 10

Cross posted from my blogetary:

Today’s Poem a Day challenge was using the prompt, “Friday.”

So, here’s my entry:

Friday

Then–
Friday, Fryday, Freya’s day, FRIIIIDAY!
Day of possibilities, the unopened present.
Day when anything can happen and nothing proved wrong.
Frypan food day, Freya’s date night,
Drink with friends and dance with all your might.

Now–
Friday is laundry day, stay at home eat pizza day;
Sleeping in on Saturn’s day and wondering about Jupiter’s day.

In the end, though, Friday is my day.

Blog Contest!

So, I got my copies of Aoife’s Kiss today! Yay! See? Here it is!

Forgive the distortion. I had to hold it up at an angle to keep the reflection from glaring it out.

Now that I have my copies, I can have a BLOG CONTEST! Yes, that’s right! Just in time for Eostra, Passover, Good Friday and Easter! If you would like a signed issue of this Aoife’s Kiss that has my short story, The Lullabye, in it, then just leave a blog comment. And it looks like a great copy! With titles like AI & the 40 Zombies and Dragon Cuisine, how can you go wrong?

You have until the 18th to leave your comment on my blogetary blog here. Then, I’ll drop your names in a hat, draw one out and the winner gets a copy!

WOW- Women on Writing

WOW - Women on Writing is an online zine for the encouragement of women writing. Actually, anyone writing, but the focus is women. They have a quarterly writing contest and helpful articles for the working writer. Well, they just published an article I wrote for them. You can check it out here.

A lot of other stuff has come out since I wrote this article. For example, what I didn’t know when I wrote this article is that in many states, women pay more for insurance than men because women are typically more responsible and actually make appointments and participate in preventive health care. But because of that, we’re seen as being more expensive, and that’s even when we don’t use the maternity care. So, we end up paying 39% more in health insurance in many states, including California. New York, however, does not allow for discrimination due to gender.

Write your congressperson.

PAD Day 3

As the blogger announced, at day 3, we are 10% done! Yay!

Today’s prompt was: “The problem with…”

You can see an abundance of poems on problems here.

This was my post:

The Problem with Zombies…

The problem with zombies is they’re already dead.
What’s a gal to do short of blow off their heads.
Hope they stumble around enough feeling for their skull
it’s a wonder as she runs off in her heels that she can
get away at all.

Vampires, werewolves, dragons, ghosts –
each have their flaw (of which they, typically, boast)
the point at which they are undone –
Existence unraveling with the rising of the sun.

But zombies are different, they can’t be beat.
The problem with zombies is they can take the heat.
The trouble with zombies is they don’t leave.

In the end, I suppose, the truth will out -

A gal could do worse in a world full of monsters,
then to end up dating a tall, unrotted corpster.

Writers Digest Poem a Day Challenge

Crossposted from Blogetary:

So, I decided to at least try the Poem a Day Challenge.

The prompt today (April 1 that is) was origins of something. Here’s mine:

The Dawning of my Demise

Began with yearning turning
to need –
pressure building
exploding
pencil gripped and tearing
through the page.

To get my words out.

Feeding desire to throw
words on the pyre
and
see
them
burn.

To be a writer.

I was 9.

According to last years Poet Laureate, the trick is to read the prompt EARLY in the day (something I didn’t do today) so your poem can gel. So, we’ll try again tomorrow, shall we?

Now, go take a look at the latest Beyond Centauri.