Yearly Archives: 2018

123 posts

Of Little Goats and Alcoholics

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Appropriately enough, Kaveh Akbar’s collection, Portrait of the Alcoholic, is dedicated quite simply “for drunks.” It’s not surprising, then, that you get poems dealing with issues of addiction.

One has the catchy title, “Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy.” Well, he could, but it would do him little good if he was about to be sacrificed and roasted as a celebratory meal (no kidding).

It’s exactly how an alcoholic might feel. Or a drug addict. Or anyone harried by any habit they just cannot shed.

Here’s the poem:

 

“Besides, Little Goat, You Can’t Just Go Asking for Mercy”
by Kaveh Akbar

Besides, little goat, you can’t just go asking for mercy.
With a body like that, it’s easy to forget

about the spirit—the sun unfolding over your coat, your throat
too elegant for prayer. I like it fine, this daily struggle

to not die, to not drink or smoke or snort anything
that might return me to combustibility. Historical problem:

it’s harder than you’d think to burn even what’s flammable.
Once I charged into your body and invented breath. Or,

I stumbled into your mouth and found you breathing. When I left,
I left a lozenge of molten ore on your tongue. Stony grain-pounder,

sleepy pattern-locator, do this: cover your wings, trust
the earth, spread your genes. Nothing here is owned. The ladder

you’re looking for starts not on the ground but several feet below it.

An Ode to Food Sections

poetry

 

I don’t know about you but on these cold and dark November days—clocks cowed back an hour to the time of our father’s fathers—I start to think obsessively about food. Fortunately, I am neither alone nor outside the ordinary. In the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, everyone and his cousin twice removed (from the kiddies’ table) is thinking about food, most especially newspaper and magazine food editors.

Some people dream of money. Some people dream of bling. And some people dream of wheels (arrest-me-red race cars are cute, after all). But me, I dream of Thanksgiving.

It’s easy. You can even dream with your eyes open. Consider all the color photography around us—feature upon feature with shots of brown-skinned turkeys, glistening bowls of homemade cranberry sauces, steamy piles of stuffing, Brussels sprouts and sausage, sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, squmkin pie (but mostly, and dearest to my heart, faux mincemeat pie).

Without invitation, Norman Rockwell crashes the party and people laugh. And why not? Everyone at the table is leaning in, smiling, forgetting about the world (thank Squanto!) for awhile. What’s not to like?

These days you’ll find me, then, in the Food sections of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. Bon Appetit? Yes, please. On-line recipe sites? Some more, please, sir! A gazillion ingredients requiring a full-time cook? Who cares, I’m just reading and dreaming here. You’ll find me in the dictionary between “vicarious” and “pleasures.”

Thanksgiving is where I’d like to slam on the brakes, avoiding Christmas altogether. Or maybe make like ten lords a-leaping by jumping over Christmas altogether. Thanksgiving resonates (and smells up the house with nostalgia) because there’s no gift-buying, no lines, no politics, just family (OK, maybe some politics, if you count Uncle George) and *food*.

And a few winers. And loosen-the-belt nappers. And football-game watching zombies.

But most importantly, it’s a festival focusing on one of life’s most heralded pleasures: food and drink. Before the day, in living color and 28-page spreads. After the day, in leftover turkey soup and ridiculously fat sandwiches featuring breast meat, stuffing, and cranberry as condiment (extra points for gravy)

Calories? No one cares. Cholesterol? Take it outside, Debbie Downer. For one day only, we’re here to cast care to the wind and let cheer and conversation in.

Just had to take a time out to say all of this, is all. Now back to my regularly-scheduled eye feast.  Reading isn’t fattening, after all. It’s just anticipation. Like Carly Simon says….

Metaphoric Push-Ups

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rosary

Easily the most difficult exercise you can practice in poetry is the metaphoric push-up. Leave your like’s and as’s in the cupboard, why don’t you, and point-blank tell the world how this is that, knowing full well that this isn’t that, but the audacity of saying so works. Somehow. Against all odds. Thus, the burn in your creative muscle.

To start, choose something simple. Or unusual. Does it matter? Simplicity and complexity are each malleable. Silly Putty under the kneading thumbs of a child. Play-Doh with its grainy smells of yellow and red and blue. A floury ball of dough in the fine sinewy hands of a baker. Proteus the Shape-shifter would be pleased with all this. His diet is metaphor with milk, three times a day.

Before you have fun, you can read this William Matthews poem called “The Snake.” How many ways can you describe something you take your eyes off of (and your feet away from) ipso fasto every time you come across it? Or, in Matthews’ case, something you can’t take your eyes off of because snakes are a form of hypnosis?

Rhetorical questions, of course. Many, many ways, as shown here. See which metaphor (or rogue simile) you like best:

 

“The Snake”
by William Matthews

A snake is the love of a thumb
and forefinger.
Other times, an arm
that has swallowed a bicep.

The air behind this one
is like a knot
in a child’s shoelace
come undone
while you were blinking.

It is bearing something away.
What? What time
does the next snake leave?

This one’s tail is ravelling
into its burrow—
a rosary returned to a purse.
The snake is the last time your spine
could go anywhere alone.

 

 

Perhaps he saved the best for last, but Matthews really outdoes himself in the last stanza. You know. That bit about the snake returning to its burrow being a rosary slipping back into a purse.

My God and hers, it reminds me of my grandmother, the last person I know to actually use rosary beads, and use them she did. Each bead. Religiously. Doing praying push-ups, which are something  *like* metaphoric ones: a work out well worth the effort. Or so I like to think, imagining my grandmother in heaven, where she belongs.

Sins of the Fathers (and Brothers)

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It’s always amusing to hear people say, “My God. I sound just like my mother.” Or father, for that matter. We grow up vowing that we have learned from what we disliked as children growing up, but sometimes, when cast into the role of parents ourselves, we instinctively begin a shadow dance with our pasts.

The power of childhood is greater and darker than we know. One extreme example lies in the behavior of the aged on their deathbeds. If they are in the throes of pain or delirium, they often call out for long-deceased mother or father. This with a lifelong married partner at their side, even. Such is the powerful imprint of childhood, the wild woods we unconsciously navigate in times of blind stress.

Foreshadowing such behavior are the sometimes unchecked instincts learned in our childhoods not only as sons and daughters, but as brothers and sisters. It is this renegade instinct that the poet Patrick Phillips wrestles with in the following poem, wherein the speaker’s two sons become disturbing echoes of the speaker’s own childhood.

The beauty of the poem? The concrete subject, a wrestling move, lends more than one meaning to its abstract title. It’s one of the things good poetry does. See if you can’t find more than one way to interpret the word “mercy,” as seen through a childhood darkly:

 

“Mercy”
by Patrick Phillips

Like two wrestlers etched
around some ancient urn,

we’d lace our hands, then wrench
each other’s wrists back

until the muscles ached
and the tendons burned,

and one brother or the other
grunted mercy—a game

we played so many times
I finally taught my sons,

not knowing what it was,
until too late, I’d done:

when the oldest rose
like my brother’s ghost,

grappling with the little
ghost I was at ten—

who cried out Mercy!
in my own voice Mercy!

as I watched from deep
inside my father’s skin.

 

Sometimes the “Enemy of the People” Is… the People

poetry

Election Eve Special:

Poetry appears in many places—history, even. Is it not poetic justice, after all, that friends and frequent political jousters John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence?

I am reading Joseph Ellis’s bracing new book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, which has a structure of then (as in, the root of our problems) and now (as in, what flower—or thorns—these roots have wrought since the Founding Fathers’ day).

The first section focuses, appropriately enough, on race and on Thomas Jefferson (then and very much now). And although there is a lot I could say about these fascinating opening chapters, I’m moved instead by what I’m reading in the next pair of chapters (“Equality”), which focuses on John Adams.

But why listen to me? Here is Ellis on a critique Adams offered on Thomas Jefferson:

“…the Adams critique of Jefferson operates at a much deeper level of intellectual and ideological sophistication, involving nothing less than a wholesale rejection of what he regarded as the following illusions of the French Enlightenment: the unfounded belief in the preternatural wisdom of ‘the people’; the naïve assumption that human beings are inherently rational creatures; and the romantic conviction that American society was immune to the class divisions so prevalent in Europe. The political differences between Adams and Jefferson are too multifaceted to be captured in the conventional categories of ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ What we must negotiate is the distinction between a realist and an idealist, a pessimist and an optimist, a skeptic and a believer. Both men were rock-ribbed American patriots, though diametrically at odds over the likely shape of America’s future…

“The clear implication of [Adams’] presidency, at least as Adams saw it, was that leadership necessarily entailed not listening to the voice of ‘the people’ when it ran counter to the abiding interest of ‘the public,’ which the president had a moral obligation to defend even more forcefully when it was unpopular… Adams had no trouble endorsing the Lockean doctrine that all political power derived from ‘the people.’ but he could never bring himself to think about popular sovereignty in the reverential fashion that Jefferson embraced with such intoxicating assurance. ‘The fundamental Article of my political Creed,’ he declared quite defiantly, ‘is that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or Absolute Power is the same in a popular Assembly, an Aristocratic Counsel, an Oligarchic Junto and a single Emperor.’

“Adams realized that this creedal statement was heretical in the Jeffersonian political universe, where it was inherently impossible for ‘the people’ to behave despotically. He was attempting to disabuse his old friend of the same kind of magical thinking that had permitted medieval theologians to conjure up miracles. There was in fact no surefire source of political omniscience on this side of heaven, and making ‘the people’ into just such a heavenly creature was a preposterous perpetuation of an alluring illusion about kings long since discredited by Jefferson himself in his indictment of George III in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, if you wanted to know where such illusions about the infallibility of ‘the people’ led, you only needed to follow the bloodstained trail of the French Revolution, which moved through massacres at the guillotine to its inevitably despotic destination in Napoleon.”

I’m looking forward to the “Now” chapter that complements this Adams one. It is called “Our Gilded Age” and will draw lines, I am sure, between notions of “equality” then and today.

In the meantime, we’d all do well to remember John Adams’ stark warning. Sometimes the enemy of the people is… the people, voting themselves to perdition and other places we don’t want to go.

Happy Election Day, 2018, and I hope you pick up Ellis’s book for a look-see at Thomas Jefferson’s, John Adams’s, James Madison’s, and George Washington’s “dialogues” with the present day. It will cause you to think, and thinking is something the Founding Fathers valued very, very much.

 

 

Pain, Sickness, and the Desire To Be “Adamantly Elsewhere”

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saint

In honor of the passing of Tony Hoagland in October, I’m sharing “Arrows,” with its allusion to Saint Sebastian and his arrow-ridden body. The arrows in Tony’s case, of course, would be the cancer that eventually took him. But for others, the arrows could metaphorically equate to many things that torment us, body and soul, causing us, too, to look up, as if nothing on this earth “was ever real”…

 

Arrows
by Tony Hoagland


When a beautiful woman wakes up,
she checks to see if her beauty is still there.
When a sick person wakes up,
he checks to see if he continues to be sick.
He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,
looks out the window at a sky
where a time-release sun is crawling
through the milky X ray of a cloud.
   * * * * *
I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,
the wires crossed, the panel lit
by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing
out of sequence,
the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls,
and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,
the message doesn’t reach its destination,
the angel falls down into the body of a dog
and is speechless,
tearing at itself with fast white teeth;
and the consciousness twists evasively,
like a sheet of paper,
       traveled by blue tongues of flame.
   * * * * *
In the famous painting, the saint
looks steadfastly heavenward,
             away from the physical indignity below,
the fascinating spectacle
    of his own body
                     bristling with arrows;
he looks up
as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,
    exerting that power of denial
         the soul is famous for,
that ability to say, “None of this is real:
Nothing that happened here on earth
and who I thought I was,
and nothing that I did or that was done to me,
was ever real.”

R.I.P. Tony Hoagland

poetry

Wow. Not sure how I missed it until alerted via email today, but we lost a good man and a good poet (and not a bad essayist, thank you, too) over a week ago. Here is a fine tribute to Tony Hoagland in the New York Times obituary pages.

And, from only a month before his death to pancreatic cancer, there’s this must read from The Sun by Tony.

Our hearts go out for this loss, but as our thanks go out, too, for the gains in our reading lives and in our lives as poets and Americans.

Tony, we will miss you but never forget you.

Wind. Rain. Hardy’s Poetry.

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Sometimes you read a poem that somehow comes to be read in its own time. Its perfect time, I might say.

Outside it is still dark before dawn. It is unnaturally warm for November, too, an imperfect “Climate change? What climate change?” New England moment.

Wind. Rain. And me, just in from a dog-walk dreary.

The poem I read is by good old Thomas Hardy. I met Mr. Hardy thanks to Holden Caulfield, protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Holden was reading The Return of the Native while cutting classes at Pencey Prep. If there’s one thing I admire, it’s an educated drop-out.

Anyway, Holden of the Hunting Hat loves that Eustacia Vye, main character of said Return of the Native. And as I loved Salinger’s book, I picked up Hardy’s book, and loved that, too, even though it couldn’t be more different. You know. Mexican enchiladas versus Swedish smorgasbord. Different, but compelling in their own ways.

Somehow the fates cued this morning’s inclement weather for my first read of Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.” Only there’s more than wind and rain going down here. It’s raining years. And time.

Fate chose not only the right weather (outside my house) but the right age (inside my mortal coil) for reading this poem. It bleeds mortality. At an alarming rate, too.

See if your years don’t look like leaves blowing off of life’s trees as you read, and you’ll understand! As Thomas Hardy would say: “O!”

 

During Wind and Rain
by Thomas Hardy

They sing their dearest songs—
He, she, all of them—yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face…
Ah, no: the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss—
Elders and juniors—aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat….
Ah, no; the years, the years;
See, the white storm-birds wing across!

They are blithely breakfasting all—
Men and maidens—yea,
Under the summer tree,
With a glimpse of the bay,
While pet fowl come to the knee….
Ah, no; the years O!
And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house,
He, she, all of them—aye,
Clocks and carpets and chairs
On the lawn all day,
And brightest things that are theirs….
Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

The Siren Call of Submittable: Part 2

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sirens

Yesterday I wrote at length (for me) about ways Submittable has shifted the playing field for writers and literary magazines alike. Today: How Submittable fosters bad writer habits.

For literary magazines, Submittable giveth (to the bottom line, as magazines keep 62% of reading-fee proceeds) and it taketh away (the ability to staff readers who can keep up with the onslaught of submissions).

And for writers, Submittable giveth and taketh away, too. The “giveth” is convenience and record-keeping and making more markets financially-healthy to send to. The “taketh away”? Mounting costs (what writer keeps track?) from the aggregate hits these submissions make on our savings over time. And competition. Lots and lots of competition. Easy for you is easy for everybody. Eventually the odds begin to look like lottery ticket wins: steeper than steep.

But what I want to wax eloquent on today is Submitta-Mania (a disease caused by the ease of Submittable’s portals). Why are writers of all stripes ability-wise in this headlong rush to get published, ipso fasto. By yesterday, if possible?

There’s the easy answer: affirmation. Hidden in every writer (maybe even the established and famous ones) is a dark voice that says things like “Do I suck?” and “Was that acceptance the exception?” and “Am I capable of doing it again?”

Self-doubt, as we know, is one of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse.

But I attribute the rush to submit to social media as well. It’s the cocaine candy of our times.

Think about it: What makes people constantly check their phones? Why do people crave “likes” on Facebook? Why do egos on Twitter want way more followers than those they follow? Ego, ego, ego. The relentless need to trick yourself into the notion that you are somebody. Not only somebody, but somebody “big.” A player.

Oh, yeah. What fools these mortals be, and all that.

This leads me to the theory that writing for publication, and better yet for paying publication, is part of the drive to submit. Technology feeds short attention spans, which come not only in the form of what we’ll read and for how long, but in what we’ll revise and for how long. The result? We pony up the poetry and click submit, sometimes at $3 a hit, far sooner than we should.

Do you like me, pretty please? the submission wants to know. Ah, no, the first intern says while checking his phone mid-your poem. Thus your precious poetry fails to come within a statute mile of its target editor. And thus it returns like a bad penny in your inbox.

By now you know where this is going. Self-discipline is more important than ever. Writers are part of the problem when they ship poetry only written in the last 60 days to The New Yorker (response time: one year) and Tin House (one year and umpty-eight weeks).

Instead, think “we will sell no wine before its time.” Or, if you’re hosting Thanksgiving in a few weeks, this: Would you take the turkey out halfway through its roasting time and put it on a platter before your guests? (Yes, this makes a big turkey of your poem.)

How about this: Would you put on half  your clothes before going out to work?

Does this work?: Would you paint half your house and look at that side only with admiration for a month or two?

The stuff we write is mischievous as hell. It is a shape shifter par excellence. It beguiles and flatters like an illusion in the desert. Trust it as far as you can throw it. And if it says “no” to further revision, you say “yes,” most likely after you’ve sent it to its room for a month or four. Seeing it again after 120 days will change everything. Everything.

And that, my friends, can’t help but be all for the better. Not only for your art and pride, but for your nickel-and-dimed bottom line.

What Submittable Has Done To Us

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A most interesting article appears in the Nov./Dec. issue of Poets & Writers. It’s called (and pay attention to the subtitle!) “Diving Into the Digital Slush Pile: How Online Submissions Are Changing Lit Mags (And Your Chances of Publication).”

Let’s take a time out before we dive in, shall we? Any writer submitting to lit mags already knows that this isn’t Kansas anymore. For one, most every writer north of Honduras knows that Submittable is addictive for both editors and writers. And if you live south of Saskatchewan, you’ve probably figured out that this thing called “a reading fee” is making itself comfortable like a guest staying past three days.

But what does it all mean? Two things, it appears. One, Submittable is hurting writers’ bottom line while helping magazines’. And two, the easier it gets for everyone (and their sister) to submit, the harder it gets to land an acceptance. In other words, change is not always a good thing.

Still, as the article attests, when you factor in all the costs of snail mail (postage, materials, and that vanishing commodity called time), reading fees might be a deal. Why, then, a dozen submissions later, does one feel like George Washington after his doctor has bled him (again)?

Holdout magazines like Alaska Quarterly Magazine and Antioch Review (editors of both interviewed here) are feeling the heat, too. AQR‘s Ronald Spatz admits that he might be missing cutting-edge  (read: “young, up-and-coming”) writers by sticking with snail mail. So he did an experiment. He played Submittable’s game for a month in Sept. of 2017.

What happened? “In that time [Spatz] expected to receive three hundred to four hundred manuscripts over the digital transom. Instead he received 1,190—on top of the paper submissions that were still arriving via postal mail.”

This is where holy meets Toledo, folks.

The whole experiment might have led Spatz to change AQR‘s policy for good and go all-in for digital, but he resisted for a wonderful reason: “He believes it’s unethical to invite the deluge of manuscripts he would get online until he has enough staff to read all of them in a timely manner.”

Which can only mean that some lit mags are soldiering on under impossible conditions: too many manuscripts, too few readers, too long a response time. Why would they do such a thing? In the language of that plutocracy we call “U.S.A.”: m-o-n-e-y.

Submittable charges magazines an annual subscription fee, then takes a cut of the proceeds when writers pony up for a hearing. Let’s stick with the AQR example: “Those administrative fees can add up to a small but attractive revenue stream for perennially cash-strapped literary magazines. At AQR, Spatz paid $757 for the journal’s annual Submittable subscription and retained $1.86 of each $3 payment from writers using the system, with the remainder going back to Submittable.  With 1,190 submissions, the revenue from fees more than paid for the journal’s Submittable subscription in just the one month submissions were open. Had AQR kept the online portal open for a full year, Spatz says, ‘we would be getting lots of revenue, which we need, but the thing is, that would be unethical [because the journal doesn’t have the staff to handle the added submissions].'”

Meanwhile, John Fogarty, editor of the Antioch Review, has other solutions to the never-rest Everest Submittable creates.  He’s considering a policy of directly soliciting work from a small group of established writers Antioch has already worked with. “The volume is so large that it is almost impossible to manage at this point,” he says.

If you as a writer think the penny ante-financial drain of regular submission fees is rough, consider the fees charged for increasingly-popular contests. $25, $30, $35. While these might not be salad days for lit mags, there is a discernible uptick in their bottom lines, as they can now use writers’ money to pay off judges and readers of the hopeful writers’ wares.

The conclusion seems to be clear: In its innocent way, Submittable might be hurting your chances of publication. After all, convenience equals congestion equals competition at previously unprecedented levels.

Solutions? You can continue to patronize those magazines that shun reading fees, for one. Or, as the article suggests, you can take a chill pill. Read the magazines you submit to first. Narrow down the periodicals you’d like to be a part of and submit to them and them alone. Stop carpet-bombing!

What’s more, the article wonders, what’s this rush to publication all about anyway? Many writers are rushing works to markets before they’re even ready, just adding to the problem. Wait! Get feedback from fellow writers! Let it cook for a year! Then submit to a small group of magazines—ones you personally love.

If that sounds an awful lot like self-discipline, something people are not very good at, you’re right. Still, it’s advice worth trying. We are in a brave new world here, one where more and more writers are paying more and more money for someone to tell them their writing sucks.

Or, in some cases, one where more and more writers are paying for some front-line intern to skim and reject their work because, well, said intern has such a mountainous pile to scale that he or she is not going to bother giving every single piece a fair reading. Rather, it’s check the box. Caught up. Done. Next?

If that sounds unfair, you need only be reminded that digital life, like life itself, is unfair. As for literary magazines, they want to be fair and they’re doing their best, but injustices will happen. It’s all collateral damage, after all. At a $1.86-a-pop profit, Submittable’s way is here to stay, and everyone has to adjust appropriately.