March 2020 – Page 2

What Are Poets Writing About?

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OK, I get it. Asking what today’s poets are writing about is a stupid question. They are writing about whatever they want to write about.

Even amending the question helps but little: What are poets who are getting published writing about?

There is no way one can gain accuracy via a random sample. They’re all too…random. That said, randomness can provide some indications, anyway. And count me curious (thus, this post), because I’ve often noted a chasm between some of my favorite topics and what poetry editors seem to like best these days.

Put it this way. If I were a contestant on Jeopardy!, I wouldn’t fare so well on popular culture topics, and I suspect modern poetry loves popular culture more than I do.

For my sample, then, I turned to the most recent issue of Rattle, a popular poetry magazine that features “approachable” poetry. Better yet, the Spring 2020 issue features a special section dedicated to students of the poet-teacher Kim Addonizio (pictured above). It’s called “Tribute to Kim Addonizio & Her Students.”

(And can we interrupt this broadcast to say just how much better these poet-students’ odds for publication became thanks to this oh-so-specific condition? I mean, c’mon. I’ve written Editor Tim Green about having a special section for former 4th-grade students of Mrs. Ann Wilcox in Cowtown, Connecticut, in some future issue. Instead of competing against… basically everybody… I’d need only best a handful of historic writer sorts who traveled through Mrs. W’s storied classroom!)

But where were we? Ah, yes. A list of topics chosen by the 17 Addonizio-trained poets. As noted, it’s a doubly good sample because a.) they were trained by a top name, contemporary poet, and b.) their work was selected by editors of a paying poetry market (“paying” and “poetry market” being such strange bedfellows these days).

Care to play along? Let’s see how you do as I see how I do! Are their topics similar in many ways to yours? Or are you writing just a few too many poems about the Reformation in 16th-century Germany?

Accepted and published poem is loosely about…

a woman after her lover has left her
a narrator with a girl in the neighboring seat who is now sleeping on her shoulder during a long airplane flight
a dying man’s plan to paint vistas of deserts and mountains in his final weeks, months
a pair of lovers staying at a romantic place by the sea
someone’s updates on their neighbor, a man who unsuccessfully tried to hang himself two months back
a series of metaphors comparing a sermon to the neighborhood
a narrator who likes to talk about sex and think about turning into a wild animal
Penn Station as life: the board, a homeless person, commuters, movement
ruminations on love and life as a formerly-married, now single middle-aged sort
a quirky look at society post-Election Day (of gee, I wonder who?)
lovers sailing near the equator where they dive and photo-shoot creatures of the sea
Kafka’s Gregor Samsa reimagined in modern times interfacing with Twitter, tow trucks, protesters, police officers, and (God save us) Starbucks coffee
someone’s 16-year-old cat at the veterinarian’s, along with other animals and owners in the waiting room of angst
a woman entering a bar, sizing up a man, and deciding “Hell, yeah!”
a fraught mom comparing her infant son (cuddly) with the 5-year-old he has become (not so cuddly)
a couple in a house of many windows, observed by outsiders but observing themselves as well, concluding that living = being seen

I’m not sure how the “popular culture test” works here. Maybe this: Could these poems be developed into reality TV pilots that people would watch? Well, there’s sex, love, despair, death, travel, politics, social networks, coffee baristas, pets, mothers-and-children, alcohol, and, of course, self.

The stuff of traditional poets like, say, Frost? Not so much, really. The topics seem to be more immediate, contemporary, familiar. Ideas that could easily segue into features for popular magazines.

Can we learn from this? Perhaps. It seems the overall notion of sharing your life more openly—a prerequisite of life online— is a good thing, at least for poets aiming to get published.

In that sense, poetry is a reflection of our times, where folks upload not only pictures of their cats, but pictures of what they are eating for dinner, where (jealousy alert!) they are traveling, and (wait for it!) themselves via the now-hackneyed selfie.

Popular culture, then. Out of the confessional box and into open air. Only poetically. Then submit and like your odds a bit more!

Life Goes On…

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Creating poetry prompts is often considered an art form, one where you have to be uber creative by coming up with quirky and specific prods for the writer’s imagination.

But hold on here a minute. What about the cliché as poetry prompt? Behind every mundane phrase first uttered by, say, Aristotle, there’s a truth teeming with particulars.

Let’s take the expression “life goes on” as a for instance, shall we? Because there’s a year, month, day, hour, and minute out there with our names on it—the moment we will take our last breaths, I mean—and when that happens, life surely will go on, completely indifferent to that preciousness we know as ourselves.

Question is, if I tasked you with a list of specifics on ways life would go on (and I mean particulars that are particular to you and not, say, to Aunt Kate in Kansas), you would envision something peculiar to your own life (external geography) and mind (internal geography).

In short, by zooming in on the little things first, writing, and then going back to give these truths a dose of figurative touch-ups, you’d soon have a poem not unlike Faith Shearin’s below.

As a starting point, Shearin chooses that universal filler-topic, the weather. She cites items entire years have been famous for (droughts, floods) and items you might see on any given day (“weathervanes, dizzy on top of farmhouses”).

Either way, zooming in or panning out, it works if the imagery is sharp, specific, and treated in a novel way. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the cliché comes alive. And though weather is the overarching theme in her particular paean to life moving along, most any broad topic could be to yours.

Read it as an exemplar, then give it a go. How will life go on when you make your exit, stage left? Might as well take your chance to produce and direct it now. You’ll have little control once you’re through that exit door!

Weather
Faith Shearin

There is weather on the day you are born
and weather on the day you die. There is
the year of drought, and the year of floods,
when everything rises and swells,
the year when winter will not stop falling,
and the year when summer lightning
burns the prairie, makes it disappear.
There are the weathervanes, dizzy
on top of farmhouses, hurricanes
curled like cats on a map of sky:
there are cows under the trees outlined
in flies. There is the weather that blows
a stranger into town and the weather
that changes suddenly: an argument,
a sickness, a baby born
too soon. Crops fail and a field becomes
a study in hunger; storm clouds
billow over the sea;
tornadoes appear like the drunk
trunks of elephants. People talking about
weather are people who don’t know what to say
and yet the weather is what happens to all of us:
the blizzard that makes our neighborhoods
strange, the flood that carries away
our plans. We are getting ready for the weather,
or cleaning up after the weather, or enduring
the weather. We are drenched in rain
or sweat: we are looking for an umbrella,
a second mitten; we are gathering
wood to build a fire.

Life as a Submitting Author (Hint: It Ain’t Pretty)

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Being a writer who submits your work has its charm. One is the perpetual state of expectation (just west of the perpetual state of Tennessee).

Remember when you were young and the Internet was still an idea-in-waiting, how you’d look forward to the postman’s visit to see if you got any handwritten letters? It’s somewhat similar, in a pale fashion, checking your inbox daily for responses from magazines and journals.

Mostly, the following happen to you:

Nothing. I mean nothing. For days. Weeks even. Sometimes months. Remember what Mama once told you: “A watched micro never waves.”
Nothing goes on for so long that you decide to submit to another five or ten markets. That’ll show ’em!
Hint: This is known as saturating the market out of frustration. It is also known as making work for yourself should one of your simultaneously-submitted babies get accepted.
Something, in the form of subject lines beginning with RE: followed by a journal’s name. Here you engage in little reindeer games. You open the other emails first and save this one for last. You act like a little kid plucking petals from an ox-eye daisy while reciting, “S/he loves me, s/he loves me not.” Then you finally click it and know immediately by the shape and length of the message.
Hint: Usually “…s/he loves me not.”
You get a form rejection from a journal that charges a reading fee. You kick yourself (no small feat, even if you have big feet). How many times have you sworn this off? And yet you continue to fool yourself by saying, “Yeah, but this poem is that good!”
Hint: No it’s not. Unless you’re already famous. Then it might be.
You get rejected by a journal two days after you submitted. Though it’s disappointing, it actually feels good. Why?
Hint: It might have something to do with submissions from 10 months ago that still read “RECEIVED” in Submittable (maybe the journal’s name, The Cobweb Review, should have served as a hint).
You agreed to subscribe to emails from the journal the day of submission. It sends you a form rejection and your babies (typically five of them) come home downcast and in tears. As retribution, you go into indignant mom mode and unsubscribe to emails from that journal. Here we go again: That’ll show ’em!
Hint: This is small-minded, but rejected poets are quick to forgive themselves.
You make a run and get three or four acceptances in a row. You’re hot. Like ham and cheese with mayo, you’re on a roll. Now the poetry world gets it! Now they finally appreciate your genius!
Hint: Do you actually think they are aware of each other’s acceptances and are jumping on your imaginary bandwagon? Hey. Whatever floats your boat, dreamer.
Your run ends with a series of rejections (say, ten), landing you back where you began, unable to break the ceiling of unknown poets (not as famous as the Sistine Chapel’s, but a very real thing).
You get a letter in your snail mail box.
Hint: Just kidding. And seeing if you’re still reading. No one gets snail mail letters in their snail mail box anymore. That is now the conquered province of bills, catalogs, and credit card application come-ons.