Today is the annual meeting of the Mississippi Philological Association, a scholarly organization focused on language and literature, which also encourages creative panels. I’ll be reading a few poems at one of the sessions, Kim is reading a paper, and MUW has three students who will be reading fiction, poetry, and an essay. It was one of the first regional conferences I attended when I first was hired at the W in 1994, and it’s been a good group to be associated with. The journal of the association, POMPA, publishes creative and scholarly work side by side, and for quite awhile there was a very active group of poets who attended every year. Recently, I’ve been more involved in the Southern Literary Festival, so I haven’t always made the annual conference. But this year, it’s just down the road in Starkville, so I’m glad to be able to participate again. The association has also begun accepting more papers and writing from undergraduate students, so Kim and I really wanted to encourage our students to take part. I’m looking forward to hearing them read, and seeing them take advantage this opportunity for young writers and scholars to branch out from their own universities and see what other students and their faculty are doing.
Haiku Revisited
Awhile back, I wote a post on judging a haiku contest and mentioned that I had written a few haiku. It’s not my main form of poetry to work with, so I’ve always felt a little like a fish out of water with haiku, yet it was a form I wanted to explore for awhile. The problem was, when I submitted to haiku journals, the response was always negative. I’m used to that with regular literary magazines, but there aren’t that many haiku journals and I didn’t want to keep getting turned down by the same places, so I gave up submitting.
Then last year I let John Z. look at a few of them. He also said my haiku weren’t quite haiku by a strict definition, but at least he tried to explain. And he offered some revisions. Naturally, his revisions didn’t match my vision and for awhile I decided to give up on the form, at least for these poems. I rewrote them as two to four line stanzas, but still didn’t feel satisfied. I called them “meditations” but that didn’t really fit the tone. To me, they were haiku, after all. Or if they didn’t quite master the form, they were at least haiku attempts.
This weekend, I decided to give them another look. My plan in revising the first time was to get them away from the form they had been in and let them sit. Enough time had gone past that I could look at them fresh. I got out my friend’s comments and reviewed the changes and suggestions he’d made. I paid closest attention to the one poem he had said was a haiku. If one got it right, then the others couldn’t be that far off, so I wanted to figure out what was missing.
I read some more about the “cutting word.” In a Japanese haiku, there is a word, sometimes described as an exclamation that marks the turning point in the haiku. It comes at the end of the first or second line in English, though in Japanese a haiku is written in one line with three parts or 5, 7, and 5 syllables (which are different than English syllables, so English language haiku don’t count them). I knew all of this. But in reading, what really sunk in this time was that the cutting word in English is often accomplished with punctuation.
What I realized was that my previous haiku, though they had all of the elements of haiku that I knew about, were too grammatically correct. Or I might say, too complete. What I’m realizing now is that the successful haiku has a silence in it in place of the cutting word. Think of a rap haiku where the cutting word was ‘yo.’ To translate that into non-rap and still try to replace ‘yo’ with a word like ‘ah!’ every time would sound ludicrous. Leave it out, but in such a way that the feeling of a revelation is still there.
With this in mind, I revised my haiku by rearranging and restating things so that the two states or two perceptions are disconnected grammatically. Or connected with a colon or dash. Both perceptions are their own statement. One is not dependent on the other syntactically. I also looked for balance, to make that break after the first or second line, and I tried to keep the weighting of lines at about 5, 7, 5 (so the first and last lines are even and shorter than the middle one without counting syllables), though I didn’t stick to that religiously.
I was happy with these revisions to poems I thought I was done with –either they were haiku or they weren’t, but I didn’t think I could take them any further. In the process, I do think the poems improved. It was more than just rearranging syntax and syllables, in other words. It was an exploration of new linguistic possibilities. Now we’ll see what the haiku journals think. They may still be full of other people’s haiku or opt to choose ones from the haiku writers they recognize, but I hope they are more encouraging.
Who knows, I may feel like adding a few more poems to this sequence of haiku or starting another.
Yet I should add that not all of the original sequence worked as haiku. Four of them were too interconnected, and I felt they really needed to be seen together. I gave them a different title, rearranged a bit more, and wrote them as a four-stanza poem (at least for now). If I decide I don’t like the poem in its current form, I’ve also thought of trying it as haibun, using prose to form the connections and provide the context that I felt was necessary to understand the individual haiku stanzas.
ATT DSL Woes Resolved (for now ?)
When we came home from our Christmas travels, we had a little time on our hands and wanted to watch some Netflix streaming. Fortunately, we also had a couple of DVD’s to watch, since our DSL connection speeds had dropped to the point that Netflix wouldn’t load. I tested our connection using speedtest.net and got speeds that ranged from over 2 mbps (we should have 3, but 2+ isn’t bad for an average) down to .20 mbps. Typical scores were around .5 mbps. Clearly, something was wrong.
So I spent a couple of hours with ATT Support. Getting to the right person made me feel like the main character of a Kafka novel. We have DSL, but they still routed me to U-verse first, then to DSL Southwest, and finally to the Southeast division who needed to help me. This happened a couple of times, since I was disconnected whenever I tried ATT’s speed test. The third time, I got right back to the service rep who had been helping me.
When I was talking to the right guy, he was very helpful. He didn’t make me go through all the typical trouble-shooting, like resetting my modem, once I explained what I had done already. He listened well, and had some good suggestions, none of which solved the issue, but which did isolate the problem. He believed me when I told him (the truth) that I had the same problem when my computer was connected directly to the modem and not through my Airport Extreme, and he didn’t make me keep testing it that way. This allowed me to be on the chat line while others in the family were working or playing online. And he didn’t balk when I told him my modem is set to bridge mode. He did have me connect directly from the phone jack to the modem without a filter (disconnecting our phones), in case an old filter were causing the problem. For a brief moment, we thought we had fixed it when we got two or three high speed tests. Then it went right back to .40 mbps or lower. He tested the line remotely, but couldn’t find a problem other than a high ping-back rate. On the basis of this, he dispatched a service tech to our home with the standard warnings that it could be expensive if they found something inside and I didn’t have inside line maintenance, which I don’t. He did say we could refuse that service and make the repairs ourselves if that were the case.
When the service tech came out the next day, he checked our line and replaced the line coming into the house since it had a splice that could cause problems (didn’t help) and checked our bridge taps (I think he called them this), which are connections on the line coming to our house from the main office that could cause problems. He didn’t find anything there either. Essentially, he said our wiring was perfect, yet our internet connection was lousy. He explained it as our sync rate (the ability of the copper wire to deliver a signal) was perfect, but our surf rate (our actual experience online) was lousy. He said there were two possibilities. On ATT’s end, our port could need replacing, and on our end our modem or possibly just the ethernet cable to the modem (or the router) could need replacing. Since our modem and router are less than a year old, I was confident they weren’t the issue.
The next business day, ATT replaced the port on our line, and presto, our speeds went back to 2.8 or higher (and this is testing over wifi, so I expect lower results than if everything was hard wired to the computer). FaceTime calls and Netflix streaming has been much better.
So what did I learn from this experience? The main thing is that when ATT support tests your line remotely, they aren’t seeing the whole picture. They test your line from the port to your house, but they don’t test the port itself. (And I learned it’s called a port.) So it’s worth pushing until they send someone out who can really check the line and then can put in an order to change the port if they can’t find another cause.
All in all, I was satisfied with this ATT support experience. It took longer to get to a resolution than I would like (wouldn’t it be great if they could tell your port is bad when you call in?), but with due diligence we were able to find and correct the problem. It helps to be knowledgable about your service and to do as much trouble-shooting as you can before you call. What pleased me was that ATT support believed I really had a problem and took my complaint seriously. This time. I’ve had good experiences when technicians come to my home and mixed results from phone support. Having used both phone and chat support, I prefer the chat option, mainly because I don’t have to listen to hold music and I seem to get through to a person sooner, even if I did get misrouted several times. You do have to be patient and calm, but remain persistent: your problem should be resolved. Hopefully, it will be awhile before we have any more connection issues!
New Semester
It’s always nice to see a new batch of students in your classes at the beginning of a new semester, along with a few returning faces. This semester, it looks like I have a good group. Classes are reasonably sized, but not too huge. I’m excited about using my new textbook in creative writing with another group of 12. It’s one I’ve been writing and publishing as an e-book for my students. So this semester, I can test it on another group of creative writers.
Besides Creative Writing, I’ll be teaching two sections of Late World Lit — one online and the other in the classroom — and one section of Modern Poetry, which is always a lot of fun. My class sizes are not too big and not too small, so I’m happy with the numbers, too. I wouldn’t mind a few more in my face-to-face sections, but there are enough in each to have good discussions. Should be fun!
New Year’s Resolution 2: Complete a Book of Poems
Some readers of this blog will be familiar with my series of poems on the paintings and logs of Walter Inglis Anderson, which I’ve called “Barrier Island Suite.” They’ve been around for a few years and have been published individually in magazines over the years, but I’ve never quite decided what to do with them as a collection. Enough have appeared in magazines now that I can begin to think of book publication, but the collection is on the long end of chapbook range and a little too short for a full-length book. There are 20 poems in the series so far, though most would go to 2 pages in a book, so I’d be looking at a 40-page chapbook. I’ve never been quite satisfied with that, and recently I began rethinking the collection.
Since a suite is a related series in art, a suite of poems could be any length, but a suite in music is a more definite form of related movements, usually 4 in the suite de dans, though modern suites especially can be any length. To break up the series, I had initially thought to organize them in sections, which might roughly correspond with a movement in music. With this idea, I’m considering using the first several poems as a prelude, then having four more movements, which would involve keeping two existing series of poems intact and composing two more new sets. What I like about this idea is that it would allow me to write on two themes I would like to include.
Most of the poems take place on the barrier islands where Walter Anderson would camp and draw or paint for weeks at a time. They explore his relationship to nature, but also the relationship between madness and civilization, since Anderson suffered from an undiagnosed mental condition, which led him to leave his family and the Shearwater pottery for these extended solo trips. Though I initially wanted to keep the family and life at the pottery on the sidelines, it has begun to intrigue me how that part of his life was related to the solo artist. I’m planning to do some more research into his life at home and incorporate some images (especially from the mural he painted in his cabin) and stories from that side of his life into a movement that may take a different poetic form than the other poems.
Again, the idea of a suite helps here, since the music is typically in different time signatures and tempos. It may mean making some changes to existing poems as well, and I might add a few poems to the sections that already exist. The last section I’d like to write is on the Mississippi River, and will be based on his statue, “The Father of Waters” and may enlarge the focus of the suite to encompass more than Anderson himself.
Those are just a few notes of what I’d like to do. It’s a project I’ve been mulling for some time now, and 2014 seems like the right time to take it on. The additional research is exciting, as is the prospect of returning to this project with the goal of creating new material.
New Year’s Resolution: Clean My Desktop
This one is rather easy to accomplish, though it may be harder to keep! Did you know that leaving files on your desktop can slow down your computer’s performance significantly? I do, and yet I still put them there for easy access. This year, my resolution was to clean off this space and start afresh. It’s an easy resolution to do, at least in the initial stages. Dealing with all of those files can be a bit of a challenge.
I tend to download some files to the desktop or move them there so I can find them easily. This may be photos that I want to drag to a web page’s drop zone or documents that I need to look at once or twice and then discard. The desktop seems ideal because it is visible and I won’t forget them. But then the files add up and pretty soon there is clutter.
The easy solution is to move them all into a folder. Create a new folder on the desktop. Call it 2013 Desktop Files (or name it whatever you like). Select all, then deselect your new folder. Drag the selected files into the folder, then move the folder off of the desktop to your Documents folder or some other location on your drive. Voila! Your desktop is clean.
I hate to admit it, but when I did this, I moved 863 files that took up 20 GB of room. I should see a significant improvement with them stored in a new location that the operating system doesn’t have to worry about as often as the desktop. But that’s also a lot of junk to clean up and file appropriately. Most will probably go in the trash. Some should be archived in the right folder. That’s the harder part of the resolution to keep!
The hardest part is to keep it from getting this bad. For me, this will mean cleaning off my desktop every semester (at least) and at best once a month or so. I can keep the things I’m really working on and move everything else to a temporary folder for filing. But I know that in the thick of things, this can be hard to find time to do, and so it builds up. That’s what makes it a great New Year’s Resolution, to at least start the year with a clean desktop and then try to do better in the coming year.
2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Why Hire a Poet?
I’m not on the job market, so I can use myself as an example in this post. But I’ll try not to brag too much. Poets generally have reasonably high self-esteem, but not huge egos. This probably stems from the fact that most people don’t think of poets in the highest regard. We’re seen as a little strange, I think. But it’s still a respectable profession, though it is one where we face an enormous amount of rejection. We send poems out to magazines, and even with a good submission, most come back unused. More often than not, the whole submission comes back, but we’re thrilled when 1/5 or 1/4 is kept by a publication! (One poem accepted out of four or five in a submission is great. Two is superb.)
This turns poets into perfectionists. We tend to be very detail oriented, though we’re also able to laugh about it (most of the time) and don’t get overwhelmed by our own attention to detail. If I truly were OCD, I don’t think I could live as a poet. I manage the details; they don’t manage me. Or at least, that’s what I like to think.
But more than paying attention to details and paying attention to language at the most subtle levels, which any poet needs to do, you will find that poets have developed a keen sense of structure. This comes from looking at sentences and from looking at how those sentences (and the sounds and images that make them up) are arranged in the grid of the poem, across lines and stanzas or between the poems of a book.
Recently, I was asked to revise the student bulletins at my university. These are publications for undergraduate and graduate students that range anywhere from nearly 400 pages to about 150 pages. They contain descriptions of the university departments, policies, programs, and courses. It is a lot of different kinds of information, in other words. It seems to me that a poet was perfect for this job, even though that might not be the first person you’d think of. After all, the language is these publications is far from poetic.
Nonetheless, it involved arranging and rearranging lots of information, which called for the attention to detail and structure that I’ve developed as a poet over the years. Thinking about how to arrange the information and how to convey it in logical, consistent ways is exactly what a poet does on a micro level every day. This task just meant applying it on a larger scale. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I do a little programming for myself on the side (for fun and to calculate my grades), and that I know my way around web design (at least passably) and have learned a few online authoring tools like WordPress and Joomla!.
The lesson I take from this experience is that employers shouldn’t look down on someone who’s a poet, thinking that they are only impractical ninnies with their heads in the clouds. In fact, poets can be very practical, very goal driven, and very down-to-earth. Poets, on the other hand, can learn from this not to hide the fact that they are poets, but to emphasize the skills that they have developed. There are many kinds of poets and many different ways their avocation might help them in their vocation. Sell it, when you’re on the job or on the job market! And don’t wait until someone hires you to start applying your skills to other areas. Take up other forms of writing, including writing for the web or technical writing. Don’t be afraid to move into ‘non-poetic’ fields and bring some poetry to them.
In Memorium: Nelson Mandela
It is hard to hear of the passing of Nelson Mandela today. He was one of the major political figures of my youth, a living icon to look up to as a man of unprecedented strength of spirit, yet a man of passive resistance. Icons of a former day, Gandhi or Martin Luther King, were historical figures by the time I came of age, but Mandela was still in prison, fighting for an end to Apartheid.
When I was a student at Knox College, a group of us got involved in the anti-Apartheid movement, arguing for divestiture from companies with holdings in South Africa. I can’t claim to have been a major part of that movement on our campus. My good friend Adam Bruns was one of the main organizers, though, and I remember hanging out at the shanty we built on campus to raise awareness. I say that we built it, though I don’t recall how involved I was in the actual construction. I remember hanging out there many days and talking politics and social issues (and I’m sure other more local and personal issues as well).
Later, I would follow Mandela’s successful battle to be released from prison after 27 years and then watch as he helped guide a nation through reconciliation and rebuilding. Those years were not without challenges, yet Nelson Mandela always seemed the epitome of honor and nobility. His influence in the country, the continent, and indeed the world. He was a leader who helped make the world a much better place in the 21st century. Without him and those he inspired, our world would be a much darker place.
Why are All Poets Dead or Famous (or Both)??
Okay, so I hope to be living proof (along with many of my friends and students) that the title of this post isn’t true. However, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it was true if your only source of information was an online bookstore. Just one example this morning, I went to Barnes and Noble, searching for information on a recent poetry collection, which I was able to find when I had the title or (I assume) the author’s name. But while there, I happened to click a link on the page to “This Season’s Best Poetry Books.” Sounds promising, right? It ought to bring up the latest, greatest of the poetry publications of Fall 2013, right? Not so fast…
Clicking that link led to a page with Homer (not even a new translation), Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, and a collection of classic Haiku from the British Museum archives. Living poets included Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Nicki Giovanni. Nothing wrong with them, but they’re hardly the newest poets on the block. And Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry won’t give you a sense of the season’s best. The closest title to match the link title was Denise Duhamel’s Best American Poetry 2013.
I tried clicking on American Poetry to see if that gave me anything better. No luck. Hardly a living soul represented other than those on the list above. And I know from searching Amazon that the situation isn’t any better. Many brick and mortar stores aren’t much better at stocking recent poetry. Yet there are hundreds of new poetry collections introduced every season. So how can you find out about good recent titles?
If you live near a good independent, you might find it on the shelves or you might catch the poet when they are in town for a reading. I wish I had an answer — living in the hinterlands it can be hard to find out about culture of any kind. Subscribing to one or more good poetry magazines can help. Poets and Writers often has ads for new collections (and the prizes that sponsored their publication). If poets and poetry publishers want a bigger reading public, though, we need to do more to make those collections visible.
Kendall Dunkelberg 