Over the years since, they’ve published six of my short stories and twelve of my poems. They pay their contributors pretty well, especially for an online magazine, and especially for poetry (where any pay at all constitutes paying well, I suppose), and don’t charge their readers a penny. I think that’s worth supporting!

Donations are tax deductible in the U.S. and donors get entered in a draw for a whole host of prizes, including 140 And Counting, the Seven by Twenty anthology I’m publishing—and a signed copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia; a copy of the UK hardback first edition of the classic steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; two anthologies of lesbian SF, Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magick; Alaya Dawn Johnson’s alternate 1920s vampire novel Moonshine; The Time Traveler’s Pocket Guide; original art by Marge Simon and Alastair Reynolds; and a lot more.

The bulk of the session was devoted to the kinds of “turns” a poem can take—that is, the developmental moments in a poem which turn our attention. In the first session, he had already talked about the importance of having these turning moments to propel a poem to its ending. He listed these as the types of turns a poet can employ:

1. Logical or rhetorical turns: For example, in “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvel employs a three-part logical syllogism (major premise, minor premise, conclusion) and the turns are signaled by the words “but” and “therefore.”
2. Turns in time or space: For example, in “Tintern Abbey” the poet falls into a reverie and remembers, and then when he comes back, the landscape is coloured and informed by his memories. Time and space are provisional in a poem, and we can take advantage of that.
3. Turn from the abstract to the personal: For example, in “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment,” Eberhart tackles these really broad themes of morality and then in the final stanza turns to two specific soldiers he knew who had died, and it’s the personal details at the end which give the poem its power. Also, e.g. Vijay Seshadri’s “The Long Meadow” and Billy Collins’ “The Death of the Hat.”
4. Reflexive poems which turn in on themselves: These poems develop a disproportionate interest in some aspect of themselves, eg. Billy Collins’ “Canada” with its obsession with Cherry Ames, or eg. Michael Donaghy’s “The Break,” in which the second stanza (all about the conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton) is addressing the simile in the first line (“Like freak Texan sisters joined at the hip”), moving away from the first stanza’s discussion of his failed relationship to go inside the simile (as though, Collins said, walking into a hologram). In these poems, the tenor and vehicle often get switched, such as in Yannis Ritsos’ poetry (“a genius at destabilizing”).
5. A turn to the present, so that the poem includes its own composition.
6. A turn to the reader: For example, in “Dulce et Decorum Est” at “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace.”

Then we had a question and answer period. I didn’t take thorough notes on everything he was asked. He talked about sentimentality (which he doesn’t like) and irony (which he does); the poetic line as a unit of sense or a unit of rhythm but having to be a unit of something; the role of rhyme in modern poetry (“What happened was the rhymes invaded the body of the poem…”); and, how you know when you’ve finished the poem (his answer was very vague but I don’t know how anybody could answer that definitively).

I really liked one of his answers, to the question of how you decide what order to put the poems in a book manuscript. He said that he didn’t write with a book theme in mind (“All my poems are thematic in that they’re about me. Me and death.”) so he comes up with connections afterwards. He likes to lay his poems all out on the floor of the largest room in the house (“face up!”) and walk around them barefooted, looking for pairings and connections until he has enough groups of them together to make a book. However, and this was the part I really liked, he said you can also order a book by front-loading all the really excellent poems—putting the best stuff first to get the editor’s attention—and then when they accept it, say, “You know, I’ve had some second thoughts about the order…” Hilarious.

His recommended reading:

1. Andrew Marvel “To His Coy Mistress“
2. William Wordsworth “Tintern Abbey“
3. Richard Eberhart “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment“
4. Vijay Seshadri “The Long Meadow” (subscribers to The New Yorker can purportedly read it here, and the rest of us can read it in the Collins’ essay “The Vehicle of Language,” also linked at the end of this post)
5. Billy Collins “The Death of the Hat“
6. Billy Collins “Canada“
7. Michael Donaghy’s “The Break” (sorry, I couldn’t find this online)
8. Yannis Ritsos “A Myopic Child” and “Miniature“
9. Wilfred Owen “Dulce et Decorum Est“
10. Billy Collins “January in Paris” (he reads it here)
11. Richard Jones “Wan Chu’s Wife In Bed“
12. Charles Bukowski “8 Count“

For more on all of this, try this essay: “The Vehicle of Language,” which must have been written by Billy Collins. Oddly, Lapham’s Quarterly doesn’t specify the author but lists Collins as a tag, but the essay is in the first peom and talks about a “poem of mine” called “Theme,” which is a poem of Collins’, so I’m satisfied he’s the author (but made slightly paranoid by the lack of byline, as though you all might catch me in an error and be all “obviously it’s an essay by this other poet, So-And-So, who also wrote an identical poem called ‘Theme’ good Lord, Joanne, how can you be so dim” or something).

He started with the premise that the process of writing is a series of negotiations between the will of the poet and the waywardness of the poem, and that poets are the kind of people who can’t talk about just one thing at a time.

Here were his tips for how to engender the frame of mind while writing which allows you to surprise yourself and let the poem take an unexpected turn:

1. Think of the poem’s subject as being entirely provisional. Writing a poem is the opposite of writing an essay; you want to turn away from your original thesis and enter new ground.
2. A little subject matter goes a long way.
3. Think of a poem as having its own intelligence, and listen to that. If you really listen, the poem might show signs of boredom, so to keep it happy, you gave to come up with something new.
4. Distractions are clues. If you find yourself being distracted by something as you write, put it in the poem.
5. Think of the poem as having a present, as opposed to being a recounting of past experience. For the reader, the poem is taking place as it’s read.
6. Be willing to dispense with fidelity to what really happened. Take advantage of the imaginative freedom that poetry offers. Sometimes you have to make things up to get at the truth.

His recommended reading:

1. Richard Hugo “The Triggering Town“
2. Shakespeare “That time of year thou may’st in me behold” (discussion of which led to a lengthy aside about sonnets being essentially having something to say, and having something to say about what you had to say, that is, suffering a moment of self-consciousness in those final two lines)
3. Matthew Arnold “Dover Beach“
4. Billy Collins “The Trouble With Poetry” and “Poetry, Pleasure and the Hedonistic Reader” (I can find neither of these online; sorry.)
5. Ruth L. Schwartz “The Swan in Edgewater Park” (if you read only one of his suggestions, read this one.)
6. Stephen Dobyns new book about poetry (which he quoted from, on enjambment, essentially saying unusual enjambments should have a purpose), presumably Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry, though I haven’t read it so I can’t confirm that.
7. Robert Hayden “Those Winter Sundays” (also)

Edited to add: summary of second half.

In other news, I went to hear Jan Zwicky read from her poetry at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities last night with my friend Declan and her guy.

Zwicky is a Canadian poet (and philosopher and editor and probably a bunch of other things, but I know her as a poet). She’s been writing as long as I’ve been paying attention, but I first really noticed her work when Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was nominated for the GG alongside my friend and colleague Sue Goyette’s The True Names of Birds, and Sue recommended it to me (and then it beat her book for the prize). I forgot to bring my copy with me in the rush to get to work yesterday morning, and so missed out on getting it signed, which I’m a little sad about.

The reading was wonderful—I was interested to hear her really emphasize some of her line breaks and kind of breathlessly rush through some others. She had a very melodic approach to the reading (and I don’t mean “poet voice”), which was really lovely and also apt, since she chose (being in Nashville) to concentrate on poems relating to music (I don’t think she read this one, but it’s a reasonably representative example of her work and the only one I can find that isn’t reproduced on somebody’s blog evidently without permission).

After the reading, she answered some questions, and the first one, put to her by the organizer for the event, who I gathered was a philosophy professor or otherwise some sort of philosophy bigwig at Vanderbilt, asked if she considered herself a “Canadian poet.” These identity questions are always interesting (I’m still struggling with the “are you a feminist poet?” question, since I’m demonstrably both feminist and a poet but don’t think they connect terribly often), but I think it’s a question that a Canadian probably wouldn’t have asked her, since she is working in—and celebrated in—very much the mainstream of contemporary Canadian poetry, so it’s sort of self-evident that she’s a “Canadian poet” in the CanLit sense we generally mean.

I’m paraphrasing here, because I didn’t take notes, but she started out her answer by saying that she was certainly a poet of place, but she doesn’t know if that’s enough to make her a Canadian poet. There was quite a lot of back-and-forth on the whole topic of identity, and colonialism and English Canada, and somewhere in there I made some sort of involuntary movement which she interpreted to mean I wanted to ask a question, and called on me, so I commented (after introducing myself as a Canadian, to which she replied, “Oh! What part?” and I said, “Nova Scotia,” and explained about having gotten into her work because of the GG & Sue etc and she said, “I just had dinner with her!” which… of course she knows Sue, since Sue knows everybody, but was still funny) … let’s start over: so I commented what I’d been thinking, which was that the original question was probably in part problematic because Canadians as a rule don’t have any idea what it means to be Canadian whereas Americans seem to have this certainty about what being American means—and several Americans in the room were all, “Really?!” because this was news to them. Somebody in the audience, who she evidently knew, threw down that wonderful “Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver” quote (which I thought was something Pierre Trudeau or somebody like that had said, but Google tells me it’s a Gilles Vigneault lyric).

Anyway, I spoke with her briefly afterwards, and she was warmly sympathetic and funny, and encouraged me to take some philosophy courses when I go back for my Masters (I haven’t talked about it here, but I’m applying to Vanderbilt’s MLAS program, which is an interdisciplinary part-time graduate degree program with courses at night, so it won’t interfere with work), and I believe I will.

In other news, Every Day Poets has accepted another of my poems, and the Folded Word anthology containing my picfic tweets (“Stolen Lighters” and “Work Requirements“) On a Narrow Windowsill: Fiction and Poetry Folded onto Twitter is now available for pre-order. ]]> http://www.joannemerriam.com/2010/11/13/fiction-writers-have-to-be-interested-in-people-thats-not-required-of-poets-poets-just-need-a-deep-interest-in-themselves-billy-collins/feed/ 2 http://www.joannemerriam.com/2010/11/06/what-i-did-on-my-vacation/ http://www.joannemerriam.com/2010/11/06/what-i-did-on-my-vacation/#comments Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:17:26 +0000 joannemerriam http://www.joannemerriam.com/?p=3143 My folks went home Wednesday after an almost two-week long visit. I took both Fridays off work so we could have some extra time together, and we went to Cheekwood (as you know), the Nashville Zoo (which has a new baby giraffe, but we missed it – it was born the day Mom and Dad left), a Predators game, the Appalachian Center for Craft (where Mom, who is a potter, had arranged for a tour with the gracious and informative Vince Pitelka) and Radnor Lake. Dad took these photos:

Red Panda at the Nashville Zoo at Grassmere.

Flamingoes at the Nashville Zoo at Grassmere.

Elephants at the Nashville Zoo at Grassmere.

The Nashville Predators being beaten by the St. Louis Blues.

Potter Vince Pitelka at the Appalachian Center for Craft.

Deer at...

...Radnor Lake.

In the Sci-Fi Guys panel with Bacigalupi and Yansky, a conversation broke out about genre and what it all means when a book is labelled science fiction or fantasy or literary or whathaveyou, and Margaret Atwood’s name was floated as somebody who can write science fiction without being put in the science fiction writer box, and I suggested that, being Canadian, and with the market in Canada being so much smaller, writers aren’t expected to stick to one genre in quite the same way they are here. (Peacock had mentioned this cross-genre pollination–though not in relation to Atwood or to science fiction–on Thursday, and when she mentioned it, I was struck by how much more pressure I feel in the US to declare my allegiances. I hadn’t ever put that feeling into words and it was a bit of a revelation for me.)

In other news entirely, I came home to find my poem “Hamiltons” has won the 10-10-10 Poetry Contest, which was a sort of readers’ choice thing. Thanks so much to everybody who took the trouble to comment so thoughtfully on my work.