Advice to Young Faculty (Part II)

I’ll jump right in today, as revisions await.  I will note, however, that these recommendations arise from fresh starts of my own as well as some advice offered by peeps and persons of interest.  That makes them no more authoritative, of course, but I hope a bit less parochial.

1.  Cultivate space.  The two tenure-track positions I’ve held seem strikingly different in a variety of ways, but they both have at least one thing in common:  my colleagues then and now wanted some early evidence that I planned to stick around.  I’ll contextualize more fully in a moment, but at Gig 1 I was prompted on several occasions to stock my office bookshelves for the sake of the seeming alone, while at CMU I have been teased time and again for my bare walls and barren desk.

Since I was/am intent on keeping my job at both places, let me clarify.  At Gig 1 I had a fine office and nice hall neighbors, but the computer provided by the college was, if memory serves, a Zilog Z8000.  While I stocked a shelf or two in my office with teaching texts, I left most of my oft-used books at home, where I kept my mightier personal PC.  There was no careerist subtext behind the decision, just a will to convenient research.

I learned that lesson about impressions, of course, and duly stocked my shelves upon arriving at CMU.  The folks who rib me here about my lack of office decor, however, have never seen my apartment.  I will sometimes kid about my Spartan lifestyle, but that austerity is no joke:  in my home I have no pets, no plants, no pictures, no wall hangings, and precious little furniture.  The only non-functional items on display are a) two award plaques and b) gifts from friends and students.  That’s it.  My office walls are only bare because all my walls are bare.

Even so, I recognize and accept the pressure to demonstrate commitment, and I think it’s a decent idea for folks with new tenure-track appointments to do the same.  I surf the blogs every now and again, and I’ve come across a few writers who conceive of gigs newly-landed as stepping stones.  Some have hinted that they don’t even plan to unpack half their stuff, and that’s perfectly fine.  I would nevertheless urge all newcomers to do a bit of  office nesting, whether doing so stems from a genuine desire to cultivate space or from a bit of casual calculation.  A little legwork can go a long way toward setting the minds of your new colleagues–you know, the ones who just spend six months searching for you, the ones who set a tenure line aside for you–at ease.

2.  Mend your fences.  If you’re like me, you make dozens of enemies wherever you go.  (I kid, I kid; everyone knows that I’m just a great big hug waiting to happen.)  I think it’s worth noting, however, that the range of initial responses to newcomers tends to be fairly small.  While there may be some inevitable coverage collisions and minor points of resistance (it’s not unreasonable to assume that some folks on hiring committees might have preferred another candidate, but that preference seldom translates into active animosity), most established faculty will fall along the receptive end of the spectrum.  Some will be neutral and indifferent, but the majority will be more inquisitive.  They could be working with you for 20-40 years, after all, so they might as well kick the tires.

Given that curiosity, I recommend performing predilection in a process not unlike Frost’s negotiation with his neighbor in “Mending Wall.”  You’ll have plenty of opportunities to interact with new colleagues one-on-one, and during that time you will have countless opportunities to carve out your collegial identity.  That sounds a bit crass and calculated, I know, but the process of defining interests and laying down boundaries tends to be much more spontaneous and organic:  your new peers will learn about you from the decisions you make, the mantles you take up, and the obligations you dodge.

Please note:  I am not advocating/would not advocate fertilizing your local grapevine, hoping that your hopes and dreams make it to the right ears.  What I am encouraging, however, is a measure of forthrightness in owning up to your professional interests and inhibitions.  Since arriving here at CMU, for example, I have made it abundantly clear that I’m a sucker for student advocacy.  New faculty are exempt from service obligations in year one round these parts, but nevertheless I took part in a panel on graduate school preparation and helped to judge an essay contest.  Those choices were by no means definitive, but they were indicative; since then, colleagues who don’t know me especially well have opened up comparable opportunities for me.  In like fashion, most folks here have figured out that I’m a peculiar introvert:  I’m by no means unapproachable or unfriendly, but I have fairly finicky sensibilities.  I will pass over general invitations and solicitations (one of my less endearing idiosyncrasies), but I always answer those addressed directly to me.  You’ll find that most folks have similar inclinations and limits.  Over the course of your first year, you’ll have plenty of time to suss out the stylistics that inform their decisions and to make them aware of the proclivities that influence your own.  The more open you are willing to be, the more vivid those proclivities become.

3.  Get a head start.  This is essentially the logical extension of Item 2, but it’s double true if you have accepted a post that treats new faculty with kid gloves.  CMU, as I noted above, absolves newcomers from service obligations during the first year, and it’s easy for us to finagle  contracts that come with a course release or comparable perquisite, the kinds of incentives intended to get young’uns off to a running start with their scholarly projects.

I would by all means encourage those who enjoy such benefits to take advantage, to get articles in circulation or to beef up their teaching.  At the same time, I would also advocate keeping one eye on the long view.  It’s easy to keep your nose to the grindstone, and heaven knows I’ve exfoliated my own nosecone thoroughly during my years on the job.  A little foresight, however, may allow you to make a stronger case when it comes time to pile up your paperwork.

In the English Department, for example, our bylaws spell out in great detail the kinds of professional activity that will be weighed in the scales when it comes time to talk tenure and promotion.  All the items one would expect to see are represented, but there are also a number of less obvious ways for new faculty to prepare for those pivotal decisions.  Making use of that extra time in the early going–wisely, of course, and not at the expense of other irons you’ve got in the fire–may simplify your life over the long haul.  Had I picked up a committee during my first year, for example, my third might have been a bit more leisurely.  Those early efforts might not prove to be game-changers, but if you plan on tackling a manuscript or anticipate plans that might eat into your research time (I hope to be buying a house next summer, which tells me I probably shouldn’t bank on madcap productivity), it’s not a bad idea to invest the time while time is on your side.

If you’re searching for major revelations about the profession, this may not be the best place to look.  Natheless, I hope these suggestions will make life a bit easier for those who find themselves gainfully employed in the professoriat and who hope to clear professional hurdles a little more readily farther down the line.

Excruciations

Is it wrong that “excruciation” is one of my favorite words?  All matters of meaning aside, I just like the turn of the scroosh.

Speaking of excruciation, however, this has been a brutal week.  I spent most of the weekend brooding, mulling over matters I have tabled for far too long, and Monday was spent trying to find my footing as I returned to work.  Bad news and little bitternesses piled up, which of course affected my writing.  Tuesday consequently was spent hashing out a draft that seemed inspired in the morning, but by the afternoon I was able to recognize it for what it was:  self-indulgent dreck.  Wednesday I accordingly turned to a new project, even though I was afraid that I’d derailed my train.  Eight hours earned me three lines, a point of origin with no destination in sight or in mind.  I normally end each day with a serving of cognitive comfort food (which nowadays takes the form of reruns), but last night was devoted to a little bonus brooding.  I had that odd, unshakable feeling that something had been lost, or worse yet, squandered.

Rather than belaboring my bedevilment, I figured I would use today’s post as a standing reminder of a central Wandlessian fact:  I am often wrong.

Have a merry holiday; it’s time for me to write.

Advice to Young Faculty (Part I)

In my continuing effort to make non-authoritative pronouncements on sundry subjects (and in response to a reader who floated this suggestion my way), I thought I might offer a few bits and bobs to those just starting out on the tenure track.  There are plenty of fine guidebooks out there, and I hope readers will feel welcome to post the texts they find indispensable in the comments section.  In the belly of the blog, however, I’ll try to jot down some first-person findings that may be of use to folks trying to get their feet under them.

All the usual limitations and qualifications apply–please don’t take anything I say as gospel, and please keep in mind that any recommendations I might make stem from my own idiosyncratic perspectives and experiences.  I’ve only come across a few of the guidebooks that youngsters use to chart their courses, and most of them focus on higher-order concerns.  Me, I’m a brass tacks man, so be sure to consult your own rulebooks and bylaws before plotting your own progress.

I’ll begin with some initial observations, and I’ll try to correct my own course along the way based on readerly needs and feedback.

1.  Learn the rules of the road.  As a new member of the faculty of Highfalutin’ U., you can expect to be bombarded with paper the moment you set foot on campus.  I recently did some cleaning of my office, and I found all sorts of resources stashed away in various drawers and the Filing Cabinet of the Damned.  Most of these resources will fall into the broad category of useful-but-not-crucial:  I found paperwork for putting items on reserve in the library, for example, as well as reams of policy statements that apply to writers and researchers in other fields.  Our new faculty orientation at CMU includes a special page set aside to address Bloodborne Pathogen Exposure Control, which I find applies to only the most dangerous kinds of poetry.

There are a few documents, however, with which you should–nay, must–be intimately familiar.   Know your contract; if you are a member of a union, know your bargaining agreement; know your local bylaws (the special terms and conditions that apply to members of your department).  You’ll be able to priotize pretty readily once you’ve got your foot in the door, and good mentors and chairfolk will most assuredly sit you down and apprise you of the particulars that apply to your circumstances.  Nothing beats firsthand knowledge of policy and practice, however, and you can spare yourself a lot of blind fumbling if you dogear your copies of critical documents.

2.  Establish connections.  In all likelihood you’re going to arrive on campus with limited contacts.  You’ll probably know one or two folks on the search committee that hired you, although that familiarity will likely be the product of a few months of correspondence.  Once you arrive on campus, it’s good policy (and probably pretty healthy in a psychosocial way) to start throwing out lines.  First of all, get to know the administrative folk who work in your department; in my experience, they’re often the ones who are secretly running the show, the ones who know the ins and outs of policy and procedure so the profs can drift around in blissful ignorance. If you haven’t done so already, also touch base with the folks whose specialties abut and abet your own.  You’ll probably be divvying up some classes with them (surveys and special topics courses in particular, as well as seminars that rotate among periods), and you can gain a lot of insight and pedagogical perspective by seeing what they do and why.  I teach film and literature from time to time, for example, and I talked with the other profs who cover that class before I got started.  That allowed us to handle some of the blander pragmatics like scheduling preferences, but it also helped me to do a bit of pedagogical counterprogramming, to design my variation of the course in a way that complements theirs.

It’s also a good idea to find out who’s responsible for what within the department–who runs the speaker series, for example, or who makes curricular decisions, or who makes the calls when it comes to personnel.  Since you’re starting out at square one, it’s perfectly fair to let self-interest be your guide:  seek out the folks who are likely to have an impact on your days and ways.  That’s a path worth pursuing both inside and outside your own particular department.  You may never have cause to sit down to a friendly with your local dean or the provost, but you should know who they are and get some sense of what they do and where they are coming from.  At some point your paperwork will roll upriver to them, and it never hurts to know your audience.

As an editorial afterthought, I’d also urge you not to fret overmuch if  some of your early overtures are ignored.  I’ve taught in a variety of contexts, and profs (just like real people) range across the entire spectrum of interactive skills and proclivities.  Some will receive you warmly, some will spend time sussing out who you are and what you’re all about, and some will have no idea who you are or why you’re approaching them.  At one school, for example, I tried to make nice with a person who was nine months from retirement and wanted nothing to do with the department’s pesky whippersnappers, and at another I accidentally poached a program (a conference I assumed was uncovered, since the person who covered it had been tacitly associated with it for decades), earning a year’s worth of enmity before I appreciated the cause of the conflict.  Every group of people will have its own set of dynamics already in motion, and it will almost certainly take you a little time to adjust and adapt.

3.  Consider circumspection.  I’m spectatorial by nature, and I’ve always been unduly fascinated by the methods and motives that drive human interaction.  I seldom wade into a river until I’m certain of its depth and currents.  As a result, I tend to take a traditional piece of advice–don’t speak until you have a really good sense of who’s listening–a bit further than most.  I know full well, however, that many profs are spitfires through and through.  They have strong opinions and a need to have them heard.  Because I am not always a jackass, I would never urge the spitfirily inclined to stifle themselves for the sake of group felicity.  I would urge them, however, to contribute to collegial conversations with discretion wrought up to a higher pitch.

Have you ever been to a meeting at which some doctoral delinquent rolls in late, listens to the tail end of a discussion, and then proceeds to weigh in clumsily (and underinformedly) on a topic the group has already addressed in full?  Being the new kid on the block can be a bit like that.  Few things are more discomfiting than watching a new arrival blithely waltz across a minefield that his peers have laid over the course of several semesters.  In all departments–and I do mean all of them, ever, from the moment the earth cooled up unto the present–there are underlying, ongoing sources of conflict and contestation to be managed, soft spots and toes to be pressed or stepped on, and cliques and divisions to be reckoned with.  Even the most urbane and genteel profs I’ve known will bare their teeth when it comes to certain causes.   Accordingly, while my Conradian “Look on–make no sound” approach is certainly not for everyone, I would still recommend wading in to these conversations in much the same way you would talk about your sex life with your grandma.  A little decorous restraint in the early going–and in the late going, frankly–will help you get situated and help your new colleagues get a better sense of where you stand.

That’ll have to do for now.  I’ll see what I can add as I mosey along, and please feel welcome to offer your own insights along the way.

Temps Perdu

Here’s a new wrinkle:  I set a five o’clock deadline for today’s allocation of versical work and finished up at 10:30.  I have no idea what I ought to do with the remainder of the day, but a bit of blogging certainly seems to be in order.  I’m mildly obsessed with time today; I’m also tangled up in thoughts about loss, hence the subject line.  That’s about as close to truth in advertising as you’ll ever get around here.

I’ve been doing a little self-inflicted editing of late, which has taken three forms.  Revision of the manuscript has been paramount, as you might expect, and the ‘09 edition of my poetical self has been wooing and walloping earlier versions every day.  I also made the very important stride of installing my backup hard drive, a precaution I figured it was high time for me to take.  I had a semi-meltdown in February, and if $100 will buy me a bajigglebyte of memory (fine, a terabyte, but make-believe units of measurement are far more entertaining) and oodles of peace of mind, I’d be a fool not to fork out the dough and plug in the cable.

The other editing I’ve been up to, however, involves a greater degree of circumspection.  If you’ve been paying unnervingly close attention, you may have noticed posts of the past mysteriously disappearing. The same holds true for MySpace and Twitter, although Twitter began and will likely end as a halfhearted experiment, one I only entered into at the behest of an old friend.  While I think some of my posts may in fact be illuminating, even useful, quite a few others involve nothing more than noodling and navel-gazing, the likes of which don’t really warrant preservation.  There’s a bit of funhouse-mirror tomfoolery involved–the selves I’ve committed to pixels look a bit warped and distorted, even though they walked the earth not long ago–and I find myself in the thick of a revisionist twitch with an armful of throwin’ stones.  When it comes to judgment, who better to punish past transgressions but the self?

It’s too early to tell if a full-scale reinvention is in the offing, but I wouldn’t put it past me.  I think I have stumbled upon some strong motives for change, and right now I’ve got world enough and time to build a better Bill.

Process and Progress (Part III)

Today I’m working with a little more drang than sturm, but I shall soldier on nevertheless.

I’ve been plugging away at the collection with appalling single-mindedness, and I’m happy to say that I’m making satisfying progress.  I can see the connections that will bind individual poems to the premise of the text more clearly, and each revision I’ve made more fully evokes the aggregate identity of the assemblage I want to put forth.  It is, at bottom, a fine time to be a latchkey bald man.

Along the way I’ve made two useful discoveries about the way I think and write.  Since that’s what these P&P posts are ostensibly all about, I might as well share.  This blog, as you know, is all about sharing.

The first perhaps does not qualify as a discovery so much as an experiential proof of the anxiety of influence.  About two weeks ago I was really roaring, looking back at some old half-cooked drafts and seeing them in exciting new ways.  By subjecting the texts to 45-179° turns, or by fusing sentiments that formerly seemed discrete, I was able to make some compelling renovations.  At the time I was reading a few of Jeanette Winterson’s novels and Robert Wrigley’s In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, both of which perfectly aligned with my ambitions.  Winterson and Wrigley have a knack for wrinkling images and making indirect connections, coaxing out layers and levels of resonance beyond the obvious and not-so-obvious implications, and that aptitude was exactly what I needed to adapt my own poetry–I needed to interrogate some images more fully, to show them to the reader in idiosyncratically revealing ways.   This past week, however, I picked up a decidedly different collection, Victoria Brockmeier’s My Maiden Cowboy Names.  Her verse has much to recommend it, and it features a chewy, satisfying density of the kind one likes to roll around the skull for a spell.  That density, however, represents something of a hurdle for my own verse:  my mind is habitually inclined to a comparable mode of accretive association, but when I yield to that impulse overmuch my work becomes unreadable.   I mean that in a very literal way:  Brockmeier creates some really lovely, provocative juxtapositions, but in my hands that density yields linguistic logjams more often than anything else.  I generally have to find a middle ground, a compromise between my own additive habits of thought and my sense of actual articulation, and reading My Maiden Cowboy Names prompted me to favor the former over the latter.  Once I set Brockmeier’s collection aside I was able to recapture much of my former momentum.  I look forward to returning to her book at summer’s end, but to my thinking right now it embodies a penchant for density I ought not indulge.

The other discovery pertains to progress proper, the kind of work I have to do in order to finalize the collection by identifying some inherent sense of coherence.  That process will involve reconciling two very different compositional impulses.

When those new connections and renovations I mention above were occurring to me readily, I did a better than average job of staying out of their way.   I initially felt that some phrasings were unwieldy and some images imperfect, but I persuaded myself to trust the impulse that prompted me to commit them to pixels in the first place.  A few revisions later, after a little tempering and sharpening, the verse I produced still seemed energetic and robust; the ideas I jotted down were spot-on, and leisurely  retrospection allowed me to refine those rugged originals.

This past week, in contrast, novel combinations did not come to me so easily, and I thought it might be time to turn to other projects while I gave some new ideas time to ripen.  I had reverted to my usual workmanlike process, hammering out conceits syllable by syllable, and I was reluctant to trudge along after experiencing the heady rush of revisiting verse I only needed to see a bit differently.  Methodologically speaking, however, I thought I could play upon that tension:  many poems in the collection are products of that sure-footed, deliberate process of cold forging, and it seemed foolish to concede wholly to a new set of imperatives.  What sealed the deal was a side-by-side comparison of products from each approach:  I found a really satisfying interplay emerging among them.  The renovated verse seems to me a bit more sprung and kinetic, while the more deliberate, calculated productions seem coiled and (for that reason) pleasantly threatening.  In the process of envisioning the progress of the entire sequence I’ve threaded together several experimental strings, and each one (as a combination of products from different compositional moments) has fired effectively, with a bit of tension and energy carrying me from one poem to the next.  That bodes well for the integrity of the overall experience.

I think that high-tension wiring, rather than connections suggested by theme or thought, will ultimately determine the order of the whole.  That’s a fine thing to figure out in the home stretch.

The Rub

I thought I’d take a little break from juicing the noodle today, as I’ve made happy and maddening progress over the past several days.  Last Friday I decided to pay a visit to the Graveyard of Abandoned Drafts, and I found a variety of working parts tucked beneath the hoods of problematic chassis that were all the rage last spring.  I wrenched them out, oiled them up, and installed them in the kind of machines I’m inclined to build nowadays.   When I fired up the engines, the old parts practically purred with sonorous content.

I’m required by law to tweak every draft I’ve got compulsively until it’s time to ship them out, but in the space of five days I used bits and pieces of those old drafts to make significant strides toward the realization of my principal summer ambition.  Then Wednesday happened to me.

Predictably I was feeling pretty chipper, even a little frisky.  On Sunday I had laid down the framework of a poem that I was able to work up by Tuesday (as I note above, I had several moving parts to work  with; my drafting process is typically terribly slow), and I was accordingly hopeful that I could jot down enough notes to give shape and scope to a new idea I’d start the following morning.  Sure enough, a stray association rattled through my brain and began collecting cargo on Tuesday afternoon.  By bedtime I had a point of departure, a destination, and something to say.

When I returned from the gym yesterday morning I was rarin’ to go.  I fired up the computer and started slinging pixels.  In about four hours I put together seven satisfying lines, ones that evoke a fairly resonant memory in terms that please my ears, eyes, and medial prefrontal cortex.  And then I hit the wall.

The wall, in this case, was the consequence of a tactical turn, the price of having a fairly concrete sense of how I’d like the piece to end from the get-go.  That terminal flourish, like the point of origin, strikes a chord for me, but getting from those seven lines to the anticipated end may involve more detours and digressions than I’m prepared to make.  I’m disinclined to impose arbitrary order on a concept in the offing, but I’m also unwilling to stretch a simple conceit into an epic, hence my quandary.

I could attempt to build a bigger hinge to make it round the bend, which makes a certain sort of sense.  One source of tension and energy in my work stems from the effort to reconcile discordant impulses, and this beginning and this ending probably qualify.  Alternately, if the seven lines I’ve got point toward a different destination,  I’d be a fool not to follow their lead.  Were  it more fully realized, the ending would warrant comparable consideration.  As it stands, however, it’s nothing more than a trio of lovely lines, an anchor awaiting a ship.

And so I reckon today I’ll have to slow my roll, revise some different drafts, and come back to the matter with fresh perspective.  I have an inkling of a corollary snag that might have a bearing on my current concerns; I’ll conduct a couple of cognitive experiments and get back to you.

Process and Progress (Part II)

I confess:  I have not been especially diligent these past few days.  I’m in the process of making some fairly radical renovations to my regular routine, and as a result I am still disoriented by my own erratic progress.  I decided to focus on a handful of manageable variables in the short term, and from there I’ll try build a more holistic regimen.  I’ve executed those initial operations reasonably well, at least, so I’m hopeful that the rest of my work will fall into place organically as I go.

This week I have two objectives:  I need to sift through my extant poems and determine which ones will fit in the collection, and I need to compile a list of contests (first book and otherwise) to which I might send the volume.  It feels presumptuous to swing for the fences with a full-blown contest submission right out of the gates (more or less; I realized just the other day how long I’ve been working toward this), but just about every poet I’ve spoken to and every resource I’ve consulted has pointed me in this direction.  In any case, rigorous, merciless scrutiny has confirmed that I have a sizeable cluster of poems that cohere in a dynamic, provocative way, so I’m well past the point of no return in that regard.  Swing for the fences I must.

Perhaps the most important understanding I arrived at this week emerged after I assembled my list of open contests; I’ll get to that revelation in a moment.  The process of compiling contest information probably warrants a post unto itself, as it involves a variety of involutions I didn’t really expect.  I wanted to collect the usual data (deadlines, page length requirements, entry fees, judging formats, and the like), and that’s easy enough to do.  There are several folks on the web who’ve already collected much of that information, and their generous legwork spares me the needless recap.  What was more significant to me, however, was getting a sense of the complexion of each contest, and that involved a far more circuitous search.

The most prestigious contests are the easiest to research and appallingly daunting–few things will chasten poetic pride and presumption like reading a chronicle of contest winners that consists entirely of books you admire by writers you revere. I wanted to see who the winners were, to skim sample poems, to read the work of contest judges when I could find it.  I’m not fool enough to imagine I could identify some quality inherent to all winning entries, but I thought I could at least get a sense of the kinds of  integrity that could hold a collection together, the kinds of aesthetic sensibilities that are in play.   To be candid, I also wanted a little reassurance, a sense that verse like mine still has a place in the maelstrom of current work.  Happily, I came away with the conviction that it does.

Some of the contests, however, require much more careful scrutiny.   Many have been obliged to close down, change publishers, or limit their work to odd- or even-numbered years, a product no doubt of these hard times.  Still others have clear conditions of entry:  some are limited to women, or GLBT poets, or writers hailing from certain locales.  Some contest guidelines  sent up red flags (in terms of inflated entry fees or conditions imposed upon the winners), and there were others with winners whose names I could not hunt down who had (ostensibly) authored works I could not discover.  Working out the rules of the road was an illuminating and frustrating experience, one that took me the better part of the past three days.

At present, I have a list of 68 total contests to consider; over the next couple of days I’m going to winnow that list down to a much more manageable size.  Don’t ask me how–that’s another subject for another day.

That important understanding I mentioned above, however, emerged when a student stopped by my office and asked if she could see the list, which I had just printed out.  She seemed bewildered, so I asked if I had done something wrong.  “What are the prizes for winning the contests?” she quite reasonably inquired.

I hadn’t created a column for prizes on my resource list, and that tells me that my head is in exactly the right place.

The Furious Five

Will there be a special cameo appearance by Grandmaster Flash?  I’m not saying yes, but I’m not saying no.

Tomorrow, in any case, I launch into 75 days of concentrated activity, activity I have divided into five tidy fifteen-day segments.  If you were in my apartment right now, it would be more than a little creepy; I really wish you would call beforehand.  You would also find enough frantically scribbled digits strewn about the place to know that I’ve devised a plan that verges on numerological madness.

I’ve got quite a lot of work on the docket, some of it long overdue, some that I’m very much looking forward to.  It was all swirling around in a cloud of potential energy for the past few weeks, and I realized that I needed to build a structure around it and through it, a framework for challenge and achievement.  That, as you may have gathered by now, is kind of my thing.

This plan, however, will require a greater degree of devotion and diligence than any I have attempted before, a kind of single-mindedness ill adapted to my natural, multilinear habits of thought.  I’m fond of these sorts of plans, because they either fail or succeed spectacularly.   The trajectory will either carry me into a wall or see me through it, and I’m content not to know the outcome in advance.  This ending, unlike a few others on the horizon, depends on my own exertions, and if I fail to measure up to the conception in my head…well, that just means my imagination isn’t drawn to scale, which is a healthy thing in its own right.  And if I succeed?  That, I think, will be something.

If I were you, I wouldn’t bet on the wall.

Is There a Poet in the House?

Not much time to post:  the wheels are spinning and I’m feeling a little bit giddy.  I have come across a question, however, that perhaps some kindly seasoned poet out there can answer.

I’m preparing a manuscript for entry into a number of first-book contests, and most of those contests quite reasonably go to considerable lengths to ensure anonymous evaluation of every submission.  My problem, alas, is that one of my punchiest poems hinges on the revelation of my father’s name (and hence my own) in a New York Times obituary from 1884.

Is there some clever, conventional way to anonymize such a self-referential gesture?  Or should I instead omit the poem from the manuscript altogether?  I would hate to do it, as it helps to pin down one of my three sections, but I would really rather not find my submission summarily disqualified.

Process and Progress (Part I)

Yesterday, with much fanfare and espresso, I began work on the manuscript.

“Beginning” of course is a fairly relativistic concept, since much of the work I’ve done over the past several months properly constitutes a bevy of non-false starts, but yesterday I actually opened up the document, replaced the tentative title I had assigned the assemblage months ago, and began sorting and sifting, rearranging and revising.  As I move along I’d like to chronicle my progress, both for the sake of conceptual clarity and in the hopes that it will be of use to greenish writers like myself who find themselves on the cusp of creating their first full-length collection of poems.  I will not pretend that this is a “how to,” but I’ll include the phrase in close proximity to “first full-length collection of poems” so that keyword searchers will be able to find my blog.  I heart search algorithms.

As most readers already know, this blog represents my lightest writing, both in terms of tenor and density.  In contrast, the act of assembling a collection of verse is perhaps the chewiest, most deadly serious business I have ever undertaken (and I have done some deadly business in my day).  I spent about three hours yesterday utterly engrossed in two acts:   initial winnowing and provisional revision.  Had not the Plumber from Porlock (technically the maintenance guy, who came by to check my garbage disposal) come by, I might still be at it.

Lest I ramble, let me boil down some findings into convenient list form:

1.  Murder your darlings.  That’s advice you’ll find phrased in other ways in better places, but it’s perfectly suited to the determination of what fits and what doesn’t when the time to gather your rosebuds comes around.  While I have a strong will to protect and preserve, deciding what poems to include demands a certain ruthlessness as a plucker and pruner.  Some cuts will be easy to make–I have several poems I love irresponsibly, but the subjects they treat have nothing to do with the radiant center around which I am plotting this manuscript’s pattern–and some will be tough.  The good news, however?  There’s no such thing as a tough cut, really, just a cut you won’t want to make.  The trick is persuading yourself to make it.

2.  Obey your master.  I suspect that I found the cuts easy (if painful) to make because I understand what I’m writing about.  “Aboutness” is another elusive notion to work with, but I conceive of it as a master motif, an organizing premise that can turn a clutch of stars into a constellation.  I certainly appreciate the countervailing impulse–to conceive of the collection as an excuse to showcase your finest work, regardless of its nature–but I think its a little early to begin thinking of my verse in superlative terms.  Accordingly, I have conceded to a concept that has imbued the manuscript with a certain shapeliness.  Better yet, that same idea has helped me to write, to recognize gaps that will need to be filled.

3.  Revise with new eyes.  Another concession that the act of collection will demand is a mandatory trip to an uncomfortable class reunion:  you’ll have to go and mingle among works you left behind three, five, or ten years ago and haven’t heard from since.  The good news, at least, is that these strangers are subject to change, although you may not want to change them.  When I look back on some of my oldest poems, part of me wants to preserve them just as they are, as artifacts of my thought and creative development.  I would recommend, however, that you (and I) revise them with all your best, freshest sensibilities in play.  I made some tentative changes yesterday, for example, and they were all of a piece:  I found myself determinedly changing loose but useful descriptors for more exacting words and phrases.  Because I write fiction, I sometimes write with function in mind:  it’s often wiser to give a reader a suggestive detail than a more perfect, pointed word that hems in the imagination.  Right now, however, I’m embracing a poetic imperative that insists on les mots justes, even if the justenessitude involves nothing more than evoking ideas and images more vividly.  I would be a fool to deny my older verse the perspicacity I currently enjoy, and I would like my readers to perceive a subtle structural coherence at the linguistic level, one that speaks to my sense of aesthetics circa May 27, 2009.

4.  Subsume your muses.  My final word of advice for getting started is to accept that those fresh sensibilities will be infused with new influences.  If you’re an attentive, responsive reader, you will adopt and adapt tics, tricks, and techniques from the writers you’ve lately encountered, consciously or unconsciously.  I don’t think you can avoid it; I don’t think you should try.  I reckon the best you can do is pick up the work of a writer you admire when you’re winding back through your own work, one whose clarity, acuity, or complexity complements the current tenor of the text.

That’s all I’ve got for now, aside from mentioning that the best index of a manuscript’s readiness may well be the resentment you will feel when you’re working on anything but the verse.