Ah, the magic that is summer. When else can one lose two weeks and come away feeling as though such an outcome is somehow acceptable?
Sorry for the short hiatus, as always. I’m in the process of a) assembling and revising the verse collection and b) finalizing the portfolio that will hopefully earn me early tenure and promotion, and while it doesn’t take much for me to scamper down that rabbit hole, it takes quite a bit of effort to climb back out.
The good news is that many ends are in sight. While I’ve still got quite a bit of paper piling to do, I’ve already got about 90% of the poortfolio printed and punched; I’ve also written about two thirds of the portfolio narrative, which amounts to the most elaborate cover letter you’ll ever read. The verse is further along than I imagined it would be at this point, and chances are good that I’ll have a polished rough filed away by the end of the month. That will leave me with all of August to revise (the first contest I plan to enter has a September deadline), and by then I should be knee-deep in the business of the fall. I’ve got some jaunty classes on tap, so I’m looking forward to it.
At some point, perhaps when my head’s a bit clearer, I’ll jot down some thoughts about the tenure and promotion application. I’ve already pointed readers toward our departmental bylaws, which are fairly illuminating, but I’m still wrangling with the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the evaluation process, which have veered toward the mysterious in the past several months. The folklore of the portfolio can be a little overwhelming, and I should probably be a little more lucid before I attempt to parse it. I’m in for about ten months of relentless stress (I’ll turn in my tenure application on 9/20 for a decision that will be made by Christmas; I’ll turn in my early promotion application in early January for a decision that comes in late May), so shinyhappy thoughts will be few and far between in the meantime.
Speaking of shinyhappy, however, I feel as though I’ve devised a clearer rationale for the organization of the collection, which counts as a major breakthrough. I’d already made some significant strides on that score as I rattled the essential concept around my head–I knew the title and premise a long time ago, determined how the text would need to be subdivided, and decided on the lead-off poems for each section earlier in the summer–but the internal order (since I’d only accounted for the situation of about 5 of the 56 poems) was always going to be the toughest beast to bring down. I knew that from the start.
Accordingly, in order to get some sense of how collections ought to be ordered, I read. I read and read and read. Oh boy, did I read. I read a lot. I’ve seen a few procedural recommendations offered by generous poets who’ve posted their own methods on the web, but they didn’t really resonate with my own habits of thought. Most recommend visual modes (spreading out printed poems on the floor, or using index cards to imagine different sequences and structures), but my imagination tends to be a little more syntactic, a little more metaphorical. So I read and read, and as I read I tried to devise some impressionistic descriptor for the way a set of poems played on the page. Most collections feel like seductions; some feel like the lapping of waves; others feel like wading and drowning. As you might surmise, my method was not exactly scientific.
The collections I found myself responding too most strongly, however, all seemed to abide by the premise of a prizefight. There’s no clear-cut order to such sequences, of course, but I could almost feel the poet jabbing, ducking, and weaving, softening the reader up without allowing him to really relax, to get comfortable, to impose his own order on the unfolding of the poems. And then, when the reader is worn down by all that steady attention, haymakers.
I’ll commit it to pixels: there are few pleasures in this world more perfect than getting leveled by a poem. For my sake, what’s important to note is that it’s not always the poem alone that delivers the blow; the setup matters just as much.
I doubt that many writers can judge for themselves if they’ve got knockout power; that’s something you can only learn in the ring, and I’m consistently surprised when editors or other readers tell me how they’ve responded to something I’ve written, what hit them the hardest. I’d go so far as to say that no one knows their own strength, literally or figuratively, since the vagaries of effort, intention, and adrenalin can flood the muscle at any given moment. But I think there are tricks that can be learned, skills that can be mastered. The reader can be repositioned in the ring, the reader can be constrained to raise her guard, the reader can be bulled against the ropes and obliged to broker with the body.
If I can convince my readers to give up their chins when I’m ready to swing? Well, that would be something.
