Well, so much for R&R.

Instead of devoting the weekend to a concerted bout of chillaxin’, I found myself intensely focused on a new poem for most of Saturday and intensely focused on preparing my last batch of September submissions for most of Sunday.  I’m one trip to the P.O. short of finished, and then the slate will be clear for a new round of writing.  In another life I was probably a bulldozer.

Today, alas, I’ve already been distracted by the news, such as it is.  I had the good sense to abandon the attempt to catch up on election coverage (we’ve entered the slapfight stage of disputation, which never ends well), but I have been attending to the ongoing negotiations between the faculty and the administration here at CMU for a new contract.  Well, to be more exact, I’ve been attending to the peripheral discussion, since all bargaining (per said contract) occurs behind closed doors.  It’s hard to get a disinterested account of the proceedings or what’s at stake, but if you’re interested in such things, you can hop on over to our university newspaper and take a peek.  The main stories are about a week old, but you can tap into the discussion in the “Most Recently Commented” that can be accessed on the lower left-hand menu.  According to the latest informal poll (as of 9:23 am, anyway; the figures have slipped up and down quite a bit), 81% of CM-Life readers believe faculty deserve a better package, while 13% think faculty make too much money as it is.  As always, I try to keep something like an objective distance; not much for me to do but support the union and the bargaining team and await the outcome. 

My only grudge against CMU–and if you have to search as long as I have to establish a good grudge, you’re in pretty nice shape–is the dearth of contemporary poetry holdings in the university library.  The library is quite nice, really, and the acquisitions specialist for the English Department, Aparna Zambare, is excellent, but new poetry titles are hard to come by.  Worse still, our interlibrary loan department (which is also really strong) bounces back requests for titles published in the past year or two, which makes it tough for me to fuel my noodle with recent reading.  I can subscribe to a few journals myself, of course, and I naturally do, but I really need sustained engagement with a poet and a volume to develop a feel for rhythms, themes, and techniques.  For me the gulf between reading journals and reading collections is the difference between wading and swimming.

I buy several collections a year as well, but choosing ones that will suit me is a tricksy process of trial and error–lots and lots of error.  At bottom, I believe that I can learn quite a bit from any collection I pick up, but for me to really immerse myself in the pleasures of the work it has to strike some deep, congenial chord.  That’s why recommendations are just about useless:  many friends will write me and urge me to read one volume or another, but the aesthetics that call up a strong response in them only stand a 10% chance of calling up a comparably strong response in me.  It’s just the nature of that particular beastie, which is why having a strong browsing selection is so important to me. 

Being able to thumb through a few pages and catch the right vibes is a nourishing experience, but nowadays the pages I’m thumbing through tend to be a decade old.  That’s by no means a bad thing, but it is not perhaps as good as it could be.  It’s hard to develop a sense of what’s happening in contemporary letters when your exposure is a little dated.  I know that money is tight all over Michigan, but for a library to somehow pass over the Pulitzer winners every year since 2003 is really kind of appalling.

Nonetheless, I have to be selective and selfish:  when I work with the library, my priority is to get the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collection of criticism, fiction, and poetry up to speed.  Perhaps a little self-absorption and time to myself will do my writing good, but I like to see fellow travelers on the shelves and experience that Rilkean sense of identification, like a dog seeing itself in the mirror and thinking:  there’s another dog.

Today I shall mislead the trigger-happy Foucauldians.  Something tells me they will nonetheless feel right at home.

Assuming my life does not go utterly sour in the next five hours or so, I will have had a mighty fine week.  For novelty’s sake, I will not brace myself for imminent disaster.  I will, however, turn off the ringer on my phone.

Classes began, and all seems to be as it ought.  The first day is always rocky–I spend a little too much time essentially glossing syllabi, and it’s hard to be myself when I’m offering color commentary on canned policy–but students weathered it well and seemed game for the second round.  Lots of bright folks milling about here at CMU, and all parties concerned seem willing to give the classes a chance.  Once the first-day butterflies were swatted out of the way, I settled into something like a rhythm right out of the gate.  I think my pacing is getting a little better, and the task of speaking while self-monitoring (for lexical complexity, not filth, I should note) is getting a little easier.  Here’s to hoping the long weekend won’t misalign my mojo.

The new schedule might take some getting used to, but I’m liking the prospect of a semester’s worth of three-day weekends.  I’ve been laying the groundwork for my next batch of submissions, which will be a more extravagant production than usual (Baz Luhrmann will direct), and I spent almost the entire day surfing and searching for new places to send my verse.  Though I can be freakishly goal-oriented when I try, I really enjoy seeing who’s publishing what, scanning samples of representative work, and reading what editors have to say about their missions and visions.  I took my time, which is a pleasure in its own right.  I probably couldn’t articulate my own aesthetic especially well, but reading those of others helps to set my mind straight.  I came away with perhaps 25 new places I might try, and I also pruned my master list of a few dead stems.  Decent work for what promised to be a lazy first Friday, and I’ve set the stage for a Saturday devoted to revision, which I’ve been looking forward to since Monday.  It’s like Christmas, but closer; your holiday mileage may vary.

In equally decent news, I took a few minutes to scan through my short story tracking guide.  I was under the impression that some pieces have been out in the aether for far too long and it might be time to reel them back in.  I always dread writing those letters to the editors, perfunctory though they may be–I’d rather they think of me exclusively in terms of my work, not in terms of my epistolary etiquette.  On this occasion, however, I learned that just about all of my work was still well within the range of typical response times.   Only one piece had been pending too long, and the decision of an editor to foreclose an anthology spared me the chore of a formal withdrawal.  I’ll also get a chance at revising that story next week, which gives me something new to look forward to.  Revision, as Blake once said, is eternal delight.  I might be paraphrasing.

Add in a decent dinner, the likes of which a human might eat, and you have a bald man feeling pretty spry as he heads into the weekend.  I think I’m going to chip away at some fiction when I have this next set of submissions in the mail (a frontal lobestorm left me with two brand new story ideas to flesh out, although I also jotted down some evocative new lines of verse while cobbling together my submission list), and it feels like the time for transition is just about right.

One could do worse than be a wringer of searches.

I think WordPress is doing this on purpose, that Brent Barry was fouled, and that the chupacabra was genetically engineered by the Puerto Rican military.  Conspiracies all around! 

I had a goodly chunk of time set aside to blog this morning, but between Charter cable (which is not without a sense of whimsy) and WordPress (which is mocking me like we’ve been dating for three months) I find myself behind schedule once again.  Ergo, improv.  Today, at least, I have a topic in mind:  one of the very few tensions that exists between my verse and my fiction.

Speculative fiction, in my own practice at least, involves quite a bit of calculation.  In about 80% of my stories (and, astonishingly enough, that’s actually an exacting percentage) I write with the prospect of strong curvature in mind–at some point I know I will try to thwart, complicate, or revise reader expectations for the sake of delight and surprise.  A good example is one of my first publications, a first-person Lovecraftian adventure called “The Well of the Elders.”  It’s a fairly organic story in that I had a concept in mind but not a conclusion:  I imagined a family that, based on the mad speculations of an ancestor from the not-too-distant past, bought a parcel of land in the Southwest and started digging.  I knew that the story would involve a terminal reversal–the last of the Elder line would find something underground that neither he nor the reader expected–though I didn’t know when I started what that reversal would ultimately be.  All the prose that led up to that turn, however, was written with that prospect in view.  I knew something odd was coming, and I let the reader know to be ready for it.   I tailored the narrator to underscore his reverence and wonder for the discovery, and when I reached the last few paragraphs (once I had decided what he would find), I was at liberty to torque the story pretty hard.  All the engineering brought me to that pass, and I felt that anything less than a hard left turn would disappoint.

That principle of twist is the source of my (inexactly quoted, I know) subject line, the horrific hinge of When a Stranger Calls.  That movie is by no means smooth and soothing, but when the police call Carol Kane (and I really hope you didn’t think I was talking about anything other than the 1979 version) and tell her that the man who has been terrorizing her is calling from inside the house, the effects of the movie are suddenly heightened and amplified.  That’s great for film, even better for fiction; it’s not so swell, however, for verse.

One of the (many) reasons I so appreciate the work of Carl Dennis is that he writes with a sort of prismatic sensibility.  The source of light seems stable, but he keeps turning the glass through which it passes, teasing out the colors it can cast one by one.  The effect is consistently revealing and surprising, but it’s not the kind of revelation or surprise that my habitual approach to fictions tends to work toward.  I relish the leisurely, deliberate, painstaking means by which he coaxes his subjects toward self-exposure, but I find that in my own verse I tend to wrench the reader around when it comes to the final lines.  My first drafts almost always seem to end abruptly for that reason, and my revisions usually feature the expansions and elaborations I think the reader needs to understand how and why I turned that final corner.

I’ve noticed in my blog posts that I often trail off, that I don’t snap segments shut snugly or firmly.  I’m starting to think this is a concession to that pressure I experience so often when I write fiction or verse or literary criticism, when I want to close the narrative, sentiment, or argument with a sense of gratifying, irrevocable finality.  When I’m on the clock, so to speak, I’m always conscious of the endgame, of the terms, concerns, and conditions that will yield a fitting, forceful conclusion.

Here I can just wrap when I feel like I’ve said what I wanted to say. 

If I came across Crunching Crisis in the cereal aisle I would buy two boxes.  Today, however, the seemingly delicious term represents an especially dire kind of math.

First, some sobering news for the poets.  Given the nature of my professional obligations, I can only manage a half-time commitment to verse, a half-time commitment to fiction, a half-time commitment to scholarship, and a half-time commitment to teaching, and a half-time commitment to university service.  (I told you the math would be dire.)  I managed only six sets of simultaneous submissions this academic year, which involved many 9×12 envelopes, several toner cartridges, a prodigious quantity of Southworth Premium Weight Business Paper, and enough postage that two of the tellers at the local P.O. know me by name.  (They call me Eudora.)  Nevertheless, as I gathered up those receipts related to my professional development this year (even after discarding a few of uncertain relevance), I realized I spent $340.88 sending my work out into the world. 

Was it worth it?  Goodness, yes.  That would be true had I only homed a single poem.  From my part-time perspective, however, I can’t even begin to imagine the plight of the pros, whose investment in cash, time, energy, ink, and imagination must exceed the GNP of small island nations. 

Today, alas, rather than praising these people, I must taunt them with the nature of my “crisis”:  I have more professional development money to spend than ways left to spend it.  Even after knocking off that $340.88, even after knocking off the $119.62 I spent on DVDs for class, and even after knocking off the odds and ends of professional memberships, subscriptions, and the like, I still have a daunting amount of money left to spend, money that will vanish into the aether if I don’t spend it. 

This, I fear, may be the worst cry for help ever.

Because I did not travel this year my professional development funds covered my entire wish list of 18th-century and theory texts; I added the latest editions of the Directory of Poetry Publishers, Poet’s Market, and Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market to my tab…and I’m still deeply in the black.  I may be approaching the idea of “professional development” a little rigorously, but a lifetime of frugality prevents me from adopting a shopping spree mentality.  Come what may, however, I will not let the aether win without a good scrum. 

Were you in my giant pontoon shoes, what indispensable resources would you advise a writer to buy?

Why yes, I do choose my post titles so students Googling for free term papers wind up reading my blog instead.  Don’t you?  Sorry to all the youth of America looking for insight into Robert Herrick over the past few days.  You’ll find no insight here.  If you look carefully, however, you’ll find veiled allusions to JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenberg today.  I take away with one hand, but I slap you with the other.

Thanks to some unwholesome diligence (I started working in good earnest at about 8:30 AM and kept the wheels turning until about 7:30 PM), I was able to wrap up my semester yesterday evening.  I’ve got a meeting today at 2:00, but after that I will turn to the Bald Man Slackin’ Plan, at least for a week or so.  The last couple of days were peppered with good news–my mother’s recent collapse was due to pneumonia (which sounds like pretty rotten news, I know, but strikes me as one of the better eventualities available), a good friend got engaged (again, a little on the bittersweet side, but she deserves all the happy she can find), and I learned I have $1250 in professional development money to spend (which should just about cover postage for the last year’s poetry submissions)–so I’m feeling pretty peppery as I head into the siesta.

The area will be swamped for graduation over the weekend, so I’ll also be laying low for a day or three.  I’m going to gussy up my online personae, and I may kick up a LiveJournal and Facebook site  while I’m at it.  Those, however, will be purpose-driven sites (the former to make contact with an editor or two, the latter to give students a virtual self to touch base with), so I hope I won’t be spreading myself too thin.  I need to work my low-maintenance mojo.

The best news, however, is this:  the plan for a volume of poetry is now perfectly clear in my head. 

I’ve had an overarching theme to work with for quite some time, and I had originally divided the book into two sections fit to encompass some published pieces, some unpublished pieces, and some works in progress.  The problem, however, is that I was haunted by the Spectres of the Unsaid (which sounds likea nifty title, and you’re welcome to steal it), pieces that clearly fit into to the big picture but were poorly adapted to the two-part format.  I had set aside those poems in a separate wing of my mind, and over the past week or two their collective integrity (give or take connections I’ll need to make with a few pieces yet to be written) began to take shape.  As it turns out, I needed a third wing; like “The Woodspurge,” my vessel has three cups in one.  That’s good value by any reckoning.

That should make for a pretty exciting summer:  I’ve got an article to write, a manuscript to assemble, and plenty of time to fill in the nooks and crannies with some stories I’ve kept on the back burner.

As for today, however, I’m slackin’ like a kraken. 

In an effort to make my life a little less noodlesome, I broke some bad internet habits a couple months back.  I weaned myself off some message boards, killed an e-mail address or three, unsubscribed from some listservs, and otherwise tried to decrease my virtual footprint.  Nowadays, when I fill in my odd hours, I tend to visit various news sites to see what’s cookin’.  In retrospect, I might have been better off paying my regular visits to existentialclambake.com.  (NB:  that is not a real site, though it should be.  The less you know about my browsing, the better.)

I am no rhetorician, nor have I recently stayed at a Holiday Inn Express, but the rhetoric out there in the newsie world alternately amuses and appalls me.  We have the “Arms Across Zimbabwe” coalition government appeal coming out of Zanu-PF, which would be a lot like a great big gubernatorial hug… were it not for the rampant beatings, egregious attempts at ballot box stuffing, inflammatory rhetoric, and other fairly compelling evidence that any coalition would be little more than a travishamockery.  We have the Team America spirit of ex-military talking heads trumpeting our successes in Iraq and Afghanistan…which doesn’t seem quite so shiny when we learn that these fellows own stock in the war machine and have been strategically placed to serve as “message force multipliers” (which ranks only slightly behind “Hilary Duff scorpion pants” in the list of search terms my irresponsible readers have sent me this week).   And of course we now have the Clinton campaign’s “Debate Watch,” an awesomely middle-school attempt to imply that Barack Obama is scurred to enter the ring with Hillary once again.  Note to Senator Clinton:  if the actions of your campaign staff seemingly would cast you as a 21st-century Grover Dill, tittering in the background to George Stephanopoulos’ Scut Farkus, all the Rocky references in the world won’t make you look tough.  Not a good week when John McCain halfheartedly lodges a form protest and outclasses you by a chickahominy mile.

Because I am wired improperly, however, such news makes me crave poetry.  While waiting for my copy of The Mariner’s Wife to arrive–oh yes, I’ve ordered; don’t you want to be cool like me?–I’ve been digging through some Dennis and Doty, and their complete works (or as many of them as I can find on Amazon) stand a good chance of becoming a self-inflicted gift.  Political rhetoric, even when it’s been turtle-waxed to a brilliant shine, makes me hungry for the chewiest words, the most appetizing language, the meatiest, most filling discourse I can find. 

I’ll only be able to nibble for a week or two, as the semester’s winding down here and I’ve got to finish scripting a new prep for Summer I.  After that, however, I would urge you to keep your appendages away from the table:  the bald man’s gonna get his gorge on.

I attempted to blog yesterday, but at the tail end of grading 70 essays my prose was somewhat less than scintillating.  This is the only arena in which I try not to take my writing ultra-seriously, but I do aspire to something akin to zesty coherence.

Grading aside, it was something of an odd weekend.  On Friday we had our last department meeting of the year, at which I learned seven of my colleagues are moving on (a couple to very fancy jobs, a few to be closer to loved ones).  Happy trails, compañeros; may good fortune ride beside you, its saddlebags replete with ostrich jerky.

That evening we had our end-o’-the-year fiesta, which was a little wiggedy.  I have a smidgen of social anxiety, particularly in party contexts, as I always commit some social gaffe that reveals to my peers that I was raised by barbarians.  Friday’s party foul was an attempt to open a bottle of Sam Adams Light with some peculiar tool that apparently is designed to snip the seal off the top of wine bottles.  I redeemed myself by opening a particularly ornery jar of applesauce, so I think I came out even on the evening.  I find no shame in my failure to recognize the esoterica of the zinfidels.

Like that?  I totally just made that up, and I’m not even caffeinated.  I will not Google to see if the term already exists; I will not harsh my own awesome.

At the soiree I also had a disconcerting experience:  several graduate assistants already knew me by name, though I have only met a handful in passing.  Happily this was not a consequence of my general infamy, but because a colleague of mine has been teaching an essay I penned back in the day.  That mystery solved, I can now work at unriddling the wiggedy ways of WordPress.  Over the weekend, folks arrived at my blog by searching for “fear of rejection,” “need for acceptance,” and “carny jokes.”  I can only hope more than one seeker was involved.

Saturday and Sunday were devoted almost exclusively to grading, and by Sunday night my brain was the consistency of off-brand tapioca.  I’m exhausted this morning, but mostly because we’re in the throes of spring and my body has not yet adjusted.  I clearly became hardier this year as I adapted to my second Michigan winter, but the jump from the 50s to the 70s has caught my body off guard.  Still, I shambled to the gym this morning, I’m running an hour ahead of schedule, I’m caught up with grading, and I’ve only got two days of teaching to go. 

That’s a Monday morning tally I can live with.

Up  next:  my quest for a suitable avatar photo.  At the moment, this is the leading candidate:

I

On the radio this morning a woman was lamenting her romantic fortunes.  First she wed the inattentive go-getter, the one whose wealth and ambition could not fill the hole in her heart.  Next she wed the charming philanderer, the one whose philandering had already philanded him in divorce court twice (to her knowledge) before they tied the knot and he philandered once again.  Finally, she married the passionate junkie, the one whose affections waxed and waned in direct correlation to his supply of smack.  At the end of her chat with the deejays, she posed the poignant question:  “why, oh why, do I attract such terrible men?” 

Color me crazy (for which you will need the Crayola 256-pack), but methinks she was asking the wrong question.

In the gym, thinking that thought and watching CNN on the teevee, I saw an interview with a Concerned Parent.  The Concern in question?  Two seventh graders in Arizona were found with a “death list,” a list that included the names of students, teachers, the principal, and Barney, the purple dinosaur (he knows what he did), a list for which the seventh graders were suspended pending further investigation.  The parent, however, was not Concerned with the list itself or the thought process that prompted it; instead, he wondered aloud “why were all Concerned Parents not notified immediately?”

In his defense, he had an especially fine haircut.

Last in the lists of quizzical questioners, the bookkeeper for my dentist.  I received a sooper-scary “you are 90 days delinquent/we are about to send Knuckles after you” billing statement late Monday afternoon, and I called back this morning to investigate.  I owed a whopping $17 (an overage that my insurance should have covered but didn’t), but even a small amount, once sent to collections, can make a monumental dent in one’s otherwise shiny credit rating.  My concern in the case was the subject of delinquency itself:  I had, after all, paid $90 at the door in January, which I think bespeaks a certain amount of good faith on my part, and I had not received a single billing statement prior to the 90-day red-letter threat.  I accordingly called up, ascertained the nature of the money owed, and explained my concern regarding the prospect of seeing the matter sent to collections. 

The bookkeeper’s question?  “Alriiiight…and the reason you’re calling?” 

I suppose I should have introduced her as the bookkeeper to my former dentist, but that would have ruined the suspense.

Whenever I identify a tendency in others that upsets or perturbs me, I try to spin the camera and engage a little self-examination.  Have I been asking comparably problematic questions?  Have I been engaging in the same kind of defective/deflective thinking that makes matters that fall to my account the properties and problems of others?  Most importantly (for the sake of the blog, anyway), has a species of comparable denial affected my writing?

Perversely, if it has, it seems to have done so in a positive way, in a manner that obliges me to table my own self-consciousness as I render events or imagine the lives of others. 

If I knew how much of myself was seeping into my fiction and verse, I suspect I wouldn’t write quite so much, if at all.

Today I shall laze.  Were I more ambitious, I would attempt to lase, which would turn this post into an homage to Real Genius.  Alas, I lack the gumption.

Wednesday the end of the semester begins in good earnest:  I will collect about 75 essays, conference with my intermediate composition students, and start assembling final exams.  Anything I accomplish today will accordingly be icing on the cake, since the script for the last seminar sessions has already been written, albeit in marzipan.

I have a single Saturday goal:  to find a birthday present for the magnificent Kristin.  Today marks the one-month anniversary of her birthday, and thus the grace period for belated gifteration will come to an end in accordance with Bald Man Law.  I have been shopping intermittently since February, but I have found nothing suitably scintillating.  I hate being so lame, but I am even more averse to compromising my standards of gifteration.  Quandary, thy name is quandary. 

As you can probably tell, this is a filler post in anticipation of the hiatus that will surely attend my descent into the grading bunker.  A few rejections trickled in this week (most from September submissions, happily, which should allow me to close that chapter pretty soon), and I revised and sent out a new story, but otherwise my time has been devoted to prepping students for finals and final essays. 

As it turns out, it’s tough to work on a poetry blog when I’m concentrating on my teaching, a critical project, and short fiction.  Even so, soldier on I shall; in the absence of inspiration, diligence will often do.

We’re on the other side of Spring Break here at CMU, and I think the return has jarred quite a few folks into a fugue state.  It’s difficult to recover the momentum built up over eight weeks of class, harder still when classes wrap up for good in the short stretch from now to April’s end.  Throw in a few days that actually smack of springtime, and a return to February form becomes a bit more elusive.  When even a latchkey laggard like me wants to go out and play, you know that seasonal fever has set in.

Spring also comes with a special set of writerly distractions.  I’ve been nibbling away at a short story, as I just put a set of new verse submissions in the mail on Monday.  Though the narrative premise is fairly straightforward, the degree of alterity involved–the piece focuses on the wiggedy experience of a small group of South Pacific islanders (who, you may be surprised to learn, seldom burst into song)–has made the assembly slow going.  When I decide to begin with a creation myth, I know I’m in for a long haul.  My work on the story has also been hampered by a sense of anxious expectancy I’ve developed since I began writing with an eye toward publication.  I attempt to keep both poetry and fiction in constant circulation, and the end of the academic year tends to be an especially newsy time (though not the kind of newsies known for bursting into song).  Many journals affiliated with universities are getting ready to hit the presses, which means that submissions that have been floating out in the æther for a few months of a sudden start dropping from the sky.  I sent out a batch of poetry submissions in early January, and at the three-month mark my mailbox becomes a source of inordinate fascination.  It can be hard to concentrate on newer work when the fate of older work is pending.

My patience was “rewarded” on Friday, at least insofar as I received four rejection slips.  A four-rejection weekend would normally be a bit of a downer, but all four slips were from 2007 submissions–one packet had been in circulation since last April.  Moreover, all four packets were also compromised:  all were simultaneous submissions from which one or more pieces had already been selected for publication, which means that the editors in question had smaller selections to choose from.  When pink slips for such packets arrive, I generally feel more grateful than disheartened.  I’m genre writer enough to appreciate a little closure, and I’m pollyanna enough to believe that poems that seem like the dregs of one batch will seem shinier when revised and repackaged with more recent work.  I give them a pep talk and get them back in the game.

The turnaround process, however, is not without anxieties of its own.  I like to believe I’m growing as a writer–at the very least I know I’m changing–and revisiting an older poem or story can be disorienting.  One is pleased to renew the acquaintance, but it carries a smidgen of the unheimlich with it.  Given my attitude toward some of my oldest work, I think it’s only a matter of time before the most beamish bits I once sent out into the world will seem like strangers to me.