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I finally have found the most graceful way to record my publication credits for the merely curious or the truly interested. On the page which is linked next to HOME, I've filled in my publication history as best I could, given the great age of some poems and short fiction. I am grateful to the editors over the years who have generously given my work their attention and space in their pages. Keeping records such as this list is part of publishing; records prevent the embarrassment of sending a piece of writing to an editor who has previously seen and dismissed it, and allows me to give credit where it belongs when the story or poem (or novel?) finds a home and a readership. Publishing means subjecting our work to critique, pleasant or ugly, but that's where courage comes in.

Without readers, the writing is never complete.

Practice, practice, practice

"What you write need not be perfect. It need only add some small observation about your world." Atul Gawande

For a long time I ran this quote as part of my email signature because I believe it. I do, though, have trouble not striving for perfection. When I relax into my journal, sometimes I can put a few words together that please me, even without their being perfect. Here's yesterday's journal entry.

In a world full of news about disasters in which people lose all their possessions, I'm fortunate to have mine. For instance, I'm writing in my favorite chair. This chair is well padded, like me. It's deep enough to cradle me if I put a small pillow at my back. The arms are partly padded, partly scrolled wood, painted with a crackle finish. The upholstery fabric is a large floral pattern in sage, beige and wine. The throw pillows are wine with beaded edges. I take my chair for granted. It's always right where I left it, between the floor lamp to my left and the end table to my right. The chair is too heavy to move easily, as I am reminded whenever Duncan the Dog rolls his ball under it and I have to get down on cranky knees to help him retrieve his toy.

The chair cost very little in the consignment shop where I found it. The cushions are detached, so I can turn them and make them wear evenly. In short, this chair suits me. I hope it lasts as long as I do. It's like Robert Frost's definition of home: when I sit there, it has to hold me. The chair is not a critic of me or my work, offers not a creak or a groan. It marks my place in the world. Who owns this chair, owns her life.

KVDbooks

Learning from a Master

Last Saturday I spent the afternoon at the Boulder Public Library listening to Pulitzer Prize winner and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (2004-2006). The first part of the program was a discussion circle in which Kooser answered questions and talked about his work. After a short break, he was introduced by poet Jack Collom and read poetry in the library theater. Here are some highlights:

• Kooser's book Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon, 2004), which won the Pulitzer, has sold over 100,000 copies! This is amazing and encouraging. He's clearly reaching an audience beyond the poets and students who traditionally buy poetry books.
• We give our poems to the world; thus we should be considerate of a wide audience in choosing our language.
• Ideas are fatal to the creation of poetry. Shared experience makes the best of his work.
• White space at the end of a line is powerful; ending a line with an active verb turns the corner forcefully.
• He "fails" 28 times out of 30 when he writes; he's happy to get 8 good poems a year; daily writing constitutes good practice. He told us about a champion horseshoe player who said he threw a hundred shoes a day to maintain his accuracy. (Maybe then, writing a hundred words a day isn't unreasonable.)
• Kooser is aware of accentual and syllabic structure even though he writes "free" verse.
• Yes, he learns from other writers, and shares his work with Bob King, Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison.
• He paints.
• It's good to write to poets whose work you admire.
• His students are asked to read 100 poems by other people for every one they themselves write.
• He read 20 poems that afternoon, with a bit of banter and explanation between poems. His voice is clear, not melodramatic, not coy or self-conscious.
• One of his favorite poems is by Tomas Transtromer, "The Couple."
• Kooser describes himself as an introvert who was so stunned by the cold call from the Library of Congress asking him to be Poet Laureate that he could not respond, decided to go for a drive to clear his head and return some videos. In backing the car out of the garage, he tore off a side mirror and forgot to drop off the videos.

Branding Poems

As a kid I loved westerns--in print or on television. (We couldn't afford movies.) Every Sunday evening at my grandparents' house Aunt Dot, Uncle Bob and cousins Ralph and Margie would join us for ice cream while we watched a handsome guy on a horse round up the bad guys. Often enough, he also rounded up cows, and we saw the calves cut from the herd, roped, thrown to the ground and bawling as a red-hot branding iron marked them for their owner. In the days of open pasturage, the brand assured--more or less--that come fall roundup the owner and the hands brought in the right critters. Rustlers were hanged for having in their possession cattle with the tell-tale brand of a wronged rancher.

Branding poems is less dusty, I don't need a horse or rope, and so far no one has been hanged for corralling another poet's dogie. Poets and writers are now urged to market their work by branding it. This means  using a consistent head shot, creating a company name, and publicizing the work through readings--where the audience learns pretty quickly what to expect from a poet. One needs a "presence" on line. No longer is it enough to write well and throw the pages into the air with the hope that someone will catch them. Independent bookstores like Shakespeare & Company, which championed James Joyce when no other vendor would touch him, are few, and even the mega-stores, e. g. Borders, struggle against the tide of online opportunity for books and writers to garner attention. Well, I fought with this idea because it felt like bragging, but finally it has taken hold. So here I am brandishing a red-hot iron with my initials on it, stamping every poem as it lies with my mark. Rustlers beware!

Collecting Cosies

If you are not a mystery fan, you may not know that a cosy is a typical English mystery in which the murder--almost always someone dies--happens early on, often off-stage, and usually is precipitated by revenge, greed or the elimination of a witness to an earlier crime. The cast is led by a smart and minutely observant detective, police or civilian, who may even, like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, solve the mystery without leaving her fireside chair. Then there is the remote location--an old manor house, a lonely moor or desolate seacoast. An island works extremely well. The killer is likely to be among the assembled guests. Often, there is a big reveal, wherein all is explained, no plot element left hanging. Subplots serve the main plot. There are lots of Victorian fireplaces, people riding bicycles and a whole lot of walking and gardening.

I love these stories. They are like chocolate or potato chips for the mind. No education is attempted, no moralizing except for the obvious: crime does not pay, the guilty give themselves away, the good are rewarded.  Because the main characters and a few secondary characters repeat in each series, that task of character development is done after the first book, mostly. So if I love these books, understand their purpose and their structure, why not try writing one? Someone famous once advised writers to create the books they want to read. But I feel no compunction to write a cosy. I think this reluctance may be genetic: my single strand of English DNA might be warped or ripped or overshadowed by the Irish-American in me. (Given the history of these two countries, it's a wonder I'm not in a constant state of internal revolt.) Then again, I might not enjoy reading cosies if I had to work at writing one. Sort of like a sun bather having to build a beach.

Baby Rabbits & Elevators

I have no elevator speech. This is a problem. I need one, apparently, in order to tell strangers who and what I am. But can I cram a long life and a dozen passionate interests into a thirty-second sound bite? I could learn to speak like the voice-over on an ad for some dicey new medication that ends with "Ask your doctor if you should take this pill. It will change your life." (Or end it.)

No, that won't work for me. I see no possibility of summarizing three occupations, a marriage and its end, two children, a dozen or so moves around the country, the thousands of books I've read, the horse, the dogs and cats, the political fears and views, the friends, the enemies. No I barely fit into the elevator, let alone into an introductory speech delivered breathlessly between the lobby and the top floor.

This elevator speech is one of the myriad details I've been chasing like baby rabbits lately. These details of the business side of writing, too long avoided, now feel urgent and interesting. Cute as these little bits of organization are, they often skitter away to hide under the second growth of clutter, only to be spied racing across the road, about to be flattened by some eight-cylinder project roaring high speed toward my desk. These baby rabbit details, if they survive, multiply and nibble the day away. But they are so cute--like my new logo, my brochure, a business email. Fortunately, they are not as cute as a new poem or a new short story, so I'll let them hop around and catch 'em as I can.

Fight Hunger with Poetry

The Great Hunger, my newest poetry book, started with a suggestion from poet Allison Adelle Hedge Coke to put art in service to an issue. When I first arrived in Colorado I took a week's workshop with her at Naropa University, and it was all to the good. I'd long been concerned about food supplies--my own, the issues of organics, the risks of agriculture, the fact that Americans are mostly too fat and other people in the world go hungry. I still have no clear process for sorting out these issues and seeing a path to what might be called Food Ethics. But I do continue to learn and to put myself in a position to help, however slight and local that position may be. And sometimes I have fun in the process.

This coming Sunday, February 20th, poet Carolyn Jennings and I will do a benefit reading for our local food bank, FISH. We are reading at West Side Books on 32nd Avenue in Denver. Price of admission is a donation for FISH. The fun comes as we read in a call-and-response pattern--one of my poems from The Great Hunger, then one of Carolyn's from her book, Hunger Speaks. It's pretty amazing to see how our poems speak to each other. Then, we hope, audience members will read poems about food that they have brought. Then, we eat. We eat so that others may eat. We read poetry so that others may eat. It's going to be delicious.