2012 Literary Excursion

Fiction took more of a backseat to poetry, this year, but I did fall into some standout reads. Completely adored new efforts from Shane Jones and Ben Marcus, solidifying them, for me, as writers who don't experiment just for the sake of it. Daniel Fights A Hurricane, while not as good as Light Boxes, had all the riveting despair and hope that Light Boxes offered in a yummy, compact volume. The Flame Alphabet was different from Ben Marcus's earlier work, but it got more empathy out of me than any novel has in a long time. I hope the mainstream success of these two signify a shift in publishing towards more original work that plays with the idea of what a novel "should" be.

In the Young Adult arena, The Hunger Games trilogy was a disappointment, though not written as badly as other teen reading out there now, while Lois Lowry's The Giver trilogy is a classic that needs no explanation for its resilience. And, after reading Giovanni's Room, I suspect I've found a new favorite writer in James Baldwin. The first ten pages sucked me in, and as much as I love books, that doesn't happen to me too often.

Didn't read too much non-fiction, but I spent a lot of time with the Mozart biography, which was insightful for someone who knew little about Mozart, but a little too accessibly written. Aside from that, none of it held my attention enough to be memorable. That's probably something I should try to rectify in the new year.

POETRY, yo. I discovered some great poets I hadn't read before, like Valzhyna Mort and Nate Slawson, and, thanks to a Modern Poetry class through Coursera, I finally opened up to classics like Bishop and Ashbery (whose collected works I plan to go through next year). Since accepting my new role as a poet (as opposed to a novelist), I'm excited to faceplant into whatever poetry I can get my hands on, and I think I've become more open-minded towards things I may not have read before. The doors are open, and the poetry is endless.

Fiction

The Angel Esmerelda – Don DeLillo

I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur – Mathias Svalina

The Flame Alphabet – Ben Marcus

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

Catching Fire – Suzanne Collins

Mockingjay – Suzanne Collins

Cataclysm Baby – Matt Bell

Suddenly, A Knock on the Door – Etgar Keret

Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens

Naked Pictures of Famous People – Jon Stewart

Citrus County – John Brandon

The Weather Stations – Ryan Call

Short Dark Oracles – Sarah Levine

Cure All – Kim Parko

Daniel Fights A Hurrican – Shane Jones

The Giver – Lois Lowry

Gathering Blue – Lois Lowry

The Messenger – Lois Lowry

NW - Zadie Smith

A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’Engle

The Fifty Year Sword – Mark Danielewski

Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

Trout Fishing In America – Richard Brautigan

In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan

Non-Fiction

The Creative Habit – Twyla Tharpe

Mozart: A Life – Maynard Solomon

Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake – Heidi Lynn Staples

This Is Not A Pipe – Michel Foucault

Shitty Mom – Laurie Kilmartin

Just My Type – Simon Garfield

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story – D.T. Max

This Is How You Love Her – Junot Diaz

What Light Can Do – Robert Haas

Parenting Beyond Belief – Dale McGowan

Poetry

On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing – Karen Carcia

Yo-Yo Logic – Lauren Shapiro

Panic Attack, U.S.A. – by Nate Slawson

Heavy Petting – Gregory Sherl

The Trees The Trees – Heather Christle

Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me – Mark Leidner

The Oregon Trail Is The Oregon Trail – Gregory Sherl

I Don’t Mind if You’re Feeling Alone – Thomas Patrick Levy

Collected Body – Valzhyna Mort

The First Four Books of Poems – Louise Gluck

Love, An Index – Rebecca Lindenberg

The Last 4 Things – Kate Greenstreet

Betting on the Muse – Charles Bukowski

Mistake – Meredith Stricker

Ghost Machine – Ben Mirov

Listening For Earthquakes – Jasmine Dreame Wagner

Wolf Face – Matt Hart

The Grief Performance – Emily Kendal Frey

Carnavoria – Laurie Saurborn Young

Victory – Ben Kopel

The Mining Camps of the Mouth – George Kalamaras

The Best American Poetry 2012 – Mark Doty

Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror – John Ashbery

Collected Poems and Prose – Elizabeth Bishop (just poems)

All Black Everything – Weston Cutter

Source to Mouth – Brandon Krieg

Plainsight – Justin Runge

Horse Latitudes – Paul Muldoon

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster - Richard Brautigan

Plays

Proof – David Auburn

Shoppers – Denis Johnson

Five Modern No Plays – Yukio Mishima

Graphic Novels

Not Simple – Natsume Ono

The Walking Dead Compendium One – Robert Kirkman

Chapbooks

Halfsteps and Cloudfang – Daniela Olszewska

Small Hollering – Jamie Kazay

I Cannot Pretend To Be A Ghost Today – Sasha Fletcher

The Bible – Gregory Sherl

The Wilhelm Scream – Jeremy Behreandt

How the Days of Love and Diptheria – Robert Kloss

Treesisters – Joseph Rippi

Meat is All – Robert Borgstrom

The Tiny Jukebox – Nate Slawson

Feral – Patty Paine

a city / bottle boned – Megan Burns

Focus on Grammar – Gillian Devereux

Some Citrus Makes Me Blue – Megan Fernandes

Going Attractions – Brian Foley

Once Was A Weather – Trey Moody

The Point Or What I Cannot Recall – Tyler Flynn Dorholt

Bye Land – Tony Mancus

Least – Jon Cone

Legal Pure – Eric Amling

Trout Fishing And Bishop And Poeming

I've been reading some John Ashbery, lately, and, more recently, Elizabeth Bishop, whose work I find very dichotomous in style. She is somewhat known for her attention to detail and her descriptive, objective writings, but her poetry is rarely about her personal life. Not confessional, by any means, but quite detailed from a distance. I may have found this subject matter boring, at one point, but reading her work (and perhaps trying to write poetry of a similar style) teaches you how hard it really is to give a very detailed but objective viewpoint on something, to get really close to something, without developing too much feeling for it. I'm enjoying her work though, if only because it stands as an example of achieving success in writing without too much self exposure.

My reading material has exclusively gone down the "poetry" fork in the road, as of late, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but just the thought of reading fiction now seems unappealing and even overwhelming. I can definitely see myself getting back into some nonfiction, though, namely the newish Richard Brautigan biography. There's also Richard Dowden's Africa, which I never finished and would like to get back into. And, of course, the Dostoyevsky biography continues to stare me down.

Writing front is pretty tame, at the moment. I have a new batch of poems that is turning from a small batch into a big batch (I enjoy using the word "batch" for poems, I think, because I have no talent in the kitchen and therefore take the opportunity to steal that word from the kitchen and use it to my liking elsewhere). They need a lot of editing before I do anything with them, individually or otherwise, so I've been trying to scout out any large chunks of time I can get in the near future to work on that. Submissions have slowed down, since all this new stuff isn't ready. I have an itty-bitty group of poems called This Is Not A Well that I don't know what to do with...they might get folded into the larger thing. There is one really good poem in there that I will find a home for, somehow, as I'm very proud of it.

It should be evident that organization does not exist in my projects, at the moment, which is probably why I'm not a millionaire poet already. Obviously.

Thanks again to everyone who's bought Moon Law. If you haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet, you may do so here.

Moon It Up

My new chapbook, Moon Law, is officially out in the world now, thanks to Wild Age Press, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. What started out as a few lines in my notebook, over a year ago, is now a whole narrative, printed on postcards with illustrations and housed in a box with a ribbon. The beginning-to-end process is fun to watch, especially with chapbooks that embrace artistry and defy the traditional notion of a bound book, and I'm grateful to have found such an innovative press to nurture my first chapbook. It was also a pleasure to be involved in the production of the book, from the first brainstorming session to the final printing. Kelly Thomas, who runs Wild Age Press, made this whole process a memorable experience for me.

Those looking to purchase Moon Law can do so at Wild Age Press. To those who already got a copy, thank you so very much for the support. I've worked long and hard on my writing pursuits and gotten criticism here and there, over the past year, for taking on writing and parenting simultaneously, so it means more than you know to those who acknowledge that I'm still (and always will be) a writer with publishing goals, no matter what else is going on in life.

Kid Corner

I had quite a handful of favorite books as a kid, and these are a few of the ones I read and reread. I would like to know yours, also.

The Diary of Anne Frank
There isn't enough I can say about the ways this book shaped a large portion of my life, but it did, so much so that I considered divorcing the husband when he voiced his dislike of the book. There is a maturity and a childishness to Anne Frank that comes across in her words and stories, as well as wit and courage, all of which aided in my decision to start a diary at age ten and to someday be a writer. I don't care who you are, read it. Some things you just need in your life.

The Hobbit - J.R.R Tolkien
Bottom line, Bilbo Baggins was a BAMF. And I was enamored with the ring. For whatever reason, I couldn't get into The Lord of the Rings, but I read The Hobbit a few times before running into it on my school curriculum.

The Tillerman Series - Cynthia Voigt
I know a lot of people who can't read stories unless they can personally relate to them; not always the case, for me. And I think that's what drew me in about this series - that these kids' lives were so far different from anything I'd ever experienced. Abandoned by their mother and forced to find their own way, I remember how in awe I was of Dicey Tillerman (the oldest, but still a child, herself) and her seemingly natural step into her role as parent to her younger siblings. I knew it surely wasn't something I could handle, but she handled it with courage and maturity. The later books in the series followed the kids' into their adult lives and didn't have the same intensity of the first book, but I'm now trying to track them down, because I think I'd enjoy them more now.

Congo and Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
The thing about Crichton's novels is that as awesome as the movie versions turned out, the books always seemed way better (particularly Jurassic Park and The Lost World). Congo and the JP novels were the only Crichton I read, but I read them many times and appreciated the accessible science thrown in with the story (because I typically need more than just a story, even a good story).

Everyone Is Jumping Off A Bridge

This is kind of a hasty rant.* Something that used to nag me once in a while and now commands my daily thoughts is the lackadaisical, almost apathetic way we go about choosing what to feed our brains. I probably think into this too much, but it's hard for me to grasp how people can be more choosy over what color frame to put on their cell phone than what information they ingest and possibly commit to permanent memory.

The appropriate disclaimer here, I guess, is that I'm more than kind of a snob about this. My existence sometimes involves a struggle between strictly regulating what I see/hear/read and being open to new-to-me material (I believe I usually maintain a healthy 70-30 mix of both). And that's not to say all lowbrow stuff should be off one's radar; if I stumble onto a Keeping Up With The Kardashians marathon, I will, more often than not, watch an episode or two. It's those that limit the contents of their minds to reality television or other material that (arguably) isn't intellectually stimulating that worry me.

I don't usually like to judge people, for the most part; I'm a very "live and let live" person who celebrates differences over sameness and conformity, and passing judgement is just not what I do. Hence why I've been putting off writing this post. Because, why not let people take in utter drivel 24/7 for the rest of their lives, if that's what they want to do? Fair enough. But what happens when they breed, and we've got parents that don't know who Anne Frank is? Or, how would you feel if the lady teaching your kid at school spent her summer (whoa, True Story alert!) reading nothing but the Fifty Shades trilogy. Seven times. And nothing else.** It's become disheartening to me, maybe, because I no longer come across this suggested intellectual laziness once in a while - it's everywhere.

I read The Giver trilogy this past week and realized that if you go back far enough in time (which isn't that far, this one only being two decades old), you can find well-written fiction for young people. Fiction with plots that don't involve teens with perfect features and done-to-death love triangles. I wonder if people would see how disappointing contemporary YA/teen series are if they read something like The Giver series, because, negating the illogical premise - even with the suspension of belief Lowry requires - they are well-crafted stories with important messages (albeit hammered in pretty hard) and characters you can respect for having more on their resume than two attractive boys in love with them.

It's really about time we stopped allowing ourselves to be served our own intellectual makeup by faceless people and companies that determine what we should and should not be fawning over. I've lost count of how many customers I've served who buy a book for no other reason than, "I just want to see what all the hype is about." What? Aren't your money and time and mind more valuable than that? Just because something is at the top of a bestseller/box office/TV ratings list doesn't meant it's good or worth your effort. It's okay to seek out mental stimulation that people aren't talking about. I suppose that requires more work than saying, "Hey, I'll see the movie that's playing on four screens and everyone else is seeing." Not everything that goes mainstream is necessarily of poor quality, but more often than not, it can be watered down and effortless. And again, if that's all you're feeding your mind, I fear the loss of history and critical thought and intellectual progression for future generations.

I hope, someday, we can bring challenge back to the way we exercise, mentally. To possess something with such a seemingly endless capacity and capability as the human brain, I don't see how someone can't be compelled to discover all that it can do.

* Please, do tell me if I'm completely off the mark with all this, because I really do want to be wrong about it, I want someone to tell me I live in an unfortunate bubble, outside of which everything isn't altogether That Bad.

** It's possible an issue or two of People Magazine made it onto her Summer Reading List, as well.

Between Words

Playing with space when writing poetry appears to require some getting used to, if you come from the physically formless world of fiction writing, as I have. The latter doesn't demand you consider the shape of the piece, the way poetry does, and I'm taking as much advantage as I can of this additional means of word expression. Because you can have your plain fries, that's all well and good. But you can have cheese fries, too, and damn it, I'm going for the cheese fries.

I would think re-imagining the use of the page would be a cliche outside-the-box effort for anybody, really; we're all taught to read from left to right and write in paragraphs and stanzas. The idea that text can hold more power than just the meaning of its words - that the words themselves can visually coalesce into trails and shapes that contribute to the poem's message - is exciting. I've taken traditionally formatted poems that seemed like they were missing something and resuscitated them by allowing the words to escape onto the rest of the page.


I gather my faces
ride my Portuguese
man-of-war
out to sea


I gather my                       faces
            ride my Portugese
                        man-of-war

out to sea

Freedom of form and shape and language is refreshing. I write poetry with less boundaries than I did with fiction. I enjoy writing a poem with a purpose of shape, then following it up with a left-aligned, prose-y piece. I enjoy taking traditionally shaped poems and scattering the lines all over the page, and vice versa. I enjoy drinking a soy dirty chai while doing all of these things.

Moon Law, Forthcoming

Got some great news, last month, that my poetry chapbook, Moon Law, was chosen as the winner of the Wild Age Press Anything Goes Contest and will be published in limited edition this October. Further details to be announced; for now, you can read a little about Moon Law and myself here.

I'm excited Wild Age Press chose to publish my work. They're just getting started, but I greatly admire their vision and commitment to the artistry of chapbook publishing. Many presses have a uniform design for the chapbooks they put out, and that's great, too; Wild Age's approach is to look at each work individually when determining how best to physically represent it, and as someone who takes an interest in book arts and handmade things, I love the idea of treating a written work not just as text on a page but as art.

Other projects are slowly in the works. I'm in the beginning stages of shopping around Memory These, another chapbook. Also putting together a draft of a chapbook called This Is Not A Well. I have a lot of scattered ideas for it; the challenge is knowing when an idea will/can be a chapbook-length work and when it will just be one poem. Or at least, that's the hangup I seem to run into, every now and then.