The Slip

I know what a thankless job it can be to read poetry submissions. Given the thousands of pages that pass across an editor's desk each season, I'm grateful for the occasional handwritten note or suggestion. In the past, I've received very thoughtful and often helpful commentary from editors at The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, Michigan Quarterly (only one of whom accepted my work, by the way). I am thrilled to receive such messages!

A recent note, however, made me laugh out loud. Its author thanked me for the "oppurtunity" to read my work, and included a suggestion that seemed completely unrelated to the poems I'd submitted. In total, the three or so scribbled sentences contained two spelling errors and one very bizarre observation. I'm sure the editor's intentions were good. I too have been in that cross-eyed, overworked place and understand how exhaustion can lead to oversights. And yet, I've never found a rejection slip so amusing. I guess he did something rite -- I mean, right, right?

Elegy

The Shrine Down the Hall (Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson)

Lucky

Why should we celebrate the Irish? Thomas Cahill tells us:

No doubt, several reasons could be proffered. But for me one answer stands out. Long, long ago the Irish pulled off a remarkable feat: They saved the books of the Western world and left them as gifts for all humanity.

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Thinking of my Grandma T. today and all the lovely Irish ladies I'm blessed to have in the family!

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THE LOST LAND
Eavan Boland

I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:

Where the hills
are the colours of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:

At night,
on the edge of sleep,

I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then

I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

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Download Eavan's reading and conversation with Nick Jenkins courtesy of the Lannan Foundation.

The Odd Couple?

Reader, I married a chemist. While he's been odd man out at the writer's table on more than one occasion, god knows his colleagues find my -- occupation? -- strange to say the least. We're very different beings...

I tire of ye-old-crazy-poet stereotype, but today I stumbled across some research that caught my interest. In 2002, Stanford's Department of Psychiatry found that unusually creative people share traits with the mentally ill. (Shocker!) What's interesting about this list is that it outlines characteristics not only exhibited by artists, but scientists as well (Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge University Press):

Personality traits associated with creativity in artists

• Openness to experience, especially fantasy-oriented imagination
• Impulsivity, lack of conscientiousness
• Anxiety, affective illness, emotional sensitivity
• Drive, ambition
• Nonconformity, norm-doubting, independence
• Hostility, aloofness, unfriendliness, lack of warmth

Personality traits associated with creativity in scientists

• Openness to experience, flexibility of thought
• Drive, ambition, achievement
• Self-confidence, dominance, arrogance, hostility
• Autonomy, introversion, independence

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Can't wait to see what K. has to say about this one! Any other artist/scientist lovebirds out there?

Workplace

Arrange + Rearrange = Deranged?

Yesterday was plain awful. (You can say that again) Yesterday was plain awful...

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Actually, last week was sort of awful. Stress and chaos leave me bluesy. The good news? After much paperwork, our house is officially on the market. We've repainted, re-carpeted and will soon be redoing the porch.

I'm going to miss this place, its hundred-plus-year-old structure and original chandelier. I'm going to miss the yard and swing out front. The sun room. My office. The foyer and staircase at Christmas. Our bright blue bedroom...

Otherwise, I'm ready. Let's move.

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Currently reading:

East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
Islam: A Primer (John Sabini)
The Diminishing House (Nicky Beer)
The Wave-Maker: Poems (Elizabeth Spires)

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Let's move. Seriously, let's go already! I say and wish this for my friends whose manuscripts are finished, and I say and wish this for myself. The first-book process is starting to grate.

Actually, it's been grating. My nerves are raw. I've arranged. Rearranged. Sectioned. Taken things out. Put things in. Shaken. Stirred. Published the damned poems individually. Reviewed. Revised. What more do you people want!! I'm kidding... well, sort of...

Against the Quiet

This town's public self is part tourist, part retiree. It's pretty. It's quaint. Its committees vote on tree removal and the appropriate shade of paint to best approximate history.

This town likes its softball leagues, its fishing docks and soft serve.

Weekend nights are sleepy. Teenagers and twenty-somethings cruise their trucks down main street between waterside park and the Dairy Queen.

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Saturday. Past midnight. Lights out. We were talking -- about what, I've forgotten. Then pop-pop, pop-pop-pop-pop...goes the gunshots.

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K. joked that perhaps six cars suddenly backfired in quick succession. A blue moon kind of event -- vehicles starting themselves and lurching from people's driveways.

Of course, we both recognized the sound and its source. Like any place, it's quiet here until it isn't...

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Have you ever lived in a town so small news only travels as word-of-mouth? No paper. No organized means of reportage.

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What if you live in a place like that, but have no one to talk to, no one to confirm the noises you hear, the things you see aren't invented?

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pop-pop pop-pop-pop-pop

A dog barked. The sheriff's car whizzed by.

In the dark, we waited, saying nothing.

Lightning Strikes Twice

With submissions for first-book prizes numbering a thousand or more per contest, the odds are against the entrants. So when Nick Lantz (disclosure: friend) won both the Bakeless and Felix Pollak competitions in the same year, I offered my congrats and then begged him to please save something for the rest of us!

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The Washington Post featured Lantz's "Will There Be More than One 'Questioner'?" in Sunday's Poet's Choice. Here's part of Nick's introduction to the poem:

The title...comes from an interrogator's preparatory checklist in a declassified CIA document from 1983, the "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual." I came across it while doing research for my book We Don't Know We Don't Know, which focuses partly on salvaging poetry out of politically degraded language.

In clumsily seeking to conceal the manual's actual subject, the euphemism "human resource exploitation" comes off more sinister than "interrogation" (or even "torture") ever could. The manual disavows violence as an interrogation technique, but these disavowals appear in what are clearly later additions, and they are so frequent, and vigorous, that they too become unintentionally self-incriminating...

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I heard Nick read "Will There Be More Than One 'Questioner'?" a few years ago and was awestruck. Weeks after the event, I couldn't stop thinking or talking about the poem. Unfortunately, what the Post's reprint misses are bold blacked-out words and phrases (designated online via brackets). Live and on the page, the exaggerated caesurae emphasize -- with great success -- the dangers of omission. We Don't Know We Don't Know (Graywolf Press) -- go get it!

While you're at it, you should also pick up The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors' House. True, Nick is my friend; also true, I didn't want to put this collection down. Here's "Portmanterroism" as heard on The Writer's Almanac.

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Have questions about either of the aforementioned books or poems? I'm currently working on an interview with Nick and would love to hear what you think.

Am / Not

I am home again from a fabulous trip with my girlfriends -- two pounds heavier and a whole lot happier.

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Not sure whether I started this record too soon? It's meant to chronicle our adventures in Jordan, not the daily and / or weekly happenings in this small town...

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I am beyond excited for two wonderful friends who've won the William Miller and Brittingham poetry prizes...

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...not going to announce the names now, but will shout them from the rooftop when word becomes official.

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Am in disbelief: are we really starting to categorize items for freight (air and sea), storage, carry-on? International relocation is complicated. Thank goodness for Excel.

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Call me crazy or just plain stupid -- I'm not applying for an NEA fellowship. There's just too much going on...

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I'm sort of in love with this poem by Sasha West.

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Not easy trying to curb my insane Diet Coke habit. I'm down from six to two per day, and drinking lots of water.

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I'm reading Wide Sargasso Sea, and it's passing too quickly.

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Am happy to have poems forthcoming in The Southern Review and Alaska Quarterly, but happier to be writing again.

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Not sure where this list ends. Am I rambling?