More About Rejection: Editors

"Editors are our friends," William Stafford said.

What did he mean by that?

Editors keep us from having work out there that sucks.

We should thank them, he said.

I couldn't agree with him more.

In fact, I'll up him one or two.

Editors tend to contact us on weekends. Do you know what this means? Editors work day jobs, and don't put on their editor hats till they've already put in a full work week. What editors do is a labor of love, dudes, not a paying gig.

Editors care. They care about words, about invention, risk, about a poem staying true to its intentions, about logic, about each and every fucking line break. If you can't justify all your line breaks, don't expect the editor where you sent the poem to send you anything close to flowers.

Editors take a look at our poems and liken them to little engines that could. They write and say, I've made a few changes; if you're amenable to them, may we publish your poem in this version? (Our answer was--and will probably always be--thanks so much, yes, of course you may).

Editors often let us revise our work and resubmit it.

Editors have told us they would like to consider others, which we have to say we never did not mind, because they were preventing us from having work out there that sucks.

Editors have had to read our bad poems--ones we had no business sending them--and find a way to tell us (politely) "while I enjoyed moments in each of these, I could not quite find one I like enough to keep."

Editors get excited about our best work; they love when a poem jumps up from the slush pile and starts doing the tango with them. To get accepted, a poem has to be that good--it's gotta be doing a wild, wild hula dance (with a light-up hula-hoop) Shake that hula poem, baby!

Editors are our friends.

What to Do With Rejection Slips

1. Make paper airplane; aim for nearest recycling bin.

2. Hang on fridge with "You'll regret this" scrawled across it in red Sharpie.

3. Cut into tiny pieces; use as confetti the next time you write a great poem (i.e., tomorrow).

4. Cut up, along with photos of birds and flowers from magazines. Decoupage!

5. Paste it into your writing journal and draw a beautiful "frame' around it using lavender and pink crayons. Cross out "we are sorry" and write "we are so very stupid."

6. Pin to dart board.

7. Shred; feed to worms.

8. When you have one hundred, cut in strips and fashion a paper chain to hang across your workroom ceiling.

9. When you have one thousand, kneel for the editor with the bleeding finger cut on your submission.

10. When you have ten thousand, self-publish.

How to Write 5 New Poems in 4 hours or Less

plus laugh a whole lot, gab, kevetch, present an impromptu Twitter tutorial, scarf down a tuna melt, and watch a pile of chocolate Dove hearts vanish before your very eyes. What was I up to?

I arrived in Edmonds a little before 10 am and landed a 3-hour parking spot in front of the local Starbucks. As I gathered my wares and headed in, two ladies out front complimented my parallel parking prowess. I took it as a good omen.

Stellar poet Kelli Russell Agodon waltzed in at 10:03 am to join me at my quaint window table. Ready, set, write! We warmed up with an ekphrasis using an oil painting from the Museum of Modern Art (courtesy their website, with a catalog of its entire collection), then got into some serious Write a Poem from a Paraphrase of an Un-known Poem-ing. We were afoot!

After an anagram-inspired poem, we delved into an exercise created by Naomi Shahib Nye that asked for questions, for images, for what we'd done in the last 36 hours. I listed baked chocolate chips cookies, made split pea soup, took my son to his swim lesson. (I didn't end up using any of the things I'd done, but I got a decent draft from the questions answered by the images).

In between exercises we sipped, munched, swapped mommy tales, and hoped Kelli's sweet golden retriever was only temporarily lethargic (he couldn't lift his head up when Kelli left to meet me, so her husband had taken him to the vet).

We packed up at 2:45 pm, five new poems in each of our satchels--enough revising to keep us busy till our next meeting (hopefully in March). As we were saying our goodbyes, Kelli's husband called to say the vet figured out the problem with Buddy--a pinched nerve. What a relief.

And off I sailed onto I-5 and into the southbound traffic.

If you are trying to figure out a way to get poems written without having to spend money for a class/workshop, I highly recommend this method. Enlist a friend, set a time to show up at a coffee shop--a place where you can be fairly certain neither of you will run into anyone you know. Bring along a book of exercises prompts--The Working Poet is a great one; so is Kim Addonizio's Ordinary Genius. Bring your favorite writing utensil and some paper, a timer, a little baggie of yummy treats, and your to-go mug. You can each pick 2-3 exercises in advance, or you can pick them randomly from either of these books. When the timer goes off, share aloud what you've each written. Whatever you do, don't offer criticism to your poetry pal, although saying "that part where you go from being a hawk to being a chipmunk was really cool" is perfectly fine. But since no one regularly writes a kick-ass poem in 10-15 minutes, and since the goal is quantity, save your analysis . . . and get onto the next prompt.

Happy poem-ing!

Ekphrasis Poetry Workshop

I'm gearing up to teach a writing workshop on ekphrasis poetry on Bainbridge Island (Kiana Lodge) this April 17, as part of the Field's End Writers' Conference. You can register at Field's End. Bruce Barcott will be the keynote speaker, and Sheila Bender will lead a workshop on "Writing Through Grief." Also, Novelist Anjali Banerjee will present a session on "Knowing When to Stop Revising." Other workshops will include “A Dozen Steps to Find a Literary Agent or Publisher,” led by Alice B. Acheson, and “Capturing an Oral History,” presented by Kit Bakke. Besides my illustrious poetry workshop, you can choose from “The Prose Poem” with Oliver de la Paz and “Eating Poetry,” led by Nancy Pagh.

The admission price includes breakfast, lunch, and a wine-and-cheese book-signing reception.

Hope to see you there!

Joannie Kervran Stangeland

Joannie Kervran Stangeland is entering the second half of her life, and I am excited to be among those who welcome her across the threshold! We will be gathering Monday, Feb 1 at the Columbia City Cinema to eat chocolate cake, share some poems, and raise our glasses to a woman of many gifts and talents, including being an exceptional friend and poet.

Here's a favorite poem of mine, from her chapbook Weathered Steps.

Happy birthday, Joannie. 

Such Whimsy!

A mid-week visit to the Seattle Art Museum has kept me giddy and upbeat/positive all week. I loved watching the old video footage of Calder happily conducting his wire-hanger miniature animal and people circus. Priceless. I also got a chance to examine one of Michelangelo's illustrated grocery lists:

"two rolls, a pitcher of wine, a herring; tortelli . . ."

Why, of course.

I took notes for what I hope will eventually be a couple ekphrasis (poems about art).

Buoyed all week by visual art and the spring-like weather.

And today a book I've been wanting to own since last August arrived in the mail: John Hollander's A Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. (It is out of print, very expensive, and very hard to find, but I finally tracked down a copy I could afford!) This is the book if you want to understand and write ekphrasis poetry. It's illustrated and contains a great many ekphrasis poems written over the last 500 years. I probably won't have time to read it till late March (between quarters), but I can skim it now, at least.

I picked up a pile of reserve books from the library, too -- can't wait to dip into Bernadette Mayer's Poetry State Forest! And I have out two books by Rae Armantrout, whom I feel drawn toward despite my inability to make any sense of most of her poems, though I appreciate their intelligence, unique voice, and beauty. I hope, with continued reading, a clearer path into her work will emerge.

So that's been my week . . . that and a lot of thinking/listening about Haiti.

And I Thought I Was a Slob

Alexander Calder's desk. (Take that, neat freaks!)