Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

Here is the entire text of the rejection letter I just received from Light Quarterly:

Dear Anna Evans,

Very accomplished work. The fact that I don’t get some of the references doesn’t necessarily mean I’m stupid, but rather that most of my readers aren’t much smarter than me. And I don’t want them to be uncomfortable while the tide of erudition rises. “Sonnenizio” is perhaps closest, though it’s a little somber and steamy for the tone I like in my pages.

Do send others.

With all good wishes,

So, my submission was too erudite, not funny enough and contained undesirable references to sex. Heh! The erudition is primarily associated with the sonnet “Glengaristeia Glen Dross,” which, I admit, is only really funny if you’ve read Homer & Virgil, and seen the play/movie Glen Garry Glen Ross.

Still, as an editor myself, I always appreciate the personal rejection note, and I certainly will send him more when I have anything suitable. (Alas, I’m more given to serious than light verse, and tend to be somewhat European in my attitude towards carnal versifying, so it may be a while.)

Here, for (a lack of) posterity is the offending sonnet. After all, if Light don’t want it I can’t imagine who would…

Glengaristeia Glen Dross

There is a format for this sort of scene:
you gird on armor—in this case a suit—
then give yourself a pep talk, chug caffeine
while finalizing strategies en route.
You take first blood, assault him with your charts,
but he suspects statistics are a lie.
Pray to the Gods of Wall Street and the art
of misdirection. Sweet talk him to buy.

And buy he does, and buy again. You’re strong
as any of the heroes who took Troy;
he signs his name, the check. For a swan song
you tell a joke about an altar boy.
But don’t let this success go to your head;
most Aristeian heroes end up dead.

I admit to having a predilection for narrative poems, to the extent that I often feel frustrated with myself because the pervasiveness of lyric poetry in the current mode tends to suggest that my inability to appreciate its virtues or compose something appropriately oblique is a personal flaw. How refreshing, then, to encounter The Reaper Essays.

For the benefit of my younger readers allow me to explain that The Reaper was a literary journal which ceased publication in 1989 after 18 issues. The editors, Mark Jarman & Robert McDowell, believed that by then they had achieved their stated aim of creating the circumstances in which a new narrative poetry might flourish. The Reaper was the editorial persona named as responsible for many of the excellent essays contained in this book. (Other chapters, no less excellent, include a fictitious correspondence between Dante and Homer, and a laugh out loud hilarious spoof of an interview with a contemporary poet couple.)

On the positive side, I feel as though I have finally been given permission to write narrative poetry. Selections such as “The Reaper’s Non-Negotiable Demands,” which includes a call for no more poems about poetry, and “How to Write Narrative Poetry” which gives ten admirable rules to follow, not only encourage me to believe in the art form but also prompt me to reconsider my own oeuvre, past and present, to see how I measure up. I immediately rewrote a work in progress I’d been having trouble with, “Addictions,” as an unashamedly narrative poem and guess what? It’s way better.

On the negative side, I think Mark & Robert downed the scythe too early. In “Thanatopsis Revisited” that po-biz icon American Poetry Review comes under their microscope and is accused of publishing too few narrative poems. Now I happen to have the most recent issue of APR—the journal of which they state still so truly “nobody likes it, but everybody reads it”—and I didn’t remember being assaulted by a profusion of narrative poems either, so I did my own quick analysis. There’s one by Stephen Dunn “Everything Else in the World” which has narrative elements. Lucia Perillo’s all start off looking like narratives, but only one, “Incubus,” really tells a story which sustains reader interest. I don’t know what to say about Rebecca Seiferle’s long poem “The Fragments of Holderlin” except that I’m sure Lyn Hejinian liked it. The other contemporary contributors are resolutely lyric, with the proud exception of Kathryn Starbuck, whose elegy to her father “Griefmania” tells the story of his life in approved Reaper fashion. So 17 years later we have about the same proportion of narrative: lyric.

My other evidence for this lack of progress goes back to the spoof interview “The Reaper Interviews Jean Doh & Sean Dough.” I doubt I would have found this chapter so hilarious if it wasn’t, alas, still so true. At one point Sean says “Once you meet someone, and I think we’ve met everyone, I think it’s very hard to dislike his or her work.” I have encountered this attitude when I have criticized contemporary poets in my MFA work. It’s hard to make relevant, unbiased criticism acceptable when the poets are all critics and eat at the same Academy shindigs.

If someone else doesn’t get to it before I finish my MFA I think I might have to pick up the scythe.

It was a foregone conclusion that I would spend the better part of this afternoon writing a canzone. Firstly, someone submitted not one but two canzones to The Barefoot Muse. Secondly, I came across the form in Marilyn Hacker’s Selected, which I am currently reading for the MFA. I believe I may have mentioned before that whenever I meet a new form my brain itches to experience its twists–I guess it’s a bit like rollercoasters. Fortunately while writing my canzone I lost no electronic equipment and gained no bruises.

The canzone is a devillish form because despite the fact that it contains 65 lines, there are only 5–count ‘em, five–end words. This is the pattern:

121131144155
515525533544
454414422433
343353311322
232242255211
12345

In the course of reading The Last Avant Garde I came across John Ashbery’s (I think) advice on writing sestinas, which was to select the six words by choosing  five tangible things from one paradigm, and one intangible thing from another. I hadn’t had chance to apply that to a sestina yet, but I figured a similar ratio should apply here. I mulled this over in my head while I did the gymnastics car pool and voila!

As you know most of the time I don’t post poems on my Blog for fear of jeopardizing future publication, but who’s going to publish a canzone in this day and age (apart from possibly me, ironically enough)? Anyway, enjoy!

Canzone for My Daughter, the Gymnast

Still in diapers you fell from the bars
atop your crib, you walked a wall like a beam
beside an eight foot drop. I guessed the bars
of fear that pen most children in weren’t bars
to you. Ladies & Gentlemen, give the floor
to my daughter! No hands on the handlebars
of your first bike. President or behind bars,
I joked. Childhood’s defended like a vault
with rules and checks. But you burned hot to vault
above that. Thrilled, I nevertheless envisioned bars—
the seedier kind—in your reckless future. You’d brave
any danger, my daughter, for the sake of being brave.

At no time in my childhood was I brave.
I always thought the way to rattle the bars
was organization: you don’t need to be brave
with fallback positions, like the Atlanta Braves.
My ventures tended to break up like moonbeams
on choppy water. I graduated to brave
only with you, countering the manuals bravely
by letting you be you. No doubt you floored
my mothers’ circle, calmest when given the floor,
a tiny adult, likely to tantrum when, braver
than me, your maternal grandmother tried to vault
your will. You’re some kick, kid: two forty volts.

A gymnast now, your best apparatus is vault.
I watch you sprint up, silent as a Brave
with tomahawk aloft, toward the vaulting
horse. If I could clear obstacles like you vault…
but I lack confidence, plus they raise the bar.
I think you like it because you get two vaults,
princess of second chances. In a vault
I hide my fear for you where no stray beam
of thought can reach it. (Once you fell from the beam.)
You run at life the way you run at the vault,
your small feet pounding dust up from the floor;
everyone watches you, clears off the floor.

Round-off double back handspring across the floor.
I want your courage locked up in a vault
so no one can destroy it. How you floor
the boys your age! You knock them to the floor
all grit and sinew: tiny, with that brave
jut to your chin. I picture you, a dance floor,
worry you won’t let boys lead or take their floral
tributes: corsages, bouquets—being barbed
and feisty. Maybe there’s even a dyke bar
in your future? Old fashioned, I dream of a floor
of stone, a church roof studded with old beams,
me looking on in a tasteless outfit, beaming.

Your coach says you’ve good posture on the beam
and treat it casually, almost like floor.
But sometimes you lack balance, not on beam—
in life where you’re quixotic as a beam
of light. Your feet arch like the roof of a vault
as you twist and pose. If real life were a beam
you’d have it down, but like a fallen beam
your nature makes you stumble. If only bravery
came laced with caution…you would be less brave.
Damn it, you’re beautiful, balanced on the beam
of womanhood, flying between the asymmetric bars
of control and abandon. You’d die behind bars.

Darling daughter, stay out of seedy bars,
keep that look of an impossible sunbeam,
always behave as though you own the floor
and there’s no obstacle you cannot vault.
I’ll be cautious for both of us. Live brave.

First of all, two bits of good news:

1. Eileen D’Angelo of the Mad Poets emailed me to ask me my address so she could send me my honorarium for the reading in Bryn Mawr. I didn’t even know we were getting paid, and while the amount is likely to be somewhere in the region of $25, the point is that being paid makes it mean more, and helps me believe, as I must, that this is my career.
2. Leah Browning of the Apple Valley Review emailed me to tell me she has nominated BOTH of my poems (”Color Therapy at the OB-GYN” and “Your Wife”) from the inaugural issue for a chance to appear in the Best of the Net Anthology to be released by Sundress Publications.

This has all helped me to maintain my positive mood. Also, today I finished reading Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters, collected under the title One Art, for the MFA. I have always liked her poetry but knowing the story of her life makes me admire her even more. I’d say it’s a ‘must-read’ but at 600 plus pages, you might want to reserve it for a time in your life when you are confined to bed for several weeks!

On the down side, earlier this evening a visiting five year old lectured me about feeding too much junk food to my children. Can’t win ‘em all…

Yesterday evening Rachel and I fearlessly crossed the Ben Franklin bridge and headed off into the wilds of Pennsylvania to give a poetry reading at Barnes & Noble in Bryn Mawr.

Thanks I’m sure at least in part to this ridiculous heat, it was a small but select crowd. However in my experience smaller crowds are typically more attentive and the quality of the poetry in the Open Mic is also higher. Last night was no exception.

The event was hosted by the charming and funny Autumn Konopka, who also read an excellent poem in the Open Mic about her ‘bad-ass’ pony muses. Rachel read a great set, including the poem she wrote for me, which of course I love. I read a mixed bag of my favorite published and/or prizewinning poems, and then concluded with “Catalog,” the seven deadly sins poem. That was the second time I’ve performed it in full publically, and I use the word ‘performed’ advisedly. (Rachel says I ’sneer’ it.) Anyway, as before the audience seemed rapt, and subsequently I sold three chapbooks. So that was all right then.

After that Rachel, Paul and I repaired to a BYOB Italian restaurant P knew of in the area, and I, as the designated driver, proceded to watch them get mildly drunk while I ate some excellent food. The tone of the conversation deteriorated rapidly and a good time was had by all.

Today I feel positive and on track for the first time in a while.