Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter

For the first time in a couple of years I am going to attempt the poem a day challenge. I won’t be posting drafts of my poems on here, for various reasons, but I will try to keep you posted, on a relatively regular basis, as to how I am doing.

I have a couple of ideas for the first few poems already. After April 8th things may get trickier because we are traveling back to the UK for the Easter break, but maybe I’ll be inspired by my Haworth trip and my return to the old country!

Meanwhile, both Barefoot Muse and The Raintown Review are still accepting submissions. The upcoming issue of Raintown is almost full (and has reached sonnet saturation point, as I explained to one contributor whose sonnet will be deferred until winter.) However submissions never close at Raintown, so keep emailing your poems to theraintownreview_at_gmail_dot_com.

Meanwhile I have a small gripe about the otherwise wonderful site known as Duotrope’s Digest. I have been keeping an eye on it lately because I had made it a stated goal to improve Raintown’s appalling response statistics. Imagine my horror when I suddenly saw that Barefoot Muse was on the Top 25 Most Approachable Markets list! (That’s almost as bad as Raintown being on the 25 Most Slothful, which it was for a while.) I have perused 560 individual poems since this reading period began on Dec 1st, and have accepted just 6 with a further 11 on hold. Even if I go on to accept all held poems that is, by my reckoning, a 3% acceptance rate. Duotrope has me at an 18% acceptance rate. Of course, as my trusty assistant Editor Q pointed out to me, these statistics aren’t very scientific. TBM’s data comes from just 22 reports in the last 12 months. I think Duotrope also compiles by submission, not by poem, which would put my own stats up to 10%. (I’ve had 150 separate submissions, and have accepted/am holding poems by 15 poets.)

The problem is that being on the 25 theoretically most approachable markets increases the amount of total and utter crap trigger happy “poets” email me. This would all balance out if those poets then took the time to record their rejections on Duotrope, but they don’t. There’s only been one new report filed for TBM since I started following the stats closely in mid-Feb.

Ah well…

Today I have a rondeau and a rondel up at the Rondeau Roundup, a new site hosted by Allison Joseph, Editor of the Crab Orchard Review, for “the exploration, appreciation and publication of the rondeau, rondel, roundel, rondeau redouble, rondolet, triolet, and ballade.”

I can also report recent acceptances from Measure, for “Nietszche’s Umbrella,” which is a consolation prize for the fact that it didn’t appeal to this year’s Nemerov judges, and from The Lyric for “Keepsake.” NB: I’m always delighted to appear in both Measure and The Lyric, but what I would really like is to get some acceptances from outside of the Formalist Ghetto, as I call it only half in jest.

Things are going swimmingly at The Raintown Review, too. Through determined efforts at rapid response times Quincy and I have got it off Duotrope Digest’s list of the 25 most slothful poetry markets. Since its inception on February 21st, the website has had 280 unique visitors, who have visited 4-5 pages each. We have also garnered three new subscriptions via the online subscription process and received submissions from 80 poets!

And now, in honor of the clocks springing forward, I’m off to get a pedicure and then buy some more sandals to replace several pairs consumed by Sammy “Chewer” Evans since last summer.

As part of my remedial education in Modernism I recently decided to read Ezra Pound’s Cantos, one of those books that I suspect more contemporary poets have read about than have actually read. The Cantos aren’t quite what I expected. I imagined they would be more sublime and lyrical, and less documentarian–a significant proportion of the early cantos is excerpted from various written sources. I’m lucky that I speak fluent French, can read German (and following my Dantean exploits, muddle through written Italian) so the multilingual aspect could be worse. (Clearly the Chinese and Greek are, well, Chinese and Greek. How does one ever translate this book into another language?) Anyway, the main thrusts of the work (Anti-usury, pro-Odyssean type heros) come through very clearly, and most minor references can be elucidated with a quick check on Wikipedia. (How Pound would have hated that!)

I did also read some criticism/expository prose on the earlier Cantos. There are a few useful writings gathered at the Modern American Poetry website. However, searching the Internet I found this site, where fans of a writer I didn’t know had gathered his commentary (Some expository, some critical, some political) on the early Cantos.

I enjoyed the tone of these writings, finding them erudite but companionable, almost as if I were reading the Cantos alongside a good friend who was continually throwing me his thoughts. So, I decide to find out more about Robert Anton Wilson and his works. Now, anyone who gets called “an American novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychonaut, futurologist and libertarian” sounds like he might be my kind of polymath. Unfortunately he died in 2007, although you can still read the last few entries in his blog here.

I checked out the one book of his that Burlington County Library dared to list, The Earth Will Shake (1982) and found it unputdownable. Maybe this is in part because it has a very close relation to Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Cantos VII to XI), which are a composite look at the life of one Sigismundo Pandolfa Malatesta (1417-68), an Italian lord and mercenary who was also a leading thinker and aesthete of his time. The Earth Will Shake, on the other hand, follows the life of a descendant of Malatesta’s, one Sigismundo Celine, born in the mid eighteenth century into a time of political and religious instability (Think, the Spanish Inquisition.)

Right before reading this I had consumed A.S. Byatt’s Possession, largely because of a discussion that took place on the Harriet blog regarding novels about imaginary poets, and whether fiction writers did and should attempt to re-create a body of work for their character. (My opinion in this particular case is that she should not have done, or at least, not so much. The novel is excellent; the poetry tediously Victorian in the extreme.)

Anyway Possession begins with the hero, Roland Michell, discovering drafts of a love letter by esteemed poet Randolph Henry Ash in an old copy of Vico’s Principi di una Scienza Nuova, a book that ALSO gets referred to in Wilson’s The Earth Will Shake.

So, in the course of reading 3 books, (The Cantos, Possession and The Earth Will Shake) I have come across the Malatestas twice, and Vico twice, neither of whom I had previously heard of at all. This is the (somewhat borrowed from Wilson) concept of Literary Spaghetti.

Of course, you know that Dante’s Inferno was referenced multiple times in all three of these books, and also in the novel I read immediately before that, the excellent The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson.

A little parmigiano, anyone?