Postcards from the Imagination

"My head was saying no, but my belly was saying go for it!"

Posted by Ginger at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had words in my head this morning, something to do with E.B. White, ZZ Top, and a string of other incongruities that occurred to me while I was pounding the snooze button, something that seemed interesting in the haze of waking, but which I've since forgotten. Alarm clocks should be outlawed on Sundays, but we have to go paint sets for the middle school's production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Should be fun to get down with a paintbrush and make something I don't have to sign.

As an addendum to my post below, if you've never seen an issue of EPOCH and are curious just what "an open forum for traditional and experimental work" means, here's a random list of former contributors I found while browsing around the net. If I find time to look through some of the back issues, maybe I'll add to it: A.R. Ammons (of course!), Lucie Brock-Broido, Mairead Byrne, Julie Carr, Jorie Graham, Thylias Moss, Haryette Mullen, Kevin Prufer, Leslie Scalapino, Peter Jay Shippy, Charles Simic, David Woo, Rachel Zucker.

Posted by Ginger at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

EPOCH's reading period is wide-open right now, and I personally would love to see some bloggers' work! Send your 3-5 w/SASE to:

EPOCH
251 Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-3201

No sim-subs, but they respond pretty fast, abt. 6 weeks according to an independant source. 

Sample issues are $5 postage-paid. 3 issue subscriptions are just $11.  

A little bit about the magazine:

In the 1950s and 1960s, EPOCH brought to light the first published fiction of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Stanley Elkin, along with early stories by Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates.

The magazine now appears three times a year in September, January, and May. Recent work from EPOCH has been reprinted in (and cited in) all of the major annual anthologies: Best American Short Stories; Best American Poetry; Best American Essays; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; Editor's Choice Awards; Best of the West; New Stories from the South.

EPOCH does not publish literary criticism or book reviews. We intend to keep the magazine eclectic, an open forum for traditional and experimental work, including the long poem. We continue to make space in the magazine for new writers and for work (like the long poem) that might be considered unwieldy.

Posted by Ginger at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Q: how do you view the process of writing poetry as beneficial to the life of you and your daughter?

A: The truth is that I really don't see or expect any very tangible benefit for either of us. My writing is driven almost entirely by a passion for making things, not because they're useful--in fact, the more utilitarian the project, the less interesting it seems--but because the thick of the creative process is where I like being. If I could spend 8 uninterrupted hours, 6 days/week engaged with a project and still have our lives run smoothly, I'd probably be one of the most contented people on the planet. (As it stands, between 2 part-time jobs, classes, coursework, parenting, and running a household, I get far less writing time than that.)

As for the less tangible, life is too brief to waste merely surviving. Writing poetry makes me feel alive in ways that making money and dinner don't.  For my daughter, I want what every parent wants. To get her up on her own two feet so she can figure out what makes life seem worthwhile to her and do that.

I will ask, not because I like confrontation, but because it seems a necessary thing to note: if I were a married man with children, would you be asking me the same question?

Posted by Ginger at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Someone in workshop today thought my anti-capitalist poem/rant sounded whiny. What to do with that? I'm dissatisfied with the poem myself, but largely because it's not direct enough, because I let myself lapse into humor too frequently. I don't know what to do with "whiny" because I feel like it critiques a point of view rather than a style of writing. On the other hand, I don't want to dismiss it too quickly in case there's some improvement I can make that would be more compelling.

Lately, I feel like "good advice" for living is bad advice for poems--my poems at least. I'm not Mary Oliver. I'm not looking to write wisdom literature. I'm sick to death of easy answers that aim for stasis or balance. My first book is not going to be a tutorial on happiness.

I live a certain way because I don't have a husband and, given what I've been through, don't really want one. But passing on a husband means passing up a higher standard of living, time out of the house with free childcare, the division of household labors, intimacy, mutual sympathy, etc., etc.

Friday night my babysitter flaked out and forgot to return my calls, so I drove my daughter to her school dance, dashed over to the reading, read my poems, dashed back over to the school, and came home rather than joining my colleagues for drinks.

Whine.

What I mean is that independence is expensive and exhausting and I suspect it's making me a harder person than I want to be. I'm getting through my days without the anti-depressants now, but can I still go where I need to go emotionally to make good poems?

Damn, time's up again. Zzzzzzzzz.

Posted by Ginger at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm too careful. In writing, that is. In life...well, I'm a single-mother who, with no life savings and bigtime student debt, is working on an MFA in POETRY. You do the math.

The truth is that I don't know shit about shit, but that shouldn't stop me from flinging handfuls of steaming ignorance into cyberspace more often.

I'm not talking about belligerent opinions secretly held in reserve for fear of giving offense. On the contrary, I'm not sure what, if anything, is worth having a belligerent opinion about.

And here's a case in point. I immediately began wondering if that was really true, and whether or not I should delete that sentence until I'd given it more thought. But what if it were untrue? What if I happened to have a very belligerent opinion that I wanted to express three weeks from next Tuesday? What difference would that make?

None. At all.

Every now and then I cringe at the things written in my archives, but I don't delete them because it feels too much like image control. There's something worth having a weak opinion about. We're all in the image business with varying degrees of consciousness, but the cultivation of a tightly controlled persona strikes me as stupid.  

So what's the difference between corporate branding and originality in art? What am I after when I sit down to write? How is what I'm after different than what your average marketing director is after? At base what we both want is for people to be won over by our products. 

I could argue all the similarities and some of the differences, but at the moment I'm already bored with that line of thinking.

The question, however, has something to do with a certain uneasiness I have about why I arrange words in the first place. I don't want to be the spokesperson for me or for people like me and I'm certainly not comfortable speaking for anyone else.

Friday's night's reading went great, by the way, and while that ought to come as some sort of affirmation, it only adds to my confusion. I don't know what people liked or why they liked it or whether I'd consider myself successful if I knew.  

Reading about Futurism & German Expressionism & Dada & Surrealism, I think it must be lovely to have something to really rail against. I rail privately against systems of social organization I find cruel, or at best indifferent--but smarter people have said it better and no one listened to them either. Worse, every last gesture of aesthetic racialism is eventually co-opted by the establishment if it's appealing enough to get the public's attention.

Oh, well. Bedtime. 

Posted by Ginger at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

First-year Cornell MFA students Virginia Heatter (poetry) and Matthew Grice (fiction) read from their work this Friday, November 9 at 7:00 p.m. at No Radio Records, 312 E. Seneca Street in Downtown Ithaca.

The Reading Series formerly known as Lounge Hour is possible because of the support of the Cornell University Department of English and the Creative Writing program. This event is free and open to the public.

Posted by Ginger at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING."  --from André Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism

Then this: "I had a sneaking suspicion..that from the viewpoint of poetry I was off on the wrong road, but I hedged my bet as best I could, defying lyricism with salvos of definitions and formulas...and pretending to search for an application of poetry to advertising (I went so far as to claim that the world would end, not with a good book, but with a beautiful advertisement for heaven or for hell)."

And maybe more later. 

Posted by Ginger at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Ginger at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)