The Next Big Thing Project

I’ve been tagged in a blogging project called "The Next Big Thing," a series of questions and answers on my next project, big or otherwise.

First, thanks to Carlen Arnett for inviting me to do this blog-tag game. Carlen’s interview is here: http://robinblack.net/blog/. I know her as a poet, but she is transmogrifying into a fiction writer! Her project is fun and exciting--I hope you'll go and check it out. She's guest-blogging on Robin Black's site.

In a couple of days, I'll be passing on the links to the writers I've tagged for this project.

Here are my answers to the interview questions for The Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

My next volume of poetry is tentatively titled "Map of the Floating World." The title has changed about six times since I started it. My guess is that when my editor starts work on it, the title will change yet again.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Hard to answer. The ideas for poetry come from everywhere and nowhere. One section of the book is definitely inspired by reading I was doing about Anton Mesmer. The guy lived a really strange life! And it's hard to say whether he was a great psychologist or a complete charlatan. Both, actually.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry. Definitely poetry. My last book, "Meridian," was more of a mixed genre, employing a mix of lyric and prose. This one is much more purely poetry.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Silly question to ask about poetry. But I think Mesmer could be played by my father, were he still alive.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

"Map of the Floating World" is an exploration of the Trickster in mythology, history, and personal experience.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

Again, the question assumes prose. My book will be published by a fine small literary press. Only about three poets in this country are commercially viable enough to have agents. Well, maybe a few more, but not many. And not me.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About six years. I have written and published a couple of others in the meantime, but this one was started and stopped any number of times.

Who are your influences?

Poets whose work I love and who have, I hope, made me a better poet: First and foremost, Dickinson. Then Hopkins, C.D. Wright, Rae Armantrout, Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Brenda Hillman, Carol Snow, Roethke, Bishop. Etc.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My father. When I was very young, he would disappear into the sky in a big yellow bird with a red stripe, and I thought he was magic.

Shakespeare, the Sonnets

I was so impressed the other night, at a reading, to hear Minnesota's poet laureate Joyce Sutphen recite a couple of Shakespeare sonnets off the cuff. This, just after I had taken a class at the University on Old Bill's sonnets, and had decided to read them all in order, something I have never done. I have my favorites, but I've also missed a bunch. So hearing a couple from someone who's committed a number of them to memory was such a pleasure.

What is it about those poems that continue to draw us? And what is it about the sonnet form? Sonnets often feel like letters to me. They're so often addressed to an intimate you, and so often to a loved you. One of the things I always notice when I hear a sonnet read is that it seems larger, more expansive than the 14 lines of 5 beats each into which it is usually tucked. Great sonnets are bigger than their form. Although I guess that could be said about all great poems.

I sometimes imagine a sonnet as a boat, a small boat with oars and that last two lines a rudder. It's always going somewhere, and I am being carried with it. Maybe I'll commit a boat or two to memory--

Greenstreet Does It Again

I just finished--although "finished" is not quite the right word--Kate Greenstreet's new book, Young Tambling. It's a genre buster, a memoir of sorts in a hybrid of prose, visuals, and verse. Once again, Greenstreet offers the reader the privilege of walking with her through her mind as she does her days, present and past. Perhaps even future. Greenstreet is a master at expressing a marvelous interiority, a collection of quotes, images, ideas, the day's detritus, and somehow making all of this more than just a pastiche, but a whole in which the parts can be observed and analyzed, but never nailed down as to how they work their mystery. Great book, Kate! I'll be picking it up again and again.

Meridian Published

So my new book, Meridian, is out as of mid-September. I'm grateful to Tupelo Press for putting out such a beautiful book, and to Patricia Fargnoli for selecting it for the Snowbound Prize.

Metaphor

"To make one thing stand for another is the fundamental activity of consciousness."
         - Susan Griffin

My poet friends have been laughing at me lately because I've been saying I hate metaphor. How can you be a poet and hate metaphor?? You really can't, because metaphor is how we think, how we make consciousness. I've been tired of tired metaphors, though, my own and those of other poets. It's tricky to make new metaphors, because it requires new thought, new excursions into psyche. I find myself working over the old metaphors until they no longer have savor for me. So, somewhere along the line, new kinds of consciousness and new metaphors have to come into being. Partly writing, and partly waiting, is how this basic activity of consciousness arrives.

January

Some people like to escape January in Minnesota. I'll admit it sounds attractive, in the midst of the third-snowiest winter on record. But there is a quiet in January that draws me, even as I wait for the birds' pineal glands to tell them the sun is coming back. Something about a persistent light snowfall, carrying on from one day to the next, erasing what it can.

New Book Coming in 2012

My manuscript "Meridian" won the 2010 Snowbound Poetry Chapbook Prize from Tupelo Press, judged by Patricia Fargnoli. The book will be published some time in 2012. I haven't heard a firm date, yet. (At the pace that poetry gets published, I often wonder if many poets can only hope to be published posthumously.)

It's wonderful to have a book coming. There is a sense of anticipation, as if the creative work is not quite completed, because the book design, the words on the cover, the image all need to be put in place for the finished product to become a book. The hard part--the writing--is done, though, and what comes next is just for pleasure. I used to think that publishing a book was going to change my life in some large way, but now I am happy with the quiet, subtle change that occurs when one's creative effort enters into the world. Someone will read it, and that is such a lovely thing.

Save a Forest

Looking at the 3-foot stack of old magazines over there in the corner, I think we should stop printing literary journals and move everything over to the Internet. More and and more, I'm liking what I see in the on-line journals. The quality is there in many of them. And the biggies like Poetry and Kenyon Review and Agni, etc., can continue to provide the kind of quality they've been offering in an on-line mode. They can continue their advertising on-line as well. And the poems will be more accessible, reaching more readers and staying in print a lot longer. Thereby making the journals' survival a lot more feasible, and saving one heck of a lot of trees.

Amazing Karesansui Poems

I am reading a slim volume of poems by the superb West Coast poet Carol Snow titled Placed: Karesansui Poems. It's taking me a long time to read because there are so few words. The title of each poem is a single preposition, and the view from each is into the karesansui garden, a small landscape garden designed to be viewed from a number of fixed vantage points.

The entire book is composed of a series of 70 poems, each titled with a preposition followed by a small collection of phrases separated by dashes, many of them in quotation marks, with meticulous documentation of their sources. This is, in fact, probably the most meticulous book of poems I have ever read!

And I am slow because the poems demand that. What are prepositions but linking words? They are entirely about relationships--temporal, spacial, logical. So the poems are meditations on relationship. Here is "Across," in its entirety:

Across

each of its stones its own--on the scale of-- : from
me--
a distance: an ocean

Some of the references are clear, others are pebbles dropped into the well, and it takes a long time for them to reach bottom. That's why this reading is so slow.

There is more silence in these poems than in any I have read since Dickinson. There is also more action, and hardly any-thing. An extraordinary collection.

Equinox Just Ahead

It is almost

summer. That time that sweeps
past. Day. Its train of greens
leaves us bowing

and bow-wowing. Dogs panting in the heat
and lacking any respect
from humanity. To be “shot down in the street

like a dog.” Dogshot in the street. Down
dog. Almost summer. That heat. Sequins
and green equinox. When

the center of the sun
lines up with the equator. We look
for lines and intersects. In an angle-

less universe, equinoctial points
matter. The celestial equator and the ecliptic intersect.
That makes us happy, dogs that we are.

Orioles

In May, right about this time, when the maple leaves are goldish green and standing up on their stems, about the size of a fifty-cent piece (dates me, doesn't it?), the orioles return. And sure enough, yesterday they came, looking for nectar and singing their tune ("With a song in my heart"). Amazing creatures, that I never tire of watching and hearing. Spring. A good reason for living.