I've been focusing, ahem, trying to focus on writing, etc lately, along with the usual cram of useful/not-so-useful get-togethers that summer seems to inspire. There's something about summer that makes me feel the time is extra, a catch-up. As in, can I get everything I didn't do last year into this year via summer? Can I get far enough ahead in what I want to do this year so I can relax in Autumn? The box of years is a mostly useless distinction, but yet I still keep lists of books read, films seen, books I want to read and films I want to see, odd budgets (this I won't explain), home improvements, dog training, wardrobe adjustments, fitness programs. All of this is acknowledged by me yearly. Perhaps it's crap for me to say I don't "do" new years' resolutions. I don't do them, I have it all figured out well in advance of that holiday what I want and don't want from my year.
What I'm doing this week: re-ordering Money for Sunsets, which in some forums has developed a new title. What I've found particularly useful: the use of a three-ring binder (though darling has given me one that will fit 240 pages, the flipping through and movement sans computer has been a healthy adjustment to having fourteen electronic versions that haunt me (did I save the right version and where?), as I'm mostly a disorganized writer choosing to focus on the process of writing rather than the storage of it, the submitting of it, all of which leads to regular trouble finding the "it" I'm looking for), a newfound honesty with what doesn't work, several new poems that do, and this article from Tupelo Press editor, Jeffrey Levine:
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Poetry Manuscript:
Some Ideas on Creation and Order
by Jeffrey Levine, Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press
From the January 2007 issue of AWP Job List. © 2007 The Association of Writers & Writing Programs.
Some considerations, a bakers dozen, are offered here by one who reads 3- to- 4,000 manuscripts a year. Admittedly, a good deal of what I say is concrete, generic, and in some cases, "merely" stylistic. Since style is, as ever, informed by matters of taste, you must take into account that these thoughts reflect my own prejudices and preferences, and that I've made no attempt to gather a consensus from other editors. Beyond style, however, other advice here concerns more abstract matters: what makes a book a book? How is the artistic process applied to making a poetry manuscript cohere? What are some useful approaches to the art of transforming individual poems into a transcendent whole?
The rest can be found here:
http://www.awpwriter.org/careers/jlevine01.htm
Full of obvious tips on submitting that trip many writers up to real truth on how to get dirty and get things arranged, this is one of the better guides I've found on this subject.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Wrecks in Effect
To those half-dozen or so who check back semi-regularly to see what I'm up to, my apologies. The contents of this blog are an adequate parallel to the real-life goings-on of one Elizabeth J. Colen... i.e. Not Much.
There's the walking of the dogs every day, the soreness in my calves still from a recent trek down then up the stairs at Wreck Beach in B.C. (a worthy hike for those who like sun on bare skin, beautiful sunsets, other assorted contact highs, and disorganized drum circles). The garden is growing lovely, Bing Cherry has finally sprouted leaves, the grapes are calling for an arbor I haven't the time or energy to build, and the big built box now full of bamboo has truly taken off. Perhaps there will be pictures here some day. I'm contemplating tomatoes, chard, onions, basil. I have a new writing project on the horizon, but am planning a new way of writing: detailed mapping, an outline of a paper city before putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, mind to serious work. Perhaps in the coming months I will begin. For now the locations and events are developing, the characters fermenting.
One of my favorite journals for contemporary poetry has recently accepted one of my favorite poems (Aposematic) for publication in the fall. I'm not really sending things out at the moment. Today even the focus must be on organizing the office, as piles of paper and books have now sprouted piles of paper, like tumors, sitting sideways on larger piles. I have no idea where anything is anymore, nor sometimes who I am. I'm hoping to come to organization with both by the end of the day. In the meantime, Her Circle has posted my latest review of a fantastic little book from FC2: Correction of Drift by Pamela Ryder. Check it out here:
http://www.hercircleezine.com/2008/05/30/correction-of-drift-a-novel-in-stories-by-pamela-ryder/
There's the walking of the dogs every day, the soreness in my calves still from a recent trek down then up the stairs at Wreck Beach in B.C. (a worthy hike for those who like sun on bare skin, beautiful sunsets, other assorted contact highs, and disorganized drum circles). The garden is growing lovely, Bing Cherry has finally sprouted leaves, the grapes are calling for an arbor I haven't the time or energy to build, and the big built box now full of bamboo has truly taken off. Perhaps there will be pictures here some day. I'm contemplating tomatoes, chard, onions, basil. I have a new writing project on the horizon, but am planning a new way of writing: detailed mapping, an outline of a paper city before putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, mind to serious work. Perhaps in the coming months I will begin. For now the locations and events are developing, the characters fermenting.
One of my favorite journals for contemporary poetry has recently accepted one of my favorite poems (Aposematic) for publication in the fall. I'm not really sending things out at the moment. Today even the focus must be on organizing the office, as piles of paper and books have now sprouted piles of paper, like tumors, sitting sideways on larger piles. I have no idea where anything is anymore, nor sometimes who I am. I'm hoping to come to organization with both by the end of the day. In the meantime, Her Circle has posted my latest review of a fantastic little book from FC2: Correction of Drift by Pamela Ryder. Check it out here:
http://www.hercircleezine.com/2008/05/30/correction-of-drift-a-novel-in-stories-by-pamela-ryder/
Saturday, May 3, 2008
new in the world...
I have received notice that the new Fifth Wednesday Journal should be hitting the shelves any day now. I join the talents of Allison Joseph, Marge Piercy, Glen Pourciau, Alberto Alvaro Rios, and the late Arthur Saltzman (August 10, 1953 - January 8, 2008), among others. I myself can't wait to read it. Get your copy at www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com
My review of Jen Currin's _Hagiography_ is now up at Her Circle also. Catch that here: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2008/05/01/hagiography-by-jen-currin/
My review of Jen Currin's _Hagiography_ is now up at Her Circle also. Catch that here: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2008/05/01/hagiography-by-jen-currin/
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
What lives can drown
I remain continually stunned at how beautiful a read Anderson Cooper's _Dispatches from the Edge_ is. I have never had an interest in him, not personally, not professionally, not physically (though he is a handsome devil). I don't even care if he's gay or not. I picked up the book at the library/community book sale for a dollar. I think it was even half-price day, so I may have gotten this feast of semi-current events and elegant syntax (original price $24.95) for 50 cents. It’s even made me cry three times, which is more than he's cried at all the things he's witnessed. What’s most striking to me is his global comprehension. He sees the world as boundaries drawn not by politics or state lines, country lines, etc, but by the lines of famine, war, natural disaster. Things that don't ever go away, they just shift location. There’s an interesting moment when he's on Route Irish from Baghdad airport to the city when the driver says that "they" say it's the most dangerous road in the world. He responds somewhat absently that they always say that. The book moves forward in a sort of see-saw manner, for each chapter he talks about two different times in his life, different places he's been (for example Iraq/Bosnia for the chapter titled "inkblots of blood" (taken from the metaphor that each individual reads their time in Iraq like a Rorschach)). Tragedy in the book, all the disasters, all the death, all the suffering starts to feel the same so that our relationship to the places he mentions, in that we forget where he is, parallels the disorientation he experiences at seeing images repeated, seeing a Sri Lankan boy throwing rocks at the gulf after Katrina, seeing his dead brother in the face of a beggar in Thailand.
*
On Niger, experiencing, and going home:
"Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don't exist in offices that aren't there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of the car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble--roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.
At some point though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. There is adventure waiting. Life happening. It's not your life, but it's as close as you'll get. You want to see it all.
One minute you're there--in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun--then you're gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass." (p85-86)
*
On Hurricane Katrina:
"It begins as a breeze, barely noticed, brushing the land where man was born. A bush pilot flying out of Kisangani might have found himself buffeted by a surprisingly strong current of air, or a farmer on a rocky Rwandan slope stretching his back as he stood could have felt the cool wind on his face. But it's not until the third week of August 2005 that meteorologists take note of a powerful tropical wave of wind and water moving slowly off the coast of West Africa." (p123)
*
He talks a lot about Katrina, the aftermath mostly, though he stood in the storm somewhere on high ground, windbreaker flapping, gore tex eventually soaking through. He stayed a month, and didn't want to leave, hoping if he could tell just a little more of the horror, someone else's face, someone else's story, that more people would stand up and notice, stand up and really do something.
"My office is insisting I come back, 'at least for a little while.' That's what they say, but I know it means it's over. They'll let me return, visit from time to time, do updates, but soon there will be other headlines, other dramas, and those who weren't here will want to move on." (p201)
His fascination with Katrina seems to stem from the fact that (like many of us felt), 'this shouldn't have been able to happen here' and 'we're America, we should have taken care of our people.' He (and we all) expect these thing to happen elsewhere, which doesn't make them lesser in intensity but less unexpected. If we are a rich country what does it matter? And driving home the fact that we are not one country, united. We are rich and poor. Two countries. Cooper doesn't go into the politics much, not more than he did on his show, shaming a politician from patting other politicians on the back for what (little) they had done. And he stays open about his privilege, his culpability. He admits to horrifying a photo shop employee with pictures of the skin of a corpse peeling away from a hand like a glove interspersed with soldiers having fun. He guilts himself over calling human beings "corpses" or "bodies." It seems natural that he should want to know their stories. He wonders at times how he can laugh, smile as bullets fly, drink a beer while bodies float. To some degree he says he travels the world looking for feeling, like his brother who wondered if he'd ever "feel" anything again, right before he dropped off the 14-story balcony.
*
I don't remember where I was when I found out the levees broke. I remember the time before the storm. I remember the weekend in North Carolina meeting Carol's parents, her father only four months from death, her mother figuring out how she and I "met" within five minutes of meeting me, giggling in the airport parking lot. I remember sitting in the livingroom staring at the Weather Channel at CNN. I remember thinking, saying, that storm, the levees, a city underwater. C's mother, father, C and I talking about the potential for disaster. C remarking how cheerful and botoxed the female newscasters seemed. I remember that just hours before landfall while the radar got angry on the screen that we feared even the layover in Atlanta, hundreds of miles away.
I've only been to New Orleans a few times. I remember convincing myself I could feel the hum of machinery underground, the pumps that keep the streets dry. I was fascinated from the get-go that anyone would think to build a city under sea level. That my nerves buzzed every hour, irrationally waiting for the wash of water that was sure to come, no matter how blue the sky stayed. I became fascinated and later read about how bad off the walls were, how likely a flood, how the water wanted in.
*
On Niger, experiencing, and going home:
"Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don't exist in offices that aren't there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of the car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble--roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.
At some point though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. There is adventure waiting. Life happening. It's not your life, but it's as close as you'll get. You want to see it all.
One minute you're there--in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun--then you're gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass." (p85-86)
*
On Hurricane Katrina:
"It begins as a breeze, barely noticed, brushing the land where man was born. A bush pilot flying out of Kisangani might have found himself buffeted by a surprisingly strong current of air, or a farmer on a rocky Rwandan slope stretching his back as he stood could have felt the cool wind on his face. But it's not until the third week of August 2005 that meteorologists take note of a powerful tropical wave of wind and water moving slowly off the coast of West Africa." (p123)
*
He talks a lot about Katrina, the aftermath mostly, though he stood in the storm somewhere on high ground, windbreaker flapping, gore tex eventually soaking through. He stayed a month, and didn't want to leave, hoping if he could tell just a little more of the horror, someone else's face, someone else's story, that more people would stand up and notice, stand up and really do something.
"My office is insisting I come back, 'at least for a little while.' That's what they say, but I know it means it's over. They'll let me return, visit from time to time, do updates, but soon there will be other headlines, other dramas, and those who weren't here will want to move on." (p201)
His fascination with Katrina seems to stem from the fact that (like many of us felt), 'this shouldn't have been able to happen here' and 'we're America, we should have taken care of our people.' He (and we all) expect these thing to happen elsewhere, which doesn't make them lesser in intensity but less unexpected. If we are a rich country what does it matter? And driving home the fact that we are not one country, united. We are rich and poor. Two countries. Cooper doesn't go into the politics much, not more than he did on his show, shaming a politician from patting other politicians on the back for what (little) they had done. And he stays open about his privilege, his culpability. He admits to horrifying a photo shop employee with pictures of the skin of a corpse peeling away from a hand like a glove interspersed with soldiers having fun. He guilts himself over calling human beings "corpses" or "bodies." It seems natural that he should want to know their stories. He wonders at times how he can laugh, smile as bullets fly, drink a beer while bodies float. To some degree he says he travels the world looking for feeling, like his brother who wondered if he'd ever "feel" anything again, right before he dropped off the 14-story balcony.
*
I don't remember where I was when I found out the levees broke. I remember the time before the storm. I remember the weekend in North Carolina meeting Carol's parents, her father only four months from death, her mother figuring out how she and I "met" within five minutes of meeting me, giggling in the airport parking lot. I remember sitting in the livingroom staring at the Weather Channel at CNN. I remember thinking, saying, that storm, the levees, a city underwater. C's mother, father, C and I talking about the potential for disaster. C remarking how cheerful and botoxed the female newscasters seemed. I remember that just hours before landfall while the radar got angry on the screen that we feared even the layover in Atlanta, hundreds of miles away.
I've only been to New Orleans a few times. I remember convincing myself I could feel the hum of machinery underground, the pumps that keep the streets dry. I was fascinated from the get-go that anyone would think to build a city under sea level. That my nerves buzzed every hour, irrationally waiting for the wash of water that was sure to come, no matter how blue the sky stayed. I became fascinated and later read about how bad off the walls were, how likely a flood, how the water wanted in.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Lynda
Today is not my mother's birthday, but would have been the 63rd birthday of a woman who tried to mother me. When I met her and learned her birthday was April 4 and how old she was, my first thought was how she almost had the same birthday as the man who makes River Phoenix go Dutch Boy in My Own Private Idaho. Four four forty-four. This is not for her, but for my reel mother, based on a drawing I could have done:
PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER
A sketch of my mother’s face gives good impression of the woman within. Drawn in brown crayon, the eyes are flat, sight obscured going both in and out. The lids in blue, heavy, require the uplift of beige feathered lashes to keep them aloft. The skin is pink, shaded grey along the contours, not for wrinkling—that onslaught of time against elasticity and slenderness of pores—but for the haze of smoke rising from the slim cigarette just below the picture’s lowest border. The mouth is a red cut across the paper never gotten quite right. Her ears are hidden in her hair, which sits on the oblong orb of her head in curled clumps that resemble cross-sections of tumbleweed more than anything living or dead. From the black tip of the collar one gets a sense of her dress, simple, elegant. In a word, devastating. The neck that emerges is graceful and shows little wear.
PORTRAIT OF MY MOTHER
A sketch of my mother’s face gives good impression of the woman within. Drawn in brown crayon, the eyes are flat, sight obscured going both in and out. The lids in blue, heavy, require the uplift of beige feathered lashes to keep them aloft. The skin is pink, shaded grey along the contours, not for wrinkling—that onslaught of time against elasticity and slenderness of pores—but for the haze of smoke rising from the slim cigarette just below the picture’s lowest border. The mouth is a red cut across the paper never gotten quite right. Her ears are hidden in her hair, which sits on the oblong orb of her head in curled clumps that resemble cross-sections of tumbleweed more than anything living or dead. From the black tip of the collar one gets a sense of her dress, simple, elegant. In a word, devastating. The neck that emerges is graceful and shows little wear.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Good People
Ah, I forgot to mention my very first book review (of Stephanie Dickison's _Road of Five Churches_) is up:
http://www.hercircleezine.com/index.php?s=elizabeth+j.+colen
Please be sure to peruse the site as well, as there's gaggles of fantastic stuff to read about this month.
http://www.hercircleezine.com/index.php?s=elizabeth+j.+colen
Please be sure to peruse the site as well, as there's gaggles of fantastic stuff to read about this month.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
It all adds up
1.
I currently have 1680 messages stored on my hotmail account. I've had the account for 11 years. I have trouble letting go of words. I still have emails from my grandmother who died 6 years ago. I like opening her messages and feeling an immediate connection. Perhaps I shouldn't feel an immediate connection just because it's on my screen, but somehow it feels different, less nostalgic, more real than paper letters. I can pretend each time is like the first time. Messages from less-dead people can feel this way as well. Not that I spend much time going through old messages. Hence the need for the wading through, saving and discarding that I started last week. For particularly good correspondences (this may be you), I may save because it makes me feel like one day we may publish a book together. C and I kept our early letters this way. For months we each compiled separate documents without the other's knowledge.
2.
I went to the dentist today. The new office is not in the woods. My dentist office and I play this little game. We make appointments, then one of us cancels, then the other does. It can go on for months. Because the dentist does not like the gum action (depth of .2 or .3 beyond what it should be) around my still-present wisdom teeth (tooth 17 and tooth 32), he thinks I should come in every 4 months instead of every 6. My insurance doesn't mind, so technically I shouldn't either. However, having gone to the dentist regularly until age 10, then once at age 15, and one other time at age 21, until last year (at 31) I went for the second time in my adulthood, I don't really take much heed from what they deem "regular." I have good teeth, even the ones I shouldn't still have. Originally I was supposed to go in in 01/08. I cancelled (which I do every time), rescheduled for 02/08. They cancelled, rescheduled for 03/08, then cancelled again, but did get me in the following week (today). C made me promise to go regularly, but once a year seems appropriate to me. Twice may happen, but is not often likely.
3.
Have you heard of iroha mojigusari? I want to try this, but will likely not have the energy for some time. Sleep seems more important than writing lately.
4.
I have 1 more book to read this month to get to 10 on the month and 30 for the year. Ten is more doable than the 15 I did last year. Plus I don't have to start looking at the thickness of books at the end of the month to catch up with thinner volumes. That was stupid.
5.
I have 40 more minutes to work today. I am currently 1.33 projects behind. I can probably do 4 in 40 minutes, but not if the craptastic writers are at the top of the queue.
6.
The repetition of the ueue in queue makes me very happy. That's two YOUs and two MEs as far as I'm concerned.
7.
If you're ever in the Showcase Showdown while I'm in the audience, please watch my hands carefully. I do not watch the Price Is Right because Drew Carey's voice is too low-key, too sardonic really is the thing I suppose because Bob Barker was low-key too. Although I do respect that he still says, "Control the pet population. Please have your pets spayed and neutered" at the end of every show the way Bob used to do. I do not watch the show, but I do like the Showdown. My daily TV watching often includes The Daily Show at 10:00am, The Colbert Report at 10:30, the last eight minutes (the Showdown) of The Price is Right at 10:52, and the first ten minutes of Ellen DeGeneres. Anyway, as I was saying... if you're ever in the Showcase Showdown, watch my hands. Two days in a row I have been within $1000 of the price of all showcases (without going over). Yesterday I was $85 and $789 off, today I was $445 and $661 off. In each case, regardless of whether I was contestant A or contestant B I would have won the Showcase Showdown. Yesterday had I been contestant A I would have won both.
I currently have 1680 messages stored on my hotmail account. I've had the account for 11 years. I have trouble letting go of words. I still have emails from my grandmother who died 6 years ago. I like opening her messages and feeling an immediate connection. Perhaps I shouldn't feel an immediate connection just because it's on my screen, but somehow it feels different, less nostalgic, more real than paper letters. I can pretend each time is like the first time. Messages from less-dead people can feel this way as well. Not that I spend much time going through old messages. Hence the need for the wading through, saving and discarding that I started last week. For particularly good correspondences (this may be you), I may save because it makes me feel like one day we may publish a book together. C and I kept our early letters this way. For months we each compiled separate documents without the other's knowledge.
2.
I went to the dentist today. The new office is not in the woods. My dentist office and I play this little game. We make appointments, then one of us cancels, then the other does. It can go on for months. Because the dentist does not like the gum action (depth of .2 or .3 beyond what it should be) around my still-present wisdom teeth (tooth 17 and tooth 32), he thinks I should come in every 4 months instead of every 6. My insurance doesn't mind, so technically I shouldn't either. However, having gone to the dentist regularly until age 10, then once at age 15, and one other time at age 21, until last year (at 31) I went for the second time in my adulthood, I don't really take much heed from what they deem "regular." I have good teeth, even the ones I shouldn't still have. Originally I was supposed to go in in 01/08. I cancelled (which I do every time), rescheduled for 02/08. They cancelled, rescheduled for 03/08, then cancelled again, but did get me in the following week (today). C made me promise to go regularly, but once a year seems appropriate to me. Twice may happen, but is not often likely.
3.
Have you heard of iroha mojigusari? I want to try this, but will likely not have the energy for some time. Sleep seems more important than writing lately.
4.
I have 1 more book to read this month to get to 10 on the month and 30 for the year. Ten is more doable than the 15 I did last year. Plus I don't have to start looking at the thickness of books at the end of the month to catch up with thinner volumes. That was stupid.
5.
I have 40 more minutes to work today. I am currently 1.33 projects behind. I can probably do 4 in 40 minutes, but not if the craptastic writers are at the top of the queue.
6.
The repetition of the ueue in queue makes me very happy. That's two YOUs and two MEs as far as I'm concerned.
7.
If you're ever in the Showcase Showdown while I'm in the audience, please watch my hands carefully. I do not watch the Price Is Right because Drew Carey's voice is too low-key, too sardonic really is the thing I suppose because Bob Barker was low-key too. Although I do respect that he still says, "Control the pet population. Please have your pets spayed and neutered" at the end of every show the way Bob used to do. I do not watch the show, but I do like the Showdown. My daily TV watching often includes The Daily Show at 10:00am, The Colbert Report at 10:30, the last eight minutes (the Showdown) of The Price is Right at 10:52, and the first ten minutes of Ellen DeGeneres. Anyway, as I was saying... if you're ever in the Showcase Showdown, watch my hands. Two days in a row I have been within $1000 of the price of all showcases (without going over). Yesterday I was $85 and $789 off, today I was $445 and $661 off. In each case, regardless of whether I was contestant A or contestant B I would have won the Showcase Showdown. Yesterday had I been contestant A I would have won both.
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