It’s been an atypically social week here. I met my former bookshop co-workers at one’s Amherst apartment for lunch, and on two separate evenings heard 6 different poets read:

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• Tim Mayo — not for the first time, he’s a great friend, but I so enjoy hearing him;
• Jan Freeman — this publisher of Paris Press is a talented poet in her own right, and it was a treat to hear her newer work;
• Patricia Fargnoli — she read some of my favorite poems from Then, Something, and ended with the astonishing gift of a new poem;
• Penelope Scambly Schott — I wasn’t familiar with her work, but what a soft-spoken dynamo!

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And of course the Collected Poets Series reading with

• Kate Greenstreet — she seems to have memorized all of her poems, so that her book is almost a prop, and her reading more like a monologue, utterly captivating;
• and Mary Koncel — sly, funny, joyful, a great match-up with Kate.

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How invigorating these nights of poetry are! I’m bushed, but jazzed. And so grateful.

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As I mentioned two posts ago, Laura Didyk and a compatriot are working on a new project, In the Eyes of Everyone: A Project for Everyday Visionaries. My contribution, and Jessica Atcheson’s, are now posted on Laura’s blog.  Go check them out, and maybe it will inspire you to try it yourself. If you do, don’t forget to send your photos to Laura — there’s no time limit on making stuff!

This Thursday, December 3, at 7:00 pm, the Collected Poets Series is pleased to present Mary Koncel and Kate Greenstreet! Please note our new start time.

Mary Koncel has published two books of prose poems, You Can Tell the Horse Anything (Tupelo Press) which was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and Closer to Day (Quale Press). Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies,and she was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. She has an MFA in English and recently completed her MS degree in Animals and Public Policy at Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine. Mary lives in Worthington, MA, with her husband and many animals.

Kate Greenstreet’s second book, The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta Press, 2009) includes a DVD containing two short films based on the two sections of the book. Ahsahta published Kate’s case sensitive in 2006. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). Find Kate’s poems in current or forthcoming issues of jubilat, VOLT, The Denver Quarterly, Fence, Court Green, and other journals. Visit her online at kickingwind.com.

For more information on this month’s poets or the Collected Poets Series, please visit our website: www.collectedpoets.com.

Since we watched the first two seasons of the BBC series “Primeval” on DVD, the exclamation, “Oy! You!” has become a permanant addition to my lexicon.  I’d bet my books that not a single episode passes without the cute blonde zoologist, Abby, shouting this at least once.  It’s very endearing.  (Early episodes also inevitably included gratuitous shots of her barely-clad bottom as she padded around her flat in her undies, but those seemed to have tapered off by season two.)

Far better than other outbursts you might hear in our household, “Oy!” has become my go-to phrase of choice.  It’s quite versatile; a note up or down changes your tone from mild annoyance to I’ve-had-it-up-to-here!

Last night it was, “Oy! Would you look at that?”

Lance and Vincent carved a big pumpkin.  When asked if he wanted a scary or a friendly pumpkin, Vincent said, “Scary.”

Lance got to work — Vincent’s only real contributions were as critic and occasional picker-upper of a seed or two.  He did spontaneously strip off his shirt, but when asked to put his hand in and clean out the guts, he said, “Oh no, I’m too little.  Daddy will do that.”  Oy.

In the end, however, Daddy did too good of a job.  When he finished, lit the candles, and turned off the lights, the ta-da moment was interrupted by the sound of Vincent sobbing.

The Great Pumpkin scares the bejeezus out of Vincent.

“It’s too scary! It’s too scary, Daddy!”

Oy.

Not that I disagree entirely.  That’s one freaky pumpkin.

As I was putting Aidan in his pajamas, I heard Vincent rummaging in the silverware drawer. (Don’t talk to me about child-proofing. We did, our drawers are child-proofed.  Vincent conquered the contraptions in 3 weeks.)  When I went to check on him, he was about to deface the pumpkin with a butter knife:  he wants to add a second nose between its eyes, quite reasonably explaining that this will solve the whole “too scary” conundrum.

He’s not wrong.  But I still confiscated the knife. Oy!

A while back, I mentioned this great new program that DZANC Books is running, the DZANC Creative Writing Sessions (DCWS).  I have since tried it out, and I simply can’t say enough good things about it.

The DCWS “allows writers to work one-on-one with published authors and editors to shape their short story/novel/poem/etc.”  For less than the price of new sneakers you can receive a thoughtful, intelligent, in-depth critique of your work.  And you choose the author you want to work with from a large list.  The fees for the program are low because the authors have donated their time; all the money goes toward another program DZANC runs to bring writing programs to schools, grades 4-12.  Thus in one fell swoop you get personal attention for your writing at bargain-basement prices and contribute to an important cause.

I signed up for 2 hours, chose the poet I wanted to work with by researching the authors online, and sent 5 poems.  If you participate, be aware it can take a little while — you won’t receive a critique the very next day.  The authors have donated their time, life is busy.  However, the level of critique I received was stellar.  How deeply this poet engaged with my work was really gratifying.  And the benefit of having this established poet, who doesn’t know me or my poems, and hence approaches my work completely blind, without any preconceptions or received knowledge, is invaluable.  I’m thrilled with the feedback I received.

I’m working toward a full-length collection (wheee!), and do my writing in near-isolation; I don’t belong to a writer’s group or a critiquing circle.  And my funds are very limited.  (As a friend said just this morning in an email,”Anything that you spend $$ on, I think is worth listening to!”) DCWS is a wonderful tool for someone like me.  And I loved it.  I hope it does well for them, because as soon as my budget allows I intend to sign up for more!

I want to thank Karen Weyant for blogging about her experience with DCWS back in June.  Her post gave me the impetus to try it out, and I’m so happy I did.  Thank you, Karen!

We love Vincent. Let's poke him in the eye.

The pre-sale for my chapbook ends in a couple days; the size of my print run is determined by the number of books sold during this time.  So if you were planning on buying a copy anyway, and have been procrastinating, now is the time.  Just click on the cover at the top left of this page.  Thank you, and thanks to the awesome folks who’ve already ordered a copy!

When the bookstore closed, I didn’t just lose an income.  I lost the place where passionate conversations about books are conducted as a matter of course, as well as daily interaction with the people having those conversations, with me & around me, both fellow staff & customers.   Being a part of the buzz.

I assumed I’d be able to keep in adequate contact with most of my bookstore friends via email.  Silly me.  If you want to keep in touch with anyone in this world, you have to join Facebook.  I’m not kidding.  Even my mom is on Facebook now.

This post is not a diatribe against Facebook, quite the opposite.  I love Facebook.  It can indeed be a significant black hole wherein I lose chunks of my day, but so can television.  I don’t watch TV anymore, so I figure I can afford a little time-sucking endeavor.  The early days are especially intoxicating, getting reacquainted with old friends, becoming “friends” with amazing writers.  But I settled in, found a groove, and, generally, manage my time well.

I don’t really consider Facebook “networking”, however.  It’s like a big party full of people, some of whom you’ve known all your life and others you seem to bump into everywhere, whose names you can never quite remember.  The contact is glancing, snippets of comments here & there, but it’s friendly, and fun.  Sure, it’s superficial, but I’d argue that you can tell a good deal about a person by reading a week’s worth of her Facebook status.

And I’d argue that those who are using Facebook for wholly marketing purposes  are not only missing the point, but they’re probably not being very successful at it either.  I’m aware and have made use of the self-promotional tools of Facebook.  Of course!  But any friend who is merely a walking advertisement is all too easy to block from my newsfeed.

Also intoxicating and a potential disruptor of my space-time continuum is the new site for women writers, SHE WRITES.  It’s about three weeks old and growing fast.  (Men are not barred from membership, but the focus is women writers.)

There’s a very large swath of women writers represented here, including poets and bloggers.  And while networking is much more prominent, there are real conversations occurring:  any member can start a group, and within those groups are even more threads of advice and information, questions and in-depth explorations.  The vibe is one of enthusiastic support, and I’ve already increased by tenfold the number of women writers I know.  The discussion groups allow a different way of knowing each other beyond the usual virtual kaffeeklatsch.

All that, plus each member can personalize her profile page.  Um, I’ve spent a rather excessive amount of time playing with my page, but I might be done. For now.  The pitfall with personlizing is how personal the process becomes!

You may be wondering, what about Twitter?  Not for me, it’s just too micro.  It seems to me that for Twitter to be truly useful, you need an iPhone or something of that ilk.  I don’t even have a cell phone anymore.   But if you’re on Facebook, you can find me here, and I’m here on SHE WRITES.  And if you happen to see my mom out there in this brave new world, be nice to her; she’s trying.

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On a related note — related by virtue of being about me:  My chapbook, Hunger All Inside, is still available for preorder from Finishing Line Press.  If you haven’t yet ordered it, and wish to, you can click here for more information, or click on the book cover at the top left to go straight to the Finishing Line Press new releases page.  Thank you!

NPR did a short report on Friday’s Morning Edition called “Already Poor, Poets Don’t Much Mind the Recession.” It’s charming, ends with some terrific “recession haikus”, but it’s breathtaking how badly it misses the point.

Yes, yes, we all know there’s no money in poetry.  But the funds to support the poet in her writing and the press in its printing have to come from somewhere.

Poet first:  the audience for poetry is, by and large, other poets.  Let’s just take that as a given.  Because there is no money in poetry, poets work other jobs, either in academia, Brooks Brothers, bookstores, or elsewhere.  Poets donate money to the presses they believe in, subscribe to journals, buy poetry books, and write poems they hope to publish in journals and books.

But if the poet loses her job, ahem, she loses more than her income.  She loses whatever  “extra” funds she had to make donations, subscribe to journals, and buy new poetry books.  Used book sales generally go up during hard times.  That’s great.  I like used books and used book stores.  However, used book sales don’t benefit the publisher or the author, except by increasing readership — nice, but it’s not going to help pay the rent in the hear and now.

I believe in supporting your community, but without the Dorothy Prize I certainly could not have afforded the spate of subscriptions I recently took on.

Now, the publisher, both of books and literary journals, operating on a shoestring in his basement, or in tiny offices buckling under the weight of stuffed manila envelopes, is paying for his endeavor usually with a budget cobbled together through donations, book sales, and a day job.  What happens when he’s laid off?  When the economy tanks, books sales go down, subscriptions dry up, donations slacken.  Presses begin to see their cash flow dwindling to a trickle:  Salt Publishing has sent a call for help.  Tupelo Press as well.  And some university-affiliated literary journals, like Southern Review and New England Review, are being threatened with losing their university funding.

All of this to say that poets, and poetry, do very much mind the recession.

In that spirit:  as I’ve said, subscriptions are ridiculously cheap.  Many literary presses offer substantial discounts if you order directly from them.  So if you can, please subscribe to a journal today — there’s a bunch of links to great ones a few posts ago.  Go to a publisher’s website (like Salt or Tupelo or Four Way Books) and buy a new book.  Or, and I know this a revolutionary proposal, go to your local independent bookshop and place an order there.

While great poetry will be written whatever the state of the economy, without our support the venues to publish and share that poetry could disappear.