My first draft of November, and the month’s three-quarters gone — oy.  I’m accustomed to shoe-horning in a fair amount of me-time rather late at night, after everyone has gone to bed, but lately it’s just not happening.

But after days of a line here, a deleted stanza there, I think this morning’s work has done it.  I always struggle with tone, and a tendency to wrap things up too soon — which is only partly a result of my fractured writing schedule.  Anyway, the draft below will stay up a couple days.

Recession

Time now to hold our breath
for the season’s first snow, its gentle
exultation. We fish

pennies for a tree
from the baby’s mouth, let the boy
play with flour and water.

Focused, face frozen,
he puffs white while his rolling pin
chides the dough flat.

The baby emits cyclic
shrieks, crawling through clouds
sifting down from the table.

Books used, clothes used.
Milk in a box good for a year.
Yet how easily

they love their lives,
what slight graspable dreams—
they skate the floor through drifts

of flour, while the year’s footfalls
retreat through crystallized
sheaths of leaves.

Because I’m constantly discovering new poet crushes, these poets who write such exquisite lines, whose poems I absolutely covet.  This week’s discovery: Carolina Ebeid. You can find some of her poems online

Here at Memorious. “Pale / glyph of dog” — seriously, I felt my heart twinge.

Here at Agni Online. “The work of grief is perennial.”

Here at Perihelion.  “Evening rested its warm heft / like the young beast / unyoked and susurrous.”

And here at 32 Poems, the poem that began my Google quest. “”She’ll curve the paper into the shape of a shell / and listen into the sea, its stammerings.”

I am dumbfounded and beyond disappointed that she doesn’t have a book yet for me to grub up an order for somewhere.  How is this possible? Her poems are published widely & well, another instance of how vast the supposedly small po-world is that I haven’t known her work better until now.

Attention: Someone needs to publish this poet’s first book immediately — a chapbook, a gorgeous letterprint or mimeographed number, I don’t care — I need a collection to carry with me at all times.  I’m going to find it necessary to print out these various poems available online and fashion a pamphlet/totem myself.

Talking to a rugful of first-graders is a scary business. Keeping their interest, watching for signs of restlessness and disinterest, and then immediately switching course to lure back their attention…I think we chatted 25 minutes all told, but I was exhausted!

The teachers were endlessly patient and encouraging — the kids’ poems are hung all around the school, which I didn’t notice on my way in, and the kids kept getting side-tracked from our question & answer period in order to give me instructions on where I could find their particular poems, though I assured them that I would absolutely explore every floor of the school and read every poem.  One clever girl, after about the fifth time the teachers had gently assured them that their poems would be read, please no more, it’s time for questions only, raised her hand, and when called upon said, “I have two questions: first, you can find MY poem on the door down the hall…”  Nice try.

What creative children, though, and how wonderful to be in a writing workshop when you’re seven.  That day’s work involved brainstorming “the just-right title” for the poems they’d been working on.  One girl’s: “Let Me Blow Away”.  Who knows how many of theses kids will continue to write into their adulthood, but I think that such creative nurturing can’t help but inform the people they’ll become — future poetry book buyers at the very least!

@ the Green Street Poetry Series.

Interesting how much more nervous I was reading to that classroom than to the audience of adults at the Green Street Café the evening prior.

Not that I wasn’t nervous at all! There was a nice turnout, and the audience included a number of poets who had never heard me read before, which always gives the internal eternally insecure “please like me” beastie a kickstart.

But I’ve discovered that I deeply enjoy the act of reading my poems for an audience, the quiet listening we all do as I mine each line for its sounds and cadences.  And it’s so much more satisfying to participate in a featured reading, where you can read for 20 minutes or more, and really find your rhythm and ride it, than the open-mic quickie.  I’m glad I have more events on the horizon; only wish I had the time, and childcare funds, to do more!

Egads, where has the time went?! There’s micro-time, this week, wherein:

1. I drove to North Adams for a meeting,
2. have my reading tonight with Kim Rogers at the Green Street Café (which I am so excited about; that and the dinner provided — Green St. has an excellent menu!),
3. and tomorrow afternoon I’m visiting, in my capacity as local poet, a classroom of first-graders at the Smith College Campus School.

Add that to all my regular doings & whatnot with the boys, and that’s a pretty action-packed week for me.  The last item is of special note — I’m not altogether confident of being able to keep one 7 yr old’s interest, never mind a roomful of them.  I’m going to read them two poems from Hunger All Inside, “All Souls’” and “Night Visits”, and we’ll talk about Halloween and what a metaphor is.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

And, as if the reading tonight weren’t event enough, yesterday was Lance’s birthday.  He’s coming with me tonight, and our dinner will be our first without the kids since Aidan was born.  Our first night out together, alone.

Which brings me to macro-time, this year, which is almost over!  Too soon to start enumerating blessings etc., but oy! This year has slipped by me as sneakily as Vincent hiding a bread knife (a.k.a. his “sharp sword” which he needs to fight the “bad witches”) behind his back.  That Thanksgiving is a mere 2 weeks away, and you-know-what soon after, doesn’t even bear thinking about. Oy.

I’m drinking coffee at my desk.  The baby’s napping, Lance took Vincent for a walk. And I’ve just noticed a couple phrases Lance scrawled on the legal pad on my desk at some point in the last day or so: “Robust incoherence” and “transcendent vacuity”.

I don’t know if he was criticizing something himself or quoting someone else in awe, but, Ouch!

I have alway felt sympathy for the pain of a bad review, hoping in a vague amorphous way not to ever experience it myself, while also thinking, A scorching by M. Kakutani or W. Logan? I should be so lucky!

But now that I have a chapbook, which actual other people who are not my mother or husband or best friends are reading, I understand those writers who avoid reading reviews, a querulous mention in PW, or tart dismissal in the back section of Poetry.

(Though again, really, I should be so lucky.)

As a poet, I’m used to not being much remarked upon or noticed (and I’m not suggesting that will change). But what I’m coming to terms with now is the very tangible fact that when you publish a collection, not just a poem or two in journals but a pile of poems all together for compare-&-contrasting, people will have opinions about it.

Obviously. I know. And yet. When your focus is writing and publishing, getting your work out there, “out there” is far away, and you’re removed from what “out there” means: strangers, who may or may not think your work is shite.

So it’s a delightful surprise when someone out there reads your work, and likes it, and then tells other people about it, an unexpected peach: “Marvelous things will happen”: Thank you so much to Sandy Longhorn for her generous post about Hunger All Inside!   Sandy’s blog has turned me on to many other poets, she’s an abundace of poet-advocacy — I’m happy to have been noticed and noted so positively.  Lucky me!

This Thursday, November 5, at 7:30pm, the Collected Poets Series will present another full night with poets April Ossmann, Peter Waldor, and Pamela Stewart.

April Ossmann is the author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books, 2007) and has published her poetry widely in journals including Colorado Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Harvard Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books, 2009) and Contemporary Poetry of New England(UPNE, 2002). She has won several poetry awards, including the 2000 Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. She is a publishing, writing, and editing consultant (www.aprilossmann.com), and teaches poetry in private tutorials and at The Writer’s Center in White River Junction, VT. She has also taught at Lebanon College and the University of Maine at Farmington and was executive director of Alice James Books from 2000 -2008. She lives in Post Mills, VT.

Peter Waldor was born in Newark, New Jersey.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For the past twenty years Waldor has worked in the insurance business in northern New Jersey where he lives with his wife and three children. Waldor’s poetry has appeared in many magazines (both in print and on-line) such as Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and Mothering Magazine. Waldor’s book of poetry, Door to a Noisy Room, was published by Alice James Books in January, 2008.

Pamela (Jody) Stewart was born in Boston. She received her BA from Goddard College ADP and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Among her publications are four poetry chapbooks and five full-length volumes of poems: The St. Vlas Elegies (L’Epervier Press, 1977), Cascades (L’Epervier Press, 1979), Nightblind (Ion Books/Raccoon, 1985), Infrequent Mysteries (Alice James Book, 1991), and The Red Window (University of Georgia Press, 1997). A chapbook, The Ghost Farm will be published by Pleasure Boat Studio in the spring of 2010. Jody has been included in the Pushcart Anthologies twice, won American Poetry Review’s first prize for Best Poems of 1980, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hawthorndon Fellowship and an MCC grant. She met her current husband Ed Cothey while traveling in Cornwall, UK. They returned to the States in 1990 to Hawley, MA and formed Tregellys Farm. Jody is working on a New and Selected volume.

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

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!

I’m tired, still recovering from my run-in with the new world pandemic (though everlastingly grateful to have apparently not infected the boys), and cannot imagine spending one more minute on this poem this week.  I have no perspective on its worth at all right now, just hope it’s worth reading:

{poof!}

My second reading this week, this time without the 3-ring circus of my kids, was super.  Some friends who’d never been to a poetry reading before came, so it was fun to introduce them to the experience and demonstrate that it’s not that scary after all.  And I enjoyed the mix of themes and styles that resulted by reading with Kim Rogers.  (We’re doing it again in November, this time as part of the Green Street Poetry Series in Northampton.)  AND I sold a few chapbooks, to people I don’t even know, which is new and different and wild.

But all that public contact came at a price.  Starting to feel better today, definitely didn’t catch the worst flu bug around, but being sick and still having to be the mama doesn’t leave me room for anything else at the end of the day.  Especially when the kids zero in on my weakness and cling ever more, my pint-size personal Chinese handcuffs.

With a lot of luck I’ll complete a new poem this weekend along with some books.  And maybe that will prove to be not so far out of the realms of reality as it sounds.  Rain days are good for hunkering down and getting things done and we’re experiencing a monsoon of rain this weekend — some editor of some journal once said that every time it rained he’d end up with a slush pile of rain poems for days thereafter. So I guess the key is not not writing a rain poem, but holding on to it for a while and submitting it during a heat wave, when rain will seem like nirvana.

What a whirlwind of a weekend!

Even though I was tethered to a table all day Saturday during the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, I had a grand time.  Unlike some literary festivals where folks ignore the book tables in droves, MassPo is all about poetry & poets, and poets love books, so I was able to chat with a number of interesting people, including

• one poet who read a blog post I wrote last year about enjoying her book — what a thrill that was! I always think I’m sending these posts into the ether, so it never fails to surprise me when their subjects come upon them!  Which then makes me wish I had written more cogent & detailed posts re: my admiration in the first place.
• two poets I know & admire from their blogs & ReadWritePoem — meeting online friends in person can be a gamble, but Carolee & Jill were every bit as wonderful & generous face to face as they are electronically.  I hope we can meet up again before too long.
• Joan Houlihan, who is a HOOT!  I adore her.

Now I have to wait an entire year for the festival to come back around again…hopefully next October I’ll be able to participate a bit more.

*

Also this weekend, last night in fact, was my chapbook release party.  Wow.  I’m so thankful for the nice crowd of good friends that came out on a cold & wet autumn night at the tail end of a busy weekend to help me celebrate.  And I’m grateful it was a patient crowd:  I brought the boys for this first big event, and that added quite the element of unpredictability to the poetry reading!  I’m pretty sure none can say they’ve ever been to a reading like this one before…and nor will they ever again.  Look for some photographs of this singular evening soon, right here, and you’ll see what I mean!  Too bad I didn’t think to have the reading filmed for posterity — with Aidan & Vincent’s assistance, it was, um, quite a night.

In the meantime, I have another reading this Wednesday night, with the ferociously talented Kimberley Ann Rogers…this time sans children.  Because we all could use a night off from time to time.