Well, that was fun, wasn’t it!


For April is Poetry Month, I posted on my Facebook page one poem a day, for each day in April. Because of the attention-deficit nature of Facebook participants (I include myself), I included only a fragment of the poem, with the idealistic hope that particularly motivated readers would seek out the full poem for savoring. There is this device called Google. And, for now at least, there are still books.

This was the order I imposed on April.

Since April is National Poetry Month, for the nation of the United States, I leaned where possible to American poets -- 26 out of 29. (The final post directed Facebook readers to this blog post.) I count T.S. Eliot as half-American because he was born and raised in St. Louis and didn’t become a British citizen until he was 39. Other British-American hybrids, but in the other direction (grew up there, moved here) are Judith Barrington and Denise Levertov. I included St. Louis poets because St. Louis is a city of poets. Also, I am from there. As are T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Joseph Stanton, Sara Teasdale, and Maya Angelou.

All poems were originally written in English. I favored contemporary poets, and when possible, living poets (who could benefit from your patronage). In the spirit of VIDA, I tried to ensure a gender balance (15 women, 14 men!) I leaned toward poems about poetry, writing or other art forms; I figured that was more user-friendly and conducive to the theme. For special days (e.g., the anniversary of the Civil War, Shakespeare’s birthday, Good Friday), I went with the best pertinent fragment. For birthdays, I let the birthday girl have her pick. And yes, I threw in a few poets because in addition to being gifted, entertaining, generous souls, they are also pals (Judith Barrington, Matthew Olzmann, Joseph Stanton.) The full list follows with the key:
A = American
M = Modern
C = Contemporary
In bold face – alive and writing. Google them! Buy their books, go see them at readings!

Maya Angelou – A, C – Phenomenal Woman
Judith Barrington – ½ A, C – The Musicians’ Seamounts
Charles Bukowski – A, M – So you want to be a writer
Billy Collins – A, C – The Norton Anthology of English Literature
e.e. cummings – A, M – somewhere I have never travelled
Emily Dickinson -- A -- Hope
Stephen Dunn – A, C – Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point
Lynn Emmanuel – A, C -- The Politics of Narrative: Why I am a Poet
T.S. Eliot – ½ A, M – The Waste Land
Deborah Garrison – A, C – A Working Girl Can’t Win
Jonathan Holden – A, C – How to Play Night Baseball
Marie Howe – A, C – The Moment
Clive James – C, L – Whitman and the Moth
Julia Spicher Kasdorf – A, C – First Gestures
Denise Levertov -- ½ A, C – Come Into Animal Presence
Thomas Lynch – A, C – Refusing at Fifty-Two to Write Sonnets
Heather McHugh – A, C – A Ghazal for the Better-Unbegun
Marianne Moore – A, M – Poetry
Matthew Olzmann – A, C – Previous Theories of the Body
Dorothy Parker – A, M -- Comment
Kay Ryan – A, C -- quote from her interview in the Wall Street Journal, regarding poetry, as the Pulitzer winner this year
Christina Georgina Rossetti – Good Friday
Joseph Stanton – A, C – Vermeer’s “A Woman Weighing Gold”
Mark Strand – A, C – Eating Poetry
Mary Jo Salter – A, C – John Lennon
Sara Teasdale – A, M – Advice to a Girl
William Shakespeare – Sonnet 7
Walt Whitman – A – The Uprising
Paul Zarzyski -- A, C – Matched Pairs

What are your favorites?  Let me know.  And I'll see you on Facebook next April.

Labels: American poetry, April is Poetry Month

posted by Elizabeth at 9:58 AM   0 Comments

Having quit my day job, I find myself busier than ever, working as a contractor, and finishing the polish on my novel, "Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me."  I did chance to read this wonderful compilation, reviewed below.  In the meantime, be sure to follow my "April is Poetry Month" parade of daily poems in fragments on Facebook.


Jobs have been much on everyone’s mind this year – losing them, finding them, wishing some would be created, while wishing others would succumb to a quiet unlamented death. Lots of us, for better or worse, have had the opportunity to meditate on the difference between making a good living and making a good life and just in time to help us along these meditations comes a collection of essays called "Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit."

He has compiled a book that is “a picture of work in America. Untold sums of people have worked at all the jobs these writers have. And here were the best storytellers in the country giving voice to the dynamics of that work, of trading their time to get coffee and rent and keep a car going.”

These are all Southern writers, and the South has a tradition of storytelling. Wanting to be a writer, writing, becoming a writer -- all these stages of development in a writer’s life are too often regarded as elitist, fancy-pants ambitions and I think the word “Southern” throws a dose of humility into the presentation. Because humility is here aplenty. John Grisham's is the biggest name (other well-known ones are Rick Bragg, Pat Conroy, Winston Groom and Connie May Fowler) and he is the only one to have left behind what is considered a “profession” to become a full-time writer.

Others in the collection served as a high school guidance counselor, a mail carrier, a telemarketer. Many of the jobs are tedious and difficult, but all are recounted with respect. Some jobs involved daily encounters with dung, danger and death: A factory worker is made high and sick by the fumes of the lacquer into which he dips boat paddle oars all through the night shift. A railroad lineman picks bodies of dead animals off the tracks. A Seaman First Class steams across the Pacific towards Vietnam. A pulpwooder wades through the cottonmouth-laden debris left behind by a bulldozer to salvage the remains because “To leave the pulpwood piled on the land would be like burning money on the ground.” Even though, Rick Bragg adds, “I had never met a pulpwooder who had all his fingers and his toes.”

Carpenter Barb Johnson also lost a piece of a finger. But that was perhaps the least of her losses.

"Then Hurricane Katrina ate my carpentry shop and everything in it,” she writes in her piece “For the Good Lies,” “and I got a new story, that's for sure. That new story was almost about how I threw myself into rebuilding my business, working ceaselessly to regain the ground I'd lost. It eventually became clear that would be impossible. So it didn't happen in an instant. Not like you see in the movies, where ta-da! someone has an instantaneous transformation. It was a long, slow, wave goodbye. Letting go of the idea of something is much more difficult than letting go of the thing itself. But once I had cleared out the notion that I was always going to be a carpenter, the new story was perfectly obvious to me. I threw myself into writing ...”

Housewife and mother Janis Owens also threw herself into writing: “From '83 till '96, I wrote at least four hours a day, and sometimes round the clock, if the plot was cooking and [her young daughters] otherwise occupied. My college typewriter had died a natural death and I had no means to replace it, and for the first few years wrote in long hand, on yellow legal pads, from the first page to the cardboard, then flipped it and wrote on the back.”

So unassuming (“from the first page to the cardboard”) and quiet is Owens that throughout her long apprenticeship to the craft, no one in her modest, small-town life understands or cares that she is writing. On the long-awaited day when she finally is able to tell a neighbor that she sold her book, her neighbor’s reply is “You mean, like, at a garage sale?”

Similar to this is Tim Gautreaux’s account of his “short stint as an AM radio announcer on a little south Louisiana 500 watt station back in the mid-1960s.” The loneliness of the “dead stop” Sunday afternoons gnaws at him. For the sake of someone to talk to, he offers a free Beatles album, a gift certificate to a local café, and finally the cash in his own wallet to “the next caller.” No one ever calls.

But, as he writes as the conclusion of his piece “When Nobody Listens,” that job prepared him for the reality of his true calling, the “revising and revising, mailing a story dozens of times, figuring out the art of writing, making what I wanted to say into what people consented to hear, and failing again and again. But I was used to that. Being ignored was like announcing on small-town radio, and I never gave up, because I’d realized on a Sunday afternoon a long time ago that failure is not a problem. Not trying is.”

Agreed.

Treat yourselves to these stories. They are gems of gratitude. They are testimonies to resilience. And as for the difference between making a good living and making a good life, they overwhelming favor life.

Labels: day jobs, Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, writing

posted by Elizabeth at 10:39 AM   1 Comments