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"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." 

~Mark Twain, attributed


We place a lot of emphasis on literacy, and rightly so! But this quotation made me think of how many people read only for functional reasons (work reports, sports scores, etc.) but who don't read for pleasure as well as for information. I know everyone has different passions, and an athlete might say one can't have a full life without sports, and a religious person might say one can't have a full life without church. So I guess it's presumptuous of me to say you can't have a full life without reading for pleasure, just because it's true for me. But I'm gonna say it anyway! So there.


Poem Starter: Write a poem made up of book titles. Here's one I just found in the books in the pile closest to me.

If There Would Be No Light

dark emperor
tap dancing on the roof,
switching on the moon

flicker flash


--Laura Purdie Salas

 

"Flying helicopters has been referred to as the art of falling without hitting the ground--and the same might be said of the ride to publication. It's the art of hanging in during the free fall, keeping your eye on the horizon, and refusing to give up. No matter what."

--Robert B. Robeson (in the Jul/Aug 2011 issue of Writer's Digest)

I'm definitely feeling like this year is a free fall in my writing career. No trade sales yet, dwindling work-for-hire assignments, and a feeling of non-productivity. So I'm just hanging on. Looking forward to fall, always a time of fresh starts. How about you? Are you soaring or falling this year?

 

"Be curious: Who is that woman buying five lemons and two peaches at the grocery counter? What does her purse contain? And what does she dream at night?

Only you, the writer, care. Don't let her disappear out in the parking lot and into oblivion."

--Natalie Goldberg (Writer's Digest article...Sep 2010)

I love this quotation...especially the part about dreaming. We see tiny slivers of each other's lives, and I always find it fascinating to extrapolate from their the important things about people. I may be totally wrong, but that creating of characters, and plots for those characters, is one of my favorite things to do. Of course, I might have it totally, completely wrong! But when I do my creating in poems, whichever friend or stranger was the initial inspiration has no idea anyway. :>)

What do you think?
 

 

To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy . . . is to set our own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances instead of being conditioned by them.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

I'm struggling to be happy lately. I do think happiness is largely a choice you can make. And I'm trying to remind myself of that every day.

I've been struggling mostly because of an assortment of health issues of family and friends. Some issues are enormous parts of my daily life, and others involve more distant family members and online friends. The specter of hospitals, police officers, constant doctor's appointments, cancer treatments, hearing aids, threats to self and others ... Sometimes it feels like one bad news bulletin chasing another right into my heart. 

So I try to remind myself of the good news: I'm a basically healthy person and have a family I love, a house to live in, food to eat, friends to email, and a laptop to write on. Thank god for that laptop. When life feels particularly awful, I feel lucky to be able to escape into my writing. Right now, I'm escaping into several projects:

* a work-for-hire photopoetry book for upper elementary kids

* two collections of short verse about two emotions

* a prose picture book about pirates--dark and funny, I hope

* a chapter book dealing with Goldilocks

* several found poems

* a terza rima for the Poetry Princesses (OK, I haven't actually escaped into that one, but I'm at least thinking about it!)

Occasionally, things reach such a fever pitch with a health situation that the appointments and treatments take over life and it's hard for me to get ANY writing done. But I feel lucky that, for the most part, writing offers me an escape from whatever life throws at me. 

 

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."

--Andre Gide

This is one of my favorite quotations, because I need to remind myself of this frequently with regard to my writing. In my life, I'm up for adventure and change and challenge. But in my writing, I find myself sticking to what's safe all too often.

This week, I'm doing Young Author Conferences all week, and one way I'm risking losing sight of the shore is by using a workshop form that is challenging for the kids. We aim for a certain form, but not formula, and the results are mixed. But when they're good, they're really good! And we all have fun giving it a try (well, except for the occasional kid at the back of the room who wishes we were writing poems via videogame.

Where do you need to lose sight of the shore?

 

I'm under a lot of deadline stress lately, so I thought I'd post a quotation that actually looked at the positive side of stress. Here it is:



That's right. There isn't one. I couldn't find a single quotation extolling the virtues of stress. Dang.

But I did find this about deadlines:

A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.

~ Rita Mae Brown

I'm not sure this applies to me because I have plenty of inspiration on my own, but too many work-for-hire deadlines to leave time for my own writing. Oh well. I will say that I use deadlines all the time for my own projects to help me stay on track. I just know better than to assign myself 6 books in a 3-month period. And usually I know better than to accept that many assignments.

Usually.

Any quotes you especially love about stress or deadlines?

"There is more, not less intensity in plainness, because simple stuff operates without the safety net of the poetical."

--Hugo Williams, Strong Words, 2000

I've been reading many quotations about obscurity, vagueness, mystery, accessibility, etc., and how they relate to poetry. I love poems that I can understand. I want rhythm, imagery, and perfect word choices, of course. Beautiful language is wonderful. But if all that is wrapped up in a poem that makes me go, "Huh?" then I won't go any further with the poem. Maybe I'm just a lazy reader. Or an impatient one. But I want meaning, meaning that's created in two-thirds, at least, by the poet, with me as the reader creating the rest of it. This is why I've never liked nonsense poems for kids--the sounds aren't enough for me. Words carry so much inside them, and I feel like that's wasted somehow when a poem consists of nonsense syllables. And it's why I don't like obscure poems, where the words make sense and there's some mood-setting and/or fantastic imagery, but I also have no idea what the poem or poet is trying to say. When I can read a simple poem, one that tells a narrative or shows an image in clear words, but one that still makes me nod, tear up, laugh out loud, think about something new, think about something familiar in a new way--that's when I feel like I'm in the hands of a master poet who'll take good care of me.

What do you think? I know not everybody agrees with my stance here. If you have a favorite poem--obscure or plain--that you'd like to share an excerpt from, please do! Or just share your opinion:>)

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

--Anaïs Nin


This quote caught my eye, since in my personal life lately, I'm struggling with things said and unsaid. When I read the quotation, I initially thought the ending was going to be, "but what only we can say." In other words, to tell the story only you can tell, as we're always hearing writers and editors say at conferences. But Anais Nin takes it one step farther and challenges us more: Say what we are unable to say. I can interpret that several ways, and they all scare me--that responsibility, that stepping beyond the normal boundaries.

What do you think? Do you write what you can't say?

I'm still processing all my notes and such from IRA! Here are a few gems from the author sessions I went to.

Megan McDonald: Her dad threatened to rip out the very last page of any book brought to the dinner table! [As a fellow reader-at-the-table, I admired the seriousness of that threat!]

Elise Broach: The main challenge of Masterpiece was how to make the two characters, a boy and a beetle, communicate and have an equal relationship.

Tracie Vaughn Zimmer: In poetry, "Content should be master over form!"

The art in Steady Hands has some of her belongings photographed in it. Her dad’s welding gloves, lace from her [I think] wedding dress, a key from her grandparents’ home, etc.

On forcing students to revise poetry: "Poetry is short, so revision isn't tragic."

Paul Janeczko (on A Foot in the Mouth: Poems to Speak, Sing and Shout): The editor first suggested a book of poems for kids to memorize. Janeczko said, “I don’t think so.” Ended up with these poems that are fun to say and MAYBE memorize, if you read them enough.

Chris Raschka (at the end of summarizing his artistic method): “And if it doesn’t work, I throw it away and try again.”

Teacher Nicola Turner and poet Joyce Sidman (who both said so many wonderful, useful things about teaching poetry, but I'm no longer sure who said what!): “Poets bring opposites together in a way that makes perfect sense.”

Jordan Sonnenblick: “What boy readers are most looking for is authenticity and story.”

Annie Barrows (on creating realistic chapter book characters): “My 7-year-old daughter wanted a mirror rather than a window.”

"A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket."

--Naomi Shihab Nye, The Poetry Paper, no. 3, 2006

I love this definition of a poem. And today, Inauguration Day, something about it fills me with hope. I went looking for a quotation about hope this morning, actually, but found this one instead. A quotation about possibilities. Maybe they're the same thing, I don't know. But I kind of feel like the U.S. is a country of hearts open to the sky right now, and we're ready for winds of change and the freshness they bring.

"Having cold water thrown over your dreams is part of being a writer."

--David Wheatley, The Irish Times, October 17, 1995


I know, this quotation is nothing unique. But I'm thinking about it because Hope Vestergaard  and I were chatting yesterday. She mentioned that she was working on a project in the same general topic area as mine, and I said, "Oh no!" And I know another wonderful writer working on a poetry project (which mine is) on the same topic. Ack!

But Hope redirected me, saying it was just a matter of great minds thinking alike. She said she was "...trying not to succumb to the easy lure of publishing negativity this year."

And I know what she means. I generally remain relentlessly upbeat about this industry, despite the terrible odds of finding a publisher and then actually finding enough people to buy the book. But I was glad for the reminder. I've had some bad news recently on the professional front (which I'll share once it's able to go public) and am feeling more uncertain than usual, especially with the hurricane of hysteria over layoffs and reorganizations.

Still, I hate it when I'm with a group of writers and they want to spend an hour moaning and griping over "the state of the industry." Obviously, you have to be aware of it and work as smart as you can. But I'd rather do something productive than get in the rut of looking for failure.

What about you? Are you a griper and you like it? Maybe it's just how you deal with all the bad news? Or if not, do you have any tips for keeping upbeat and positive about this wacky industry?

Photo courtesy of MorgueFile.com

OK, I don't really like it when people use quotations to say their way is the right way to do...anything! It's like quoting the Bible. You can find something to twist around and support any view you like. But...since I'm going away this morning, alone, for a poetry retreat, I did enjoy these two quotations to bolster my feeling of "rightness," my feeling that right now, it's alone time that I need:

"Contact with other people does not lead to art; it leads to conversation."

--Robert Bly, RTE Radio 1


"Poetry, like crime, can only be accomplished in absolute privacy and secrecy."

--Franz Wright, Contemporary Poetry Review


Ha! I don't think these are correct in all cases, but they're clever and made me smile!

Today's post was going to highlight un-nominated-for-the-CYBILS poetry books from a publisher. That didn't go so well. See my mini-rant. So I looked for a quotation to share instead, and the first four words of this quotation fit me so well this morning, I thought maybe it was a sign!

This quotation refers to poetry, but I think it's true of idea-finding in any form.

"You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you."
--Joseph Joubert

I think it's probably more true of reading poetry than it is of other forms, though. Reading poetry requires the reader to bring more to the table, I think. You have to be engaged, and the shape and the meaning of the poem often shift depending on the reader's experiences and moods. What do you think?