Ugh. Here it comes…

I have been a bad blogger (although that word still makes me cringe a little; I prefer to think of this as a compendium of thoughts, not always coherent or terribly insightful, but useful to me, and I hope at least a little interesting to you). I have definitely been a bad writer.

However, I have been a good worker, moving up in the job world from a part-time position to a full-time one…WITH benefits (cue the triumphant horns). I have also been a good reader. With my new Nook, I have been reading like a fiend, trying (and failing) to keep up with both my physical hold queue and my virtual one at my local library.

Books! Books!! BOOKS!!!

And I have also been a very, very, very good buyer of books, both e-books and book-books. Here’s just a sampling of the books I’ve bought in the past eight weeks:

Moving Thoughts

my little sister made these sweet cupcakes

The other day, a coworker, knowing that I moved from California to New York, asked me about my experience. He and his girlfriend are considering moving from New York to Florida, and he wanted some firsthand knowledge. This got me thinking. It’s been almost two years since my move (!!), but I haven’t really reflected too much, at least here, about how the move has gone, how it’s affected me and my relationships with others, and whether I’d do it again.

Since we’re all still thinking about the new year and what it holds for each of us (beyond the feverish, resolution-fueled exercising I see at the gym and yoga studio), I figure this deserves some attention. Here’s what I’ve learned in the past year and a half (not in any particular order):

Save up.

If you’re considering moving to a new city and you don’t already have a job lined up, wait. Stop. Save. As much as you can, but I’m recommending at least enough to cover your expenses for six to nine months. I’d never been unemployed for an extended period of time before I moved to New York, and I’d never really struggled to find work, so I naively thought that it would take me three to six months TOPS to find a new job.

Boy was I mistaken. It took me a full year, about a thousand job applications, and interviews with three companies (the only ones who responded), to find a part-time entry-level customer service job. Whose salary is not even close to what I was making at my previous job.

Of course my search was hindered by the worst national job market in decades, a failing economy, and an extremely competitive under-employed labor pool in New York City, but I wish I’d really heeded all those friends and family members who expressed serious reservations about my plans to leave a good job without having a new one in place. Especially since NYC is probably the most expensive city in the US.

You Are Here: On The Road to A Finished Collection

indeed...

I submitted my last round of entries for first book prizes this past month, with version 3 of Harvest (as it is currently titled) and immediately began rewrites. Such is my revision process. Unless I’m totally sick of a thing or I think it’s hit the glory spot (very rare), I’m constantly revising poems. And also manuscripts.

There was one last set of contests whose deadlines were Oct. 31st or Nov. 1st and I thought I could push through and get one more revision out, but it was not to be. On deadline days, I was (and still am) up to my elbows in versions of versions, cutting poems, putting others back in, changing poem order, moving lines around. One of the things I loved about seeing Sharon Olds read recently (other than her sheer awesomeness) was her announcement that she’d just been revising the sheaf of papers in her hand…on the subway ride over. I thought, wow, that is hard-core, I need to be that hard-core.

With the holidays coming up, I’m focusing on revisions, no submissions, tooling and retooling my great sheaf of papers, so I thought now was as good a time to reflect on a year’s (plus) hard work, mental tomfoolery, and the awesomeness of CityBoy’s workhorse printer.

In the past year (starting in January 2010), I sent my manuscript, in various forms, to eight book contests:

Colorado Prize for Poetry
Kundiman Poetry Prize
Main Street Rag Annual Poetry Book Award

Barrow Street Press 2010 Book Contest
Crab Orchard 2010 First Book Award
Pearl Poetry Prize

Kinereth Gensler Awards / Alice James Books
Philip Levine Prize in Poetry

…spending just under $200 in reading fees, and probably another $50 in postage and copying charges, and churning through at least three reams of paper.

I’m still waiting to hear from Barrow Street and the last three, since I just sent those in in September. I did not win any of the others (no big surprise), or come very close, though I did get a very nice mention in my Crab Orchard rejection that I was a semifinalist. Out of how many semifinalists, I don’t know. But knowing that someone liked the poems, even just a tiny bit, was heartening.

Oh, and I did get a few subscriptions to journals and the odd book or two from some of the presses, which was quite nice and much appreciated. I always love getting a thick envelope in the mail. I think it goes back to college admissions days, when a big fat envelope meant that all your dreams were going to be answered (you can figure out what a skinny form letter did -and does- to one’s ego).

There is another batch of four to six contests I may add to my rotation next year (I missed a couple of key deadlines) but I do feel like I’m getting the hang of this part of the po’ biz. Here’s a couple of things I learned over the course of the year:

1. You’re going to need a lot of paper. A lot, a lot, a lot.

2. And a very patient partner who doesn’t mind coming home to stacks of paper spread all over his very tiny living space which he can’t move or touch or even look at, under pain of death (did I mention CityBoy and I share a 500-odd square foot studio?). CityBoy is a good man, a prince among men.

3. And a lot of patience for yourself. There will be days when you hate everything you’ve ever written and, picking up the other beautifully published and much admired works you possess in your poetry library, lament the fact that you’re even trying to do this thing. Are you really as good as Dorianne Laux? Mark Doty? Marie Howe?

4. The answer is always “yes” or “I will be.”

5. You’re also going to need friends. Good, poetry-reading friends who don’t mind being sent some weighty tome of words and hounded for their feedback. Because they will see things you can’t. Or echo that niggling bit of yourself saying, yeah, this poem doesn’t really work, even though I like this line or that image. They will ask the dreaded question:  “so what?”

6. And something else to do or see or taste or feel on those days when it’s not coming easily, the poem or the rewrite or the poem order. You’re going to need to walk your neighborhood, see movies, look at art, ride the subway, go to the grocery store, eat that big salty bowl of ramen at your favorite place with the go-go dancer waiters. Because that’s where the next poem, the next image, the next “holy shit” moment is waiting. Right there.

7. And then you’re going to have to get right back to work. Sit your ass in the chair and think and imagine and form words and dream. I know, I said it, dream. But that’s really all this is. You distilling your best self into these dreamed-up words, these lines and images that make you smile and do the fist pump dance and make you love language again and again and again. Because, in spite of what you do to pay the bills, this is who you are and this is what you do.

So, I am here…with one manuscript in progress, currently 62 pages (with some creative margining), 46 poems, 3 sections. Even now, flipping through the pages to tally them up, I’m making mental changes (That poem’s still in there? Really?) (Three sections? Hmm…), but that’s part of the joy of being in charge. You make the calls, you say what goes.

Rock on, peeps, and wish me the luck of the wolf.

- Jho

The Making of a Manuscript: The Table of Contents

I never thought I would get so jazzed seeing a Table of Contents. Of course, when it’s your own, things get a little more interesting.

The product of at least seven years of writing (good lord!), my manuscript has so far boiled down to 36 poems, 54 pages, and god only knows how many commas, periods and dashes. I’m particularly fond of dashes, these ones —, not these ones -.

I’m also especially enamored of verbs, as my writer friends out there know. These sprang up again and again: bristle, scuff, slough, swathe, sprout, startle. I ended up pruning where I could, swapping verbs for other, more unexpected ones.

The Making of a Manuscript: The Title

I’ve been hard at work on my manuscript, in anticipation of the Jan. 15th deadline for the Kundiman Poetry Prize, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what to include, how to order it, whether I should break it into sections, and most of all, what to call it.  I’ve got a couple of ideas:

The blogosphere (are people still calling it that? I’m so out of touch.) advises choosing, as your manuscript title, the title of a particularly relevant poem from your collection, or a line from said poem, or some other line/word that communicates something about your collection.  I’ve been surveying the poetry books I own and, almost all of the time, the book title comes from a poem in the book.

I’ve Got a Stack Thiiiiiiis Big

My writing desk

I’m doing it. I’m finally, really, truly going to get my manuscript together and attempt to publish it. Of course, this works differently in the poetry world than, say, the fiction world. There’s some money in fiction, mostly thrown at the big muckity-mucks, the Dan Browns, Patricia Cornwells and Stephanie Meyerses of the Bestseller Lists, and maybe a teeny, tiny, grain-of-sand-sized bit for the major players in the po’ biz (as those in the know ironically call it). But for those of us unknowns and virtual unknowns, it’s pocket change, amounting to what my Upper East Side neighbors spend a month (maybe even a week) on their nannies.

There’s just not enough of an audience. There are no blockbusters. No one’s looking to cast the heroine in Cecilia Woloch’s excellent new book Carpathia. (Although with that title, don’t you kind of wish they were?)

So it’s a labor of love and perseverance. The desire to share your meticulously crafted and recrafted words with a larger world than your mom, your boyfriend and your best writer friends.