Archive for category Poetry

Screw a bunch of resolutions…

Dec 30

Posted by john in Business of publishing, Poetry, Real Life, Weight Loss, Writing | 1 Comment

Let’s make goals instead. I suck at resolutions, but somehow manage to be pretty goal-oriented. So here are my goals for 2012. At some point I’ll take a look back at last year’s goals and see where I succeeded (number of novels written) and where I failed horribly (weight loss), but this is not that post.

1) Words per day – I’m quitting my day job, so there’s no reason not to ratchet up my productivity. My current goal is 2,000 words per day, or 10,000 words per week. That equates to half a million words in a year, which should give me plenty of fodder to do the 2 Black Knight books I’m contracted to turn in this year, finish the Return to Eden trilogy this year, and work on something else (maybe a fairy tale, maybe a straight thriller). That also leaves a lot of words on the table for short stories, because my books are short, usually under 75,000 words. So I should be able to crank out a lot of product this year, which is pretty key to putting food on the table.

2) Solicit more paid work – not just fiction, but I’m a pretty good non-fiction writer, too. I’ve still got a few contacts in the poker world I can ring up, plus there are several entertainment industry publications that are interested in having me write for them. I’d like to get a couple of articles each month out in the world to help out in the slow months when the fiction dollars aren’t cranking.

3) Return to writing poetry – I haven’t done much poetry in a year or so, but re-launching Red Dirt Review has me itching to write more literary fiction and poetry, so I need to re-train my mind for those particular backflips. And if you haven’t check out the Review yet, give it a shot. There’s some work over there by some amazing poets and short story writers. And submissions are always open.

4) Work on my photography – I got a new camera, now I need to learn how to use it. I want to learn about filmmaking with a DSLR, and I want to learn more about photography, too. My years in lighting design and stage direction have given me a pretty good sense of composition, I just need to get a better handle on the technology.

5) Work out and lose weight – I’m not real healthy right now, and I’ve got to make time to get some of the weight off. It needs to be higher on this list, but whatever switch in my head that makes me want to get up and work out every day hasn’t flipped yet. I did get a couple of workouts in during my week off, but not as many as I would have liked.

That’s what we’re going to start with – what are your goals for the new year?

Out like a lamb, poetry coming in…

Mar 30

Posted by john in Poetry, Writing | 3 Comments

As we pull into the last couple of days of March (just a few hours left to enter my contest for a Kindle!), National Poetry Month is looming on the horizon. To celebrate said celebration, I’m going to participate in Kells’ Poetry Book Giveaway! All you have to do is comment here to enter, and you’re entered! One lucky winner will win a copy of Rhett Iseman Trull’s amazing book, The Real Warnings. The consolation prize will be a copy of my book, Red Dirt Boy, signed by the redneck himself!

Yes, I know the link is to the ebook, but you are registering to win analog editions of both books!

I saw Rhett Iseman Trull read selections from this book last year at an event at the Green Rice Gallery, and it’s simply one of the best books of poetry I’ve ever read. I laughed, I cried, I was in awe of the poems this woman crafted. I liked it so much I quit writing poetry for a month or two because I felt like I couldn’t touch the quality that she nailed in this book. Don’t worry, eventually my ego rose back to the surface and I resumed writing. But I still love the book and think everyone should have one, so leave a comment and you might just get one!

Red Dirt Boy is my second collection of poetry for people who think poetry is for wussies. There’s laughing, shooting, drinking, strippers and even a little dancing scattered through the pages, and I’ll be happy to autograph it for whoever wins. I might even spill a little moonshine on it just to complete the package! So leave a comment, and win a book!

Challenge continues

Apr 5

Posted by john in Poems, Poetry, Writing | 1 Comment

Won’t be hard to keep up with my Poem a Day challenge this week, since I signed on for another month of Just Do It at Theatre Charlotte April 16th. If you’re in town, you should check it out. It’s $5, and a whole fun mishmash of different written stuff, poetry, spoken word, theatre and whatever comes out of the crowd that night. This will be the third one I’ve participated in and I have a great time. The theme this time around is “Sorry seems to be the hardest word.” This is one of the pieces I came up with for the evening. I’m gonna try to come up with three total. I always try to write stuff fresh for the event because as we’ve discussed before, I’m worthless without a deadline, and this gives me another deadline. Lemme know what you think in comments, this is still a work in progress. At least for 11 days, then I perform it.

Apologetic Antecedents

Sorry seems so hard
because it’s just the beginning.
There’s never a “sorry”
then a yank,
a little blood,
and “all done”
like pulling a tooth when you’re eight.

It’s always something painful and awkward
like “sorry I was a dick and screwed your sister
on the washing machine at Thanksgiving
while you were in the kitchen making cranberry sauce”
just to give a possible,
yet completely fictional
example.

Sorry is always the precursor
to something that sucks,
but has to be done,
like putting iodine on a cut,
or breaking up with the girl
that cheated on you with your brother
and his wife
even though she’s all kinds of a freak
and does that thing you like
in bed.

So it’s not the word that’s hard,
it’s what follows.

Poem a Day Challenge

Apr 1

Posted by john in Poems, Poetry, Writing | 2 Comments

For National Poetry Month (yeah, I didn’t know either until I started reading poetry blogs, because apparently I’m a poet now, which while may sound gay as all get-out does not in and of itself mean that I will commence to smoking cloves and I am still far more likely to be found wearing a luchador mask than a beret. That is all) there’s a Poem a Day challenge at Poetic Asides, a Writer’s Digest blog written by Robert Lee Brewer. I’m going to try to keep track and write a poem each day, but let’s be reasonable here, I have a job and a wife and plenty of other bad habits to indulge, so it’s unlikely that I’ll manage one every day, but here’s the first one. Robert’s prompt was loneliness – this is what I got to.

Enforced Solitude

Sitting in the window
looking for you,
watching the birds
and dog run free
while I content myself
with clawing up the new toilet paper roll
and pooping in your new heels
again.
Mondays are the hardest day,
I think,
for cats.

I know, right?

Publication Update

Feb 18

Posted by john in Poetry, Poker, Theatre | 1 Comment

So I’m not counting running one of my own poems in Red Dirt Review as an acceptance, since I happen to be the editor, but you should go over there and check it out regardless. There are some great writers from all over featured this month, and as long as I can stay relatively sober I’ll publish that one a quarterly basis.

But I have had another poem run in The Deuce Coupe this week, and I’m really glad they picked it up, because I felt like I really nailed this one. Sometimes I feel really good about something I’ve written, and sometimes I’m just “meh” about it. This one I really liked right off the bat, but I knew because of some of the imagery I’d have issues getting it picked up. So I was really pleased when it found a home so quickly.

Tonight it’s off to dinner and then Reservoir Dogs, directed by a friend of mine and featuring several others. I’m reviewing it, so I’ll let you know when the review runs. And I had a great recording session last night with Special K, we got two more episodes of the Gambling Tales Podcast in the can and ready to go, so now we can take our time planning the next few. It’s picking up steam, but slowly, so spread the word!

A Plan?

Feb 15

Posted by john in Poetry, Writing | 1 Comment

So since I’m closing submission to the first issue of Red Dirt Review today, I figured I would be spending my evenings this week working on that project. Then Special K reminded me that it’s time to do another recording session for The Gambling Tales Podcast, so that’ll fill in one evening. Then I checked my calendar and saw that there’s a meeting of the Charlotte Writer’s Club Tuesday night, so that’s another evening. And Reservior Dogs opens Thursday, and I’m reviewing it for Charlotte Viewpoint, so another evening is occupied. Just Do It is taking place this Friday at Theatre Charlotte, so that night’s full as well. And there’s a poker game Saturday night. And I’m driving to Atlanta Sunday to get there in time to cover the Sunday Warm-Up for the PokerStars Blog.

Yup, life’s getting pretty much back to normal, which means I’m busier than a one-armed paperhanger. I did manage to get some submissions of my work ready this weekend, and sent a bunch of stuff out. I’ve been using Duotrope’s Digest to search through a bajillion places online that accept poetry, and I’ve started limiting myself a bit. As I get rejections (and a few acceptances) I’ve decided to start only sending out the stuff I feel the best about. I know that seems like a no-brainer, but in the rush to get submissions going, the temptation to send out mediocre product is pretty overwhelming. But that dilutes the brand, and since I am my brand, I need to make every effort not to have stuff out on the world that isn’t my best work. Unless it’s here, because it’s almost acceptable to be mediocre on your own blog. Almost.

So as I clear my current round of submissions, I’m going to focus on sending out fewer packets and making them stronger submissions. I’ve found that when I send out stuff that I feel really good about, it’s just a matter of finding the right market for them. For example, two poems that I wrote and got rejected from their initial 2-3 submissions I still felt were really good poems, so I kept slinging them out there until I found a place where they would stick. Dancing with Fireflies was picked up by Victorian Violet Press, along with a reprint of Gingham, from Returning the Favor.Those should run in their May issue. Now I might be the last person you’d expect to have a poem in something called the Victorian Violet Press, but the stuff they run makes them a very good fit for those particular pieces. And Deuce Coupe has picked up another of my poems, called Death of a Small-Town Sports Hero, which I really like because I think I got the imagery right in there. I’m not sure when it’s running, but it’ll be soon. Their turnaround time on responses and publication is pretty super-fast.

Now both of these poems had been initially rejected by the places I first sent them to, but I really felt good about the pieces, so I kept on plugging. But as I received a few rejection letters this weekend, I started to realize that I had submitted some things that even I didn’t like! So no wonder they weren’t getting picked up. So I created another sub-folder in my Writing folder, labeled “Meh,” for stuff that I’m done with, but I’m just not crazy about.

Oh yeah, folders. That’s how I work on stuff. I tend to hand-write my first drafts, because it just feels better to do it that way, a little more visceral. Then I type it into Word (I save everything as a .doc because some folks can’t open .docx, and it just saves me a step) and put it into a folder labelled Work in Progress. Then I typically let it stew for a day or week or whatever, until I get on an editing binge, and go back over and tweak things. Very, very few pieces do I consider ready to send out after just the second draft. The typing bit always turns into a revision phase as well as a transcription phase, which is probably another subconscious reason for creating the process that way. Even the pieces that I do think are finished after the second revision usually go through one or two passes in that draft.

So once I’ve gone back to a piece in the Work in Progress folder, and polished that turd until it shines, I move it into a folder labeled Ready for Prime Time, which in my head means it’s ready to be submitted. Once it’s submitted, if it’s sent to a place that allows simultaneous submissions (and unless the venue is typically very cool or very fast, I only submit to sim/sub venues) it goes into a folder that reflects that. If I send it to a venue that doesn’t accept sim/subs, it goes into another folder. Then I log the submission into an excel spreadsheet with the title, venue and date submitted. Once I get a response, I update that info and date into the spreadsheet.

If a piece is rejected, I take a look at it again to see if I think it needs more polish, and if I don’t think so, it goes back into the submit file. If it’s accepted, it goes into the Accepted folder. So this whole process takes some time to manage, and sometimes I get carried away in the whirlwind of that mess and forget to write and polish. So I’m going to cut down on my volume of submissions to no more than three submissions per week, and focus on only sending out work that is a solid representation of what I want out in the world with my name on it. After all, I have a blog to post drivel on, right?

But still, if my unspoken goal for the year was to have one piece accepted each month, and I’ve had seven acceptance letters by mid-February, I think we might be doing okay on our plan.

Open Mike

Feb 12

Posted by john in Poems, Poetry | 2 Comments

So last night I went to the monthly Open Mike night at Jackson’s Java hosted by Jonathan Rice of Iodine Poetry Journal, just to check it out and see what I thought. I took several pieces to read and figured I’d gauge the vibe and decide what to read by how things were going. Several people were working the Valentine’s Day thing, so I decided to go in a different direction. I read “Beer Goggles,” which is a piece that currently has found no love from any of the places that I’ve submitted it to, but is very popular whenever I perform it, which just goes to show that what works on the page may have little or no connection to what works in live performance. I also did a piece called “Better Home” from Returning the Favor, which I’m always a little nervous about performing live. It requires me to sing a couple of segments of the poem, and since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket I always feel like I’m taking the audience’s life into my hands when I perform the piece. But both pieces were very well-received, and I sold three books before the night was done, so that was great! I also swapped a book with Jessie for a copy of one of her chapbooks, which is good for both of us.

Here’s a video of “Better Home” that I recorded a few nights ago in my home office.

But I had a good time at the Open Mike and will definitely be back next month. Everyone was very welcoming, very supportive, and generally very good. I was concerned about the quality when I first arrived, because it’s hard to know going in what the level of suck will be at any open mike event, but there were only a few people all night that I thought couldn’t really write, and one of the best ways for them to improve is to be exposed to better writers. Several folks weren’t terribly good performers, but I might be a little bit of a snob there, with 20 years of theatre in my background. But most people were pretty good, and one girl in particular did a slam-style memorized piece that was just beautiful and made me wish I’d done video of the whole night so I could catch her performance.

She was one of only two people of color at the event, and it only reinforced the sense I’m developing about where poetry is sitting today. It seems like white people write their stuff down and read it out loud, while brown people tend to memorize their stuff and perform it. My friend Q is a member of the Charlotte Slam Team, and has been to the National Poetry Slam several times, and he’s one of the best poets I know. But I don’t know that he submits stuff to magazines and websites because I don’t know how much his stuff works in a written format. Watching him perform is fantastic, but if there’s no bridge between slam poetry and traditional written poetry, where is it all going to go? There are a lot of poetry events all around Charlotte every week, but they all seem to happen at clubs (and too late for me on school nights) that cater to a more typically African-American crowd. So I guess here’s my question – is performed poetry a “black thing” nowadays? Does that leave written poetry to be a “white thing?” And where does that leave people like me, white folks who are performers and writers? Is there a middle ground to bring the slam poets and the written poets together?

I hope all that doesn’t get me in John Mayer-esque trouble, but it’s kinda where my head is at with trying to figure out how to make poetry more vital to people’s everyday life.

Headless Chickens

Feb 9

Posted by john in Poetry, Real Life, Writing | 2 Comments

Yeah, that’s what I’m running around like lately. Despite the feminist nature of my wife, and the irrefutable fact that I hold true that men and women should be treated as equals, I seriously live in the Cleaver household. I go to work, bring the paycheck home each week, and when I come home I sit down in the den watching TV, while Suzy cooks dinner and brings it to me. She then sits with me while we eat, and then she cleans up. It’s not the most 21st-century of partnerships, but she takes care of everything in the house, and I go to work. It works for us, so don’t judge until you take a few minutes to think about how really fair the arrangement is. Suzy doesn’t work outside the home unless she wants to do a show. So her job is to keep the house. I go to work, and pick up a fair amount of work on the side, and in exchange for that I don’t have to clean up shit around the house.

Until my wife gets sick and can’t clean up. So now I’m living like most of my friends do – working a full-time job and cleaning house when I get home each night. And let me tell you, this shit gets old fast. Tonight I have a Honey-do list half a page long just to stay on top of things, and if Bonnie hadn’t stayed with us last weekend I don’t think it would have been possible at all. Having someone to do laundry while I was doing dishes let me get ahead, and I’ve managed to (barely) stay there. So my writing time is pretty limited, because when I get home I’m dealing with feeding the two of us, then cleaning up after dinner, then laundry, then at some point I need to make a run to Target to refill a prescription and pick up a couple of things, then maybe late tonight I can sit still long enough to scribble a little. And I understand that this is how single people, or people with working spouses, live all the time, so I’m not asking for sympathy. It’s just an adjustment for me, and I figure that about the time I get used to this, she’ll be healthy again and things will start to get back to normal.

In unrelated news, check out Jessie Carty’s blog for my video of Gingham, which is available in Returning the Favor. I’ve pretty much decided to wait until I sell down to about 10 copies, then order another 30 copies. They come packaged in 15-copy units, so that just seems to make sense to me. Unless there’s another monthly deal at Lulu that makes it more reasonable to buy more copies. But nothing right now, because I don’t have anything in the immediate future that will put me in a position to sell many copies, and I don’t need to have them sitting on the shelf.

Also, Red Dirt Review submissions are open until Monday, so send me an email with some good stuff in there. Bam Bam and Dr. Chako will both be featured in this inaugural issue, so join the cool kids!

Conundrum

Feb 8

Posted by john in Poetry, Writing | 3 Comments

Seems like that’s what adulthood (ick) is all about, right? Questions that you don’t really have an answer for. At least, that’s what a blog is for, anyway. So my current conundrum is book copies. I have 25 copies left of the original print run of Returning the Favor, which I’m pretty happy about. I’ve given a bunch away as Christmas gifts, given a few away in trade at book shows, and sold enough to recoup about 75% of the total printing and ISBN registration costs. I have one reading scheduled for April, and not a lot else in the way of readings coming up. Since I don’t sell more than five or so copies of the book per reading, I think I’m good for a while, but I don’t know how many copies I should keep on hand. What do you guys think? Does anybody out there have any idea how many copies of a book I should keep around? Lulu does a pretty good job of filling orders quickly, so it’s not like I can’t go out and get more with two weeks’ notice.

And while you’re giving me the benefit of your countless wisdom, my poem Deployed has been published over at Camroc Press Review. Check it out. The whole publishing thing is kinda funny. When I first started this escapade, I vaguely dreamed that if I could write one poem per week and maybe in my wildest dreams get one published each month, then I’d have 52 poems and 12 publications under my belt at the end of a year. So far this year I’ve had four poems accepted in the first five weeks of the year, and I’ve churned out way more than one poem per week. So I’m really happy with how that’s going, now I need to see where, if anywhere, it takes me.

Publication Update

Feb 6

Posted by john in Poetry | 1 Comment

My poem Santa Fix, about a dysfunctional Christmas, was recently published in Deuce Coupe. I like this blog/journal because it tends to run edgier stuff, so I’m hoping it will be an outlet for some darker work for me. Not all poetry is pretty, and it’s a great thing to have outlets for the raw material.