Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Fiction

“The Elegant Maru” in Christmas in Outer Space from WhortleBerry Press

Sleeping Beauty Speaks Out in Expanded Horizons, Issue 11 (September 2009)

Woman Without Time in Colored Chalk, Issue 8 (May 31, 2009)

“Death of an Eikaiwa” in The Death Mook from Vignette Press

Essays

“Afterword: Lysis.” in [+!]. August 2009. p. 85-87

Feminist or Not: Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva (Not! Side) in Sirens Magazine. July 2009.

Review of Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House edited by Brenda Shaugnessy and CJ Evans in Galatea Resurrects 12. May 2009.

Poetry

Magdalene & the Mermaids, reviewed

• by Julia Glassman at Feministe
• by Kristin Conrad at Feminist Review
• by Gautami Tripathy at Everything Distils Into Reading

“Instructions to a Rapist”, “Subspecies Variation”, and “The Weimar Pizzeria” in The Smoking Poet (Winter 2009/10)
Profile and poems: These Unbroken Bones, On Foot, Train Sound Triptych, Layers & Plates, First Cicada Death, Red Rock Gorge, Morning in Xinxiang, and In Nanyang at Outsider Writers

Kannon & the Pendulum in Blue Fifth Review (Fall 2009)

Crossing the Manhattan Bridge, Justice, First Not Sex, Over River, Flash Flood, August Moon, and Inch Beach in Blue Turtle Crossing, Fall Edition (October 2009)
CompuSutra in EOAGH 5 (October 2009)

“Two Visions of the Finite in Seattle” in Gloom Cupboard 106 (September 2009)
Seized in Incantations in Blue (September 2009)

Sulaymaniyah and Memory– a Rainy Night in As Per La Roman De La Rose, For Example, Edited by Arpine Konyalian Grenier for Big Bridge 14 (August 2009)

Cotton Sweatshirt in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol I. Issues 1-2 (August 2009)

Oyster\World\Woman and Phalanges in wunderkammer, collection week (June-July 2009)

Eugene, OR in Black Oak Presents (Summer 2009)

Summer’s Orders in qarrtsiluni, Economy Issue (June-Aug 2009)
Carpal REM in Ottawa Arts Review (June 2009)

Queen of Wands and Old Soul Mates in Listenlight, Issue 19 (Spring 2009)

Survivors: Rabbits, Butterfly, and Koi in Galatea Resurrects, Issue 12 (May 2009), The Critic Writes Poems

Beyond Organic Groceries in Faraway Journal, Volume 3, Issue 2 (Spring 2009)

Losing Season in Slog (March 20, 2009)

Season/al Master/ed in Aquila Review, Volume 2 (Spring 2009)

Henan Highway Stretch in foam:e, Issue 6 (March 2009)

Alisha Marie, Cave of Real (Deep, Consumer Society, Cul-de-sac, and Dawn Marks in wheelhouse magazine, Issue 7 (Winter/Spring 2009)

“Unforming: a Five Poem Series” in WomenWriters.net (January 2009)

“Chant for the Whole”, “Titanoboa cerrejonensis”, and “Zales/Jared/Kay” in Counterexample
Poetics (February 2009)

“An Airport of Three Years Ago”, “Eight of Wands”, “Le Soleil”, and “The World in Tarot” in viviparous blenny, Volume 1 (January 2009)

“Erratic & Growth” in Literary Mary, Issue 1 (January 2009)

Last night, I finally saw Bright Star on its last night at the Queen’s Film Theatre. The movie was a fiction, but a lovely one, about the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. From the opening in which we saw her needlework up close, it was clear that this was not the poet’s story but hers. Overall, though I would have liked to have seen Brawne’s fashion work defended in terms of being artistic (not merely as having more fans and bringing in more income than the men’s poetry), the film was well-written. Despite its focus on Fanny, the film did make clear  John’s economic plight and the contrast between it and the situation of his wealthier artistic friends. There was also no suggestion whatsoever that critics of Endymion had killed him. Rather, the first crisis of his illness coming after he road on the outside of a carriage on a rainy winter’s night. Jane Campion’s fiction, in other words, is more accurate than Shelley’s. She also made good use of the letters and poems, with the former being foregrounded (both in the plot and the cinematography) and the latter appearing at times in bits and pieces or else recited after composition.

The movie did, however, stumble in a few places.  A tendency to linger on certain shots made it slightly unbalanced. Worse, these images were terribly cliche: Fanny lying on her bed or amongst flowers in agony or ecstasy, our heroine in various postures bathed in soft light filtered through a window. Even if these visuals were not cliche, they would have become so by the end of the film given how often they were repeated. Perhaps these were failed attempts at developing visual leitmotifs.

As for the acting, Abbie Cornish’s performance as Fanny was flawless, and most of the supporting cast played their parts admirably well. Ben Whishaw as Keats, however, came across at times as too stiff and too melancholy.

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I have two main reasons for posting one-poem reviews on this blog:

1. Discussion of poetry should center poetry. Our ideas about poetry should not be more important than our poems. This is not to say that abstractions and theories should be avoided, only that if they become unmoored from poetry, that if we never begin our thoughts about poetry with a poem, then we have given up saying something about poetry for saying something “important”. This will never result in something important about poetry, though it may in fact result in something important.

2. I want to bring more attention to work that appears online. This is for both the writers and the readers. Poets who publish online are sometimes left to wonder if people are really reading their work: even if they see statistics on how many impressions a page gets, that doesn’t tell them how many people are actually pausing to read rather than merely skimming (a common mode on on the Internet). I want poets to know that someone is paying attention. I also want to inform readers about smaller online journals they may not otherwise hear about. (I’ve received a few emails and comments that show I’ve successful on both points.)

These two goals might make it seem that I would only write positive reviews. While I do try to focus on the positive, however, I do not do so one hundred percent. Why?

• No poem is perfect. Part of paying attention is looking for the flaws and limits of a piece. (In the best poems, these flaws will be part of their value.)
• Bad poems sometimes deserve to be called out, especially if they are illustrative of a common problem or nasty attitude. In the former case, discussing the issue may improve poems later on. As for the latter, I do admit to being a touch vindictive on occasion. 

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Recent online authorial meltdowns over less-than-stellar reviews have brought me back to the question of what the appropriate way for an author to respond to a review is. I still remember my high school journalism teacher telling us that when someone wrote a letter criticizing our work we should print it without comment and trust readers to be intelligent enough to decide for themselves if the critique was fair. There is something appealing in applying that idea to book reviews—an appeal to our better selves and to what we as authors hope for in an audience.

That said, book reviews occur in a different context from letters to the editor: whereas the latter are read by someone who has already chosen to pick up the paper, the former may influence the choice to pick up the book (though a book that receives negative reviews will probably sell more copies than a book that isn’t reviewed at all: name familiarity does play a role). Thus, it may be a bit more reasonable for an author to respond to a review that they feel is unfair or untrue.

But what are the bounds of an acceptable response?

1. Debate the points made by the critic, not the critic’s status or authority. Alice Hoffman asked who Roberta Silman was. I’ve had someone respond to a negative review of one of his poems by saying that I’d never written a memorable line of poetry in my life, which if true wouldn’t have had any impact on whether my critique of his work was fair. These sort of maneuvers don’t advance the discussion and are a sort of silencing: don’t go after me, or I’ll use my higher status to hurt you.
2. Don’t encourage other people to join in attacking the critic. This is a variant of the status argument: I will hurt you by bringing other people (my fans, since I’m more popular than you are) to say nasty things. No matter how thick your skin, it takes time to go through a deluge of emails, phone calls, or even blog comments.
3. If you feel the need to rant, do so but it in private. Have a friend you can complain to, preferably over a glass of whiskey. If this friend can double as someone to check your public response for constructiveness, that’s even better. Ranting can help get it out of your system, but screaming at people doesn’t help advance the conversation about literature.

What other guidelines should an author who responds to a review follow? Or do you think writers should never reply?

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Lately I’ve been writing a lot of negative statements about poems and their publishers. That isn’t something I enjoy, and it isn’t really what I’m about. Yes, my critiques come from a place of love (of poetry), but that isn’t always apparent and, frankly, this sort of criticism isn’t fun.

To help me get out of this rut, I’d like to ask all of you to leave a comment with a link to a poem you enjoy. I’ll even sweeten the deal by choosing one person who comments on this post by Friday to receive a copy of my book, Magdalene & the Mermaids. (If you’re interested in this, be sure to leave a valid email so that I can contact you.)

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