Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

These days, most people who make a living from writing don’t make their living from writing. What I mean is that most people who earn enough money to live off of from being writers don’t earn that money exclusively from peddling words: they bring home their bread by teaching or speaking in some other capacity in public. To get those gigs, however, it is not enough to be a writer: you must be a Writing Expert (preferably with a TM). The best way to establish yourself as a Writing Expert (TM) is to prescribe certain ways of living and writing. To get those ways accepted, they should have a veneer of common sense and a slight outsider-edge. (After all, what’s a creative writing class good for if it doesn’t give its students a frisson of rebellion?)

An excellent example of How to Be a Writing Expert (TM) is this article from an “assistant lecturer in Creative Writing”: Does a room of one’s own really help you write a great novel? Sure it totally misses the point about Woolf’s work by ignoring the fact that historically women have not had the time, space, or independence which allows one to think and put words on paper, but it certainly serves the purpose of establishing Matt Shoard as an authority on how people ought to write!

Here’s the thing: comfort breeds complacency; rural bliss breeds The Lost Symbol . . . Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls “an occasional revelation”.

Ah yes, the good old Romantic valorisation of poverty. If one person who wasn’t miserable wrote poorly, then misery must be a necessity for decent writing! (Actually, I have it on very good authority that China Miéville has a lovely flat, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment.)

What’s really impressive here is how the “assistant lecturer in Creative Writing” manages to position himself in opposition to the fluffy bourgeois (who would want to have a retreat in the countryside) without actually having to suffer the loss of control over one’s life that poverty entails:

Personally, I like to hold “hungry” creative writing seminars through lunch, far from a vending machine, at the cold end of campus with the heating down. You can almost see Dan Brown leaving and David Foster Wallace taking his place. “I want to smell the breath of a stranger as he speaks my name,” wrote one student this week. They’re no more prolific, but they’re gutsier. Discomfort cures overwriting.

Oh the heroic young man, holding off from his trip to the cafeteria until he has finished his day’s writing! How brave! How, like, real! (I hope none of his students have trouble with hypoglycemia.)

I’d rather not smell the breath of a stranger speaking my name because when they’re that close, they’re that much closer to attacking me. Because I am a woman, I walk through the world (even if I’m just running to the store at 10 pm for a bottle of whiskey) with that discomfort. Because I am an Aspie, I hear all the time that I need to be “cured”, that my way of thinking and approaching the world is invalid. That is real discomfort. These seminars-before-eating and cheap flats (if chosen) are at best self-indulgence, at worst appropriation of the very real struggles of the oppressed.

Oh well, at least we agree about coffee. Too many writers on this side of the Atlantic try to make due with tea, and that’s just wrong. (See, I’m an expert too. Hire me?)

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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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