a/POC/a/LIPS
Really, if it weren't for Shelby, none of this would have happened …
Beethoven's "9th," Dvorak's "New Word," and Freddie Redd's soundtrack, "The Connection," have been on the stereo all night, endless looped playback. Shelby and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, formatting the last touches my poetry so we could send it out into the void. We are dazed, blood-shot, happy it is Halloween; the last possible day to send out poetry in October.
It took us all weekend to beat a book into submission. The hardest part was the title. Actually, looking back, this really isn't a surprise. It took me hours and hours just to pick the colors for this website ("but everyone will see it and how perturbing if the colors make their eyes bleed?") Still, I wonder, why is that? I was cranking out sonnets over the weekend, but challenge me with a title that sums up the gist of the book and I worry into the pre-dawn light with a pen and paper and terrible titles like:
a
POC
a
LIPS
Yes! Even I wouldn't pick up a book titled like that and I've gone home with one of the worse translations of Jean Genet I've ever seen. If that wasn't embarrassing enough I thought I was on a roll with:
ASS
FIX
Y
ATE
Move over e.e. cummings! Finally we had a 60-page manuscript called, "WHEN THE WAVES TAKE ME" submitted to The APR/ Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Truman State University Press – T. S. Eliot Prize and Elixir Press Poetry Book Awards. These were all contests that met the October 31st deadline. As for the endless November contests? That chaos starts tomorrow, my friends.
I also submitted three poems, CELLO, GAPE and SNAZZ to James Hearst Poetry Prize/ North American Review judged by super star Joy Harjo.
I would like to say I can now go back to bed. I'd like to say sleeping the next 16 hours away will get me back into the pink of things. Yes, but it is a mere 2 hours or so before work and dirty adult diapers don't change themselves, you know. Ah, the glories of nurse aiding. Every time I hear some academic flunky complain about their students or the drag it is having to give mid-terms since it gets in the way of their writing, I just laugh. To have students! To be able to give mid-terms! Oh frabjous day, kaloo, kalay.
October 31st, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Yes, you were getting a little slap happy with the title ideas as the evening wore on
. Still, I’m thrilled to see something pulled together - and looking and sounding so very very fine, if I may say so! You can call on Cruel Mistress Shelby’s Ruthless Editing and Typesetting Service any day, baby (well, maybe after a few days to get the chaos that’s evolved while we were hunched over the kitchen table under control!)
Here’s to you –
October 31st, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Zachary,
Wow. You’re really throwing your hat into the ring! I should be sending out too, but I’m going to wait for the late late fall contests and the upcoming spring. Good luck!
When the Waves Take Me: I dig the title. Now of course, I expect to read poems trumpeting ocean images a la Derek Walcott.
Titles are freaking hard. For poems and for collections. For the longest time the title of my mss was “Stars are the Slowest Lightning” but then I realized the title was too pretentious. It screamed Poetry. Yuck. So I ditched the title and struggled for months to come up with a new title. I wasn’t looking for a title that sums up the collection. I don’t think titles should always do that. I wanted to find a title that would pop out on the spine of a book, a title that would catch the reader’s gaze. A beautiful title.
I finally settled on “Asleep Inside an Old Guitar,” which was also the name of my first blog. The title comes from a line from one of my favorite poems in the mss. A villanelle by the way. Well, an altered villanelle form I stole from Donald Justice. The title doesn’t sum up the collection, but I might be too close to the forest to see the trees.
November 2nd, 2005 at 1:22 am
You have groovie news of your own, my friend! Good luck in Guam or New Jersey, or Maine, or whatever blighted part of the country the Colony is in. I am also very curious about the “Stars are the Slowest Lightning” mss. Is this the same book that won the Web Del Sol contest? (by the way, I love the line: “Steal, steal, steal. Distill. Absorb” in your interview) Have I not clicked on the right link on your webpage to find it? Is it sitting in your office somewhere? What became of the poems?