#2 + #3 + #4

#2 came on a Tuesday. A message on my machine from Goddard, a low-res program in Vermont.

#3 came at noontime today. I spoke with the director on the phone of Vermont College, which is listed on Atlantic Monthly's top five low-res programs list.

#4 came this afternoon, a message from the new director at New England College in New Hampshire.

These last three are all low-res programs, with Emerson (in Boston) being the only full residency thus far. I applied to half low-res and half regular; we shall see what the fates bring us.

Still a good many applications out. Still a good long time for hair-pulling and forum-obsessing. Fingers crossed. At my bookbinding class last week I was able to say, "Next school year I will begin my MFA." It's true. I have options, cards on the table.

news

- Two poems, "Blood Test" and "What I Won't Say" are up on La Fovea

- Several of my photographs have been published on the Poetry Foundation's blog from the Palm Beach Poetry Festival

- This weekend I received an acceptance packet from Emerson, my first response from the MFA programs.

Sixteen programs to hear from:
- UC-Irvine
- Cornell
- U of MN
- U of MI
- U of MT
- U of Iowa
- Emerson (official acceptance)
- Syracuse
- Florida State University

Low-res:
- Bennington
- Warren Wilson
- Vermont College of Fine Arts
- Goddard College
- University of Alaska Anchorage
- University of Southern Maine
- Pacific University
- Antioch
- New England College

And three other programs to which I've applied, non-degree associated:
- spring Writer-to-Writer workshop with Sherry Quan Lee called "Bookingmaking: Writing to Save Your Life"
- Squaw Valley
- BreadLoaf

palm beach poetry festival

Sharon Olds & me

Please see:

Palm Beach Poetry Festival: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6.

The Carol Connolly Reading Series

The Carol Connolly Reading Series Friday, January 11, 2008 7:30 PM at Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts 6666 E River Rd, Fridley Free and open to the public

Hosted by Anna George Meek


Featuring:


Raised in the south, MOLLY SUTTON KIEFER currently teaches English in Red Wing, Minnesota where she lives with her husband. She received her BA in English at the University of Minnesota, where she is also currently studying for her Master's degree. Her poem "Harry Houdini" can be purchased as a poetry postcard broadside through Yes Press (www.yes-press.com). More information can be found at her website, http://www.mollysuttonkiefer.com/.


EMILY K. BRIGHT the author of Glances Back, a chapbook collection of history and storytelling. Originally from Connecticut, she lived in France and Ghana before settling in Minnesota. Her writing is fascinated by the original landscape we carry with us when we move to a new place. Emily will receive her MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota this spring.
This Carol Connolly Reading is sponsored in part by Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts.

la fovea

What is this strange concept? I love the visceral images included in poetics. Check it out.

Thursday Prompt: I never...

Getting to Know You: Sometimes I have my students play "two truths and a lie." You tell three things about yourself and the class must guess what the lie might be. The key is to tell the lie convincingly enough and select truths so ludicrous that each is disguised as the other.

Drinking Game: I never. I never ate a watermelon whole. I never... The game is to pick things you think everyone else has done. Often this game can get raunchy, such as, "I've never had sex in a public place..." It becomes a confessional game, where others have to take a drink, or a shot, when they themselves have done that never.

Today's prompt: Write your own "I never" or tall tale. See if you can disguise it as the truth.

telling lies

In Nin Andrews' Sleeping With Houdini*, a collection of prose poems, she wrote of an interview with a famous poet, where the poet confesses that he thinks of lies when he writes poems.

"Lie beautifully," she writes. "Lie convincingly. Lie. And then he did tell me his secret. The secret of the beautiful lie."

Writing poetry is a bit like telling lies. Even the confessional poems. We take the truth and bend it a bit, take poetic license, tell lies. It's the only way I can get away with it sometimes.

I've decided to try telling lies here, just for daily practice, for the beauty of art.

* This is my second review. I enjoyed writing the first so much, I thought I would give it another go.

Calendar Advisory/Photo Opportunity
For Immediate Release

Intermedia Arts presents
Emergence: Intimate Evenings of Poetry and Prose
Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Series Readings—January 7th & 9th, 2008

WHAT: Join mentors Anya Achtenburg, Louis Alemayehu and Jude Nutter for two spectacular evenings of poetry and prose, featuring thirteen of the twin cities’ most talented emerging writers. Emergence: Intimate Evenings of Poetry and Prose celebrates the passion and dedication of new and emerging writers, and brings to a close our fall semester of Writer-to-Writer, the adult mentorship program in which intimate relationships are created and nurtured between artists, mentors, and the written word. Writer-to-Writer is made possible thanks to generous support from the Jerome Foundation.

Fall 2007 Writer-to-Writer Mentees:
Gregory Chamberlin
Trisha Collopy
Cynthia French
Kathryn Holmquist
Robert Karimi
Julia Klatt Singer
D. M’Chelle
Debra Stone
Meghan Stotko
Molly Rose Sutton Kiefer
Francine Tolf
Greg Watson
Mary C. Yang

For the most up-to-date information, call Intermedia Arts at (612) 871-4444 or visit www.intermediaarts.org. Intermedia Arts is located at 2822 Lyndale Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55408.

WHEN/WHERE:
January 7th & 9th , 2008
7:00 PM at Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis
$5 suggested donation

PHOTO/INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES:
Digital photos, audio, video, interview and photo opportunities are available upon request.

ABOUT WRITER-TO-WRITER:
Writer-to-Writer is an adult mentorship program that gives emerging and established writers the opportunity to advance to their next level of artistic development. Participants meet regularly throughout the program, with one established writer mentoring four-to-six emerging writers. Writer-to-Writer creates intimate relationships between artists. Mentors act as artistic catalysts and partners, providing each mentee with artistic feedback and professional guidance. This program allows advanced artists to develop their community-based teaching skills while working to support and strengthen our local literary community.

Intermedia Arts is a catalyst that builds understanding among people through art.

CONTACT:
Julie Bates
Phone: 612.874.2815
Email: Julie@Intermediaarts.org
Web: http://www.intermediaarts.org

Thursday Prompt: Non-conventional form

Recently, in my morning poems, I wrote in the form of a works cited page.

I've read poems that resemble grocery lists.

I've read poems that appear as want ads.

I've read very clever poems as Q&As.

Here is this week's prompt: Take a conventional form, one that belongs truly to something else, something mundane, or something prose might claim as its own, and write a poem. Think table of contents, think mapquest directions, think memo, think text message, think interview, think health care plan. Think beyond the patterns of every day poetry and reinvent the patterns of every day rhetoric.

congrats, becky

Warehouse Reading with Rebecca Lehmann and Forrest Anderson -- July 7, 2007

thinking about chapbooks

I've been thinking about the beauty of the chapbook, especially now that I am looking to late winter, thinking of fine press / letterpress / bookbinding (courses I will be taking at the Anderson Center and The Loft, both lovely art organizations in Minnesota), and I'm thinking about the trajectory of my own writing. I am thinking about having national lit mag credits and how I look forward to it, am waiting patiently, will get there, I think, and I've been methodically writing that poem a day. I am thinking about the chapbook, and I've begun redirecting some of those poems of the day into a thematic unit--those about my paternal grandparents, about their home in Michigan (just returned yesterday, thirteen hours of driving, much to think about and digest). Theirs is a sweet, subtle relationship, and my memories are quiet but poignant, I think. I hope. This is what I am working on now: applying to MFA programs, sorting out summer workshop options, and on the side, writing about my grandfather. Also, finished the review for CutBank and am patiently hoping it will get published. A humble contribution, one I would love the opportunity to return to...

Hope your Thanksgivings were good, full of rest, full of good food, full of family, full of making, maintaining, returning to peace.

"For a poem is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time—through it, not above and beyond it. A poem as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality."

-- Paul Celan

wishing for words

How do you use words for something you love so passionately--something so big, something where words are the most important? I don't know how to explain the feeling I have when I am driving home after my Thursday Intermedia workshops.

Full, this is true. I am still writing in my head. I realized how I would put together that Autobiographical Sketch for UC-Irvine (curses, they want a personal statement and an autobiography?) (Of course, others want me to write a piece on how I will contribute to diversity on the campus. And other topics.)

Full, I think of lines of poems. I dream up how I might jigsaw words into little poems, snippets I sketch out in my notebook as I drive. I should pull over, I know. And Husband, long ago, bought me a tape recorder for just such instances. What I really need is a laptop--a way to quietly spool out the thoughts in my head onto the page. Composing poems in my head. They drift out so quickly, like cotton candy fluff, drift away, forgotten.

This is some kind of cruelty though.

If asked, "Why poetry?" I would fumble the question. I would say something about loving the compact form, the precision and choice of words, the reflection on humanity, the capturing of a small moment. All these messy words to describe something so perfect, so small.

I might mention how I love small things: little knick knacks you can put into the palm of your hand, works of art; I always pick the splinters of chips or slivers of cake, a collection of food already divided; I love those small, tender moments, the glance, the quiet reflection of the world around us, the way his hand fits into mine.

But I don't really know how to explain why poetry makes my body sing, makes me feel more alive than any other, pleases me as we dissect language and discuss the importance of one word, one arrangement, one line break. I just know, I just feel.

we don't know sun in winter, here in minnesota

However, during exam week at my high school, I will be in Palm Beach, while my students stare out the icy window, the snow crusting over the landscape. I will be in Palm Beach, a hotel with white sheets, walking distance from where I need to be, my laptop sprawled on the bed, books stacked at my side.

For I have been accepted into the Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

I didn't expect it to happen; I had simply applied in practice for graduate school, with only a vague hope of going. I applied long ago, thinking I wouldn't get in, but I'd have the methodic practice of application. Palm Beach was a kind of pipe dream, I suppose, and I get the impression it's gotten a great deal less competitive, now that it has more funding and can open up to more workshops, but nonetheless, I am grateful for the opportunity, especially given the topic of my own workshop, which is addressing revision (so much needed for me).

My principal has given me permission to go, open arms, which is so wonderful. She was open in the same way to the Intermedia program as well, when I had to miss an hour and a half of parent-teacher conferences. I am glad for this kind of support, especially when it takes me away from the classroom in the very last week of the semester.

Congratulations, Jude

My Intermedia Arts mentor, Jude Nutter, recently won the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. CONGRATULATIONS!

Working with her and in this group has been really wonderful for me. Excellent critiques and conversation.

Thursday Prompt: Take a Line

Go to poets.org. Randomly find a poem. Choose a line. Use it as your first. See where it takes you.

form

I am currently teaching Paradise Lost to a jumble of juniors and seniors in high school; this is the curriculum left behind by the permanent instructor whose job I am taking for this year. I am impressed that he will tackle this again and again and I am finding myself falling in love with the puzzle of the language, just as I finally fell for Shakespeare.

My own style is free verse, as is the majority of poets writing today. Thus, the line break becomes crucial, the word choice and stanza break imperative to meaning. I have dabbled in form before, and I appreciate those contemporary poets who can sink into tradition and heritage and manage to create a decent rendition of a sonnet, a villanelle, a cinquain.

And there are the haiku, the small breaths, the puffs of poetry, that can cause the intake to be so startling.

Thursday Prompt: Family

I have a body of work inspired by the lives of people I care about--there are, of course, the typical love poems, the poems about childhood (angry or not), the poems exploring relationships with exes.

There are two people who surface in my poetry the most--a close girl friend of mine, who happens to be incredibly bright, a scientist, and full of personality. Her life explodes, making nature as metaphor easy.

I also have been working a series of poems that focus much on Alzheimer's. My grandfather, a professor of Education, has recently been institutionalized, and I have been a distant witness to the progressive movement toward dementia. These poems also drawn in the devotion of my grandmother, his wife of sixty three years and her own experiences in trying to maintain that love and dignity at the ends of their lives.

This is my prompt for you this Thursday: Write about your family, but don't go for the easy poem, the one about a parent or a sibling. Try to find someone in your tree, maybe branching even farther out from grandparent, to someone who has a story to tell--maybe write it as a persona poem, maybe as someone discovering a story, maybe simply a narrative. But tell a story from the annals of your own family history.

Thursday Prompt: Visual Dictionary

One of my favorite tools as a writer is my visual dictionary. I picked up a copy at the University of Minnesota bookstore, and I can learn the precise terms for a bird's anatomy, for the body's bits, for the geography across the ocean.

So here is today's prompt: go to this site, an online visual dictionary. Pick a subject at random and use it: write a poem involving the intricacies of whatever you choose.

an tic i pa tion

Sometimes, I anticipate the mail a little too much--knowing exactly when that estimated response time listed on the website is over, knowing my application to something is due any moment. I feel ridiculous, like a puppy, scampering toward the rusty mail slot, angry at the sheaf of envelopes, the junk mail getting in the way.

An tic i pa tion noun 3. expectation or hope

I was fully prepared to bolt home after school today; I had readied my excuse (they are coming to measure replacement windows; I killed a yellow jacket with a book, shattering one of our bedroom windows), though the splay of envelopes on our wooden porch floor was my true reason for haste. I knew this: the mail did not come yesterday, and I was told we'd find out on Monday if we were accepted by Intermedia Arts into their Writer-to-Writer SASE mentorship program.

And indeed, being told it was a "highly competitive round" with "some truly phenomenal applications" (mine would be the "some of not," perhaps), I was also told this: "Congratulations! You have been selected..." I think these are the sweetest words, the best ways to open a letter to a writer. It's so thrilling and frightening, this application process (good practice for graduate school, I thought, if I were rejected, as was the Palm Beach application, which I still have a month to hear back about). This, with a C.V., an artistic statement, and a series of poems. This, something I had done in practice as an undergraduate, a reality as I applied. A small step, a lovely first move toward what I hope will continue to be a true re-entrance in the world of poetry.

Now, if only I'd hear back from Mid-American.