Writing like a writey thing

Since I started tracking my submissions in March of 2009, I have sent out one hundred and twenty-five poems, stories, and paper proposals (some are the same piece more than once, of course).  I've gotten thirteen acceptances.

...Make that fifteen. Right Hand Pointing accepted my poems "Water" and "Why Kindred Spirits Worry Me" for their Issue #44. 

When the issue goes live, I'll post the link.  Per their website, they produce about six issues a year so it will be a little while.

Raising the banner of mythpunk in academia

I will be presenting a paper on "Mythpunk Poetry in the Classroom" for the 2011 SAMLA conference in November. That's South Atlantic Modern Language Association for those keeping score at home. Regional conference, so not as many cool points as the MLA, but it also is in Atlanta and therefore easier to get to. The panel is called "Statues Talking Back, Beauties Becoming Beasts, and Little Red Riding Hood Laughing at Wolves: Revisionist Mythmaking in the Classroom." I totally intend to namecheck Catherynne Valente, Amal el-Mohtar, Erzebet Carr, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Rose Lemberg, and the rest of those miscreants.

Song for Butterbeans

I wrote this when I was seventeenish. It won a prize, which went to my head. Later the Agnes Scott literary magazine foolishly took it, encouraging me further, and and thus you find me here years later a broken wretch of a creature, teaching Freshman Comp and still writing poetry as well as committing fiction on a regular basis. Behold my late adolescent poetic sensibilities, complete with inexplicable line breaks, erratic punctuation, and whimsical rhymes. Actually, judging by some of my recent stuff, neither the inexplicability, erraticity*, nor whimsy have changed all that much...

Song for Butterbeans

Heat rises from damp earth,
add my own humidity
I, a country girl, pick
With embarrassing unfluidity.
Green smell: “Pod No.5”
hundred eighty million
Will I make it alive
To the end of the row?
Vines leafed brown lace
Wrap around my ankle,
The Bean From Outer Space
Attacks stealthily: Beware!
Butterbeans with nearby green entwined
Like cousin lovers hid behind
A ragged screen of weeds I find
Tomatoes do not care.
My whole body itches. Dive bombed
By bumblebees seeking morning glory and such,
I like butterbeans.
But not that much.



*Yes, I do believe I made that word up. Wanna make something of it?

There was a time
when I wrote poetry:
just sit down and write it,
that's what I did.

I knew I was flawed but beautiful.
I assumed that someone was listening.

--a long road from there to here;
when did I forget? and when
did I stop being in love?
You have to love the words to write them.

Now it's painful
to write and not scratch them out.
I wake up like other addicts,
not knowing how I got here.

Perfection is the drug;
I gazed into the mirror so long
self-critiqued so finely, with such art,
that I disappeared altogether--
I filtered the clear water
until none of it was left

So now there is a time
I just sit down and write it
until the water runs clear again,
just like that.