Lazy As a Wheaten Terrier

On the last leg of my travels, I came down with a fast-moving, punch-in-the-face of a cold:  no doubt the result of too many hours in the narrow walls of trains and airplanes, too many subways and taxis, too many door handles and turnstiles.  I like to wander, but not at the end of a long semester when I'm tired from climbing the mountains of ungraded papers.

But New York was good.  And Chicago was good.  And New York (a second time) was good again.  During New York, Part Two, I ate terrific meals at Bouchon Bakery, Tao, and some incredible pizza place in Brooklyn.  Although I'm not a drinker, I do confess to sampling a few apple martinis.  And the dessert of the trip turned out to be the French macaron, which is two little flavored meringues held together either with jam or a cream filling in flavors like pistachio, rose, caramel, or coffee.  Yum.

The summer sprawls out before me like a Wheaten Terrier asleep on the floor, belly up, paws splayed in the air.  This moment in mid-May always feels full of possibility.  Right now, the summer seems endless, although I know it to be finite.  And, just as I do at the start of every winter break, I have made a list of the things I want to do by the end of August:

1. Finish two book reviews and submit them for publication (amazingly, a draft of one is nearly done!).
2. Finish a first draft of The Arranged Marriage so that I can then let it marinate for a few months.
3. Begin research on blacklisting, the 1950s, and other details to do with HUAC.
4. Continue genealogical research.  Interview my father about his father.
5. Read books of creative nonfiction that use fragmentation as a narrative strategy.  Recommendations, anyone? 
6. The composer Joanna Bruzdowicz wants to expand the song cycle from six to twelve or even fourteen songs.  So, I need to select more Fever-World poems for adaptation to music.
7. Work with my mother to finalize plans for publicizing Red Army Red.
8. Read for pleasure.
9. Attend some literary events.
10. Make some new poet-friends. 

And then I must remember that the list cannot be comprised entirely of work, even if I do love the work of writing and of being a writer.  There should be a second list, a shadow list containing tasks like "Walk Argos to the farmer's market" and "Cook healthy, delicious meals for myself" and "Go on an adventure with J." I would like to visit my parents' weekend house in West Virginia, take a few day trips, catch up with a few friends, try some new exercise routines like boxing or zumba or pilates. I would like to develop a taste for some summer beverage like the Mint Julep.

The summer should also be lazy as a Wheaten Terrier. This means I need to practice something for which I have no talent: relaxing, doing nothing. I must learn how not to watch a clock, how not to hold myself to a schedule when the weekend arrives.  I must learn how to sit on a lawn chair and watch the world drive by.  

Sounds & Music

First there was a quick trip to New York for the Poetry Society of America's annual awards ceremony.  J and I had a terrific dinner at Sushi Samba, a really good vegan lunch, and some tasty treats from Citarella. There were also nice wanderings through various green parks and rainy streets, places whose names I've already forgotten.  The Washington Square Hotel turned out to be just what we were looking for:  a quiet hotel in a not-too-touristy part of town.  While my parents really like the New Yorker, with its chrome diner and its look-at-me foyer, I prefer to stay in neighborhoods where the locals do their grocery shopping and buy their lattes.

The prize event contained a surprising number of poets dressed in their fancy clothes.  I was shocked by the number of silk ties and shined shoes--not at all what I would expect from the versifying crowd.  All the readers were poised and prepared, the audience receptive, and setting was nouveau Victorian, which meant velvet settees, gilded portraits, and leopard-print carpets.

Note to self:  from now on, ALWAYS coach the person introducing me.  After the very sweet Alice Quinn mispronounced my name five times in the space of about one minute, I could barely drag myself up to the podium to recite one of my poems.  Why is it that my name sounds lovely (if I do say so myself) when pronounced correctly but is an absolute screech of horror (Gee-Hane Doo-Brow) when mangled?  But, from now on, I really must remember that trusting in the MC's knowledge of classical French names is a huge mistake.  I will have no one to blame but myself if my next event or poetry reading includes the sounds "Gee-Hane Doo-Brow."

***

And now I am in Chicago, preparing to attend the premier of a musical adaptation of poems from my second collection, From the Fever-World.  Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz has transformed six of my "fragments from a nonexistent Yiddish poet" into songs for a mezzo soprano, piano, two violins, a viola, and cello.  This morning we attended the rehearsal, during which I heard the songs for the first time:  just as cold, sharp, and metallic as I had imagined the music might sound.  While the musicians discussed nuances of the texts--this tempo versus that, the question of rest, of notations--I sat listening.

On Sunday, the piece will be performed in a proper space, which will give the mezzo's voice room to expand and the instruments even more space for dissonance and ice.  When I wrote From the Fever-World, I knew I was making something theatrical and narrative.  The jagged poems create a story about a woman who didn't exist but who seemed to share the room with me, when I was writing in her voice.  I never imagined that Ida Lewin would one day have a voice, not only on the page but also in the air, in different registers, that someone other than me would recite her words (much less through song).

You can read a nice story about the event here.  At some point, I hope to have links to music or video of the event on my website.  In the meantime, there have been some conversations about bringing From the Fever-World to Poland and to France.  Does this mean I may have to renew my passport, at long last?  I hope so.  What better excuse for travel is there than art and collaboration with other artists?

The sun is shining here.  And I all I need is a cup of good coffee to make this day really delicious.
  

Roots and Wings

I often think about the words of one of my first poetry professors.  He said that a poem "must have both roots and wings."  I understood this to mean that a poem must be rooted in the concreteness of narrative while also using language, imagery that allows the text to lift off the ground toward flight.  Think of the way some favorite poems end:


"To find, to seek, to strive, and not to yield."


"In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."


"what I hear is the murmur / Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape."


"saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry."


"How can I rest? / How can I be content / when there is still / that odor in the world?"


***


I have a new favorite show on PBS:  "Finding Your Roots," with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  It's a show about genealogy.  Well-known figures like Kevin Bacon, John Legend, and Barbara Walters, learn about their families' histories through old immigration records, letters, photographs, census documents, and even DNA.  


Roots here are those of the family tree, which is in itself metaphor. The branches are family too.  And, somehow, in understanding the way that family is an organic, growing thing, we learn something about ourselves, our choices, our passions.  For instance, Martha Stewart learns that in every generation, going centuries back in her line, there were craftsmen dedicated to fabrics or to baskets or to wood. And somehow Martha Stewart--as "Martha Stewart, the brand"--becomes a little less mysterious and a little more inevitable. 


Or, at least that's the thinking behind the show.


***


Lately, I have spent a lot of time with Ancestry.com, researching my own family history, particularly on my father's side.  There are family stories (or should I call them mysteries?) that I am trying to follow to the roots. Maybe my questions are the beginning of a new project. 


***


I am learning that books should also have roots and wings.  They need to be rooted in the concreteness of research, specificity that comes from close study of one's subject matter.  But they need language that  gives the books open spaces for breathing, wandering.

This Kind of Encouragement

This blog serves as an informal (and sometimes fragmented) documentation of my writing projects, each one moving from idea to rough draft to something smoothed and polished and eventually to that thing we call "book." I started Notes from the Gefilte Review in 2007, when I was in the middle of writing my first collection, The Hardship Post.  If I had the time or the patience, I could wander backwards through this blog and find traces of all my books, little smudges that are evidence of how poems accumulate into the shape of a manuscript


Here we are in April 2012.  My fifth book manuscript, The Arranged Marriage, has really moved into a stage where I can now distinguish its full shape, the way one poem brushes up against another to create a larger story.  There is a beginning, a middle, and almost an end.  At this point, the poems sound like themselves.  They are conversational and serrated:  little knives.  I could make a chart of the words that keep appearing;  in fact, you can find a visual representation of the book's concerns in this older blog post.  Poems from the collection have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Bellevue Literary Review, and New Orleans Review.  Others are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Third Coast, and--as I just learned last week--West Branch.  And a few months ago, three poems from The Arranged Marriage won first place in the Anna Davidson Poetry Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience.


In other words, all signs have been pointing toward a manuscript not only in-progress but also in-successful-progress.  Still, the writer's capacity for self-doubt remains huge.  And each time I've drafted a new prose poem for The Arranged Marriage, I have wondered, "Is this any good?  Any good at all?"  So, I almost cried when an email arrived a little over a week ago.  It was from the Poetry Society of America and began, "Dear Jehanne, I am pleased to officially inform you that  Claudia Rankine selected your submission as the winner of the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola award."


Maybe it's magical thinking or delusion, but it seems to me that writers often receive this kind of encouragement just at the moment when they need it most.  A few hours before, I'd experienced a disappointing PoBiz interlude, one that had left my ego feeling very dented and dinged.  I was sitting in a pretty restaurant in DC, complaining to my mother:  "When do I finally get to say that I've paid my dues?"  And she was answering with the kind of patience that seems the domain of mothers.  She said that maybe writers never stop paying.  Maybe they are always apprentices or journeyman.


And just then my phone beeped.  Beep:  there is good news.  Beep:  these poems are the poems you should be writing.  Beep:  keep doing what you're doing.  


So, thank you to Poetry Society of America and to Claudia Rankine and to Alice Fay Di Castagnola.  I have my instructions.  I will keep writing these poems.  I will keep doing what I'm doing.

Poems, Occasionally

Like many poets, it's not uncommon for me to field certain requests for my services:  "Can you read this poem that I wrote last night and tell me what you think?"  Answer:  yes, but here's my fee for such a service.  "Can you explain what this poem in The New Yorker is saying?" Answer:  I can try, but you may not be convinced by my explanation. "Can you write a poem on the occasion of my FILL IN THE BLANK?"  Answer:  Akkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!

It's this last request that usually makes me gulp as my stomach drops into my feet with dread.  The occasional poem--a poem written on the occasion of an event such as a wedding, a funeral, an inauguration, or some kind of event so momentous and awe-inspiring that the only response to it must surely be 40 - 400 lines of measured speech.  Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" was an occasional poem, the occasion being President Obama's inauguration.  "O Captain! O Captain!" was Whitman's occasional poem in response to the death of Lincoln.  There is Ted Kooser's Valentines, a book of poems written over the space of 22 years, on the occasion of 22 Valentine's Days.  Auden wrote occasional poems.  Frost famously couldn't read the one he had written for JFK's inauguration (I can't remember--was the light too bright?  had he misplaced the text of the intended poem?  had he lost his glasses?), and so he ended up reciting "The Gift Outright" from memory.

Annie Finch has a nice piece about occasional poems on the Poetry Foundation website.  She points out that occasional poetry offers her the chance to "address a wider audience."  Finch treats the challenges of the occasional poem as opportunities for finding inspiration in unexpected, often seemingly prosaic places.  Based on the informal survey I took of my poet-friends ("Hey, what do you think of occasional poems?") and the rather unscientific data that I collected from this survey ("blech," "yuck," "awful," "I would rather rip off my own face than write an occasional poem"), Finch's response to the task of writing occasional poems seems extremely cheerful and optimistic.

And it was this article that I turned to for advice and encouragement when--approximately a month ago--I was approached to write an occasional poem in honor of the new Hillel House, which will open at Washington College in mid-April of this year.  At the time, I was simultaneously flattered by the College's request and terrified.  How could I write a poem that suited this event but that also remained a good poem, a poem that I might have written outside of these circumstances?

As I began drafting the text, I came to understand the real challenge of the occasional poem.  No matter how good the intensions of the one who commissions an occasional poem, it is unlikely that he understands fully what he is asking from the poet.  The person who commissions a poem may envision a text that speaks about the occasion in a very literal manner; or he may imagine that he is asking for a poem that sounds the way he imagines poems are supposed to sound (whatever that means).

Meanwhile, the poet understands that her poem must stay rooted in the particularities of the occasion--the wedding, the funeral, the inauguration--but that the text risks silliness or meaninglessness if it doesn't simultaneously move toward the lyrical, toward something larger than that one, particular moment.  In fact, it's possible that the occasion doesn't really warrant poetry, unless that occasion is placed within a much larger historical context.  Finally, the poet realizes she must produce a text suitable to the occasion but also true to the larger body of her work.

I'm not going to post the poem that I wrote on the occasion of the new Hillel House at Washington College (at least I won't post it today).  Mike Kaylor, the master printer at the Rose O'Neill Literary House is going to print a limited edition broadside of the poem in the coming weeks.  Mike does really beautiful work, as you can see here.  Even if it was a small agony to write my first occasional poem, it will be amazing to see my words embedded in delicious, heavy paper.  Broadsides are poems made concrete.  So, maybe when the broadsides are done, the ink dried, I'll post a picture of the piece here on the blog.  

Slings & Arrows or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AWP

At some point, as I walked the four labyrinths of the AWP book fair, I realized that 2012 marked my tenth year of attending the Conference.  A friend, someone who manages to write without being too much part of the establishment, told me, "You're on the inside now."  What he meant was:  You're PoBiz.  And I guess it's true.  I have a teaching job.  I publish with the appropriate degree of regularity.  I've done residencies and conferences.  I give readings in suitably sticky bars, dusty libraries, and the occasional marble-columned venue.

After all these years of AWP-ing, I have found my own way to do the Conference.  It involves a lot lingering in the hotel bar or restaurant or cafe with people I like or love.  As much as possible, I avoid panels.  Anyone who has been to a few AWPs will tell you that the panels don't change much from year to year; there are always panels that address themes and variations of (1) turning your MFA thesis into a book, (2) finding a job outside of academic, and (3) teaching difficult students or difficult subject matters in workshop.

Occasionally, I'll attend a few readings.  I've become less and less invested in off-site events, which are often pungent with their own hipness but generally lack a good sound system and a respectful audience.  I've been to too many off-site readings where the poets can't be heard because the audience is either too busy heckling or drinking to pay attention.  And since most off-site readings involve a long shlep through the cold and wind of [fill in the name of the host city here], I try to focus my attention on events that are scheduled inside the conference hotel or within a two-block radius.  Yes, I've simply become that lazy.

I also enjoy wandering the book fair.  I gave the kind folks at Measure grief because they don't send out acceptance emails or letters when they accept work for submitters.  This has happened to me twice.  And, while I'm grateful when Measure wants to publish my poems, I also appreciate a heads' up.  It's always helpful to know when one's poems are going to be...you know...appearing in print.  This kind of barbed conversation is typical of AWP discourse, as when a journal asks you, "Are you familiar with our publication," and you answer, "Yes, you've rejected my last five submissions."

My favorite pastime at AWP is sitting on a chair at the edge of some conference thoroughfare:  perhaps a hallway or a lobby.  If you sit long enough--even five minutes will do--eventually the whole world of Conference will stop by your seat and say "hello."

Worst moment of the Conference:  "Wow!  You've lost a ton of weight--like three people's worth."  Thanks.  I didn't realize I weighed 800 pounds last year.

Regularly repeated moment of Conference:  "Oh, you write poetry?  Have you published a book yet?"  Seriously, when will that conversation stop happening?  Five years from now?  Ten?  Fortunately, my response to this question was truly satisfying:  "My fourth book comes out in September 2012 from Northwestern."

Best moment of the Conference:  Well, there were several.  My meal at Russian Tea Time was terrific, as it always is, especially the delicious black currant tea.  I also had a great conversation with musician Carol Honigberg, whose Pilgrim Chamber Players will perform the world premiere of a song cycle  based on my From the Fever-World (scheduled for May 2012).  I spent some wonderful time with members of the Northwestern University Press cohort, all whom are so lovely and supportive of Red Army Red.

In fact, the whole Conference made me realize that I better start thinking Red Army Red, whose release is only six short months away.  Soon, I'll see the cover design and the catalog copy, not long after that, the blurbs and the "marketing pitch" for the book.   Before I know it, I'll be a four-book poet reading from her newest collection.  All of this means that I better start practicing and memorizing these Cold War poems.  By the time I arrive at the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston, Red Army Red will be a real book displayed at the Northwestern UP booth, along with all the other new releases.

Redesign

As a child, I was considered something of an artistic prodigy.  I used to take classes at the Corcoran with college students who were twice my size (I was eight at the time).  And although I no longer paint and draw, I can still sew anything, learn how to make almost anything if given a chance.  But, my excellent hand-to-eye coordination does not extend to that thing we call the Interwebs.  I don't know code.  I don't have lots of snazzy voice files and images with which to fancy up my website.  So, when I decided it was time to revise "www.jehannedubrow.com," there wasn't a lot that I could bring to the table...um, I mean laptop.

I gave the website a makeover in honor of Red Army Red, whose publication is now less than a year away.  It also seemed time.  So many of my poets friends have sites that reflect their personalities:  quirky, soft, loud, retro.  If nothing else, mine at least needed some coolification, a little streamlining.  I don't know if the site is any more Jehanne than it was before--ideally, my website would need a mid century vibe, some images evoking Panton or Eames.  But at least it's prettier now, easier to navigate. And it's red, which seems like a good beginning for Red Army Red.  So, go check me out here.  And if anyone out there is a fantastic (read:  both good and cheap) photographer, I desperately need a new headshot that will make me look like the best, poet-iest version of myself.