Anne Sexton on Rejection

More tidbits from Kathleen Spivack’s wonderful memoir, With Robert Lowell and His Circle (truly, reading this book is like sitting next to the best conversationalist possible at Bread Loaf!):

It was commonly thought that Anne Sexton had rushed into print, experiencing no difficulty in getting published once her first brilliant poems had been created.  This was untrue.  In fact, Anne had tried to publish consistently for several years before the acceptance of her first manuscript.  The first time I went to see her, she pulled out masses of rejection slips from her file drawers and waved them in front of me, laughing.  She had two file cabinets full of magazine rejections.  Some were printed rejection forms; others, nasty letters. It was somehow comforting to see her fling them about, to know that the struggle to publish was a common one and that everyone got rejected.

Anne actually seemed to enjoy the process of sending out material.  She had envelopes addressed to the magazines she favored, and when her poems came back in the mail, she immediately transferred them to new envelopes and sent them right out again.  She insisted I do this too. She never condescended to me, or acted as if my poems were not worth being published.  We were conspirators together against a harsh anti-poetic world, she seemed to imply.  Our poems would prevail.  “Don’t let the bastards get you!”

She liked to read me her rejection mail.  She’d have it out on her desk, ready to read, when I walked into her house for lunch.  “Oh Kathy,” she would exclaim.  “Listen to this!” She’d roll her eyes heavenward, recite the note dramatically, and then stuff it away in a file drawer, only to find another one to read.  “You see,” she would say to me throatily, “You just have to keep trying.”  Then she’d pause.  “The bastards…,” she added.  A dramatic sigh.  She’d stub out her cigarette, light another, lean her head back, exhale.  “Don’t let the bastards win, Kathy! Don’t ever forget it.  Promise me.”

 

In other interesting news, apparently Anne Sexton spent grant money putting in a swimming pool at her house, but this is where she wrote/entertained/lived her whole life, poolside, and there is something just so forgivably glamorous about that image of her hanging out at the pool surrounded by pages of poems.  And maybe everyone else knew this, but I didn’t:  Elizabeth Bishop regualarly wore tight leather pants around the house and loved to play Ping-Pong.

Ah, poets…the life of every worthwhile party!

Sylvia Plath Getting Workshopped

I’m reading Kathleen Spivack’s With Robert Lowell and His Circle, an impressionistic memoir of the group orbiting poet Robert Lowell, and right now I’m at the part talking about what it was like to be in his legendary poetry classes back in the late 1950s-early 1960s in Boston. 

Here are a few tidbits:

While Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were both in the same class (imagine!), Lowell didn’t really see Sylvia as being the star; Anne was:

I can still recall his somewhat nasal Southern-Virginian-New England voice, oddly pitched, as if starting to ask a question, saying to Sylvia and to the class, “This poem [“Sow”] is perfect, almost.” A slight breath-gasp, nasal and outward, as if clearing his sinuses silently, “There really is not much to say.”  A kindly but bewildered look.  Long, struggling silence.  Lowell looks down at the poem, brow furrowed. The class waits.  Sylvia, in a cardigan, does not move.  She listens.  “It appears finished.”  Long silence.  Lowell looks agonized, but then he always does.  Anne [Sexton] fidgets.  Realizing that her arms draped with charm bracelets are making noise, she stops. Sylvia leans forward, dutiful, expressionless, intense, intelligent.

“But.  I don’t know.  There’s something about it….”  Lowell’s nasal voice trails off, helplessly.  “Does anyone else want to say anything about this poem?”  No one apparently wants to say anything.  We are all too intimidated. …  There is the almost inaudible sound of Lowell’s nasal breathing.  He is thinking.  Everyone tries to refrain from saying something stupid.  The room gets darker.  Sylvia does not move, watching.  “I’m sure this will be published,” Lowell comments to her offhandedly, with a sly kind nearsighted glance.  But perhaps the poem already has been published?  No one dares ask.

There is a feeling of unsatisfied poetic process in the room.  The poem is formal and beautifully presented, as is Sylvia herself. Everyone senses that Lowell has damned with faint praise and has managed to sidestep real engagement with the poem. One can’t get beneath the surface of the poems Sylvia brings to class. And yet one can’t define that, or change it, either. There is an air of accepted disappointment, an accepted frustration.

 

These are the poems that eventually make up the manuscript of her first book, The Colossus. In a quote from Lowell’s writing, he says, “She showed us poems that later, more or less unchanged, went into her first book, The Colossus.  They were somber, formidably expert in stanza structure, and had a flair for alliteration and Massachusetts’s low-tide dolor….Somehow none of it sank very deep into my awareness.  I sensed her abashment and distinction, and never guessed her later appalling and triumphant fulfillment.” [with the poems in Ariel]

Spivack adds:  “[Lowell] was deep in Life Studies, and W.D. Snodgrass as a current favorite poetic role model interested him more.  Sylvia’s formal poetry at the time seemed confining, a path Lowell had already traveled in his earlier work. He expressed his astonishment at the bursting forth of raw emotion in later work, after Sylvia’s death.”

This sounds like the world’s most intimidating workshop FOR SURE, as Spivack writes, “In class Sylvia’s comments on other students’ work could be scathing, as well as full of obscure references.  She managed to suggest that everyone—except herself, of course—had plagiarized poems from dead British or American writers.”

I don’t think that Robert Lowell is held in the same high regard he once was these days (correct me if I’m wrong, poets), but all I know is that I read a couple of his poems yesterday before jumping into my own revising, and my results were better for it, for feeling that immense pressure to be precise.

Nebraska Update #1

I am feeling settled into my little place here, figuring out the best way to prop my feet and balance my computer on my lap without my legs going numb.  I’ve heard about a Nebraska specialty, Runza, which seems to be a bread bowl with a cabbage/burger mix inside--??  I replaced the disgusting sponges in the sink.  I was shown the best place to go to watch the Missouri River roll by.  I woke up as the first train passed in the night, whistle blaring, but mostly slept through the next one.  I drank a Nebraska beer (Eos) and I heard about where to go to get Buds for a dollar on Thursday.  The bagger at the grocery store followed me and my cart outside, and when I said, “Are you following me?” he said, “Yes, ma’am,” and I said, “I really don’t need any help with my groceries,” but he explained that it’s his job to help.  There’s an Arbor Day parade coming up later in the month (Nebraska City is the birthplace of Arbor Day!) that I don’t want to miss. And I have an inside connection I can use to get a tour of the taxidermy museum where, among other things, I hear there are 100 taxidermied chickens displayed in a coop. I’m reading The Receptionist by Janet Groth, a memoir about her life working for The New Yorker for 21 years and liking it a lot—so gossipy!

Also, I’ve been writing and not automatically hating everything.

Life is good.

I-80 Observations

 

--Ohio seems to have toned down the hyper-vigilant speed traps, leaving North Carolina as the state with the most speed traps, IMHO.

 

--I love the improvements to the Pennsylvania Turnpike—three lanes! No potholes!—but I kind of miss that adrenaline rush of trucks barreling by an inch from your car through rain and fog, lanes of opposing traffic separated by flimsy posts and steel rope.

 

--It’s worth stopping a Culver’s for a custard milkshake.

 

--They still make classic chef’s salads in the Midwest. I should have asked for French dressing or Thousand Island at the Big Boy in Maumee, Ohio.

 

--The World’s Largest Truckstop—in Iowa—is large but very disappointing. Shouldn’t such a mecca not have gas pumps that are broken and unable to pump without standing there, holding it? Plus, the bathroom was dirty.  Plus, while it was E-Z in, it definitely was NOT E-Z out. I do not recommend stopping there.

 

--I always wonder about that RV Hall of Fame (in Indiana). What must an RV driver do to be so honored with enshrinement in the Hall of Fame? There were a lot of cars—not RVs!—in the parking lot.

 

--Ohio’s roads are the flattest and straightest (and the most expensive).

 

--Illinois has the most peaceful roads—west of Chicago—and they really should be marked for 70, not 65.  The Chicago area is filled with maniacs…more adrenaline.

 

--My favorite green interstate sign comes after Pittsburgh:

“Ohio

And West”

 

--A squirrel ran across the interstate in front of my car in Indiana. I’ve never seen such a thing.  There were absolutely no trees around, by the way.

 

--I don’t care if it is just a Hampton Inn: don’t come to the breakfast bar in pajamas and bare feet.

Heading Off to Nebraska City!

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” 

~Virginia Woolf

 

I’m thinking about Virginia Woolf at the moment, most particularly A Room of One’s Own, because I am lucky enough to be heading off to a room on my own for the next month, thanks to a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska.  I’ll be finalizing one book (fingers crossed!) and perhaps poking around in a new one.  I’ll have time to walk around with my characters in my head and sticky plot problems simmering in my subconscious.  I can spread and pile and sort all my scraps of papers every which way.  I can go to bed whenever I want and wake up whenever I want.  My errands will be few and will seem novel in this new environment.  I can read the stack of books I’ve packed in my car.

There are many things I am grateful for, and tied for the top of my list are my husband for putting up with my absence and the people who start/run/support the valuable spaces artists need.

Also, selfishly, I’m grateful to see that Virginia Woolf also wrote this in A Room of One’s Own:

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” 

 

Or write well, I’d have to add!

Something to Ponder

The best food for thought comes at unexpected moments. I was walking in my neighborhood yesterday, supposed to be enjoying the brief glimpse of true spring weather, supposed to be pondering my work-in-progress...instead, I was reeling through various to-do lists and (the horror!) sub to-do lists and even sub-sub to-do lists, when out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an etched stone in someone's garden.  I whisked by, but something made me back up and go read what was written:

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." ~ Socrates

I won't say my life instantly changed. But I will say that the words have been haunting me.

Link Corral: Me-me-me! Experts on the State of Publishing! Brackish Fiction Contest!

First things first…a super-short story of mine that was published in Camera Obscura has now been posted online:

From “Ghost, 1899”

You stand at the edge of the river.

You’re not sure how it happened.  It could have been that rigid knot growing inside your chest that you ignored.  It could have been staring blankly into emptiness or shooting deep into darkness.  It could have been stepping into the street at the wrong moment when the streetcar rattled by. It could have been bad drink at the hotel, or too many, and wandering here, to the edge of the river, and walking forward into the splash, the cold, the black. It could have been your baby. It could have been anything. When you were alive, you thought these details of dying would matter, and now you discover that they don’t. You’re dead. You must now find a way to believe that.

 

Read the entire (short!) text.

*****

The Washington Post speaks to an array of people at all points of the writing/publishing world, asking for t heir thoughts on what’s going on in this industry rife with change:

From novelist Jennifer Miller:   “My debut novel, “The Year of the Gadfly,” received the kind of reviews that a young novelist dreams of. But with over 60,000 titles published each year, it’s a basic fact that if your book doesn’t achieve “Gone Girl” status within a month or so, then it’s simply gone.

“Which is why I’ve spent the last year fighting to keep my book relevant. I produced a book trailer that featured famous journalists like Brian Williams and Christiane Amanpour. I organized an out-of-pocket three-month book tour last fall, and I invented the Novelade Stand: a lemonade stand for books, in which I set up a sidewalk table with colorful signs, homemade cookies and copies of “Gadfly.”

From Richard Peabody, speaking as a writing teacher:  “One thing hasn’t changed — a solitary writer plays with words in a room somewhere. If you understand that nugget, then you may have a future in this crazy biz.”

 

Read on.

*****

Submit!  There’s a fee, but you get a subscription to a great journal…plus, who can resist this prompt?

The Potomac Review announces a flash fiction themed contest:  “Brackish”

--Fresh water and salt water like Chesapeake Bay

--Oil and vinegar

--Chocolate ice cream and fried onions

--Bugs Bunny meets Freddy Krueger

These ideas aren’t prompts, just nudges to your imagination.  The concept behind our theme, Brackish, is to take two things or ideas, like fresh and salt water, that shouldn’t work together or mix well, but do anyway. 

In the spirit of the Potomac Review’s watery origins, we will celebrate this phenomenon by asking talented writers to participate in our first themed writing contest: a flash fiction contest. Contest dates: February 28st—April 5^th. Enter online and check the website for further details: http://cms.montgomerycollege.edu/EDU/Altsub1.aspx?id=24421

The winner will receive publication in the Potomac Review, a year’s subscription to the Potomac Review, and $1,000!

To enter, submit a compelling piece of flash fiction of up to 1,500 words that combines any two (or more) subjects or genres with at $20 fee per entry. You can pay online via the website. Submissions will be judged by Drue Heinz and Pushcart Prize winner Kirk Nesset. This contest adheres to all CLMP Contest Guidelines.

The Potomac Review is an award winning internationally and nationally known literary magazine, based in the Mid Atlantic, along the Potomac River.