The Orange Prize nominations award are is coming up soon, and Jessa Crispin has, of course, written a nice thought piece on what it means to have a prize for female writers:

There are still huge gaps of women's experiences for fiction to fill. That can be inspiring for a writer. Lorraine Adams said to me about her book The Room and the Chair — which is populated with aggressive, batty, slutty, heroic, downtrodden female fighter pilots, reporters, wives, and underage prostitutes — "I feel like so much fictional women are not reflective of the women I know." Virginie Despentes wrote King Kong Theory in part out of frustration that "Even today, when women publish lots of novels, you rarely get female characters that are unattractive or plain, unsuited to loving men or to being loved by them...

Had the book [Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas] been written by a man, I would have tossed it aside halfway through with a roll of the eyes. But having been at one point in my life broke, living with a horrible boyfriend and unable to leave without serious financial (or hell, physical) consequences, and seeing female friends trapped in poverty, bad relationships, bad apartments, it felt like a betrayal of the reality of the situation. Obviously it is not impossible to get yourself unstuck, but it can be devastating. If we're still trying to figure out how to live our lives and get out of the traps we got ourselves into, hearing "You just have to cosmic order some money and a new house, and the universe will totally provide — or wait, probably not because you're not secretly a princess," can make us want to scream. Which is maybe why we discuss the state of women's literature every single year, and take it all so incredibly personally when it comes up short.

I've been reading a lot of fiction written by women lately without really thinking about it--the stories were just ones I've wanted to read, the voices were just ones I've been drawn to (problems of time and scale aside, of the 50 books I wrote down to read this summer--including fiction, poetry, and non-fiction--34 were written by women). Sometimes I think I take for granted that this isn't usual, and it's good to be reminded of that, if only because I'm an over-ambitious and obsessive-compulsive list-maker.  And because Jessa Crispin made me.

You Can Rock, Or You Can Leave

It seems a shame that I only just found out about Janelle Monáe, the fabulous cross between an early Michael Jackson, James Brown, and something really, really sparkly.

Here's her video for "Tightrope." Damn, she can work a pair of oxfords.



Maybe I found my new karaoke song?

Rainy Days and Sundays

The first farm share of the season yielded a ton of salad greens, including arugula; some spicy purple-pink radishes; and a fragrant bundle of herbs (most of which I, sadly, can't identify).  Tonight I made a big salad with the greens and radishes, threw in some mushrooms and cucumbers, dressed it with a healthy helping of olive oil and lemon juice, and topped it off with some sourdough croutons:

Yum.

I've been reading Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty, and wish that I had ten ounces of Vincent's confidence--the woman was never afraid to do or say anything, and she pretty much did whatever she wanted, charming everyone who breathed within ten feet of her.  Which only sounds like an exaggeration.

I mean, come on.

In other news, there's nothing like a rainy day and a timely re-read of a Zadie Smith essay to make you realize you were going about everything absolutely wrong in your novel.  So now to try a new tack--starting with too many chili-lime cashews and heading straight for hacking apart the first 20 pages or so of my book and re-making them.  

With any luck, I'll be able to put the bookmark I made for the awesome residency program at Millay's New York home, Steepletop, to good use one day.  Until then, forward!  And some flowers, too.

Finding your way

Many congratulations to my sister Kaitlyn, whose whimsical Wayfinding Instruments were chosen for the 2010 Art of the State exhibit at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.  The juried exhibit runs from June 27 through September 12 and is open to the public.  If you're in the area, you should check it out!

No plot? Kind of, well, a problem.

I haven't had to worry about plot in a long time.  No need--I've been writing poems and even my narrative-driven, weird little prose poems, don't quite operate like fiction.  But once I realized I'd been mulling over the same storyline--manifesting itself in different ways and in dozens of scraps--for over two years, I decided to show up at the keyboard every day this summer and write it down.

Not. So. Easy.

Turns out, writing poems made me forget how to work with plot.  As in, I didn't really have one.  Except vague ideas about what, maybe, was supposed to happen to these characters.  Characters I could picture about as well as I can see my alarm clock in the morning when I haven't yet put on my glasses.  This coming from the girl whose lenses are special-ordered by the optometrist.

I consider myself an orderly person.  I don't really like surprises or uncertainty or gray areas, even though the brainy part of my brain insists that gray areas help you think and are more interesting than a simple circle yes or no.

Making the step from I don't know what I'm doing to Just do it anyway, something will happen felt like working up the courage to drop out of a plane.

Thankfully I've had some good companions during my free-fall:

Julia Holmes's forthcoming debut novel Meeks (from Small Beer Press, you should read it, it's great), with its dark, fairy tale structure and intertwined narratives, made me feel up to the formal challenge I'd set for myself.

Julie Orringer's beautiful debut novel The Invisible Bridge kept me thinking about luck and chance and humanity, the importance of stories in a time of crisis.

Lydia Millet's Love in Infant Monkeys helped me to remember that levity in the face of weirdness or tragedy can go a long way.

And, to Aimee Bender and her first novel An Invisible Sign of My Own, I owe a debt of gratitude for reminding me that the modern fairy tale still has relevance.  And that being compulsive and weird and sad, whether your compulsion is numbers or words, can be alright for a little while.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with my talking bear.

Officially Official

My grades are submitted, and my summer job hunt is on.  All I'm really thinking about, though, is starting my MFA program this fall and writing writing writing this summer.

Hooray!

"Does poetry matter?" Duh.

Well, this is distressing.  A recent blog post at the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts, poses the question: does poetry even matter?  As evidence of poetry's diminishing importance: an article in Poetry about the need for more political poetry and a comment from David Foster Wallace about how American poetry will gain more readers when it addresses a more "common" readership (Really, DFW?  If you were alive, and most days I remember to wish you were, I'd email you about this.).

True.  People don't read poetry.  It doesn't sell.  DFW's "common man" gets frustrated and scared off by line breaks and unusual vocabulary.  Teenagers are horrified by Romeo & Juliet every year in freshman English classes across the country.

Yet the kind of question asked in Paper Cuts risks essentializing broader cultural values to the elitism of contemporary poetry on one hand and rampant American anti-intellectualism on the other.  To my mind, you can shelve poetry along with all of the other elements of American society that are deeply undervalued: the arts, education, independent businesses, access to public works and health services, good television...

The fact that someone can take a question like "Does poetry matter?" under serious consideration means that, as a culture, we're really just in the terrible habit of devaluing what it means to create something (which is ironic, considering that more people than ever consider themselves writers, even though our literacy rates are plummeting).  We value loudness and immediacy.  We value the material.  We value our way or the highway.  We value speak English this isn't Mexico.  We're not patient enough to listen, to make ourselves uncomfortable, to ask questions.

Poetry, and, to my mind, all good art--literary, visual, auditory, hybrid!--should make us confused and full of wonder and want to respond.  This requires listening, quiet, openness, an ability to do something productive with unease.  Which, I can understand, is a pretty difficult state of mind to achieve when The Hills are on in the background (okay, that was a pot shot).

Maybe what's really been happening (what's happened in the 20th century more generally) is that poetry is no longer a genre for mass reproduction or mass consumption.  I think this is one of many reasons poetry gets called elitist: it's for the few instead of the "democratic" many (what a great farce: capitalism as democracy).  We could really talk lots more about elitist literature and what that means, but I'm going to keep going.

Contemporary poetry is written for a smaller audience, a more particular audience, a more privileged audience.  I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with this.  The relative smallness or largeness of a writing community can become problematic when artists become too insular and stop seeking new ways to understand and to explore, but that's a different kind of problem.  An audience, more generally, has to be taught to value something (kind of through osmosis--I think of values as etherial, social, inherited), or has to feel the spark of recognition that fires when humans encounter something beautiful.

It makes sense to me, then, that given the state of things, the audience for most poetry is largely other poets or other writers.  And it's relevant because we can't help writing and responding to other writers, to other art, to the world around us.  Poetry is one of many available forms in which to express this response, but it's not going to pay the bills because it doesn't hold any value in the capitalist model of American letters.  But there are other models.  I'm thinking of all the small presses out there, letterpressing beautiful chapbooks and stitching them by hand, sometimes giving their objects away, mostly just trying to cover the costs of printing.  Then there's all the new litmags cropping up online with fancy web design and a devoted cadre of followers checking out their free content.

Maybe poetry will be relevant to a larger audience somewhere down the road.  Maybe it won't.  Most likely it won't.  But I don't think that means the form is no longer culturally relevant.  When American poets stop writing poems for one another, for whoever will read them, for themselves--that's when you can say something's different, something's passing on, over and done with.