Why I Want an Agent

Photo ©  Lori Gravley.  

I have my writer’s group.  Over five years, almost 52 weeks a year, we’ve met, growing only large enough to fit at a single table, though sometimes I notice others join us and write along. Not for four hours like we do and not at 7 AM, like we do.  So, I’ve got my writing group.  Sometimes, I meet them other days and we gossip and complain and plan and cajole and support and then we write.  We always write.

And I’ve got my critique group.  We all have a practice that works.  And we practice and we read and we share what we read and we share the work and look at the work from angles, finding its facets and trying to make it shine a little brighter.

And I’ve got old friends and students.  We email and message and like and smile at each other from a distance. 

I’ve got my presence.  I post a blog a week now, and three or four encouraging messages on my author feed.  I post photographs to Instagram, sometimes incessantly.  Beauty is everywhere.  And I’ve got my website, and every time someone puts one of my words online, I share it there.  And tinker here and there and grow my friends.  And I read poems I love on the radio at WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs, OH, not all the time, but a couple of times a month.  And really, I don’t want to do much more than that because all that leaves just enough time to show up for work, everyday.  And I do.  Two hours or more each day, including weekends.  During the week, I aim for six-hour days, but no matter what (even when I'm traveling around the world for the work that pays the bills), two hours.

What I don’t have, and what I desperately want is an advocate, an adviser, someone to help me grow my career, someone to run my too many ideas by and help me parse out which ones might sell.  Someone who lives inside that publishing world I’ve danced around for so long who can show my work to people who will love it.  I want another pair of trained eyes to look at my work and ask me just the right questions.  I want someone who will believe in me when I can’t quite muster that belief and who will allow me to work knowing that my work might just find the right readers. 

I want a midwife and a doula.  Fifteen percent of what I earn seems a reasonable fee for someone who will do my work in the world so that I can work in the worlds I’ve made in my head. 

I could publish things on my own, and I might.  The historical projects I’m working on may not be saleable.  Or maybe the contemporaries with their little edge of paranormal will have missed the shining paranormal moment in publishing as a reader last year said.  In that case, with these projects I love, I’m willing to work on my own and even pay to get them out in the world.  Someone out there needs those books, and they can’t find them on my hard drive. 

I can publish things on my own.  I’m a poet.  I write a lot of poems that I have to send out (220 last year, thanks Duotrope), so it’s not that I’m afraid to do the hard work of sending things out.

But even with all the opportunities to publish on my own, I want someone on my side.  Someone who will take those saleable concepts and sell them, or at least try.

I want an agent. 

Poem a Day--Beyond the Personal

I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I do research to write some of my poems.  My verse biography of Christine clearly needs research even though I came to the project with much knowledge.

If you’d told me when I was first writing poems that a satisfying poem could be written from research, I might have scoffed.  Though I loved the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and appreciated Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, I hadn’t thought of the way a poet created a world like the ones these poets built. 

Even though I wrote poems from different points of view, (most notably "American Girls" which was published in Nebo and nominated for a prestigious award) I wrote that poem from the direct inspiration of a radio story on NPR.

At that time, the thought of using research to write a poem seemed at odds with the confessional and nature poets I read.  Now, I know a number of books written from the same sort of research and exploration that I undertake regularly to find inspiration for poems.  Drea Brown’s Dear Girl, a short verse biography told from the perspective of Phillis Wheatley; the award-winning verse biography of Sylvia Plath, Your Own, Sylvia, by Stephanie Hemphill; and Myrna Stone’s Cassanova Chronicles are all recent books based on research.  The poet immerses herself in the world of an historic figure and then tries to imagine that world for a new generation. 

I have a curious and unsettled mind, so when I find it hard to draw on daily images for inspiration, I usually have a question on hand that I’d like to explore a little more. It doesn’t take much research to find just the phrase to unlock a new poem. 

Try it. Choose someone from history, someone small that you’ve heard only a few things about, and see what you can discover.  See if you find those perfect few words to light the match that will glow into your next poem, or maybe even a book.

Or go to a historical museum, read the placards and interprative displays and write a poem. 

Or next time you see one of those historical markers on the side of the road, stop, read it, soak in the atmosphere, and write a poem.  

A small section of my bookshelf with my research materials 

for Christine

Listen to the radio, read the newspaper, immerse yourself in the world.  Then write the world as only you can. And if you write a poem from a news story, remember that you can submit to Rattle: Poets Respond by Friday of each week about a news story you read and responded to that week.  

If that doesn't work for you (as it sometimes doesn't for me) go back to your daily life and find inspiration there. Or the dictionary. Or a news story. Or try a new form. Whatever works to get the words on the page.  Happy writing.

Medieval France: Provins

I’m thankful to Violette-Anne Onfroy-Curley who recommended I take a day trip to Provins instead of Troyes or Tours. This town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has embraced and is using its many medieval homes and restored cellars to build a thriving tourist trade. 

I’m sure I probably wouldn’t like it during a festival, and I didn’t go to one of the weekly shows, but the town itself is worth a visit any time.  If you like crowds, find the festivals and shows.  If not, go on a quiet weekday like I did. 

The train strike meant that I had to take a bus to Provins, and the drive through the little villages and wheat fields was a lovely antidote to a week and a half in the city.  The bus drops you right outside a tourist shop, with many of the less academic medieval books for sale including some of the lovely books illustrated with medieval miniatures.  

The wall that surrounds Provins was built in the twelfth century. As you enter the city from the tourist center, you enter through one of the original gates.  The tourist center has maps with specific walks through the town, and most walks lead to four fee-based sites that you can buy a pass for at the tourist center.  In the first site, the Tithe barn, the audio guide gives detailed information on the Champagne fairs in the twelfth century that funded the development of Provins before eventually giving way to fairs in larger metropolitan areas like Paris.  It provides details on trade and craftsmanship as well as about the management of money and people at a large medieval fair . 

 

The tithe barn itself has vaulted ceiling both on the ground floor and in the basement, and the basement guide includes details on medieval quarries that were sometimes located underneath towns.

The number of half timbered houses in town is quite remarkable, and the timbers are visible, so though Provins was a bustling town, that they didn’t plaster over the timbers speaks possibly to less wealth than in places like Paris where plastering over the wood was a way to show your wealth and status.  Downtown, I was lucky to come across a home that was being restored, and later during my walk, I met a man who actually invited me into his wood and plaster home and showed me the progress of the restoration work he and his wife had taken on their charming home forty years ago.

The tower in Provins is another lovely stop.  Unlike the donjon at Vincennes, this tour took me all the way up to the bell keep, full of pigeons and their requisite byproducts.  The bell in the tower still rings, and it chimed while I stepped carefully around the pigeon puddles.  The fortified tower had murder holes and multi function rooms. 

The views over the fields and old houses in the village were worth the somewhat treacherous climbs to the top.

It's possible to walk along much of the old wall from both outside and inside the city, and walking along beyond the canal, I found a lonely stretch where little cut outs in the wall for wells and old gates were visible.  Someone laid these stones eight hundred years ago, and they are still here. Living in the US, there isn't often this deep sense of history unless I visit first nation sites, so I always find these old walls moving. I often stop just to rest my hand against the wall. 

Poem a Day—Talking Back

 One of my favorite books to use in creative writing classes is the short book Talking Back to Poems.  The author takes four of our concerns in writing poetry—sound, imagery, structure, and meaning—and uses them to talk about a collection of poems.  Then he asks the writer to “talk back.”  If the poem uses sound in interesting ways, he invites the reader to respond by writing a poem that uses sound in a similar way. 

Writers do this all the time, consciously and unconsciously, borrowing ideas, forms, and thought progressions from other writers.  That’s one reason why it’s both important and sometimes unnerving to read widely and often as a writer. 

As I’ve been reading lately, I keep noticing a poetic line form that seems somewhat random to me.  Writers would indent every other line, not as a way to indicate that the previous line continued but as an inexplicable (to me) affectation. 

Everywhere I turned, I saw this form.  Like in this poem by Adrien Matejka  

Those Minor Regrets

         We ran Carriage House East

nonstop like a bunch of hungry mouths—

in jacking-jawing & ravenous orbits—

          & the huffing in the throat stack

& double-ply knee cracks as we slid

          Toughskin thick past the dented

        

         buckets on blocks & lover-graffitied

walls, one after another in industrious,

planetary circuitry. All that symmetry. . .

I trusted the poet.  There is control of language, distinct imagery, effective use of couplets and single lines.  But I did not understand the indented lines. 

A truck headed to Garbage Mountain from downtown Cairo.

So I talked back to it.  I was writing a poem about traffic in Cairo (see above) and the form seemed to fit the subject. I tried it.  And, in writing it, I discovered the fun of making one poem hidden in another.  And though it wasn’t a form I’d ever tried, it felt organic to this poem.  It fit in this draft poem tentatively titled “Cairo Road Song.”

            On the road from the airport

the driver will not stay in his lane

            though there is no reason

he aims the car right down the broken yellow line

            it’s late at night

the other traffic bobs and weaves, boxers. . .

The reading of other poets of both enjoying their work and wondering about the choices they make becomes another source of inspiration for my daily work.  What inspires you?