The rest of Thursday

Liz’s lecture

I walked in a little late due to the publishing things running late, and Liz is talking about Anglo-Saxon poetry. Apparently, Old English is more like German than modern English. Specifically, today, we’re talking about iambic pentameter and this dude Ezra Pound who was really good at it. He was a translator originally, and then (I think she said) he wrote his own. Translating’s really difficult, you know? Meanings don’t translate nicely. Just take Matt’s dude, Schieslinger. A literal “It is as I have said” becomes the equivalent of the colloquial “I told you so.” In Puerto Rican Spanish, “Brincando el charco,” literally, “crossing the pond,” refers to emigrating to the USA. So imagine how difficult it is to do in poetry! Pound wanted to put rhythm back in free verse, and avoid poetry that’s just prose broken into lines.

She read us a couple lines to show us how breaking the meter is effective. In Seafarer, one of Pound’s translations, appear the lines “Bitter breast-cares have I abided” and “Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head”, both of which have a caesura, or pause in the middle. Consecutive stresses also have interesting effects. In Pound’s In A Station Of the Metro appear the lines “The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet black bough” in which the last three words are all stressed, which provides a blunter sound than the airy ‘apparition’.

She read to us from Canto 2, Pound’s work, which is about the kidnapping of a young boy who turns out to be Dionysus. She pointed out that some syllables are longer than others, that we linger over syllables like ‘lithe” and “sinews’, and more examples of consecutive stresses: “Evil and further evil, and a curse cursed on our children.”

A few random facts I recorded: A kenning is when you make a word by sticking two words together, like night-watch. It’s quite common in German. -tion words are Latin, by way of French and English.

I can definitely appreciate the problems inherent in translation, and, by extension, Pound’s brilliance. There are definitely some good lines in these poems. It’s interesting to learn about the caesura and the way meter can break. I always assumed that if you wrote in meter, and not everything fell into the meter, that you were doing it wrong. Apparently not. Apparently meters are almost made to be broken, because it’s once you do that those lines really stand out. There’s something quite lovely in the lines with consecutive stresses. I find I tend to do the opposite in my work. Most of it is pure free verse, but when a meter or a rhyme enters into it, those lines stand out. But it’s certainly prettier Liz’s way. I laughed when she mentioned Tiresias and Cadmus and then explained to the audience, “Wise people.” I played Tiresias in The Odyssey, and know all about why you should listen to him (or her—that changes over time.)

Workshop

Honestly, I have nothing to report without spoiling the plot of all my fellows’ stories. We workshopped our inciting incidents, or eight of them anyway. I’m not entirely sure when this assignment was given out, but it doesn’t seem to be in the workshop logs, so. We were to write 5-7 pages of the inciting incident, the plot point at the end of Act 1 in which everything changes. We got them Wednesday night and read as many as we could for today. I read them all. Patricia did tell us to search our books for the suffix –ly because adverbs are evil. Why? asked Mark. Because, said Patricia, that’s telling and not showing. He wanted to know what you’d replace ‘slowly’ with and I answered ‘plodded’ without a pause. Specifically, that replaces ‘walked slowly’, and there are a million other examples.

2^nd  publishing roundtable

This one was about smaller publishing. Several people who’d been published, including our workshop authors, spoke. One lady had published along the gamut: large press, small press, and self-published. One had done small-press for poetry, and one guy had already owned a publishing company for publishing his magazine, so he printed his book there. They agreed that for fiction and nonfiction, self-publishing is a last resort. One person mentioned that Barnes & Noble will sell your books in a section for local authors, but you have to be your own distributor. There’s been a general consensus that you need to be prepared to do your own publicity when you get published. You can’t assume that your publisher will do it for you. They discussed publicists, who take pay for getting you seen. Low-grade for getting you a radio interview, high-grade for getting you onto NPR. Go after awards and contests. Do readings. Possibly most importantly, have a social media presence. Poets & Writers came up again.

The talk confirmed my instincts (prejudice?) to avoid self-publishing. I’d love to be sold at Barnes & Noble—and I don’t live near one, unless you count school, but I may well do at some point. I live in fear of not being able to get my book well-publicized. It’s good to know about publicists, I may well end up using one. I’m certainly going to take Poets & Writers up on their offer of a subscription cheap—it seems to be the place to be to get contact info for publishers, contests, and awards. It would be really good to get onto NPR, people listen to that on the way to work. I’d reach so many people. That, of course, would be why it’s so expensive. I’m glad I have the blog/Facebook page, apparently I was right on the money when I figured I needed these sites as a starting point for publicity.

Participation reading, round 2

One lady from my group read part of the piece she workshopped earlier. There was an interesting piece about using donuts as bait for bears, that had a nice twist at the end. The poet from the last session read a poem about whistling in astonishing detail. Apparently, if you can’t whistle, the problem is that your mouth isn’t the right shape. One dude read a story about dinosaurs, which was surprisingly thrilling, considering we knew how it would end—it was during meteor times. That actually helped, I think, not having to work out what was going on and being able to focus on the dinosaur’s perspective on it, which is so alien. Good advice for a sci-fi novel. I think it’s a form of defamiliarization, from what Matt said. The audience knowing what is being described defamiliarizes the alien way in which it’s being described, and vice versa. There were some really astonishing pieces of poetry about cutting off a toe and giving birth in the rain, and one about pulling out a tooth. There was also an absolutely hilarious piece about exiting a theater, involving more and more extreme methods, which was extremely reminiscent of Welcome to Night Vale.

Writing Life Roundtable

Jerry got a few writers together to talk about making a writing life. He asked everyone to say what the best thing they did to make a writing life possible was. Answers: Falling in love with writing. Moving away from New York. Changing jobs into one that didn’t involve writing. Getting a job that allowed for a large stretch of free time in the morning in which to write. Creating a schedule. Not trying to serve too many masters.

They discussed MFA programs, which come in residency and low-residency. Residency is the normal MFA program; low-res is a shorter amount of time, but higher intensity, with online classes and such to supplement. Liz went to one of these, and was able to work one-on-one with someone for six months. They covered writing groups and writing retreats. Apparently if you get into the retreat called MacDowell, everything’s paid for.

Some last words of wisdom: Matt reminded us that we’ve got to hold onto the feeling that we are writers for after the high we’re experiencing now. Patricia told us to keep people in our lives who support our writing, and “scrape off” people who don’t.

Powerful stuff, man. I never considered a master’s in writing. It’s a thing you sort of have to do for science, but writing? That might be cool. Most of the writing people in my life are exclusively fantasy writers, but I wonder if I could find other realistic fiction writers to bring into my life? I know what Matt means. The second best thing about the conference, underneath all the amazing stuff I’m learning, is being reminded that I’m actually good at this. Again, I come back to: what do I need to change about my life to make this a reality? Schedule? Work writing into my schedule next to my classes? Continue going to conferences? I’m not sure I could handle a retreat—I need to do other things with my brain after a week. Maybe a short one? I could see doing a weekend just writing. Maybe I can set aside a weekend this summer for just writing. Especially after all the stuff that’s actually due is done.