Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

over an immense sky. This dawn
is pale, faint, pinched, contained. In this still, cold

quietude, there is yet an expansive
silent hope. The sky is clear, clean, and bright.

The broadness of what opens over us
is laced, lightly, with flecks of clouds,

like a garment trimmed with ribbons,
or a lighthearted comment edged

with laughter. Closer, small blade-winged birds
dart in twining airborne paths, stitching

graceful lazy loops and calm curls,
before returning to nest here,

in these short tough shrubs, close at hand,
singing short chirrups, contented queries.

We can call that joy, even if
it never blazes, or perhaps because.

for Karen D.

I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts as to why and how these two objectives differ. I consider myself a poet, but earn my living in an absolutely-nothing-to-with-poetry field. After initially having lots of energy and a strong desire to pursue publication over several years, and with some success, I have lately found myself seriously losing momentum in this regard and am wondering to what extent the dichotomy you refer to plays into it. Not an earth-shattering development, but I am curious.

A:
Nice meeting you, Nic, and thank you for question. I’m pondering how to clarify my earlier statement, but basically it’s personal for me. I’ve been in both places and find value in both, and continue to struggle to make sense out of this dichotomy. I’m also really tired (sick kid) so hoping this isn’t rambling too much and makes sense to someone.

My poetry career began in academics. Well, my post K-12 poetry career, I should say. This was back in the 70s and late 80s. Because the poetry publishing field was so highly competitive, and it was so HARD to get published, I was always afraid to show my work to anyone for fear it would be borrowed, cribbed, stolen, abused in some fashion. I have enormous notebooks collecting jealously guarded early works that very few have ever seen. I won awards; was published in most issues of the the school literary magazine; moved onward to small press poetry mags; worked in a library in part as selector for 20th century English language poetry; applied to creative writing programs; was offered a fellowship. I made friends among poets, bought tons of poetry books, went to readings & receptions, and was determined to make poetry my profession.

Sounds like a fairly typical progression, doesn’t it? Well, after I received the offer of a fellowship, I celebrated by going out with my creative writing pals from the local university, and asking what happens once you get your degree? It turned out, for a woman, there was no real future. There was a long pause, as my circle of friends all looked at each other, trying to decide who would be the one to share the unhappy truth. Eventually, the head of the local creative writing program, still a highly respected and frequently published poet, told me, “You will be over qualified for the job you hold now.” A flurry of vehement conversation later came part two, “You have been offered a fellowship. That is your degree. You are a writer, you are a poet. The rest is just politics and the icing on the cake. Even if you do get a job as a writing faculty, you will lose the freedom to write what you really want. You’ll be measured by quantity of published work in the area you’re hired to write in, not your creativity or innovation. If you are hired as a poet and decide to start writing short stories, the stories will not contribute to your tenure efforts. They will be discounted. And visa versa.” Or words to that effect.

I didn’t want to believe this, so I did research. At that time, I was able to locate only ONE tenured woman faculty of poetry on the North American continent. Most women ended up with one or two year temporary appointments, moving from school to school. The looks went around the circle again. I was told, “We are writing faculty because we can’t do anything else. You can. You have options, choices.”

I declined the fellowship and went to library school. I was a single parent. I had a child to support. I didn’t want to raise her as a gypsy, I wanted to give her some stability and safety in life. I wanted health insurance (kid was sick a LOT, in the hospital three times her first month).

Fast forward twenty or so years. I continued to write. A lot! But I didn’t continue to submit my poems to formal publications. Well, occasionally, just a few, but I didn’t work at it. When I did submit works, it was usually to chapbook contests, and they were gently declined. It really does help with later publications to have various journal publications first. I did a little bit in the Chicago slam poetry movement, but again not a lot. I grew up in a university town, and was focused from an early age on academic achievement. I was still protecting my poems, afraid of sharing them except through official formal publication channels. I had a few really trusted readers, but I had to train them myself. The tendency of friends is to simply always say whatever you’ve done is wonderful. That never helped me understand what went wrong at a certain paint, how to make a piece stronger, did I ramble too long, or try to cram too much into too small a space, did I overdo it with alliteration/rhythm/???, were the line breaks too random, etc, etc.

A few years ago I become the UM Emerging Technologies Librarian, with a significant focus on the impact of social media on academic activities such as teaching, learning, research, publication. I work closely with the unit focusing on open educational resources, and actively promote Creative Commons licensing on campus. This is part of my job, but has snuck over into almost every aspect of my life. After a few years, and after routinely posting short poems (micropoetry) on Twitter and Facebook and Identi.ca, I was asked to contribute to the blog OpenMicro. This grew into collaborations, and other invitations. I started reading online poetry magazines in addition to print. I attended poetry readings & workshops in Second Life, and joined in as a reader, and challenged myself with improv poetry. Eventually I started a poetry blog for the National Poetry Writing Month challenges, which I’ve done a few years now. It gives me quite a rush when people end up in a flurry of conversation around my daily poems during April, people telling me they are eagerly waiting for the next one, guessing what I’ll do. Unfortunately, I simply don’t have the stamina to keep it up all year. I wish I did. Online social media, being open and sharing my poetry has resulted in a readership many magnitudes larger than any I could ever have through print media, much more engagement and activity. It is so much more rewarding than anything else I had done with my poetry, I cannot begin to express it.

Now, I am not seeking academic tenure for my poetry, so I am not risking my professional reputation. Actually, I am ENHANCING and enriching and expanding my reputation. But, as a writer and a poet, I am having massively more fun with my poetry and other folks poetry working in this more open and social environment than I ever did working off in my own little cubby with fewer readers than fingers and protecting my poems so much than I’ve lost copies of most of them. Just my experience, but it illustrates a bit of the dichotomy.

For the record, I’ve observed similar shifts in research and science. There is a huge focus coming out of the government to try to facilitate more rapid growth of science through transparency & collaboration. The whole concept of translational science (one of my own research interests) is based on this, as are the movements on open science / open notebook science / open data / data sharing / citizen science / etc. This is part of the conversation that will be happening at the HASTAC conference December 2-3 on Digital Scholarly Communication in the humanities. In my honest opinion, this is the wave of the future. I could go into detail about why for hours. I feel heartbroken and sad for my poet friends who don’t understand this and linger in the “I must protect my content by not sharing it” mode. Sharing it is HOW you protect your content in the modern online environment. That is how you build reputation, how you prove the date of authorship, how you expand your audience, how you maximise your sales. There is quite a bit of research to substantiate these claims. My favorite new article came out last week in PLoS showing how research publications that share data tend not only to be more cited but also more accurate and better quality!

Jelte M. Wicherts, Marjan Bakker, Dylan Molenaar. Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results. PLoS ONE: Research Article, published 02 Nov 2011. 10.1371/journal.pone.0026828
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828

Obviously, I’m biased. Which was why in the original statement, I tried to focus on the goals and not my bias. Sigh, failed, again.

There are sounds,
but distant.
There are lights,
but little.
In whispers
of snow, wind,
the first bus
of morning
whirs to me,
opens its doors.

As you can see, here are two hearts. Note
that each heart in its native state
is solid, self-interested; a singular muscle

dense and active, with an innate knowledge
of rhythm’s importance, what it is

that repeats and circles in the body
or mind, spirit, soul, life. It is a muscle
whose purpose and action is to declare

how life itself depends on
bearing in memory the echo

of the moment before. Systolic, diastolic.
The drawing together, the drawing
apart. The beat and shadow beat.

But there is no shadow
heart — simply the real heart,

muscled and quartered as the earth
is quartered; the heart divided
and beating itself; each pulse

driving blood into the roots
and branches of the tree of life. In this way,

the heart comes to signify life,
just as a circle contains and defines
the concept which it represents.

Ah, but the heart is no Venn diagram. Observe
as these hearts move together and begin to overlap.

Where the hearts touch, they open
and clear. Light enters
at that intersection — diffusing,

flooding through the rest of the flesh
until the whole of each heart has become

translucent, glowing like a child’s hand
cupped over a flashlight. You see this
in both hearts joining at that new ventricle.

Now, as they beat, blood and light
move between the two freely

and they can no longer
be separated
safely.

—–

This poem was originally written decades ago. I remember dedicating it to a friend for his wedding, and I haven’t talked to them in at least 15 years. I think of this as my Boolean logic poem.

i.
My mom played Cajun music at home, especially her Uncle PeeWee’s album. Grandma Flo complained PeeWee couldn’t carry a tune in a bushelbasket, so how did he end up being the one with a band? We mostly played the tunes when Grandma wasn’t visiting. I learned Cajun dances, picked up a few curious Cajun phrases (not from Grandma, but from her husband, the only person allowed to tease her in Cajun), but I never went to Cajun country, even when the family visited Louisiana while I was in college.

ii.
When I was a kid, Grandma Flo used to say, “Only the dirty people speak French!” I grew up in a college town where folk who spoke French were the local aristocracy, so this baffled me. It did explain why my mom practiced flashcard French in the kitchen with my Dad, and why flashcard French was used to keep secrets from us kids. That’s when I decided to learn French.

iii.
I didn’t just learn French. I immersed myself, kept my diary in French, wrote sonnets, dreamed in French, even sometimes forgot how to say things in English. But it was the wrong French, which upset my grandmother as much as that I was learning French, despite her. She spit out rapidfire obscure phrases to show me how little French I knew. I later found out these were quotes from the Old Testament. Shortly before her death in the mid-80s, she forgave me — an unexpected package showed up one day with a fat black-bound book, La Bible.

iv.
For my daughter’s high school graduation, my mom, sister and I took her on a trip to New Orleans. We had the time of our lives — places, color, food. Mom glowed. I’ve never seen her happier, showing us her favorite places, teaching us how to pronounce pralines.
During the obligatory beignet breakfast at Café du Monde, my mom wasn’t making sense. She wouldn’t leave without beignets, but we skipped the third helping to get her in a cab and over to Tulane, where I spent the day in the hospital, holding her hand and stroking her arm, because she could neither speak nor understand what was said. Mini-stroke.

A few hours later, she seemed fine, and the vacation continued, but scans showed this probably wasn’t the first or last of the mini-strokes.

It was the last trip with my Mom. But my son graduates from high school next year.…

CREDITS

“The Pee Wee Special.” PeeWee Broussard. The Acadian Two Step. 1952.
“Eagan’s Jukebox.” Max Avery Lichtenstein. Far From Heaven. 2002.

A fractured honeybee, the dragonfly,
no, a bird with wings like jewels shimmering
like sparklers, no, like oil lightly coating,
the iridescence nothing like fireworks,
the slow shift of color blurred by the speed
of wings, hyped up on red sugar, a blaze
of heat carmelizing, half flicker, half
slow-fast-fast, slow-fast-fast … hot and cold both,
now I’m craving the caramel but press for
limes (the spurt, sparkle, sizzle), bright shadow,
green and purple, dark-skinned, like the ripe plum
with three stickers on it (as if I don’t
know a plum when I see one, I scent one,
taste one, except that new cross-bred pluots
have confused that matter and genetic
modification means you never know),
no one does, really, like now, when it’s me,
when I don’t know, because I can’t
recall, my brain so befuddled and blurred
I can’t tell you what I’m thinking about
except there was once a bird, once outside
my living room window, in the tree’s shade,
but I never saw it, only my son
saw it, fast as meteors, something else
I’ve never seen, while everyone around
exclaims about streaks of light and color,
speed, bright, white, and I spin and spin around,
“Where? What? Where? What?” over and over and …

Two Friars and a Fool: Creation of Stained Glass:
http://twofriarsandafool.com/2011/06/creation-of-stained-glass/

The images are all CC-licensed in Flickr by RosefireRising.

The black leather
Goddess sizzles

Radiates heat
So hard she aches

Those around her
Walk gingerly

Speculative,
Cautious, inspired

…

Asphalt crumbles
At its edges

Cracks spidering
From beaten paths

Potholes jarring
Jouncing, jolting

Words aren’t needed
to say, “fix me”

Pack in a patch
Of aggregate

And slurry seal
Smoothed glossy black

Supple as skin
Tough as leather

And there, a bit
worse for the wear

but still working
tough as ever