Sometimes what counts as daily progress is only a sentence or two, but they’ve opened the door to where you need to go next; and sometimes it’s best to sit at that open door for a day or so, to make sure you’re really ready to walk through. Also you need to go food shopping.
September of last year. This was a lovely day.
A wonderful reimagining of Cinderella, by Stephanie Burt. In @MQR_tweets. Definitely worth reading.
I’ve always been a “kinder, gentler” sort of teacher, but writing a kinder, gentler syllabus to match my practice is turning out to be more of a challenge than I thought.
John Donne. What else is there to say? Talk about a haunting: The Apparition
Tonight’s victory: A chicken dish–an Instant Pot chicken dish, no less–that my wife, who is not a lover of chicken, actually wanted the recipe for so she could learn to make it.
The dog I would take home with me in a heartbeart if I could:
The latest edition of my newsletter just went out.
Definitely worth reading: I’m a Longtime Union Organizer. But I Had Never Seen Anything Like This
I have stepped down from my position as one of the two vice presidents of my faculty union–a decision I made in order to pursue a writing opportunity that I would almost certainly have had to let pass otherwise–and that choice has allowed me the mental space I did not have before to reflect on what I want my writing life to be.
I began working for my union about ten years ago, and I don’t regret a single minute, but the fact is that doing that work meant setting my own writing largely aside. Not that I’ve been completely inactive. I published my second book of poems, Words For What Those Men Have Done, during that time, as well as assorted other poems and essays, including “Attar’s Tale of Marhuma: The Woman With a Manly Heart,” my first ever peer reviewed publication, but most of those publications were rooted in work I did before I became the union’s Communications Coordinator, a job that I incorporated into my duties as union secretary when I was elected to that position in 2015.
Writing and managing the union blog, writing and managing almost all communications with our members, not to mention all the other duties I performed as a union officer, left me less and less time for my own writing, and when I became our Vice President of Classroom Faculty in the summer of 2020, what little time I did have shrunk even more. I didn’t realize how heavily that weighed on me, though, till the end of the 2020-2021 academic year when circumstances that are neither appropriate nor worth going into here conspired to make me very unhappy in my position as Vice President. Had those circumstances been different, I might have tried to find a way to achieve more of a balance between the writing I wanted to do and the demands of being a union officer, but they weren’t different, and so I stepped down.
I have mixed feelings, of course. The past 10 years have been personally very fulfilling; I know I made a real difference in the lives of some union members; and I know that much of the union as a whole supported the work I did. At the same time, I would be lying if I said that stepping down hasn’t also been liberating. I’m looking forward to focusing at work pretty much solely on my classes and to not having the demands of the union interfere with my writing, which, along with doing the writing, includes promoting it; staying in touch through my newsletter with people who have shown interest in my work; and figuring out what I want my online presence as a writer to be.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been splitting my online presence between the site I have on Blot at richardjnewman.com, which I think of as my writer’s website, and my blog here on Micro.blog, where I’ve been dipping in and out in a way that is far less consistent than I would like. I know that inconsistency has been rooted in no small measure in the time constraints imposed by the union work, but it’s also a result of trying to manage two separate sites and figuring out what kind of content belongs where. So I am thinking of following Rob van Vliet’s example and using Blot as the front end of my website, while moving all my blogging, long and short form, over to Micro.blog.
I’m still at the very early, and messy, conceptual stages of all this, but I’m looking forward to the process. Verbalizing what I want to do as specifically and concretely as I’ve done here is an important first step. I’m glad I’ve taken it.
Finished reading: Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky 📚
A strange position to be in: Not writing new poems bc I’m prepping classes. I’ve time to submit to journals, but only three poems in any condition to share with the world, four if you count the 16-pager that will definitely be hard to place. Life changes. Time sorts it all out.
By Zishe Landau, from Voices Within The Ark, tr by Ruth Whitman:
“Lately, brothers, I have a feeling: of all the lips
that stand ready in the world to be kissed,
the sweetest are those that are a little bit faded.”
I saw this on Twitter and it made me laugh out loud. “Twitter explained in 10 seconds:” twitter.com
(I just wish I knew what the guy was saying.)
Since I first started writing poetry as an undergraduate, my initial instinct has been to turn whatever I want to say into a poem. Nearly two decades later and it can still take as long as a year or more for me to realize some ideas need to be turned into essays.
Finished reading: The Arabian Nights (New Deluxe Edition), translated by Husain Haddawy 📚 I’m only going to teach the first 80 pages or so, but I am looking forward to it. The material is so, so rich.
Mark Powell, in MQR:
You experience certain things at a time when you’re really malleable and your blank brain and your belief system are pretty plastic…[I]t…fashions the lens through which you see the rest of your life.
From “Here But Elsewhere,” by Bret Shepard, from MQR Winter 2022:
“Christian’s mother died when a rope
broke as she helped pull the bowhead
onto the beach, its recoil force enough
to kill what it hit the moment it did.
Some deaths create other ways to die.”
@mqr_tweets
They caught the guy who’s been stealing unpublished manuscripts.
I run First Tuesdays, a reading series in Queens, NY. First Tuesday of the month, September through June. Half the featured readers, whenever possible, will be Queens writers. Writers, any genre, with a book or books, click here for info re featuring. Also, I pay.
They spelled my name wrong, but this is publicity from the 1980s, when I played my one and only semi-professional gig at The Bitter End in Manhattan. My friend Bill Kaplan wrote the songs. He and I performed one. He performed the other with someone I don’t remember.
This was a fun read: The Magpie of Superstitions, by Liam Hogan in @Contrary Magazine.
Haunting. Three Hours in Central Pennsylvania, by Matt Barret. In @Contrary, same issue as my poem. I really am in such very good company.
More worth reading from the Winter 2022 issue of @Contrary. From “How Deep In The Valley,” by Roseanne Freed:
“After a parent buries
a child there is no gentle choreography to help
us through to the other side past grief.
There is no other side.”
Contrary Magazine just published What Filled The Room, my first publication of 2022. It’s an important poem to me and I’m glad that it’s out in the world. If you have a moment, I hope you’ll give it a read.