Installment #23
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The Habitual Poet is an ongoing series of contributor interviews. If you are a Poemeleon contributor and would like to participate copy & paste the Q's from below and e-mail your answers to: editor@poemeleon.org.
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Reading:
Q: Where do you prefer to get your books?
A: The library, including interlibrary loan (I work at an academic institution). I don’t feel guilty not finishing a book, I read more authors than I may otherwise and I help the circulation statistics in poetry at multiple libraries. I then buy the books I want to own. I also buy at readings and fests.
Q: How many poetry books do you think you own, and what percentage of these have you actually read?
A: I catalog in LibraryThing, so I know I have about 500. Thankfully I don’t quantify which I’ve read, but it’s not 100%. In the early years I bought many poetry books used. I thought they were an endangered species.
Q: When, where and how do you usually read? (i.e. at bedtime under the covers, cover to cover, etc.)
A: At night. Online as I bump into things. I have been trying to read poetry books front to back so I can learn about ‘books’, but sometimes I read the short poems first.
Q: What books of poetry have you read this month?
A: Margo Stever’s Frozen Spring, Suzanne Cleary’s Trick Pear, Todd Boss Yellow Rocket, Courtney Queeney Filibuster to Delay a Kiss, The Essential PK Page, From the Fishhouse anthology.
Q: What other books/magazines/backs of cereal boxes have you read recently?
A: More than Sarah Palin! The local Sunday paper, The Toyota Way for work, Home Buying for Dummies. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop letters.
Writing:
Q: When, where, how do you write, and why?(i.e. at dusk on a dock, longhand in a notebook, because...)
A: Mostly at night, usually around 9. On a laptop with lots of printing out and marking, plus various manipulations by computer.
Q: How many first drafts do you think you complete in a week? A month?
A: Anal as I am, I have a 13 year record of drafts per quarter—that’s drafts, not first drafts. I’m still trying to find out what and how I write well. I could probably figure this out statistically, but it would be better to write a poem. The second quarter seems to be especially troublesome, according to my data.
Q: How long do you wait before revising a poem?
A: I work it to try to find out what the heck I am talking about. I let it lay to see if it is still interesting.
Q: When do you know a poem is “done”?
A: I don’t. Usually I underwrite, so my own private world seems great to me, although in reality . . .
Q: Have you ever given up an invitation so you could stay home and write?
A: Writing is the sanctuary of the lonely.
Publishing:
Q: What is your system for sending out work?
A: I use and support Duotrope, online. It used to be my back up system, to one I developed with double index cards of poems and journals. Now the cards are the backup system and Duo keeps me honest.
I love data and the more writers who honestly report their response times and results to Duotrope (you can do this anonymously), the more we will all know of which journals are doing a good job of managing the work they receive.
Q: What have you more recently received: a rejection notice or an acceptance? Was it what you expected?
A: I got a rejection from a journal that gave a ‘please send again.’ I know which two poems they liked best, but not enough. I have a friend who says when it’s a phone call it’s good news, and so before that I got *the* phone call for a chapbook win from Slapering Hol – a welcome surprise.
Q: Where do you generally publish: online, in print, or a mix, and do you have a preference?
A: I tend toward paper because I am a book lover, but I see advantages to being online and will submit to the online journals that are well organized and easy to read.
Q: What is the worst (or weirdest, or best) experience you’ve had with a journal/magazine/press & its editor(s)? (No names, please!)
A: My first poem got accepted about a year and a half after I sent it out, a phone call asking if it was still available. When journals lose a submission and don’t respond to a query, they get off the list.
Q: Have you ever received any fan (or hate) mail? If so, what was that like?
A: When I published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette it was the most notice my poetry ever received, also from everyday people.
I’ve written fan mail.
Practical considerations:
Q: What is your day job, and how does it affect your writing?
A: I work as a research assistant doing health services research for two doctors at University of Colorado Denver. It’s working with data and doing some good in the world. The job is interesting and my immediate work group is smart, funny, and eclectic. It saves my head and my heart for a different space when I write.
So far I’ve only written one pathology poem, alas unpublished.
Q: How does your significant other’s occupation affect your writing life?
A: I’m available. Write fan letters. We’ll see what we can do.
Q: Have there been periods in your life when you couldn't write?
A: Recently the home buying process and moving have thrown me for a loop, but now I’ve found my desk. I’m one of those people who gets writer’s block. They don’t make a pill for that.
Q: Do you have a “poetry budget”?
A: When I’m poor I enter less competitions and can’t subscribe to as many journals as I like. It’s how I ended up using the library a lot. But compared to other activities, really, writing is cheap.
Q: Have you ever suffered (or made someone else suffer) in the name of your art? (i.e. picked up your kids late from school so you could finish a poem, forgone lunch to buy a book, left a relationship because the other person just didn't understand, etc.)
A: See motto of the wonderful Gist Street reading series in Pittsburgh: It’s not about suffering!
Random nonsense:
Q: Do you have any superhuman abilities? (i.e. can you tie a cherry stem in a knot with your tongue, or write a double sestina with both hands tied behind your back?)
A: Superhuman abilities, no. But I can juggle, my books are alphabetiized and divided by gender and nation.
Q: You write a scathing poem about your mother and she learns about it. You:
a.) Move to South America and leave no forwarding address
b.) Delete the poem and insist it never existed
c.) Show it to her (she’s already written you out of the will anyway)
d.) Do none of the above; instead you:________
Explain that it was the speaker of the poem (persona) who wrote the poem and it has nothing to do with my actual mother. I’d probably talk about metaphor and say the poem was really about the death of America. My mother would say the poem is ‘cute.’ By the way, I can't imagine writing a scathing poem about my mother.
Q: If the best medical specialists in the world told you that if you didn’t give up your poetry habit today you would die in six months, would you get your affairs in order or would you leave that up to your family?
A: I would get a second opinion! All kinds of medical error happens in this world. Then, I would surreptitiously write haiku, take a cruise and hope for the best.
Q: If you could be a vowel, which one would you be and why?
A: I would be a short ‘u’ – uh, uh, uh. It’s the sound of sex and death.
Q: Finally write a couplet for a collaborative ghazal using the following kaafiyaa and radif: “said the poet”.
(mine is somewhere in the middle)
A hungry wolf loped back into the inglorious forest.
The lone hunter admitted he had not read the poet.
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Lynn Wagner was born in eastern Pennsylvania, went to grad school in Pittsburgh and recently moved to Denver. She’s worked in porduct development, library preservation and now health services research. She’s been a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and won the 2009 Slapering Hol Chapbook competition for her manuscript, No Blues This Raucous Song.