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Last night, I finished grading and Macbeth prep (seriously, how lucky am I to make a living by teaching Macbeth? So lucky. So lucky that I’m actually glad that it’s been gray and mizzling and awful outside, as that is perfect Macbeth weather) early. And so I made my hot chocolate specialty (less sugar, a Peep instead of marshmallows — try it. You’ll love it. I promise) and sat down to watch Borat, which was every bit as gloriously offensive as people have told me it was. If I ever, for some reason, got to teach a film studies class, I would absolutely do a section on the mockumentary, examining what exactly they’re mocking and why exactly they’re so funny. I doubt I could show Borat (are we mocking another culture, or our culture?), but I could show clips. I would absolutely have to show Spinal Tap, though. No question.
Over break, I read a fantastic book recommended by my mentor/ultimate all-time hero/don from Sarah Lawrence called The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden. I read the book to try to get some insight into why handless women keep popping up in my poems, but ended up getting a great deal of insight into the creative process. I’ve recently entered a fallow period, a time of stillness, and the book discussed the essential nature of these times. It often seems to me, especially in the world of the MFA programs, that we tend to emphasize constant work, almost as an athletic enterprise, even if it damages the work, rather than waiting, refilling, inspiration. I wonder sometimes if the most important work we do is when we aren’t writing.
Word came yesterday that my manuscript was a semifinalist in a competition — this is exciting news. Unfortunately, that manuscript has now disappeared, as I gutted it and moved many of the poems into my first manuscript during the Great Reconstruction of Manuscript One. It looks like the semester break is going to be another poetry boot camp — the waiting will have to be over, as I’ve got a ton of witch poems, a chapbook, and a manuscript screaming for attention.
Ah, the day after Thanksgiving, that day of guilt and regret, when the Internet is full to the brim with “detox diet tips” … Really, the only detox diet one should engage in after Thanksgiving is detoxing the fridge of its leftovers. Thankfully (or sadly), my fridge is leftoverless, and I don’t even have to worry about making the decision to eat nothing but broccoli for the next week or to finish the last of my mother’s amazing stuffing.
I did manage to be productive in areas other than calorie consumption yesterday by finally finishing up Anne Carson’s Plainwater (the link will take you to the reader’s guide, which has some interesting questions and some hilarious questions), which further solidified Carson’s status as a poetry superhero in my mind. And today I begin to read and prepare for teaching Macbeth, which is just about The Ultimate in excitement.
Also, Google has informed me of some Emma mentions out in the web. An enormous thank you to Annogram, whose review of Edge by Edge offers the most awesome compliment imaginable: “Bolden feels as pissed off as Plath and I love that!” A Plath comparison! I am humbled! Thanks also to Incindiary Lit for their kind words on my poem in the 2007 issue of the Briar Cliff Review. And, last but very certainly not least, an enormous thanks to Kyes Stevens and the folks at the Alabama Writers’ Forum for this review of my section of Edge by Edge. It’s an honor!
And now, off to Macbeth. Tomorrow, I will attempt to drive back to Auburn as the town fills past capacity for the Iron Bowl. Perhaps I should put flags on my car as camouflage?
I have been terribly remiss when it comes to updating my blog. For this, denizens of cyberspace, especially the great numbers of you who are apparently finding your way here by Googling the terms “seafood poems” and “how to stuff envelopes,” I apologize greatly. There are reasons, and they are multiple, and include two rounds of antibiotics so strong that my pharmacist called twice to make sure I was okay, eighty five papers that had to be graded in seven days, a cat with a stomach virus, and the return of Bravo TV’s Project Runway. I have been running around at a pace so hectic and intense that I’m a little surprised that I have not yet vaporized into some sort of quantum cloud, all of my particles having been transformed into a state of pure energy.
There have been wonderful things: the reading at Troy State University in Montgomery, for instance, was fantastic. Thanks to everyone who came out to see me read! This reading marked my first post-reading question and answer period. It wasn’t quite as terrifying as I thought it would be, mostly because of the wonderful, well-thought-out questions.
And then there was another trip to New York, from which I just returned yesterday, which was, really and truly, too wonderful for words. Though this was my last reading for this chapbook, and somewhat bittersweet, I was able to spend a bit more time in the city that I love so dearly, and with the people who I love so dearly — I got to see two of the people I love most in the world, and narrowly missed a third (soon! I promise! Soon!), spent an incredible evening with my teacher and mentor and inspiration and guru from college, and got to share much of it with my lovely Alabama friend Whitney. There are so many things I miss so much about New York — the sounds, the sights, the scarves, the people, the paper stores, the holistic healing shops, the ability to wear jeans tucked into riding boots and not be mocked — it’s great to go back, if only for a bit. Though it is also nice to be home, especially as “home” means “highs of seventy five in late November.”
And now? Fellow Internetters, The Emma is taking a brief break. A breather. A rest. A respite. I have pretty much completely worked myself into the ground, and need to take a little time to let my creative batteries recharge. I have resolved to do a lot of reading — I’m finishing Anne Carson’s Plainwater (oh my goodnesses how good is this) right now, and also finishing Robert A. Johnson’s The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, recommended by aforementioned teacher and mentor and inspiration and guru, which will hopefully help me to understand why so many of the women in my poems get their hands chopped off. Any additional recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
Also: I realized the other day, with a terrible jolt, that I am no longer cool. Not only, as my students informed me, do people no longer say “diss,” I no longer listen to cool music. I’ve had the same set of cds in my car stereo for six months. And I’m still listening to cds on my car stereo system. So music recommendations will also be greatly appreciated. Let’s all help in this new project: Mission to Make Emma Cool.
My officemate, the gorgeous and ridiculously talented Chantel Acevedo, tried for many weeks to persuade me to participate in NaNoWriMo. I protested and protested and protested, partly because of the post-NaPoWriMo exhaustion I felt in April, and partly because, I insisted, I don’t write fiction. On November 1rst, I was still resisting the idea. But it was there. Oh, it was there. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, whispering: NaNoWriMo! Emma! Emma! NaNoWriMo! And thus I found myself, yesterday, after a weekend of administering oral antibiotics to the feline Gertrude Stein, sitting at my laptop and click-clacking away at some fiction.
And so it would appear that I am participating in some form of NaNoWriMo. I’m not calling it NaNoWriMo, exactly, because a.) I missed the first few days (though I am already considering an extension into December to make up for this — I know this is against the rules, but, hey, I’m a poet writing fiction, I’m already breaking the rules) and b.) using that word that “No” stands for — the “novel” word — terrifies me. Let’s call it SemiWriMo. Or, perhaps, EmAgAtFic — “Emma Again Attempts Fiction.”
I’m not quite sure what’s called me back to the land of lengthy prose. Perhaps it’s because this — if I write fiction, meaning novels (or why I don’t write novels, or what I would write if I did write a novel) — has been an ubiquitous question as of late. The question, or some variation thereof, has come up at both of the Q & A sessions I had in the past few weeks. And, of course, the question comes up every time the subject of What I Do emerges, especially with family members concerned about my finances.
Why don’t you write a novel? It’s a question that’s always made me uncomfortable, largely because it always seemed a very strange question to me, akin to asking a golfer why he doesn’t play football. But now I’m wondering if it’s as strange of a question as I always thought it was. I’m also wondering if the distinctions are as neat and distinct and, most of all, distant as I thought they were. Perhaps it’s more like asking a sprinter why he doesn’t run marathons — they are two totally different things, but they’re both running. They just require a different set of muscles.
Perhaps the sprinter would answer, That’s what I’ve always done. Or, That’s what I was drawn to. Or, That’s what I’m used to doing. All of the above would be good answers, but not quite sufficient. I have always been far more comfortable with poetry, it’s true. But there has always been some attraction to fiction for me. I do love writing flash-fiction and short stories. I even, as a junior at the School of Fine Arts, had an Independent Study in novel writing, during which I wrote a piece about a tortured middle-aged couple named Mike and Marie and their tortured marriage (how I thought I knew enough about tortured middle-aged couples and tortured marriages at that age is beyond me). But novel writing has never seemed entirely comfortable to me, however, and I will even admit that I’ve always been afraid of it.
It’s quite possible that it all goes back to the fear of failure. If you fail in a poem, it’s not that big of a deal — just a stanza or three to scrap. But if you fail at a novel — yikes. And perhaps it has to do with comfort in failure. I’m comfortable with failed poems, at this point — I even welcome them, because I know that I’ll learn a great deal from them. Failed flash fiction, failed short stories, yes. Failed novels? That’s another territory. That’s a dark, dark, uncharted, untraveled territory.
So it is probably best that I start this during NaNoWriMo, when so many others are taking their first steps alongside my first, tentative, shaking steps.
1. Cat vomit.
2. If a literary magazine keeps your poems for over a year and a half, they could at least sign the rejection slip. I’m just saying.
Enough grumpiness. This lolcat was so funny it would be terrible for me to not post it:
If only Gertrude Stein could grow such a mustache.
Emma Bolden is the author of How To Recognize A Lady, a chapbook of poems published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press' Quartet Series, and The Mariner's Wife, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook, The Sad Epistles, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She was the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference and was named a Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation/Poetry magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in such journals as Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Redivider, The Greensboro Review, and Verse. Her manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown College, where she also serves as the poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.
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