The Neurotic-Growling-Self-Loathing Side of Poetry Biz by Devon Miller-Duggan

The Neurotic-Growling-Self-Loathing Side of Poetry Biz

“Really?!” I mutter to myself, “Norton (or Knopf, or FSG, or Copper Canyon, or…) sees fit to publish this sentimental mediocrity?!” This little conversation with myself not infrequently happens when I get to the bottom of whatever poem I’ve been reading on Verse Daily or Poetry Daily in The New Yorker. I recognize that it is not useful. I even recognize that I might be wrong about the poem/poet in question and that taste in art is profoundly variable. But I have the conversation anyway, often, and gut-wrenchingly, because, of course, the rest of the text has to do with how many years (and contest fees) it’s taking me to find a publisher for my second book, and how many years it took to find a publisher for the first one, and how lousy my acceptance rate is with journals.

And sometimes, I’m pretty sure I’m right, and the poem in question is mediocre, at best—formulaic, predictable, energy-less.

I know I’m supposed to have a thicker skin at this point (40+ years in the biz one way or another). I know this stuff is not rational. I know a lot of it is about networking—at which I am horridhorridhorrid—and that I kind of inadvertantly deep-sixed my best shot at having one and have subsequently proved dirt-dumb and incompetent at getting any others going.

I know I’m supposed to be able to get beyond the gut-grinding desire for affirmation and fame and just write for the love of art and out of some bone-deep sense that this is what I’m supposed to do. But those two things have never, ever been mutually exclusive, ever. And sometimes I get tired of pretending that they are.

I used to want to win the Yale Prize. It was a sad day when I aged out of that possibility. I used to want a little fame—okay maybe a lot, maybe Billy Collins-type fame. Maybe I wanted to be the next T.S. Eliot. I have gotten better. I have made peace with the fact that I don’t have Eliot’s brain (much less Eliot’s Pound), and wouldn’t want much of Eliot’s life. I don’t much care about fame anymore, but I would, dammit, like to find publishers for my books without it taking decades of rejection beforehand.

And I would very much still love to believe that poetry is a meritocracy, and that I have some sort of place in a hierarchy of merit—that I’m at least seriously better than mediocre. And, dear Lord, I would love to stop feeling so effing needy.

Way back in my Master’s program, a couple of my profs took the trouble to make it clear to me that they thought very, very highly of my potential. The third of them seemed to think I was an idiot. They were probably all right. And there is a certain irony in the fact that the guy who apparently thought I was a lightweight, giftwise, was the one whose work I like best. More to the point, the two who were kind enough to be encouraging actually scared me nearly to death, so of course I pretty much quit writing for about 5 years after the M.A. And I learned the danger of even the most well-meant evaluations.

Still. There are days when I wonder what the heck I’ve been doing all these years. Whether it’d have been better to set my sights on being a potter or a maker of ecclesiastical vestments—nice concrete things where you can see the fruits of your labor being used and useful. Or a wedding gown designer, like I wanted to be when I was younger, or a contentedly mediocre landscape painter so I could spend my life staring at scenery. Or I could have gotten a, you know, job, and made a reasonable contribution to the family coffers.

I say, when I’m asked, all the usual-and-true things about believing in art and the making of it. I say I’ve always loved words, which is also true. I say that I am in pretty decent shape if I’m writing and am edgy and off-kilter if I’m not, and that I think this is both an important bit of self-knowledge and sufficient reason to keep making poems.

And I think I’ve paid my dues fairly decently—I’ve taught generations of students to love poetry, and have helped some of them with writing it; I’ve supported other writers by buying their books and reading their manuscripts; I’ve shown up a readings that hurt my teeth; I’ve revised, revised, revised and listened, listened, listened; I’ve read the writing of beginning writers who were looking desperately for someone to tell them that the thing is worth their doing; I’ve collected a bloody mountain of rejection slips: I’ve worked hard at being a pretty terrific performer/reader. I think I’m reasonably (that is, with reason) sure that my poems are at least as good as much of what’s out there, and sometimes considerably richer and more interesting. But they seem to be drenched in editor-repellent. Reeking with it. And the thought that I have spent 40 years learning to be a critical reader and still can’t see what’s wrong (or whether there is anything wrong) with my own work is a serious bummer.

People I respect still, now and again, tell me that I’m good, even really, really good. But I couldn’t tell you whether this is balm or just more confusing oil on the stormy waters of my writerly sanity. Probably both—that tends to be the way of things. I certainly don’t want them to stop.

We are going to pass over in silence the matter of jealousy, mostly because my friends whose careers are shinier than mine universally deserve what good fortune they’ve had come their way—and they’ve uniformly worked their asses off to be available for that good fortune. And I love them and am deeply happy for them.

But it’s not an uncomplicated happiness.

And yes, I do understand that this is a whine from a position of privilege.

A mentor would help. I think I might be too old at this stage, though. Which kind of makes me feel doomed. A mentor would have helped. Someone to put a good word in at, say, Poetry or The APR or…, someone who’d have handed my book off to an editor-friend at a respectable press. And I did kind of screw myself there. So, in some sense, I’m not allowed to moan now.

But if the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then I am definitely living in looney-land.

There are no answers here. I’m not looking to be made to feel better. I have a rich, lushly full life–full of everything that is truly important. And I certainly don’t think I’m the only poet out there feeling these things. I’ve known brilliant, honored poets who had trouble getting a publisher for their next books. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of folks in the guild have some or all of these feelings, either constantly or occasionally. I don’t think I’m special in this regard.

I’m just really tired of being so needy, and of that needy-ness helping to make me clumsy and counter-productive on the rare occasions when I have the opportunity to do myself some good career-wise. And of the amount of rejection, about which I am supposed to be mature and knowing and accepting and competent. Mostly I do manage some version of those things. I manage to keep at it and keep the whining to a sort of minimum. I guess what I wanted here was just to have a space in which to speak the confusion, frustration, snarling neuroticism, and just plain pain that goes along with my life with Po-Biz. She’s a fanged, vampiric bitch-mistress is Po-Biz, and I’ve got the bruises and lacerations to show for the relationship. Just like nearly every other artist out there. And I don’t think I will ever understand my own willingness to keep showing up just to be beaten again. Something in me must believe it’s worth it, but most days I couldn’t tell you what that thing in me that continues to believe in the sacredness of the work is called. Unless its name is Just Dumb.

Kaffee und Küchen–Bligger Devon Miller-Duggan Revisits Germany

Kaffee und Küchen

We were in Germany again for spring break. When we lived there for 8 months after our wedding in ’77, courtesy of the flawlessly generous and gracious Humboldt Stiftung (foundation), I came home pretty negative about the land of many of my ancestors. I found the Germans formal-but-rude, intolerant, often plain mean in public, and generally unpleasant to live among. That being said, I met and liked a lot of individual people–I’m mostly talking collective behavior here. I liked living in Europe–loved many things about that, and some things about Germany in particular–the intense respect for the land itself, the train and transit systems, being able to have fizzy water delivered to our apartment, the scenery, the forests, the Gothic churches, the city of Freiburg. But the Germany of 35 years ago had not dealt with its past and was a country living with the huge wound of Cold War division. It’s a very different place now. Germans have done a remarkable job of confronting their past (I’m not claiming perfection, just profound commitment and ferocious care) and the wound has been healed–though that’s a difficult and ongoing process. But, generally speaking, the Germans I’ve encountered individually and en masse more recently are less formal, more polite, and much less chip-on-shoulder. It’s a lovely thing to see/experience–the healing of a nation. And all the things I liked before are still very much there, though a little less graffitti on the sides of nice old buildings would be good (that being said, there’s some astonishingly wonderful tagging in Berlin–I never object to art–but a lot of it is just vandalism and grade C work). 

And Germany’s comfortable. I speak a moderate amount of German (courtesy of the Humboldt Stiftung having put me through the Goethe Institut 35 years ago), and can more or less function. My husband (who’s a German historian partially because he made a nicely calculated decision about his field of study based on which country in Europe actually supported foreign scholars working there.) speaks beautiful German–he’s good with languages; I have a good ear and a bad memory, so I tend to sound like I have more German than I do, which can be a problem. Anyway, we know how to read the train and bus schedules and what the general rules of behavior are and all that stuff that makes being someplace easy. We like the food (which has also gotten hugely better in the past 35 years). And we are never likely to run out of things we want to see, or re-see, or do. The place is dense with culture from pretty much every period in Western history in a way that even Italy, for all its wonders and pleasures isn’t. I have a friend who’s an intellectual historian who likes to summarize things elegantly. He says that France has contributed importantly to culture in pretty much every period, but has only achieved the highest level of contribution in the creation of the Gothic cathedral, and maybe then again in Impressionist painting. But Germany has contributed at the highest level through much of the Common Era. I’m not sure this is entirely right, but it’s interesting/fun to think about. And pretty close to true. Of course, there is also the matter of Germany having committed some of the great crimes/sins/abominations in history.

And right there, I think, is the source of my fascination with the place. Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, the city of Dresden, and the (carefully legal and obsessively efficient) Holocaust. For me, at least, there is something profoundly important and compelling in that dialectic, something emblematically and crucially human. The Nazis were not monsters, except in so far as we all are, and it seems awfully important to me that we recognize and remember the extent to which pretty much all of us have the capacity to go there–so we have a fighting chance of avoiding it. 

I’m getting preachy and awfully close to political. Sorry. Here’s the thing: They put the Holocaust Memorial a block away from the Brandenberg Gate, and 2 blocks away from the Reichstag–seriously prime real estate, but more to the point, a pretty beautifully conscious and intentional statement of identity. Although they have carefully reconstructed many of the buildings we flattened (including, thank God, much of Dresden), they’ve left the broken-but-surviving tower of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche standing there next to a very clearly modern new sanctuary, so that if you get off the subway at the Zoological Gardens transit hub (it’s one of the major hubs, so many, many folks do) the war-battered tower is one of the first things a visitor to Berlin sees. Right there in the middle of the Ku-Dam–which is the Berlin equivalent of, say, 5th Ave in New York. We were in Munich, too, this time. Munich is gorgeous–mostly consistent and carefully reconstructed, and lushly full of delights—like the typically intense and still essentially whimsical Munich Surfers. It doesn’t hide its history. But it’s not quite as grubbily, richly complex as Berlin. 

It was distressing, 35 years ago, to find myself not liking the people who represent a big chunk of my ancestry. It’s really nice, now, to find myself liking and respecting them without having to pretend that they are or have been anything other than complicated and awful and also, always the people who nurtured Bach.

Read Devon Miller-Duggan’s blog Fat Matters.

Confession or My Life-Long Affair with Television by Devon Miller-Duggan

Confession

or My Life-Long Affair with Television. Actually, there are a lot of famously popular shows that I have loathed over the decades: Amos & Andy (thank God—I’d have to shoot myself if I’d ever like that horror), anything with Jackie Gleason in it, I Love Lucy, The Three Stooges (no surprise there), Twilight Zone (I am a wimp), Get Smart, Seinfeld (not a single character I liked at all, and yes, I love a great many New Yorkers).

Here’s a list of Things I Learned from TV Shows:
1. Humans might eventually get a clue: Star Trek in all its variations.
2. The quirky smart guy is a lot sexier than the conventionally handsome one: Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild,Wild West.
3. Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
4. Sometimes it’s good to dump procedure and change the rules of the game: Star Trek.
5. History is much more interesting than what they teach in school: The World at War.
6. Watching dance in nearly any form is bliss: all sorts of programs, but mostly PBS.
7. Shakespeare: Hallmark Hall of Fame & PBS.
8. Everything sounds better with a British accent: PBS.
9. Lots of stuff from Rocky & Bullwinkle, most of which led to rebellious behavior later.

I could go on. And of course there are not-so-great lessons I also learned: the fat girls will always be sidekicks and/or pathetic, schadenfreude rules, girls are supposed to be___(boy, fill in the blank on that one…).

I was an unusual kid-with-two-working-parents in the 50s and 60s. For much of it, both parents worked two jobs. And I was an only child; I was alone a lot. I read voraciously. But I also spent a huge amount of time making things with the tv on (my Troll dolls had amazing wardrobes). To this day, I rarely sit down to watch TV without also sewing, crocheting, knitting, or otherwise making something—or lots of somethings. I love it when it’s complicated and tough (Oz), when it complicated and sexy (Justified), when it’s just plain complicated (Game of Thrones), when it’s preachy (Boston Legal), when it’s sleazy (Revenge), when it’s quirky and delicious (anything by Joss Whedon).

I love it. I don’t think it’s hurt my brain. But I wonder. Sometimes.

Devon Miller-Duggan writes on the death of her godson in Afganistan

I haven’t sung the National Anthem since we went into Cambodia. I’ll stand for it if I’m in a crowd—I’m not looking for fights. I absolutely won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance. The republic for which the flag stands has my whole (if conflicted and frustrated) loyalty, but I won’t pledge anything to a piece of cloth. And I am not a big fan of American Exceptionalism when it’s not backed up by really, really good behavior.

But I am a person who appreciates and cares deeply about Things Done Right. I’ve (sort of) joked for years that the reason I’m an Episcopalian is that the Book of Common Prayer has the best funeral service in the (Christian) business—clean, dignified, beautifully and movingly phrased, properly focused.

Very often—most often, in fact—we live in a culture that provides grossly inadequate death rites. The rites happen in a big hurry after the death itself, and then everyone is expected to pick up and toddle on, keeping our grief for our grief group, but otherwise not bothering the rest of the world or asking it to understand that universe-rending changes have occurred for us.

These issues came together pretty shatteringly for me this last week. Our god-son was killed by an IED in Afghanistan a week ago. 23. Beautiful and large-hearted. You can read about him here, if you’re so inclined: http://www.thefastertimes.com/politics/2012/01/31/the-tragedy-and-grace-of-sgt-william-stacey/
or go to the ABC news site and click on last week’s Person of the Week.

His parents teach in Seattle. All military personnel who die abroad are brought home via the Air Force base in Dover, DE, 45 minutes down the road from here. So we went down to meet the body of our god-son. You’ve probably seen some version of what happens in a movie. What you may not know is that every body that comes home is treated with the same respect and care that you’ve seen in those movies. And unless you’ve had to do this thing, you don’t know about the rest of it. You will not have seen the meticulously, graciously appointed waiting center where families gather at all times of the day and night and in all weathers, or how thoughtfully and comprehensively the center is equipped. You won’t have seen the ferociously fresh-shaved faces of the Marines who are there to take care of those families. You will not have watched a chaplain very carefully avoid inserting anything of his own denomination into the conversation so that you are clear that he is there to do or be whatever you need him to do or be as a reflection of grace. You will not have had the Marine colonel who is up in the middle of the night to meet the body get down on one knee and take your hands in his to tell you how much he grieves with you. You will not have watched the troop slow-march from the far end of the tarmac, or seen the three Marines who flew with the body stand at anguished attention as it is lowered and moved, or listened to the heart-battering silence that rises even above the sound of the jets idling engines as they carry the draped coffin across to the waiting mortuary truck. You will not have seen beauty and terror woven together in the night quite like this. But you should know. We should all know.

And my long moratorium on the national anthem is over. Not that I have changed my opinion about expressions of nationalism, but Will probably sang it loud and proud.

Why Devon Miller-Duggan’s Christmas Tree is Still Up

One of the weird things about having been raised as a New Critic—or maybe it’s just a natural inclination that learning to close-read Eliot in the 9th grade brought to the front of my brain/personality—is that I do tend to read pretty much everything as having layers of meaning for me to pull apart. Which is mostly great fun. So I helplessly apply that even to stuff like noticing when different neighbors dump their Christmas trees. Which means that I get a nasty sort of smile every year when the first tree to hit the curb is outside the house of the guy who runs Campus Crusade for Christ. His wife NEVER smiles at anyone in the neighborhood. Neither do his kids. I’ve never understood evangelicals who are grim—I mean, if you’re so sure of your own salvation, why wouldn’t you be cheerful?

But this post is actually about Christmas trees. Maybe you were hoping that you wouldn’t have to hear any more about it until after Halloween. Well, I’m not done with it. I don’t mean the theological side of it, not entirely, though I am much more oriented toward Incarnation than toward Resurrection as a Christian. Nope, I’m talking about the excessive, exhausting, blithering decorative practice of Christmas. Or, more to the point, why my tree is still up and my lights are still on.

I was taught to decorate a tree by my father. My father was a dentist. Most dentists are profoundly artisanal by nature and very often aesthetically obsessive. My father certainly was. Decorating the tree was a very specific and slightly crazed process: First you put the lights on and make sure they are perfectly, beautifully, lavishly placed. Then you turn the lights off to put the ornaments on—bigger ornaments toward the bottom. Every ornament must be hung so that it can hang freely (the tree should be able to shiver slightly when anyone walks by), and if it doesn’t, then you can trim the branch to make it hang right—but you must trim the branch so that it doesn’t look trimmed. You must make sure the tree is lavishly arrayed in ornaments. Then you do the tinsel—one piece at a time, each piece hanging freely (scissors help here). Then you turn the lights back on. And your tree is magical. God, my father made a beautiful tree. You can imagine how he was about the lights outside. The angriest I ever saw him was one year when local boys went on a bulb-shattering spree. Those boys were very lucky that he never caught them.

I’m much less obsessive than he was (my family might dispute this), and do different things with the tree every year (all red, all green, all this or that), but I am still finicky as all get out. I gave up on tinsel 30 years ago when I realized the cats were eating it, though.

Since a tree is essentially a huge floral arrangement, and floral arrangements are, by definition (not a huge fan of silk, me) ephemeral, why would you expect it to last very long? Besides, the needles fall off, don’t they? Not always, esp. if you’re careful about what sort of tree you buy. Still, the holiday is over by 12th Night/Epiphany, so why’s my tree still up? Aside from the fact that it still has its needles.

It makes my husband goofily happy. He grieves when it finally comes down every year on his birthday (mid-February) or right before Lent, whichever comes first. He grew up with Eugene-O’Neil-Irish-family Christmasses (ever seen the SNL Disfunctional Family Christmas skit?). And Christmas was pretty much the one thing my family was good at. Seamus has rejoiced in the folderol and fa-la-la of my family’s practice for 35 years and shows no sign of stopping. So the tree stays up and the outside lights stay on to brighten winter nights for as long as we can keep them. Unlike my mother (who lives in a bed-sit on our ground floor), I don’t actually have to fight him to take things down by that time. She’d leave her stuff up all year if I wasn’t able to convince her that it’s more fun when it comes out (the day after Thanksgiving, NOT the day after Halloween) if it’s been packed a way for a few months.

Besides, didn’t Dickens suggest that the world would be a kinder place if we all kept Christmas in our hearts?
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Read more by Devon.

Fat Matters by Devon Miller-Duggan

A fantastic and thought provoking new blog by frequent contributor Devon Miller-Duggan–fatmatters.wordpress.com. Check it out!
Also, re-posting the first entry here:

Welcome to my round world.

I have a lot I would like to say to the folks-of-normal-size and the medical profession in general. Much of it boils down to two basic things: Where the hell do you get off making all those judgments? & You’re not helping.

First, let me share my credentials. I was not fat as a small child. I started to get plump when puberty started occupying the territory of my body and people (loosely defined as other children, my family, and people on the street) started talking about me to me about my being fat. So, much of my 57 years (47, to be precise) I have run around with “fat” as the core of my public identity. It is the first thing that anyone sees or thinks about me, and, very often, the abiding “tag” with which I am identified. Oddly enough, I gather it’s the same for conventionally beautiful people, and not always an easy tag for them to bear, either, though I suspect that the burden of beauty is more work-with-able than the burden of race of other visual tags.

I am not lazy. I am a little undisciplined, but it does not translate into my not getting much done. Quite the contrary. At any given point, I usually have five or six projects going, ranging from crocheting for charity to the novel I’m working on to running various committees at my church. I am one of those people about whom her friends say “I don’t know how you get so much done.” I exercise. I am not stupid. The fact that I went to one of the Seven Sisters, then to Johns Hopkins, have a Ph. D. from a reputable institution and have published a book certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m profoundly intelligent, but it does pretty much guarantee that I am not stupid. I am not clueless. I probably know more about calorie counts, carb counts, glycemic indices, and the general biochemistry of weight than you do. I am not a rampant, cream slurping sensualist. Well, not entirely, anyway. I am not a member of NAFA, the National Association for Fat Acceptance. I don’t think being fat is a good thing. That being said, there are fat people who are beautiful and fat people who are remarkably healthy. But mostly it is neither aesthetically advantageous, nor without health consequences. At 57 I’ve already had both knees replaced. My always-skinny aunt has had to have hers done, too, but mine had to be done about 15 years earlier than hers. I have type 2 diabetes. But I take my meds, exercise, and my A1C is 5.6—I’m a compliant patient. I am not pathetic, unmarried and miserable. I’ve been happily married for 35 years to a non-fat man with a big fat degree from a nice school in Cambridge, MA. And no, he’s not a “chubby chaser.” His all time favorite screen goddess is Audrey Hepburn—go figure. His other is Sophia Loren–I don’t have those cheekbones-of-a-goddess either.

I’m not merely “plump” (a word I am actually rather fond of) or slightly overweight. At my heaviest, I was more 130 pounds overweight—unquestionably “morbidly obese” by any standard out there. The term “morbidly obese” is repugnant. But then, many doctors are “terminally stupid” about their overweight patients (and, very often, their female patients, their older patients, their younger patients, their breathing patients—I am hugely lucky to have a GP who’s not an a-hole), making nearly unchangeable judgments about my intellect, my character, my life, and the causes of anything that was wrong with me. No, really. When I was in my late adolescence, my friend-of-the-family physician suggested that I had flu because I was fat. We will pass over in silence the extent to which the orthopedist who did my knees talked to me like I was 13—and the fact that he very clearly didn’t think it mattered how UGLY my scars were.

Why am I fat? Unless you’re my therapist or my doctor, it’s none of your bloody business. But I know why I’m fat, how I got that way, and how I stay that way. I know with some precision. I even know why I have so much trouble willing the good for my own body. That’s none of your business, either. Heredity and an unwillingness to make being thin the whole-and-sole focus of my life are factors, though.

Others are entitled to an opinions about my weight, just like I’m entitled to an opinion about their height/haircolor/taste in clothes/morals/behavior/whathaveyou. But no one is entitled to talk to me about it any more than I am entitled to walk up to them on the street and ask why it’s okay for them to wear $600. shoes when there are children in this country who have none. And, in my case, people I barely know do, in fact, walk up to me and offer opinions about my body: “You have such a beautiful face; you’d be gorgeous if you lost weight.” We’ll pass over in silence the things cars full of teenaged boys have been known to shout as they passed. We’ll hope they’ll grow out of it. Some teenaged jerk-pig-dog-wantwits do grow out of it. Many don’t.

Obviously, I have a fair amount to get off my chest. I’m not getting any younger, so it seems like 2012’s a good year to start speaking my mind. Hence the blog. I plan to tell stories, offer tips, and meditate on the business of being fat in a world that has better things to be thinking about. We’ll see how it goes.

Bitch Bitch Bitch by Devon Miller-Duggan

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch

Dear lit. Mags. of the world, please stop asking me to subscribe, to friend you on Facebook, to tweet you on Twitter (which I don’t do anyway) in the same envelope in which you have rejected my poems.

Really!? What sort of marketing genius told you this was a good idea? Whoever it was has no notion of that admittedly old-fashioned concept: Common Courtesy. Common courtesy would dictate that you do not simultaneously tell someone that she or he is unworthy of your publication and ask for her or his hard-earned bucks.

I can deal with rejection. I don’t like it (because 40 years of collecting rejection slips has not yet driven me over the edge and into masochism—at least that’s what I tell myself), but I can suck it up and go on with my day. But don’t ask me to support you when you’ve just shut the door in my face. It’s rude. I don’t care what your marketing advisor says. I know it’s Tough Times out there in arts-organization-land. I live there, too. But that’s no reason to get crass and corporate.

One of the points of literary magazines is the support and preservation and promulgation of art and culture, isn’t it? So shouldn’t you be aiming for better behavior, not worse?

And while I’m crabbing away, I’d like to add a note to the editors who send rejections suggesting that I should be reading every journal I send to, especially theirs. I read 5-6 journals a month. Oddly enough, I tend to read the ones that have published me at some point. Okay, there are a couple I have had subscriptions to in the past that I’d mug somebody to get into, but even that was temporary. If you want to be a subscribers-only lit mag., then do it. Otherwise, get real. You’re being rude.

Okay. That’s off my chest.

Neighbor by Anna Sarigianis

Neighbor

On nice afternoons she’d sit outside
and we’d talk from one porch to the other.
She’d tell me about her hydrangeas,
her grandchildren, her dog,
and how the dead follow her
in carts and on horseback
They cannot walk, she’d say,
they are but sticky pieces of themselves
that curve limbs against the heat of the living,
clinging like wet leaves to rags.
The ones she left behind were close,
she’d say, her brothers hang on her shoulders
and her sisters coil around her feet.
Once, for a moment, I thought I saw them,
huddled around her limbs like frightened birds,
but it was only her skirt
heaving in the wind.
One morning, after making toast,
her son stood at the table
and she screamed
and her eyes turned black
because this man in the kitchen was her father,
a dead man walking. She screamed
and cursed them for letting in demons.
They bolted the door.
That night she said she could not see,
she said now that it is dark, they come in twos.
She cried they press, they press.
The dead ride fast. As do the living.

Anna Sarigianis

Bio note: Anna Sarigianis is in the process of changing her major at the University of Delaware. She is one of the founding editors of the new online journal Kenning.
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Curated by Devon Miller-Duggan

What’s wrong with me? by Devon Miller-Duggan: earthquakes, the adjunct teaching life, and Occupy

What’s wrong with me? 


by Devon Miller-Duggan

Right before the semester started here in the next-to-smallest state, there was an earthquake. Then, on the weekend the dorms were supposed to open, Hurricane Irene came barrelling in, bringing tornadoes in her wake. The start of classes was pushed back two days and the frosh ended up moving into their dorms at the same time they were starting classes, which was a lot for them to take in.

So we hit a trifecta of scary Mother Earth behaviors. And the semester started off weirdly. Maybe that’s why everybody I know at the University feels slightly off-kilter. It doesn’t help that morale is already in the dumps because we’re all dealing with an administration that is actively hostile to faculty, terminally tone-deaf with the alumni, and insistently clueless about the importance of the University to the larger community of the state. So the zeitgeist around here is fairly crummy. Teaching is good, but teaching is pretty much always good. Things are fine once I get my draggy self into the classroom, but the general atmosphere around campus is just grey. This isn’t new for me, per se. My relationship to the institution has been conflicted/grouchy/unfullfilling for decades. I’m adjunct, which translates, in this medium-sized, semi-eminent institution to my being krill. Full professors are blue whales. The current administration, with some significant exceptions in the Dean’s office, are giant squid and great white sharks. Being krill is wearing. Teaching is great, but being krill outside of the classroom pretty much sucks. 

Still, I’m not sure either that, or this semester’s peculiarly tough schedule is why I feel so ridden-hard-and-put-away-wet. I’m not willing to entertain the notion that it’s age–and really, I don’t think it’s that. What I am beginning to think is that national politics are actually sucking the life out of me on some level. State-wide politics are blessedly sane-ish in Delaware, almost by tradition (though there are rumors that Christine O’Donnell is going to make another run at a senate seat, God save us). I think the Oakland police gassing the Occupy folks and shooting the Iraq vet in the head, the NYC cop pepper-spraying women, and the continuous flood of hateful untruths spilling from the mouths of various presidential hopefuls and sitting legislators and conservative commentators is just clawing away at my sense of something I don’t really have a name for. It might be less depressing if I hadn’t been raised by people who believed in paying attention to the news and in a fairly optimistic notion of what the American Experiment could achieve. Better, maybe, to have been raised among depressed lefties. 

I was briefly cheered by the thought that this year I’d be able to order a Turduchen from Costco and gleefully avoid a big chunk of Thanksgiving prep. But they’re already sold out. Maybe we’ll go out instead.

Kenning—a new online poetry journal–from Devon Miller-Duggan

Kenning—something new

Kenning is a new online poetry journal. Here’s our statement of purpose:

We lose something when we put a poem on a page. It’s a bargain we’ve made for millennia–putting words on a page to represent the experience of hearing. The page preserves poetry, but it forces us to sacrifice the communal hearth experience. We are in a unique moment of history; we no longer have to make this bargain. Technology makes it possible to hear a poet’s voice without sacrificing preservation for intimacy. We can reconcile the two. While readings and recordings have partially filled the need to hear poems, Kenning significantly extends the range of opportunities to hear.

Our goal is also to bring together both “page” and “spoken word” poems in one place, in both their written and oral forms. We welcome both established and emerging poets, formal and free verse poets. A traditional “page” version will always be accompanied by an audio-file of the poet reading his or her work.

Acceptance and publication are contingent. Once the poet has been notified of acceptance, an audio-file of the poet reading the chosen piece must be sent to Kenning within two weeks. If the author is unable to send us a file in an acceptable format, we will regretfully/tragically/ruthlessly de-accept the poem.

You can submit at “mailto:kenningjournal@gmail.com” kenningjournal@gmail.com