POST ON MARCH 20, 2013


Here's what's going on:

Thanks, everyone for keeping up with everything--each
small assignment--for working diligently to improve your
poems, for weathering snowstorms, etc. The visit / interview
with Professor Botkin was informative and there was great
energy in the room. Thanks to those of you who handed in
the three questions. Every little bit counts (literally). And
thanks to those who have posted regularly on the blogs (I
added Rebecca's blog to the links btw). To a certain extent,
"publishing" on blogs has become part of what "publishing"
is in our brave new world. Feedback or not, putting the work
out there into the world is part of maturing as a writer, part
of developing a thick skin, as well as part of being part of
a community of writers. You get validation and you support
other writers. That's what it's all about (or largely about).

We'll investigate a bit more the process on Lulu on Tuesday,
and I'll talk about the "anthology" which is mostly just selecting
poems from our texts, as well as online journals, and any
print journals you want to borrow from the library (up to two).
You literally type / print / cut and paste the first ten, but after
that you're assembling a table of contents. this can be tricky, but
I'll explain on Tuesday.

Next week we look at poems by Joe, Lori, Kevin.

The review, as described in handout, should be posted by
the 26th of March. You find two online journals chosen
from the list for online journals at the 42 Miles Press
wordpress blog, and compare and contrast them, and basically
just do what you did in the first writing you did on the literary
magazine (either The Laurel Review or Passages North).
You post this on your blog.

The last batch of poems, 16 pages minimum, 26 maximum
(up from 24), is due soon. We are still following the
staggered scheduled, with modifications due to circumstance,
and so poems by Mackenzie, Ryan, and Erin are due on the 26th.
We'll mostly think in terms of formatting, but, like the infor-
mation about long lines yesterday, aesthetics is part of the
poetry's shape on the page.

The idea is to mess with the technology of downloading your
manuscript now. More on this on Tuesday.

I want to talk some about the poems I assigned over time
in SHADE on March 26, and check out the poems in Herb
Scott's book starting on page 169 to 238, which we will
discuss a bit on April 2. Understand, this is a kind of seminar
and an assumption is made that a bit of reading is not a
chore, but one way to test the waters, to learn what's out
there. It is how one learns how to write. No big news, that
you learn to write by reading. You can't play rock and roll
without listening to a lot of it. (I know you all know this,
but indulge me.)

Note: 3 absences lowers a your grade form, say, a B to a B-.
Just a reminder.