Providence, Post Office, Publish, Perish

Thanks to the crowd at Blue State Coffee for a nice show last night. Witty hosting by Tony Brown and Ryk McIntyre. It was also good seeing Megan Thoma, Mike McGee, and David Perez read again. If you want to laugh your butt off, Megan's featuring later this month. I'll put up info when I have the exact date. If you want somebody else roaming the lines between slam and academia (in this case an MFA), check out David Perez tonight at the Cantab or Friday in Manchester.

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I'm about to send out a lot of stuff.

I've been bad in the last year about submitting work. I've been concentrating so much of my energy on producing that I've forgotten about the whole publish/perish dichotomy, which is especially important since I'm going on the job market this year. I look around at some of the MFA grads with whom I'll be competing and know that I'm competitive as far as total publication records go. I'm no Seth Abramson, in all the named journals (and probably never will be), but I've got a few decent journals under my belt and three chapbooks through real publishers. diluvium will of course be the big shot this time around, and I'm sending it to the major first-book contests: Yale Younger Series, Whitman, Bakeless, etc. But I'm also pulling out the individual poems that have until now been serving as fodder for the ocean in diluvium and sending them out to journals. I've gotten positive responses on them from some poets I greatly respect (and who would both know good stuff when they saw it and not BS me about whether or not what I'd just shown them was so). We'll see how the readers react. As usual, my big problem will be choosing work. That is:

I'm one of the few poets I know who doesn't quite have a shtick. Whether it's performance or written work, I write a wide range of material. On the one hand, it's great when you see it all together. These sets that I've performed at Worcester, the Cantab, and Providence have been like one-man variety shows in a sense. I've written before about The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series and how it forms a spectrum of Icarus poetry. But when I just have to choose 3-5 poems to send off to a journal, I get a bit lost. Do I choose the ones that have similar themes? Similar styles? Do I try to show off range and therefore pick three very different poems? Grouping by style is usually the safest bet, as the journals I've seen tend to choose this way. And yet it chafes me. That's another reason I haven't submitted much lately - it hurts to break pieces apart instead of letting them build up into a greater effect. It also hurts to say several things that are all very close to each other (though I suspect my "very" might be "somewhat" for others).

If you've read any of my stuff in the past year and have suggestions of places I can submit to, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be going through back issues, looking for similarities in style, and sometimes comparing to Jeffery Bahr's Publication Ranking list. I prefer to submit to places that I think look good, which is not to say I'm being shallow, but that I particularly like journals that have a coherent aesthetic that extends even to the production of said journal. I have to admit that some of my submissions this time around, however, will be based on the reputation of the journal, deserved or not.

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Lastly, I'll likely be blogging a bit more this month. Ironic, given that I'm starting an adjunct professorship at the University of New England as well as continuing work on my dissertation. If I'm going to have less time, I might as well have drastically less time.

MIT Tongues

The other week I went to the MIT Museum. There was some great stuff, and even an exhibit that will be useful for my dissertation, amazingly enough (the folks involved produced visual "poetry" like 2D busts formed by terms used in a blog). My top takeaway for the day was a child's contribution to the "Wall of Ideas" in the second floor robotics area. While most other children had drawn some kind of boxy robot equipped with laser beams or nigh-magical rocket boosters or some other kind of high-flying-no-practicality inventions, this child had simply written, in all capitals, "TODAS LAS LENGUAS!!"

Much Love for the Cantab

In case anybody from the Cantab comes across this blog as a result of buying my chapbook or Googling me or Facebook linking or whatever: thank you for an awesome night. You laughed when I hoped you'd laugh. You went dead silent when I hoped you'd be listening. You played along with any requests I had. You multiplied my efforts. You were, in short, an ideal audience, and I was so glad to have been there from the beginning of the open mic to the end of the slam that followed my set. Thank you.

Capital Fs

Yes, I capitalize the Fs in JeFF. I do this in publications (journals and chapbooks, even in my one scholarly publication so far), on my syllabuses, when signing off to family members in a letter or email. Sooner or later folks ask about those capitals. I've got three reasons.

1. The capital Fs were spawned from the way I make my signature. It looks like the Fs are uppercase, which is just a quirk of my writing. But a gentleman by the name of John Greenwood started printing them capitalized in a writing workshop we took as undergraduates.

2. I liked the look. There's a balance to JeFF Stumpo that I don't find in Jeff Stumpo. Somehow the weight at the beginning just looks right to me.

3. It makes people ask. On the downside, somebody might wonder if I made a typo in my own name. That's a rare event, as the two capitals make it appear pretty darn intentional. It's silly and vapid, but it gets me a second look from time to time. Sometimes (submitting poetry without a guardian angel comes to mind) that's needed.

Sorry that the story doesn't involve going through demon trials to upgrade the letters of my name one at a time, and if only I can defeat seven dancing genii by midnight tomorrow I'll get all the letters capitalized. Or a horrific typewriter error at the hospital when I was born, the ramifications of which later trickled into the internet and the untold millions who can't type properly. Or that time I was approached by [insert famous artist/musician/puppeteer here] who granted me a new name in exchange for one of my poems.

Signing off,
JeFF

Set List

If you saw me last night at the warm and welcoming Poets' Asylum in Worcester, this is the set list you heard. If you're going to see me at the Cantab on August 19 or at GotPoetry! Live on September 1, this is the list you'll hear*. I really like how it turned out - it has a progression (with the exception of the first poem) from simple to complex performance. That is to say, the pieces get more and more involved in terms of motion, tone of voice, use of persona, etc. It really lets the audience slowly build up into the complicated pieces, all the while bouncing back and forth between serious and silly so as not to overwhelm with one tenor. All told, the set lasts about half an hour (give or take a couple of minutes depending on improvised banter between a few poems, but I try to go from one to the next without much interruption).

Vom Kriege
Icarus comes in first
Icarus applies for a grant from the DoD
in absentia
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi...
Love After Marriage
Mother Earth
[scheduled banter about truth in poetry]
Esteban Peicovich and the Theory of Relativity
Wooden Boys and Deadlier Toys
[option for There will be no reinvention of the wheel depending on the audience]
Sign of the Turtle
ADD TV


*If you go see me at the Zion Hill Reading in November, you won't hear this list. Instead I'll be telling a Russian fairy tale for about 20 minutes.

Smooth, Not Criminal?

Most of the poetry in diluvium is my own. All of the central 8-line poems are original, and the vast majority of the lines in the surrounding ocean are either created specifically for this sequence or adapted from other poems of mine. There are, however, some exceptions that I fear may cause me trouble later on.

I quote from a huge variety of sources, anything from two to eight lines: song lyrics, poetry, computer error messages, scholarly works. At the end of the sequence, I plan to include a Waste Land style set of endnotes: On page x, the lines that begin with y come from source z. In no way, shape, or form do I wish to plagiarize, just collage.

I've recently become concerned about the different between plagiarism (which is readily solved by providing credit where credit is due) and fair use (which is concerned with protecting the use of exact words, whether or not credit is provided). That is to say, if dreams come true, and diluvium gets published, can the poets and bands I crib from come after me for using their lines without permission, in a context they didn't approve?

I'm already starting to write some of the poets, some of whom I've met and will probably be OK with the project. Some are dead, but their works are still under copyright. Some are so big (e.g., U2) that I'll never hear anything regarding permission to use the lines until there's actually a book coming out. I'm going to let large fish and dead fish (who are large by virtue of being controlled by publishers more than individuals) get fried by the publisher, whoever that is, when the time comes.

Anyone out there do a lot of collage work and/or a lot of quoting and have any advice? Am I just being paranoid, since nobody comes after poets for this kind of thing anyway? Am I just being nice, since I might not really have to (by virtue of being under the radar) but choose to tell the people I'm quoting?

Another diluvium sneak peak

I'm realizing that I don't so much mind putting samples of diluvium up here. As I learned with El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent and The Icarus Sketches, people react quite strongly (in a good way) to the finished sequence, but very few journals are willing to touch the individual poems. Here's a draft of Noah's wife on page 19, fretting about the rut they've gotten themselves into: