Having recently moved to North London and joined the Highgate Poets, I seized the opportunity to help them put up their new website soon after being accepted into the group. What took weeks of custom programming to create the content management system for the Ojai Poetry Festival only took a matter of hours this time, owing to advances in the WordPress blog software.

Thanks also to a host of software plugins, the site not only features member news, but has a calendar of events, newsletter, integration with the group’s Twitter account, and much more. Going forward, options for selling anthologies on the site or enriching the list of members with more detail is just clicks away.

It is a pleasure to be associated with such a fine group of poets, actively writing and publishing in the UK, and remarkable to see how open source software such as WordPress makes setting up a dynamic website easier all the time.

The open reading portion of the evening was just as eclectic as those I had attended in California. The flavour, though, was different. Two older gentlemen sang folk songs a cappella. Themes of opera, atheism, and of course anti-war sentiment peppered the poems from the floor. David Floyd promoted his new pamphlet entitled “Protest.” The walls were lined with ink drawings depicting the horrors associated with capitalist greed for oil. And at the back table, a periodical called Peace News replaced what had typically been promoted at Torriano House–The Daily Worker.

The featured poets themselves took up less directly political themes. Sarah Doyle read several ekphrastic poems inspired by Pre-Raphaelite paintings, each carefully tuned to musical perfection within the constraints of metre and rhyme. She ended with a humorous poem that amplified clever, self-deprecating moments with sucker-punch-timed rhymes. Ruth Ingram read translations from French and German, as well a her own work steeped in keen observation and a quirky turn of thought.

Dennis Evans read short, personally meaningful poems full of plain speech and local knowledge. Diana Bishop, former reader-in-residence at Keats House, read poems with the beautiful diction and expert timing of a trained BBC radio presenter. Her work focused on childhood fears, drawing out the music of language with an easy and subtle relationship to both free verse and form.

Though I miss the longstanding friendships and easy camaraderie of my former California poetry haunts, both the poet and the anthropologist in me came away from the evening galvanised. I look forward to swapping poems with group members in our meeting next month, and continuing to find my way in the eccentric and historically-rich London poetry scene.

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”

Oscar Wilde would be pleased to know that, based on my experience so far as an American in London, Britain and America are still very much separated by a common language. More than this, as a transplanted poet beginning to send down roots into unfamiliar ground, I am discovering that the set of poetic impulses that find favour in the UK differ from those enriched by my native soil. This makes sense: so much about art is a matter of taste, and so much about taste can be cultural.

And so, even as I have been experiencing culture shock in my ordinary life, I am also going through a kind of poetic culture shock as I find my way in this new literary terrain. One of the best ways I have found to get through culture shock of any kind is to articulate and embrace what is unique about the new environment. While it would be impossible to describe, universally and categorically, what distinguishes British and American poetics, I recognise certain differences on instinct. The Americas could not have made a Seamus Heaney; the British Isles could not produce a Sharon Olds.

And so, I have been making a personal and highly subjective investigation into the strengths of each culture’s contemporary poetry, by reading and re-reading two books: The Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner) and The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt). I took note of the poems I liked most, then listed the qualities held in common by my favourites from each book.

Obviously, this list does not hold up as a set of universal generalisations. Particularly when it comes to poetry, for every rule there is an exception. London might have produced a Li-Young-Lee; New York could have fashioned a Paul Muldoon. Plus “American” poets in this volume like Charles Simic have strong ties to Europe, and at least one “Brit” in the book is an American transplant. So it goes.

This evening, I will participate in the peculiarly British tradition of Bonfire Night (having previously only ever lit fireworks in the warmth of summer), and then am looking forward tomorrow night to my first gathering of a local poetry group. I am not trying to bend my sensibilities to suit the new context as much as I am trying to get in touch with what I admire and respect about British poetry, to invoke those qualities from within. I was drawn to London to learn, to be influenced, to find out more about myself by contrasts, and to embrace the Old World. Overcoming poetic culture shock helps me further that journey and lighten my load.

Who knew these dark muses could set the quills of so many fine poet-friends a-quiver? I know what I will be reading on the tube for the rest of this week–poems like Jackson Wheeler‘s “Crow Sings Jazz” and a promising-sounding one by Paul Fericano, ever obsessed with The Three Stooges, entitled “Curly Howard Misreads Edgar Allen Poe.”

My own poem, “Shelf Road, Ojai” (originally titled “Crow”) qualified me first for an honourable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Competition, then as a runner-up in the Indiana Review Poetry Prize–but has never actually been published before. Re-reading it brings me back to the eponymous trail in a Shangri-La now some six thousand miles away. Perhaps all along these messages-in-a-bottle I call poems were only ever meant to return to me on the shores of a different island, to remind me of who I was, and who was with me, everywhere that I have been.

The anthology is now available at local bookstores or on Amazon.com.

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

There are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.

Click to view the map.

As I travelled by tube to the Southbank Centre to attend the first event of the London Literature Festival, and my first poetry reading since moving to London two months ago, I took with me my American expectations about poetry venues: coffee shops, small community centers, the occasional well-appointed-but-out-of-the way theater or library hall. Seated facing the podium on the sixth floor of this clean, bright temple to art, I kept examining the layers of the backdrop as if it were a painting. First, a Union Jack. Then the London Eye. And on the far side of the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. This was not a painting, however, but a window. The statement was clear: art, and for this evening, poetry, commands a central place in Britain. However, centrality means anything but homogeneity, as the four readers in this “Poetry of Place” event demonstrated.

Read the full article online at the Silk Road Review Blog.

How perfect then, having been featured at one of the first “Friday on Saturday” readings five years ago, to read poems from my new collection Human Shade to the community that has become a poetic family to me. Doris once again baked cookies, which prompted a man from the street to burst in while I was reading a poem. Fortunately Friday, outwardly graceful, but with a core of steel, makes not only a lovely emcee but an efficient bouncer. I re-read the poem.

I will miss this enthusiastic and quirky community of artists and word lovers. While this was my last featured reading before we leave for London, I do have two ensemble readings schedule for April: at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum on Sunday, April 10th at 7:00 PM, and at Frank Picture Gallery in Santa Monica on Thursday, April 14th at 8:00 PM. If you are in Southern California, perhaps I will see you there for a little sweet sorrow before I go.

Each order that has come in so far has felt like a small vote of confidence in my work. Collectively, they represent a substantial community of encouragement and support. By taking and fulfilling these orders myself, I feel personally connected to readers. I can also see where the books are going, as shown on the following map:

The first two boxes of books are scheduled to land on my doorstep on Thursday, and nearly all of them already have homes. Almost as soon as they land, I will need to request more books from the publisher in time for my readings in March.

This, to me, is the best the Internet can offer–a sense of personal and meaningful connection to a global community of support. Prior to this experience, if you had asked me to name fifty to a hundred people who would be willing to pay good money to make extra sure they got a signed copy of my book, I’d be hard pressed to name them. Now I know who you are.

I look forward to shipping out books this weekend.

The Magna Carta

One of my poems, “Recipe for the Broken“, is a finalist for inclusion in the Goodreads July newsletter. The newsletter is sent by email to over two million members of this social networking website for book lovers. As far as I know, that is a far greater circulation than even the most popular literary journals in print can boast. Apart from the exciting opportunity to reach a wider audience, I also decided to submit a poem as a kind of participant-observer in my ongoing informal research into alternative modes of publishing.

The contest goes like this: poets submit a single poem on the website, and from scores of submissions an editorial team picks six finalists to go on to a round of open voting. You can read the finalist poems for this month here and vote here. You need to be a member of Goodreads and also the ¡POETRY! group on Goodreads in order to vote. Voting ends, in this case, at midnight on July 2nd. Only the first-place poem is published in the email newsletter.

This is one example of the ongoing democratization of poetry–not only because it involves voting, but because it involves more generally the dissolution of intermediaries between author and reader. Laura Miller has a compelling argument for why similar trends, like the rise of self-publishing, are not necessarily such a good thing. As the intermediary “gatekeepers”–editors and publishers–are increasingly circumvented, the burden of discovering good writing shifts to the already overwhelmed and distracted reader.

James Fallows also recently detailed, with his signature blend of intelligence, curiosity, and crystal-clear prose, why and how a company like Google, iconic for its ability to democratize (and thereby collapse) whole industries, is going out of its way to help poetry’s sensible cousin, journalism. Google’s premise is that good journalism is a form of content necessary to the web search engine giant’s own survival, and that high-quality investigative journalism is critical to the success of actual, governmental democracies. They contend that the journalism industry is experiencing not a lack of demand, but a lack of efficiency that will ultimately right itself. In the interim, however, to prevent or at least minimize a dark age of poor-quality and fragmented news, Google is extending a helping hand to newspapers everywhere.

Who, I wonder, is helping literature in general, and poetry specifically?

Dave Gessner points out another aspect of poetry’s democratization–that is, “we are all poets now.” Social media has revolutionized our relationship to the art of words, and to the art of relating to one another through words–rewarding brevity and wit. Thousands of Emily Dickinsons who might, in a previous age, have been content to lock their scribblings away in a hope chest are now getting into the game. And, whether or not you think some of it ought to have stayed locked up, or at least been run past an editor first, the trend toward sharing poetry online is irreversible.

And so, in the absence of some greater deus ex machina, perhaps we are the very saviors we have been looking for. As we writer-readers forge relationships of trust and shared taste with one another, perhaps we can replace the former “gatekeepers” of literary merit–not with a large conduit for unfiltered trash–but with pass-it-along networks where good writing advances through new “mini-gatekeepers” with earned reputations for advancing quality writing to a receptive audience.

Let us not forget, though, that pure democracies undermine minorities and enforce conformity. That is why the most successful governmental democracies make provisions for the individual, and delegate governance to elected officials, instead of relying on majority votes alone. Much like understanding an agreed-upon set of principles for governance (such as a constitution), likewise some degree of formal or informal cultural education is a prerequisite to the appreciation of art. And even as complex laws are put before experienced legislators, so too must there still be some form of “gatekeeper” involved in the championing of literature and literary ideas.

Whether these “gatekeepers” and “mini-gatekeepers” will come in the form of a new breed of tech-savvy editors at independent and university presses, through the increased reputability of online forms of publishing, or, most likely, both–one thing is clear: we are in a time of great change and upheaval, as writers and readers of art-made-out-of-words seek to connect in a world made startlingly smaller and faster by the proliferation of ones and zeroes.

I also took this occasion to debut my new limited-edition broadside of the poem “Recipe for the Broken.” The poem was first published in “Walt’s Corner” of The Long Islander, the newspaper founded by Walt Whitman in 1838. Fittingly, the column is now curated by George Wallace. The poem and background image are printed on sturdy 8.5″ x 11″ paper as part of The Broadsider Volume 2, Series 12 (Poor Souls Press 2010), conceived and created by Paul Fericano. A limited quantity of hand-numbered and signed prints are now available for sale on this website.

I also have to admit I had no idea that writing prompt websites have been around since 2006. Nor did I realize the popularity of responding to writing prompts online until I contributed a prompt to RWP for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo to the initiated.) I had been swapping prompts by email once per month with a few fellow poets from my MFA program, and sent in my most recent concoction at one of the RWP site organizers’ request. That prompt, and every other prompt this month, received about two hundred responses–mostly poems! Witnessing this frenzy of writing, reading, and critiquing caused me to question some of my previous remarks about where poetry might be headed in the twenty-first century.

And so, I will watch with interest as poets and poetry lovers find new ways to reach out and connect. Though poetry may indeed be a sideshow in this media-dominated era, sites like RWP and Big Tent Poetry prove that it remains an act that many still want to get in to. Perhaps, to do so, we must be willing to redefine words like “reader” and “audience,” even as social networking websites have redefined the concept of “friend.” Or perhaps, amid all the fire juggling and sequined vaulting online, the opportunity remains, under a sufficiently large and encompassing tent, for words to transcend the horn-toots and clown cars of entertainment, reaching up into the rafters, to where the trapeze artists of language still make art.

While my first two pieces, on how to learn from rejection and how to be a poet every day, will remain archived on the site, my latest response to a member question, originally slated for mid-May, will now no longer show up on the site. So, in honor of the first day of the last month of this remarkable community’s existence, in honor of the first day of National Poetry Month, and in honor of Read Write Poem member Julie’s question, I am publishing my final column in this series here, on my own website.

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At work, when I interview candidates for an open position, I always ask what it was like at their previous job. I am amazed at how many interviewees animatedly complain. It is a warning sign to me that, if I hire them, they will likely soon be doing the same about my company. And so, though it seems Socratic, I am compelled to respond, whenever fellow writers ask me if they ought to do an MFA, with more questions, such as: How is it going in your current writing workshops? What is the conversation like between you and your trusted peers, when they give you feedback? Who are your current mentors (including those you learn from solely through their published work)? What are you working on improving about your writing life? Whom do you emulate? What do you absolutely know you still need to learn?

Learning to write well is, to me, a lifelong process of self-education. Just as I consider myself responsible for looking after my health, and enlist medical professionals to that end, likewise I am the one in charge of educating myself as a writer. My attitude, therefore, played a critical part in making my MFA two of the most rich and fulfilling years of my writerly life so far.

That said, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” tells the story of a man who, thorough his attitude, found existential meaning in the midst of his imprisonment in a Russian GULAG camp. And so, having said my piece about attitude, let me turn my attention to the substance of the MFA program I attended. After all, nobody wants to pay tens of thousands of dollars to participate in an experience that feels like a Soviet labor camp.

To hear some speak of the MFA system, it can sound like The Gulag Archipelago, which is probably what prompted RWP member Julie to ask:

I’m curious about how writing can be “improved” or even just taught by teachers.  I’ve always felt that poetry arises out of deeply felt experiences that can’t be articulated in any other way but in the shorthand of poems, and yet your writing (at least what I’ve read so far) indicates that an MFA isn’t the kiss of death for originality and that certain “life” that much of current poetry seems to lack.

I must admit that I feel under-qualified to speak to the current state of poetry, or the current state of the MFA system at large. My scientific sample size is limited to one: just me, attending a single low-residency MFA through Pacific University, Oregon, for two years time. I can tell you what I got out of it. Doing so, in my experience, is a bit like sounding a tuning fork. Some will read this and resonate automatically, based on how they are put together. Others might ask “Did you hear something?” and then move on.

Doing an MFA is not for everybody. There are plenty of great writers without them, plenty of mediocre writers with them–and vice-versa. The best answer I can give is to share my experience. Then, if something goes “ding,” you might want to take a next step toward looking in to this type of education.

One of my faculty advisors, Marvin Bell, said something I found remarkable. He said, “Genius in the arts consists in getting in touch with your own wiring.” At first, this would seem consistent with the idea that good writing can’t be taught. This is especially true if you consider teaching in the narrow and traditional sense of imparting information, and quizzing it back. However, my experience in the MFA had more to do with the part of education that shares a common root with the word “educe”–that is, I felt my true writerly self coaxed out from within.

And so, while good writing may not be “teachable” in a traditional sense, a better question might be: is there value to mentorship in the arts? Reading the exchange from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” strikes me as a natural precursor to the faculty advisor exchanges in a low-residency MFA. Let me be clear: MFAs are expensive, and MFAs take time; Peer advice is free, and workshop groups are cheap. What made my MFA worth every penny of tuition, and every second of the two intense years of study, was this timeless process of mentorship and exchange. Pick your mentors well.

I studied with remarkable poets who have dedicated their lives to poetry. Just being around them was a privilege. But more than this, I experienced the traits of an artist awaken in me, through conversation and contact. Plus, their writing advice was invaluable. Though I may have found my own “wiring” eventually, through the support and encouragement of my advisors, I feel that my MFA gave me a jump start on the discovery process–easily compressing ten years of self-educating study (or more!) into two rich and immersive MFA years.

Regarding the “kiss of death for originality” sometimes linked to MFA programs, I see self-direction as the most significant mitigating factor against this syndrome. With regard to mentorship, the difference between the teacher-as-sender/student-as-receiver model of teaching, and the rich and engaging dialog I experienced in my two years, is the difference between potentially getting in touch with someone else’s wiring, and getting in touch with your own.

In workshops, the danger of sucking the life out of a poem is heightened, since groups tend toward consensus, and consensus favors mediocrity. Still, for the self-educating poet, taking temperature readings from a variety of bright, engaged readers, and conversing with them about their reading experience, can be an invaluable precursor to the more terse and ruthless process of sending poems out to a publisher. It is an imperfect science, fraught with false reads and biases. Then again, the literary marketplace is as well. The self-educating poet carries a salt shaker wherever she goes.

Finally, while my low-residency MFA was certainly not a GULAG camp, the results were a bit like going through boot camp. Two years of getting up early before work to write, reading after work, and spending time in the evenings and on weekends revising work and sending out poems helped me to groove new and lasting habits. I could set up the same accountability for free with trusted peers–and since graduation, I have. But the energy required to sustain my focus in the MFA program specifically helped me achieve an escape velocity–leaving behind preciousness and hesitation, propelling me into a new realm of discipline and confidence.

Your mileage may vary. For me, this particular MFA, at this critical juncture in my life, was transformational. I wrote blog entries on my website throughout my time in the program. If you would like to read more about my experience, including a transcript of the introduction to my graduate reading and student speech at commencement, please see the “MFA” category on my site.