Friday, June 24, 2005

Hide

Well my friends its Friday and do I need to go work and teach people how to make beautiful art or not so beautiful art as the case may be? No the answer is no—there will be no brushes used in this house for the next three weeks unless it is for entertainment purposes.

Yesterday I received an email from someone I did not know saying how much he enjoyed my recent poem in Pleiades which would be great if I had actually received my own copy. As politically incorrect as this sounds, I feel like a blind girl going out of the house naked. Damn it, why can’t I read the poem? I mean yes, I wrote it but that was like three years ago and now I am naked and blind and writing nothing.

Also in the box, a letter from the director of Palm Beach workshop (could I possibly milk this workshop any further?) asking me to send a copy of my poem “Hide” which I read at the reading because someone from Sydney Australia wants to read it at their poetry festival and they don’t seem to be able to find a book by Teresa Ballard. I am going to have to get Teresa Ballard has no book T-shirts.

Anyway I have decided to make a copy of all these letters and send them to Louise with my next Yale submission and tell her it is all her damn fault. If she would just pick me next year we would all be satisfied and she would break her lifetime streak of never picking a woman. Not that I am bitter.

So the question for the day is how far have you ridden a poem because I think I might have to go out and shoot this one after it gets back from Australia? And is there one poem in your work that people keep coming back to?

These are the things I want to know, while I finish my pile of The New Yorker which has grown by bed.

8 comments:

Emily Lloyd said...
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early hours of sky said...

True fact: the best complements I ever received are from my children and the harshest criticism mom you really should NOT put that in the book and for some reason you can’t ground them for these comments.

And Miss Lloyd I think you might actually be a bigger flirt than I am and that is saying a lot but I still think Loudon has the crown or maybe Charlie. God we are all sluts. I mean that in a good way. Yes, the poem is new…brand spakin’. I don’t know if I like it yet but it is nice to know I can still do line breaks.

Emily Lloyd said...
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Emily Lloyd said...
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early hours of sky said...

I believe I made my point lmao

and the t-shirts are on order.

Anne Haines said...

You guys are cracking me up!

I know what you mean about the "greatest hit" poem thing. My poem "Door" was published by Poetry Midwest, then I stuck it on my poetry group's CD because it's short and worked well as an introduction, then a local composer got hold of the CD and asked if he could set that particular poem to music, then I ended up reading it on the radio because my program was going overtime and I needed to pull out a longer poem and substitute something short -- and at about 17 seconds, "Door" was the one. The damn thing took about 5 minutes to write and was written as an assignment for a class, and I still don't see what the fuss is about with it -- it's just a little tiny nothing poem. But it seems to be the one people come back to.

I guess it's better than back when my old writing group was giving readings all the time and somehow I became "known" for my mulberry poem which involved a lot of ripeness and juice and hands and tongues and so on. It was just about fruit, I swear! :)

Patty said...

A poem I've been glad to ride is called "My Mother." It appeared in The Atlanta Review, and then was picked to appear in Atlanta Review's 10th Anniversary Anthology. A poem I can't shake is called "Why I Hate Ukrops'. It's a flimsy, gimmicky poem that makes fun of a weird, monopolistic grocery chain here in Richmond. More people have asked for a copy of that poem than any other. Ugh.

early hours of sky said...

Patty, I cant shake Things I tell my Lover Before Entering My Parents' Home It stays with me like a bad penny but I cant shake my parents either;)