Archive for the ‘From the Editors' Desk’ Category

Well, We Did It!

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 by beth

(Okay, I just spent 10 minutes trying to think up a dashingly witty intro, and this sentence is about all I’ve got.) Well, we did it! You did it! Woohoo! Volume VI is finally on its way, and you mind-boggling writers gave us a mind-boggling year trying to figure out what was going to be in it. Being a contemporary poetry junkie, I (foolishly) thought I’d seen it all – but regardless of how much Simic, Strand, Ashbery, and whatever other big poetry names I read, what I realized through editing this year was that there’s so much more to poetry I’ll never experience if I keep only reading the work of people 40, 50, even 60 years older than me. I’d missed the whole point. Poetry can and should be as big, as small, as old and most definitely as young as you want it to be. It’s a freedom, it’s a necessity, it’s a desperate attempt to make sure something, anything is snatched away safely from the jaws of time and space – but whatever it is, it’s not something you can catch and stuff into a box. The poems this year showed me a rawer, braver side to poetry that I was never expecting, and there were so many great surprises: a sestina that was the best I’d ever laid eyes on, a couple of adventurous prose poems, a piece so subtle it almost didn’t exist, an artsy rant that made me love it for its bad manners. That’s not to say that everything I came across was a “good” poem, but everything I came across did show me something about how our generation yearns to express itself, and why it wants to express itself in the way it does. You guys taught me so much about how to read and understand poetry for all that it can possibly be, not just what it has been. So, to all of you, thanks for the ride!

That being said, “all that [poetry] can possibly be” doesn’t mean that any collection of words is a poem, let alone a good one. The large majority of the poems that needed more work weren’t suffering from a lack of creativity or potential at all- what they needed instead was just a better understanding of how to manipulate and communicate through poetry. Time for some tips! The three common myths I’ll be pinpointing concern misused redundancy/repetition, having description and imagery as the sole mission of a poem, and disregarding sentence structure because “poetry is art”.

Myth: Repetition of important lines helps to emphasize the direction of a free-verse poem.

Fact: Generally speaking, repeated lines are much less powerful than pushing the poem forward with new, constructive material.

I used to be an avid hater of poetry. To tell the truth I can’t really blame myself; the one poetry lesson I remember having in school consisted of the teacher showing us how chorus-like repetition is an ubiquitous, extremely useful poetical tool. Generally, in free verse it is actually far from, except in cases where the attitude of the message or narrator needs a certain listless or exasperating edge. More often than not, well, what can a conspicuously repeated line say that you haven’t already said? They’re sort of like lazy dogs. They sit around not really doing anything, and they’re always in the middle of the hallway, preventing you from getting where you want to get.

So try not to say something if you’ve already said it, especially in a genre where negative space and simplicity are prized. A key feature of poetry is that it “speaks against an essential backdrop of silence. It is almost reluctant to speak at all, knowing that it can never fully name what is at the heart of its intention”, as James Tate once wrote. Put words down sparingly, but suck out as much meaning from each word you put down, rather than putting words down generously and assuming that your general idea will be presented somewhere along the way. Before you put down any line, ask yourself the following questions: Does this line have a specific and irreplaceable role in both the immediate context and big picture? Does it contribute something that no other line contributes? Is it doing its share of the work in shaping the poem towards the final goal, or is it just along for the ride? (Of course, this advice is entirely applicable to catching redundant lines as well.) If the answers are yes, the precise direction of a poem will feel much more controlled and purposeful.

Unlike listening to a pop song with a chorus, reading literature requires that the reader actively pursue a poem, not just passively intake it. Making a reader go through chorus-like repetitions doesn’t come off as catchy; a lot of times it feels more like the writer ran out of constructive things to say. The great thing is that really short poems, e.g. less than 10 lines, are just as legitimate as really long poems, so it’s totally fine if what you have to say comes off strongest in just a handful of words. It’s a much more powerful alternative than unnecessarily tossing in repetition or redundancy to make it longer.

Myth: Detailed description and imagery are all you need for a good poem.

Fact: Detailed description and imagery are all you need for a good photographic painting. A poem should communicate something.

Description and imagery! They’re paraded as creative writing 101, and they certainly are in a sense, but they are by no means all you need to craft a poem. Of course, a great poem can be inspired by beautiful scenery or whatnot, but before even thinking about brainstorming phrases for detailed description or imagery, try nailing down exactly what inspired you about whatever it is you saw. It should be something less obvious than just the physical aesthetics of what you saw, e.g. the ideas it inspired, how it symbolizes something else, or simply the feeling that the sight gave you (and if that’s the case, try to dig beyond just “sad”, “angry”, “happy”, etc.). Make this the ultimate mission of your poem, and use imagery and description to cultivate and help push along this mission – but avoid making imagery and description the mission itself. Poetry is, at its heart, a form of communication, which is different from seeing a photo or painting. Details can be used to highlight certain sentiments, attitudes, or narrative direction, not just complete an image. An example:

The sky is white. The pallid light

hits here and there, crinkling your image

of the silver pencil canister. Your glasses

badly need cleaning, you realize. The apple slices

left on the counter have browned since you last

looked there, and it’s much too painful

to take them from their perpetual

solitude.

This is just a snippet of a poem, so we don’t know what the writer’s full mission was. However, we can sense something more complex than just the picture the writer presents. You don’t just picture the sky, the glasses, and the apple slices; through the specific wordings and phrasings of the description, the writer is actively herding the reader towards a specific feeling. However subtle they may be, the phrases “crinkling your image”, “your glasses badly need cleaning”, “the apple slices … have browned”, and “perpetual solitude” sculpt the feelings of blighted or weak vision, prolonged time, and isolation. Farther on in this poem the writer ties together these feelings into a more constructive statement, but even in these few lines there is an added dimension, an added “mission” to the description that you couldn’t just see in a photo. It’s that slippery, more complex dimension that poets should try to capture in imagery, not just the physical details of the picture itself, however stunning they are.

Myth: Poetry is about uninhibited expression, so correct syntactical, grammatical, and punctuational structures can be ignored.

Fact: Generally, ignoring syntactical, grammatical, and punctuational structures in poetry is about as communicative as ignoring them in everyday speech.

The great thing about poetry is that neither I nor anyone else can give a black and white definition of what makes a poem. So, really, if you want to write poetry and ignore SGP structures, there’s no reason why you can’t. But for poetry be accessible and communicative to others, there just can’t be distracting comma splices, missing periods, and fickle tense usage hanging around. There’s a simple analogy for this. If you’re going to have a conversation with anyone, you’re going to seem unfocused, clumsy, slightly rude and possibly even unintelligent if you purposely toss grammar down the drain. (If you want a poem to appear unfocused, clumsy, slightly rude or possibly even unintelligent, that’s of course a different matter – but in such a case the material and tone of the piece would also have to be in character.) Generally, to be able to speak honestly and coherently, a poem has to obey English conventions in the same way any other form of writing does, simply because funky or nonexistent SGP structures are distracting, and cannot convey the subtleties needed to make the tone feel human and genuine.

Of course, there are always exceptions, like the ones I mentioned above. The trick with these exceptions, as I alluded to, is that the poem in its entirety must conform its entire personality to make wacky SGP usage appear natural. Basically, the stylistic identity of a poem should not have multiple-personality disorder; if it’s aiming to create a certain attitude with unusual SGP structures, then that attitude should be present in every other aspect of the poem as well, so that the whole thing speaks as one unit. For instance, if you’re writing a solemn, haunting sort of poem, dropping periods and using sentence fragments would appear distinctly un-solemn, and probably not coherent enough to feel haunting. However, dropping periods and using sentence fragments work much better in the following poem snippet:

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane

adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun

submerges the subject

noun is choking

verb disgraced goes on doing

there are adjectives up for sale

now diagram the sentence

- from “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve” by

Adrienne Rich

Part of the reason lack of punctuation works here is that the poet’s mission in these lines is to pinpoint a “sinister side” of sentence structure in a very stark way that is completely devoid of emotion or inflection. I mentioned above that the subtleties of SGP structures help create a genuine, human tone, and the poet exploits this by using the lack of SGP structures to make a distinctly raw, almost empty, “un-human” tone. So in cases where you want to create an extremely alienated or barren feeling to a poem, disregarding SGP could help you out – but in the vast majority of cases, just stick to English conventions.

Some more notes:

1) You could write the bestest poem in the world, and still have it get rejected. An editing team is just as human as you are. We have our bad days, our grumpy moods, our times when we just can’t focus on a submission as much as it deserves because there are 20 jillion projects due the next day for school. Or, maybe your poem just happened to be the fifth one in a row popping up in an editor’s docket that had to do with cats, and that poor cat-drenched editor is so darn fed up with cats that you couldn’t even pay him to accept it. Don’t pay any mind to a rejection. Well, read the comments, but then go prove us wrong.

2) We’re all teenagers. We all have way more than enough heartbroken, love-dazed pop songs on our iPods. So if you can name a mainstream pop song that accurately reflects the style and/or material of your poem, we’re probably not interested.

3) Back to 1). Those icky things called final projects and IB/AP exams are just as much a part of your life as they are of ours. The truth is that a disproportionately huge amount of submissions comes pouring in right before our deadline, and it just goes according to logic that not as much attention and opportunity can be given to each one when a) there are so many and b) it’s the Nightmare Quarter of Testing. By all means, if you finish the final draft of a totally genius submission the night of April 15th, submit it – but if you’ve got good stuff earlier in the year, don’t wait until the last minute to send it to us. You face less competition that way.

Keep writing, and keep submitting. We’re the next generation of the literary world – and that’s one big charge.

- Clara Fannjiang, Poetry Genre Editor

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Observe and Tweet.

Friday, April 16th, 2010 by visiblelogic

When the social networking site Twitter launched in March of 2006, teenagers received it with a resounding mixture of confusion and dismissal. “What’s the point?” and “I don’t understand it” became the most common response to Twitter-focused conversations in the cafeteria. But beyond the walls of high schools around the world, professionals—musicians, politicians, and actors—signed up to self-promote.

A longtime fan of standard blogging, I found Twitter and fell instantly in love. Many of my peers scoffed at my new toy, and when asked why I “wasted my time” with Twitter, I had no response more eloquent than “because I like it.”

—

Beginning writers take great pride in their individual spaces on the web, whether it is their Facebook page or their Gmail inbox, and I’m not exception. I meticulously plan each of my blog posts, always sure to use proper grammar and appropriate word choice. During my sophomore year, however, between final exams and the Polyphony HS submission deadline, I couldn’t find time to post. I had no new words to give my small virtual following. School had zapped my creativity, like it so often does during the busy months. I didn’t write for weeks.

Even after school let out for the summer, though, I didn’t rediscover my stories or characters. It seemed they had left me, and the emptiness rested, heavy in my chest. Even the arrival of summer camp, the one event I felt positive could change even the worst situation, didn’t help. Disillusionment hung over me until a girl from my cabin asked for my help with one of her stories. The mild surprise I felt at discovering her shared desire to put pen to paper sparked something—a sort of warmth. I approached her story with my hypercritical eye, and that’s all it took. Her words filled the part of my brain that, for months, I had considered dead. I began a list of suggestions for her. I imagined possible subplots for her characters, too, though I didn’t write them down. I felt so in touch with the writer I had been just a few months earlier that I picked up my cell phone and tweeted.

The first tweet was about the look on my cabin-mate’s face when she saw the long list of suggestions in my hand and the red pen marks all over her story. At first, I felt guilty, but as I continued tweeting about it, I found myself becoming more engrossed in the thoughts that may have gone through her head at that moment. I had begun a short story based on her reaction when I realized the power behind those 140-character status updates. Writing begins with casual observations, and Twitter allows people a place to publish them. Each tweet had reinforced my obsession with human emotion, which led to the creation of that short story.

To a non-writer, careful observation may not seem so important, but I pray that other young writers don’t think that way. In elementary school, I always asked visiting authors where they got their story ideas, and the answer was always the same. “Everywhere,” they would say. Then, I considered such an answer a cop-out, assuming they didn’t want to share their secret, but now I understand. My story, which focused on the intricate relationship between stepsiblings, emerged from my cabin-mate’s disappointment. Ideas are everywhere, and taking careful note of the life around me helped me discover that.

—

Back on my feet now, it would be easy to knock Twitter, but I don’t. My friends still say I’m indulging myself, publishing my thoughts on the Internet for an audience of strangers. My friends have asked who reads my tweets, and honestly, I don’t know. I have 71 followers, and I haven’t met most of them. But their anonymity isn’t important—their presence is. Not knowing them allows me to publish my tweets without fear of judgment, and although that was just as essential to my development as a writer as that first tweet in early July, but I won’t dwell on it.

That’s a lesson for another day.

Shelby Brody

@shelbyiswriting

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The Journey To Find My Inner Writer

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 by visiblelogic

My middle school education was mediocre at best. All students were treated exactly the same. There were no grades, just checks and minuses. The more advanced students did the same work as the least advanced students. I left middle school not knowing what I was good at (or had the potential to be good at), and that was the biggest problem. If I’d known I had potential as a writer, I would have started sooner.

For me, the thought process came before the writing skills. I had always prided myself on my imagination and creativity. This was what initially sparked my interest in writing. When I was twelve, I saw the movie, “Finding Neverland,” about J.M. Barrie, author of the novel, Peter Pan. The film is about the family who inspired Barrie to write the novel, and how he inspired them in return. One of the boys in the family, who Peter was named after, had a huge imagination. Barrie showed him how to put his imaginative thoughts on paper by buying the boy a journal to write down his every idea. After seeing the film, I asked my mom to buy me a fancy journal for my thoughts. Ever since, I’ve kept journals to record concepts for novels, or short stories, that I hoped to eventually write.

I still wasn’t a full-fledged writer at that point. Stories fascinated me – I read more books than I could count – but I wasn’t sold on the act of writing itself until freshmen year of high school.

We had just turned in our first essays of the year; my English teacher posted unclear sentences from each on the board. Our assignment: clarify them. I was immediately able to reorganize them in my head, and was first to raise my hand each time. After about the fifth one or so, my teacher stopped and addressed the class: “Wow. The one thing you guys should know about Rae is that she has tremendous strength as a writer.” This blew me away. In fact, it’s one of my most vivid high school memories; certainly one of my happiest. I had never really known I could write before then. After that, I really got going. I was writing all the time.

Now, instead of doodling in my math notebook, I write. When I’m upset, I write. When I’m happy, I write. Nothing pleases me more than getting an idea and flushing it out on paper. It all plays out so clearly in my mind, kind of like a movie, but so much more personal and internal.

My friends don’t get my obsession with writing, reading, and editing. When I get an idea for a story, I immediately grab my journal and write it down. After I read a great book, I have to tell an English teacher about it. Every creative piece I write, I have my parents and friends read. You can never stop developing as a writer, so I do the best I can to make progress.

The great thing about writing is that it’s accessible. All you need is a pen and paper. You’re in charge of everything you write. And how often are you completely in charge of something

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Sunblock

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 by visiblelogic

Sunblock

Chicago is known for its biting winters. People save their parking spaces with lawn chairs. Ice lingers in the space between street and sidewalk, stained black with exhaust fumes. Snow falls in April, and I usually don’t mind, perhaps because I’ve lived here my whole life. There does come a time, however, when even I ache for a sunburn. Winter lasts forever in the Midwest. A change of pace wouldn’t kill anyone. Chicagoans would find just as much pleasure in complaining about a sudden shift in weather as they do complaining about the six-month winters, which only proves my theory. A day of 60-degree weather would please everyone, because come Valentine’s Day, most are ready for spring break trips to a tropical island somewhere.

I often receive horrified responses when I admit to enjoying winter. As a writer, I find the season invaluable. In my last post, I admitted to conversing with my characters. Usually, my characters appear to me in dreams or during passing periods, but between the months of November and April, while snow falls in sheets, my walks to school inspire me most. Because when I see a man racing against a blinking stoplight, two daughters in tow, stumbling across the ice, what am I as a writer to do but to invent a plot for him? So, he’s a teacher, unhappy in his job, barely pleased with his marriage. He wants to earn a graduate degree in music composition. He writes concertos while his Shakespeare class takes a pop-quiz. Perhaps it’s an exercise for the literature-obsessed, but without the need for a distraction during a freezing morning walk, I think I would always wait for my characters to find me. Does that make me lazy? Maybe, but my most enduring stories were born that way.

Not all writers feel inclined to do this, however. I like to say that there are two extremes—the character writers and the situation writers. Certainly, someone can fall between these two labels. I do, at least. But situation writers can have just as much luck with the dismal winter months as character writers do. What screams plot more than a car skidding over an icy street into a lamppost or a bank or a person? Nothing. And oftentimes, the best characters arise from graphic situations like the one I just described.

Yes, Chicago winters test the soul, but doesn’t the best art come from suffering? (Don’t worry. I’m half-kidding.)

Only four weeks until spring break.

Shelby Brody, Editor-In-Chief

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My Imaginary Friends

Monday, February 8th, 2010 by visiblelogic

Tonight, my aunt Janet was reading an article in my high school alumni magazine about my second novel, and she asked me, “How did you come up with the name Avery?” I looked at her, blinking like my younger cousin had just shot me in the eye with a laser pointer, and I said, “That’s his name.” She smiled, and then I said, “I mean, what else was I supposed to call him? That’s his name.”

I take my characters for granted. I treat them like old friends rather than like facets of my imagination. Maybe this comes from spending hours on end with them (in any given week, I talk with my characters more than I talk with my parents), but maybe not. Maybe it comes from the power of characterization, an element of fiction oftentimes abandoned (especially by young writers) in favor of an exhilarating plot.

I have what I like to refer to as a two-track mind. While one half of my brain works to answer questions asked of me by my teachers, the other half is considering various sentence structures that could be used for a certain cliffhanger line in my latest story. While the left side of my brain takes a Chemistry test, the other half is conversing with the male protagonist of my first novel, trying to determine whether he smokes cigarettes or not. While I’m supposedly taking notes in Geometry, I’m slowly turning everyone in my world into a character, and as I’ve learned from experience, writers and their characters have intimate, borderline Utopian relationships with one another.

In my first manuscript, my male protagonist is a twenty-year-old musician named Peter Scott, a dark-haired, outspoken romantic. He possesses every quality of a star-struck high school dropout, almost all of which are revealed throughout the course of the novel, but some of his more telling past experiences are kept quiet. Since first discovering Pete, I’ve spent hours getting to know him, and I oftentimes think that I know him better than I know myself. I certainly know him better than I know even my best friends. Only I am privy to the serious relationship he had with a girl named Melanie before he left his childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, and I am certainly the only one that knows he lost his virginity to her in a field when he was sixteen, their bodies lit only by the dim headlights of his ancient Volkswagen.

Characters are undoubtedly complex, sometimes as complex as the people I encounter on a daily basis. Each day that I spend with Pete, I learn something new. Every time that I write another chapter from his perspective, I realize that I didn’t know him as well as I thought. It once took me an entire day to discover that Pete didn’t drink his vodka with ice, that he smoked Marlboro lights, and that his romanticism stems from his love of pop music.

Halfway through that day, I told my friend Adrian about my problem.

“I’m ninety percent sure that Pete has a substance abuse problem,” I said, sitting down next to him in the fifth floor hallway.

“Ninety?” he asked.

“Ninety.”

“Well, then why don’t you ask him?”

To write is to play make-believe.

“What?”

“Close your eyes,” he said, “and ask him.”

“Fine.”

And maybe it was my desire to write about someone with an addiction to nicotine. Maybe it was my need to explore problems that I’ve never experienced first-hand. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because Adrian and I were alone in that hallway, and I felt safe with him. So I closed my eyes, and I asked Pete.

And he said yes.

So it came to follow that Pete spent a large quantity of his nights with a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, and I felt that I truly knew him inside and out. That trick Adrian taught me helped me to better understand character. Once Pete had a definite set of personality traits, it became easy for me to deduce (or to learn by working for hours with him) what alcoholic beverage he preferred (Absolut vodka) or what his favorite color was (blue).

As a writer, I am also a manipulator. I take my characters and unwittingly place them knee-deep in the tide. I say, “Good luck finding your way back.” Once I’ve assigned them their basic characteristics, such as Pete’s impulsive romanticism, they’re on their own. It’s up to them to reach their goal. It remains my belief that once characters have been fleshed out to a certain degree, there is little that we can do as writers to convince them to approach their problems in another way. Once a character has been cast into the surf, there’s not much that we as writers can do but record their journey back. We may watch from the edges of our seats, our nails jammed into our mouths, but we are merely observers by that point. We’re simply along for the ride.

Shelby Brody, Editor-in-Chief

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Finding Inspiration

Monday, February 8th, 2010 by visiblelogic

Yesterday, when looking through my bookshelf for inspiration, I stumbled across my Geometry notes. Mind you, I didn’t particularly enjoy Geometry, so my first instinct was to bury the notebook as far under my bed as possible. But then it slipped through my fingers, falling open on my carpet. There, staring me in the face, was the fiction of Geometry past. My characters filled the room before I could stop them, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting on my bed, flipping through the pages like an addict. Hidden underneath the notebook’s red plastic exterior weren’t two-column proofs. Instead, I found stories; plot maps; and perfect first lines.

Clearly, I’ve never been much of a math student.

I used to think that watching my teacher draw coplanar lines was a waste of my time, but as soon as I found that notebook, I realized how valuable the mundanity of high school can be to the adolescent writer. It’s the fuel to our literary fire; it kicks up inspiration into our eyes until the classroom around us disappears and we are left with nothing but our pencils and our ideas. Think about it. Where would teenage writers be without something—a teacher, a subject, a classmate—to complain about?

Exactly.

I turned my own complaints into a young adult novel. After the rejections started pouring in, I began to think of Polyphony HS as a safe haven for virgin writers, because Polyphony HS does something that no other agent, publisher, or literary magazine does—we talk to our authors.

When I was a sophomore, I submitted my own Geometry-inspired writing to Polyphony HS, only to receive a rejection six weeks later. But unlike the form letters I’ve received from publishing companies and agents, the Polyphony HS rejection didn’t sing praise or half-heartedly dismiss my piece. Instead, it gave me constructive criticism from three of my peers that forced me to reexamine my work with a more discerning eye. I’ve kept the suggestions I received for that one piece in mind as I continue to create, and the anonymous editors behind those comments have provided me with a more precise attention to detail.

Polyphony HS is a beautiful magazine (and I’m not even talking about our Tony Fitzpatrick cover art, although I could—trust me). For the adolescent writer, it’s an invaluable resource. It’s a place for each of us to grow, with support and with careful, but constructive criticism from our peers. It changed my writing, and I can only hope that in the year and a half I have left on staff, its message will continue to give courage to those writers too timid to share their Geometry notebooks with the world.

Shelby Brody, Editor-in-Chief

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