Anyway, what with all this new found confidence, I have begun another wave of poetry submissions.

It's fairly difficult to do, at least for me. Here's how it goes. I try to select three or four markets, with a balance of prestigious, award-winning markets (read: not bloody likely) and smaller, more accessible ones (read: may have gone bankrupt already). Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is where I currently fall.

Then I have to pick out poems to submit. That's also a difficult bit, since I can only send each poem to one of the markets. There's always the problem of that one poem that I currently think is the greatest piece of art ever produced by me. Do I send it to the prestige market on the off chance that it will knock 'em dead? Do I send it to the lesser known market with a better chance of publication?

Then I have to find about fifteen more poems that I love enough to submit. And there's only a finite amount of my own poetry I'm in love with at any given time. I also tend to throw in a wild card poem with each submission-- something outdated or bizarre. It's my "what the hell" poem.

It looks like I'm submitting to three markets this time around: Hanging Loose, New York Quarterly and Prism International. I should warn you that the odds of rejection are extremely high, so none of us should get our hopes up.

Oh, well. At least rejection will help me cultivate that pesky humility.

One of my readers (Stefan) wrote to me about my inadvertent sequence of theme poems for my collab class. I thought his comments were provocative:

There is a theory that says the greatest scientific advances come not from the results you expected from an experiment, because those were structured into the experiment based upon your prior knowledge. It the unexpected results that lead to new ways of thinking, of discovering undiscovered processes, interactions, and truths about the nature of things.

I have always felt that this applies to creative endeavors, also. If what comes out is what you put in, then it is pedestrian work. If something more comes out then what you put in, then you have bridged the gap from the mundane to Art.

You will note that he's basically giving me license to think of myself as a Creator of Art, but never fear. I'm not wholly convinced that my sequence does hang together and therefore, I don't think it fits into Stefan's criterion for Art. But I find this to be an interesting general definition of Art.

I'm not sure if it's true, yet, but it's something to ponder.

Something interesting happened in Dickinson class today.

We had a round table discussion of several Dickinson poems. (Aside: the most annoying fucking guy in our program, a blithering fundamentalist moron named Jaheed, said that "most" of Dickinson's poems were written by "taking the role of a male" because they were written with "intellect" which is a "male characteristic." And you can't even argue with him because he's so stupid; he'll agree with whatever you say and then act as if you said something completely the opposite. I fucking hate that guy.) The discussion was a nice break from our usual lecture format, but I was sort of panicked beforehand because, what with Eleanor and Mickey being over and all, I didn't actually prepare my analysis of the poems.

The first poem we discussed confused the hell out of me when I tried to read it. So I figured I'd just wing it, as usual. When the professor opened up the discussion, she had someone read the poem. As they were reading, I hit upon an interpretation that I thought I could support within the text. Well, I jumped in and offered my take before anyone else did, thereby getting myself off the hook for the rest of the class.

I will admit that at first, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself; it was a perfectly reasonable analysis. But then, other students started to offer other readings, ranging from imperialist to sexual, that I hadn't even considered. And they had outside evidence to buttress their arguments. My interpretation started to deflate, but hey, at least I had participated in class, right?

After we were done analyzing the poem, the professor gave us some biographical information that pointed to one interpretation of the poem above and beyond than the others. As you may have guessed, it was mine. My friends said supportive things like, "I hate you" and "you suck" because they knew that I hadn't even looked at the poem until class time. And I got all pleased and self congratulatory. Not very attractive of me, I know, but there you have it.

I should be clear that it's not like I was proven "right" and everyone else was proven "wrong" or anything. Almost everyone's interpretation was supportable by the text, or biographical knowledge of Dickinson, or surrounding poems. They were all "valid" interpretations, and some of them were fascinating. There's really no way of telling what ED's intentions were. But I was happy, not because I was "right," but because I had extrapolated a meaningful reading of a complex poem basically off the top of my head.

I don't think I'm very smart about things like that. I mean, I don't think I'm a very original thinker. I can remember things, and I can absorb information that others give me. But I don't feel as though I often expand on ideas, or flip them around, or combine them, or look at them creatively. The idea of coming up with a critical thesis paper scares me to death, because I have to do something "new" and "original" and "inventive." I'm not real good with that, historically speaking.

So it meant a lot to me that I was able to come up with an original conceptualization of this poem. I mean, it is not a huge accomplishment. But it means something to me.

I keep meaning to write about my birds, who continue to provide me with endless hours of entertainment.

When Eleanor was over, she witnessed Pigwidgeon's stupidity for herself. "It's pretty sad," she said, "when that bird can't even sit on his perch without falling over." Yeah, you're telling me.

Here's another trick of his. If I am getting ready to go to bed and shut off the lights, I'll go over and close the cage. (This is because, if the cage is open, and I turn the lights off, Pidgie will get confused, flap around madly and fall out of the cage.) Now, when he sees me approaching, he immediately flies out of the cage, circles back and lands (with an ungraceful thud) on the top of the cage, and won't be coaxed back in.

So then, I have to turn out the lights and leave him sitting on the top of the cage. He's been fairly good about staying put up there, but sometimes he reacts by flapping around madly and flying into stuff. Once, he crash landed on my pillow, right next to my head. True story.

I think whatever Pidgie has is contagious, because Cassie's new habit is even stupider. She's been eating the wall. She aims for one particular spot in the wall (where a nail used to be, I think), sticks her head in as far as it will go, and nibbles. I mean, of course, right? Why snack on birdseed, when you can eat bits of drywall? Drywall has more calcium in it, probably.

Those birds. I freaking swear.

"I finally decided to read some of the Peanuts books in my extensive collection, but it took me half an hour to read one Peanuts cartoon. I kept staring at one frame, thinking, 'Oooh. Look at all the pretty squiggles!'"