more encouragement

Juliana has come in in favor of running "Butte County Timeline in Disarray" as a stream of text underneath the rest of the poems in Valley/Ridge. So that's something.

My instinct is to keep it. I can see what Walter was trying to say with it being too heavy, too definitive. He thought it creates a sense of gravity and drags the eye down. In a "spatial allegorical" sense, too much importance is given to the line of text that runs underneath the floaty spatial poems and landscape photographs.

My thinking, though, was sort of that with the poems and photographs I was enacting a sort of movement through space, and with the timeline I was enacting a movement through time.

WIP Reading

I'm reading next week at Mills College's Works in Progress Series in the Bender Room Tuesday April 4 at 5:30. I'll be doing selections from my thesis project Valley/Ridge.

Speaking of which, I met with Walter Lew today about my thesis. He was less than enthusiastic, especially about the timeline running underneath the poems. Lara says he's cranky and jet-lagged and I should pay him no mind.

DIY Poetry

Mills' MFA program organized two events this last week around the topic of publishing. One was a cocktail party and the other was a conference with various panels about publishing. The party (at the Uptown Nightclub) appeared to be less than useful for us poets, since there weren't any poetry publishers at the event.

Of course, the main thing I learned at the conference was: start your own stuff, promote your friends, get promoted by them. It was actually kind of empowering, in a whole 'You don't have to wait around for things to happen to you, you can make them happen yourself.' And there's a lot less of a stigma around self-publishing.

My plans for the coming few months: start a reading series and attend more readings; get my online magazine up and running, finally; do a chapbook series in a rather substantial size. I just want to make sure that after graduation I'm still involved in writing and performing and publishing and getting my work seen and heard.