brittany cavallaro

It’s a toss-up, for me, but for years I’ve gone back to these:

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No, your computer isn’t dropping frames! It’s made entirely of stills.

I remember when Dave Stroup first showed this to me, some eight years ago. He had to upload the file to my computer with a USB drive, on my insistence, because there was no way for me to watch it over and over the way I wanted to. Its resonance changes for me year to year, but the nature of this nomadic academic situation is that I’m always leaving someones, somewheres, and there’s always a reason to rewatch this. Thinking about all this now as my last few months in Madison wind down.

“It’s been said that there are only seven basic plots in fiction. Pulp novelist William Wallace Cook would beg to differ.

According to Cook, there are a whopping 1,462 plots, all of which he laid out in his 1928 book, Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots.

Plotto has just been reissued for the edification of novelists everywhere. Author Paul Collins, who wrote the introduction to the new edition, tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Mary Louise Kelly that the book came out of Cook’s need to sustain a punishing writing pace: In one year, 1910, he churned out more than a book a week.

“He was known as the man who deforested Canada,” Collins says. “He had to systematize it. He was literally manufacturing fiction, to the point that when he wrote a memoir, he titled it The Fiction Factory.”" -via NPR

Last night, my poem a day group (also known as, some of my favorite Madisonites who are also poets) went out for drinks and dancing at the Cardinal. (They played Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” on Jacques’ request; we all got down.) Today, we met in Casey’s beautiful apartment to eat jelly doughnuts and talk about poetry, in between lewd hand gestures and lots of innuendo.

Nancy and I. She is always the most poised.

Jacques and Becky.

“I’m done with words. I’m writing a poem that’s all punctuation.” -Angela

Josh has the most infectious laugh.

Angela is thoughtful; Casey is emphatic.

The grind continues. Sometimes this constant writing feels like the equivalent of wind sprinting in the rain, and sometimes it’s wonderful. Today, it’s 8:28pm and I just sent out the first one of the day — and I’d be proud, except I am two behind. I should get on that. (File under: when going out with your poem-a-day group means you fail to write your poem for that day.)

This month, I have a mini-essay up on Beloit Poetry Journal’s Poet’s Forum on my poem “The Girl in Question”. Each month, BPJ posts these essays in an attempt to generate discussion, and I’d love it if you would stop by and ask me a question about the post or the poem, if you get a chance, or about poetry at all. I think it’s a really cool idea, and I love the previous posts (Bruce Bond’s discussion of his poem ‘Audubon’ is lovely, as is Jenny Johnson’s on ‘Aria’). You can read “The Girl in Question” here, and listen to an audio recording here. BPJ has been really terrific about all of this, and I’m excited to see whatever replies are posted.

I am attempting to poem a day again this month, this time with a group of terrific poets. We all know how this goes. Cross your fingers for me.

The busiest semester ever, already! I’ve been in Chicago these past two weekends, helping out my father with a trade show (hats! all hats all the time!), and now I’m back. I’ve just started working at Bull City Press, helping the wonderful Ross White with production on several projects, including an anthology, and I’m teaching a section of composition as well. And writing! Trying to write, really, and trying to push that toward writing. And on that note, I need to be at a meeting in ten minutes — I think that’s how this spring is going to go.

This being the New Year, the time to begin all one’s ill-advised projects, I’ve decided to undertake writing a poem a day. I’ve been less than successful the last few times I’ve tried this (I thought to link a few examples, but shame is keeping me from it). But I’ve just finished a longer historical sequence that took up a great deal of my reading and my head-space (and apparently, my sleep-space — I’ll be happy to stop dreaming in persona now, thank you), and I’m itching to write all the things that I didn’t in those months I spent in the early 19th century.

We’ll see if I can keep at it. If left to my own devices, I average a poem a week, a week-and-a-half, so this attempt to reset my Circadian whatnots might be futile. But I’m on winter break from my PhD program, and I’ve been reading quite a bit, and, and, and. I’ll try to keep it up for at least two weeks.

The winter 2011/2012 issue of Beloit Poetry Journal has been shipped, with my poem “The Girl in Question” inside! You can read it on their website as well. I’m in the process of writing a bit about this poem for their Poets’ Forum; the post will go live in February. Right now, they’re featuring a lovely piece by Bruce Bond on his poem “Audubon”, and you can read it here.

I’ve also learned that I’ll have two new poems coming out in TriQuarterly Online next summer, a journal I’ve had a crush on for a long time. They publish really interesting work, and I’m really excited to be a part of that.

In other great-online-journal news, check out Devil’s Lake for some terrific new poetry and prose, including work by some of my favorites (Corey van Landingham, Eduardo C. Corral, and this complete killer of a poem by Eric Morris, one of the more exciting pieces I’ve read this year). This is the first issue out where I haven’t been at the helm of the mag, so it’s a bit bittersweet for me, but the new staff are so talented and enthusiastic, and they have some great work lined up for the spring as well. I’ll still be doing reviews and interviews for them, a job I’m also doing at Cream City Review. Some great work coming out in that issue as well; I’ll keep you posted.

Late December, which means I’m at my parents’ house in Illinois, Christmas shopping and baking and superfluous-latte-drinking, killing time because I have a lot of trouble writing around so many people. My lives in Madison and Milwaukee are really full — friends drinking Bullet rye and talking about ridiculous things, impromptu dance parties, shindigs for every possible occasion in our living room. And an office-with-a-view on a friendly floor in Curtin at UWM, with English GTAs buzzing back and forth. But I get a lot of time to perch in my window and dream and sketch and reread all my favorite books. (Even if my recent push to finish finals made it feel like I largely read articles by Peter Elbow, made bottomless pots of English breakfast, and wept.) Here, there’s just more, or more people, or, really, a full, bustling house, something that my church-quiet-in-daytime apartment in Madison lacks. Given time, I could get used to it and find the head-space to write poems, but for now I’ve found the background noise better for accomplishing small, practical tasks, like filling out forms, sending out some mid-year submissions, and, well, writing blog posts.

Speaking of: I’d love some new poet blogs to read. It’s nice to keep a finger of the pulse of what’s being discussed outside my immediate circle. I frequent, like many writers I know, Luke Johnson’s Proof of Blog, and I love C. Dale Young’s Avoiding the Muse for its round-up of news and poet talk, and, of course, I read those blogs run by writers I know and love well (like Jacques Rancourt and Rebecca Hazelton). There are sites like HTMLGIANT and Montevidayo that are interesting and group-run, but I have a soft spot for the personal blog – I like hearing about the daily stuff as well as the professional. Can anyone make any recommendations?