My Poet Father - by Hannah Sward

Daughter Hannah with Anthony... Los Angeles...

Editing an ongoing series of essays on Literary Friendship, "Writers Friendship, Writers Enmity," for Web Del Sol / Perihelion (James Houston on Raymond Carver; Lola Haskins; Tony Barnstone...) thought, with some trepidation, I'd invite my daughter Hannah to contribute her thoughts on what it was like having as father... a writer... so, expanding the scope of "Writers Friendship" from what it's like for one writer to sustain a friendship with another, say, to sustaining a relationship with a family member, a daughter no less, who is herself a writer--and a good one!

Okay, here we go...

"My Poet Father," she writes (and I'm including Hannah's essay with her permission):

"The first sounds I remember are of an Olympia portable typewriter. My father clicking away. To this day, I find myself comforted by that sound.

Me, two years old, falling asleep to the rhythm, the vibrations of his voice as he recited his poems at poetry readings, half asleep in a papoose on my father’s back. I remember the vibration of my father’s voice as he recited …

I have many feelings about growing up the daughter of a poet. I cannot separate my father from the poet, the poet from my father. I envy his life. I want my life to be just as interesting. The stories my mother has shared with me of all the young women fawning over my father, coming over to our house, one by one going up to his study in our big old Victorian house in Oak Bay, Victoria, British Columbia. The stories my father himself has told me. Arriving late to a reading he was giving at The Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Only hours earlier having been hit by a car. Still bleeding from the head, bandaged, dizzy, (briefly) an amnesiac, he arrives to read, auditorium filled with starry eyed students –

My father the poet, his life rich with stories I have both lived and not lived, he is my hero. I romanticize his life and the life I have lived growing up with him. The frequent visits to Earle Birney’s home with his much younger, beautiful wife in Toronto. My first meeting with Margaret Atwood, she hovering over me like a medicine woman as I lay sick in my red, wrought iron bed on Algonquin Island (Toronto Island) in the cold of winter. Or, his CBC radio interview in Montreal with Leonard Cohen in the early eighties.

“Why can’t I go, dad?” I ask. “Why can’t I go with you to meet Leonard?”

Growing up there were many places I wanted to go with my father. There’s a line in one of his poems,

*NIGHTGOWN, WIFE'S GOWN


"Where do people go when they go to sleep? /

I envy them. I want to go there too. /

I am outside of them, married to them. /

Nightgown, wife's gown, women that you look at, /

Beside them--I knock on their shoulder blades, /

Ask to be let in. It is forbidden. /

But you’re my wife, I say. There is no reply. /

Arms around her, I caress her wings."

And I, as a child, and later as the adult, I knock on his shoulder blades, ask to be let in... "But you’re my father," I say. This is the life I wanted to avoid. Now I find myself living it. Even as a kid, the life of a writer is too painful, too lonely. But at the same time many lives in one. The life of a poet’s daughter is at once rich, but it is also lonely. The dreamer, the drifter, the life of a poet, the life of poet’s daughter . . .

___
*first published in The Paris Review... reprinted in dad's Collected Poems.

Getting Published 3

Why I Publish In E-Zines: One Writer's View of Online Publishing
(Originally published in 1996)

Computer-phobic writers, fellow freelancers and fans of olde style
lit-mags ask why I have chosen to publish in e-zines like Web del Sol / Perihelion; Alsop Review; Blue Moon Review; X-Connect; eSCENE; Gruene Street; Realpoetik; Recursive Angel; Transmog; and Zero City, to name a few.

1. I publish on the Net and World Wide Web because it's cheap: email after all is free.
2. It's more efficient: no SASEs, no International Reply Coupons; fewer trips to the office supply store.
3. It saves time: I don't have to wait 18 months to hear back and the rejections, when they come, are less annoying because a) I've invested less in the submission process and b) it's easy enough to send the work somewhere else.
4. It gives me the opportunity to improve on what I write and make changes even after publication. Zen Buddhists say "First thought, best thought." I say, "Think again."
5. It allows for interaction: timely feedback from fellow writers, editors, publishers, agents, and students.

I recently [remember, this is 1996!] sent a poem to Realpoetik ("rpoetik, the little magazine of the Internet, a moderated listserv..."), got an e-mail acceptance message and saw the poem published, all within 24 hours. Editor Robert Salasin claims he has approximately 3,000 subscribers. All I know is that over the next few days I got more responses ("fine work...," "wish you continued success in Cyberspace...," "would like to use excerpts from A Much-Married Man...") from that single appearance than I got from 30 years of publishing in magazines like The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Transatlantic Review, etc.

Yes, it's a form of instant gratification. Just what the world needs, right? In my opinion, instant gratification has gotten a bad rap. Or maybe I'm late to the game and am just beginning to catch on. Anyway, I write for myself and always have, but I still agree with Whitman: it doesn't hurt to have an audience.

I still use pen and pencil to write and revise and turn to my Olympia portable to type envelopes. I'm still doing what I did in my 20s: writing, revising and sending the best work I have to the editors of the journals I admire.

Writing is re-writing and I spend just as much time revising now as I ever did. To this day I send poems and stories to traditional print journals and, when the publication appears, sometimes long to remove a line or two or correct a typo or printers error. A while back the then London-based Transatlantic Review published "Thousand-Year-Old Fiancee" and destroyed the poem, made it meaningless with a record thirteen typographical errors. They never sent me page proofs and, once the poem was printed, there was nothing I could do except rage at the editor, the inattentive, lackadaisical schmuck.

Now, when I submit work to an e-journal there is no typographer involved because there is no type to set. And if an error occurs or I change my mind, voila! I can email corrections and see the fix made promptly and at no expense. I like that.

Apart from an increasingly large, responsive audience, what's the payoff? Payment used to be in contributor copies. Now with magazines appearing in electronic print, there are no contributor copies to send. Still, a few mainline lit-mags and e-journals do make an effort to pay. In all the years I've been writing, I haven't come close--not one year have I come close--to covering the cost of postage. How much is poetry worth? In 1958, in an effort to determine the dollar value, if any, of my poetry, I engaged in an experiment. A student at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, I sent half a dozen poems to the local phone company as a way of paying my bill. Not only did Ma Bell send them back, but she disconnected my phone. So be it.

*

I'm doing multi-media stuff now combining poetry, fiction and non-fiction with photographs, paintings, movies and--soon--music and the human voice. I'm collaborating with visual artists, computer scientists and other writers. If you're interested, check out Earthquake Collage and Highway 17 on my home page.

My first computer was an Apple IIe and my first word processing program was Magic Window. Today I use Microsoft Word and Photoshop on a Mac G-4, supercharged by my son. How does it all work? I have no idea. I just switch on my modem, gaze into cyberspace and type away. It's still Magic Window to me.

"So what's the point?" my partner wants to know. "Isn't this just one big ego trip? Who really reads those e-journals? Do you actually think you're going to sell copies of your books on the Net? And what about copyright? How do you know someone isn't going to rip off that new book of poems of yours?"

Of course she's right, but I have all those virtual magazines and editors on the Net waiting for me to check in.

"Gee, honey, I don't know," I say. "I'm just gonna go upstairs for a moment and check my mail."

Copyright (c) 1996, 2001, 2007, Robert Sward

[In response to the above, my friend David Alpaugh writes, "I enjoyed your explanation of why you moved to Internet publishing. I've gravitated in that direction for the reasons you note and also because the sort of person who runs an Internet site tends to be more progressive, less reactionary poetry-wise on the whole than the old school hard copy editors (perhaps because many of the netters are not cloistered in the academy, out and about in the world in various fields). Site editors strike me as more in tune with the kind of reader Dana Gioia would like to recapture for poetry."]

Please see Getting Published 2 - The New Math of Poetry for more on David Alpaugh.