In the spirit of my last post (doing what you love for free) I have accepted an internship at this awesome Chicago org called Open Books.  I am excited to be part of an organization that is working to combat the literacy crisis in Chicago. Did you know: 53% of adults in Chicago low or limited literacy skills? (I stole that fact from the Open Books website–where you can find more about literacy in the U.S.)

While I hope to learn about how Open Books works as an org, build some great relationships with the students and with teachers and staff, I also hope I learn about the landscape in Chicago. Who and what is where and how.

It’s funny. Biking around Chicago actually makes it feel smaller and easier to navigate. I think it has something to do with being a part of the landscape you are traveling through (whereas in a car you separated). I hope that this internship does a similar thing– that through relationships I will create a network that make Chicago feel less like black hole into which I have been submitting my resume and work applications. And more like a city of Big Shoulders.

Chicago has a lot of nicknames. Big Shoulders come from Carl Sandberg’s poem “Chicago”:

Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.

1. Networking, verb: looking for people to help you get ahead in the business, any business.

2. Networking, verb: A. getting to know people who have similar interests to you or someone you know. B. taking the opportunity to geek out with people who share the same peculiar knowledge set.

I used to think of networking as defined above definition #1. And, it made me feel greedy and little slimy and generally unpleasant. So I decided I was bad at it and did not want to work to improve. However, a friend– more of an acquaintance really, Grace, redefined it for me as above definition #2. This felt like something I could get behind, a skill I wanted to learn. While similar to small talk, networking has the opportunity to open doors to new friends, jobs, definitions, and avenues.

So I’m working on my networking skills. Today, when I bought a couch off craigslist I had a nice chat with the fellow, an owner of a brand marketing graphic design firm. It was an overall enjoyable experience. He was jovial, and I worked to be outgoing. I’m also sprucing up my LinkedIn page.

Here, here to networking. 

Today, I began volunteering at Green Youth Farm. And let me just say an obvious axiom about poetry: It doesn’t happen just on the page or in the classroom or when reading a book curled up on the couch or in an airplane seat. It happens in the garden. Poetry is a kind of magic. And so is garlic. You dig a hole for a clove of garlic, you cover it with dirt, with hay, you wait and wait, it grows and grows a mathematical white dress in the unseen places below the dirt near the earwigs and the worms, the green shoots and scapes escape through hay signaling life, life, life. Then you assign a group of teenagers, and an odd poet to pull up the garlic, to tie it in bundles and hang it to dry from the hoop house. There are a fifty or so poems right now in a hoop house in Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side marinating in the summer heat, drying into the kind of poetry you can eat.

a kind of magic

I tell myself not to worry about this onslaught of rejections by post and by email. At least some of the rejects are what I term “nice” rejections. The second or third tier rejection slips with comments and signatures. I remember back to the manuscript-overflowing shelves (both literal and virtual) at IR and know not to take it personally. Rejection season leads to summer, which is also known as manuscript editing, revising, polishing season, and summer leads to autumn when school and journals are back in session and postal workers (both literal and electronic) everywhere are delivering those shiny new pages of stellar poetry.