Talon

This entry is part 14 of 93 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2011

 

At the harbor front, thick roll of banked clouds; beyond, deeper than velvet, the theatre curtains of night. Across the park, a row of street lamps comes on. Their light is butter-yellow, their light is flicker-dim. A half hour of pelting rain, then finally the boom of fireworks above the river. Silver and gold, blue and lilac and gold. They burst into tendrils like spider plants in the air. Their force is tender, and my chest is a cage of hollow echoes, small winged creatures riding blind and bumping against the walls. Gone the sheer white morning, sky thin enough for the sun’s milk to shine through. Everyone turns away after the last flares flicker and wane. We all want something stronger to tear through the murk and silence, we want to be the hawk that sails clear across the canvas, talon widening the rip from one edge of this world to the other.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Woodrat Podcast 42: Tea with Fiona and Kaspalita

Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita on the waterfront at Aberystwyth, Wales
Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita on the waterfront at Aberystwyth, Wales

Brew yourself a nice cuppa and join Fiona Robyn, Kaspalita and me for a conversation about writing, religion, spirituality, science, small stones and more. We met on May 7 in Aberystwyth, Wales; Fiona and Kaspa subsequetly tied the knot on June 18th, and starting on July 1 they will again curate a month-long river of stones, with contributions from around the world.

Fiona Robyn is a novelist, a blogger, a therapist, and a creativity coach. She is very fond of Earl Grey tea and homemade cake. Kaspalita is a Pure Land Buddhist priest, a sometime blogger and is still learning to play the ukulele. Together they are on a mission, they say, to help people connect with the world through writing. In addition to the river of stones (see the aggregator blog) they also host the Writing Our Way Home forum and run e-courses on writing, spirituality and connecting to the world. Fiona has even written an e-book, available as a free download, called How to Write Your Way Home.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

How to be a poet

This entry is part 39 of 39 in the series Manual

 

Write from a place of deep fear, which the authors of the Old Testament rightly considered the beginning of wisdom. Turn your poems into cunning traps and instruments of fraud. Writer’s block is primordial and best left uncarved; create only in its shadow.

Prize your digressions. Revise nothing, and put all your poems into books that self-destruct after a single reading. Wallow in idleness. Treat inspiration as a sworn enemy.

Practice abstinence; it’s the only way to know what love and hunger are really all about. Find something absurd to believe in and cling to it as passionately as Pound clung to fascism or Neruda to Stalinism. Watch a lot of television.

“First thought, best thought”: get it down and go do something useful, like cleaning the toilet. In lieu of reading, listen to audiobooks. Write about what you don’t know and didn’t think you cared about. Stay in your cave until you start seeing beasts on the walls.

Cultivate suspicion and distrust toward the universe — after all, it is out to kill you. If you must be sociable, avoid poets, for they are boring at best and petty at worst. Hang out with artists and musicians instead.

And for god’s sake, learn HTML.

Luisa Igloria on her daily writing practice

Now it’s the turn of Via Negativa’s other regular contributor to hold forth at Marly Youmans’ blog as part of the ongoing House of Words series there. Fortunately, she’s not quite as prolix as I was! Luisa talks about how she got started using entries from The Morning Porch as writing prompts, and gives three examples of how particular entries sparked the poems they did.

For instance, Dave’s TMP observation on January 28 was “The silence of falling snow. When my furnace kicks on, the three deer digging under the wild apple tree startle and run down the slope.” When I read that, the first sentence, “The silence of falling snow” coupled with the image of “the wild apple tree” had a certain beautiful gravity that felt– and sounded– almost biblical. The wild apple tree and the three deer digging also made me think immediately of medieval tapestries, rich with illustrations of plants and animals. From there it was a short leap to recalling stories in bestiaries like the Physiologus. […]

I find Luisa’s fealty to craft and the creative venture endlessly inspiring. Go read.

Woodrat TV: The Book of Ystwyth poetry reading


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 1).


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 2).


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 3).


The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (part 4).

In lieu of a podcast this week, here in video form is the full, hour-long poetry reading I flew to Wales to take part in last month. This was a group reading in support of The Book of Ystwyth: six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, whose launch coincided with a 60th birthday retrospective exhibition of, and monograph on, the contemporary Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins (who I interviewed in the two most recent episodes of the Woodrat podcast). All six of us — three Yanks and three Brits — had written poems in response to his paintings, and The Book of Ystwyth includes a generous selection, illustrated with full-color details of the paintings in question.

In the reading, ably MC’d by Damian Walford Davies, as you’ll see, each poet appears twice, once on either side of a break (which occurs in part 3), so that the first poet is also the last, the second is the penultimate, etc. Here’s a key to who appears in which video:

Catriona Urquhart (read by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Ian Hamilton): parts 1 and 4
Andrea Selch: 1 and 4
Callum James: 2 and 4
Marly Youmans: 2 and 3
Damian Walford Davies (as reader): 2 and 3
Me: 3

Anita Mills was the camerawoman. I take the blame for the sound and all the editing. The bookstore’s set-up had the podium in shadow, which meant that the camera often focused on better-lit bookshelves behind our heads. In the process of lightening and increasing contrast on the videos, the color turned spotty, whence my decision to make it black and white. I assure viewers who have never been to Wales that it is a fully modern country now, and almost everything is in color all the time.

The Book of YstwythAs for the book: quite apart from its contents, which are of course scintillating, it’s a beautifully designed object with high-quality paper and image reproduction, retailing at a very affordable $15.95/£9.99. It was published in the U.K. by Grey Mare Press in association with Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales, and in the U.S. by Carolina Wren Press. Click on either link to order.

House of Wordiness: my nearly endless interview at the Palace

This entry is part 16 of 20 in the series Poetics and technology

 

At her blog The Palace at 2:00 a.m., Marly Youmans has an on-going series of interviews with writers and publishers called The House of Words. One afternoon last February, I sat down and wrote a few thousand words in response to a series of questions she sent me, and promptly forgot about it until a couple months later when the first installment appeared (#20 in the series). Marly posted a few installments, illustrated with photos she found at Via Negativa, then went on vacation for a month… in the midst of which, somewhat surreally, she and I actually met up in Wales. This was the very first time we met, despite the fact that we’ve known each other for several years and are only about a five-hour drive apart over some of the most lovingly maintained highways in the world. Anyway, the interview finally resumed in the third week of May, and just concluded a few days ago. Here are the links to the pieces in order, with a brief quote from each to give you a flavor. If you have comments on specific points I raise in the series, please leave them at Marly’s blog rather than here so as to keep the discussion in one place.

Part 1
Friends started telling me about Blogger that summer, but like most literary snobs I turned my nose up at it, both because of the absurd and ugly word, “blog,” and also because of what I was hearing about blogs in the mainstream media: that they were filled with worthless minutiae of people’s daily lives and/or links accompanied by minimal, uninformed comments. It didn’t seem at all attractive.

Part 2
I’ve come to feel that blogging and poetry writing are an ideal match, at least for those of us who are shameless enough to share imperfect drafts with the world.

Part 3
The push to come up with new content every day was transformative.

Part 4
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite: I run an online journal, but almost never submit my own work to journals unless invited. But mostly that’s because very few journals consider previously blogged material, and I write first and foremost to feed the blog.

Part 5
In general, I think the best medicine for discouragement [at not getting published] is to join a community of writers, online or in real life, and focus on the writing rather than the writer.

Part 6
There are just so many opportunities for collaboration now — I don’t see how any serious writer can fail to be excited by that.

Part 7
Generations of poets have been taught to be absolute perfectionists and struggle against every word, because we all know how mortifying it is to have to look at a poem in print that we’ve long since revised. Being mainly self-published and mainly online does allow for a more fluid conception of one’s work.

Part 8
It gradually turned into a regular magazine, though we’ve never gone so far as to issue periodic issue-dumps, as other online magazines do, preferring instead to remain bloggish, with new material at least five times a week, and comments activated for every post.

Part 9
I fear a lot of people start blogs these days on the advice of editors or agents who neglect to tell them that the most important trait of a good blogger is generosity.

Jack-in-the-boxwood, Wales (photo by Marly)
Jack-in-the-boxwood, Wales (photo by Marly--click on the photo to visit her post)
Marly Youmans and Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Marly Youmans and Clive Hicks-Jenkins take a spin through the art gallery

The Book of Ystwyth

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series The Temptations of Solitude

 

The Book of Ystwyth: Six poets on the art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins, which includes all of the poems from my Temptations of Solitude series, is now out. It’s a stunningly beautiful book; you’ll definitely get your money’s worth. Carolina Wren Press does have some review copies available, I’m told, so if you have a well-trafficked blog or magazine, please consider writing it up.

The book was launched on Friday night with one of the best group readings I’ve ever been privileged to take part in, relaxed and well organized, with no bad readers and an overflowing and attentive audience. One of the six poets, the fantastically gifted (and much too modest) Callum James, blogged about the reading as well as yesterday’s launch of the exhibition, which was and is mind-blowing, for anyone who can get to the National Library at Aberystwyth by August.

I expect I’ll have more to say about all this after my return to Plummer’s Hollow and my own computer. I’ve been bothering all manner of people, including Clive, with my audio recorder, gathering material for the Woodrat podcast, and we have video of the reading, so I’ll have my work cut out for me. But for now, I intend to vacate for another week. Wales is spectacular; were it not for the shortage of forests, I think I could live here.

Link roundup: Things I give a flying f*ck about

A few links I’ve shared on Facebook over the past three weeks. With all the poetry reading I did last month, I didn’t have much time for anything else.

Truthout: “Why the United States is Destroying its Educational System”
Chris Hedges, depressingly on-target as usual.

The Atlantic: “Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of Fiction, and More”
Stephen King has some nice things to say about poets. (But preferring Judas Priest to Black Sabbath? No accounting for taste!)

Harriet: “Death of a Kingmaker: A Critical Evaluation of Silliman’s Blog”
How being a powerful blogger can interfere with writing. I found Silliman very cordial the couple times I communicated with him, a genuine guy with some strong opinions and an equally strong streak of generosity. I wasn’t a regular reader, though.

Poetry Daily: “Casino” by Osip Mandelstam — a new version by Christian Wiman
Probably the single best poem I read all April.

Glenn Greenwald @Salon: “Lessons from Manning’s transfer out of Quantico”

This episode should be a potent antidote to defeatism, as it provides a template for how issues that would be otherwise ignored can be amplified by independent voices creatively using the democratizing and organizing power of the Internet, and meaningful activism achieved.


Not just a gag gift, but a very simple concrete or visual poem. I’m trying to think how I can integrate one into a panel discussion at next year’s AWP.

Woodrat Podcast 39: William Trowbridge

William Trowbridge

William Trowbridge was the last of the four poets Kristin Berkey-Abbott and I read for National Poetry Month (here are my review and hers). We called him up last Monday to talk about Fool and foolishness, humorous versus serious poetry, and why the Midwest produces so many poets, among other things, and got him to read some poems from Ship of Fool, too. Check out his website for a bio and links to all his books.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Whimper

Can’t… read… one… more… book… of… poems…

It doesn’t help that I’m trying to get ready for a two-week trip to the U.K., leaving Sunday. It’s getting very hard to concentrate. Which is a pity, because I still have four lovely books to blog, two of which just arrived in today’s mail. Maybe when I get back.

trout lily