Collin Kelley – Via Negativa

March 10, 2019March 10, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 10

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts.

This week, a pure miscellany. Daylight Savings Time is kicking my ass, so I’m afraid I’m too tired for the usual careful thematic arrangement. I’ll just jump around my feeds in a random fashion and grab things that appeal in my sleep-deprived state.

I think it’s important that as we create, we acknowledge ourselves and the history we bring to our creative process. When I traveled back to my parents’ home for the holidays this year, I was reminded of how much I have changed from the shy little boy who grew up in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Now, this was nothing new to me. Ever since I came out, I’ve worked to become more of who I feel I really am. I’ve worked to let more parts of my personality out that I was ashamed of or hid while I was in the closet. I felt that process meant I needed to change a lot. And maybe it did. But somewhere along the way, I pushed a lot of my past away. Maybe it was from painful memories, maybe it was from a loss of ideals and connections that were held in my youth. I don’t know. But either way, I focused more on my now.
But my past is part of who I am. And as I’ve worked more on my writing, I’ve realized more and more that there are parts of me that don’t make sense if I don’t accept every history I have. As I came home for the holidays, I remembered again that no matter what, there will always be a part of me that grew up walking through the forest, playing in crick beds, going to church, and so many other things. As much as I come home and see that I don’t really fit in my hometown the way I used to, I still come home and feel a connection.
My Label is Aaron – guest blog rewind by Aaron Gates, co-editor-in-chief of Peculiar (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

One of the first sonnets I wrote, as an undergraduate, contained the lines: “A mouth of purple crocus opens through/ the snow, wild to speak the store beneath. / It carries coin.” I don’t remember the rest, although the poem is probably in a bin in the attic somewhere. The lines have been running through my head all week as the weather flips from warmish to snowy to springlike again. March is always a crazy month in my academic calendar, but I am ready for the madness, as long as it brings me color!
Lesley Wheeler, A mouth of purple crocus

It’s Friday morning. The sun’s shining, the air’s still quite cold. We have a yard full of new snow. I have been working on lyrical CNF essays and poems for several weeks now. Wrote a sonnet Wednesday, much to my surprise. It’s a single sentence with internal rhyme (another surprise), and it’s about the first day of Lent (yet, another surprise). I have no idea what’s going on in my mind’s writing room these days, why some things are so out of the blue, but this poem seems to be a gift. Inspiration began with looking out the kitchen window, watching cardinals that flit branch to branch in the crab apple tree, then make their way to our feeders. I love watching the dance.
M. J. Iuppa, The First Week of March, 2019, Racing towards Spring . . .

Such a pity, at times, this humanity.
But not now, now we are the light
Reflecting off the brittle surface of the ice.
Now we are slipping deeper into the dream,
Deeper into the sweet, cool fog of sleep.
James Lee Jobe, ‘We are breaking through the ice of an imaginary stream.’

Brrr! Writing from a very chilly morning here in the suburbs of Seattle. This weekend was full of excitement. I had been a little under-the-weather since I had three fillings earlier in the week, so by Saturday I was sick of being house-bound and it was sunny though not warm so we ventured out to the zoo, mostly to see the little red panda cubs again. Then Sunday was the book launch for Martha Silano’s Gravity Assist, a fascinating collection that examines the space race as metaphors for family relationships.
great pleasure to see the introducing readers, Kelli Russell Agodon, Molly Tennenbaum, and Rick Barot, as well as Martha’s reading from Gravity Assist (check out one of the poems from the book, “Instead of a Father”) and to see a lot of friends from the Seattle writer community come out to support each other. Glenn also snapped a shot of PR for Poets on Open Books’ shelf!
I was a little nervous (I don’t do great in crowds with the MS thing), but it increased my feeling that I’ll probably do fine at AWP – except for remembering anyone’s name or face in a crowd (still troublesome for some reason, so if you see me at AWP, be kind and remembering my brain doesn’t function totally 100 percent in overload, when you say hi, remind me of your name, the name of the person next to you, and probably my own). I was especially happy I went since a friend had a small emergency during the reading that I was able to help out with. You never know when you might be useful!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Zoo Visit, Poetry Readings, PR for Poets in the News and Submission Fatigue

I will be in Portland, OR from March 27 – 30 for the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and the No Fair/Fair.

The No Fair/Fair is being held as an alternative event for small presses that cannot afford to be part of the expensive AWP. Thirty small presses – including Sibling Rivalry Press – will be taking part in a book fair and series of readings.
Collin Kelley, AWP and No Fair/Fair in Portland

I struggle this morning. Whether to read poems, or write them.
I’ve lost an hour. Where did it go?
I hate subordinate clauses that are followed by non sequiturs.
I hear slips all the time—like tinnitus, like a mosquito’s whine, like a seagull’s cry.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse, Minus an Hour

It’s almost like I’ve given up everything for Lent and as if Lent is all the time. I am behind in my blog, poetry writing, poetry submitting, letter writing, and all things me. Except that I was in a play, so that explains my absence in January and February, 2019, but it doesn’t explain anything else. Tuesday, I was downtown and saw Abe Lincoln all dressed up for Mardi Gras on Fat Tuesday.
Kathleen Kirk, Fat Tuesday with Abe

That morphine is pale blue
sickly-sweet baby blue
like every cutesy sleeper
I didn’t want for my infant son.
That I would feel
like a mother bird
tenderly tucking the drops
under her waiting tongue.
That the gasp and hiss
of the oxygen pump
would be both comforting
and terrible.
Rachel Barenblat, Things I didn’t know

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for imagining to be other characters or to use other voices in my writing and have used imaginary characters or people from my family’s past before. But this issue is so layered and sensitive and volatile that I don’t think I could write from their point of view, just as I couldn’t imagine being a person of colour or to have a disability or major illness and do them justice by pretending to understand what they were going through.

It’s an interesting prompt to try and take on the voice of a character other than yourself for poetry. We do it all the time for fiction, but poetry seems to lean more towards the intensely personal for the author. I would avoid attempting it with this sort of subject matter, but taking a mythical, fictional or historical figure or a totally made up character can help push your awareness of this writing style. Give it a try.
Gerry Stewart, A Voice Not Taken

I’m overjoyed to say that Sarabande Books will publish a collection of my visual poems next summer (2020), all Misery poems. In my mid-50s I’ll be a debut author. I’ve been toiling away at these poems for going on three years and it’s been a constant surprise. I love the textures of it, the possibilities.
Publication is a ways off so I’ve been delaying saying anything about it. But I’ve begun mentioning it in my bio when I have a piece published, so rather than live in fear that someone will read my bio, we announced it.
I don’t have a title yet. This needs to be decided soon so I can design the cover, which is kind of exciting. Visual poetry in general is exciting. I love doing it. I hope to learn many new things. I’m in Frankfurt taking a collage class this week, case in point.
Sarah J Sloat, good news

The first-person possessive pronoun permits English speakers to colonize the cosmos. Often, I catch myself in claiming “mine.” My house, my meadow, my cat, my children! As if I could actually own any of them (although I possess a piece of paper that asserts that I own my house, sometimes I have my doubts). I did not intend, when I started writing this poem, to remind myself not to go about “making it all about me.” But it does serve as a reminder. And I think a few of us human beings ought to be more aware that our tendency to hoard and claim may not serve us, or the world, all that well.
Ann E. Michael, Perspectives

The third was a bridge, an archway,
an aqueduct. It looked
like a semicolon; she had always
wanted to use one,
but never learned how.
She walked across and woke up.
The room was the same.
The morning light through the curtains.
The taste in her mouth. Even
the face in the mirror.
She touched the charred stubs
on her back, stroked that memory
of having been hitched, however
fleetingly, to something
that could blot out the sky.
Romana Iorga, Four Nightmares

At night, the ancient ones speak
to us in soft, bodily gurgles
and strange dreams from a different homeland.
We surface from senseless landscapes
to wear our slave clothes
and artificial faces, masks
of every sort. We trudge
to our hollow offices to do our work,
that modern drudgery,
filing papers and shredding documents,
the feminine mystique, the modern housework,
while at home, domestics
from a different culture care
for the children.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A Poem for International Women’s Day: “The Hollow Women”

Also, the monsters that exist within domestic spaces. Or develop because of them. The crucible that transforms one thing into something else. In taurus, the monster is less actual monster and more metaphorical. The house and family that the monster exists in becomes a monster in and of itself. I’ve been thinking about this as I work on my notes and a few pieces about the HH Holmes Murder Castle, where the hotel is in itself, wholly monstrous. So then how does a house, in the context of something like the summer house, itself both breed monsters and become one?
Kristy Bowen, horrific domesticities

In the melodramas and storms, it was rather steady, unforced and unmannered, the ongoingness of poets reading and singing people they hope are listening, but singing nonetheless in the space their words create.
I think of the different tones and approaches taken by our nine poets: the whispery, the off-slant, the eloquent wit, the darkly ardent. The open pleas, the laments. The open door to tenderness. The eight-minute slot per poet added to an intensity of poets concentrating their meaning and audience listening hard to what they had to say. That focus ensured that the words left their mark.
Jill Pearlman, Staying Power of Poets Resist

For me, the writing comes first, so when I’m working with found texts, I’m scanning for words/ phrases/ lines that spark a reaction. I don’t have any idea at this stage where the poem is, what it will say, how it will say it, but I have that initial phrase and that’s enough. I can’t predict where I’ll find what I’m looking for. I mean, I’ll go to a charity shop and buy a handful of books that in some way look promising, or I’ll scan a newspaper or a magazine and find an article that looks like it’s got potential. However, it’s not until I sit down to work with these sources that I know if they’re of value to me or not. Also, I’ve noticed that if I try to force it by settling on a phrase that’s ‘just good enough’ (because I can’t find anything that really fires my imagination) the process of creating the found poem becomes too conscious and invariably generates a poem I’m not happy with.
Julie Mellor, Originality …

Thanks to Afshan D’souza-Lodhi at The Common Sense Network for publishing my short piece, New Oldish Poets Society – which you can read here – detailing twelve women poets who’ve recently published their first pamphlet or collection in their late 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. I’ve read a few articles recently charting the rise in poetry’s popularity yet nothing that I’ve seen mentions the rather wonderful phenomenon of more and more older women being published for the first time.
You can decide for yourself why it is that older women are increasingly making a space for themselves in the poetry world – in my article I suggest that it is to do with networking, education and publishing opportunities made available by the internet, as well as changed and changing attitudes towards women in general and a reassessment of what is considered ‘good’ poetry, along with different types of people making editorial decisions.
And you can draw your own conclusions about the reasons for the absence of older women in articles celebrating the current #poetryboom…
Josephine Corcoran, New Old(ish) Poets Society

a jet plane’s contrail
splits in two, a heart breaking
dissolves into cumulus clouds
that look like bees
James Brush, Rural Free Delivery

I pulled a book off the shelf. What made me think of you?
I keep throwing myself at the feet of strangers, circling around them again, they are both familiar and made strange when viewed from a new point in time. This is the way of things, isn’t it? There is a painful roundness to the world – I started something new going over old territory.
The world is too round for my determination. The time=distance cluttered with objects as real as anything I think I can hold in my hands.
The Too Sharp Corners of the Too Round World.
I keep accidentally dredging up evidence of my own life. Evidence is a funny word, really, in use. After all, evidence is just support for an argument. For a hypothesis.
The introduction to your poems presents the evidence that you likely existed.
Ren Powell, March 4th, 2019

January 6, 2019January 7, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 1

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. And if you’re a poetry blogger yourself, consider doing a regular links round-up of your own. It’s not enough to share links on social media; only through interlinking (and commenting) can we hope to build strong online communities.

Poetry bloggers this week shared thoughts about the year just past and hopes or resolutions for 2019. There were book lists and reviews, writing prompts, political reflections, original poems, and more. Some time in March or April when the pickings become slimmer, I imagine I’ll look back with longing at this first week of January when we were all so full of energy and resolve…

After a picture-book snowy December, we are pounded by rain, raveled by high winds. The gracious curve of the snow banks is now pocked and dirty, broken limbs, unburied trash, dog shit. And yet, a junco landed on the railing outside my window and clearly looked me in the eyes. There was a break in the cloud cover this morning unveiling a tiny sunrise, all golden and pink for the few minutes it held open.
2019 comes apace, a date I could not have even imagined when I was a child. The world now is different and the same. Politics eerily repeating itself like a warped tape, but I take a breath and there is ocean, rain, tomatoes to grow.
Books to read. And so, I cross the threshold to the new year, the new list. I’ve been keeping a reading list for a decade or more, and how I wish I started sooner. Looking back, I see patterns, interests evolve and then fade away. But poetry. Oh, poetry remains. So this year I read 138 books, 82 of which were poetry collections. I’ve listed them below in alphabetical order by title. A rich stew of ideas, language, and heart’s blood.
May the new year find us all looking toward the light. May we listen well. May we feel heard. May we not forget our place in the web of all life on this planet. May we remember that kindness is better than money. May no person be made to feel less than human, less than worthy of compassion. May we find teachers that help us become the most full expression of our hearts.
And may we read some poetry that connects us to each other.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Of Lists and Longing

Five years ago, my poetry collection Render was published and, shortly thereafter, my father passed away. Fast forward to 2018 and another new collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, was released and my mother made her transition a few weeks later. Some might think of this as a curse, but I see it as a natural cycle of birth and death. The books and their attendant need for publicity, readings and planning have helped distract me from thinking about the loss of my parents, but have also caused me to reflect more deeply on the time I have left and what I want to accomplish.

My mother’s death was not as peaceful as it should have been. She believed she had more time and her rapid decline knocked her sideways. Although she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer in the summer of 2016, my mom thought the radiation treatment had bought her additional years, so when she became ill in September she was thoroughly unprepared. There was anger, fear and irrational behavior. She should have had comfort care many weeks before she actually got it at the hospice. I have friends who have been caretakers for their ill or dying parents and heard plenty of horror stories, but the reality is much worse. The physical and emotional toll is something I will have to contend with for awhile, but I am processing the last few months by writing about it. I have four poems so far in various stages of completion. I wish I didn’t have to write them, but perhaps they will be useful to others who are in a similar situation. My hope with everything I write is that readers will find resonance.
Collin Kelley, Looking back, looking ahead

I received the Oceanic Tarot by Jayne Wallace as a Christmas present from one of my sons. It’s a beautiful deck that appeals to my love of water and swimming, and it provides simple, positive explanations for each of the cards. This morning I did my first reading with it.
In fact, it was the first reading I’ve ever done. Even though the tarot has always fascinated me, I’ve only used individual cards as writing prompts, and I’ve never taken the time to learn the symbolism or history behind them.
My interpretation of this three-card reading, which pertains to past, present, and future, is the following:
I need to let go of the guilt I feel about taking a semester off from teaching English. Devoting time to healing from depression, regaining my energy, spending time with family and friends, and completing my current poetry project are more than worthy endeavors–following this path is lifesaving, at least for now.
Time for reflecting on my relationship with my father and also with all the people I met on the Camino will help me finish the poems I’ve been writing for the last three and a half years.
Christine Swint, First Tarot Reading

I may need to rethink my no-getterness when it comes to writing, because I recently had a dream about the Egyptian god Thoth. He wrote a message on a scroll for me and was very insistent that I read it. In the space between dreaming and waking, I was desperately trying to remember the message, but of course it was gone the second I woke up. I do not know why I was visited by Thoth. I had to go and look him up because I had no memory of who he was in the Egyptian pantheon. It turns out that among other things, Thoth was the patron of scribes and of the written word. He maintained the library of the gods, was said to have created himself through the power of language, and wrote a song that created the eight deities of the Ogdoad. So I was visited by the one of the big dogs, and I don’t care who thinks that’s loopy, I believe in paying attention to that kind of stuff.
Kristen McHenry, Go-Getter vs No-Getter, Leg Lag, A Visit from the Big Dog

Last year, I read 202 books. I really thought that was the most books I could read in one year. Turns out, I was very wrong. In 2018, I read 221 books. That’s a book every 1.65 days.
Of the 221 books I read in 2018, here are my favorites:
Poetry
~ Nothing is Okay by Rachel Wiley
~ Strange Children by Dan Brady
~ Secure Your Own Mask by Shaindel Beers
~ Prey by Jeanann Verlee
Courtney LeBlanc, Best Books of 2018

In the past year, I read fewer books than usual, but if anything I thought about them more. The year began with a big project: reading Homer’s Odyssey chapter by chapter with two other friends, each of us reading a different translation and discussing them online. As the only one of the three readers with any ancient Greek, I was the one who looked up and struggled through passages we wanted to compare. This not only revived my interest in the language but rekindled my desire to go to Greece, which came true at the end of the year. The final book I’m reading, Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, is a novelistic treatment of the life of Alexander the Great, whose Macedonian birthplace we visited. There were a number of other classical books, or works inspired by them, in the early part of 2018 – specifically several by Seamus Heaney; Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a version of Antigone with an immigrant heroine and her brother, a suspected ISIS terrorist; Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a poem that lists all the deaths mentioned in the Iliad, and Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, about teaching the book to a class that included his own father and then going on a trip with him that recreated the ancient voyage.
Beth Adams, Book List – 2018

The old year is dead!
Dead, cold, gone.
We drifted and swam through its wide river,
what a survival story that was.
And now we cling to the new one
like dawn to eyelashes,
like song
to guitar strings,
and smoke
to fire.
Claudia Serea, Survival story

I suppose for a lot of us who write poetry it’s the firm intention to write better this year, to send out all those poems we’ve been sitting on and humming and hawing about, and, if you’re like me, checking out the plethora of competitions that seem to come swarming around now. You might be lighting a candle for the ones you sent in for the National (which is the poetry equivalent of the Lottery double roll-over; spare a thought for Kim Moore lying on her sofa…she notes in her latest blog post that she has 9,500 poems to read through before sending in her choices for the long-list). Or you may, like me, be checking out Poets and Players or the Kent and Sussex, or Prole or York Mix……the list stretches out like Macbeth’s line of taunting kings. As regular readers know, I’m a sucker for competitions. I like the tingle. And I’ve been lucky, but it’s worth recording one illusion I was under at one time. I thought if I won a big competition, the world of poetry would beat a path to my door. It doesn’t. Basically, if you want to make a mark (which significantly, I haven’t) you have to keep on writing and working and submitting and begging for readings, and networking like crazy. The company you keep is important, but no-one owes you a living. You get the days of euphoria, and then it’s back to earth.
John Foggin, The glittering prizes, and the return of a Polished Gem: Stephanie Conn

There are a few poetry books coming out (or already out) this year that I’m looking forward to. These include new pamphlets from HappenStance Press (on order), Vertigo and Ghost by Fiona Benson, new books by Rebecca Goss (Carcanet Press) and Niall Campbell (Bloodaxe), debuts by Lisa Kelly (Carcenet), Tom Sastry (Nine Arches Press) and Mary Jean Chan (Faber). There are many more but these are the ones I have my eye on at the moment. How about you?
I’m writing this on Friday evening, and expecting my family back from their Australian holiday early tomorrow morning. Now that I’ve finally grown used to a very quiet house, I am, of course, feeling nostalgic and a little sad about my quiet Christmas and New Year which are about to be mightily shattered. It’s been an interestingly different time for me. I’ve made no resolutions, I’ve set no goals. I do have vague ideas about what I’d like to achieve this year but I’m not setting my heart on anything.
A cold snap has reminded me to break the ice and fill up the bird baths that I keep dotted around our garden, front and back. I use old roasting tins and bashed up flower pots. I’ve been rewarded many times by beautiful, variously-coloured and sized feathered visitors and I like to think that it’s what you do each day, and keep on remembering to do, that counts – more than what you say you’re going to do at the start of the year. Have a great week.
Josephine Corcoran, A very quiet start to the year

One of my goals for 2019, besides getting more sleep (I average four hours a night, which I hear from doctors is not enough, what?) is getting out more and spending more time with wonderful creative people! Yesterday I had the chance to meet up for lunch with the lovely and talented local poet Sarah Mangold. I had run into her work at Open Books and liked it, so I was happy to have this opportunity to talk over coffee. And now I’m looking forward to reading her chapbook, Cupcake Royale! Nothing cheers me up like spending time with artists, writers, and musicians – I think it decreases the feeling of “I am crazy for doing this” and always inspires me to do more in my own creative life!
I’ve been reading a beautiful hardcover illustrated edition of Virginia Woolf’s letters and the second volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters. Virginia Woolf is always cheerful, restrained and clever in her letters while Plath is a little more self-revealing, passionate in her happiness and her disappointments, but I think both can teach us lessons about women writers. I’m also reading After Emily, a book by Julie Dobrow about the two women who devoted a ton of time and energy to make sure Emily Dickinson had a legacy and a reputation as a great poet. It’s kind of a wonderful lesson in what it takes to become a household name in the 1800’s in upper-crust society in New England and dispels the illusion that Emily didn’t make en effort or that she became a sensation out of nowhere – a sort of early template for PR for Poets! (Book Clubs were very big, FYI.)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Year So Far, Poem in Natural Bridge, Lunch Dates with Poets and Poet Letters, and 2019 Goals

I confess that 2018 was defined by the frustration all around us – all of us. One of the things I am going to do in 2019 is to lessen the chaos around me that distracts and drags me down. No, I’m not turning off the news. Burying my head in the sand makes me an irresponsible citizen and voter. But I intend to avoid the crap that none of us need. What we engage in is a choice we make. I want to make better choices.

I saw a graphic that said something like this: We have 365 pages this year to write our new life story. That made me realize several things. One, urgency. If we don’t put anything on a page, that’s a lost day. I can’t write today’s page tomorrow. It also means I am responsible for my own story, my own year. Yes, I have to work with what the world throws at me, but that is only part of the story. What I do with my resources, time, events, people are my responsibility. Choose well. Kevin Larimer, the editor-in-chief of Poets & Writers said something in his note in the newest edition that resonated with me. He spoke of deeper gratitude for the idea of production that isn’t entirely based on what is put on the page and more on how we honor those moments of living off the page.

One thing I am going to do this year is to guard and protect the time I allocate for writing and reading.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Year Trade-In

Here’s great way to kickstart your writing in the New Year. Cut some snippets of text from a range of newspapers/ magazines/ novels (whatever you can lay your hands on). Maybe add some found images too. Pop them in a bag and post them to a fellow poet, challenging them to make a poem out of the contents. This is what my good friend, the academic (and poet) Dr Zoe Walkington did for me just before Christmas. I didn’t realise until I’d created the poem (above) that Zoe had already had a go with the same bits of text and image. I can’t reprint her poem here yet, because I’ve urged her to submit it to an online journal. However, here’s what she says about the process:
‘The way I created it was cutting up two magazines. As you have identified one was a Sunday supplement, and the other was a “specialist” magazine which was a sort of ‘psychologists digest’ type magazine which I receive as part of my membership of an American psychological society.
I made up my own poem, then – being lazy – never glued it together, and so the parts of the poem sat on my desk for a while, and I then looked at the bits one day and thought “what would Julie do with these?”
The idea of putting it in a freezer bag was just a random method of transport but then I thought it could merit the title of “a poem in a bag”!! ‘
Julie Mellor, Why I made this for you

2019:
Now, reading post the one thing that stands out to me besides that I now having muesli everyday instead of Raisin Bran, is that I wrote,

“Am I being kissed or am I the onlooker?”

My concern with that question is that — if I’m being kissed, then it means I’m waiting for someone/something to do something so I can be engaged in the moment.

I don’t want to be part of the “pick me” generation.

So I think the biggest change this year is I’m stepping up. Things have changed since that last post 6 years ago– I am no longer in that same house and my daughter is at college.

If anything holds me back this year, I no longer have the excuse of parenting or not enough time. So, yeah, accountability, it’s the nametag I’m wearing.

Anyway, looking again at the photo– maybe I’m none of those people (the kisser, the kissee, or the onlooker), maybe I’m the full glass of champagne, sparkly and bubbly, and just being the best I can as the world does its thing…
Kelli Russell Agodon, Thoughts before 2019: Am I the Kisser, the Kissee, or the Onlooker?

Let’s write a kissing poem. First, go back to the past and recall an important kiss or kisses—the first kiss, a French kiss, an unwanted kiss, a stolen kiss, an illicit kiss, a last kiss, a goodbye kiss, perhaps a metaphorical kiss. Your poem need not recall a warmly positive memory of kissing.
Recreate the scene. Make it clear that your first-person speaker is going back to the past. Use descriptive details to call forth that time: What was the music then or the dance style? What were the clothing styles? Any fragrance from perfume or aftershave? Any local color, e.g., flowers, trees, food?
Be sure to include some metaphors. Try to make one of them an exploited metaphor.

Use some hyperbole. If, however, your scene is not a tender one, hyperbole might not work. Try it and see what happens. If your poem becomes overly dramatic, revise it out.
Diane Lockward, Advance Call for Kissing Poems, Plus Prompt

There is now an increasing number of poets who are making their own films. I’d go so far as to say that it’s when poets see that there is a type of film poem that does not need to respond to the hype generated around the visually powerful imagery of music and YouTube videos, and that they can forefront their poetry, that poets get involved.
This year, Chaucer Cameron and I brought together ten poets to meet over a six-month period to learn more about, and to create, film poetry. The group worked together as a ‘collective,’ each person was responsible for creating at least one film poem, but also worked together sharing skills with the rest of the group. As facilitators, we were there to teach, inspire and encourage. One poet said: “I wouldn’t have realised quite how much potential it offers to explore and experience poetry in new ways unless I’d actually made my own poetry films. My relationship with my own and others’ poems has shifted and deepened as a result of working in this way, enriching my writing practice.” And another observed: “It offers fresh opportunities for bringing your work to the world.”
The ‘collective’ resulted in the group presenting a final showing of sixteen film poems to an audience of fifty people, mainly new to poetry, and a tour which included the films going to the 2018 Athens International Video Poetry Festival.
So, maybe where the roots of film poetry lie do not matter – it’s the act of communication, inherent in poetry, that’s important. It is the potential of film poetry, to offer creative opportunities for exploring and communicating poetry in new ways, that’s exciting. Audiences new to poetry in particular, engage more easily with visual and auditory content, making film poems an ideal medium to share work. It’s the magic that counts.
Poets at the Root of Film Poetry – guest blog post by Helen Dewbery of Poetry Film Live (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

All poems are triangles. They either start narrow (at the point) and expand as they progress, or they start wide and compress or shed excess to a fine point at the end.
Grant Clauser, Notes on Poetry Energy

Michael Carrino sent me a link to an article that discusses the idea of fully thematic collections, what the author calls ‘project’ books. The article sets ‘mind’ against ‘heart’.

Well, no-one is going to argue against ‘heart’ so that battle is won before it has started. It’s a little like calling certain kinds of poetry ‘academic’. Label applied: job done.
These are all false dichotomies. Hearts have minds and minds have hearts. One feels what one thinks and one thinks what one feels.
George Szirtes, MINDS AND HEARTS: SHAPING

Yesterday, as I drove to a very early morning spin class, I had a vision of a poem. What would happen if the 3 wise men had come to a border situation like the ones we have in the southern parts of the U.S. […]
This morning I attempted the poem that started to glimmer at me yesterday. It did not turn out to be the poem I first thought about. This morning’s poem begins, “I am the border agent who looks / the other way. . . . ” The poem goes on to reference the East German soldiers who didn’t shoot as people assembled at the Berlin Wall in 1989, but the wise men do make an appearance later in the poem.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Wise Ones and Modern Borders

As I shifted uncomfortably in my hard chair the other evening, it occurred to me that sometimes my experience of attending an open mic is not dissimilar from my experience, at times, of the editing process.
I approach with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
The lights go down. I can’t see clearly.
I eat a cookie.
Poems are going on and on.
I feel like a small ogre in the dark, thinking things to myself like: “No, no, no.” “Cut that line. That one two.” “Stop there. Stop. Stop.” “What are you going on about now?” “Nooo.” “What on earth are you talking about??” “Too long! Too long!” “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I feel uncharitable. Can’t I be more open-minded to these poems?
One cookie is not enough. I eat a second cookie.
Sometimes I think things like: “Hm, that wasn’t half bad.” “Hey, something really interesting is going on in this one.” “Oh, wow, now THAT is a poem.” “That was interesting. I could learn from that.”
Sometimes I laugh out loud.
Two cookies is too much.
Marilyn McCabe, Open Mic, Insert Pen; or, Notes on the Editing Experience

I run in darkness now – either in the early mornings are after work. And I miss taking photos along the route. It isn’t the photos themselves, but the function of photography as a tool for noticing. Appreciating. Instead I listen: the rattle of the dog’s tag on the leash, our footfalls in an odd kind of syncopation, approaching bicycle tires on the gravel, the blackbird sweeping over the dead leaves.
I inhale attentively and try to put a kind of frame around the wet smells of the earth, the sharp smells of the rusting metal of the old train tracks.
*
On my way to work I pass the adult daycare center and through the window see a man and a woman dancing. She is maybe 30, and her enthusiasm heavy. His age is impossible to guess, his joy expressed only in a pinch between his left eye and the left corner of his mouth. She lifts his arms for him. I can’t hear what she is singing.
I feel a cold current moving with the wind.
Ren Powell, January 5, 2019

She likes to think about angels and mermaids
And when she dances it is with her arms outstretched
She spins and whirls
My granddaughter, only five years old
Today I gave her some prayers beads that I had strung
And told her about the LovingKindness prayer
Sweet child, she touched one bead at a time
Saying
I love my Momma, let her be good
I love my Daddy, let him be good
Oh, there are days when it is just so fine
To be an old man
James Lee Jobe, ‘She likes to think about angels and mermaids’

November 11, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 45

A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, plus occasional other poetry bloggers in my feed reader. If you’ve missed earlier editions of the digest, here’s the archive.

Current events were inescapable this week, but so were events of a hundred years ago: bookends for our culture of violence and genocide. So poetry bloggers had plenty to say about the US election, the ending of World War I, politics in general, and how to preserve sanity and make time for what matters (writing, obviously). But there were also posts about new publications and recently read books, plus Collin Kelley had the genius idea (which I for one intend to steal) of blogging a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired his forthcoming collection, and Giles Turnbull calculated the amount of daily exercise he gets from making coffee.

Those of us lucky enough to live in a land that’s not currently wracked by war might think about our luck. We might strengthen our resolve to quit wasting time and to start/continue/finish the work we were put on this earth to do. History shows us that we can’t always or even often count on peace. The world plunges into war for the flimsiest of reasons: an archduke is assassinated, and the world goes up in flames.

So if we have stability now, let us seize the day. Let us not waste time on Facebook, bad movies, wretched television, or any of the other countless ways we’ve devised to waste our freedom. Generations of humans have laid down their lives to secure us this precious liberty; let’s resolve that their blood hasn’t been shed just so that we can fritter day after day away.

If we haven’t always done a good job of shepherding our talents, let’s declare today to be Armistice Day. Let’s forgive ourselves for every opportunity we haven’t followed. Let’s see if any of those doors are still open to us. And if not, let’s rest easy in the assurance that there will be new doors if only we stay alert for them.

For those of us who are activists, we might think about how to use our talents to create a world where we practice war no more. Or maybe we want to raise funds for those who are damaged by war. On a day like Veteran’s Day, it seems appropriate. We can be the voices for those who have been cruelly silenced.

For those of us who teach, we might want to think about how artists and writers might speak to current generations, many of whom do not know any veterans. On Veteran’s Day, which began as Armistice Day, you might bring the work of Wilfred Owen into your classrooms. You can find some poems at this site; I particularly like “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Pair this poem with some artistic works, perhaps the works of Picasso that look at war, a work like “Guenica” (here’s a site with the image). For this generation of instant access to facts and information, it would be worth discussing whether or not creative explorations enrich our understanding of war and its aftermath. Is photography and documentary film more worthwhile? Another kind of art?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Approaches to Armistice Day

The first two Native-American women. First two Muslim women. First Somali-American, a former refugee. Youngest woman ever, a Latina. First black female congresswoman from her state…They are the hope for me today: the brown female faces of those who won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with many white women who also won races, and the first gay male state governor. These are the faces of the future — though their majority power may be very far away, beyond my lifetime even.

When I look at the map, the polarization is depressingly clear, and I can’t even feel smug about Quebec being better, after our last election. It was just the same: most of the rural, homogeneous French-Canadian areas went conservative, while the diverse metropolitan areas (chiefly Montreal) were solidly progressive. The real question in so many places today seems to be: do you want someone who will actually work for the things that benefit all people, or do you want someone who looks like you, expresses the same fears, and wants to go back to the past? […]

I’ve been on the side of immigrants and non-whites all my life, and especially so since marrying into an Arab/Armenian immigrant family, with multiple personal histories of genocide and narrow escapes from persecution to begin life again in new places. Twelve years of being a Canadian-American, and having opportunities to travel, especially in Latin America, have only made me MORE sympathetic and more identified with migrants and refugees. I’m grateful for my life experiences and fervently wish I could share them with a lot more people, because I think if you don’t live it, or have very close relationships with people who do, it’s hard to really get it. Thus, the map we keep seeing, and the fears that keep being exploited.

Besides this endemic hatred of “the other”, the environment is the other issue that creates ongoing despair for me. There is so little time, and so little will on the parts of governments — in fact I believe we’ve already passed a critical window where reversal was possible. So much of what I have valued and loved about the Earth is in danger of being lost forever. To me, this is the fundamental issue of our time, and even here in Quebec, where many people say they do care about the natural world and live close to it, the new government feels it is not important, and secondary to economic concerns. How shortsighted can we be?

Today is a day to rejoice in a first step back from the precipice Trump’s presidency has placed us in. Frankly, though, we can’t let up for a minute.
Beth Adams, Bright Faces of Hope, and a Long Uphill Road Ahead

I’ve been thinking about the loud controversies of late and the various ways we Americans have changed the meaning of our identity as human beings. An American man or woman shopping at the mall is human—that’s a given, right? A consumer is important; is human. A voter is human, but these days it is only if he or she believes the same things we do and trusts in the same proper steps to transform the country (rather than some other, surely evil steps) and so votes for “our” party. The ideal of respect (sadly, not always fulfilled over the centuries) for one another is in pronounced abeyance. That’s natural, of course, because the ideas that the image of God shines through all mortal flesh is dead in what is essentially a post-Christian society. […]

In great part, we mean in this country because we shop. I shop, therefore I am. Likewise, we are tiny parts in the voting apparatus, continually pestered to think according to correct party lines. If we are too young to shop or vote or too ill or decrepit, we just don’t matter much to the system—we’re not quite human, and others decide what to do about us.

But this is wholly wrong, isn’t it? We have forgotten what it is to be human if we believe that either consuming or voting correctly grounds us and makes us human, much less fully human (another large question!) But that akilter definition of the human is the strong impression one gets from vocal campus outbursts and the standard media and the blizzard of advertising tumbling around us….
Marly Youmans, Shop. Vote. Don’t forget to be human.

The hinge of words swings back and forth, creaking,

unable to decide what direction

they should take. My knees argue, unable

to agree on where we’re going. They want

to take a vote, but it’s just them, the two

of them. They aren’t listening to me, or

anyone else. How can I walk, half snow,

half heat?
PF Anderson, Knees (Bodymap, 2)

You know I love taking pictures of hummingbirds. They represent something about my soul – always in a hurry, and attracted to flowers. I think that we have to watch how to take in the stories of our world – reading books an antidote to the confusing and jarring barrage of bad news and bad things happening in the world – because they force us to slow down and consider things more deeply. Spending time with people on the phone or in real life is different than e-mail or texting – it helps us integrate with our communities.

When you’re a writer, and if you feel your writing in important, it is essential to guard your writing time. For me, it’s after everyone is asleep – when the inner editor is quieter (editors often go to sleep at 10 PM, I think) and my mind is freer to make connections. I’ve been writing poems outside of any planned “book project” – letting myself write whatever it wants, from flash fiction involving time travel to poems about Game of Thrones. It’s clear from the insomnia and nightmares that I’m sensitive to what’s going on in the world, not to mention the stress of trying to get all my medical tests and appointments in before the end of the year, when my deductible flips over and I have to start paying out of pocket again. Emily Dickinson is my symbol of the poet isolated from the world, and yet, had a tremendous life of the mind in her rooms and gardens. She really allowed herself time to write and even more, time to notice things. Instead of allowing our minds and attention to be constantly drawn to the latest scandal and tragedy (and there are plenty of those), scanning instead of truly paying attnetion, how do we hold ourselves steady? Meditation, prayer, reading and writing, and if possible (which it isn’t always, in winter) spending time out in nature. If you have other answers to this modern dilemma, let me know. How do we put into practice embracing the things that are truly important to us?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Urge to Protect and Post-Election Insomnia, Looking for the Magic, and Guarding Your Mind/Time

Ten Reasons for (not) writing:

California is burning.

Our white nationalist president is blaming California for the fires.

There is a civil war going on in this country, and the right is better armed.

Mass shootings r/t #3.

Refugees walking hundreds of miles to be greeted by armed troops at the US border.

Initiative 1631 (a policy to combat climate change) failed to pass in Washington State, funded by big oil, so we may as well just prepare for the worst.

It’s a big season for deaths. I attend deaths, hence, I’ve been busy.

Prop 2 failed. No new library for Sequim, Washington. Property owners win.

Promises to keep.

The new kitten is eating all of my plants and then taking naps on the keyboard.

Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Afternoon

Okay. Just over 1500 words of my play Accountability Partners for this week’s Long Form Friday, which took place in the afternoon because I had to attend some training for the college in the morning. Also, four poems written this week, two of which I (kinda) finalized this morning. When I should have been running. *Cough*

I’m being really, really, REALLY stubborn by keeping to these early morning and Friday writing sessions, considering all of the grading I’m backed up with, but damnit, I made a commitment to my writing for this academic year, and I did it by abandoning a shit-load of committees and other responsibilities, and if I wasn’t backed up with grading because of my writing at this point in the semester, I’d be backed up with grading because of all the committee meetings and driving between campuses and other time-sucks that make this job absolutely maddening. […]

[W]hile it appears that nothing has really changed, everything has changed. I am so much calmer, and enjoy teaching so much more, when I protect my writing time. (I’m also so much happier and healthier when I protect my running time, but we can’t have everything, can we?)
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Writing, Grading, & the End of Soccer Season

Have you ever read the right book at precisely the right time? One Beautiful Dream by Jennifer Fulwiler is about a religious mom of 6 kids (under age 8) navigating the season of having babies while also pursuing her dream to write. So we have a little in common! And so often I have felt like my dreams conflict–my husband and I want a large family so obviously I have to set writing down, to quit. I’ve tried to quit so many times, but I find myself there again, writing a poem, a book of poems, sending them to publishers. […]

I desperately wish I were a better writer. I desperately wish I were a better mother. But the answer to being better at both isn’t necessarily for me to give up on either one. God gave me a unique calling that is made up of some different moving parts but it is all going in the same direction. Something about writing is important and I need to keep doing it. Welcoming all these little baby-strangers into my life, one at a time, is also part of that calling, and I don’t fully understand how it is all going to work out together in the end.

This book helped me though. It made me feel like although my big family dream and my poetry dream are both crazy dreams to so many (most!) people, God made me for this, so even if I fail, I don’t really fail. I feel inspired to keep going. And I don’t think that right now that is going to look like starting a new book or a novel, but it might, if that inspiration comes, and I’m not too afraid to follow it.
Renee Emerson, dreaming big dreams

100 years since the end of WW1. My granddad, Alfred, was a sergeant in the Kings Own Yorkshire Life Infantry. He joined as a territorial some years before the war, working as a journeyman housepainter. For some time, on Armistice day I’ve posted a poem I wrote for him, and also for my grandma, Ethel. I never knew her.

Everyone dutifully remembers the men who died in uniform, and that is right and proper. I wish we would publicly remember their wives and mothers, the ones left behind to bring up big families; there was no social security for them. They were left to fend, and those working class women often struggled to make ends meet. They often had big families. Alfred never saw active service. He wanted to, but instead of going off with the lads he called his comrades, he was admitted to hospital and died in 2016 of Hodgkinson’s lymphoma.

Ethel managed to bring up my mum, my two aunts and my uncle. She gradually grew profoundly deaf. The isolation fed depression and in the 1930s she took her own life. Remember the women left behind. Remember them. [Click through for the poem.]
John Foggin, Centenary

The air shimmers and stiffens
and Mary shatters it

like a pane of glass.
There is a quality
of sound – a mud-born
eructation from the throat

of a marsh bird, or
some searing midnight
heartbreak called from ridge
or hillside – that curls

around the edge of time
to bear witness to what
we have never known,
should never have to know.

And Mary shrieks from that
elemental place, her mouth
split earth and her voice
magma, sudden and naked

in the wrong world.
Dick Jones, Binners

For a workshop on Tuesday, Election Day, one of my undergraduates submitted a poem based on the day he hid in a closet during a middle school shooting. A different student said there had been a shooting in her school, too; another described an active shooter just last week in the high school her sister attended; a fourth said a friend had died in the Parkland massacre. Stunned, I responded with something like, “Are you telling me that four out of the fifteen of you have had a near miss with a school shooting?” Then two more raised their hands. Six. […]

In short, teachers now have dangerous jobs, students are always vulnerable to random violence, and nowhere is safe. So all together, now: let’s write pantoums! Seriously, teaching poetry during any of the crises we’ve been negotiating lately could seem frivolous, but I’ve been feeling the opposite. My poetry classes keep turning into spaces for analyzing and reflecting on disaster in ways that feel more emotionally useful than, say, reading the news.

Some of that is chance resonance between syllabi and world events. Well, sort of chance. For a different course, my mid-20th-century US poetry seminar, we’re studying the usual characters–O’Hara, Brooks, Rich, and others–but I replaced a session I used to devote to Vietnam war protest poetry with several readings from an anthology I’ve really come to admire: Words of Protest, Words of Freedom, edited by Jeffrey Lamar Coleman. It’s been clear especially since Trump’s rise that we remain in the middle of Civil Rights battles that defined the country fifty years ago, or perhaps in a never-ending backlash against them, so I knew it was time to represent Civil Rights poetry more robustly on my syllabus. Coleman clearly did his research, because while the book contains many famous poems by our best US poets, it also features more obscure work culled from little magazines of the era, and the friction is riveting. I’ve been so impressed by how eagerly and intelligently my students are working through material that is even more relevant than I intended. The KKK leaflets were distributed here on a Friday, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting occurred the next morning, and for Monday, the assignment was to discuss poems about the KKK bombing of a Baptist church that killed four young girls in Birmingham in 1963. That synchronicity has definitely brought urgency to our discussions.

But is it synchronicity, now, or just the permanent daily texture of the world? Since I started drafting this post, there’s been another mass shooting. The election cheered me, but the administration immediately punched back with more ways of undermining the law. Poetry gives me access to other minds confronting related crises thoughtfully–it’s personally useful to read Giovanni, Hayden, Brooks, and many others as they work through anger and hope and grief–but it’s also providing small collections of us with a nonpartisan angle of discussion on the human toll of violence, the way it ripples out in space and time, and I’m grateful for that, too. It makes me feel warmly connected to other anxious human beings working through serious questions, and I hope it does the same for them.
Lesley Wheeler, Keeping the minutes on violence, with Lucille Clifton

Shell shock. Combat fatigue. Delayed hysteria. Contemporary psychology and medicine have another name for it now, post-traumatic stress disorder, and have extended the concept of delayed stress response to victims of trauma other than combat: abuse and catastrophe victims, anyone who has survived a traumatizing experience, of which the world offers many options. […]

Lately, I feel a bit as though the country in which I live–the citizens, popular culture, government and also the environment itself, geological, ecological, biological–has exhibited PTSD responses. Probably, now that I think about it, that’s been true for a long time. So I find myself contemplating the long view (see the Clock of the Long Now for a theoretical 10,000-year perspective!)

As an individual, I do not have a long reach nor a significant number of years to dwell on the planet. That need not keep me from using the long-view perspective; indeed, I sense that the type of curating that I have begun in terms of compiling another manuscript and thinking about the life of work I have contributed over the years through child-raising, landscaping, gardening, teaching, helping young people in university, assisting family members, and whatever other small drops one person can add to the ocean of existence, suggests my comfort level with the long now has deepened.

Likewise, I accept that suffering just pretty much covers the human condition from beginning to end, and without it we would never recognize how amazing the earth and its diverse communities are nor appreciate our joy nearly as much. Despite the difficulty involved in recalling trauma, we may need to face it, with the compassionate support of other humans, in order to more fully live our ordinary lives and understand the long view.
Ann E. Michael, Post traumatic stress

After voting (or perhaps while you are waiting in line), check out the stellar work in the Poets Resist 2018 Midterm Elections Special Feature! I’m still pinching myself because I can’t quite believe I’m in this lineup, which I feel compelled to share in its entirety: Yanyi, Luther Hughes, Sage, Sumita Chakraborty, Lynn Melnick, Hazem Fahmy, Linette Reeman, Melissa Crowe, Arielle Tipa, Simone Person, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Ally Ang, Jesse Rice-Evans, Dena Igusti, Stephen S. Mills, Chen Chen, Bailey Cohen, Heather Derr-Smith, Bryan Borland, Zefyr Lisowski, Allie Marini, Erika Walsh, Gemma Cooper-Novack, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Hannah Cohen, Fargo Tbakhi, Cassandra de Alba, and George Abraham.

I’m so grateful to Anthony Frame for reaching out about contributing to this special issue of Glass: A Journal of Poetry. “The Day Dr. Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I Teach My Daughter the Names of the Parts of Female Anatomy” would not have been written otherwise. I tried and failed to write something for three months, then this poem was completed in less than three weeks, which is very quickly for me.

My poem is indebted not only to Dr. Ford’s brave testimony but also to “Naming of Parts,” written by Henry Reed, who served in the British Army during World War II. You can hear Henry Reed and Frank Duncan reading the poem, the first part of “Lessons From the War,” here.

Poets Resist!
Hyejung Kook

Recently, I have been spending most of my time redacting texts and doing cut ups from newspapers and magazines. However, I haven’t produced any composite fictions along the lines of the one above for a while. When I came across Frances Revel’s work [in 3:AM Magazine] I felt so inspired I promised myself I would go back to this type of work. After all, the nights are lengthening and collaging is a great way to pass an evening.

3am magazine published Revel’s work in their Poem Brut section, which is well worth a look if you’re interested in the way poetry and art collide. There’s some interesting and challenging work on their site that really widens the definition of what poetry is and how it looks on the page/ screen. I’ve said before that the internet is a great platform for this sort of experimental literature, primarily because of the speed at which new work can be published, and also because it costs much less than traditional print to publish texts like Revel’s.

3am magazine also publish asemic poetry in their Poem Brut section. I only came across this term recently, after fellow poets Marion New and Sue Riley returned from a writing residential and introduced me to it. I was sceptical at first – a kind of gut reaction that said, ‘it’s not poetry’. Well, maybe it’s not the sort of poetry I’m familiar with, I began to reason, because partly, my love of poetry is to do with its fringe status. I’m often drawn to poems that stand outside the (lyrical) mainstream.
Julie Mellor, Whatever it is, we’re against it: 3am magazine

I find myself in the midst of some terrific reads right now, piles of jewels of books that I’m rolling around in like Midas.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is a gentle murmur of profound wisdom, the breeze ticking the corn leaves, quaking the aspen as this botanist and member of the Potawotami people braids together different ways of knowing. I’m taking small bites of it, rare for me, a voracious eater. But it’s the proper way to absorb this book.

Ruth L. Schwartz’s Miraculum is poems of close observation, of some duende, and the intimacy of conversation with an old friend. I love encountering books whose authors seem like someone I’d like to know.

Bruce Beasley’s All Soul Parts Returned is quick becoming a new favorite, sprawling, witty poems considering the soul and the sanity, tweaking the sacred mutterings of catechisms. Love his work, which always makes me laugh and be amazed at his creativity.

Lucia Perilla’s On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths is so full of life, often wry, vivid. Mortality is much on the mind of these lively poems, so it was especially startling for me to learn that this wonderful poet I just discovered died a few years ago.
Marilyn McCabe, Easy on the Eyes; or, Book Report on Recent Reading

With Midnight in a Perfect World officially released next week by Sibling Rivalry Press, here’s a Spotify playlist of the songs and music that inspired and informed the poetry in the collection. There are tunes by Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Marianne Faithfull, Iggy Pop, Kylie Minogue, T. Rex, Miles Davis and, of course, DJ Shadow.

Midnight in a Perfect World – DJ Shadow: Insight, foresight, more sight – the clock on the wall reads a quarter past midnight. So begins DJ Shadow’s epic slice of trip-hop built on a plethora of samples including the opening words from Organized Konfusion. I first heard this dreamy song from Shadow’s debut, Entroducing…, in 1996 on my second visit to London. It remains one of my favorite pieces of music and its mood informed the entire collection.
[Click through for the full playlist]
Collin Kelley, A playlist of songs & music that inspired “Midnight in a Perfect World”

The Road Most Travelled: My room to the Kettle

door to kettle: 23 steps

kettle to tap: 10 steps

tap back to kettle base: 10 steps

take plastic jug, cup with coffee granules in, and carton of milk to sink: 10 steps

return to kettle when boiled and take it to sink: 20 steps

return milk and plastic jug back to cupboard and return to sink: 20 steps

re-fill kettle and return to plug and then return to sink: 20 steps

take cup of coffee back to room: 25 steps

So the most exercise I get, other than walking to my workshops, is through making coffee! 138 steps per cup of coffee … I suspect I do 1,000 steps per day just imbibing coffee and making my dinner! :)
Giles L. Turnbull, The Research Roundabout

October 21, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 42

Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but this week I found myself drawn to that most ubiquitous type of writer’s blog post: the announcement of recent writing or publishing success. Though often brief and unassuming, taken together, I think they showcase the incredible variety of opportunities for expression and publication that are out there these days, not to mention the imaginative depth and versatility of the poets I follow. First, though, let’s have a few reviews…

Friday & Saturday I had the opportunity to hear poet Lola Haskins read and to teach a workshop.

It’s my first exposure to Haskins though I had heard good things about her. Her Friday night reading was remarkable in that she read everything from memory, her voice is soft and yet words chosen in her work are profound. Each and everyone with a purpose. It was especially intimate because she was so in tune with the audience and not a page in front of her.

Saturday she quickly set out to provide sound advise and tool for eradicating the dreaded boredom that creeps into our writing and takes over. To stop writing from safety and write from risk.
Michael Allyn Wells, Breaking Out of Boredom with Lola Haskins

Sometimes, if I wake up extra-early, I’ll make a pot of tea and read one of the many bound-to-be-good poetry books stacked on the cyborg (what we call the sideboard, for obscure reasons). This morning I read Diane Seuss’ Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and Girl. It’s full of elegy and ekphrasis, a very rich book I can’t do justice to here. As far as analytic sharpness, I’m tapped out at the moment by teaching and student conferences; I’m just reading receptively, to fill the well. But I’m moved by her poems mourning a father lost in childhood, friends lost to AIDS, and her own lost girl-self. I’m also processing a brilliant reading and visit from Rebecca Makkai, whose much-acclaimed novel The Great Believers concerns the arrival of HIV to Chicago’s Boystown in the eighties. Rebecca was my student here in the nineties; I remember her fierce intelligence well, how she blew in like a wind ready to strip away stupid traditions, as the best of my students do now. But that version of myself feels long gone. All these texts and memories mirror each other fractionally, so my head feels busy with bright shards.

I’m also especially taken by Seuss’s self-portrait series, perhaps because one of my classes is deep in discussion about confessionalism. Here’s one: “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid.” But I like “Self-Portrait with Levitation” even better: “Embodiment has never been my strong suit.” Here’s to learning to float again, one of these days.
Lesley Wheeler, Still life with two relaxed superheroes and a sparkle pen

September is coming to an end and the falling temperatures leave north-east England sharp but bright. I am on a train from my home town in Northumberland en route to Münster in the German province of Westphalia. The 2018 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival awaits at the end of my long train ride: three days of poetry and film in a city reaching summer’s end. It is a good time of the year for poems, I think, and a good time of the year for films.

My excitement is tinged with the knowledge that this may be my last visit to the continent as a fully-fledged citizen of the EU. I’ve always wanted to visit ZEBRA. It seems to be an important place for poetry and film but when one of my films screened here four years ago, I couldn’t afford to come. I’m expecting an international affair: a reminder that, regardless of who is playing games with our borders and our nationhood, people will get together with others to write poems and make films. I am heartened by the fact that the very act of making a poetry film defies and challenges creative and political borders.

As I trundle my way through France and Belgium, I reflect on how the poetry film community is naturally collaborative. It needs more than the single artist in order to exist. That’s not to say that a person can’t make a poetry film on their own – I have done this and many of the films at the festival will surely be author made – but rather that if everyone worked in isolation, as much of the UK’s mainstream poetry world does, the world of poetry film would not be so rich and diverse. Part of this seems inherent in the medium: the juxtaposition gap often works best with two other-thinking minds. It sits at an intersection between several worlds: those of poetry, film-making, television, experimental art, music, sound art and artist’s moving image. Arguably, the poem is the only essential ingredient because without it, the form does not exist.
Stevie Ronnie, Film Ab!: A personal report on the Zebra Poetry Film Festival 2018

This summer I was wildly honored to have my poem “To The New Journal” published in the Summer Issue of the Southern Review. This is the third time I’ve been published in SR and I am a true fan of both the words and the visual art that they publish. There editors are professional, kind, and smart. But there’s one thing.

The Southern Review doesn’t feature much work on their website and so once the physical object of the journal is read and put on the shelf (and maybe tossed from libraries at a later date) most of the poems and prose are gone. Enter the Academy of American Poets with a new project: to showcase more poems on their website. Through an agreement with the Southern Review and Tin House, poems that were published in these print journals may now have a forever home as part of the Academy’s curated collection. This is the reason I can share “To the New Journal” with you.
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Much like the Poetry Foundation website, the Academy of American Poets website seeks to provide an essential resources of poems, essays on poetry, poet bios, and lesson plans to anyone who is interested. Need a poem to read for a wedding or for a divorce? These websites can help! Teaching a poet and want to bring their voice into the classroom? These are great sites to access.

However, sometimes poems swing the other way: from the worldwide ether onto the printed pages of a book. My poem, “Boketto” based on the Japanese word which loosely translates to, to stare into space with no purpose, appeared on the Academy of American Poets site two years ago. This month, “Boketto” stars in the new craft book, The Practicing Poet, Writing Beyond the Basics, by editor, poet, and publisher extraordinaire, Diane Lockward.

Diane contacted me and asked for permission to reprint “Boketto” in her newest anthology / craft book (this is her third and each one is worth owning) and I happily agreed. In The Practicing Poet, Diane has created a prompt for a “weird word poem” based on my work. She has also done an explication of the poem that showed she had read the work carefully noticing the focus on double-barreled words and chiasmus (and no, I didn’t know the word chiasmus before yesterday but I like it and it describes a key strategy of the poem.

So this month I get to swing both ways: page poems onto the web and web poems onto new pages. I’m feeling very lucky indeed.
Susan Rich, The Joy of Poetry (That Swings Both Ways) Academy of American Poets, Practicing Poet, and the Southern Review

Many thanks to Matt DeBenedictis and John Carroll for having me as a guest on the Lit & Bruised literary podcast. We talk poetry, travel, London and the forthcoming publication of Midnight in a Perfect World. You can listen at this link.

And don’t forget to preorder the new collection and be entered to win a free manuscript/chapbook evaluation from me! Preorder from Sibling Rivalry Press at this link.
Collin Kelley, Talking poetry and travel on the Lit & Bruised podcast

Spent three and a half hours writing just over 1500 words of Accountability Partners today (my non-verse play). And in the morning, before the kids woke up, I wrote another poem for the new manuscript. That makes over 60 poems written since the end of June!

Sorry for the blog brag, but I had to share my good news with the universe. I’m on some kind of unprecedented tear here, and thoroughly enjoying it. I mean, not all of those 1500 words are golden, and I sincerely doubt all of the poems are publishable (certainly not right now — most need the benefit of time and careful revision) . . . but I’m so, so happy and grateful for the generation. And, yes, relieved. Because at this time last year, I was already having serious doubts about my abilities and future as a writer (even before the bad news/sabbatical debacle). After all — while it goes a long way toward helping with validation, publication is not necessarily the thing that makes one feel like the genuine article. It’s the ability to commit and get the thing that you want to write done. And after many years of just fucking around, treading water, I’m finally moving in an actual direction. Making progress. Yay!
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Long Form Friday Report

I’m really enjoying writing poems for ‘Frames of Reference’, part of the public art programme for King’s Gate, Amesbury, commissioned by Ginkgo Projects and funded by Bloor Homes.

I’m one of six Wiltshire-based artists who’ve been given a Local Artist Bursary for this project. You can read about some of the other artists and see examples of their work on the Ginkgo Projects’ site. The brief for this project is to create new work in response to the landscape and heritage of the area in and near Amesbury, so I’ve been working on some Wiltshire poems for the last couple of months, in between my other work.

For some poems, I’ve been thinking about my own life in Wiltshire and the ways I interact with the landscape and history here. For others, I’ve taken a different approach. For instance in my poem Circles and Wildflowers, which I’ve recorded onto SoundCloud and which you can read below, my starting point was the word ‘circle’ and some of its synonyms, combined with the names of wildflowers native to Wiltshire – names so gorgeous they are poems in themselves. Circles are an important feature of the landscape here with, to give some examples, the World Heritage sites of Stonehenge, Woodhenge and Avebury Stone Circle nearby, not to mention crop circles which mysteriously appear. [Click through to read the poem.]
Josephine Corcoran, Circles and Wildflowers

Before we get too far away from last week, and the week before that, let me record 2 publishing successes. I got my contributor copy of Gather, which published my article “Praying with Medieval Mystics.” In it, I explore Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich–longtime readers of my blogs know that I’ve explored the lives of those women before, but I like the ways I wove the ideas together.

I also got my contributor copy of Adanna, which published my poem “Blistered Palms,” which I wrote in the aftermath of last year’s hurricane season. It was one of those strange moments, reading the poem, when I recognized the inspiration for some of it, but not the rest; I don’t remember the writing process, the way I do with some poems. I remember driving by the huge piles of brush which had shreds of trash blowing in a breeze. It was close to Halloween, and at first I thought I might be seeing a Halloween decoration that had migrated, a ghost in those branches. I remember the time when it seemed that every morning, a different piece of jewelry broke.

Do I see this poem as hopeful? Yes, in a way. I also see some of the spiritual elements of my Christian tradition, that direction to try fishing again, maybe from a different side of the boat. And of course, there is the title, which talks to me of both the palms of hands, whether they be crucified hands or hands blistered from clearing away hurricane damaged palm trees. [Click through to read the poem.]
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Monday: “Blistered Palms”

I have been lucky in print this year. Two literary journals that I’ve long admired, Bellevue Literary Review and Prairie Schooner, published my poems. This is “a big deal” to me, because it is always exciting to be admitted into the pages of a magazine I like and because, despite the advantages of online/cloud-based literary journals, I love print!

There’s something inexpressibly marvelous about holding a book in my hands, turning the pages, and having a physical object–paper, binding, print–to carry with me.

Online magazines, theoretically at least, have a longer reach and can capture more readers (“hits”) than print. Literature requires audience, and the interwebs offer potentially millions of visitors to the poem online; but the operating word here is potential. What’s possible isn’t what generally happens. The readers of online literature, those people who stay on the poem long enough to read it–and then read the next poem, and the next, on-site–are not as legion as we poets might wish.

Through moderate use of social media, I do publicize my own work when it appears online (see links to the right on this page!). I welcomed the appearance of literature on the internet because one of my purposes for writing is to communicate with people. Readers matter to me. Getting my words into the public domain is the only way to begin that process of communication, and though online journals seem like the most ephemeral form of ephemera, they do make it easier for me to “share” (thanks to Facebook, I am beginning to despise that word) the poems or essays I’ve crafted.
Ann E. Michael, In print

Thank you to Escape Into Life for including an art and poetry feature containing my poems about the moon and some gorgeous art work. And I promise you, these are not your old run of the mill moon poems. There are universes being torn asunder, menacing Blood Moons, magical nightflowers, and some gorgeous art work. Here’s the link and a sneak peek:

Escape Into Life Moon Feature by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escape Into Life Moon Feature Poems, Autumn Scenes from Seattle

I’m over the moon to have a poem in the latest edition of Rise Up Review, a US based online magazine that publishes exciting and innovative new work. I know how hard it is to keep up with everything that’s being published, but if you have time, check out their Found/ erased section too, showcasing some excellent cut ups and composite fictions by Kathleen Loomis and J L Kleinberg (whom I first came across in Streetcake, an online journal that publishes experimental writing).
Julie Mellor, Rise Up Review

One of the most daunting challenges that confronts every struggling and submitting poet is the demand for “previously unpublished” poems. We have grown used to it by now, and most of us have developed elaborate systems for keeping track of what poems have already found a home, which are somewhere in the submission process, and which are virgin territory. We work with it, but we are not required to like it, and I would like to take this chance to say that it doesn’t serve us, the poetry community, or the poetic canon well.

It is understandable that publications and editors want fresh work, want publication rights and exclusivity, yet in asking, always, for work that has not yet found an audience they are eliminating the opportunity to re-publish some of the finest poems being written today.

In a hypothetical scenario a fledgling poet may write a poem that is, against all odds, a minor masterpiece, and since he or she is new at the game the poem will be submitted to a local anthology, or even a chapbook published by a local writer’s group. And…there the poem stays, unread, unhonored and unquoted save for the fortunate few who stumble across it.

One would think that publishers and lit mags would want the best of the best but their insistence on previously unpublished effectively screens out and eliminates many of the finest poems being written today. I believe that this may be one of the reasons that poetry is less in fashion today, because there is so little poetry that receives popular acclaim (and in no way am I implying that popularity indicates excellence). However, our audience, as poets, has to hear our voice and read our words in order to respond. The likelihood of any single poem becoming well-known or well-loved when it has a single publication, and often in a magazine with quite limited circulation, is small indeed.
Re-thinking Previously Published Poetry – guest blog post by Kathy Lundy Derengowski (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

This time it’s not just one poem. I’m staring down a bunch of poems. Make that a chapbook-length collection of poems. I’ve been sending them out individually and as a chapbook. With no luck. But I’ve long had this little hmm of concern about them. So I keep revisiting them, and having an argument with Me and Other Me:

– I read these poems and get a little glurgling in my gut. What is wrong, what is wrong?

– Is it the burrito we had for lunch?

– No. It is not the burrito we had for lunch. I’m sorry, I have to, again, come to the conclusion that the emotions of the poems are obscured. Or overly intellectualized. Or not well realized. Or, frankly, nonexistent. Too many of the poems feel like intellectual exercises.

– But we’ve been working on these for almost two years!!! There are some very interesting parts of many of these poems. There is emotion in some of them.

– But the sum? No. we just have to face the fact.

– But wait, two years worth of work? Must we chuck it?

– Quite possibly. In economics that time and effort is called a sunk cost. You can’t worry about it. It’s done and gone. The product just doesn’t work. It’s the clunker of chapbooks. A lemon.

– But, wait, let’s be reasonable. What about the parts that work? Can’t we start there?

– Yes. We can, clear-eyed and with renewed energy, start there. But there are no guarantees. Isn’t there a column in some magazine: “Can this relationship be saved?” That’s where we are. The answer could possibly be “no.” It’s also quite possible that we have not a chapbook-length collection but just a few good poems. They can be used toward some other as-yet-to-be-realized collection. The rest can go in the chuck-it bucket.

– Eesh. Okay, I might be able to live with that.

– Frankly, remember, all of these poems started out as imitations. So to some degree, they ARE intellectual exercises. We were trying on other poets’ rhythms and thought processes.

– Yeah, but we were inserting our own thoughts, our own nouns and verbs and clauses, so they did arise out of our own concerns. And then we edited them toward our authentic voice.

– But I can still detect that disconnection, that roundabout route to the poem. We have not shown what is at stake in these thoughts, situations, these descriptions, flights of fancy. We have not truly plumbed what these poems are “about” for us.

– This question, “what is at stake,” annoys me. What is ever at stake in a mere poem? No lives are lost or saved here.

– No? We are an uttering animal. We cry out in words. We jubilate in words. A poem can be a little cannon of power. What’s at stake? If I, the reader, don’t feel that something vital is at hand, some deep energy impelled the poem to being, then the poem misses the mark. I can indulge in memory and fantasy and philosophical meanderings. I can tell you my dream. But if I have not conveyed the deep “why” of what turned those into utterance, then I am wasting the reader’s time.
Marilyn McCabe, I Second That…; or, Considering the Emotional Gravitas in Poems

September 23, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 38

My Poetry Bloggers feed was unusually full this week, thanks to the reemergence of several of the more infrequent bloggers (who in my opinion have nothing to be ashamed about; some of my favorite bloggers only post once in a blue moon). Not surprisingly, one of the more popular topics was blogging itself — is it merely a form of “obliterature”? (See Lesley Wheeler’s post.) People also wrote about sickness and recovery, new publications, travel, the changing seasons… and don’t miss Jayne Stanton’s account of the Forward Prizes reading! So much good stuff this week. Enjoy.

Last year around this time I was also in the hospital for similar symptoms, and they diagnosed me with MS. This year they did tons of tests, and now they know I have MS, but not why I have the symptoms I do or how to control them. This is very frightening, of course. But I didn’t give up, and I didn’t let the doctors give up. A lot of them shrugged their shoulders at me over the past month – infuriating when you’re looking for help – but eventually I actually got help. So one lesson: Do not give up and do not stop asking for help. Second lesson: Remind yourself (and your body) of the good things in life, the beauty, the reasons you want to keep being alive. […]

This was reminding me of the writing life too. The writing life can feel like these awful stretches of rejection, of non-recognition, of not getting the grants or jobs you feel you’ve got a shot at. Why are you even writing when it feels like no one cares or pays attention? The same frustration you can feel in the doctor’s office in a sea of shrugs. Why do we do this? Why do we bother? But then an editor will call with an acceptance and some perceptive advice or you’ll get someone, somewhere who cares and shows it and it will make your month. It can feel like a terrible slog, most of the time, reading and writing and practicing in a vacuum. I think a lot of women writers, especially, tend to over-give and over-volunteer and forget to take time for themselves (I managed to get myself in some trouble this month because while I was in the hospital, I had an editing project and a contest I’d promised to judge – and I was absolutely out of my mind – intractable brain problems tend to do this – and not able to do jack. Sometimes that happens. We have to forgive ourselves and also, maybe don’t commit to too many projects in the first place.) There was a conversation today on Twitter about how many male “geniuses” are only where they are because of the support of the women around them – unpaid editors, caretakers, supporters. Treat yourself like your time is limited. Because, not to be too grave here, but it is.

So I have to think of some of the same “survival” skills that apply to recovering from illness and apply them to the writing life. Say you haven’t been writing, you haven’t been feeling like you’re doing enough to promote your work, you don’t feel like you have a support network for your writing, etc. Be kind to yourself – relax and give yourself downtime. Be kind to your support system. Subscribe to journals that support you. Write a thank-you note. Read a book just for fun, not for self-improvement or critique, but fun. And if a bunch of editors are virtually shrugging their shoulders at your work, just like with doctors, keep going until you find the editor that gets you. Remind yourself why you are writing in the first place, spend time with what is beautiful, and try to give yourself some joy.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, In the Recovery Zone, and How to Avoid Despair with Illness (and Writing)

The world is never, really quiet. There are waves in the darkness that beat a rhythm through our very cells. Dance.
Ren Powell, September 18

I’m sitting at my favorite spot in Starbucks trying to get organized. Not writing. But today after so many months I decided to upload something new on the blog. I think I’m officially switching to a Website with the option of blogging. It’s clear that I don’t have the time or energy to keep it up like I should. Time to move forward. There are so many things on my radar, so many changes I won’t go through right now. I’ll certainly post now and then. I have to update my fall schedule, dates, etc.

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Today is the equinox. Summer is over. Could not be sadder about that.

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OK a few things. We adopted a puppy. I’m up for tenure. Some festival changes happening. And next year I’m moving to Mississippi for a year with the kids and said puppy. All of these items require their own blog post.

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Did I mention Rewilding is available for preorder?
January Gill O’Neil, Rewilding is here!

If you pre-order a copy of my new collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, by Nov. 1, you will be entered to win a free poetry manuscript or chapbook consultation/evaluation by me. The winner can transfer or donate the evaluation to another person if so desired. I have helped many poets organize and sequence their manuscripts, along with critiquing individual poems, creating titles and more. Just call me the “manuscript whisperer.”

Pre-order and enter to win at the Sibling Rivalry Press website at this link.
Collin Kelley, Win a manuscript evaluation by pre-ordering “Midnight in a Perfect World”

A. and I spent two really quick days (really more like one) in Venice, Italy and then spent most of today traveling to the medieval city of Erice, which is in Sicily.

So far: Italian food is just as amazing as everyone believes, in Europe a glass of water is still more difficult to come by than alcohol, Alitalia DID lose my luggage and I’ve yet to hear what happened to it, AND I’ve written two poems on two different flights (and they might be crap poems, but at least I was writing).

Also, the view from the hotel is fucking amazing. And no, my photos don’t really do it justice.

Also also, I’m running on very little sleep.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, A Quick Post from the Sabbatical I Stole (Kind Of) By Running Away to Sicily

In high school, I listened to “American Tune” over and over again–hitting the rewind button on my Walkman–but I never expected to hear Paul Simon sing it live. When he began, “Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken, / and many times confused…” we had already been on our feet for the encore, and with eyes closed I didn’t realize everyone around us had sat down. My husband had to tug on the back of my shirt. I’d be tempted to use a line from that song as an epigraph–for this very poetry collection in hand–but Stephen King got there first; he quotes “American Tune” at a section break in The Stand. […]

Early this morning, I was thinking about how the utility of blogging has changed a little bit since we first began this process. If I want to tell you about my upcoming reading with Emily Jungmin Yoon and Lindsay Bernal […] or share my excitement about receiving a 2018 “Best of the Net” nomination from Split This Rock for “Customer Service Is,” I’ll probably use other forms of social media to do so. If I want to blunder my way through a draft of a poem or essay, I’ll keep it offline to preserve the publishing options. So this space becomes a space for…what, exactly? But this blog can host thoughts that fill larger spaces than 200-odd characters or a link + hashtag, for sure. Maybe open-ended grist for discussion, like Iggy Pop (circa 1980) telling Tom Snyder about the difference between “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” art. I got to this snippet via thinking about Paul Simon–who a commenter argued was of the “Apollonian” school. I suspect I am too, though I’d like to think I’m capable of raising a little hell on stage now and again.
Sandra Beasley, Still Digging After All These Years

–Every morning as I blog, I wonder if I should be doing a different kind of writing. But I also wonder if I’m creating and perfecting this form of writing–and will anyone care? I think of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, and I think she’d be a blogger, if she was living today–although her poverty might have kept her offline.

–I am trying to think about my successes, not my failures. In the last few weeks, I could have sent out more of my creative work. But let me think about the fact that I’ve done some actual writing.

–I’m listening to the On Point interview with Ethan Hawke. He talked about working on Boyhood, the movie that was made over 12 years. He talks about it being a movie that was made without the element of having to sell it. He says it was like being in your room painting watercolors with your friends or making music on Christmas Eve. I love that way of talking about making art.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Friday Fragments: Creativity, Anxiety, Travel, and Possessions

I just received the proof from Lulu of my first self-published book, titled STONE empty chair. It’s a collection of my best haiku, starting about ten years ago and ending in August, 2018.

It’s a little book full of little poems – just 6.5 x 4.5, with 50-odd haiku, in four chapters: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. It would make a nice gift, and fits easily into a Christmas stocking or a 7×10 inch envelop for mailing to a friend.

I took the cover photo in my backyard, near the little pond I installed in July with the help of my youngest son. The stone is Oregon’s state rock, the thunder egg. What a great name for a rock! The chair is one I made from twigs, and it was featured in my video The Fairy House. In fact, you can see me making it in the video.
Erica Goss, STONE, empty chair: Erica’s new haiku collection

In August I pray to lesser gods,
gods drier and without Douglas Fir
gods wafting burnt laminate
gods shriveling before the crunch
church of pinecones

thunderless gods
sniffing, boneless gods with dry-needle teeth
and sweet-sugar nature—
Fall Poem / an interview with poet Rachel Warren (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

I was looking forward to some poet-spotting and saying hi to one or two familiar faces, maybe. Instead, I promptly went into introvert mode: a seat in the cafe with my nose in a book (and a novel, at that!) beforehand, an ice cream taken back to my seat during the interval and a prompt departure afterwards for the Tube at Waterloo (walking past the book stall without a sideways glance). What’s wrong with me?!

Anyway, I’m glad I went. I enjoyed my first Forward Prizes evening very much. It was a re-connection with the buzz that exists around poetry in a building full of poets and poetry lovers.

All fifteen shortlistees were there except for Jorie Graham (who sent a letter, and a recorded message and poem reading). I really hope I get the opportunity to hear her read in person, some day.

There was no second-guessing the winner of the single poem, but I thought Fiona Benson’s ‘Ruins’ was a close contender; beautifully read, too. I’d like to read more of her work (I gather there’s a forthcoming collection). I’m delighted for Liz Berry, though. Incidentally, ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ is the subject of one Jen Campbell’s Dissect a Poem videos. You can read it here.

I really enjoyed the readings by shortlistees for Best First Collection; such a range of voices and subjects. Kaveh Akbar was the audience’s darling but the award went to Phoebe Power for her Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet). Heritage was a theme common to several of the shortlisted works. I really enjoyed Shivanee Ramlochan’s readings from Everyone knows I’m a Haunting and pleased to see a Peepal Tree Press poet alongside those published by the Big Guns.

After the interval there followed strong readings from the Best Collection shortlistees. I particularly warmed to JO Morgan’s voices from Assurances (Cape) and hope to hear him read again, somewhere. Danez Smith stole the show, though, and the prize announcement was hugely popular with the audience.
Jayne Stanton, The Forward Prizes for Poetry

What is the least helpful advice you received?

“Write what you know.”
Terrible.
It should be:
Write and when you discover you don’t know what you are writing about—research, learn and then write some more.
You don’t know, what you don’t know and you are always learning so why would you stick to writing what you know?

Writing is always a journey and journeys are supposed to be meaningful and that means you are learning as you journey; sharing and teaching as you write.
As you experience life of course write about that, but let it lead you to new paths and new discoveries.

“Find your voice” is another bit of supposedly helpful advice that is also problematic.
You already have a voice and while you absolutely need to explore and discover as much about yourself and therefore develop your voice, it is already a part of you.
It’s the voice that is insisting you write.

You can write in different voices, you can be a mimic, you can stretch and should stretch until you are uncomfortable and then stretch some more.
The true voice that you already have will tell you what is b.s. and what is honest if you remember to listen.

If you read and listen more than you write you’ll have an authentic voice– nothing to ‘find’, it’s already within.
Poet Chris Jarmick: Thoughts on Writing and Dealing with Dark Times (Lana Ayers’ blog)

Then there are the times when a poem comes like thunder after lightning. All you can do, then, is hang on and try to get the words down fast enough before the vibrations fade.

I’ve had a few poems come like that, over the years, in a single stream-of-consciousness burst that sends words pouring onto the paper. But those have been few, far between, and always welcomed over the drudgery of pushing limp lines around on a poem that refuses to gel.

The arrival of the Leopard Lady, however, was something different.

I was working in my journal one night when this voice began, with no prodding or priming or expectation. It was strong and sure, a voice with Appalachian cadences, and it was dictating lines, whole poems. I scribbled as fast as I could for as long as she spoke, 13 pages that included three poems almost whole and large chunks of several more. But fascinating as this visitation was, I also had a strong impulse to turn it off, turn it away. She was a biracial woman from an era before mine, and the carnival she called home was entirely alien. And so I focused on other projects, working on novels and other kinds of poems, and I let the Leopard Lady rest. Or tried to. But the poems kept coming, slowly building a life story.
When the Voice Arrives: Making of the Leopard Lady – guest blog post by Valerie Nieman (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

I don’t do radio nowadays. The old passion that would have me winding the aerial up its 40’ mast in a force 9 gale so that I could catch the Australians between 05.00 and 07.00 has been necessarily stilled. No more chasing the fluctuating ionospheric conditions to bag a 5-second contact with that lone operator on some lump of rock in the Indian Ocean. No more regular ‘skeds’ with the guy in San Antonio who sounded just like Jack Nicholson; or the Russian doctor in a desolate oil pipeline outpost in Northern Siberia who wanted to learn English; or the Australian fence-mender 50 k. from the nearest shop and bar; or, as once, the panicky weekend sailor whose yacht was shipping water fast off Mauritius on whose behalf I had to phone the Grand Bay coastguard. It was always the romance of contact with the beleaguered or self-exiled individuals in exotic locations, the two of us fighting against fading signals or interference from the hundreds of other stations out there on the same wavelength wanting to touch base with the rare DX station with whom you alone are in contact. Those few minutes of shared alternative culture across thousands of miles of earth and sky are worth all the solitary hours of static crackle and atmospheric hiss.

There aren’t very many poems about people talking into two-way radios. In fact, I’ve never come across any! So for the time being this is it. So whether this poem is a work of quality is hardly the issue. That anyone should want to produce a piece about people talking into a radio microphone should be enough to turn our heads…
Dick Jones, WAVELENGTHS.

In past decades, let’s say my pre-teen years through my forties, I often read more than 50 novels in a year. Then, in my fifties I started reading poetry in earnest. A poetry lover since childhood, I was less likely to buy books of poetry than to buy novels; less likely to read all the way through a book of poetry than a novel; less likely to have poetry friends to talk with about the poetry I was reading. Then, I started writing poems myself. Now I spend most of my reading time with books of poetry. […]

I read more slowly than I used to and this means that, though I spend about the same amount of time reading as I used to (given the vagaries of other obligations, for example, work, running a press, writing, volunteering) but digest fewer words. This is partly due to changes in vision which are common at my age, partly due to the slowing-down effect that reading poetry has on its readers, partly due to the distracting effect of screen reading and social media, but in some part, I’m not sure why my appetite is so much less voracious for novels than it used to be. When it comes to novels, I buy few, but often pick up 1/2 dozen at a time from the library. Why? Because these days, I have a new novel reading habit: I often start novels but don’t finish them. In fact, I often go 30-50 pages in and decide “no, I don’t want to read this.” Let’s just call it, “time is running out” for anything that doesn’t enlighten me or bring me pleasure.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with an Embarrassment of Novel Riches

For about 20 years I kept this one poem in my wallet. Then it lived on a bulletin board in my office and recently, it migrated to the kitchen. I like that it’s been with me since December 1994. I think this was my first year subscribing to the New Yorker Magazine. I had just let my apartment in Harvard Square for the wilds of the Pacific Northwest for graduate school. I missed the grit of the Boston accent, the cold stare of strangers, the bookstores. This poem spoke to me — my decade plus of living faraway. More than two years away from the US, I entered New York via JFK only to have the customs officer question if I was making up the country of Niger.

Seamus Heaney never included this (as far as I know) in any of his books. I don’t know why but I suspect that perhaps it was too internal, so common and uncommon at once. See what you think.

Far Away

When I answered that I came from “far away”
The policeman at the roadblock snapped “where’s that”?
He’d only half heard what I said and thought
It was the name of some place up the country.

And now it is both where I have been living
And where I left — a distance still to go
Like starlight that is light years on the go
From faraway and takes light years returning.

~Seamus Heaney, The New Yorker, December 26, 1994
Susan Rich, Such a Good Mix: The Poetry of Travel and the Travel of Poetry

“Obliterature draws attention to the gendered formation of literary value while also denoting the casual, minor, repurposed, and ephemeral writing expelled from literary criticism’s traditional purview. Such writing might include letters to the editor, junk mail, diary entries and their twenty-first-century digital descendants: blog entries, comments on a newspaper and magazine site, Instagram posts, LiveJournals, Snapchats, Tumblrs, or tweets. Obliterature, fittingly enough, is also popular parlance for a ‘letter or email written while drunk off your ass’…The concept, as we develop it in this article, explains the literary phenomenon of not being fully in control of one’s words and the labor phenomenon of not being fully in control of one’s work.”

– from “Obliterature: Towards an Amateur Criticism” by Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde in the September 2018 Modernism/ modernity, a special issue on “weak theory”

None of us knows if our writing careers will be of much interest to literary critics in the future–or whether there will continue to be literary critics, or a future–but I have to add a few more categories of ephemeral writing that consume a LOT of my time these days: comments on student poems, response papers, quizzes, and essays; assignment sheets; teaching notes; course descriptions; recommendation letters; private editorial comments on Submittable; and the smartphone text-i-verse with its debris of emoticons. I’ve also been a lead drafter on a surprising number of university-related guidelines and reports, having been here for 24 years and generally preferring to do the writing portion of committee work over other tasks.

So I like this term “obliterature” a lot, although it’s from an article I’ve so far only read a portion of, because I’m tight on time but got snagged by the title as I was sorting mail. I recognize obliterature as an object of fascination for me as a critic–all the scraps and commonplace books kept by Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Anne Spencer, and many other women as they tried to find time for poetry amid domestic chores, tough jobs, and political urgencies. I also recognize it, with more chagrin, as denoting a body of seemingly-necessary writing I constantly perform, obliterating time for other kinds of writing I am constantly saying I should prioritize.
Lesley Wheeler, Obliterature

Doubt. I decided to write today about doubt in reviewing because doubt is crippling and prevalent. It is also a private experience; on the surface we struggle to seem reasonably confident, we repress a lot of our fears and doubts so we can function in a world that often would rather not know our current interior state of being. People turn to reviews for reading recommendations, to discover writers they’ve never heard of, and to deepen their engagement with a text that often has yet to be, or perhaps might never be, critically examined by literary theorists. They come with an expectation that the reviewer has enough knowledge of the genre to give an informed opinion or analysis. This is a reasonable expectation. Let me say, if you have doubt, like me, doubt that you can review a certain book, or that you know enough to review that book, you are in a good place, this doubt shows that you take the review seriously and want it to be as good as possible.

Not all reviews are created equal: some are glorified yelp reviews, some simply lackluster, some start off beautifully but then fall apart, some miss the point entirely, some are pompous and painful to digest, some are unbelievably brilliant, but most fall into the useful category. They help readers find books, and isn’t that what most reviewers ultimately want to do? Above all, I want my reviews to be useful, but hope they can be artful as well.

If you’re thinking about writing book reviews for the first time, I say please, yes, we need more reviews and reviewers in the literary community. If you are nervous, if you feel doubt, just keep working through it, there’s a way through. Sometimes I experience this doubt before I begin a review, I finish a book and think, but I don’t know what that was about! Then, I start putting words down on the page and suddenly I have more ideas than I can possibly use. Or sometimes I finish a review, and then I go to post it on my blog, Fork and Page, or I go to submit it to the journal I write reviews for and I think, what if I’m wrong about something, what if I didn’t understand the author’s intentions this time, perhaps I should just scrap it all together. But when I read the review again, I realize that it is the best I can do at this time, that my doubt is part of a larger struggle with self-confidence. I share this to help normalize these feelings, as ultimately reviewing itself has taught me so much about writing, and I hope that doubt does not hold other writers back from writing reviews.
Overcoming Doubt as a Book Reviewer – guest blog post by Anita Olivia Koester (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

All night, even as rain pounded
the crickets called and called
their high-pitched throb offering
a different perspective
on the downpour’s
thrum, a bass string’s thump
on windows, roof, the dark’s
wild fullness that we don’t
understand and thus fear.

Shiver of screech owl, damp in its
hickory-tree perch
sad dreams, body aches, waking
into memory. We animals
amid bedsheets, sweaty and tossed,
find ourselves alert, listening.
Rain drums sown in long bands
and crickets sing.
Ann E. Michael, Wet Year

There is this reach, this angle of fingertip-catch on entry, this strong pull initiated between iliac and pubic crests: between each wave the fire of core muscle on a long diagonal across belly, back, shoulders, alighting in palm of hand and the strong pull set free on ballistic recovery, loose and relaxed. Now the other, the next: ravenous for reach, for glide. A rolling, easy kick to balance. Scything through water for miles, unconscious of power, so fearless there is nothing but animal power, nothing but joy so still and deep it barely resembles emotion: it is an element, it is body and water and sky, bone and forest and eel, fish, orca, raven in flight. It is the dead brought back from the abyss: it is the living bone they animate. Abalone. Driftwood, bleached white and knobby. Pearlescent shell of former lives holding the single drop of now: now the entire lake, forest, sky, muscle and bone articulated in water-breath, the drum of heart perhaps the lake’s, perhaps mine, perhaps K’s, perhaps the rhythm of the boat’s oar, perhaps the pounding of earth itself far, far beneath this ashen wave, this drop, this almost imperceptible and tiny life as vast as sky, as ocean.

Shhhhh, says the boat.
Now, says the body.

Now.
JJS, Skaha Part III: 8:30am—10:30am, fearless joy and power

August 19, 2018August 19, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 33

This week, the #ShareYourRejections hashtag took off on Twitter, with poets joining other writers in detailing rejections both humorous and harrowing. Since a number of this week’s blog posts also address publishing challenges and successes, I thought it might be interesting to begin with a few of those tweets from regular Revival Tour participants before proceeding to the usual blog excerpts.

Back in the day of snail mail submissions and SASEs, the quickest rejections came from Field Magazine. I once sent them poems on a Monday and received the rejection notice that Friday.

We joked about David Young camping at the Oberlin post office.

#ShareYourRejections

— Jim Brock (@DoctorKokomojo) August 16, 2018

#ShareYourRejections I started submitting poems when I was 19 years old. My mother told me I wasn't a real writer til I had 100 rejections. I collected the paper rejections in a photo album. I have 3 photo albums of rejections now, and well over 1000 rejections since I turned 19.

— Jeannine Hall Gailey (@webbish6) August 16, 2018

Clearly,I don’t submit as much as most of you 😆 but my stats this year so far: 29 subs, 8 accepted, 15 Rejected, 1 withdrawal, 5 pending. Apparently,Ima lazy poet. 🤪 #ShareYourRejections

— Charlotte Hamrick 🤨 (@charlotteAsh) August 16, 2018

I have a few journals that I would love to publish in but when they reject me I sometimes don’t submit again til several years later — I need to be more confident in my work #ShareYourRejections

— Renee Emerson (@thisquiethour) August 18, 2018

1st AWP. Sat down next to a writer whose name I recognized from journals. I said hi, that I admired their work. They asked where I taught, what program I was in. When I replied middle school teacher/no MFA, they said "Why are you even here?" and moved seats. #ShareYourRejections

— Donna Vorreyer (@djvorreyer) August 17, 2018

My #ShareYourRejections story: Member of an award panel wrote that my poems "lacked depth and meaning." That hurt. I don't mind being told no, but you don't have to be mean about it.

— Grant Clauser (@UnIambic) August 16, 2018

I kinda feel bad about sharing that #ShareYourRejections tweet earlier. 99.9% of all my interactions with eds and pubs has been wonderful and professional. I want to highlight the positive.

— Grant Clauser (@UnIambic) August 16, 2018

#ShareYourRejections My most recent book was rejected dozens of times over several years. I kept revising and it was so much better when it was finally accepted. I am grateful it wasn't accepted earlier.

— Risa Denenberg (@risaden) August 18, 2018

Every Girl Becomes the Wolf is now available!

This chapbook explores the received images of the feminine in fairy tales. The women and girls in this collaborative chapbook resist the common tropes of red riding hoods, gilded mirrors, and iced palaces. Every girl becomes the wolf because every girl has the power to tear apart the cultural conceit of wicked stepmoms, heartless mothers, and voracious monsters. Witches, hags, and mothers of damaged creatures from myth, movies, and lore prowl through this poetry. Lilith settles in to enjoy the county fair rib-off, Grendel’s mother holds her son close, and the Sphynx bears the weight of mythic secrets. Mothers demand their own freedom, daughters refuse gendered expectations, and wives leave what spoils with rot behind. As they wrestle with their place in these stories, they transform into figures outside of the victims or villains they have been perceived to be.

I’m so proud of this chapbook of monstress poems Laura Madeline Wiseman and I coauthored and its been a delight to see that friends, family, and strangers have been receiving the book.

I received my author copies this week — with their gorgeously smooth textured covers — just in time for WorldCon 76 this weekend! If you’re going to be there, consider stopping by Room 212C to hear me read some poetry-type things along with some fellow Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) members.
Andrea Blythe, Announcements: New Poetry and an Upcoming WonderCon Reading!

Pre-orders for my new poetry collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, are now available at Sibling Rivalry Press. You can pre-order at this link.

Many, many, many thanks to Seth Pennington for his gorgeous cover design, Colin Potts for the author photograph and SRP publisher Bryan Borland for his support of this collection. The book will be officially released on Nov. 15. Stay tuned for book launch and reading announcements! […]

“In Midnight in a Perfect World, Collin Kelley navigates the moody landscapes of desire, travels the dark edge of Eros in the 21st century of love, charting his passage in language sometimes brutal, sometimes lyrical, often both at once. And if that perfect world all lovers seek remains elusive, here we break the boundaries of the familiar and arrive in a place where we can breathe the twilight air and step, almost, into the dream of it, ourselves.” — CECILIA WOLOCH, author of Tsigan
Collin Kelley, ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ now available for pre-order

Kansas City area poet Sara Minges brought out her new book at a well-attended reading at Prospero’s Books.

Sara’s book, Naked Toes, published by Chameleon Press, is a splash of upbeat, witty, and sometimes cathartic views world of the world around her through her wide open and perceiving poet’s eyes.

She mocks Barbie and Ken. She even tangles with Barbie; she will not be plastic or silent.

Her real-life role is that of Play and Happiness Expert. No, Really. There is such a thing.

She shares exploits of “arse kickin,” being handcuffed in the county jail, and her little black dress.

One gets the impression that publication of this book was perhaps a freeing experience. Like the freedom she gets from naked toes.
Michael Allyn Wells, Local Poet Sara Minges Brings Her Poetry to Print

As I know you’re at work on a new manuscript of poems, does it differ from your previous books, overlap, or strike out into new territory?

Vanessa [Shields]: I just finished writing my new poetry book last night! How cool is that? Its working title is ‘thimble’. This collection began out of spiteful necessity. Meaning, I couldn’t not write poetry anymore. Come last October, I was bursting after having not written in months. I was on the fence about submitting to the Ontario Arts Council Recommenders’ Grants because I was pissed I didn’t get one the previous year (!). Out of spite, I threw some poems together and submitted. I got three grants! The most ever for me – and it floored and humbled me. Also, gave me the confidence I needed to keep writing. My confidence shifted from a drying brook to a roaring river!
Bethany Reid, The Fabulous Vanessa Shields

The other night these lines drifted through my head: Once I saw the world as full of opportunities / now I see the trip hazards. […]

Yesterday I got an acceptance from a journal that hasn’t accepted my work before, TAB. And even better, they took not one, but two poems.

As I always do when work is accepted, I went through my submission log; happily those poems aren’t under consideration at too many other journals. As I made my way through the log, I thought about how long they’ve been looking for a home. I thought about long ago, when I read a poet who said that after 10 rejections, she assumes the poem still needs work and does a revision. But I know that the odds of acceptance are cheap–there are lots of poems out there, circulating, looking for a home.

Yesterday’s acceptance is a good reminder that progress can be made in a writing life, even if one has only scraps of time. In past years, in days of paper submissions and postage, I’d have already created packets of poems ready to be mailed at the first moment that literary journals opened for submissions in September. These days, I try to remember to send out several submissions a week, which during busy weeks, turns into only several submissions a month–which is still better than nothing.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Inner Life of the Disney Princess and Other Inspirations

August has begun its now-typical delivery of multiple rejections, as most of the awards and contests to which I submitted my manuscript earlier in the year (and one proposal to a conference-of-which-we-won’t-speak-because-OH-MY-GOD) have reached their decision-making deadlines. So there’s that happiness. I’m watching my list of submissions dwindle on Duotrope and it’s both depressing and kind of relief-inducing. I’m nearing the point where my MS won’t be out in the world at all. That makes me both weepy (well, it would, if I was a crier) and kind of elated. One can’t be rejected if one’s not putting oneself out there. Of course, one can’t be published, either.

But there’s a small collection of poems growing still — and after I get some distance from them and then return and edit them with some discretion, perhaps I’ll begin submitting those. Maybe I should just have my sights set on journal publication and give up this book nonsense.

That last sentence is probably disingenuous but I’m more or less thinking out loud with this blog.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Persona Poems, Rejections, Decluttering, and Trash Pandas

I’m happy to hide out at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in these waning days of summer. The first thing I noticed upon arrival was how green it smelled–I love my city, but you don’t get overlapping layers of flower and grass pine, nor all the butterflies. There’s a frog that lurks outside my studio. There’s a magnificent spider that I’m pretty sure it’s a brown widow, not a black one, but I’m staying clear just in case.

Because this is my fourth time here, it’s easier to slip into the rhythm of things: I knew to bring my own orange juice, my own blankets, and a bottle of scotch. I enjoy being social at breakfast, or at lunch, but not both. I’m trying to spend only an hour a day on email, isolating it to the leather couch in the living room. I’ve got a stack of books and lit mags to devour, and W8 has a comfy reclining chair for reading. Although I haven’t been in this studio before, I’m happy to see a number of friends as past occupants. […]

I wish I could say this time was all about recharging my creative energy. That’d be a lie. I have over 1,500 pages to evaluate (literally) of work not mine, some of which requires line edits. Yet this is also my chance to push-pin the pages of the fourth collection to the walls, and live amongst them. There’s a distinct type of edit that gets done when I can look at pages casually, skipping around, and compare adjacent shapes of poems. I catch redundancies of phrase I did not see before.

I’m still deciding three sections or four, and which poem will close the manuscript. But my resolve holds: this book is a book. I’m excited to tell you more about it soon.
Sandra Beasley, Back to VCCA

It has been a summer of quiet. Avoiding the noise. Relinquishing the pressure of “content”, in terms of both producing and consuming.

I wrote very little. Read less than I’d like (awaiting new reading glasses). But listened.

I dropped every project on my summer to-do list, except extending my morning meditation to 20 minutes, which I have done with more ease than I anticipated. I unintentionally developed a daily yoga practice as well. I don’t recognise myself.

And yet, I do. […]

After so much rejection last fall and a winter of depression, I spent a good deal of summer thinking about how I have fetishised my identity as a writer. As a poet. What keeping up appearances has meant for the praxis of my writing. I forced myself from the fall to keep a handwritten journal, rather than an electronic one – just to remind myself that public documentation of writing does not make it any more significant.

I asked myself whether my writing time passed in a state of anxiety, of fear. Whether I was writing to prove something to the vague, indefinite judge out there of what is “good” poetry. Whether I was motivated by a fear of not being seen (ie not being “real”), … or a fear of being seen.

This week is the first week back to school. I am looking forward to meeting the students tomorrow. Looking forward to my morning routine – which includes writing.

The difference now is that I no longer think of it as the time in which I have to justify my existence.

I have been listening to John Cage’s music. Wondering what silence has to say for poetry. I’m listening to the coffee machine and its easy metered song. I’m motivated to discover what words will come from it all.
Ren Powell, The Pursuit of Silence

[A]fter having to cancel a reading the day after I got out of the hospital, I took a whole bunch of prescription drugs and set out to conquer the world – two days after.

Brick & Mortar Books in Redmond hosted a panel on apocalypses, including me, YA author (The Last One) Alexandria Oliva, and Gather the Daughters author Jennie Melamed, last night. It was great – a good sized audience, great questions, and the two other authors were wonderful. I was so happy that I turned a corner – I was really nervous I’d have to cancel. It was a nice reminder that I am more than just a sick person or a super mutant patient of a bunch of specialists.

It was also nice to sell some copies of Field Guide to the End of the World, talk to other writers about writing, and talk to an audience about the joys of poetry. Things that remind me of the good parts of being a writer. Today I got an acceptance in my inbox of two poems, which was a nice reminder, too, that it the middle of what feels like an endless stretch of bad, there might be good things waiting.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Talking Apocalypse, End of Summer, Hospital Trips (and Other Unplanned Trips)

I attended a lively and unpredictable poetry reading/performance recently, No River Twice. The poets who participate in the group reading develop the concepts at each performance, endeavoring to find meaningful and entertaining ways to permit audience members to sense an active engagement with poets and to experience poems more vividly. It appears to be an evolving performance process, and I enjoyed myself!

Grant Clauser explains the idea on his blog. Most of the poets involved have at least some acting or performance background. They are also active as mentors, instructors, advocates for the arts, and “working poets,” by which I mean they get their work published and performed and are constantly writing, revising, and reading the work of other poets in the service of learning new things.
Ann E. Michael, River of poetry

It is always interesting to read poetry in a new venue — one that is new to you but has been many things in the course of its 100 year existence, or one that opened its doors last week and has hosted one jumble sale and a campaign meeting. I often record my poetry events so that I can make any necessary alterations to volume, pace and diction in my delivery, not to mention noting any memory slips; this also means that I hear how room ambience varies with venue and audience size.

If I’m reading without a mic then I prefer the smaller cosier rooms where the audience is metaphorically sitting on my knee; if I have a microphone that is nicely positioned, I like a larger venue where the sound hangs around before dissipating into the evening.

I like to hear the room ambience in a live recording, which is making me think about what my audiobook should sound like. There is ambience when I record poems from memory because I stand about 4ft away from the microphone in order to reduce pops and clicks. For the screen reader performed poems however there is no ambience. So I’ve been playing around with the reverb settings in my recording software to see how well added ambience sounds.
Giles L. Turnbull, Friends, Room Acoustic Experts, Poets, Lend me Your Ears!

I wanted the challenge of having to write a single draft of a poem quickly, then send it off right away.

There’s pressure in knowing you only get one shot–but freedom from perfectionism too.

I bought a pack of random postcards.

I pull out a card, turn it over, and begin to write.

My only constraint (aside from the poem needing to fit in the small space)

is that the poem must have something to do with the concept of time.

It’s been quite crazy having to figure out how to work time into a poem about a giraffe or a monkey.

Even though it feels like I am writing in a vacuum, the poem is a missive to my audience of one.

Some of the poems came swiftly, without setting my pen down once.

Some of the poems have taken a bit more time.

But nearly all are silly, in some way.

Rarely, if ever, do I allow myself to just be silly.

And you know what, I can’t figure out why. It’s actually a lot of fun.

It’s okay not to take every endeavor so seriously.

Participating in the August Poetry Postcard Fest is reminding me that it’s okay to write mediocre poems.

It’s even okay to write bad poems.

As long as the postcard poems make the recipient smile, that’s good enough.

And good enough is sometimes good enough.

And I think there is a larger lesson in this postcard experience for me–

just write!

No matter what happens on the page, just write.
Lana Ayers, About half way…

About 12 years ago I finished an MA course in Creative Writing that I was ill-advised to have started. I don’t know what my motive was, but my heart wasn’t in it. I duly got my MA, but the writing didn’t start in any meaningful way until I started going to the Poetry Business Writing Days on a regular basis a couple of years later. Even then, between 2007 and 20012 I averaged about twelve new poems a year.

Something strange (or, rather, wonderful) happened in 2013; it was like a dam bursting. I’ve written ceaselessly since. 272 new poems. I cannot account for it, but I’m happy to count my blessings. And I can now look back and see a curious process and progress.

In one of the essays I wrote for my MA I see that even then I had an idea about where I wanted to be. I wrote that my imagination was:

‘visual, excited by landscape, particularly the landscape of hills, fells, sky, sea and weather’. but that I wanted to be more: concerned with explorations of people in landscape, and the meaning of their histories.’ […]

This poem, about someone I was very fond of, only happened because of the pressure of a fast writing task that ambushed me into knowing an emotion I didn’t know I felt. Thank you for that ‘write from a postcard’ task, Jane Draycott. I plucked up the courage to give a copy to Julie’s brother at her funeral. He liked it. He shared it with people, and I sent it off for the Plough Poetry Competition, where Andrew Motion liked it and gave it the first prize. That’s what changed everything. It gave me permission to think I could write, along with the encouragement of Kim Moore (who put one of my poems on her Sunday Poem blog), and Gaia Holmes, who gave me a guest slot at the Puzzle Hall Poets. That was it. The dam broke.

Years of reading and teaching, and having a family and a history were stacked up, waiting to be dealt with and voiced. It took 70 years, but I finally got going.
John Foggin, I’ll be back

[Larry] Levis suggests that from a poetry of place in which place was specific and represented a lost Eden, this kind of poetry of place has been shifting in favor of finding different ways to imagine the imagery and ideas of that loss. Of the poetry of place in general he notes, “It is the geography of the psyche that matters, not the place.” He notes “Eden becomes truly valuable only after a fall, after an exile that changes it, irrecoverably, from what it once was.”

“And yet most younger poets still testify precisely to this alienation and isolation, this falling from Eden. Only they have changed it. It is as if the whole tradition has become, by now, shared, held in common, a given…,” he observes. He wonders, “Again, in some unspecifiably social sense, it may be that places themselves became, throughout much of America, so homogenized that they became less and less available as spiritual locations, shabbier and sadder.” He considers, “it may be that this…new homelessness…is what a number of…new poets have in common when they practice the ‘meditational’ mode–for what they tend to hold in common is, at heart, a contradiction: an intimate, shared isolation.”

But I wonder if this isn’t exactly what poetry is, an intimate shared isolation? Don’t we sit alone with a volume in our hands seeking to find contact with another mind/body/soul/individual? Maybe I overstate it. And maybe he overstates a poetic drift away from poetry of place. But as I read desultorily across literary magazines and volumes, I do find less about exterior place and more about interior place, specifically the interior place of identity. Is this the new home that we’re writing about, the home of who we are, or think we are? And is self-identification by definition an exercise of comparison to others, in some way an oddly collective act? Funny.
Marilyn McCabe, “Who am I, why am I here, why did I cut my hair, I look like a squirrel”; or Thoughts on Poetry of Place and Self

Time and time again, poetry shifted my gaze and restored my mental health. It gave me access to experiences I’ve never had and clarity on ones I did. So many poems made me feel less alone in my mistakes, and brought cognition to mistakes I didn’t always realize I was making.

Like Katherine Larson’s poem “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” where she reminds her lover, “every time I make love for love’s sake alone, / I betray you.”

And Lisel Mueller’s poem “Fiction,” that expresses the familiar nostalgia and grief we’ve all had at the end of a friendship. She longs in lyrics, “if only we could go on / and meet again, shy as strangers.”

And Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “For the Dogs that Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut,” which I’ve read nearly every week for the past three months, because, I too, “must apologize for how adulthood has rendered me.” and fear vulnerability. Like him, “I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo” and have, for awhile been “…in the mood / to be forgotten.”
The Transformative Power of Poetry – guest blog post + TEDx talk by Crystal Stone (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

July 15, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 28

A shorter digest than usual this week — no doubt because of bloggers being off on holiday — but some unusually hard-hitting posts more than make up for it.

Scrape the leftovers into a pan on the stove,
whatever was chilled in the fridge, crammed in cupboards,
canned or covered, not quite fresh but only newly

expired. Things others would throw away, like broken
laws or a person who told the right story at just
the wrong time. Call this truth.
PF Anderson, Leftovers

I’ve been slowly and painfully reading Claudia Castro Luna’s stunningly beautiful book, Killing Marias (Two Sylvias Press, 2017), in which she celebrates in elegiac poems the “disappeared women” of Juarez, Mexico. Of course, these stories portray the same conditions that women in Central America continue to confront, conditions in no small part fostered by US policies. The added insult however, is that now families are being torn apart at US borders.

This morning I looked for my copy of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Anne Sexton’s first book of poems, published in the early 60’s, which reflects on her first psychiatric hospitalization, an event that separated her from her young daughter. I didn’t find the book, not surprising, having moved so many times since it was placed in my hands by a friend who saw the suicide in me, back in the seventies, while I was trying to make sense of having lost contact with my son. I had already swallowed Plath’s The Bell Jar whole, and was identifying more with feeling like I was crazy, less with how power and abuse were shaping my life, and just on the verge of reading/writing poems myself. I held on to the Sexton book at least long enough to remember these lines:

I could not get you back
except for weekends.

My son was kidnapped by his father when he was four; afterwards, the legal sham of a custody war dragged on for over a year. I don’t speak about losing custody of my son often or easily; the experience was too awful and left me with unremitting feelings of shame and helplessness. I identified with Sexton when I read those lines, my own poetic line for my relationship with my son was briefly, in summers.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse in Bedlam

This week I visited Virginia State University to read the papers of Amaza Lee Meredith, an African American artist, architect, and teacher who was a sometime neighbor and longtime friend to the poet Anne Spencer. I leafed through scrapbooks Meredith kept full of letters from students, memorabilia about Spencer, and poems she either copied out or clipped from magazines. She also preserved clippings about a few favorite politicians and a receipt from her $5 donation to Adlai Stevenson’s campaign. Meredith and Spencer were friends during the Jim Crow era and they clearly talked urgently and often about educational inequality and school segregation. I’m not comparing my experiences to theirs–Spencer and Meredith and their families were in physical danger, as well as being subject to daily degradations, because they were black in mid-twentieth-century Virginia–but I think negotiating this political moment is tuning my awareness to aspects of Spencer’s situation.

What sustained Spencer when social injustice and literary rejection demoralized her? Her garden. Reading and writing. And friends like Amaza Lee Meredith, to whom she signed “I love you,” late in life, in a shaky hand.
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry, politics, and friendship

For me, it is as if, like all great art, The Waste Land were taking place in a continuous present. Furthermore, in my own condition, that present was entirely enveloping, full of echoes that shook me without my knowing quite why they did so. Perhaps I recognised the revolutionary Budapest of 1956 with its bullet and shell scarred buildings in those falling towers; perhaps the woman who drew her long black hair out tight was an incarnation of my mother and her black hair as she turned away from me to brush it; perhaps the voices of Eliot and Vivienne in the room and those of the group down at the pub echoed some experience of hearing my own mother and father at a point of tension and the presence of overheard unfamiliar others engaged in their own lives in some social space.

Perhaps all this was personal, or some core of it was. I chose to concentrate on it here because of its significance to me then, But also because the world it conjured is never quite dead. Not even now.
George Szirtes, FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH ELIOT / Little Gidding 8 July 2018

It has no name. The thing that swells up
inside me like a hurricane. The thing
that visits me in the late afternoon.
Last week I came home and it filleted
me open like a fish.
Crystal Ignatowski, Whole

I recently read James Geary’s entertaining book I Is an Other–The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. Geary takes his title from one of Rimbaud‘s letters, calling this phrase metaphor’s “principal equation”:

Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things–jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike–and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.

I like this definition because it feels more complete than the typical definition of metaphor as a comparison without the use of the adverbial comparative (i.e., no “like” or “as”). Indeed, metaphor probably forms the basis of language itself; while that conclusion’s much debated in semiotics, linguistics, and other scholarly disciplines, common sense and common usage strongly suggest that even thought itself–in terms of how we think internally about the world–employs metaphor as an underpinning.
Ann E. Michael, Back to metaphor

Jorie Graham is a master orchestrator of thought; her poems have always treated thought as a kind of entity. Graham has studied this entity and given it a language that floods, eddies, pivots, and unfolds, and yet that language is elevated beyond thought’s actuality, which is transformed through this mimesis. But what if Jorie Graham’s entity—made up of a single person’s thoughts—met another entity, a bot, full of the encyclopedic knowledge of the internet as well as the user’s voice. The first of four sections in Graham’s most recent collection Fast explores this collision of minds, of art and information, of human and machine. The resulting poems are frenetic as they are thoughtful, their pace perhaps lacks the elegance of Graham’s earlier poems, and yet this is the point. Something here of the self is lost to modernity, to the cacophony of disembodied voices and to the many horrors of information floating around the internet like sand in the ocean.
Anita Olivia Koester, Through the Looking Glass and Beyond: Fast by Jorie Graham

Collecting Dust

Sometimes the problem with hording is remembering what you’ve hoarded or, more accurately, what is in what you’ve hoarded. The number of times I look back at lines in my (electronic) ideas pad and have no memory of several of the lines is not even funny, and that’s stuff I’ve apparently written! But, when I received the list of books in the Poetry 1 module reading list for my MA course, I was delighted to recognise names I know from the online world or have actually met in person :)

The Module Matrix

I never really understood a matrix, other than that the plural was matrices; modules I understand marginally better, though the reading list for Poetry 1 module is rather baffling: there is a list 1 and a list 2, and list 2 is further subdivided into required reading, suggested reading and recommended reading … it gets trickier when some books are on list 1 and 2, so it is quite hard to figure out in which folder to file the electronic copy of the text!
Giles L. Turnbull, A Collection of Poetry Friends

It’s Saturday night and I am home trying to do a poetry submission.

Poetry submissions annoy me when I overthink them. I look at my work and say, “Hmm, this isn’t good, nor is this.” I say, “not this poem, this poem sucks, maybe I’ll work on this poem, hey–what’s this? I’m hungry, do we have any sliced gouda?”

I sabotage myself. I can’t figure out who to submit to, even though I have a list in front of me of journals I want to submit to.

I put the “pro” in “procrastinate,” and so much, I end up writing a blog post (which I am behind on), instead of submitting.

And wait, I’m the one who wrote that viral piece, Submit Like a Man? I could learn a lot from myself.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Friday Submission Club

Sometimes when I’ve just “finished” a project, I get all bouncily excited. I can’t wait to get it out into the world, CERTAIN that the world will be AGOG. At times like this I wish someone would gently wrest the “Send” button from my hand.

If I do excitedly send the fresh, new piece, fortunately it takes so long for most places to respond that the rejection letters come less as a knife to the heart of Tigger as a knife to the heart of, say, Kanga, perhaps, or Roo, or, depending on the day, Eeyore.

If I’m a sensible bear, I’ll put the piece aside. I’ll come back to it later and HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. Then I’ll put it aside again and later come to it with a more measured response. Although if I wait too long, I’ll get too Wol-ish about it all, and that can be insufferable.
Marilyn McCabe, Help Me If You Can; or On the Stages of Project Completion

Colin Potts – photographer, professor, chess enthusiast and all-around good egg – shot my new author photo, which will appear on the back cover and in publicity for the book. I wanted the photo to have a connection to my favorite poem in the collection, “In the afterlife my father is a London cab driver.” Since we couldn’t get to London, we convened in the parking garage of the MidCity Lofts in Atlanta on a hot Sunday afternoon. Fellow poet and BFF Karen Head loaned us her car. Sitting in the back seat of a hot car wearing a winter coat on a July afternoon is not recommended, but Colin did a spectacular job. He was shooting in close quarters, from a low-angle and basically blind since he couldn’t see the viewscreen on his camera. Lighting was also an issue, but the overhead “map lights” provided just enough illumination to give the photo the noir look we were after. Thank you, Colin, for making me look like a rock star!

I was asked to write a short blurb for an upcoming appearance to describe the collection, so I’ll share that with you as well:

Sibling Rivalry Press will publish Collin Kelley’s third full-length poetry collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, in Nov. 2018. This sequence of cinematic, dream-like poems is infused with travelogue, pop culture and music – from Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush to Kylie Minogue and David Bowie. With the city of London as a final destination, readers will touch down in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Denver, Atlanta and New York before crossing the pond for a cathartic reunion of ghosts from the poet’s past.
Collin Kelley, “Midnight in a Perfect World” coming Nov. 15

July is a good time to get together one-on-one with friends, to appreciate the little beauties around us, to maybe make peach ice cream or learn one more grill-out recipe to share. We just celebrated Glenn’s birthday with my little brother and sister in law drinking cider, eating grilled-duck tacos and spent the end of a warm evening watching the hot air balloons going up in Woodinville. The goldfinch showed himself off too.

So, be sure to enjoy your summer, be sure to enjoy the little things, take advantage of downtime to do thing you forget to do during the rest of the year – watch the birds, water your garden, drink something cold outside. Read some poetry and be kind to your little poems as you revise and refresh. It’s a good time to go a little easier on ourselves.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Goldfinch and Sunflowers, Thanks to the Coil, and Celebrations

July 8, 2018July 8, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 27

It’s high summer in the northern hemisphere, and for many poets this week, that seems to have triggered reflections on productivity, perhaps because for most of us, poetry writing is something we look forward to doing on vacation. I guess that’s good, because it implies that we think of it in part as a leisure pursuit, an avocation as much as a vocation. Summer’s also the time for poetry festivals, writing retreats, and of course, extra reading. I’ll admit, I don’t always find hot, humid weather conducive to good writing myself, in part because it’s so damn hard to sleep…

Head-exploding insomniac connections firing: Athena and Penelope
incarnations of each other, all a plot device, see, and Pan, there’s always Pan—

(Get it? Get it?) What, she thinks suddenly, is even happening
to my arms, whose flesh is this, so loom-muscled, weaving water itself

into story, into a new body with which kingdoms shall be run
by guile, yes, by wile, epithets carefully-chosen; Penelope and Odysseus

incarnations of each other too, and Circe, let’s not even pretend
she’s different from the rest of us, I could turn you all to pigs

and you’d be cleaner, ya Trump-voting motherfuckers, Circe said…
JJS, July 7, 2018: Penelope as Lady of the Lake

I’ve bitten off way more than I can chew this summer and that’s just fine with me. I have work to do: a thesis adviser who needs to see ten new poems in the fall, a chapbook to assemble and send out to the masses, a bunch of poems on audio to edit, a podcast to create, 17 more hours of film to screen for the Austin Film Festival, a few graphic narrative poems to illustrate, four or five drafts of poetry blog posts started but not finished, and two essays to complete and send off for hopeful publication in a litmag. I’m in sweet, heavenly, artmaking bliss.

I really am. I love all this creation happening inside and all around me. It’s exciting and makes me happy. And ain’t nobody making me do this. It’s my own, wonderful, glorious work (sure wish I’d get paid for it, though). The only things getting in my way are a full-time job doing none of this stuff during prime “I feel creative” time, and the other full-time job of raising three precious children and taking care of my family, my home, myself.

This is not a sob story. You, dear poetry reader, may know just how I feel. Maybe not now but possibly at a different time in your life. I have learned to juggle and forgive myself and finally to just start, dammit, stop putting it off. That’s how the art gets made. That’s how the words are put on the page and the paint stays wet. Just trudging on.
Lorena Parker Matejowsky, 1000 words + two sylvias = making art

Though I keep my poetry writing time consistent—not long, but everyday, with reading and notes—I find that my creativity and actual-finishing-of-poems varies, depending on what is going on in life. And, as cliche as it is, I suppose suffering does beget poetry.

I don’t want to go into detail, but I will say of all the problems we could have, ours is not a Dire one (it doesn’t threaten those I love in a permanent way) but it is a problem and a cause of Stress, though it is so romanticized (only in such wealthy societies can it be looked at as romantic to be an orphan or very poor). We have our health and each other.

But it is a sizeable problem with no easy solution and so I supposed that all my poetry writing would come to a complete stop as we wonder and pray and wonder. However, I’ve written more poetry in this month than I had in the earlier half of the entire year.
Renee Emerson, When Between a Poem and a Hard Place…

I got back from teaching and had two days to unpack my suitcase. Then I re-packed it for the Berkshires. We made the seven-hour drive and I co-hosted a poetry symposium in a quirky new hotel space, TOURISTS; a reimagined motor lodge in North Adams, Massachusetts, thanks to the vision of Scott Stedman and Jeff Gordinier. There was hugs with Beth Ann Fennelly and Erika Meitner and January Gill O’Neil and finally meeting Rachel Zucker, new friends, poem-toasts, an oddly tasty spread of pork and Calabrian chiles on seed bread thanks to Cortney Burns, wandering through the woods to the chime chapel, more poems around an open fire, Jeff & company’s late arrival from the Esquire thing, touring Mass MOCA (Louise Bourgeois & James Turrell & Anselm Kiefer), lunch at Bright Ideas Brewing, a p*cha k*cha talk, broccoli rabe with wood-ear mushrooms, beet salad, more reciting of poems, live music from Sean Rowe (whose foraging expedition I’d missed earlier in the day while on the hunt for a digital projector), following Jan’s lead to talk about fostering inclusivity in the literary scene, finally meeting Laurie’s brother (which made me miss Mississippi), more beet salad, introducing some folks to Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, learning one of my co-conspirators had been Tommy’s classmate, getting up to the top of Mount Greylock, and stopping off for a Sam Gilliam glimpse and dinner in Troy on the way home.

Issue 18 of Barrelhouse came out, with my essay on “Pioneers of the Digital Trail.” If you want an essay that name-checks Mavis Bacon, Carmen Sandiego, Number Muncher, The Oregon Trail, The Secret of Monkey Island, and pained teenage love affairs, this is the essay for you. You can’t find the text online–thank god–but the issue is for sale here, and they typically sell out every print run.

And somewhere in there, I wrote a 3,000-word craft essay about sestinas that is scheduled to run in American Poets.

The funny thing is that when I came here to explain my June absence, I felt nothing but a sense of failure–a silent blog, a wasted month, and a fixation on the deadlines that were missed and are still pending, rather than any of the ones met. This despite an envelope full of thank-you notes that arrived from the KIPP students. Don’t let the corrosions of the world fool you, friends. Please keep doing the good work that I know you are doing.
Sandra Beasley, June

Turns out this is a good year for blackberries. The canes are loaded with fruit and weighted with vining wild grapes and honeysuckle. The latter bloomed rather late this year and are still putting forth fragrant flowers. The marvelous scent made berry-picking quite soothing.

Soon, the catbirds and orioles and everyone else will be harvesting these berries. Despite their thorns (which didn’t deter me, either).

~

It has been far too hot to work in the garden, however; so I have been writing, and submitting work to literary journals, and even painting a little–something I have not done in years. Finding ways to be both creative and relaxed. Much needed.
Ann E. Michael, Berrying

What a full-on week it’s been: a glorious mix of poetry, music and family. Consequently it’s Sunday evening already and I’ve only just sat down in front of my PC to write this week’s blog post.

The poetry highlight of my week was my first visit to Ledbury Poetry Festival. This has been on my wish list (recently renamed my Life’s For Living list) for some time, so I’m pleased that, at last, I’m able to put some of my poetry plans into action.

As Ledbury is a small market town, it was quick and easy to move between venues without getting lost (I found I didn’t really use the street guide I’d picked up at the festival office). The festival is extremely well-organised and executed with a warm and friendly vibe. Add to this an uneventful return road trip on well-behaved motorways, a spot of retail therapy along The Homend and an overnight stay in a thatched country cottage B & B: just the ticket!
Jayne Stanton, Ledbury Poetry Festival

I wrote in June: I’ve been trying to juggle the availabilities of 7 guest poets against those of four or five possible venues. It’s like herding cats and knitting fog. I’m in open-mouthed admiration of anyone who manages to run a poetry festival. How are they sane afterwards? Right now I’ve not managed to book a single venue. At this rate I’ll be putting it off till September. We shall see. Well, I made all the arrangements. Lovely venues like the stunning Halifax Central Library which is stitched into the even more stunning Piece Hall, and also the splendid Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds. I bought drinks and nibbles and napkins and paper plates..all that. I ordered too many books from the printer. I had not allowed for hot weather nor for football. It was a delight to read with wonderfully talented poets…Gaia Holmes, Vicky Gatehouse, Alicia Fernandez, Tom Weir, Ian Harker. It was a shame that we almost outnumbered the audience. But gods bless the ones who came, anyway. Was it worth it? Yes. It’s always worth it. Why write, otherwise. And there’s still one launch reading to go. Fingers crossed.

There’s been furniture moving, and painting and decorating, and mixing cement and raking-out and pointing, too. Some wall mending, thrown in, and more to come. It all distracts from ‘the work’, and the less you write, the less you write, and then you get frustrated, you lose all the carefully hoarded vestiges of serenity, and you might just lose your temper and do something(s) you regret.
John Foggin, The tigers of wrath, and an (un)discovered gem: David Spencer

Usually the summertime brings a flurry of activity to my part of the country, people desperate to get outdoors and in the brief season of sun, and usually also unofficially doesn’t start until the day after July 4 – and this kind of weather is why. By next weekend we’re supposed to be back in the sunny seventies, and I hope I’m over this cold/MS double-hit by then! I’m not a sun-lover – MS folks are supposed to avoid sun and heat, and I was allergic to the sun since I was a kid (hence my lovely vampire-esque complexion, LOL.) But the long string of grey days gave me time to think about how I’m spending my time, how much time I should give to political activism vs arguing politics on social media, to dealing with insurance/prescription/medical-related nonsense (it could literally take over my entire life if I let it, but it’s dangerous to ignore it) and writing new work vs revision vs manuscript shaping vs submitting vs writing. How much time I can afford to spend alone in nature, which seems to me to be restorative both health-wise and spiritually. I’m usually a go-go-go type of girl, but MS has taken a bit of that out of me, and being a bit slower and more deliberate hasn’t actually really made my life worse, though I often feel frustrated by not “getting enough done.” I have to quit judging my life by the amount I get done, and start appreciating the good things that happen without a deadline, outside of time.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poems in Tinderbox, a New Review of PR for Poets, a new Poetry Star, and Summer Downtime

Time to lounge under lamplight
or a fan, at least, in this solemn sweatbox town,
sin city, hidden city, dark city. What kind
of city is it? The kind where “They say it’s your
birthday” gets bellowed out on Facebook, and Facebook
denizens bellow back (not at all concerned with
the shadow behind the curtain, the sooty shoes
poking out from under the bed). It’s never time,
never the right time.
PF Anderson, Black Birthday

I’m getting a perfectly respectable amount of work done for an empty-nest academic in the summer, but so far, no holy miracle of ramped-up sentence success. I spent June enacting deep revisions to my novel manuscript, responding to very good advice I received from a small press, and we’ll see where that goes. I enjoyed concentrating on it, at any rate, and it’s definitely a way better book now. And I’m a better writer for having undertaken the challenge.

I’ve also been reading in all genres, working on submissions, and writing a few poems, although I find tuning my brain to fiction-writing makes poetry harder. I’m now revising a couple of essays and finishing research for a third–I’m visiting an archive near Richmond on Tuesday, so Chris and I will stay overnight and share a fancy dinner, maybe visit a museum. I really don’t know yet how much I’ll finish by the time September hits in all its frantic glory. I’m trying not to worry too much about that, either, although being zen about the passage of summers and outcome of my labors–well, it hasn’t been my specialty. Working on it.
Lesley Wheeler, Prove or disprove and salvage if possible

I had been working on a multipart essay when I wondered if it was really a sectioned poem. So I spent days and days easing, tapping, tweaking, clipping each segment into lineation, attention to rhythm, structures, and all the various things that poetic forms allow/require of us. And now I’m not sure it works. But the process has been interesting.

On the one hand, the poeming process helped me make the language and sentences more taut and efficient, catch repetitions, reorder thoughts. Creating lines allowed me to inject additional suggestions into the ideas, or even with a line break subvert what I was saying, or at least question it.

But too often, the lines gave gravitas to places I didn’t really want emphasized. It made some ideas too weighty, too self-important. Some ideas I wanted to slip in with more subtlety, subtlety that demands of lineation did not seem to allow.

So I’m going to take the newly taut language and spread it back out, give some good fat back to some of the sentences, allow a more languid pace.
Marilyn McCabe, Formtion, Functiorm; or On Navigating Form and Function

E-grazing to Eureka

Mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, Twitter etc. is one classic way most of us procrastinate, right? Let us turn this ‘e-grazing’ to account. When you see something that you want to comment on or share – a meme, a line in a message, a snippet, a poem or a quote – do that, but also screen-shot it and save it. That word or line that made you go ‘wow, cool!’, ‘lol, that’s hilarious’, ‘that’s so me/us’, ‘ugh, what an idiot!’, etc. – it made you think and feel, however fleetingly. A few hours or days later, go over these fragments that found echoes within you, and you may just see new poems taking shape from and around them.

Poetry in Foreign Languages

One way to reconnect with the form and sound of language is to listen to a poem or a folk song in a language you do not know, or one you know just a little, so you can connect to its rhythms but block out the meaning at will. You can go for a softly chanted poem, like biya o josh e tamanna, where you can immerse yourself in the melody, but in one’s more restless humours a faster tempo can also be welcome ex. Laila O Laila. Free-write to the song on infinite loop, just listen to it and brainstorm, or write your own ‘imaginary translation’, etc.
Seven Selcouth Sources of Poetic Inspiration – guest blog post by Hibah Shabkhez (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

As I walked, I paid attention to the trash that I saw. It will all be picked up by later today, but for now, random pieces of trash lined the Broadwalk. I was most struck by the debris that once we would have hauled home: coolers, umbrellas, a variety of clothes.

In a history class long ago, our teacher reminded us that most of what archaeologists discover comes from digging in the garbage dumps of former societies. I often wonder what future archaeologists will make of our trash. Certainly they will comment on the huge amount of plastic.

This morning, I looked at all the trash, both the collective version and the individual pieces, and I thought about the symbolism. What could we learn if we use this trash as a symbol?

I plan to write a poem on this very topic. What will you write as the week winds down?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Prompt: The Morning After the Day Before

Once back at camp and we’d traded our hiking shoes for flip-flops, we gathered in a loose circle, drinks and snacks within reaching distance. Suddenly, Jonathan said, “Uhhh, guys?…” and pointed to the road that ran through the campground. There was a snake, crossing the road.

Of course we all popped up to investigate and that’s when we heard the telltale rattle of its tail. Yup, a rattlesnake. Eventually the rattler made its way to the woods — away from our tents, thankfully — and we carried on talking. But the image of the snake, its beautifully slinking body, stayed with me.

Once home on Sunday I perused Twitter and came across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Black Snake. I knew then I needed to write a poem about the snake that appeared at our campsite.

The poem is still a work in progress but I’m excited about nature inspiring a poem. What are your favorite nature poems?
Courtney LeBlanc, A Week of Work

Your latest book is New and Selected Poems. What will readers find inside? Obviously new work but also poems culled from your previous two collections? Tell us more.
This book was born out of a drunken love affair between myself and my editor at a Manhattan dive bar. I was originally going to release a third collection called Human Algorithm that fused my twenty years in the tech industry with trying to find sex and love with strangers on the smartphone apps. But since I’ve decided to focus on fiction and autobiography for the next few years, New and Selected has become a magnum opus for me. The poems I originally planned for the third collection are in here, plus work from the previous volumes and other unreleased poems from early in my writing career.

You, like many other artists these days, operate outside the mainstream – using micro/small presses or self-publishing to get your work to readers. That method was once frowned upon, but has now become commonplace. Any regrets?
I know it was once frowned upon, but times have changed. I read Rupi Kaur’s collection, Milk and Honey, last year and it’s brilliant. She began her career by posting poems on social media. You do whatever you can to make your voice heard. Unless someone’s going to give me a million-dollar book deal, my poetry and graphic novel publications will remain 100 percent in my control. I had a nasty experience with a publisher with my first collection and it left a bad taste in my mouth. So, I figured out how to do it on my own and it’s been great.

You seem to have written a lot of work, but aren’t in a rush to publish it. Most authors are burning up to get their work out there.
Yes, I have a backlog and it’s wild. I’ve written eight children’s books and I also have another graphic novel called The Philadelphia War, which should be out in 2019. I’ve started an autobiography and I’m deep into writing a dangerous, fucked up novel set on Wall Street. That book actually is my main focus right now. I also have a novella called Midnight that I wrote for five years and it’s just sitting there.
Collin Kelley, He’ll Take Manhattan: An interview with poet, writer & photographer Montgomery Maxton

Francesca Bell caught a lot of attention with her poem I Long to Hold The Poetry Editor’s Penis in My Hand. I mean it’s hard to overlook a good penis poem. Bell, however, holds a special place in this poet’s heart because her talent has come without a formal writing education background. Reading her work you would never know it. She has carved out a very successful non-traditional road on her poet journey. Her publication credits are lengthy and include River Styx, North American Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Crab Creek Review to name a few. She has had at 6 Pushcart Prize nominations and been a finalist in several notable poetry awards.

In December of 2014 Bell had five poems published in Pank that are riveting. They touch on the delicate subject of children sexually abused by priests. These poems underscore something about Bell that I especially appreciate in a poet, a fearlessness in writing. I want to write as fearlessly as Bell does. Who wouldn’t, but it is not easy. In her poem Regrets, she talks about undressing every emotion and how silence is a too-tight dress I can’t wait to escape. She is genuine. Her writing has a depth that can be peeled back like layers of an archaeological excavation, or she can turn one her humor on the page and entertain you.

Another remarkable thing about Francesca Bell is her translation. She translated the book A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito by the Palestinian poet Shatha Abu Hnaish along with Noor Nader Al A’bed. This book is a collection of largely tender verse that I often go to and reread parts of each night before I go to sleep.
Michael Allyn Wells, My 2018 Poets Crush 6 Pack

When we first read the poems, students talked about how and why the poets had used or not used punctuation, spacing, keyboard functions (crossing through text in Chan’s poem). They suggested that Rebecca Perry had used this spacing to perhaps replicate the to and fro conversation that was taking place between a father and an adult child in a car (they worked out the ‘child’ was driving so must be at least 17 or 18 years old). They thought that perhaps someone had died, perhaps one of the father’s parents, and they were driving to or from the funeral.

Then they discussed times that they had had conversations with a parent or grandparent, and had a go at writing their own poems using the same lay out as the Perry poem if they wished. They could also borrow some of the poet’s phrases if they got stuck. This gave students the space to write about reflective, intimate conversations they’d had with an adult they trusted and were close to. One student wrote about chatting with their grandmother while shopping, another wrote about gardening with their Mum, another about walking with their Dad. Students shared snippets of advice adults had given them (as Perry does “remember, if you get married, to pick a ring bigger than your finger, because your fingers, like your mother’s, swell slightly in the heat”.) Often these poems were tender and moving, and even if the conversations were stilted and awkward, humour and love shone through.
Josephine Corcoran, Poems that find a way to say what isn’t said #writerinschool

At the publication of Empty Clip, this is how Emilia Phillips introduced it on her twitter feed:

This is my “book of fears”

It is true there is much fear in these poems–molestation, animal murder, hotel fights, campus shooters, prior tenant on the lam, suicide, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and on and on, poem after poem of frightful situations and the poet’s responses captured in pristine time capsules. So stomach up, because the rewards here are large. Phillips has developed, in this book, the uncanny ability to put the reader right into the scene of the poem, through exposing meticulous authentic details accompanied by pinpoint emotional responses. You feel these poems as much as read them.

While reading, I highlighted a number of phrases–way too many to share here– that struck me as prophetic. A warning. What can happen. What does happen. What has happened. What might happen again at any moment.

Lie down,
said the grass to the sky.

the same
stiff casualness of someone
pretending they’re not on guard

another girl in the class said, “Girls
get raped all the time here I don’t know why
this time was so special.”

back when I was looking down the barrel
of days of grief

how the bullet grooved clean into the skin below
her clavicle. A button hole
a baby’s mouth.

So yes, there is pain, distress, frightful memories. You already know about that, even if you haven’t been as close to the barrel of a gun as Phillips has. This happened. Face it with me. Feel it with me. And so, make it bearable or at least help me to resist.

But. Then. There is the lyricism– the translation of facts into emotions into lyrics, a skill Phillips is expert at. This is the balm of language that demonstrates how horrifying experiences can be digested, how poetic sense can be made of of terror.
Risa Denenberg, What I’m Reading: Empty Clip

Q~Who was your poetry first love?

A~My first poetry love was Nikki Giovanni. Her work is so practical, honest and revolutionary. When I tumbled across her poetry in a college library during my first years of undergrad, I had never heard a black woman so self-assured and intelligent. Her poetry not only showed me how to better use my words, but it helped me mature as a black woman and writer. Ms. Giovanni’s work taught me confidence, sincerity, and how to be relatable.

Q~Who are you reading now?

A~I just picked up Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds and cannot put it down. I was also just reading Charles Simic’s Scribbled in the Dark. I like contemporary poetry, but I really appreciate classics, too. I am also looking forward to reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi’s Americanah before summer ends.

Q~What’s one piece of advice you want to share?

A~The poem will never be perfect. I often hear people say that they have never submitted a piece of work to a publisher because they have been editing it for a year. I’m like, “let go and give it to someone who needs it.” We write not only for ourselves but because there is someone who needs to hear it. I think as writers we tend to get obsessed with our work. If you can take a deep breath, close your eyes, and feel calm after editing your work a few times, let it go.
Bekah Steimel, Maybe / an interview with poet Kay Bell

May 20, 2018May 20, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 20

A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, plus occasional other poetry bloggers in my feed reader. If you missed last week’s digest, here’s the archive.

This week, poetry bloggers were plumbing some pretty deep waters: genocide, dispossession, mothers and children, writing while parenting, the importance of linking and connecting, the rewards of political poetry, the perils of housecleaning, and more. Let’s jump right in.

I’ve thought many times about the line I’ve heard that goes: To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. I didn’t know the attribution, so I looked it up and found a much deeper sense of its contextual meaning. By luck, I came across a delightfully intellectual blog titled Mindful Pleasures, a literary blog by Brian Oard, and read this particular entry which contextualized and interpreted the quote from its original source, Prisms by Theodore Adorno (1903-1969). I was not very familiar with Adorno, but reading a small sampling of his writings today was fascinating; he wrote philosophy that is both relevant to the litanies of domination and suffering in the 20th century, but also prescient to the 21st. [Adorno was a leading member of the Frankfort school and an important contributor to the development of critical theory.]

I can’t pretend to have much more than a tortured history of attempting to read philosophy, attempting to follow arguments to their conclusions, attempting to live in a way that abides by and remains consistent to a core philosophical stance, but I’ve always aspired to.

With gratitude to Brian Oard’s dense but readable blog post, I am excerpting a larger portion from a latter Adorno text:

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living–especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier. (Negative Dialectics, 362-363)

Devastating. I can’t deny the ringing truth in this passage and I have had those dreams. I was surprised how–on reading it–I feel that striving to have a strong social consciousness and a true moral compass are worth the struggle, are still crucially important, might even save us.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Mourning

Ivanka stands clapping — she’s sixty
miles away — while Mnuchin pulls off

the big reveal: the president’s name
writ larger than the thing it dedicates.

We see it all, live, this Nakba, the burning
tires, the streams of tear gas, a baby

grounded, inhaling dirty smoke in Gaza.
Maureen E. Doallas, They Call it ‘A Great Day’

Sunday afternoon in The Leeds Library… the oldest subscription library in the UK, celebrating its 250th birthday in the most fitting way I can think of. A reading with the poetry legend from Beeston. The scholarship boy who took a long slow-burning revenge on his patronising old English teacher at Leeds Grammar School by writing two Meredithean sonnets. Them and [uz]. A rallying cry for all of us, that remind the world that [uz] can be loving as well as funny. Erudite, sophisticated and articulate, too. I set that alongside another of his lines in National trust

the tongueless man gets his land took.

Tony Harrison read with his trademark relish for the heft and texture of words; it was a Leeds event and he celebrated with lots of his poems about his mum and dad, from The school of eloquence..which are rooted in his personal history and theirs, but which speak for everyone exploited or conflicted by the class appropriations of language, literacy and education. It was joyous.

Tony Harrison. He’s the reason that I ever thought I might write poems (if not poetry). This comes with stories. In 1971 I moved to Newcastle to be a lecturer in a College of Education. When I took my children to school of a morning, there were very few men doing the same, and one of them was a striking figure..lean and handsome in an RAF greatcoat, very Dostoevskian. Eventually, I asked our Julie (5 yrs old) ‘who’s that bloke?’. ‘That’s Max Harrison’s daddy.’ ‘What’s he do, then?’ ”He doesn’t do anything. he’s a poet.’ I’ve dined out on that story, but the point is that though contemporary poetry meant absolutely nothing to me, then, I mentioned this to a colleague, who invited Harrison to come and read to our 3rd Year B.Ed English students, and so it was that I went to my first ever poetry reading. […]

What Tony Harrison did that night was a revelation. Poetry could be angry, political; it could give back a voice to the tongueless, it could be passionate, it could use rhyme and structure and scholarship as a natural part of its rhetoric. It could be funny and sexy. So I was hooked. I still am.
John Foggin, One of [uz]. An afternoon with Tony Harrison

The repeated rhymes send the poem galloping forward, the pace accelerates as the poem reveals its truth, threatening to slip out of control the way emotions threaten to slip out of control. But then [Chelsea] Dingman regains control of the poem by shifting perspective – the I speaker asks a question “Is this escape for you?” – and by returning again to the controlled syntax of a shorter sentence and by a reducing of the repetition of that aching long a. Whereas in the center of the poem we heard that sound nine times in four lines, in the final nine lines of the poem we hear it six times: escape, blame, plated, frame, ashtray, ache. Like the sound of breath slowing down after a period of excitement, like somebody who had been crying uncontrollably regaining composure. The poem ends with two sentences that are grammatically questions but which function as statements, as a move towards acceptance: “In any homecoming, what can we do but echo & ache? / To leave ourselves as one thing & return as another?”
Jennifer Saunders, “In the Alcoholic’s Apartment, A Time Machine” by Chelsea Dingham

She is the water drop on a lotus leaf
no grease marks on the stove
clothes folded away, dishes rinsed
on the sink. Being born afresh
is like dying in the right sense.
Uma Gowrishankar, Remembering Mother

It has been a while since the blue heron
has shown his face, but I know he will return.
And I know my mother will shriek for joy.
She will bounce on her heels like popcorn
in a skillet. She will wave her hands like a flag
in the wind. Everything will become more real
in that moment.
Crystal Ignatowski, No Matter What Time Of Day

You’ve heard me say before, poetry saved my life. It did. It does.

Reading and writing poetry, both.

I’ve been writing since I could hold a crayon.

And because things were difficult for me at home, many of the poems were about family issues.

Family poems felt important to write.

But the hard part was not being able to share them with anyone.

The content of those poems felt shameful. Secrets that needed to be kept. Too dangerous to reveal.
Lana Ayers, Family Poems Are Hard–part 1

Margot Kidder eased me through rising panic
every Friday at 1 p.m. as I was deposited
on the sidewalk and mother’s car shimmered
like a disappearing mirage, moving bullet time
away from me.

Margot Kidder was Lois Lane.
Feisty, brave, stubborn, in perpetual need of rescue.
Her dark hair, un-PC cigarette dangling,
whiskey voice, in love with the one man
she could never truly have.

Years later, when she had her publicized breakdown,
was found dirty and wandering the streets,
I cried in front of the TV, wishing I could give her
even a fragment of the comfort she gave me
when I was ten and in need of rescue.
Collin Kelley, To Margot Kidder, With Love

I am not the hero of my poems; I am the villain. This poem is calling out my own bullshit for whenever I say oh, this time will be different, which of course is a myth that tricks women into performing emotional labor and taking on the thankless and pointless task of “fixing” men. What do we give up when we fashion ourselves to be desired? And, what do we sacrifice when we reject those notions and refuse to be this “dream girl?” Does that subject us to anger? Or, are we called bitter and jaded when we refuse to follow this narrative? These are all of the mental gymnastics I had to perform as I was writing this poem. I ask these questions throughout the book, especially as they play out in the conservative landscapes in Midwestern/Southern places that often rely on women fulfilling traditional roles.
Anne Barngrover, interviewed by Jennifer Maritza McCauley on Bekah Steimel’s blog

I came across this article by physicist Alan Lightman on the TED web site about quiet time/mindfulness. Here’s a small sampling:

Somehow, we need to create a new habit of mind, as individuals and as a society. We need a mental attitude that values and protects stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, personal reflection; that honors the inner self; that allows each of us to wander about without schedule within our own minds.

I have paid lip service to these values that Lightman writes about for years — since becoming a mother just over thirteen years ago. They became values because I no longer had an easy way to incorporate them into my life. Infants and toddlers do that to you. There’s little stillness, precious little privacy, and solitude only (mostly) when sleeping. They were aspects of being a person that I took for granted when I had them, and missed fiercely once they were absent.

My children aren’t toddlers anymore. My youngest is five and more self-sufficient by the day. She has her own sense of self. Her own need for stillness and even, sometimes, solitude. And yet my children growing older hasn’t created more space for my own stillness, privacy, solitude, slowness, or personal reflection. There’s less. Far less, even. But my children aren’t a cause, at this point, for my lack of that space.

For the past few years, this blog’s tagline has been “a record of panic, parenting, teaching and art-making.” It’s due for a change. In a conversation with A.P. this week, he reminded me that I didn’t grow up, let alone spend the last decade, thinking I wanted to be known as an educator or even an academic. I want, I have always wanted, to be known as a writer.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Reconsiderations, Reversals, Reminders

The poem writing time usually comes out of my sleep time, and by the end of the month, I am drained and flattened with exhaustion. I do start the poems on the bus in the morning, jot bits and pieces throughout the say, but I don’t get to actual assembly until my son goes to bed and I have clear uninterrupted quiet time. As he gets older, that gets later, and my NaPoWriMo work gets harder and more exhausting each year. Realizing how much easier the strict form made things, I’m debating about perhaps taking on a sonnet redoublé or heroic crown next year. The risk of taking on too much form is that you may lose the emotional drive to write the poems. If they become overly intellectual, they are cute rather than touching, so I’m not sure about this yet. I suspect I’ll be reading a lot more sonnets while I ponder this.

Usually, I write most of my poetry during April, explicitly because of NaPoWriMo. As a single mom of a special needs kid, with a demanding professional career that is most definitely not poetry, it’s … hard. But I have always been a poet and always wanted to be a poet, and turned down a fellowship in a poetry MFA program to go to grad school in a program with a future that would allow me to support my kids on my own. Each year, I want to keep the poems going, and just become too tired. I really want to not drop out this year. I’m thinking I might be able to keep it going if I try to do one poem a week. I’m thinking probably Sundays. So, watch this space, and see if I can do it. Moral support welcomed!!
PF Anderson, On Writing a Month of Sonnets for #NaPoWriMo

Unintentional Spring cleaning has come to the Typist household of late, but rather than serving to tidy things up, it’s caused widespread chaos. First, there was the aforementioned filing, which I did actually tackle last weekend, causing allergic reactions from an explosion of dust and masses of toxic ink particles released from shredding five year’s worth of old paper. Then….there was the rat. I’m not going to talk about the rat. It’s too upsetting, and it’s currently unresolved. Experts are coming over to assess. I can’t think about it. I’m just ignoring the fact that the contents of our hall closet are currently strewn all over the living room floor and under no circumstances am I to open the hall closet door.

But the big one is our bookshelf. I shall explain: Those Little Free Libraries that are getting popular are now everywhere in my neighborhood, and they’re like catnip to me. I cannot not stop and browse through them when I see one. I also can’t not take a book that I’m interested in. However, I have been violating the Little Free Library social contract by not contributing books as equally as I procure them, or let’s face it—by not contributing at all. The other day Mr. Typist suggested I “pick out a few books to give away” and we could do a Little Library stroll during which I could make good on my debt. I smiled and nodded agreeably in an attempt to hide my rising panic. “Pick out a few books to give away”??? That would be akin to picking out a few of my children to put up for adoption. My books are my precious. I have cultivated a beautiful, and to my mind, pristinely organized collection of poetry tomes and classics, and I could not possibly let go of any of them. “Pick out a few books”, indeed. What a monstrously callous suggestion.
Kristen McHenry (AKA The Good Typist), Spring Entropy, Bartholomew Cubbins Bookshelf, Hoard Denial

Last year’s house-to-bungalow move necessitated a massive cull of STUFF that I hadn’t so much as glanced at in years. Operation Study took me three days of hard graft, during which time I faithfully reappraised just about every single sheet of paper in the filing cabinet and heaven knows how many ring binders, lever arch and box files. The poetry ones fared much better than a teaching career’s-worth of policies and planning but I decided to keep only those poems I love, or like enough to go back to (at some point…).

Since The Move, I’ve become firmer with myself about what I keep and what I give away. I no longer keep poetry magazines (I do keep contributor copies, though). Instead I pull out and box-file those poems that jump off the page and ‘grab’ me: the timely or current; those I wish I’d written; those that elicit a That’s it! or a fist pump; interesting forms, etc. In turn, I take some of these for discussion at Soundswrite and stanza meetings.
Jayne Stanton, Collecting poems

Links appeal to me because they mean connection. The interconnectedness of the web parallels the many relationships among human beings, societies, and environmental entities from forest to desert, as well as infrastructural connections from town to city and across waters and the physiological connections that make life in a carbon-based embodiment possible. And neuro-connections that maintain our pulses and our consciousness–without such linkages, what would we be?

Our genetic linkage influences what we look like, what forms of illness or robustness our bodies possess, and the likelihood of carrying those traits to our offspring.

When we link ideas or concepts or theories, the resulting concatenation can be innovative, revelatory, novel–even if the result is a failure, there’s much to learn from trying to solve the puzzles we encounter when putting together unlike things.

Writing a poem, for example, involves such a combinatory effort. Combinatory logic is a mathematical concept but an intriguing metaphor for what poets do when we mash together observations with ideas and emotions and whatever values each writer operates under.
Ann E. Michael, Linkage

As I was too sick to celebrate on my actual birthday, Glenn invited a couple of friends over for coffee and cupcakes on this last beautiful weekend, and it was great to watch up with all of them. Roz is a fiction writer, Natasha is a poet (and she’s writing a novel) and Michaela is a visual artist and writer, so we had great discussions about art and publishing and I realized how much it helps us as creative folks to hang out with other creative folks. I am also lucky to have such fun and talented friends, seriously. It helps to remember that each of us is part of a community – we are not actually alone in the artistic universe. It can feel that way sometimes.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Celebrating Friendships and Art, Spring Fever The Importance of Perseverance in Poetry & Looking Forward to Skagit Poetry Festival…

It was time again for my task as first-round reader for a poetry book contest. Once again I approached with self-doubt and angst. Once again, I learned some things to apply to my own work.

The twenty-five or so manuscripts I looked at were uniformly pretty well-written, which tells me that people are taking the time to learn something of the craft of writing (or at least reviewing the rules of grammar) and the art of poetry.

But I found that several of these full-length manuscripts felt more like solid chapbooks with other stuff stuffed in around them. This is interesting and a useful cautionary tale. I need to examine my own current full-length ms to make sure I have truly a full group of good poems and not a core of good ones and some bubble wrap.

A corollary to this is that it seems like collections are getting longer and longer. And I’ve noted in an earlier post that contest rules are asking for mss that are of higher and higher page count. I just don’t think this is a good thing. I want a book of poems to be a small world I live in, roaming around, revisiting streets and vistas. I don’t want to wander forever in strange terrain. Too many times I’ve encountered collections that after a while make me say “Enough already.” This is not good for poetry, already fighting an uphill battle for readers. Too many poems invites too many weak poems. I favor shorter and stronger throughout. Whack ’em with some good stuff and go.
Marilyn McCabe, Another Round of Notes from the First Round

A review is generally considered to be a critique, or a work of opinion. That’s true for many reviews, whether they are of literature, film, food, or art. The reviewer is out to convince the reader of a particular point of view; i.e., the book was delightful or boring, the film sensational or regrettable, the meal delicious or average, the art shocking or banal.

In the exploratory review, however, the reviewer’s opinion is less important than the potential reader’s experience of the book. In other words, the reviewer is less concerned with convincing a reader of a book’s worth, and more concerned with making the book available for the reader’s own judgment. This process respects the reviewing triad: author, reviewer, and reader.

When I review a book of poems, I’m not looking for something to criticize. As Anjali Enjeti writes in Secrets of the Book Critics, “I’d much rather celebrate a book than criticize it.” This doesn’t mean that I’m some kind of Pollyanna, heaping praise on every book I review. Nor am I aiming for a balance between the two; i.e., “this was bad” but “this was good.” My goal as a reviewer is to pry open a book of poems and let the light out, or dive deeply into the dark.
Erica Goss, The Exploratory Review

Seeing pictures of people playing golf in the foreground, with the plumes of smoke from the erupting Hawaiian volcano in the background, makes me want to scream, “Get out of there!” Sure, they should be safe. But there were people in 1980 who went camping near the spewing Mt. St. Helens volcano thinking that they’d be safe. But they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the mountain exploded sideways, which no one anticipated.

I’m also thinking about the first case of urban ebola. That’s a bad, bad sign. But at least the actions being taken have been swift.

Still, it’s the kind of news nugget that makes me wonder if at some point, we’ll look back and say, “We were so upset about the latest Trump debacle that we didn’t see ____________.” Readers of this blog know that I’ve spent time preparing/thinking about the wrong apocalypse. I scanned the horizon for mushroom clouds, not seeing the oceans steadily warming and rising.

Of course, history often works in circles, not straight lines. Perhaps all that time scanning the horizon for mushroom clouds are still ahead: I feel fretful about Iran and Israel and North Korea.

In the meantime, I do the work that must be done: teacher observations, annual reviews, buying food for both school and home, paying bills, making dinner, washing dishes, washing clothes–these tasks too run in circles, making me feel that I’m never done.

My creative work, too, feels circular, not linear. I return to the same themes, the same ideas, but execute them in different ways.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Apocalypse and Other Upheavals

April 8, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 14

It’s just-spring (in the northern hemisphere, at any rate) and the world is, to be sure, mud-luscious. But most mornings, that mud is frozen solid. A few hardy flowers try to bloom, only to wither in the next snow squall. Well, it is the cruelest month. But the birds are migrating through or returning to nest more or less on schedule. An honest-to-god trumpeter swan was just spotted in a farm pond less than a mile from me. And of course, since it’s Poetry Month, the poets are out in force. Even some poetry bloggers who went into hibernation back in January are emerging bleary-eyed like bears from their dens.

I am citizen of an overdressed republic
that knows itself as more than an illusion
and will keep donning clothes and moving on.
Sometimes I think I too am overdressed.
I think I should strip naked, walk the street
with nothing on, and face the filthy weather

we emerge from. I think I is another
as we all are. I think it’s getting late
and dark. It’s hard to see. I smell the dust
that’s everywhere and settles. I know it mine.
I am in love. I am standing at the station
waiting to board. I’m not about to panic.
George Szirtes, What I am Losing by Leaving the EU 1

8. Write about a medical procedure that made you become a mystic.

9. Write from the perspective of a gym machine or a kitchen gadget/appliance.

10. The gods used to speak in cataclysms, burning bushes, angelic appearances. How would gods communicate today? What would Jesus Tweet?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, 30 Prompts for April and Beyond

I found the whole experience of choosing a book cover, and a title for the collection, a challenge – albeit a challenge I was happy to undertake. I spent time looking at various artists’ work, trying to decide if their paintings or drawings would make a suitable cover. I knew that I wanted to have some kind of real life connection with the artist, so I stayed away from browsing the internet or sites like Pinterest. This also helped me to avoid the sensation of being overwhelmed by too much choice.
Josephine Corcoran, My book cover

All that he owned was a tamarind tree
even the land where the house stood was not his.

So, what is yours, the young wife asked coiling her finger
into his matted hair. His drunken eyes looked from her

to the pods on the tree, her skin the texture of seeds.
Uma Gowrishankar, The Anatomy Of A Tamarind Tree

The thrill, for this class, is that we are reading works that were published in the last five years (I have to remind my students that the poems might have been written and finished years and years before that), and that the students and I are dealing with the same unfamiliar terrain–I have yet to “teach” or present a poem by one of these poets in a class. To be sure, my students’ footing may be more secure than mine in their reading and understanding of any one of these diverse poets. It’s also transparent to my students that these poets may share more with them, their world and concerns, than what these poets may or may not share with me. Our engagement is about the questions, the troubling disruptions, the things that seem a little beyond, and then those moments were we see something, right there, that the language reveals, animates, or kills.
Jim Brock, De-anthologized

I’ve been meaning for a while to post some reflections about my winter term courses. One of them, a general-education level seminar, focused on poetry and music. We started with prosody and moved through a series of mini-lessons on poetry riffing on various musical genres: spirituals, blues, jazz, punk, hip hop. Anna Lena Phillips Bell visited and talked about old-time music in relation to her book Ornament. A student composer stopped in, and two other visitors analyzed song lyrics poetically, focusing on Kendrick Lamar and Bob Dylan. It was all tremendously fun, not least because my students were smart and game. I’m not sure I feel much closer to answering my big question: what possible relations exist between poetry and song? But I did write up the thoughts below for my students and they seem worth sharing.

First: while there are pieces about which I’d say with perfect confidence, “That strongly fits my definition of poetry,” or “that’s absolutely a song,” there’s a gray area where the genres lean strongly towards each other–a cappella singing, rap, poems recited rhythmically or over music. If music means “sound organized in time,” performed poetry fits the bill, whether or not the words are set to melody or there’s instrumental accompaniment. Rhythm is latent in words; voices have pitch, timbre, dynamics.

Conversely, song lyrics can be printed out and analyzed poetically, and singer-composers in various eras have had a very strong influence on what page-poets try to accomplish. I’m still bothered when people conflate the genres or put them in competition with each other, because the differences in media feel profound to me, yet lyric poetry and songs with lyrics share a strong sisterhood.
Lesley Wheeler, How poetry approaches music (and dances away again)

Emily Dickinson/Ghost line (209/520): Mermaids in the basement came out to look at me..

(But) what if I am the ocean/my slim pout/dull teeth/what if I am a paper doll/cut from/from my mother’s grief/ the hate she clutches because I resemble/my father/how misery is her wheeze/her gaze bitter/I drink energy drinks/until my eyes bulge/heart screams/laughs/sobs/in empty parking lots/I could fall in love with myself/like a dog/a loyal hound falls in love with the sound/of fast food wrappers/crinkling/my pulse sugared and accountable.
Jennifer E. Hudgens, 6/30

Last night, my husband gave me the word paraphernalia. My favorite phrases were: repel the leper, the bells peal, a panel of liars, the rapier’s rip. I ended up with a draft that might be going in the direction of a “dark days” type of poem. Today with my students, we brainstormed a list from ventriloquist. My favorite phrase from that list was a quiver in the soil brings violets.
Donna Vorreyer, The Sounds & the Fury…

It might seem odd, but the most impressive part of the day was the award ceremony. You might think boring, long, drawn out, but more than 300 students gathered in the auditorium to celebrate each other and WRITING awards. Students CHOSE to attend this LitFest. chose to submit pieces of writing beforehand. Judges read and assigned awards for Honorable Mention, Third, Second, and First Place, and then lastly, the Critic’s Choice award. I actually felt quite emotional thinking about the efforts behind this annual event that has taken place for a couple decades, the people who made it happen, and the excitement of individual students when names were announced and celebrated by classmates who cheered them on. My mind spun to sporting events where the cheering can be deafening. How often do we get to see this type of jubilation over WRITING. It’s so often such a solitary endeavor, and often unrecognized. While judges read the top winning pieces, there was no audience chatter, no cell phone distraction, and no one exited. The audience was diverse, but the response was uniform–respectful!
Gail Goepfert, Back to High School, Mary, and Chocolate

Some years I have endeavored to draft a poem a day for 30 days, some years I have been active giving and performing readings, some years in teaching; it varies on circumstance and energy. This year, I am celebrating by reading more than by writing.

When I buy poetry books, I try to purchase them–if possible–from the author or from the author’s original publisher rather than more cheaply (Amazon, used books, etc.) The author gets no royalties from books bought second-hand, and because few poets are rolling in cash from book sales–and while gaining an audience may be of value–even a small royalty check is a welcome thing, a confirmation of the work in the world.

Best-selling poetry is not necessarily the “best” poetry. Those of us who love the art can contribute in small ways by using the almighty dollar to support the writers we think need to be read.
Ann E. Michael, Poetry books & the $

It is National Poetry Month, and having gone through all of my books in March (and letting go of a great number of them), I thought I would read an entire poetry book, each day in April, and then tell you about it. […]

The Moons of August is like a series of hallways and stairwells that take you deeper and deeper into a house. You turn a corner and find a picture of her late brother, or her lost infant. Sometimes, you find hieroglyphics or cave drawings on the walls. There’s the funny story about her mother measuring penises, that turns into a reflection about God counting the hairs on our heads. We see people walking ahead of us, catch only a glimpse of Jack Gilbert or Temple Grandin as they disappear into a basement or climb out a window. Humor and heartbreak and a wry, forgiving and encompassing compassion are threaded all the way through.
Bethany Reid, Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August

Truth is brutal. So much we can’t recover,
years I’ve begged for you to wait for Spring to bloom
again, living in despair beside each other, and another

stormy season while we tussle for an answer
or a coda to the sum of all of life’s bother.
I’ve learned to hold my tongue, to question
nothing. Questions are another sort of winter.
Risa Denenberg, Abiding Winter

In 2004, my debut poetry collection had been out less than a year and I was trying to book a gig in New York City. I can’t remember who suggested getting in touch with Jackie, who was the host of the Pink Pony Reading Series at Cornelia Street Cafe, but I got her email and, with little hope, sent her a note. A day or two later, Jaxx responded with an invitation not only to read at Cornelia Street, but to join her at the Bowery Poetry Club as well. When I spoke to her on the phone about my travel plans, she told me I was crazy for booking an expensive hotel room. “Are you crazy? Come and stay at my place.” And so I did. Jackie’s walk-up in Harlem would became my home-away-from-home for my many subsequent visits to NYC. There would be plenty more invitations to read at Cornelia Street and other gigs Jaxx was involved in. She was generous in ways so many poets are not, especially in championing new voices and giving them space. She thought the “po’biz” scene was bullshit and many of the poets involved in it were boring, self-important assholes. She was most definitely right about that.

Jaxx loved her apartment in Harlem. It was rent-controlled, steps from the subway and she loved the mix of people in her neighborhood. She believed in supporting the bodegas, the local restaurants and was livid when one of the big banks opened a branch on her block. Her apartment was full of books and music, great art and a giant, over-priced yellow leather couch. She loved that fucking couch (she even wrote a poem about how much she loved that fucking couch). I had the honor of sleeping on that fucking couch, as well as laughing, crying over love affairs gone wrong, and staying up late to gossip, talk poetry and politics or listen to music. Especially Patti Smith. Jaxx was inspired to create her own band, Talk Engine, which produced some fantastic personal and political music revolving around her poetry. […]

And, of course, her poetry was brilliant. Her collections The Memory Factory (Buttonwood Press) and Earthquake Came to Harlem (NYQ Books) are, as her mentor Ellen Bass said, “vivd, compelling work.” (You can read my interview with Jaxx about her poetry at this link.) Jaxx’s past was filled with harrowing tales of molestation, rape and living as a junkie on the street. She had the strength and determination to turn her life around, and was big in the IT world. When I met her, she was the director of employee support at Yahoo’s headquarters in Manhattan. In her spare time, she was tteaching poetry to inmates at Rikers Island prison. She also kept up Poetz, a calendar of all the poetry open mics and readings happening around the city.
Collin Kelley, In Memoriam: Jackie Sheeler

Today I found the plaster Virgin with Child,
Her mountaintop avatar wound with plastic rosary beads
Left in offering. Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
My father taught me to pray, but the incantations didn’t stick,
Maybe because of the good swift kick
He said I needed, and then gave, seeds
Of my future rebellions– Wiccan symbols, Celtic
Knots I traced in the dirt at Mary’s feet, the wind wild.
Christine Swint, Fourth Leg of the Journey-to-Somewhere Poem

boom of surf at Bastendorff Beach
field of whitecaps on the Coos Bay Bar
seasick swells of the Pacific

brisk current of Rosario Strait
narrow roil of Deception Pass
Light-year twinkle on Admiralty Inlet

mirror of Mats Mats bay
foamy wake behind the Bainbridge Ferry
swirl of kelp beds off Burrows Island

When they ask her
what she will miss most

she answers

all that water
Carey Taylor, All That Water

SHIFTING SANDS

Demons and marvels
Winds and tides
In the distance the sea has already vanished
Demons and marvels
Winds and tides
And you
Like seagrass touched gently by the wind
In your bed of sand you shift in dreams
Demons and marvels
Winds and tides
In the distance the sea has already vanished
But in your half-closed eyes
Two little waves remain
Demons and marvels
Winds and tides
Two little waves in which to drown.
Jacques Prévert, translated by Dick Jones

I feel as if my head is bowl of sticky noodles and I can’t get my thoughts straight.

When I come to blog, I think, “What could I say that is interesting or useful?” And then decide to turn on Queer Eye and eat pistachios.

It occurred to me today (and maybe because it’s National Poetry Month and I’m writing a poem a day) that I need to lower my standards a bit on this blog, especially if I want to get a post a week.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Average Blogger = More Words Than Not

Q~Who was your poetry first love?

A~ee cummings was the first poet whose work I committed to memory—I suppose his poetry “looks” the most like poetry (or what I thought poetry should look like) on the page, with its crazy line breaks and spacing. There’s something about the sparseness in his poems that really resonated with me, the way he seems to say more in what he’s leaving off the page than what he includes on it. I still remember each line of my favorite poem of his, a short one starting “no time ago” and ending with two simple, devastating lines: “made of nothing / except loneliness.”
Bekah Steimel, Sirenia / An interview with poet Emily Holland

I was wowed to discover the book Above the Dreamless Dead: World War I in Poetry and Comics, edited by Chris Duffy, in our own public library! What a powerful book. Contemporary cartoonists “adapt” (interpret, illustrate) poems from the Great War, whether by the actual Trench Poets (poets who really served in the trenches) or others connected to that war. I reviewed it over at Escape Into Life, and should review more poetry books there this month, National Poetry Month, but I am a fast/slow reader of poetry. Even if I whiz through a book on first read, like eating M&Ms, I then slow down and go poem by poem, taking notes, savoring, mulling….um, to pursue the original simile, sucking off the candy coating to get to the chocolate. No, that doesn’t apply at all to most poetry I read! Never mind.
Kathleen Kirk, Above the Dreamless Dead

Look up the vocabulary of an esoteric subject that has nothing to do with your poem. The subject might be mushroom foraging, astronomy, cryogenics, perfume-making, bee keeping, the Argentinian tango, or zombies. Make a list of at least ten words. Include a variety of parts of speech. Import the words into your poem. Develop as needed.
10 Revision Ideas for Poetry Month – guest blog post by Diane Lockward at Trish Hopkinson’s blog

My father has a gun. I don’t know
where it is. It must be somewhere.
Maybe in his dresser drawer.
Maybe underneath his bed.

We don’t speak of it. The gun is not
meant to kill. We don’t believe in that.
I repeat, We don’t believe in that.

Outside, frost butters my window.
The world cracks at a slow pace.
Crystal Ignatowski, A Gun Is Not A Father Or A Husband Or A Saint