Jill Pearlman – Page 12

April 21, 2019April 21, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 16

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: water, fire, destruction, creation. Religion. Books and poems.

A woman dropped a poem in a well and waited to hear it hit bottom. No knowing how deep the hole or how black the water. If you could even see the stars from that sort of depth. Who knows where the source begins. Where it clouds with grief. What relief to hear nothing at all. What vacancy lurking behind every vowel like a shadow.
Kristy Bowen, napowrimo #14 & #15

What will our cities look like when sea levels rise amid the permanent consequences of climate change?
At last, here is the final version of “floodtide” = a video that I first showed and performed at the Paroxysm Press Fringe event this year.
Nearly every scene in the video has been artificially composited and animated from multiple sources, originally filmed in multiple locations around the greater Adelaide area, the Fleurieu Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, inner city Melbourne and its Port, Far North Queensland, and more… [Click through to watch the videopoem]
Ian Gibbins, floodtide

Then, the flood: flash. Side of road overwashed
as we are washed over. Swept. Wind is the broom
and we the debris. Unnecessary as dust or crumbs.
What name can we give to this occurrence? Call it
natural. Disaster. Or just a Thing That Happens.
Not that the name means much to us once we drown
in it, sucked under and curled into water’s embrace
whether sea or river or the lake become enraged
by thunderous sky or thunderous quaking crusts
the planet [they say] possesses. Loose scutes or
scales. Loose bark, like a tree. Pieces of slate
shorn sideways. Shear. Water. A species of bird,
Calonectris, that touches earth only to breed.
Ann E. Michael, Half-way through

The idea that Notre-Dame might be reduced to a hole in the ground, a collection of rubble terrified me. When I lived in Paris, or before that, or after, the Cathedral lodged itself deeply in my being. A friend mentioned he just loved the smell – the stone-cellar and incense smell, the millennial smell. To those who lob the charge that a church is just a building, I’d answer that it embodies a reach towards beauty and a divine; the anonymous artists were launching a message in a bottle to us in the future. If someone got spacey and was questioning reality, they only had check that massive stone exemplar of material culture – touch feel it, know its place on earth in the now.
I’m thinking, now of the book I’m going to be reading tonight, the Passover Haggadah. As a material object, it’s generally minor, though I do love the book as object. This ritual book collects up narrative of escape, the road, liberation, impermanence made continuous through telling. Wandering Jews cherish our books which contain worlds. They’re portable and tell of things that couldn’t be saved, couldn’t be etched or carried or kept in stone. Stone is irrelevant.
Material culture is dissolving into a haze. We’ll be doing a lot more of the wandering exile narrative thing, it seems. Forests and species will be translated into words by writer, poets, narrators. We’ll be telling each other about glaciers, extinct frogs and birds in books. We’ll be carrying them with us in our bags, on our backs, taking and transmitting evidence of a world of constant change.
Jill Pearlman, Passover, Notre-Dame and the Book Thing

The world constantly reminds us that nothing is permanent. Nothing escapes destruction.
wisteria in bloom ::
what the old stones don’t tell
Dylan Tweney, [untitled haibun]

We’ve had a great week of justice action in our church and larger community in South Florida. Last week I scribbled on a bulletin, and yesterday morning, I started to think about a poem. These ideas spurred my creativity:

We have built our house of justice in hurricane country.

We have made a home in the swamp of despair.

In this abandoned waste dump, we have claimed a homestead.

If we then create some fill in the blanks, maybe we get some different options:

We have built ________ in hurricane country.

We have built our house of justice in ________.

We have made ______ in the swamp of despair.

In this _______, we have claimed a homestead.

In this abandoned waste dump, we have claimed __________.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Writing Prompts for Holy Week

When the house lights went down
I started to cry. It’s just
a third grade concert — songs
about “this earth our home”
with canned accompaniment
and four third-grade classes
fidgeting on the risers — but
you’d have loved it. […]
I wiped my eyes furiously, hoping
no one noticed the ridiculous mom
in the second row who was moved
to tears by songs about recycling.
This is how I send you video now,
Mom: these poems I don’t know
if you can hear from where you are,
this earth no longer your home.
Rachel Barenblat, This earth our home

The shower shoots out Morse Code, rapid-fire dashes
(dash-dot-dot gap dash-dash-dash gap dash) in gray lines
sloppily staccato in midair. My eyes trance
watching them, wondering what secret messages
they carry that I will never know how to read.
Closing my eyes, the codes tap against my dermis,
vibrating with heat like sunlight, telling me: Here
is the shape of the thing that is you. Here are limbs
and rims, edges and fringes, points and portals. Know
your limits.
PF Anderson, -.. — –

It’s 11pm and I should be asleep.
In the morning I’ll pay for it
with a dull headache,
leaden arms and legs and a desire
for everything to go away so I can
stretch out on the sofa, sip coffee,
and listen to the wind rustling
the palm trees. I’ve been there before.
Charlotte Hamrick, Write then Sleep

I love seeing how the designers rise to a challenge, within minutes conjuring all kinds of ideas, choices of colors, shapes, the imagination, the technical skills required. I love the way they become truly wrecked throughout the course of the competition, sleep deprived, on edge, and how they always say the competition pushed themselves to do things they would not otherwise have done.
I don’t know anything about fashion or clothing design, so I don’t really understand exactly what they mean, but I would like to feel that feeling — of trying something I’m not entirely sure I can pull off. The problem with not being in a reality show about writing poetry is that I have to come up with my own challenges and push.
I have had that experience — in recent times, for example, trying to write a long poem with long lines and leaps, pushing and elbowing and elbowing the boundaries of the poem. My first videopoem pushed me in this way, and my animations. (Can I really draw an octopus that looks recognizably like the same octopus across ten frames? Fortunately, all octopuses look sort of the same….)
So what’s it all for? Well, as regular readers know from a previous post in which I revealed the meaning of life to be, well, a meaningless question, I don’t think “it” is all “for” anything. It just is. I wake up every day (so far). So what am I going to do?
Marilyn McCabe, Bring it on home; or Thoughts on Structure

I have been working on taking deep breaths that go all the way down through my toes and back up through the crown of my head.
I have been reading poems because it is National Poetry Month and each morning copying someone’s poem into my journal then writing my own “bad” version of it.
I have making homemade enchiladas and eating them with my daughters and their various friends and boyfriends.
I’ve been moving my furniture around in my house and seeing if I can get something like a “flow” going. (I think it has helped.)
I have been walking every day and snapping pictures on my I-phone and not remembering to share them on Instagram.
I’ve (gasp) shared several chapters of my mystery novel and now my first two readers are saying, “C’mon, where’s the rest? No fair!”
I have been reading my poems here and there and listening to other poets read their poems.
Bethany Reid, Where have you been, Bethany?

A few months ago, I had sent three poems to a juried committee for a local community event called Ars Poetica, a collaboration of poets’ words and artists’ interpretations. All three poems were chosen, two by one artist, one by another, who then set about making art from what they felt the poems were saying to them, in preparation for a gallery exhibition and poetry reading. When the day came to attend the public event, I was prepared.
Prepared to be very nervous. Prepared to be disappointed in my own delivery of the poems. Prepared to feel let down, or overwhelmed. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional response I would have to seeing my poems on a gallery wall, never mind the stunning impact of the art which emerged from the images I had conjured in the privacy of my mind.

Or how momentous it would feel to meet in person, the artists who had engaged so deeply with my work, Melissa McCanna and Steve Parmalee. It was a magical experience: unexpected in its impact, momentous in the way it renewed my understanding of why I write. To connect, to inspire, but more importantly, to experience the creative force that is life-giving, joyful, heart-sustaining, and community-building. May we all find ways to connect with Source, with one another, and may we all remain open to the blessedly unexpected gift of joy.
Sarah Stockton, Unprepared for Joy

We’ve had a number of terrific readers in Seattle recently, but I hadn’t been well enough (or free of doctor’s appointments enough) to make it to any until yesterday. Last night Ilya Kaminsky read from his terrific new book, Deaf Republic, and Mark Doty read poems, and it was wonderful to see them plus say hi to a punch of local poets I don’t see often enough. Thanks are due to Susan Rich for arranging the reading!
Glenn shot this pic on the way to the reading. We pulled over in a school parking lot because the cherry trees were so astounding! I have been hibernating a bit lately due to cold weather and being slightly under the weather, but it was so cheering to hear such great poetry and see so many friends in a warm setting. And there’s something rejuvenating about getting out, dressing up a little, being around humans who aren’t trying to take blood or give you a prescription!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry Month is Half Over! Poems Up at Menacing Hedge, Plus Ilya Kaminsky and Mark Doty visit a Seatte coffee shop, and More Blooms

But reader, I have other things I must confess. As hard as it may be to accept, I have never watched Game of Thrones.

I confess to reading Tasty Other by Katie Manning. Poems of pregnancy, and birth, along with swollen ankles, lactation, weird dreams, and urges. You might think it would be a book that maybe guys might not quite get the full benefit of. Maybe being a father of four (albeit grown) kids, who has been in the delivery room for each, or that is it well-written poetry, or more likely both, but I liked it, a lot.

I confess that I am reading several other books, yes at the same time.

It’s National Poetry Month and I confess I did not write one poem this past week. (Insert bad poet award here) I did revise and work on several drafts. (insert special dispensation from the higher poet here).
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Tears for a Fire

The Bones of Winter Birds by Ann Fisher-Wirth went into the purse a couple of days later, at a very low moment, when the strep seemed to be bouncing back, or was it something else–could it be mono, the nurse practitioner asked? A couple of needle stabs later, the verdict is probably not, but this snow-covered beauty of a book was great company in uncertainty. The first poem in Fisher-Wirth’s book is a gigan, a form invented by Ruth Ellen Kocher that I’d never tried before, so I had to experiment immediately, and you should go for it, too. (As soon as you start getting stuck you have to repeat a line, which is handy. My prompt to you: write a gigan about something BIG.) After I scratched that itch and jumped back in, I was moved again and again. There is a sequence mourning a sister Fisher-Wirth didn’t know well, and there are also a number of small gems, talismans of grief transformed into beauty, like “Vicksburg National Military Park”. Here’s a slightly longer one, funny-heartbreaking: “Love Minus Zero.”
Like Fisher-Wirth’s book, Martha Silano’s Gravity Assist is deeply ecopoetic: she’s trying to rocket out to the big picture, taking in species loss, disastrous pollution, and other terrors of the anthropocene. Silano is one of our best science poets, in my opinion, but she’s also a specialist in awe, exuberant about beauty and love and the good things that persist in this damaged world (for the moment!). Her gorgeous “Peach Glosa” reminds me I’ve never successfully attempted that form…hmm. Also, it’s not online, but if you’re a tired and overextended woman irritated by exhortations to tranquility, you need to get this book and read “Dear Mr. Wordsworth.”
Lesley Wheeler, Nibbling on gigans and glosas

Rena Priest’s first book, “Patriarchy Blues” (MoonPath Press, 2017) won an American Book award. Her new chapbook, “Sublime Subliminal” (Floating Bridge Press, 2018) was a finalist for the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award. In an interview posted at the Mineral School’s blog conducted during her fellowship residency there in October 2018, Priest had this to say about her writing:
[T]he poems don’t always make sense, but I want to give my reader the feeling that there is some underlying formula involved, and I want to anchor them with images.
When reading Priest, it would be wise to take her guidance to heart. To look for the clues that emerge from the images she offers. To consider how her poems’ underlying structures, like subduction plates, may be moving even as they anchor. Be alert to the subliminal messages that are strewn throughout “Sublime Subliminal.” Some of these messages are found standing on their heads in tiny italics at the bottoms of pages on the outside or inside edges. That you don’t notice them right away is your first subliminal cue of what you are in store for as a reader. And then dig in. There is much craft to envy in these poems.
Risa Denenberg, Sublime Subliminal

The religious images, honestly, go right by me. And I know, that’s sad; they’re probably the heart of this poem, so who knows what I’m missing. But let’s just say the Bible is my worst category on Jeopardy!, along with British monarchs and Roman numerals. So I have to set aside the Jesus imagery for someone to explain who is more schooled in it. I’m all about the work itself, and the slightly hallucinatory exhaustion afterward, because I’ve done that, I remember that; I worked so hard (ranch hand, long ago) and got so dirty that the bathwater hurt at the end of the day and literally ran like mud down the drain.

And then Carruth takes us back into the history of field work, of forced labor and slavery, and his images are still raw and immediate—everything that happens to those hands! And by the end, there’s his defiance, a sort of punch-drunk triumph, a strength (even momentary) in being the person who does the work, one of those who actually did the haying and the lifting, the digging and the building. There’s a little discomfort here—he’s already admitted he’s a “desk-servant, word-worker”—but any poet who can help out for a day of haying and go home and write a poem like this is also doing great work.
Amy Miller, 30 Great Poems for April, Day 20: “Emergency Haying” by Hayden Carruth

I learned that guilds are basically conservative. Innovation was frowned upon because it may give one artisan an advantage over the others. Designs and methods did not change quickly.

I also learned about the dyes:
From “Colors”:
Red made from roots of madder,
yellow from everything but the roots
of weld, the challenge is blue:
woad leaves dried, fermented, spread
on stone for nine stinky weeks.
From India Vasco da Gama
brings indigo, a better blue.
Before science can prove
the chemical’s the same, central heat
warms walls; tapestries are not needed.
Other colors were made from these three, as we learned from the color wheel in grade school. The lion is some shade of yellow. The unicorn stands out because he is white.
Ellen Roberts Young, More About Tapestry Unicorns

A slow and perfect spring rain
Stretches out into a second morning,
And my backyard drinks it up
With no one watching but me.
The others in my home sleep late,
And won’t go out back anyway.
Nor me, but I watch from a window,
My meditation is done
And the first light of day grows.
I am quiet, sipping black coffee
And watching the rain.
James Lee Jobe, ‘A slow and perfect spring rain’ //

March 31, 2019March 31, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 13

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: world-building and destroying, drafting and revision, travel and homelessness… “How do we go on, heart open, in the presence of mortality?” as Jessamyn puts it. Let’s join Josephine Corcoran in toasting: “Here’s to poems, wildflowers, insects and weeds.”

My mother was the earliest form of Google I knew. People called her with questions all the time. She kept files of clippings with financial advice, addresses of agencies, lists of experts, research findings — all updated with her ballpoint wiki. She had her travel skills to reference, her training as a registered nurse to summon, her experience with the dying to share when, inevitably, people needed her counsel.
Before the Internet, people were our search engines.
Laura Grace Weldon, Humanity is a Search Engine

I spent most of last night on Mars. All of it, actually. And the night before that. And the night before that. And the year before that …….
Colonizing Mars, actually, although that sounds grander and empowering than the experience. Let me tell you, Mars feels a lot like Kansas or Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. Well, except for spacesuits and cold.
There’s this grinding isolation, which I’m okay with, surprisingly, but it flattens everything. A numbness that comes with having a really predictable daily experience. I guess kids can adjust to all kinds of things as long as it seems normal to them. It was normal for me to study, do my chores, watch threads of wind scour the flat plains, lift the dust, and drop it back down.
PF Anderson, Mars Memories

In Los Angeles, I had to forget that entire tent city I’d seen five minutes before arriving at a gorgeous art space, Hauser and Wirth, forget the waste spaces of highway with people like driftwood, to get to the art. The scale of homeless population reflected the west – vast, long vistas I wasn’t prepared for. We’d landed an hour earlier. Welcome to confusion.
The art, fortunately, didn’t exclude life – Annie Leibovitz’s retrospective was excessive and marked by raw vital messiness, mostly of another era of culture clash, the 70s, both seemingly more violent and more innocent. The humanness of desire and struggle was poignant, marking a swath of human history. In the maelstrom was music, drunkenness, ecstasy, sadness, communion.
It took me a while to get onto the thing about LA – the wastespaces and no-places are the thing, and the places where people gather to eat, drink, play are little happenings.
Jill Pearlman, One Big Tented L.A. Thing

There’s a story here:
Something was built.
Something was broken.
That’s the essence of story, but I have no idea of the particulars. Make them up for yourself; the possibilities are numerous.
Ellen Roberts Young, Spring Walk and Story

I find whenever I’m in Portland and especially in Old Town, someone interacts with me–all the interactions have ended up okay, but there have been some odd moments (Note: not all the interactions have been homeless/drug user related, there is just an energy to this city I can’t describe, but it usually shows itself by feeling as if you’re in one big impromptu improv event.)

An example of what I’m talking about is once I was standing at a crosswalk and a man jumps out of nowhere, puts a cup of “water” ?? (I hope) over the head of a friend I was with and then directly in front of my face and yells, “You are hypnotized!” before deciding we were not hypnotized and wandering away. While these moments make me laugh afterward, the “that was weird” part of the trip, they remind me to tell you to keep your eyes open and do travel with a buddy, especially if you’re a woman.

Again, I have been to Portland numerous times without incident, but every. single. time. It’s something. Someone wants to dance with me on a sidewalk, someone is yelling something my direction from across the street, someone is shouting “let me hold your kneecap” out a car window, someone is blowing bubbles at everyone who passes by, someone has decided to ask random people their favorite type of shoe. It’s both inspiring and tiring. It’s “I’ll use this in a poem” and “I think we’re done here.”
Kelli Russell Agodon, #AWP19: Need a break? My Favorite Things in Portland

On a flight crowded with sleepy creative writing professors—the kind with teaching-intensive jobs who can’t escape to the AWP convention until late on Wednesday—I probe for existential dread the way you tongue a loose tooth. No, not sore, not yet.
This surprises me, given how my children’s current transitions have predisposed us all to panic. My daughter is applying for jobs plus finishing her senior honors thesis at Wesleyan; her adviser is moody and keeps missing meetings. My son will hear about the rest of his college applications while we’re at the conference, and he’s anxious, too. I’m not actually worried about either of them, not in the long run, but suspense is keen.
This is my first AWP since stepping off the Board of Trustees and even though I have a few residual duties, I feel giddy. Or is that jetlag? On Thursday morning before heading to the convention center, I pull out a small sewing kit I’d packed, intending to reattach a button on my favorite velvet jacket. The needle has rusted from disuse and I can’t thread it. I’m having issues with orderliness and containment.
Lesley Wheeler, Time out of joint at #AWP19

Last Sunday, 3 members (myself and two others) of our poetry club, Casa los Altos, collaborated with the PoetrySlam group of our city in their annual “Grito de la Mujer” (Woman’s Scream) live performance event. This year, it was held in our Central Park.
Guatemala consistently ranks, unfortunately, as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. This annual event invites poets from our city and the surrounding region, both men and women, to give voice to the often invisible and unspoken fears, heartbreaks, hopes, desires, experiences, spirit, anger, and more that we are often called upon to suppress. The power of the written and spoken word to shine light into places that affect us, cannot be overstated. This event is not for poetry that is merely “pretty” or that sounds “nice.” Our presenters this year talked about being mistresses, about balancing motherhood with career, about being accosted in the streets, about being young, about being men trying to navigate a world where power dynamics are changing.
Marie Anzalone, “A Woman’s Scream” Live Poetry Event

The first session I attended in the afternoon was Revelation or Resistance: Form or Narrative at the End of the World. I was less interested in the authors reading their works than in the discussion that followed. It was a good discussion, but if you know me, you know that my Apocalypse Gal self can talk end-of-the-world for days and never get tired of it. I wanted more conversation about what to do in terms of retirement planning and the knowledge that the world is seriously screwed, but I understand that not everyone has floor boards that are 2 feet above sea level. One of the presenters did early on present information from the latest, most serious climate report that came out a month or two ago; I’ve only heard from a few people who have actually read the whole thing, and he’s one of them. He mentioned 20-30 feet of sea level rise in the next few decades, which is a much more compressed time frame than originally thought and a much greater volume of water.

I made lots of notes of my own thoughts during this session, and they ran along the lines of future generations who will be aghast at the fact that we spent lots of time and money in fancy conferences talking about narrative form and planetary destruction and not much time actually working on the issue. I do agree with the one presenter who observed that this slow motion apocalypse on many fronts is moving so slowly that it’s impossible for us to react effectively. It’s not like a world war that might galvanize and mobilize us.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, AWP: Report on Day 1

What an inspiring day! The March meeting of Bath Writers and Artists was co-chaired by Sue Boyle and Peter Reason. Sue began the morning workshop by reading a thoughtful and passionate essay by Chrissy Banks, “The Place of Poetry in a Time of Catastrophe”. Are we fiddling, she asks, while real people burn? […]
I came home with an altered (less anthropocentric, I hope) perspective and a heightened awareness of “hyper-objects”: things that are everywhere but too big to see — like anthropocentrism and other habits of thinking and feeling that lead, not deliberately but inevitably, to disaster. I think I have already demonstrated that I can morph into a fictional post-apocalyptic unicellular extremophile, but it’s time to face the apocalypse head-on and do something about it. The expression it’s not the end of the world has gained a horrible new relevance.
Ama Bolton, Of Trees and Tygers and Catastrophe

From one perspective, the idea that art needs to wallow in the ugly that we want to avert our eyes from is condescending in terms of respecting the life experiences that other people have and how they choose to deal with them.
Not everyone needs to be confronted with a mimesis of each of life’s horrors, nor do they need to be overwhelmed with expressionistic/exhibitionistic sharing of other people’s feelings in order to “understand” or “appreciate”, or feel empathy for other people.
Not everyone is healed by a performance of their pain.
Isn’t the drive to create a beautiful moment from the complexity of such an experience as real and as authentic as it is to focus on the ugly? Can’t a glam shot of a new mother in her clean sheets also be interpreted as an expressionistic portrait of the joy inherent in the moment?
Staged is staged. Regardless of the fact that we seem to unconsciously hold up the “ugly” as authentic, and the beautiful as false or narcissistic. Could a case be made for our fascination with our own flaws as being more honest than our filtered selfies?
Ren Powell, March 31st, 2019

Of course, there is no real risk. I know that. I can save each and every draft, if I want, and trace my way back if I get lost. But reason has no standing where irrational fears hold sway. What I am really fearing is that I’m not up to the challenge. No longer a careless writer of what comes to mind, no playing child, but an editor, choicemaker; which words will I befriend, what voice will I take on?
And will any of the strangers I meet like the result? In editing mode, that question rises, grim as the sun on the hot sidewalk on the walk to the first day of school.
I wonder if other people share this editing dread. It’s normal to fall in love with a fresh draft of something exciting and new. Why mar the lovely face of this beloved with some virtual red mark of the editing pen? Surely it’s brilliant as is. First word, best word. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But I won’t know until I voyage into the process of questioning what’s there — does this belong? does that sound best or is there a better way? does it contain more vitality if I turn it upside-down? — and come to the destination on the other side.
Marilyn McCabe, Off We Go Into the Wild Red-Penciled Yonder; or The Hesitant Editor

And what do we do as writers but build worlds? I suppose this applies to poets as much as fiction writers, maybe even creative non-fiction. Some writing may have more in common with the non-created world, may live and breathe inside it, may exist alongside it simultaneously and occasionally wander back and forth. Things may be plucked from reality and stretched or bent into the shape, even amongst the most autobiographical work. These are perhaps the most interesting kinds of worlds, the ones that disorient you somewhere along the way, not sure where you are–in fact or fiction, and that confusion is part of the point.
Kristy Bowen, worlds within worlds

I’ve been waiting in my writing, setting poems aside, picking them up again, panicking because I might not have the most recent draft. Sometimes, the poems grow on me, and I see opportunities for nuance, for the subtle shadings. Sometimes, I grow tired of them, convinced that they are terrible. Time for waiting is running out, with just over a month before I turn in my thesis. But I can still get close to the ground of them, inspect their stems and blades, their rhythms and imagery (and I suspect that imagery is at the root of my worries). A garden is always in revision—something for me to keep in mind as I keep working at these poems.
Joannie Stangeland, Rye diary: Day three

Once I get past the initial rush to lay out images or the plot, I love the fine tuning, the balancing of all the finer points of writing, playing with the language, weighting words by their placement, drawing out imagery. I try to keep the reader in my mind, what they need, how much I want to lead them and how much I want them to run off on their own with my words. But also giving precedence to what I want the poem to do and say. It’s a delicate act of balance above the poem while stepping within it.

Sometimes it works and sometimes I focus too much on what I want, the ‘thing’ I’m trying to make the poem do that I force it into shape and it shows in its reluctance. This is when I need mentors, writing group companions and other readers to step up and tell me something isn’t working. I find it so helpful to have these dialogues because I am mired deeper within my own writing than another reader and often I cannot see where the problem is, even though I may have a sense of their being one.
Gerry Stewart, Finding Balance

Go easy on yourself: NaPoWriMo is a bit of fun, not another chore. If you miss a day, start again the following day. If need to take a day to catch your breath, same. Don’t write off the whole challenge because of a couple of missed days. At the end of the month, you will still have achieved much more than you normally would or had even thought possible.
Manage your mindset: The challenge is derived from NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month in November, where the focus is on quantity, not quality. Think of it as a 30-day scavenger hunt – you want to spark an idea, capture the essence of it and move on. Switch off your critical voice. Knowing that these are fast first drafts takes the pressure off. As Jodi Picoult says: ‘You might not write well every day but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.’
Angela T. Carr, Surviving NaPoWriMo: Tips for a 30-Day Poetry Challenge

Among other things, I’m teaching ancient Near Eastern epics this semester. I don’t often get to do this, and it’s my favorite.
My students read the Enuma Elish. They read the Hymns to Inanna. They read my beloved Epic of Gilgamesh. We study archetypal character and archetypal story, the role of catharsis in human survival, the integral nature of creation/destruction and eros/thanatos, sacred marriages and descents to underworlds, hero’s journeys.

I say, and say again:
The question at the center is: how do we go on, heart open, in the presence of mortality?
Heart open. Not numb.
In the presence of suffering and death.
At the intersection of medicine and Humanities, heh.
How?
JJS, Two Years: An(other) Open Letter to my Surgeon

When Depression Talks Over Me by Lannie Stabile in Kissing Dynamite – This is one of the most expressive poems I’ve read about depression and anxiety that doesn’t slam you like a sledgehammer. No, it’s calmly desperate which is a large part of its strength. Lannie is a poet to watch.
“I remember the first time I unhinged my jaw,
vomiting the swollen stories,
watching them gurgle in the open air”
*
Burn Barrel by Allie Marini in The New Southern Fugitives – This poem begins with how to assemble an actual burn barrel. It caught my attention because when I was a kid in rural Mississippi, we had a burn barrel and it was my chore to burn the household trash. As the poem progresses the barrel transforms, becoming a metaphor for the poet’s own suppression. It’s so very skillfully written.
“refashion yourself
into something clean & less—become a grate, a burn cover, become hardware cloth & trap hot cinders in
your mouth. limit the risk of combustion. just swallow everything down.“
Charlotte Hamrick, First Quarter Favorites: The Poets

Never passed it on to me
who watched her pinching
pastry: butter, sugar, flour;
how it fell from her fingers,
how it fell through the air.

She tried. She did. But grew impatient
with the way the mix would clump
and stick. O, give it here she’d say.
The pastry would flake, and fall.

You need cold hands she’d say.
Yours are too warm.
John Foggin, On Mothers Day, for my mum, Marjorie 1911-2007

At the end of shiva I wrapped myself
in your monogrammed sable stole
and walked around my neighborhood,
blinking like a mole bewildered by sun.
Like my child, still wrapping himself
in the plush blanket from your funeral
carrying you with him from bedroom
to living room sofa and back again.
As I prepare to leave this first month
I’m still learning how to carry you.
Rachel Barenblat, Four weeks

Editing poems at night
Under the influence of hot chocolate.
Life opens like a flower.
James Lee Jobe, ‘Editing poems at night’

When I was much younger, I considered myself “spiritual.” I stopped using the term once I began a more serious exploration of my life and began to study philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, phenomenology, and consciousness more intentionally. But the crucial components–connection, relation to and with others (sentient and not), and love–those I have always understood as necessary. Even though my ego has never “dissolved” quite the way [Michael] Pollan describes [in How to Change Your Mind].
So maybe I can go back to considering myself somewhat spiritual. At this moment in life, Nature and Others matter more than accomplishments and outcomes.
Welcome Spring, welcome Spirit. Namaste, Amen.
Ann E. Michael, Book review, mind review

I’m not taking part in #NaPoWriMo as such but I am going to make a concerted effort to sit down with my notebooks every day and work on some new poems. […]
Meanwhile, we’re trying to encourage more pollinating insects into our garden so we’ve abandoned our lawnmower for the time being – although we (I really mean Andrew since he is the chief gardener in our house) have mowed a sort of path around our wild lawn.
Roll on April – here’s to poems, wildflowers, insects and weeds.
Josephine Corcoran, #NaPoWriMo

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

March 3, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 9

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 found a lot of poetry bloggers writing about self-definition, belonging, identity, embodiment, and political engagement. It was a rich haul.

like when you try to put the silence back into your imaginary cat
like a boat on a lake in your ear you live with the wind
Johannes S. H. Bjerg, likes/som’er

Still, after all my ambition, I’ll never own a home or publish my novel. Remember in high school, how I’d run wild, chasing girls, climbing trees to query clouds, that sort of thing. Once in Miami, on a dare, I jogged around a city block wearing nothing but Nikes. I may have fallen hard for someone back then, but what do you know in your twenties? Still, I didn’t expect life to fall so short or to be so unlucky in love.
My days are delayed orgasms that will never climax..
I don’t plan rash action. There will be dinner, if I wash dishes and peel potatoes. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I probably won’t write again. Bills pile up, they won’t let me drive now, and I’m busy giving things away.
Risa Denenberg, Not-about-me poem, on the occasion of my 69th Birthday.

as I was going to sleep last night I had a very clear vision of how my mind works. it was a delicate, erector-set-like machine constructed like a bridge over the much vaster body of direct experience. I could hear it humming. “that’s all there is to it?” I remember thinking
Dylan Tweney (untitled post)

Who am I when I am not interacting with someone specific? That quiet watcher who tilts her head in puzzlement. Like a dog: taking interest, but not making up a story to imagine the world into meaning. It is a peaceful place. But lonely. Maybe that is why dogs curl up tightly against each other in musky dens?
Why Leonard presses his skull into mine until I have to distract him with a pig’s ear or a bit of cheese.
This desire than needs an object.
I should have been a dancer.
Ren Powell, March 1, 2019

prayer kneels down
wind builds a nest
for the passenger you carry without knowing
Grant Hackett (untitled)

A fellowship isn’t a residency. My duties are more complicated than that–not only because of financial concerns, but because I feel a general responsibility to be out and about in the city. But like a residency, this time gives me distance and fresh perspective on life at home. I miss so much, but I don’t miss everything. And letting go of those things that I don’t miss will be an important part of returning.

The weather can be mercurial. The hills are steep. Strange to become a version of myself that reaches for blue jeans and flats, instead of skirts and heels, and buries herself in warm clothing. But this is a deeply good place, and I am grateful to be here.
Sandra Beasley, The Road to Cork

The character of the pinko commie dyke, who is sometimes me and other times other women walking through the world, has been speaking to me in a series of poems that muse on contemporary life and the issues and ideas that are important in the world today. In some ways, I think that this series is representative of my work, which is invested in lyricism and also narrative. I also am interested in personae and exploring where the lyrical ‘I’ overlaps with the poet and where it does not. The disjuncture between the lyrical ‘I’ and the poet fascinate me much more today than they did ten years ago.
The Pinko Commie Dyke Kills / an interview with poet Julie R. Enszer (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

Cathy Warner’s newest collection of poetry, Home By Another Road, takes us down the highway of reflection and, whether she is the driver or the passenger, it is a journey that asks all the big questions. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? What is home?
Warner uses every map she has available to answer these questions, and while on this journey we are fortunate to have an honest narrator at the wheel. While navigating the complicated territory of family, faith, forgiveness, regret, and redemption, Warner clearly understands we all must pay the toll master for the right of passage we call a life, where you cannot know, you never could, what might become/of you or anything you have ever loved.
Carey Taylor, Home By Another Road

No one ever means to cry, no one says, I think I’ll cry now, it’s such a good day for crying cry more she said the ocean needs your tears
the trash on the beach was pink & sparkly
driftwood like a pile of slingshots
her eye is a storm that rages from sea to sea
Erica Goss, Writing at a Non-Writers’ Retreat

One of my favorite moments is a few episodes into Russian Doll where, convinced she is losing it, Natasha Leone’s character, talking with the woman who mostly raised her, utters her safe word for mental health. I found this a nice idea–a single word that would show the people around us that we were in a bad space that required help. I don’t think I’ve every been quite there, but part of my weird anxious brain worries that if I ever were in need of help, I wouldn’t be able to convey the difference between an ordinary kind of brain wonkiness and something that bordered on dangerous. And truthfully, the weekend I sat down to watch this show the first time, I was in a weirder place. I made it through one episode and it made me so undeniably anxious that I had to stop. I went back the following week, and was glad I did, because it was so, so good.

And really, there was something so similar about the characters repeating groundhog day experiences and life pretty much–days spent doing mostly the same things with variations. This is probably why I found it initially super anxiety-provoking, the routine and the missteps that could lead to disaster. How each choice sets off a chain reaction of other choices. If you change A, the B happens, avoid B then you skip C and move ahead to D. It makes every choice unbearable sometimes thinking 10 steps ahead of everything. And I guess, welcome to my brain. And particularly, my brain on winter.
Kristy Bowen, russian doll

Where I grew up there was a mill at the bottom of the street and a farm at the top. A quarter of a mile up the road were acres of municipal park woodlands. Beyond that, an open-cast valley, more woodlands, brickworks, some working pits. In the valley where I live now, not far away from where I was born, is polluted river, a canal, a railway (think : The Rainbow). There are defunct mills,a defunct marshalling yard. No one can build on the field beyond my back garden because it has pitshafts in it. There’s an even older pitshaft under my neighbour’s house. And so on. Everything formerly ‘organic’ has been managed, enclosed, changed, even the river itself. I live on the edge of a coalfield where the 19^thcentury houses are on the boundary between stone and brick. My horizon is the skyline of high moorland from Holme Moss to Oxenhope. This is the lens through which I read the poems of Remains of Elmet, through which I imagine the landscape of the Wodo’s wanderings, the corroded dystopian landscape of Crow, and through which I see foxes, thrushes, pike, hawks.
John Foggin, Critics, poets and the common reader (Part Two)

I inhabit this place. Like a bat in a cave.
Like an owl in an elm. This place is my own.

I fill this land like a ghost fills a haunted house,
Like coffee fills a cup.

Starting out from here
Any direction is the right direction,

And turning about from any direction
Takes me back home.
James Lee Jobe, ‘From here you can see the snowy mountains’

I ate too much salt.
I listened to a podcast about a mystery person who turned out to be Sonia Sotomayor.
A flawed translation turned me into a lawyer.
Sarah J. Sloat, Tuesday minutiae

In response to my last post, friend David Graham wrote, “I’ve finally come to believe that ‘voice’ is not something to concern myself with. Others will or will not tag me with such a thing, but it just messes me up to think about it. I simply (ha! it ain’t simple!) try to write as well as I can & in the process figure out what I want to say (which for me always happens in the revision process, not before.)…In a similar way, worrying about originality is for me mostly a dead end. I love something Levertov said: ‘Originality is nothing else but the deepest honesty.’”
I thought about that for a while, and replied, “I wonder if it’s not the author that has a voice but the poems themselves. I know I get annoyed when a poem of mine starts having a kind of woff woff self-aggrandizing tone of some British lord or Oxford don. I have to shove it off its high horse. Then other poems just think they’re so damn funny they start laughing at themselves so hard I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
And soon after that exchange I found this notion by Richard Russo in the eponymous essay of his new book The Destiny Thief: “I’d been told before that writers had to have two identities, their real-life one…as well as another, who they become when they sit down to write. This second identity, I now saw, was fluid, as changeable as the weather, as unfixed as our emotions. As readers, we naturally expect novels to introduce us to a new cast of characters and dramatic events, but could it also be that the writer has to reinvent himself for the purpose of telling each new story?”
Marilyn McCabe, Mi, a name I call myself; or, More on Voice

Invisible damp fingers
leave prints on my skin,
out of sight, muffled roars –
uncertainty circles in a waltz.
Charlotte Hamrick, Morning Meditation: Fog

Anticipation feels different from expectation, though the two are related. For me, at least, the connotation of the first is more open-ended. Anything can happen, though let’s hope what happens is good. Expectation seems more results-oriented. I am not a results-oriented gardener; I like surprises, I appreciate the education I get even from failures.
Come to think of it, I could describe myself that way as a writer or poet, too: not results-oriented, more intrigued by the things I learn when I work at the writing.
Ann E. Michael, Anticipation

imagine the newspaper you read every day
I will be the article you clip & never throw away
now do you smell the slow spring coming?
the grass humid with the buzz of dragonflies
an airplane’s drone reaches the rec yard
it’ll land somewhere in a few minutes
we will still be here
imagining birds & sky & other lives
James Brush, Air Mail

My mom had a couple of stories about my early childhood — one was that I didn’t walk until I was 13 months old. “I thought you were retarded,” she liked to say.
Another story was that I wouldn’t color in my coloring book until I figured out, at age three, how to do it perfectly, without going outside the lines.
I never had a spanking until I was three — around the time my next younger sister was born. “You never needed one until then,” Mom used to say.
So here I am, 59 years later, trying once again to finish a novel…and going back to the beginning, over and over, day after day, and trying to make it perfect.
Bethany Reid, What I’m Reading Now

These days, my thoughts return to the situation of our physical bodies quite often. I have friends with very rare conditions: one friend has kidneys that make cysts and another friend has a body that creates non-cancerous brain tumors. Most of my friends are solidly in the land of middle age or older, so there’s vast terrains of discoveries–not unlike adolescence, but without some of the fun discoveries about what bodies can do. Or maybe the fun discoveries are yet to come.

Or maybe as we age, the fun discoveries don’t revolve around our bodies but our spirits.

I’m still thinking about whether or not I could weave any of this into a poem that wouldn’t be trite or cover ground that’s well covered by past poets. I joke about being rather medieval in my view of the body, that we’re holy spirits trapped in a prison of flesh; some days I’m joking, but other days I feel that way. It’s a troubling theology, but it’s also pernicious and hard to root out of my consciousness.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Poet in the Body

“Protest Poetry” also carries my college’s “experiential learning” designation, which means the students are creating a couple of public-facing projects. The first, a collaborative venture, happened this Wednesday. We began planning it a few weeks ago, after a tour of the Rockbridge Area Relief Association as well as reading poems about hunger on the Split this Rock database. The assignment was (for very low stakes, grade-wise) to raise money for RARA through poetry. I told them a benefit reading would work–I’ve organized them before–but it was up to them. We toyed with the idea of a Haiku Booth or poetry-related crafts, but decided on an hourlong event that would be organized, promoted, and emceed by students in the class. They chose and booked a campus space, issued invitations to the readers, created fliers, set up sound equipment, decided the flow of the event, and brought refreshments (I acquired a small budget for the latter).
My undergraduates also did some extra work I did NOT expect or require, because, I think, they became genuinely invested in the cause. Some of them made another trip to the food pantry with questions for the clientele, cleared in advance by RARA staff, such as “What’s your favorite meal?” and “If you had to describe RARA in one word, what would it be?” They constructed poems out of the answers, performing them at the event as well as interspersing information between the poems about RARA’s work. They also set up a fundraising table for three days in the Commons, where they offered soft drinks and home-baked treats. Talking to unsuspecting muffin-eaters about how much food RARA can buy for a dollar, they then sweetly solicited donations in any amount. All told, they raised $470!
Lesley Wheeler, Teaching poetry activism

Home, for Syrians exiled by war, is gone, irretrievable, a lost paradise just as it is, at the same time, a place forever unattainable and mythic. Listening to concerts this week by Kinan Azmeh, the Syrian clarinetist and composer, I was reminded of the mystical desire of Arabic love poetry. The object is unattainable. The wonderful paradox is that in evoking absence, art walked right in and created presence.
Azmeh’s music, presented by Community MusicWorks at local centers, evokes wistful longing with sighs, bends, microtonal wavering and high solemnity of Arab string exhortations — and Kinan’s clarinet wrangles with clarity and fading memory. The feeling is raw, open and shared. Mohammed al Shawaf, a recent immigrant, jumped up spontaneously to read his own poem gathering at Dorcas Institute, a resettlement organization. I scrawled down some of the lines as Kinan translated it into English. It’s about a nightingale who was encountering a displaced poet (apologies for the scrappy transcription!).
“Nightingale, I saw your sad face from the East…Are you a refugee like me? How did you leave heaven on earth? Everything is different, everything destroyed. Did you bring anything from home? You have awoken my feeling…. I promised you, Damascus, I would never forget you.”
Jill Pearlman, Love, Our Inalienable Right

I also read three books of poetry in the past month. all this can be yours by Isobel O’Hare is a powerful collection of erasures from the celebrity sexual assault apologies. The poems are fierce explorations of how the men making these apologies try to evade their own culpability.
The chapbook Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned by Sara Ryan (Pork Belly Press) delves into the liminal space between living and dead, with this collection of poems about taxidermy. The nature of body is explored down to the bone, with footnotes that provide an expanded philosophical look at the art of preservation.
House of Mystery by Courtney Bates-Hardy draws on the dark undertones of fairy tales, providing a haunting look into the role of women in those stories.
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: February 2019

The ceiling is low today. Clouds drift
through the window, grackles pick daintily
the last berries from frozen vines.
She can forgive winter
for its long oddity, its tired body
of a shrunken old woman. Vines spring
through her couch. A day comes when she must
do something, or simply lie there and bloom.
Romana Iorga, Spring Inspection

February 24, 2019February 24, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 8

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 found bloggers writing about challenging themselves in new and sometimes difficult ways, pondering revision, thinking about the ancient Greeks, fighting despair and depression, celebrating successes, and of course, reading poetry.

Last year I was worried about my poetry becoming stale. I wasn’t as excited by it as I used to be. So I started to experiment with found texts and suddenly I became more enthusiastic and creative. Since then, there have been many ‘oops’ moments, and I know there will continue to be many more. However, something interesting has sprung from them and I’m enjoying the writing process more. I’m also more open to new formats and platforms for poetry, and a little less concerned about getting work published (although I’m not abandoning that goal).
[Susan] Jeffers is clear: trust your impulses, accept responsibility and don’t stick with, or be protective of, wrong decisions – correct them. There’s no reason why you should stay on the well-trodden path (in writing or in life) if that path is making you feel unfulfilled. Poetry can feel very serious at times. Reading and writing it can be intense and provoke some odd disquieting feelings. However, adopting the ‘no lose’ approach allows you to step off the path and experience new ways of creating without feeling guilty that you’re not doing ‘proper’ writing (you know the feeling, when you sit down with pen and paper and time to write but you’re doing it out of a sense of duty rather than a drive to create ).
Julie Mellor, Crossing the line

Yesterday was the last day of my Lucie Brock-Broido Stay, Illusion practice. The idea was to sit down each day—at my desk, at the gym, on the bus, wherever—read a poem from Lucie’s book, choose a line, a fragment, an image, and write from or in response to it. I started on October 22. I did not show up daily, but I did show up. Yesterday was poem 65. And then a sadness that it was done.
Some of these drafts might become poems. A couple of them already have. One is in active revision. And many are pressed in the pages of my notebook. I’m hoping to get back to them, read and see which ones, or whether any, still ignite some spark worth nurturing.
What did I learn? This worked well for me. Each time, I’d write something. Even if I knew it wasn’t going to turn into anything else, I was writing. Even better, it gave me a chance to sit in active conversation with Brock-Broido’s poems again. My goal had been to choose not just compelling images but those that were difficult or uncomfortable—not the kinds of things that might naturally show up in my poems anyway. And that was the biggest challenge, to tug away from comfort’s gravity.
Joannie Stangeland, The end of one practice…

Last week I presented a project that seemed unlikely to exist and equally unlikely to succeed, but it managed to do both. It was a live poetry performance called Mirrors. In spite of the simple title, every time I tried to explain to the people I’d enlisted to read, we all got tangled up. Three groups of four pairs, with ten-minute breaks for discussion — too much information! Just dive in!
Which we did.
I chose bits of writing from observant feminist/literary scholar of Torah, Avivah Zornberg, whose verbal pyrotechnics and all-around genre-bending work I’ve long admired. I placed these powerful excerpt opposite a selection of my poems. Zornberg’s dense text, out of context, next to my dense text … a case of heightening complexity to obtain clarity?
The idea was to put them side by side and let the sparks fly. They’re not one-to-one correspondences, more like juxtapositions, points of departure, spiky soul mates. Zornberg’s probing of the unconscious of a Torah passage, her eliciting of emotion inside discontinuities gaps and white spaces left room for my poetic eruptions about existential condition.
Did they tango? Well, yes. Rumblings, premonitions, regret, amazement, praise – voices were liberated in the room, a choral celebration of the many.
Jill Pearlman, How do you know when you’re ready?

For the Greeks, Delphi was the center of the universe. Kings traveled in person from all the city-states, including the islands, to consult the Pythia, the Delphic oracle in the temple, and they built treasuries on the side of the hill to house part of the spoils won in battle, as a gift to the gods. Mount Parnassus is remote, and far from the sea; at 2,457 m (8,061 ft) it is one of the highest mountains in Greece, sacred to Apollo and Dionysus, and it was also the home of the Muses, who inspired poetry, art, and dance. Delphi is located far up on its slopes. It was a real journey for us to get there, in a modern car, on winding mountain roads. I can hardly imagine what it took for ancient people to make that journey and arduous climb; clearly it was of vital spiritual and political importance to them.
But going there myself, I could see and feel why they thought it was so special. On the way up, we drove hairpin turns, stopping once for a shepherd with his flock of goats, the bells around their necks tinkling, their hooves clicking and scrambling on the loose rocks. We passed through the narrow winding streets of the town of Delphi, perched precariously on the slope, and back into the wilderness to the ancient site, from which you see no signs of human habitation. It’s spectacular and wild: from the steep rocky slope with its pines and cedars, you look down across a deep rugged valley. Hawks and owls and crows must have been common then as now, the wind blows, the dark cedars punctuate the sky, and you climb the same paths, past the market and the treasuries, up toward the man temple where the oracle gave her riddles, and even higher to the theatre. Of course, what was once a busy mecca is deserted except for tourists. I tried to imagine a bustling marketplace, smoke rising from sacrificial fires, human voices everywhere: that was difficult. But there was something about the place itself that hadn’t tumbled with the stones, and had perhaps even preceded them. Standing on the ridge above the main temple, I tried to imagine coming there any of the grand buildings had even been built. Who were the people who identified this place and first called it sacred? Perhaps what I was seeing and feeling now was closer to what they felt. I kept hearing the cry of a hawk as it circled and rose in the mountain thermals, and then plunged down into the deep valley we can had come from. Above us was snow, the inaccessible realms of the gods. Closer by, in a glade in the woods, near a rushing spring, perhaps the Muses still danced: it wasn’t hard to imagine.
Beth Adams, Exploring Delphi on Paper

The ancient Greek stage was constructed at the heart of a stadium: no proscenium, just pillars, ramps, and the mechene. Machine of the gods, later Romans would call it, since it was usually Apollo up there holding forth and tying up loose ends—unless Euripides wrote the play, in which case it would probably be a slave, and very little of this human mess would be resolved.
Aeschylus, Sophocles—these men wrote such elegant language. Pristine and pure. Cathedral-like, their imagined worlds. I like Euripides best. He tells the bloody truth.
The ramps were called paradoi, and were used for the choral entrance and exit. At the end of a tragedy, the Chorus would sing their kommos—song of lament—during the exodos, the exit scene that served as a kind of afterword, bodies strewn across the stage.

Is this a tragedy?
God, I hope not. Please, let it be not.
[…]
Euripides said
A coward turns away, but a brave man’s choice is danger.
Euripides said
Time cancels young pain.
Euripides said
The fountains of sacred rivers flow upwards.

A week into the antidepressant, I start to be able to smile again.
Two weeks in, I can work effectively, at least for short stretches.
Three weeks in, my real focus comes back.
JJS, Skaha, Part VI: Exodos. Kommos. Afterword. Beginning Again.

She shakes her head, pushes the sleeve of her tunic

dismantles the stockpile that fences her house – the rubble
of bones, pellets of flesh, the moon marks on nails, adamant warts.
The spray of dandruff like burning stars scatters
in the garden, the smoke palls his face as she throws
a handful of soil over the eyes, the mouth open in prayer.
Uma Gowrishankar,How a mother processes a terror attack

The first gray light of a winter morning.
Walking among my fruit trees
I cry for my dead son.
I then scatter those tears
Like seed across the cold ground,
But the birds won’t even go near.
James Lee Jobe, ‘The first gray light of a winter morning.’

Sometimes my despair arrives as a result of too much focus on the gatekeepers of the creative commons: those people and systems granted with the culture’s ability to say pass, or fail, to our creative work and our desire to send it out into the world with some form of recognition and acclaim. Sometimes it takes fortitude to keep working the system, but today I’m going to ignore the gatekeepers altogether and post a new poem right here.
A Good Clear Out
I divested myself
of what lies downriver
the rusted cans and blackberry thorns
the animal traps lined with bloody fur
I’m boxing up whole decades
And giving them to strangers
yearbooks, prayer books
the necklace I bought for you-
the one I couldn’t bear to part with in the end
Yet
was too ashamed to ever wear out, so
Here. Take it.
It doesn’t suit me anymore. I’m going bare.
(SES, 2019)
And Lastly, What I’m reading:
I’ve been reading a collection of poems: New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich. I cannot recommend this book of poetry with enough fervor. If you were sitting across from me I’d wave it in your face and read poem after poem out loud, while you poured yet another cup of tea and tried to absorb the grievous beauty coming at you in words, lines, stanzas, incomparable images.
Because making art and experiencing art is a way of choosing life, and disrupts the cycle of despair.
Sarah Stockton, Disrupting the Cycle of Despair

After moving to Portland last summer, I was introduced to Portland poet Melissa Reeser Poulin through another fine Portland poet, Kristin Berger.
We all read together in January at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop where I had the opportunity to hear Melissa read from her new chapbook-RUPTURE, LIGHT.
RUPTURE, LIGHT is a book filled with poems that speak both to the personal and universal. The poems in this collection take us on a journey through the worlds of pregnancy, children, and marriage, and with this poet’s keen eye, helps us see both the transitory nature of the domestic scenes and their continued ability for rebirth: It turns out life is a will/an overfed bulb/that can be forced to bloom again/and again.
Hope is never forsaken in these poems, but as a keen observer the poet lets us know that all we love is leaving us: In the graveyard,/the snow softens the stones/while we walk, idle talk about how/we’ll be buried//You want to live forever/in the canyon we love,/your skin and bone/become sugar pine/and chaparral.
Carey Taylor, Rupture, Light

You can’t tell which year the book was first checked out because the date stamps note no year until we get to a handwritten Jun. 21, 1937. The book is then checked out every year until Feb. 19, 1943, the year bombing began in earnest in Frankfurt. It was especially heavy in 1944 and continued into early 1945. The war ended that spring.
The book is taken out again on April 15, 1946. In 1947 it’s taken out eight times. Boy, people were really hungry for poetry written in the Frankfurt dialect.
The library card makes history tactile. I’d meant to use this and the other cards for collage but this one will be spared. The others, also aged and discolored, will do as well.
Sarah J Sloat, Loose Ephemera

[…] no one would recognize
a heartbeat on the edge of familiar
songs written in dead languages
& trees that grow twisted on the plains
could be the old hair metal guitar
that escaped the pawnshop wall
James Brush, Dead Letter Office

It seems so simple to these children, the idea of a farmer-poet who once nursed a badger. I imagine they would not have been fazed to know that in his early life he’d hunted and trapped and killed animals, and throughout his life had been a fisherman. They would possibly be baffled by the fact that critics of Hughes and his poetry find it problematic. What Yvonne Reddick’s book [Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet] does, with a clarity that belies its density, is to sure-footedly take the reader through the thickets of academic controversy that surround the poetry and the poet; to analyse their relationship to the burgeoning environmental movement; to deftly unpick interpretations of art’s relationship with ecology, and equally to the alarming number of sects and subsects that occupy the fields of eco-poetics and eco-poetry. […]
Hughes was a prodigious reader of just about everything, and a prodigious writer of letters (700 pages of the collected letters), of poems (1200 pages), of plays and essays and so on. He was an educator, a broadcaster, a lecturer and a performer. He was conflicted hunter, a conflicted farmer (how many other poets do a full time job like that?), a conflicted and unfaithful husband, father, lover. He grew up in the physically and historically imbricated landscapes of the upper Calder Valley, and of Mexborough. Landscapes of the kind D H Lawrence grew up in. When I read Reddick’s accounts of various critics’ condemnation of his inconsistencies when it come to ecopolitics, I get annoyed. Because, I think, why should a poet be consistent, why should a life be simplified into ‘consistency’?
John Foggin, Critics, poets and the common reader (Part One)

I’ve been writing a lot of words on the page. Scrawled loopdiloos, but what do they say? What are they getting at? That’s the problem. I feel like I’m sleepwriting. All this impressionistic stuff is rushing out, but what is it all about? I’m not sure. I’m trying not to disrupt the process with criticism and analysis at this point, but I’m eyeing it all suspiciously.
Okay, well, then in fact, I AM disrupting the process with criticism and analysis. I know that only when I plunge into the editing process will I discover what there is in here. But there’s so MUCH of it. And I fear that’s it’s all fluff and no substance, or that I’m racing around something but not getting any closer.
How do we balance the creative impulse with creative intent? Too much intent can flatten an impulse like my hair when it gets too long. No body. No bounce. Too much impulse with too little intent is all bounce, all Marlo-Thomas’s-That-Girl-flip-curl.
Marilyn McCabe, There there; or On Substance and Style and the Writing Process

I like revision, even though it hijacks ALL my creative energies. (With these rewrites to tackle, plus Shenandoah poems to read and grant proposals to draft for my 2020-2021 sabbatical and this pesky full-time job as teacher-adviser-program coordinator, I feel like I’ll never write a new poem again.) It’s rewarding to hone old efforts and feel sentences click into their grooves. But I’ve been thinking about the word “revision.” Its emphasis on “looking anew” doesn’t entirely capture what I’m doing. In both genres, I’m re-sounding lines, trying to hear them freshly, managing echoes within mss. I’m also thinking hard, as I revise, in order to revise, about giving readings. What passages or poems would I choose to read aloud to audiences, and why? Do they sound right in my voice? If I would want to kick off a reading with this poem, or end it with that scene, do those preferences have implications for the arrangement of a printed book? Or do the mediums of print and live reading simply have different requirements?
Lesley Wheeler, Revision, re-audition

Maybe the month of February calls to us as a quiet time of yin creativity, which is a way of looking at revision as an inwardly-focused energy–as opposed to marvelous bursts of creativity from inspiration or the much-vaunted Muse. The lunisolar calendar used for centuries in Asia calls February the first month of spring (立春 lìchūn)! I had better keep at the revising, therefore. Before I know it, yan energy will return with the start of the gardening season in eastern Pennsylvania.
Ann E. Michael, On revision (again)

Read and edit old poems. Recently, I went through my files in Google Drive reading some of my old poems. I pulled out a few and edited them with fresh eyes. I submitted three and all three were accepted. Yesterday I looked through my journal from 2014 and found a poem I had completely forgotten. I added a little to it, but not much, and plan to submit it.
Play around with black-out & found poetry. Just grab a newspaper or magazine and begin circling words that you’re drawn to, then rearrange them – or not – into a poem. This is an exercise that often gets me kick started.
Another exercise I like to do is use a poem that you like by another poet. Staring at the last line, write a response to it. Work your way up to the first line, writing responses to each. I don’t remember where I read about this technique but I really like it. In fact, I plan to do it this week-end.
Charlotte Hamrick, I Need a Jump Start

Q~What’s your writing process like?
A~I don’t really have a writing process, and every year I keep trying to get into a writing routine, but I fail. But yes, I usually jot down ideas and phrases on my phone or in a notebook, and most of my poems either begin with a word or an image, or a central idea. Sometimes I might be stuck in the subway and write a short poem on my phone to pass the time, or maybe I am studying for a test and I’m frustrated, so I’ll jot some lines down that may later become a poem. In short, there isn’t really planning involved. However if I’m writing a story, I’ll usually plan it out in terms of a chart or a timeline of events and then begin.
Q~What are your poetry likes/dislikes?
A~My poetry tastes have been through many phases. There was a time, I’d almost exclusively read only Romantic and Victorian poets, and I went through a phase where I literally worshipped Sylvia Plath. In my high school, I went around quoting Eliot’s Prufrock and Marvell’s His Coy Mistress (only the bit at the end, “though we cannot make our sun /Stand still, yet we will make him run” because I found that incredibly daring and hopeful) the whole time. I’d also read a lot of Rilke, Neruda and Rumi in translation. Closer to my culture, I loved children’s rhymes in Bengali and the playful non-sense poems of Sukumar Ray. For a while, I followed a lot of insta poets like Rupi Kaur and Lang Leav, but I’ve grown out of it now. In college, as an English major, I had to read tons of poets, and in my fourth semester I took up this course called “Postcolonial Poetry,” and we read so many wonderful, beautiful contemporary poets, it’s hard to pick a favorite. I also love Carol Ann Duffy for how accessible she is, and I think accessibility is one of my personal preferences when it comes to reading poetry nowadays. Maybe the whole poem doesn’t have to be accessible, but there has to something or some part that I can understand or sparks a trail of emotions or something I find inexplicably beautiful.
death of an imaginary friend / an interview with poet Archita Mittra (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

OMG! OMG! OMG! Here I am in The New York Times Magazine next to John Legend! Well, not me so much as my poem, “Hoodie,” which was selected by Rita Dove for this week’s NYTimes Magazine.

Can’t tell you how much this little poem means to me. It is my Alex poem, and it addresses a fear I share with many people of color about the safety of our kids, children of color in particular. Seems more relevant now then when I wrote it. He’s 15 and looks more adult and child. When I say “be careful” as he leaves the house, it’s not him I’m worried about–it’s everyone else.

Needless to say, I’m very thankful that Rita picked Hoodie. She’s always been an inspiration for me so it just means that much that this poem will reach a wider audience.
January Gill O’Neil, Hoodie

I have been watching the frustration of some much loved writer friends who send out their first manuscripts over and over and get a ton of “finalists” but don’t get chosen. At least not yet. It’s a shame because these are very strong writers and I want to hug them and tell them to ignore the noise and that they’re terrific. If I had my own press I would have already published them. I don’t want them to feel that they are “less” as people or writers because today’s trends or editors don’t validate their work. In the letters of Virginia Woolf I’m reading, she tells another younger writer that she didn’t publish a thing (besides reviews) in her thirties. And her forties were when she wrote and published nearly all of the work we consider ‘important’ today. Sometimes it takes time to come into your own.
I’ve also watched some friends get wonderful news – my friend Kelli Russell Agodon just won a PSA prize for lyric poetry – and Martha Silano has a new book, Gravity Assist, coming out with a book launch in a few weeks – which, yes, I am actually happy to celebrate. You want your friends to succeed. You cross your fingers for them and cry when they cry and rejoice when they finally get the good news. As a reviewer, I come across a lot of poetry books – some of which absolutely blow me away. They are so good they are humbling.
Tomorrow I’m meeting up for coffee with a new friend who not only does poetry but documentary filmmaking (which seems an even more difficult world than poetry.) I think the best cure for feeling unloved, rejected, is to get back out there, send out your work (which I’m doing right after this post – carrying a poetry manuscript – a paper submission – to the post office) and get together with other creative folks.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Six New Poems in the newest issue of Rosebud, and When You’re Not the Chosen One

I gave myself permission to devote myself for the weekend to one book. To be within it while the snow fell and then another front pushed in rain. To keep turning pages, stopping only to feed spruce logs to the fire, as the light filtered in over the mountains through the front windows then shifted to the western windows, then faded behind the bench.
I’d waited impatiently for my copy of Casting Deep Shade by C.D. Wright, and like any acolyte, I felt a little nervous. The book opened like slow steps on creaky wooden stairs, the rumble of words, history, memories, science, photography, art, the body. The sound of rumination, of devotion.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Casting Deep Shade

January 27, 2019January 31, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 4

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 blogger who regularly shares poems or writes about poetry, please consider joining the network.

This week saw poetry bloggers continuing to write about Mary Oliver, as well as reacting to current and celestial events. There were posts about creativity and overcoming writer’s block, reviews, philosophical reflections… the whole mix. I should mention that I am slowly becoming more selective as I continue to add more blogs to my feed. It’s a good thing most people don’t post every day, as Luisa and I do here at Via Negativa! That would be nuts. Anyway, Enjoy.

Those of us who are still here: we are still, always arriving. We’re not in the Promised Land, that’s for sure. All we can really do, is to be in the becoming. Still, always arriving. We’ve been still, always arriving since we left the ennui of Paradise. We throw questions, try to dominate, cure. We try to stare down the enemy though, as if in a mirror, we’ll see our own face in its acts of aggression. Learning to love the questions themselves, rather than the answers relaxes the drive to conquer. As King said, mental freedom, illumination can move things.
Today also on the Jewish calendar: Tu B’Shevat, festival of the trees. Today trees are sheathed in ice in New England. The sap is there, held in tension, in suspense, waiting, always arriving.
Jill Pearlman, MLK, Always Arriving

I don’t know about you, but I process confusion by getting my ass into a chair and my pencil onto a page. So when the video of the young man staring down the Native elder surfaced, I watched it and paid close attention to the emotions that rose to the surface in my body. I didn’t respond on social media. In fact, it didn’t take too long for me to stop looking at social media altogether on the issue. I wrote about it in my notebook. […]
When I taught high school, I spent a lot of time choosing novels that I hoped would expand my students’ empathy, help them walk in another’s life for awhile, break down some of the barriers. That’s what literature and poetry does best, it shows us how it is to be another person. I remember how hard it was for my students in a small town in Alaska to really put themselves into the place of Ishmeal Beah in A Long Way Gone or Amir in The Kite Runner. But when they succeeded, the transformation was permanent. They could not go back to their own small lives without carrying some of the lives of other people who were different than them…. and the same as them.
When I write, I try to offer my reader that same chance to step into the poem. “Did you lose someone to Alzheimer’s? Was it like this?” I offered in Every Atom. “Are you lost and looking for the way some god might be all around you? Does it feel this way?” I wondered in Boundaries.
Recently, I look at my new poems and think I am asking, “Do you love the world? Are you open to the way the crow flies across the cold sand? Are you willing to listen for the soft compression of wings on air?”
“Are you ready to have faith that what you call other is only you on a different day?”
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, On a different day

So I am up and out the door. But the blood moon has rolled over and pulled the thin blanket of clouds with it. The sky reflects a sickly orange spill from the green houses in Bore.
I feel that I’ve written that sentence before. I’ve written about how we impose on the world.
But still, this morning was once in a lifetime.
Sporadic hail through the tree branches.
The dog tugging the lead,
still unlearning to hunt.
Ren Powell, January 21st, 2019

In the end, all that mattered was blood
relations, forgiveness, love. In hospice, I left him alone
the night before he died. Still thought he’d walk
out of that place. The nurse said he was afraid on his own
in the dark. Even with opiates, he couldn’t find a way to sleep.
He asked for me. I drove right over. He stopped breathing that day.
There was a blood moon, auger of end times, in the days
before his death, a lone orb pointing the way,
an opening of sorts, a door for him to slip through, quite easily, on his own.
Christine Swint, Driving My Father Through the End Times, a Sestina

After her tea she gets
the big pot and scrubs vegetables for soup.
Her knife is rhythmic against the cutting board,
her felt slippers scuffing from counter to stove
and back again. I see her mouth move sometimes
as she sways, mincing, mincing her life.
Sarah Russell, Mornings after breakfast

Ever since my daughter planted cover crops in the fall of 2016, I’ve been fascinated by winter rye. How tall and glorious it grows. The subtle colors of its ears. The Catcher in the Rye, and the delicious homophone with wry.
Although it’s almost February, I finally ordered the seeds, and this morning went out to plant. […]
And while I’m out in the dirt, I have time to think about writing, think about how messiness gives the eye and the mind nooks and crannies to explore. How it feels to dig in and turn over, to break the blockages apart, to weed through the words. How the rake finds new roots and clumps get rid of. Sometimes I get an idea for a poem.
This morning, I thought about how I’ve been working on a poem that complains about those people who say home-baked bread can’t be “from scratch” if you don’t grow your own wheat–and here I was planting rye! And I thought about how it’s better to experiment–and risk failure–in a poem, just as this rye patch may fail. This might be the shortest diary ever. We’ll see.
Joannie Strangeland, The rye diary

It’s been two snow & ice storms, four poems submitted to one venue, plane tickets to AWP19 bought, more presidential candidates announcing than I can remember, lots of reading and lots of writing since my last confession. […]
Going through another of those writing funks where I am not happy with much of what I put on a page. Of course, this is not the first time this has happened and I confess that I am well aware that it will happen again. I’m writing a lot trying to push through it. It’s the only way I know to get back on track. Still, it is frustrating when this happens and you wonder if you will ever put another poem on a page that you are happy with.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Federal Workers on My Mind

We can get so hung up on not writing that it makes us anxious and can block us. In a recent issue of Mslexia, poet Tara Bergin says that to combat the terrible fear of starting a poem, instead of saying “You’re going to write a poem tomorrow”, she leaves post- it notes for herself that say things like, “Read such and such an article and take notes” and other notes reminding her to read different things. This means she’s always got something to do and is not failing because she isn’t compiling an actual poem. I did something like this on the long haul towards my PhD – lots of notes to self on my desk, in books and on my phone.
My insomnia is a thing I don’t necessarily like but have come to accept. so in the particularly fevered early hours of PhD days, I made it a thousand times worse by making visual Insomniascapes on my phone -tiny images of me placed in surreal landscapes, or just the landscapes themselves. These were places I knew and ran or walked around to clear my head or to think more but the various apps made them nightmarish. This was possibly a useful kind of displacement. I’ll never really know. Maybe I ought to write poems to accompany them. Even though I wasn’t writing words there but I was still “writing”. The practice was connected with certain emotional and psychological states and was undoubtedly a creative one which was linked with writing.
Pam Thompson, “Writing” Towards Writing

It’s been really helpful to read these posts by poets writing about how they find their way into poems: “Writing” Towards Writing by Pam Thompson and fearless creating by Julie Mellor. As well as containing useful and practical advice, the posts are a comforting reminder that I’m not alone in finding writing hard going at times. I have a poem that’s been kicking around for months. It’s there because I realised that another poem I was writing was really two poems. So I managed to finish poem one but had these scraps of ideas, lines and words for the second poem. I suppose it’s something like knitting a jumper and finding there’s some good wool left over that it would be a shame to waste. Or realising you bought too much expensive wool and that it would be plain wrong to leave it lying around going to ruin. Do you understand the kind of nagging feeling I’m left with? All January it’s been going on and January hasn’t been the best of months to begin with!
Josephine Corcoran, Finding your way into a poem

I’ve been experimenting with combining sketching and poetry writing, and last night, I took a larger leap. I had been looking at an old manuscript, and I was intrigued by some of the images (not all of them mine–I can trace at least two of them back to this poem by Luisa Igloria). I started with those images and wrote the words of the poem. Then I sketched a bit. […]
These new creative directions come with questions. Do the poems work without the image? Is there a market for these poem-like things with images? As I continue to do them, will a narrative arc emerge? As images continue to make an appearance, should I read anything into them?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, When Sketches Meet Poems

Day Three: Thursday, Jan. 24: This day began later than the others thanks to a dentist appointment. (Apparently, after 40 everything falls apart, even if you’ve been taking relatively good care of your teeth.) I could still sip coffee with half my jaw shot up with Novocaine, so I trekked to Starbucks despite the late start.

Sure, it’s totally a cliche to be a writer working in any coffeehouse, let alone Starbucks, but cut this working mom of three some slack, okay? At $6 a day for coffee and a bottle of water (+ tip), with free WiFi and a corner seat next to an outlet, plus the ability to focus for three solid hours without the distractions of home or the office, it’s probably the most convenient and cheapest residency a poet-mom can get.

And even — or maybe because — I’d arrived later in the day, I stayed later too, (the Starbucks baristas must love my loitering ass) and finished a solid draft of the review. I concentrated on the beginning and writing about all of the parts of Esperanza and Hope that make it worth reading and found quotes to demonstrate and by the end of the day I was over-caffeinated, under-fed, and more than a little grumpy as a result, but very satisfied that I finished the week with a completed piece of work.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Micro-Sabbatical 2019

Delighted to receive my copy of “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” a new short story published by Faber & Faber that Sylvia Plath wrote when she was 20 years old, and Mademoiselle rejected. She didn’t work on the story again for two years, and when she did, she diminished the mystery and darkness of it. A reminder that we, as writers, often let editors guide what and how we write way too often – and just because something is rejected, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. She was just way ahead of her time. This story seems today, Murakami-esque, in the school of magical realism or symbolism – some resemblances to the story of Snowpiercer, in fact – at the time, it must have been very surprising reading indeed. I wish she had been encouraged to write more short fiction – this piece shows she had a real talent for it. One more lesson from Sylvia: don’t let editors discourage you from writing something different, or something people haven’t seen before. Or, in modern parlance, F&ck the haters.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Midwinter Sun, Four New Poems up at Live Encounters, Spy Animals, and Plath’s New Book

One thing that is interesting about reading some of the lesser-known or recently translated Tang poets (e.g. Meng Chiao, Li He, Li Shangyin) is the realization that, beyond the Li Po–Tu Fu–Wang Wei axis, not all of the Chinese poets were as focused on the clarity of the image the way these (and some others) often were. From the standpoint of English-language poetics, we tend to see Li Po, through Ezra Pound’s translations, as the avatar of imagism, though he also wrote poems of mystic journeys that veer into the surreal and dreamlike. […] But the emphasis on the imagist “thing” has until recently tended to leave a lot of other Tang-era poets out of picture. A. C. Graham began to remedy that somewhat in his Poems of the Late T’ang (1965), and in recent years, further translations of individual poets have been more frequently published.

The latest of these is the work of Li Shangyin (813-858), translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts (New York Review Books, 2018). This volume includes not only Roberts’s translation of approximately 50 pages of Li’s poetry (with facing original Chinese), but also the versions by Graham and some by Lucas Klein (most of which are duplicate poems, making for interesting comparisons). Li’s style is at times naturalistic and imagistic, but more often allusive, metaphorical, and, like Li He’s, surreal. His work has historically been considered extremely obscure or, as Roberts puts it in her introduction, “unknowable and elusive . . . almost baroque, opulently layered with distinct mythological, historical, personal, and symbolist imagery” (xi). This, of course, makes him difficult to translate. […]
Perhaps of use is an ars poetica, which begins,
At dawn, use clouds
To conceive the lines.
In winter, hold snow
To divine the poem. (33)
Mike Begnal, On Li Shangyin

I’m thinking of the whole complicated continuum from Pastoral poetry to the current imbroglio of ‘eco/environmental poetry’. I’ve been wrestling with this ever since I read Yvonne Reddick’s tour de force of exegesis in Ted Hughes: environmentalists and eco poet. I think I lost my way in the second chapter in which she summarises the sects and subsects of ecopoetry criticism: the topological, the tropological, the entropological and the ethnological. There are probably more by now, but they didn’t help me to entangle what I think of as ‘nature’, living as we do in a land where every metre has been named, walked, farmed, exploited, fenced, walled, built on, abandoned and reclaimed. All I know is that is if we continue degrade the ecological balances of the world it will die. The earth will get over that. It doesn’t care. It’s already gone through four major extinctions, not least being the one caused by the emergence of oxygen in the free atmosphere. It doesn’t care for us. But it seems obvious that we need to care for it if we care anything for ourselves.
When it comes to poetry that concerns itself with the natural world (and I’ll strenuously avoid that capitalised cliche Nature) I guess my first big eye-opener was Raymond Williams’ The country and the city which was my introduction to the idea that words like that are culturally constructed, and go on being deconstructed and reconstructed. Very little of the poetry we were given at school concerned itself with the city and the urban. It was pastoral, nostalgic and often sentimental . Poems like ‘The deserted village’. Poems like ‘Daffodils’. It took me a long time to work out why I distrusted ‘Daffodils’ but the clue’s in the first line:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
The first word; I. It’s not about daffodils, is it? It’s about the poet and what the daffodils can do for him as he wanders (ie purposelessly) and lonely (ie in self-elected solitariness) as a cloud (ie diffuse and without responsibility). It’s what I thought of when I heard Gormley’s phrase ‘ a pre-narcissistic art’. He did a revolutionary thing, Wordsworth. It’s a shame this poem is what he’s chiefly remembered for by folk who aren’t that interested in poetry. He opened our eyes to a power and loveliness beyond the bounds of a predominantly urban and urbane culture.
John Foggin, Green thoughts, and a Polished Gem: Alison Lock

“Nature poets” can be fierce, asserting the need for stewardship of our blue planet; poets who write happiness well understand–and convey–that pain and sorrow remain our companions in life. That does not mean a focus-on-the-positive Pollyanna attitude. No–to compose poems that show us we have every reason to love what we encounter takes bravery, because we so often fear what the world offers. To do so takes deep acknowledgment of suffering, not just a glancing nod, but compassion. The poet may not “behave well” in his or her own life but has the practiced gift of observation and enough craft to show the reader difficult perspectives.
Sometimes, gladness and optimism and beauty get obscured by experience and griefs. Next time that happens, maybe turn to poems?
Ann E. Michael, Remembering joy, redux

I just finished listening to the podcast “On Being with Krista Tippet” where Tippet interviews Mary Oliver. I am still in the glow of Ms. Oliver’s voice, her words, her generosity. It originally aired in October 2015 and so was conducted in the last years of her life when she had left Provincetown, Massachusetts after the death of her longterm partner, Molly Malone Cook.

One of the many things that I jotted down while listening to Oliver is: “Poetry wishes for a community.” She also spoke about “the writer’s courtship” and the importance of creating time and space in one’s life to write — preferably while being outdoors. […]

Here is what I know: poetry needs community; it thrives when poets come together to write, to share ideas, to acknowledge the poetic voice in one another. These retreats always leave me feeling nourished. I do not know what I would do alone in a garret unless I had my poetry community to gather with in early autumn and late winter.
Susan Rich, Poetry Wishes for a Community — Mary Oliver, Poets on the Coast, and Groundhog Day Writing Retreat.

I’ve been reading about the art of wood carving in David Esterly’s fascinating The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making. The author said several things of interest to me as a writer.
Here’s one that echoes Rilke’s idea of “being only eye,” that is, looking at something so intimately that “self” consciousness falls away but something of the deeper self rises up. Esterly writes:
“Once I gave lessons in foliage carving. I proposed to the students that we reject the idea that carving should be a means for self-expression…The assignment would be to carve a laurel leaf, a leaf of extreme simplicity. I asked the students to throw themselves entirely into the leaf, seek its essence and express only that, putting aside their personalities and carving only with hands and eyes…At the end of the day? There were eight individual leaves, some more compelling than others, but each distinct from all the rest…Trying to express the leaf, the carvers inadvertently had expressed themselves. But it was…a self-expression…from a union with their subject.”
I talk about this a bit when I lead writing workshops at an area art museum. I ask people to give themselves over to looking, and then, by challenging them to write constantly in a timed session, invite the inadvertent utterance onto the page. In this way we give ourselves the chance to surprise ourselves.
Marilyn McCabe, Whittle While You Work; or, Considering Wood Carving and Writing

The passing of Mary Oliver, and the subsequent news articles and social media messages about her, made me realize something about contemporary poetry. There’s so little joy in much of it.
The range of emotions and experience available for poets is limitless, yet the predominant themes in journals and books makes it seem like poets choose to spend more of their energy on the darker side of the spectrum. Now there’s a lot to be depressed about today and a lot to be upset about. Clearly social and political issues influence, and sometimes dominate many poets’ work. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Good writing, whether it concerns tragedy, anger, sorrow or grief, is still good writing. And as I said in a previous post, pain lends a poem a kind of emotional energy that’s useful for a poem. In fact, I think negative emotions are easier to drive than positive ones. But that doesn’t mean that every poem has to feel like a gut punch.
Grant Clauser, It’s Not All Misery: What Mary Oliver Taught Us About Joy

When the moon turned red, so many more stars appears and everything had that crisp look which is hard to explain but the night sky felt as if someone had used the “sharpen” tool in Photoshop, making sure each pinprick of light was detailed and perfectly placed.

As the eclipse went on, I thought–I should be writing. I have this weird superstition about monumental moments–New Year’s Eve, lunar eclipse, birthdays, solstice, Day of the Dead, etc–that I should be writing on these days because it’s a nod to the universe that yes, this is my passion and if you see me writing on these days, it means it’s what I should be doing with my life (and hey universe, if you see this, send me some good luck and inspiration too).

I realize this doesn’t really make any sense, but it’s a strange belief I’ve carried since I was younger. On New Year’s, let me start the year by reading a poem or writing one, on my birthday, let me be laughing so it carries on through the year.

But during the lunar eclipse, I realized that even though I wasn’t physically writing a poem, I was experience one. I was in the middle of a poem looking out. Insert shooting star. Insert the moment you hear your neighbors laugh because they are out on their patio with a drink watching as well. Insert telescope zooming on a crater.

I now want to write the poem to create the feeling I had on Sunday. I want to be lost in a poem and not know it’s a poem. Maybe that’s life. Maybe it’s when we’re mindful. Maybe this is something I need to think about more when the reader is reading my poem, is she lost in the poem and looking out, shooting star filled, or is she just lost?

Who knows if we are the poet or our life is the poem? Who cares to find out?
Kelli Russell Agodon, During the Super Blood Wolf Moon Lunar Eclipse, I Find Myself in a Poem

December 30, 2018December 30, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 52

This is my final round-up of quotes + links from the 2018 Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, supplemented as always by some other poetry blogs from my feed reader. What a varied and interesting year it’s been! This digest has in most cases constituted Via Negativa’s only real contribution to the poetry blogging community—I tend to be too busy drafting new poems (and blogging most of them, it’s true) to also find the time to blog about poetry, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. But I don’t plan to stop doing a weekly digest… and fortunately, the proper poetry bloggers don’t show any sign of slowing down either.

Introducing the Poetry Blogging Network

Kelli Russell Agodon, one of the co-founders of the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, has just launched what I suspect might become a larger and more permanent version of it, the Poetry Blogging Network. Click through to sign up.

In addition to designing a nifty badge, Kelli has suggested a focus, envisioning “a group of poets who are dedicated to blogging about their poetry lives, the ups and down of being a writer in the world, along with what they are reading and writing.” She doesn’t say how often people ought to blog, but notes that she herself is “committed to blogging at least 2x a month (with my accountability buddy, Susan Rich, to keep me honest.)” Based on my own experience here at Via Negativa, I would add that getting a co-blogger is another good way to keep the blogging energy going.

Kelli has also volunteered to host the links list, with Valentine’s Day as a deadline for new additions, and I really hope that all the Blog Revival Tour regulars will re-up, and that other bloggers whom I’ve sort of unofficially added to the revival tour over the past year will take the opportunity to add their blog links to this list as well. Also, it would be great if the community were a little more diverse this year in terms of geography, ethnicity, sexuality and gender orientation, poetic style, etc., which might require some of us to make an extra effort to reach out to people who aren’t necessarily already within our cozy social media circles. If there’s one thing the poetry world doesn’t need, it’s more cliques, factions, and in-groups. Let’s build the most inclusive network we can! And also, let’s read and link to each other as often as possible. Please don’t let mine be the only regular digest.

Jesus never watched YouTube
or used glitter glue.
He didn’t dance the foxtrot
or even the hora.
He never rode a school bus
or sharpened a No. 2 pencil.
If he were here, he might marvel
at tweets from Lin-Manuel,
at the array of snack foods
in even the most basic 7-11.
But I think he’d be too busy
tenderly cradling the body
of the latest migrant child
to die in government custody,
overturning tables
in the halls of Congress,
searing the earth
with his tears.
Rachel Barenblat, Jesus never ate chocolate

For Noël, the French received a gift of unknowingness. It’s a lucky gift! Les gilets jaunes have doled out confusion to their compatriots who are singularly sure of themselves, gifted in the pur et dur, the absolute. Their clipped “mais oui!” or “mais non!” has, until now, been singularly annoying.
In this new moment, when asked about politics, people pause, hesitate, search for words that are taking days and weeks to form. They glance out the window at the full moon, the crumbling cornices, the slate roofs. Roll over, Descartes! Perhaps there are no answers at all!
Yes, the conceptual ways of thinking are sinking under their own weight. The good news is that the French have a great correction in their back pocket. Food, or exquisite attention to the everyday. The marchés are cornucopias of oysters, escargots, fishes, feathered pheasants; they have a milky way of pungent cheese, chocolate and of course the faucets nearly run with wine. Celebrations aren’t just about consumption: they are happenings of community. I also think of Francis Ponge’s poems about oysters and escargots. When systems can’t be trusted, when they fail, go to what you can touch, taste, what is close to the heart. Don’t go to nihilism, go to regeneration. It’s a chance to reimagine what society could be, to clear space for imagination and the beauty of what is.
Jill Pearlman, To France: The Gift of Not Knowing

On the back of #PoetBlogRevival, I started the year with good intentions: to blog weekly about the poetry life. How hard could it be? I stuck to my resolution for over six months, blogged sporadically over late summer and haven’t posted at all over the last three months. So what? you might say.
There are many others with much more to say and whose literary achievements are worthy of note (check out, for instance, Matthew Stewart’s annual round-up of the best UK poetry blogs over on his blog, Rogue Strands).
I attended the Forward Prizes for Poetry in introvert mode. Since then, I’ve more or less withdrawn from the poetry world ‘out there’. I’ve begun to feel overwhelmed by e-newsletters, blog posts, web links to further reading and other such means of keeping abreast of poetry what’s news, hip and happenings. Much of it has gone unread. I’m more behind than ever with my reading of the magazines I subscribe to. I’ve been less active on social media, too (no bad thing, that).
On the positive side, I’ve written twelve new poems on a theme, with others in the pipeline. And successes are up on last year…
Jayne Stanton, 2018: the long and the short of it

2018 has been my biggest year to date for videopoetry. I came to the genre by pure chance in the middle of 2014, after making short experimental and narrative films on and off for about 35 years. Videopoetry completely rejuvinated my film-making, returned my love of it to me at a time I felt it was all close to expiry. In the past four-and-a-half years, I have made over 60 short videos, more than the sum of my film-making over all previous decades. I am so grateful to have been welcomed by the international community of film-makers, poets, curators, editors and audiences that, like me, have come to love this unique genre. Grateful too for the captivating videos and poems by other artists that have inspired and influenced me over recent years.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I completed judging of the first Atticus Review Videopoem Contest, an event that will now be added to the international videopoetry calendar for future years. Atticus is an online poetry journal coming out of the USA with a large and wide readership. It is one of the few poetry publications worldwide to feature videopoetry as an ongoing feature. It was an honour to be invited by the editors (David Olimpio and Matt Mullins), to be part of kicking off this first year of the contest. I found great pleasure in watching, and sometimes re-watching, the 115 videos sent in to us. The quality was high. In fact, as a film-maker myself, the rich creativity of my peers was humbling, in a good way. And so it was a challenge to select only four awarded videos. These have already been publicly announced, and the videos themselves will be published in Atticus on 11 January. But all four videos are available for viewing now to intrepid explorers of the film-maker weblinks to be found on the awards announcement page.

In 2018 I have completed and publicly released 11 videos, along with a few others that, for various reasons, are currently only available for private viewing. Here are the latest three I have not yet discussed here on the blog…
Marie Craven, End of year 2018

Though not much in touch with popular amusements, I am touched by bemusement. I like to think of amusement as, to be beguiled by the muse. And she is always here somewhere, waiting to distract me from ordinary thoughts in order to move me towards more ineffible states of being.

Like the sensation I woke to this morning that tugs at me to write a poem with the word frottage in it. I recall hearing this word from the lips of my first woman lover, perhaps I was dreaming of her? I now recall that it is an art technique, which also involves rubbing. The metaphors abound.
And regarding 2019: I want to start a new blog for reviewing poetry chapbooks. I’m trying to figure out where/how to do this so that it will get some visibility. I’d also be happy to buy your chapbooks, and review them. Please send me links and any suggestions you might have for this project. And what to call it?
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning A/muse/ment

Part of the magic of this poem, for me, is the way it understands how children imagine, how they are formed by chance encounters and stories whose tellers never imagined the impact they might have, and how our childhood is carried in us, and how we can be startled back into it, and in some ways become as powerless as a child. The framing narrative is kept implicit..you used to say …. these stairs …everyone else…..your room.The detail is kept for the stories of each tread, the fabulous tales told to a child who will never forget them. And then there’s the power of the image of one rooted to the foot of a staircase and its narrowing closed off perspective. I love the way poem pivots on that one line .why did you never tell me? In its control and contained love and grief it does everything I want in a poem. […]
So there we are. Thank you to all the cobweb guest poets of 2018. I hope you all have a happy and successful 2019.
Why not make a start by submitting your poems about food, or food related poems, or poems with taste and flavour and possibly a recipe for a better world to The Fenland Reed. It’s a handsome journal edited by lovely folk. Go on. You know you should. Here’s your link. https://www.thefenlandreed.co.uk/submissions
John Foggin, Best of 2018. November and December: Tom Weir and Christopher North

There was a time. One time. Sometimes I write depression. Disability? The literature of loss. Situational. There are situations: once, twice, a decade: daily there was beauty. Pain grinding me to bone. I could bear to look at my own hands as he saw them, you know. Also: how small I was when I was dying: how we all loved that. How we all loved me as superhero, triumphant. How once I told all my dreams. This morning the wind rocketed, screaming. A cobalt pre-dawn sky with half-moon and Venus. In sleep I’d walked-out: what that means so clear. But I can’t talk about it—see, time has changed. It’s not safe. Out loud. What you are can and will be used against you. Say: big cat padding through night has become herself an insult, or apology. Treading. Careful, water. Whole silences now. Which means, of course, I no longer know how to be beautiful: how did I do that, again? I can’t think. Up a fire tower, wind-quaked, I left my coat in the car. All drugs on board and hyperopic to farthest horizon. Everything close gone dark and blur, but vanishing point a fierce, bright clarity. How relieved I was, finally. Calm. Waking, there was only deafening wind. Memory of being. Beautiful. Of everything, aloud. How did this happen is the question of literature. How does a person come to this?
JJS, December 29, 2018: the question of literature

Merry 5th day of Christmas and Happy New Year, with some thoughts, hopes, and plans for the coming year…

Turn in two final book manuscripts.

Continue running the Christ Church Cooperstown women’s group another year–next up, a book discussion about the curious medieval document, The Cloude of Unknowyng. (Last year, there was one book event–Buechner’s Godric.) Figure out some more wild outings and events and workshops, often arts-related.
Send out at least one poetry manuscript.
Do some work for Fr. James Krueger’s meditation retreat Mons Nubifer Sanctus in Lake Delaware with my friend Laurie, now that we’re both on the board.
Read more. 2018 was a bad year for reading because I was stretched a bit too thin. I want to read more classical writers and also some of the early Christian mystical writers. More poetry and stories. And the stack of unread novels.
Make like a tree and put forth green leaves. Drink from deep sources.
Work on that odd idea for a new novel. Secret, of course.
Improve my health to avoid losing months to illness…
Skip blurbing other people’s books for at least a year (because I couldn’t manage those commitments in 2018.) […]
Marly Youmans, At the threshold of years: a few resolutions

I still remember walking across campus with my friend Stephanie as she explained to me about this new idea in the tech world: Blogging. Why would anyone choose to write journal entries that would be shared with the world? It was like leaving your journal on the bus or better yet, giving a stranger specific access to your thoughts. What a weird idea, I thought; it will never catch on I told her.

And here I am in my ninth year of Blogging at Blog Post Number 1,000. How did that happen?

The truth is, I do remember why I started. I wanted the casual and low stakes world that blogging provides. As a poet, it’s too easy to fuss over each comma and semi-colon. I wanted to see what would happen if I published work that didn’t need to be polished to a high sheen. I also had a very practical reason: The Alchemist’s Kitchen, my third book was about to be published and I had no idea how to publicize it. Friends of mine, Kelli Russell Agodon and January O’Neil had been blogging for years and finding real connection with other poets through the process. I thought I’d give it a try.
Blogging allowed me to connect with other poets and writers, many of us just becoming familiar with this thing called Publicity. We did virtual poetry tours interviewing each other when our books came out and sharing poems that we loved from dead mentor poets (Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov) as well as from work just appearing in journals. We wrote articles on how to organize a poetry reading for optimum success and shared information on favorite writing retreats. In other words, we were creating a network of poets who were neither academics or poet rockstars — anyone with access to a laptop, with access to a library was invited to the party.
Susan Rich, PBN for Blog Post Number One Thousand – 1,000

I took part in the Great Poet Bloggers Revival, launched by Donna Vorreyer and Kelli Russell Agodon, which challenged poets to publish one new blog post per week in order to help everyone feel more engaged in the community.
This year, I managed to put together 63 blog posts — not all of these were put out weekly as intended and not all focused on poetry. But I’m feeling happy and confident about the amount of blogging I managed to do in 2018.
Out of all the blogging I’ve done in the past year, I am most proud of the eight poet spotlight interviews I’ve conducted. It’s such a pleasure to be a part of and learn from the poetry community — and since I’ve been lax on participating or attending readings and open mics, being able to still feel connected through these interviews has been wonderful.
Andrea Blythe, Building Poetry Community: My Blogging Year in Review

OMG, is it time for a Poetry Action Plan? Why, yes. Yes it is!
What, you may ask, is a Poetry Action Plan, or PAP?
It is a road map for how to think about your writing life. I have created a plan for the past 11 years and it has served me well–even in the years when I didn’t think I needed a plan.
There are four steps to creating a PAP.
1.    Define your goals. What is most important to you as a writer?
2.    Be realistic about what can you achieve.
3.    Track your progress.
4.    Prepare for setbacks BUT be open to opportunities wherever they appear.
And if I had to add a fifth step, I’d say don’t be too hard on yourself for not accomplishing a goal.
As I have mentioned, Last year, after dealing with the death of my ex-husband at the end of 2016, I was just trying to stay above water. We were used to our little system of pick ups and drop offs. And while I never thought I had enough time, I really missed (and still miss), the balance of another parent, for everything from child care to having another voice in the room. But I managed, somehow, to get a few things done.
In 2019, I will:

Get ready to move to Mississippi! I had this as last on my list, but really, this is Job 1. The kids and I are moving this summer to Ole Miss for nine months. So all of my energy is going to making the transition as smooth as possible. *Gulp*

Write a poem a week. I didn’t write very much in 2018. It was painful not writing, but I just never found my groove. This is just a part in the evolution of my process, I tell myself as I wallow in a pool of self pity. But, it’s time to get back to basics.

Submit to eight top-tier journals. Believe it or not, I sent poems to three journals. Still waiting to hear back from two. I was asked to submit a few places. Admittedly, I regret not writing or sending out in 2018. Won’t make that mistake again.

Help Rewilding find the widest audience possible. See my last post.

Laugh more.

January Gill O’Neil, OMG, is it time for a Poetry Action Plan? Why, yes. Yes it is!

I keep saying I’m not going to try to finish my manuscript anytime soon—that I’m going to wait until I’m done having kids. But if you have ever finished a manuscript, maybe you can relate to the pull it has on you—I want it to be READ. I want it to be out in the world. And as much as I tell myself it isn’t the right time, I can’t promote it right now, I can’t spend money on contests or time on editing—here I am, printing off a paper copy to do the work of “ordering the storm”—rearranging the poems into a final arc—then the paper edits, poem cuts, poem additions….this isn’t at all when I intended to work on this manuscript, but I feel like my writing is stalled in a way, built up around this work that needs to be “birthed”—and as much as I hate the analogy of the book being “my baby”—no, not at all—I can relate it to that horrible waiting period, overdue, heavy with new life. It is a little bit like having a child that no one has met. At the same time, I want to do this right. I love my past publishers—they have been great to me—but I think that I need to win a contest to get the book any attention. I can’t manage five kids homeschooling and teaching online, plus book promotion to the scale that a small press would require. The goal is that I’d like my poems to be read by real live human beings. Now I need to just figure out the best way to make that happen.
Renee Emerson, Paper Edit

Sometimes the critique offered is not something I can figure out how to make my own, or how to grapple with it in the given poem. Especially if I’m unclear about the problem the critique suggestions are meant to solve, I can’t comfortably settle into the solution. I can try things but have no ability to gauge the success or failure of the attempt.
Or sometimes I understand and agree with the critique, but just can’t make the given poem hold up. When I turn one screw, the whole thing gees or haws to one side or another. The center cannot hold. (Maybe a revolution should be at hand…)
At any rate, receiving and using critique is very tricky. First, I have to have sufficient distance from the piece to be able to see it NOT through the rose-colored-glasses of first-love and also NOT through the who-wrote-THIS-hopeless-piece-of-crap smeared window. I gotta be cool, man, real cool.
Then I have to be willing to play around, try anything, mess things up, break things open, dismantle and remantle. That can be hard. I know what I wanted the poem to do. Sometimes a critique wants to take the poem in a different direction. It can be very hard, sometimes impossible, to allow that process. That doesn’t mean the critique isn’t right on; it just means that I don’t have enough distance yet, or as a writer I’m not yet skilled enough to figure out how to follow through, or I just don’t want to go in that direction, for whatever misguided (or guided) reasons.
Sometimes a critique is off base. Sometimes a critique is not well grounded itself. You have to be open enough to both consider a critique, and to discard it. That takes a level of self-confidence that to some borders on hubris. Own it. You might be wrong in the long run, but at least you can be honest about the fact you considered an idea but then turned it away.
As I’ve noted before in this space, one of the most important editing tools is time. Sometimes I just have to put it all away, poem and critique and notes and versions. Move on, at least for the moment.
Marilyn McCabe, Abandon Hope; or, Grappling with Critique

Neither starshine nor moonlight.
Instead, snow shine wraps me
in diamond dust at midnight’s hour.
Clouds cling to the earth, yet
a thousand celestial luminaria
light this solstice night. In the yard
a host of snow angels pressed
everywhere. No sounds, no footfalls.
No crinkle of crenelated wings.
Bonnie Larson Staiger, Solstice: Seraphim in Snow

Everything is red this morning – the soil, the river, and water draining my throat –
bloody like the spout from the hawk’s neck.
Stars wheel though darkness as in creation-time nameless but with the identity
of my dead mother.
Where are the homes of birds, food for the bees, the sun whose rays must penetrate
the graves of my people?
Uma Gowrishankar, A Tale From The Forgotten Land – II

I do hope that this machine lasts longer, but I also know that five years seems to be the life of many a major appliance these days.

I think of my grandmother who had a washing machine on a porch that had no room and no electric for a dryer. She took the wet clothes to the clothesline at the back of the yard every week of her life until her heart attack prompted the major life change of moving to an assisted living facility. Her heart attack happened as she was hanging clothes on the line. She collapsed and stayed there, under the clothesline, under a hot August sun, until her neighbors checked on her late in the evening after she didn’t answer the phone.

It was not the first time I realized that my family is made of pretty stern stuff. On days when I feel disheartened or discouraged, I think about my ancestors, and I find the courage to keep going.

I also realize that almost everything I face is nothing compared to what they went through. A washing machine that goes wonky? Kitchen cabinets that are delayed? I can hear the ancestors snorting at the thought that I have troubles.

It’s been a good morning. I’ve read some poetry; the new collections by Terrance Hayes and Kevin Young are amazing. I wrote a poem that’s nowhere close to what they’ve done, but writing is the winning of the battle. I’ve got a load of sheets in the dryer. I’m happy that yesterday gave us an appointment for the delivery of the cabinets: Feb. 4–hurrah!

And now off to take care of my physical body–spin class calls!
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Sounds of Washing

This Christmas has mostly been about recovering from minor arthroscopic surgery to correct a torn meniscus in my left knee. My stitches came out on 19 December and I had hoped to do a lot of writing because, coincidentally, my husband and two grown-up children have been visiting a close family friend in Australia for two weeks so I’ve had the house to myself. The truth is, not a lot of writing has been done and I’ve missed my noisy, demanding, distracting, annoying but totally fantastic family very very much – far more than I thought I would – and they’re not back until January 4!
But I have established a kind of routine, including exercising to increase and improve my mobility post-op, and I have completed some boring but necessary jobs that I’ve been putting off for far too long. These include donating old poetry magazines to charity shops, reshelving poetry books that have been piled on the floor and making room for my own books by putting some of the children’s books into storage. I know, exciting stuff.
Exercising on a new static bike – a present from husband, Andrew – has been a wonderful opportunity to listen to the radio. In fact, rediscovering the vast catalogue of dramas and dramatisations available on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 4Extra (via the BBC Radio iPlayer app which I connect to my Bluetooth speaker) has been one of the key pleasures of my holiday. Cycling away on my bike, I’ve listened to and enjoyed dramatisations of Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and ghost stories by M R James. I’m now listening to readings of Sylvia Plath’s Letters. I can’t help but feel inspired by her energy, her hard work, her ambitions, her hopefulness, even knowing how badly everything turned out in the end for her.
Josephine Corcoran, Christmas Retreat

Glass: A Journal of Poetry has released its annual list of recommended reading in poetry. I keep a list, too, of favorite poems throughout the year so I thought I’d share a few with y’all. These are in no particular order and are not all of the poetry I’ve saved over the past year. But, these are definitely stellar poems in some of my favorite journals. I hope you’ll click through and read them.
Louisiana Requiem by Heather Treseler in Frontier Poetry.
Hurricane, 3rd Day by Melissa Studdard in New Ohio Review.
The Peaches by Jericho Brown in The Adroit Journal.
Eve in the Blood by M. Stone in Avatar Review.
Finishing School by Emma Bolden in Black Warrior Review.
Spectacle by Lindsay Illich in Foundry.
Visitation by Marissa Glover in Barren Magazine.
Upon the Blue Nile by Bola Opaleke in the Pangolin Review.
Voucher by Jack Bedell in Ucity Review.
Europa by Echo Wren in Rattle.
Fish Love by Bryanna Licciardi in The Mantle.
Anniversary Poem by Michael Maul in Dodging the Rain.
Charlotte Hamrick, A Few of My Favorite Poems 2018

It’s almost 2019, and if you’re like me (or January O’Neil, who has a cool “poetry action plan,” you start thinking about your intentions for the year ahead – what you hope for, what you can plan for, what you are envisioning. This year’s Vision Board had a lot of animals in it, and more words about inspiration and creativity. I realized the last two years had been all about survival – first the liver tumors and the cancer diagnosis, then the surprise of neurological symptoms and the MS diagnosis. I’m hoping this coming year to be fewer doctor appointments, more wonder – less about survival, more about creating and befriending and embracing the world.
From the AWP conference in March in Portland to sending out two poetry manuscripts – one about the journey of the last two years and one about the history of women and witchcraft, which I was just shuffling through last night to think about organization and which poems to leave out and which to add. I’m going to get more serious about sending out both – I only sent out book manuscripts four times last year, but I sent out over 150 submissions (!!) total, including fiction and essay attempts, and published about fifty poems, which seems like an okay ratio, but I had no idea I had submitted so much.
Other life goals include cultivating more friendships and socializing a little more, paying more attention to my body and treating it like something to take care of and not push, and spending some time (!!) meditating or doing something restful and creative every day, maybe even just five minutes of art or writing before bed. Also, trying to value my time more. One of the things about getting serious diagnoses is that it makes you re-think what you spend your time and energy on. What are the essential things for living for you? Spending time outside, reading good things, and time consciously building a life – whether that’s balance or motor-skill exercises, or reaching out to a new friend, or time spent noticing the new flowers in your garden to the kind of moon that rises. Or the visitors to your neighborhood – the day after Christmas, this bobcat visited our street!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Two End of the Year Poems in ACM, and Dreams, Goals, and Inspirations for 2019

Happy New Year and big thanks to such an incredible online community of poets, writers, and supporters! I started actively posting and promoting this poetry blog in October 2014, and have seen a constant increase in traffic, likes, and followers. I’ve met some amazing and talented people along the way.
My blog really started out as an experiment, to just share the things I’ve learned in the last year or so as I began actively submitted my poems and other writing to different markets. It does seem there is a need for clear, concise, and quick ways to stay updated on calls for submissions, contests, writing tips, especially those with a focus on poetry. I’d love to hear from my readers if they have suggestions for information I can share or other resources they find helpful in their quest to publish poetry.
Trish Hopkinson, Happy New Year and Thank You! – My submission & blog stats, 250K+ views in 2018!

I love hearing about people’s favorite books, and regularly shop and read from lists published everywhere every December. I’ve even written a short discussion of my favorite genre books in 2018, to appear in Strange Horizons’ annual roundup a few days from now.
But I’m skeptical of these lists, too: “best” for whom, when, and why? For what purpose? I’ve found no single critic out there who shares all of my own tastes and obsessions, even though I’m part of a demographic heavily represented in literary journalism. What makes a book powerful is partly latent in the text, but is also contingent on circumstances. Even for one reader, the stories or voices that feel most necessary can vary from day to day. There’s no value-neutral, objective “best” out there.
I can certainly name the poetry books that most wowed me this fall, that I kept wanting to share: If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins by Terrance Hayes, and, a little belatedly, Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang. Does that make them the best? It means they’re really good, for sure.
But I also bought poetry books for friends, marking a few poems for each that I thought would especially appeal. Asghar and Chang were on that list, but so was Ada Limón’s The Carrying, which I also remembered loving–and as I reread it, the book gained even more force. Some books grow over time. Does that make Limón’s book the best, even if a December reviewer barely has enough perspective to see it? Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment by Alessandra Lynch worked like that for me, earlier this year. On first encounter, I felt frustrated by how the poems skirted the central subject–rape–but the successive readings you have to do for a reviewing assignment changed my reaction to profound admiration. And while I just read Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, I can say it’s almost unbearably powerful, and maybe you should read it wearing oven mitts–where does THAT criterion go in the rankings? Really, I liked or loved almost all of the poetry collections I read in 2019 (listed below, excluding things I didn’t like enough to finish)–but I have no idea which will mean most to me five years from now.
Lesley Wheeler, Best for what?–reading 2018

Just when you think your work
is done, Coyote says
we haven’t even begun.
Tom Montag, from The Wishin’ Jupiter Poems: Just When