A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, plus occasional other poetry bloggers in my feed reader. If you missed last week’s digest, here’s the archive.
This week, I found a lot of Poetry Month post mortems, as you might expect. But several other themes emerged, as well, with posts on interdisciplinary influences and collaboration, translation and “envoicing”, spirituality and religion, and the importance of active engagement in the public sphere.
April’s gone, and the rigour of National/Global Poetry Writing Month is over for another year. So how did it benefit me as a writer?
- The discipline of producing new writing, daily.
- Motivation to get started and keep going, from a writing community.
- No shortage of writing prompts to overcome self-imposed barriers/blocks to writing.
- New and unexpected learning/discoveries from prompt-related web links.
- Exploring form.
- Approaching old poem drafts from new perspectives; fresh starts.
- Unexpected/surprising outcomes.
- An abundance of material to work on or cherry-pick from.
Jayne Stanton, After NaPoWriMo
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April wasn’t a different month for me in terms of poetry than any other month. I wrote a few poems and sent a few packets out. I got some new ideas for poems, which always makes me happy. I took a purple legal pad to school–right about the time that my administrator schedule heated up, and I didn’t have pockets of time during my work day to write. But I’ve set a foundation for later.
While getting a Fitbit may not be one of the goals we see in anyone’s writing goals, I do think it’s important to remember that our ability to create poems may rely on keeping healthy as best we can. I’ve spent the last year gaining 15 pounds, and I’m happy to be taking steps to reverse that. More important, I’m glad to have a gadget that will remind me to move away from the desk periodically.
What I’d like to carry with me: I’d like to write poems more regularly. I do admire the poets like Luisa Igloria who write a poem a day, year in, year out. I’d be happy if I wrote poetry 3 days a week. I know there are trackers for that–you don’t wear them on your wrist, but a tracker is available. Maybe I should try that . . .
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Last Day of National Poetry Month
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So, for the last year, I have been writing. When I have the time. Whenever I have the inclination. When there’s something that is nagging at the back of my mind. I stopped submitting poems altogether for about six months. I concentrated on creating work. And guess what? It’s almost summer. And once again, I really do think I may have a third manuscript now. If not, I have a whole lotta poems. And that’s a start.
Donna Vorreyer, Whole Lotta Poems
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My best writing has been done when I wake up with a clear mind and maybe 40 minutes just to dream on paper.
My best writing rarely happens when I am saying to myself, “Okay, you need to make this one excellent, you need to write your best poem ever.”
I have a friend I write with back and forth and on May 1st he sent me an email saying, “I haven’t lost the energy, I want to keep writing a poem-a-day…” And I agree.
So I will continue on trying to write a poem a day, but being happy if I get a poem a week or a poem every-other-day.
Because I love the journey and while I love a draft that leads to a completed work, I appreciate the poems that don’t. They are like sketches in an artist’s journal, practice swings on a baseball field knowing one day, we’ll hit it out of the park.
Kelli Russell Agodon, While I Was a Terrible Blogger During #NaPoWriMo, I Earned My Poem-A-Day Merit Badge… (Plus: Why Quantity Wins Over Quality in First Drafts…)
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In addition to having a goal of writing a poem each day, I also set a goal of reading fifteen books of poetry this month. I came close, reading thirteen books of poetry. A little short of my goal but considering some people don’t even read thirteen books in the entire year I think I did okay. And I read some damn good poetry this month.
But just because the month is over doesn’t mean I’m going to be any less focused on my writing. I’ll use the momentum to keep writing and keep putting words down on paper.
Courtney LeBlanc, 30/30
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The landscape’s brought colors and pollinators and all the juiciness of reproduction cycles into the season’s height. Time to take walks and breathe.
And say nothing.
And let the words subside for awhile, and percolate the way the rains percolate through the wet, warm soil and into the waiting earth.
Ann E. Michael, Wordless
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I love going to poetry readings when it’s clear the poet has studied acting, is a good actor. I’m thinking of Lola Haskins, who reads with her full body, who takes such time and care with her delivery. You see her wanting to do something with her audience with her performance. Beth Ann Fennelly is another poet whose recitations (though she usually holds her book, just to have it in case) are occasions where her poetry becomes something physical through her performance. Saul Williams, of course. Or think of singer-poets, Patti Smith. Or John Giorno. Or Marie-Elizabeth Mali.
Obviously, the whole spoken word movement celebrates performance and recitation, going back to Marc Smith, with roots in the Black Arts Movement, the Beat Writers, going back to Dylan Thomas and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s radio broadcasts, back to workers’ chants and back to call and response, back to Father Walt, oh hell, back to ancient Greek poetry. The beginnings of drama and poetry and ritual, all of this is old, old stuff. It’s because poetry, those words, don’t reside in the brain–to be accessed mechanically–but are in the breath and heart beat, in the body. Performing a poem, then, requires that bodily engagement.
Jim Brock, Recitation
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These are exciting times for the arts: eyes and ears are open wide and there are few if any barriers standing in the way of experimentation. So within these exciting times of relative freedom from the constraints of rigid tradition and strict orthodoxy in style and form, it’s a truism to say that art thrives on synthesis. In all regions of the wide cultural territory that lie before us in the early 21st century, there is abundant cross-fertilisation, the elements of which are drawn from the most disparate of sources and made subject to the broadest of influences. For painting, for music, for dance, for theatre, for poetry, these are, in many ways, the best of days. […]
Whilst driving through country lanes listening to Steeleye Span singing The Dark-Eyed Sailor, I began to ponder this demarcation between the immediate subjectivity of the ‘dramatic’ and the relative objectivity of the ‘narrative’. Suddenly it occurred to me that it might be interesting to tamper with the equation as interpreted by Brecht in his re-articulation of the Goethe/Schiller proposition and extract a poem from that traditional English ballad that moved back through the formalised structures of the rhyming ballad towards the immediacy of the events that inspired the song in the first place. The unifying themes, the sequencing of events and the ‘rhapsodic’ narration would remain the same, but there would be applied to the storyline an element at least of the emotional interactions between the human protagonists themselves and their experiences within the wider context, this forming a kind of ostensible mésalliance between the two oppositional modes that might, in fact, actually work.
Dick Jones, The Famous Flower
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This track has had a special place in my heart over these years and, revisiting it recently, I found myself beginning to make this video with it. In its final form, the piece is a hybrid of music video and poetry film. The images are from Unsplash, a website for highly creative photography from around the world, all made available for re-use on public domain licence. I selected and juxtaposed the images for their associative resonances with the words, and arranged them in an order to tell a kind of abstract, gestural narrative. I built up a visual motif in this video around the colour red, relating to the rubies of the title. In editing I added movement to the stills through zooms, reversal of framing, and jump cuts on the beats, like heart beats with the music.
Marie Craven, Videos: 1000 Rubies, Human Resources, St. Umbilicus
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Last Saturday I was honored to read my poem “Blessing” at Ars Poetica – Where Poetry Meets Art at the Front Street Gallery in Poulsbo, Washington. I had the pleasure to meet Artist Sylvia Carlton, who shared with the audience why my poem resonated with her and why she chose it. I was so moved that it touched her in such a personal manner. Sylvia shared how as a mother the poem put into words so much of what she also felt about that difficult time when we let go of our children and send them into the world. Sylvia captured beautifully the contrast between the tight formality at the beginning of the poem with a dark weaving of limbs and the openness at the end of the poem where the white space and lack of formal punctuation allows the light to come in—light that beautifully emerges from behind the trees.
Carey Taylor, Ars Poetica-2018
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Tomorrow (Monday 7 May 2018) I will be starting a poetry course with the Poetry School. Titled Transreading the Baltics, led by Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese, it will look at and respond to poetry in translation from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. I don’t speak a single word of any of those languages but the thought of getting to know the poetry thrills me the way a TV travel show can whet your appetite for visiting a country. […]
As a blind person I frequently need to translate English into English. I personally do not understand the reason why some poets post their work as images rather than ordinary text. A picture of text is not the same as text that can be copied and pasted into an email, for example. Maybe that is the reason for doing it but, as Google Books proves, scanned copies of whole books can still be shared.
Giles L. Turnbull, Lost in Poetry
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Poet Pam Thompson wrote a really interesting comment on the last post, describing what I was doing with some of the poems was “envoicing”. I was much taken by the idea, conflating it, I suppose, with Robert MacFarlane’s idea of “en-chantment”….that is to bring into being, or to call up, by language. I’d always thought of the business of dramatic monologues as ‘ventriloquism’, but envoicing seems much more an act of imaginative invention. I’ve written before about what brought me into it. Basically, I was looking to break out of my own ‘voice’ and its way of seeing, and what unlocked the door was Carol Ann Duffy’s The world’s wife. An absolute revolution at the time, to me, ‘envoicing’ all those female voices in a series of revisionist versions of myth and legend. Eventually it lead me to finding voices for a whole range of sculpted figures…the angel of the North, Epstein’s St. Michael, Rodin’s kissing lovers, one of Anthony Gormley’s figures on Crosby Sands, and so on. But the first project, which produced a lot less than I thought it might, was to explore the relationship between the late Victorian painter, John Waterhouse, and his (supposed) favourite model.
John Foggin, The male gaze (4) “Envoicing”
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Your most recent collection of poetry is Sexting Ghosts. Can you tell us about the project and how it came into being?
The project is an interesting mashup of different things I started writing immediately after finishing my MFA in writing. I was, and am, so obsessed with spirituality, the universe, and where we sort of fit in. I was raised in a religious household and while I largely rejected a lot of the sort of “status quo” ideas of Eastern Orthodoxy (what I was raised in), I do believe in God/the universe, and it is important to me to explore this. I think, for awhile, I felt like I had to reject religion or spirituality, because it alienated me as a queer person — and because of the rigidity of it.
But now I’m comfortable with it, and a fluidity of traditions and approaches — I largely consider myself a witch with a mashup of Eastern Orthodox/Jewish beliefs, which is because of my relationships and upbringing and interest in largely just being authentic and true to myself. So this book is largely an exploration of that as a queer person, using the first part to explore gender and sexuality and dysfunction in the tradition family setting, while the other parts explore this within the technological realm. What does spirituality look like with texting, what does it look like when we look at the universe as a living thing separate from humanity?
Andrea Blythe, Poet Spotlight: Joanna C. Valente on spirituality and the drive to communicate
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Making Manifest [by Dave Harrity] is a creative writing workbook. you are to read a different reflection each day and complete the writing exercise that goes along with it. the thought behind it is that writing can be a spiritual discipline–and, where i have found the book unique, it blends spiritual exercise with writing.
the exercises are appropriate for beginners and not-so-beginners, and did help me to become more focused on writing as a spiritual activity. i have been slow working through this book–it has taken me about two months to complete–but i have truly enjoyed coming to it each evening, sitting down in an attitude of worship in my writing.
Renee Emerson, making manifest: a review
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Q~How is the poem representative of your new collection?
A~slight faith is a collection of poems that consider ways of creating and finding meaning, ways of seeing the world in all its horror and still wanting to live. The story that my poem, “Bimbo: a Deer Story,” is based on looks to the natural world (a dead doe, the fawn helpless at her corpse) and positions the fawn in an unnatural environment (a woman’s home). The story is simultaneously heartwarming and anomalous. In the poem, the narrator tries to understand who she is under the circumstances she has been dealt. She looks for meaning, which I believe has its core in faith. Many of us who are not drenched in religious life have difficulty talking about concepts like faith, and yet these tropes are found everywhere in art. I’ve learned “god language” through my work in end-of-life care, as a way of connecting with people who speak it. My own experience of faith vacillates between feeling authentic (faithful) and feeling hopeless (faithless). At core, faith says there is meaning. I lose and recover meaning all the time. slight faith is a way of finding peace in that dilemma.
Q~You mentioned your work in end-of-life care, how much does your “day job” influence your writing?
A~There is no doubt that my years as a nurse, witnessing illness, suffering and death, has been a bedrock of my need to write. It has also given me experiences to write about, as I have done in my chapbooks What We Owe Each Other and In My Exam Room (both published by The Lives You Touch Publications). When life seems suffused with sadness, despair and even alienation, poetry carves out a place for these difficult emotions in the world.
Bekah Steimel, Bimbo, a Deer Story / an interview with poet Risa Denenberg
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As with several other poets this month, I had to — I wanted to — read Brock-Broido’s poems over and over. She values image and sound, and she choreographs her poems across the pages. I won’t say they are puzzles, but they are gems, they’re like Matroushka dolls with meanings tucked within meanings. “I am of a fine mind to worship the visible world, the woo and pitch and sign of it,” she writes in “Dear Shadows,” but I had a very clear sense that it was not the visible world that concerned her. “I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude. // On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do. // I miss your heart, my heart” (“Dove, Interrupted”).
I’m reminded of one of my university professors, who once told us, in seeming exasperation, “Stop writing about hearts and moons, it’s been done.” And then to spend day with these poems (and read Brock-Broido’s students’ testimonials upon her death) — it’s fortifying to see how much the heart is still written of, and cared for. It makes my heart glad.
Bethany Reid, Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion
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Keeping quiet such a long time, dry-eyed
and wet-boned, gone all limp and loose and lost.
There’s the little cave they keep you in, tied
to bricks so you won’t float away, arms crossed
over your chest. Is that to hold your heart
in your body? Does it really matter?
Some day, you’ll get out — a black arts jump start
for all the bits and pieces in tatters…
PF Anderson, Zombie Sonnet
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Yesterday, I went over to a friend’s house. I arrived at 4 PM; I left six hours later. In between we drank wine, cooked four pounds of mussels, grilled vegetables, and traded poems. I was grateful for the sunshine, the gorgeous cherry tree flowering in her backyard, and her overly enthusiastic (and freshly washed) pup clambering for pets.
Most of all, I was grateful for the balance of the exchange: two poets who have been following each others’ work for years, with a baseline of respect and appreciation, talking freely about drafts in progress. We don’t have particularly similar styles, especially in our projects of the moment. But we’re able to be frank about what’s working and what’s not on the page, and that’s worth its weight in gold. Everyone needs trusted readers.
Sandra Beasley, Golden Rule
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What’s really sad is that there is not a single bookstore in Tillamook.
Not even a used bookstore.
Though we do have a wonderful library.
But when I asked the library if I could arrange poetry readings there, they said no.
So guess what I went and did?
I asked if anyone in my community would want to join me in a poetry book club.
And 9 people said yes!
We had our first meeting and it was wonderful!!! People had such interesting and insightful comments about the poems we discussed from Lois Parker Edstrom’s Night Beyond Black.
It was so much fun, people want to do it again–the last Wednesday of every month!
I feel so lucky there are so many local folks open to discovering poetry along with me.
I’m not alone with poetry any longer.
Lana Ayers, Sometimes beauty alone is not enough…
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We’re also reading Kevin Young’s amazing long poem Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, from 2011. I think my students are struggling with it, much more so than with the shorter poems we’ve read, and I understand why–Ardency is not only long (250 pages), but Young steadfastly refuses to simplify this vast, complicated, powerful story. Instead, the book riffs on the languages and structures of religion, education, and music, with a section each focused on Covey, the free Mendi translator; Cinque, a captive who came to lead the rebellion; and a chorus of survivors on trial, often represented through letters. […]
Can a poem be a monument? I think so. A book doesn’t have the simplicity of a pillar or the accessibility of a garden, but there’s a public role, too, for the productive difficulties of intensely patterned language. We need to read poetry, alone and together, because it helps us remember (and imagine) what’s lost and imagine (and remember) a way forward.
Lesley Wheeler, May the river/ remember you
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If women writers were given as many chances, as many extra passes, as male writers, I think you would see a lot less sexism and abuse in the system. I see women writers being shoved out of the way, talked over, published less, paid less, treated as less important, and I think: Why do people think this is okay, and why does it keep happening? Of course the literary world is not protected from these incidents – in fact, in my experience, it’s worse than, say, the tech world I used to operate in (I had very supportive male bosses who promoted me at AT&T and Microsoft, in particular.) So if you have power and influence, try using it to help women succeed. I bet it would prevent so many abuses. It occurred to me one of the reasons I wrote PR for Poets is I felt women writers, weren’t reaching their audiences because they weren’t being promoted, reviewed, invited to speak, like male writers. I’ve seen very shy, unself-promoting male writers lifted up by their male colleagues, taken out for a beer and given tips and even having their books suggested to certain high-end publishers, but I haven’t really seen the same thing for shy, unself-promoting women. I wanted all poets to have the tools to help get the word out about their books, but I didn’t realize this was actually a subversive act. It’s subversive to help poets learn how to promote themselves because the literary world wants you to believe that it is a meritocracy, when it really isn’t, it’s a place where privilege and place and class and gender all reflect social norms, which means the disabled, the poor, people of color, and women are going to have less of a chance to really make it. When AWP ignores the needs of disabled folks, that means less chance for us to interact with others. When publishers skew their books to a male audience because male writers “are more universal,” well, no they’re not, unless you make that the case. Readers of books actually skew strongly female, so shouldn’t the authors of books also skew female?
I’m sorry if this tone disturbs you. I like to uplift people. I like to be inspiring. But lately, with the political tone of the country, the repeated shock at many men in power abusing that power, I have started to say: enough of the shock. Let’s do something to make it better. I may not live to see a woman president of America, but I want to make some noise for equality in the poetry world, at least. If I can support other women writers by bringing attention to their work (which is why I do book reviews even though they are time consuming and mostly do not pay,) I want to do what I can to make the literary world a better place. I want to encourage you to take action too.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, My Rumpus Review of Barbie Chang, Guest Post on PR for Poets with a Disability or Chronic Illness, More Cancer Tests, Faerie Magazine Poems, and How the Lit World Can Avoid More #MeToo Moments
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Night pavement, silver-slick with moon.
Owl. Mid-road. Blocking the way. Meeting my eyes. Slow, slower: it does not move. Mouse between its talons. Guardian of the veil between the land of the living and the land of the dead.
I drive around it, trembling.
Last time I met you, you were kicking me out: I have the scars to prove it. Head wounds bleed like bastard. Talon strike perforations. I don’t want to go back.
You say: do not pass.
I pass, trembling. Into steeper dark.
JJS, May 3, 2018: what the forest said