Kristen McHenry – Page 10

September 1, 2019September 1, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 35

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. Bloggers were in a stock-taking mood this week, it seems, with posts about strength and renewal, growing older, finding time to write, and bearing witness to broken things.

Incidentally, there may not be an edition of the digest next week, since I’ll be on vacation in a place alleged to be like paradise. On the other hand, I quickly bore of paradises. And the place we’re staying may well have good wifi…

You sense summer coming to an end. The days don’t smell so much of suntan lotion & Ferris-wheel sweetness but of camphor & time lost. You hop a ride towards the ocean, your bus stop of grace. Along the way, you pass fog-tongued counterfeiters, dead-eyed mystics & heaven-haired girls dressed in plush heartbreak. Once you reach the ocean, a woman on the boardwalk offers you stones & charms, says they’ll ward off ghosts & sirens; keep the blue oblivion at bay. You hold the woman’s offerings in your hand. As the ocean sings its bittersweet song of summer’s end, you count backward from your last bad day & allow yourself to gracefully fall into the coming fall.
Rich Ferguson, A Bittersweet Song of Summer’s End

So abstract was my day—
though bloodied
with details, it scorns
any ordering into some
form easily claimed
by memory. I’ve got
the scraps, the tidbits
of flesh and bone, charred,
unlikely to match anything
I’ve gladly stored
in my mind. I must find
a place for these bones.
Romana Iorga, Portrait with Crows

One thing I try to remember is that there have always been stubborn people who have continued to do art, read and write books, make music, love and protect nature, cherish and guard all aspects of human culture, and take care of one another even when life felt the most hopeless. Often they have also been the same people who quietly sheltered refugees or the persecuted, visited prisoners, wrote underground tracts, participated in protests, smuggled food for people in need…the list goes on. These are not the people who get written about in history books, but let’s try for a moment to imagine what would have happened if they had not existed. Where would we be? That’s what is meant by action and contemplation as two sides of one coin. People who have found their own sources of strength and renewal — what I like to call “wells” that we are able to go back to drink from again and again — have more ability to see what needs to be done, and help others. So no, I don’t think we need to feel guilty for spending time doing these things, not at all. We just need to try to see the whole picture, and move back and forth between the active and contemplative parts of our lives, keenly aware of what each is, and how they complement each other.
Beth Adams, More Sicilian Explorations, and a Watercolor Disaster

The proofs for Tears in the Fence came through for me to check – two poems, one of which I think of as a ‘menopause’ poem. Is there such a thing? Well, there is now. I can’t give too much away about the poem as it’s not been published yet, other than it references Susan Sontag and uses some found text. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve submitted to that magazine, so I was on cloud nine for a while after they accepted the poems. The other good news is that I’ve had a poem accepted by The Interpreter’s House. Again, I was really pleased as it’s a magazine I enjoy reading. Having said this, I’m aware that I don’t have many poems in reserve now. I haven’t written any new ones for quite a while as I’ve been typing up my novel (unfinished, but it feels like it’s nearing some sort of conclusion). So, there’s a quiet sense of dread in knowing that particular well is empty, and knowing the only way to fill it is to knuckle down and write some more. Ultimately, I know it’s a case of priorities.
Julie Mellor, Old Woman’s Lane

What I really loved about this book [Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert] was she says a person doesn’t have to quit their day job to fully embrace their creative life. This was something that has been plaguing me – how do I balance my very government-corporate day job with my poetry life, the part of my life that fulfills me in ways my day job never will. While I don’t have all the answers for what my future holds, I am feeling calmer and a little more balanced in how I can move forward.
In addition to doing a lot of reading and studying over the next ten months, I also plan on spending a lot of time thinking about my goals for the future, figuring out how to move forward with my desires, and how to balance everything.
Courtney LeBlanc, Mid-Life Crisis

I’ve gotten back into a routine of writing a rough draft of a poem daily in between job searches, attending interviews and writing the article. While I need to financially and want to mentally get back to the real working world, I know I will miss my mornings at the kitchen table scribbling in my notebook and then typing away on the laptop. I need a full-time writing job. Me and lots of other writers.
Gerry Stewart, Changing Hats

After my trip to Peru, I started feeling called to write again. I finished an essay that’s out for submission. I revised my manuscript and started sending it out again. And I’ve even written a few poems.
Still, I wonder whether I really want to continue keeping this space. On some level, it’s so deeply connected to a past life: my marriage that ended five years ago, old jobs, old friends, old adventures that are distant memories. I needed that hard break after my MFA, and I am starting to re-emerge as a writer. And yet I don’t necessarily want to return here. When I think about this site, and how much of the past it contains, I’m just not sure I want to keep it.
I’m not making any decisions just yet. Quite frankly, I’d be surprised if there were any readers left to see this after such a long silence. Perhaps I just need a total fresh start with my digital life. I’ll always be writing, but maybe this isn’t the place for it anymore. We’ll see.
Allyson Whipple, This Space: A Reckoning

I asked writers who’d published their first books of poetry at or beyond the age of fifty to discuss their experiences. Was there any particular reason they’d waited to publish? Did they think there was an advantage to publishing later in life? How had publishing a first book changed their lives?
The responses from over twenty writers became the subject of September’s “The Reading Life” column in my newsletter, Sticks & Stones, due to subscribers on Monday, September 2. Subscribe here.
There was much more than I could fit into the column, however. I’m sharing some of the best lines from these writers’ answers in this month’s blog.
I hope you’ll enjoy these thoughtful, perceptive, and often humorous comments on the pain and pleasure of writing and poetry as much as I did.
Margo Berdeshevsky: “I’ve long believed that poetry is the language of the soul.”
Donna Vorreyer: “Poetry is one place where the voice of age can ring clear and meaningful in the world.”
Connie Post: “I hope in some way, our poems can help others to understand how we can heal the earth.”
Roy Mash: “Publishing a first book is like having another child, only without having to clean up the diapers.”
[Click through to read the rest!]
Erica Goss, Chop Wood, Carry Water: Publishing a First Poetry Book After Fifty

On Saturday, I read this blog post by Jeannine Hall Gailey. She had reviewed Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. The Fukushima 50. It sounded like a book that would hit several of my reading sweet spots: nuclear disaster, natural disaster, poetry, and a female-centered take on it all. It’s been awhile since I’ve ordered a book of poems, so I ordered it.

It arrived on Sunday. Usually books arrive and go to my ever growing books to be read shelf, but I decided to read it while I could still remember why I had ordered it. So I did.

It’s a great book–but it’s also the kind of book that makes me wonder if I’d appreciate it more if I had more background. There are some pop culture references that I can sense are there, but they’re not mine, like the reference to Watchmen.

There were also some references that may or may not be reference to Japanese pop culture, but I can’t be sure. I know even less about the pop culture of other cultures than my own.

It’s not enough to keep me from enjoying the poems, and also not enough to send me on a quest to know more. It is the kind of moment that makes me feel old–once I knew all sorts of stuff about a wide variety of pop culture, and not just that pop culture coming from my own society. Once I could keep track.

My favorite poems were the ones that gave the tsunami a voice. I thought of Patricia Smith’s Hurricane Katrina poems in Blood Dazzler. If I was a grad student, I might do more with those comparisons. If I was an ambitious woman on a tenure track, I might write a book that explores the ways we give natural disasters a personality.

I am a poet feeling like a dried out crisp. Maybe I need to play with the idea of weather having a personality. Maybe I should start with the August weather that’s leaving me so worn out. Hurricanes get so much press (speaking of which, I should keep an eye on Tropical Storm Dorian down in the Caribbean), but heat waves can kill far more people. Maybe I should write a poem in the voice of the disappearing Arctic ice.

This morning, I went to Jeannine’s review on The Rumpus. I had decided not to read it until I read the book. It’s an amazing review–wow. It does just what a review should do. It puts the poems in context and gives me insight. It makes me want to read the book again.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Giving Natural Disaster a Voice

Earlier this month, during my final residency of graduate school at the Rainier Writing Workshop, I presented my critical paper on how time works in poetry—how, by changing our perceptions, sound and image in poetry create a space where we can step outside of time. Because I’m drawn to music, I started out with sound and then repetition—including refrain and anaphora. While reading poems for this paper, I came across looping and stretching. Someone asked where I found those terms. My answer? I made them up, as a way to talk about these specific moves.
Joannie Stangeland, Looping and stretching

We are only at the year’s ninth month, and already 2019 has been, for me, a year of broken things. It began with the broken furnace, then the water heater and the entire water handling system (we have a well); then the septic pump gave out, and the stove broke, too. During the second, and longest, heat wave, our central air conditioning unit fried itself with a snap and sizzle. We had plumbing under the kitchen sink to replace, and hail damage to the roof and porch railings. Also broken hearts at the deaths of people we wanted to keep in our lives. And a few days back, I twisted my foot and damaged a metatarsal muscle–now I, too, am one of the broken things.
It’s “an unusual injury” according to my physician, in that the way I rolled my foot and twisted led to damage (inflammation, at this point) to the flexor digiti minimi brevis muscle, which is not one of the foot muscles people usually injure. While not serious, it’s painful and slow to heal. The first weeks of the semester have arrived, and here I am stumping around campus with a wrapped-up foot and a crazy-busy schedule.
Endeavoring to be mindful of the moment and keep equanimity in my life proves difficult, but I have been working at the challenge by asking myself how we measure our losses and whether there’s any benefit in doing so. After all, that I possess enough things that can break demonstrates that I have considerably more comfort in my life than most human beings on the planet; so who should care if I rant? On the one hand, measuring loss seems judgmental and arbitrary–and there’s no way a broken cooktop can be assessed against a friend’s death. Yet we do need to make some kind of accounting for loss, because if we never acknowledge it, we smother compassion. Bearing witness to our brokenness, our losses, our fears, permits us to feel with others and with ourselves.
Ann E. Michael, Twist & shout

Like Noah, we build and build, but the space gets smaller. Nothing can breathe. Least of all me, my lungs stopped up with feathers and the small animals I’ve smuggled inside the body for safekeeping. In the box, we rustle the feathers and bend the bones, but nothing fits, even side by side, stacked vertically in rows. Nothing sits upright or thrives. We name them, tag their tiny feet, and still, nothing moves inside the box. All night we soothe them with sounds their mothers make, but still they sleep and dream of trees.
Kristy Bowen, broken things

Back in January of this year, I was supposed to go to FEMA school in Alabama and learn about disaster management and pull life-sized dummies from smoking cars and walk around crisply with a clipboard being a cool head in a crisis while things went bang during mass-casualty simulations. I was relieved to get out of that whole scenario when the government shut down and they canceled all of the classes. But the government re-opened and the classes were re-booked and I got my flight information and now I guess I’m going in a few weeks. I thought I had gotten used to the idea, but I read my FEMA training manual this week, and the nerves rushed back. I know intellectually that this is literally one of the safest things I could do. It’s the definition of a well-oiled machine; a highly structured and extremely monitored operation with government officials there to guide us at every turn and make sure everyone is where they are supposed to be, doing what they are supposed to do at all times. For once, I’m not worried about the navigational side of things. I’m worried about my mind. I’ve been worried about my mind a lot lately.
Kristen McHenry, Serenity Later

It’s easy for us to forget that we live so close to so many amazing landscapes – mountain ranges we rarely visit, a roaring ocean we don’t see often enough, a whole different menagerie of birds and butterflies. One of the benefits of taking these kinds of road trips is re-familiarizing yourself with the area you live in, the microclimates, the tiny different ecosystems. Also, we listened to almost the full book (and I finished when I got home) of Yoko Ogawa’s depressing with very salient The Memory Police, about the dangers of succumbing to authoritarian governments without too much resistance. (And also the very Japanese emotion of aware – the sadness and beauty of things that disappear – in this case, memories.) We try to get through one book on every road trip. Glenn said it would be easy to do nothing but watch the sea – as the light changes, as the birds go up and down the beach, watching various vehicles get towed off the beach after getting stuck in the sand.

But I remain attached to Woodinville – the abundance of flowers, especially, and hummingbirds, which were missing in our beach visit. I think of myself more as a tree/forest/waterfall person than a true beach lover. I love the shade rather than sunning. I like the shapes of the leaves overhead.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Two New Poems up at Cold Mountain Review and Picturing the Oregon Coast

Shall we sweep the forest clean? Shall we walk across the ocean? We shall. For years we’ve counted the bodies of the dead from our wars, so many bodies. We’ve listened to the leaders tell us that now it will be alright, that now the end is in sight. It isn’t. Lower the flag, it’s dirty. Light a candle and leave it in the window for the souls of the damned to see their way home. Shall we sweep the forest clean? Shall we walk across the ocean? Yes, we shall. Friend, it is a one-way trip.
James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Shall we sweep the forest clean?’

So for you
for a little
longer yet
may water run
uphill, may nights
square circles,
mornings
rattle the key
in the lock,
and may love
be unconsidered.
Dick Jones, HEART SUTRA 1.

July 21, 2019July 21, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 29

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.

Summer reading, anyone? Ann Michael’s post on Aquinas and quantum physics sets the tone for this week’s selection, where bloggers consider social relationships, time, mortality, and being in the world. Enjoy.

Reality=relationship to others and the world. That’s a contemporary way of interpreting Aquinas. I’ve never before thought of myself as a Thomist, and the very idea makes me giggle. But as a writer, especially as a poet, the relationships and connections in the physical world are the stuff of metaphors that engage the conscious mind of abstract thought and help to put the poem across to other readers’ minds (thank you, Maryanne Wolf). Perhaps not so far from philosophy, or physics, or neurology, after all.
Ann E. Michael, Waves & relationships

i heart kit
In one of the countless late night feedings for Kit, I started daydreaming about a new writing project to spread CHD awareness and Kit’s story–so I started I Heart Kit, an instagram-poetry-blog about Kit’s fight against CHD.
I’ve always resisted sharing my poems online since I always hope to have them published in journals at some point, but lately I’ve felt frustrated with the slowness of that process and have realized that my target audience for these poems about CHD are not other poets or academics but other parents and heart warriors, those who are in the thick of it too. I want to share poems that will be read by the people they are written for; I want the poems to be read, in this desperate sort of way I want them to be related to, so I don’t feel so alone in all this.
Renee Emerson, i heart kit: a new writing project

Sometimes the news just silences me: children suffering in camps, the Justice Department refusing to seek justice after the killing of Eric Garner, racist tweets from the white-nationalist-in-chief. I make donations and sometimes participate in political action, but mostly I’m sitting around like Ursula, all ears and touchy whiskers, no words. I will say, having just heard members of the “Squad” on the radio explaining, with some exasperation, that they do not comprise a conspiracy: for years, if I stopped on campus to talk to a distinguished woman professional or two, or went out to lunch with those women, male professors and administrators passing by would, without fail, pause with looks of alarm or mock-alarm and exclaim, “Uh-oh, you’re plotting!” It’s interesting that strong women in conversation inspire such paranoia. Let’s keep being scary.
Here’s a scary poem, with thanks to the editors at Verse Daily and at the original publisher, Cimarron Review. It’s from a blizzard of sonnets that overcame me during the last presidential election, the best of which will be in my next poetry collection. Otherwise I’ve just had my head down lately, revising Poetry’s Possible Words and ticking down my to-do list: minor jobs under deadline (reviews of various kinds), and house and family chores. Self-care is on the list, too: continuing to negotiate health problems but also talking to friends, reading a ton, searching for fox-themed clothes I can wear when I have a fox-themed novel to read from…
Lesley Wheeler, Big-ears plots her escape

My Ex’s Father by James H. Duncan in Foliate Oak.
This poem is very much a character sketch by the poet of an older man. What I like about it is how James captures the yin and yang of the subject’s personality, how he shakes up people’s assumptions of Republicans or older men. It reminds us that there are no cookie cutter humans.
“he bought weed off my friends
but voted Republican and traveled
with Phish and would ask me
to drive him to the supermarket
sipping a Corona in the passenger seat”
We are Mostly Merciful by Kimberly Grey in Kenyon Review.
I love the hopefulness, the kindness in this poem. Sometimes I despair of hope in contemporary poetry in today’s political and social climate.
“I rehearsed it all night—the absence of mercy,
as a condition to you who said
when I am in the same room as your body I am
in a different room. There’s nothing exquisite
about lashing a thing unless the thing is blazon with want.”
Charlotte Hamrick, Favorite #Poetry, Second Quarter

I say attack, but I’m trying to mean feast. I had nurtured ideas that I might be able to harvest my tiny crop of rye and make something of it. I could cook the berries like rice, or grind them into some trace amount of flour to use in muffin. Now, that looks unlikely. By the time it’s ready, it will be gone. But it seems I’m pleasing my uninvited guest.
It’s got me thinking about what we feed and what feeds us. When you’re in your day, how do you nourish your writing? And how does it nourish you? The rye patch reminds me to make better choices, to feed and be fed by what’s important to me.
And to take time to enjoy the few stalks left.
Joannie Stangeland, Rye diary: Day fourteen, what feed us

With age comes impermanence. It’s always there, of course, but back then it’s a football team’s trajectory of success, the potted plant that you want to make it past autumn, your child’s delight in things that are not of this world. Now it’s everything bound by time.
Dick Jones, CALLING TIME

1969 and I’m serving drinks
at the Country Club,
so glad to be 21 and able to serve drinks.
The golfers at the bar stare with wild white eyeballs
at the tiny moonman in his white spacesuit
moving jerkily on the cratered surface
faceless, the glass in his helmet shining back
the distant earth
and I notice it without much excitement,
immersed as I am in being 21 years old,
thinking this will happen a lot
from now on.
In my dreams.
Anne Higgins, Everyone’s Gone to the Moon

Every day I walked along the shore, watching the fish in the still edges of the water, making a mental note of the plants in bloom. I was both in the present moment, and remembering being in these exact places at different stages of my life, alone or with people who are now gone or far away. There’s a stone wall that my father built along the shoreline, and one place in particular where I always liked to sit. I thought about fishing there with my mother, and swimming with friends and cousins; I saw myself at seventeen, filled with romantic dreams, waiting for my boyfriend to come driving around the lake to see me late at night. I thought of standing in that spot throwing stones out into the water, as far as I could, the day we buried my grandfather.
Beth Adams, Drawing Our Past and Present

There was a moment last night when I said, “How could I have accomplished so little this week-end?” It was after I watched the latest remake of A Star is Born, which so many people loved, but I did not, so I was ripe for feelings of regret.

This morning I tallied my word count for Saturday and Sunday: 2, 147 new words written on my apocalyptic thriller. So why would I feel that I had accomplished nothing?

As I washed my grandmother’s mixing bowl by hand (after making gluten free communion bread–there must be a poem here), it came to me. What I really mean: “Another week-end seems to be zipping by, and I still haven’t sorted any of the boxes in the cottage.”

Once, as long as I was getting the artistic work done, I wouldn’t have cared, and I’m still not sure I do care. It’s interesting, though, how that socialization has taken root in me. If I’ve had time to watch movies, I should have made time to get some real work done, the less pleasurable kind.

We also watched Blackkklansman, which I thought was profoundly interesting as a work of art. If we had just stopped with that movie, would I have felt as much like a slacker?

I meant to get more wash done. I did get some of the remaining stuff out of the cottage refrigerator, some cans of soda and a pitcher of tea that I had moved out there for the camp counselors. Why doesn’t that work feel important?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Graham Greene Meets Margaret Atwood Meets Octavia Butler

I was so excited to be able to attend a poetry reading at the new Hugo House where Dana Levin (one of my long-time favorite poets) and one of her friends/former students, Natalie Scenters-Zapico (who recently moved to the area.) I’m still not used to the starkness of the new Hugo House – hang some art, people! It would really improve the space – and the absence of places to sit and socialize (the old Hugo House had little tables clustered around the bar, which the new one lacks) and the lighting is still not very flattering. But I loved seeing these two poets read. Natalie read from her new book, Lima :: Limón, and Dana read some apocalyptic poems from Banana Palace as well as some new work. Overall an inspiring night of poetry!
One of the results of all this celebration is I am much more tired than usual and needing to sleep in more than usual. The combo of MS and anemia (yes, I’m taking iron and b12 supplements religiously) can really take the wind out of your sails. But the summer has been mild here – even, some might say, gloomy! It’s raining right now. But I like having a break from soaring temps and high sun. I can walk around my garden (and the surrounding gardens Woodinville has) without worrying about feeling beaten up afterward. I saw a family of deer with two fans and a plethora of rabbits on my street. And did I mention I’ve had two bobcat visits to my back porch (caught by my Ring) this week? So, even though I’ve felt a little discouraged poetry-wise (I even took a week or two off from submitting, I felt so bombarded with rejections) I feel that nature has been extra kind to me this July. Sometimes it’s okay to take a break and just read and write and recharge your batteries – and the rain gives us the perfect excuse to spend a little extra time at the library or bookstore. Wishing you a little time to recharge and some good news in your Inbox (and maybe a bobcat visit!)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Poem “How Not to Die” in Eye to the Telescope, a New Review of The Tradition in Barrelhouse, a Poetry Reading and Birds, Butterflies, and Birthdays

This month, I am working on rounding out my artist statement series, which is turning out to be delightfully meta as one would expect. My fave part so far is this bit:

“The poem won’t shut up until you take it home. Until you shove it beneath the bathtub’s surface a few times for effect. Neglect is the poem’s best weapon. All night, it will moan and pretend it’s coming, but by morning will be nothing but a few strands of hair on the pillow you used to smother it.”

Once that series winds down at the end of this month..I intend to do some more work on my woefully neglected unusual creatures project.
Kristy Bowen, writing & art bits | july edition

The following is a day-by-day log of my progress and thoughts throughout last week, as I completed an “Artist Residency in Motherhood” with my colleague at Stuffolk, and frequent collaborator (in teaching and in art), visual artist Meredith Starr. During the week I worked on revising a poetry manuscript and finishing one of my plays. M.S. has a year-long painting project she’s been working on, and she spent the week catching up/getting back on track with that series. […]
We reserved a small studio apartment in downtown Patchogue via AirBnB, not far from the camp where my three kids (and one of M.S.’s) were enrolled for the week. Each morning we dropped them off at 9 and then drove 5 minutes to the apartment. We’d spend a few minutes catching up and talking about our goals for the day while setting up (painting supplies for M.S.; laptop and notebooks and drafts for me), and then we’d get to work. We worked more or less without speaking, but we did listen to music — something I don’t normally do while writing in a private space, but which isn’t too distracting when I’m writing prose. (I can find it very difficult while writing poetry — if I do it has to be some kind of song on repeat, where the music is soothing but the lyrics kind of dissolve and become nonsensical with the repetition). We’d stop for a half hour or so for lunch around 12:30 or 1 p.m., and then resume until about 3:30, when we had to clean/pack/organize ourselves for the next day and then drive back to pick up the kids at 4.
For us both, it was a transformative and exceptionally productive week. We’re wondering why we never thought to do this sooner. It seems so foolish to have never attempted anything like this. I mean, one applies to formal residencies and writing retreats because one requires the time and space to create, but also because — when you are awarded one — they grant you also a certain amount of prestige. Prestige & acknowledgment is wonderful — I’m not knocking it — but the real point is to write: To work earnestly and productively and with relatively little distraction. So if you find yourself closed out/rejected by those formal residencies — they are so competitive, especially the ones for parents that either grant childcare or are more amenable to parents, requiring one or two weeks away, and not one or two months) — I highly recommend this workaround.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Artist Residency in Motherhood 2019

I admire the impulse behind anthologies, and from far off, admire the many ways writers creatively tackle a subject and form. But just like department stores, fabric stores, bookstores, and library shelves, I get easily overwhelmed. A collection of essays by one person, or a book of poems, has that authorial eye/voice to connect them all. An anthology is a flower collection, one of those massive English gardens, or the gardens at Versailles where we finally flung ourselves to the ground near the little lake and watched, slack-mouthed from overstimulation, the clouds pass by.
Marilyn McCabe, Great Balls of Fire; or, A Spillage of Essays

A hot day in the valley. The sun shines on our noses and our necks. Children in the parks, the sun is also upon their flesh. An old dog sleeps in the sunshine, a young one in the shade.

Our noses tell us someone is barbecuing meat. From behind a nearby house smoke rises in a thin line.

We are walking, with every step our shoes caress the broken sidewalk. An old song comes to mind and when we are sure we are alone we begin to sing aloud.
James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘A hot day in the valley.’

The old man
dances on gravel,

smoothing it
where flooding

washed out
the driveway.

He doesn’t
know anyone

is watching.
His dancing

settles the world
anyway.
Tom Montag, The Old Man

Latissimus Dorsi

The word latissimus dorsi (plural: latissimi dorsi) comes from Latin and means “broadest muscle of the back”, from “latissimus” (Latin: broadest)’ and “dorsum” (Latin: back).–Wikipedia

Stupendous
wings of the body, rise
and close into the pillar of my spine.
Kin of herons, steadfast
guardian, I grant you
effort and form,
resistance and motion,
breath and blood
in this sacred and scared and burning body, this
body luminous with eloquent hungers, this
body attendant to its million tides, this
body with its enduring arch of bone, this
body of precise and reverent failures.

In love, raise
my long arms in worship and receiving.
In strength, pull
earthward every blessing.
Kristen McHenry, Friends with Lats, Accidental Healing, A New Poem

July 14, 2019July 14, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 28

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.

After a bit of a lull last week, poetry bloggers are back in force, with posts about place and nature, memoir, parenting, judging poetry contests, working for a publisher, the ins and outs of self-publishing, and much more.

The term topophilia was coined by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan of the University of Wisconsin and is defined as the affective bond with one’s environment—a person’s mental, emotional, and cognitive ties to a place.
This feeling arose in me recently on a trip to New Mexico. The place in mind and heart is Ghost Ranch, which most people associate with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe–her house and studio are there (and are now a museum). But my association began before I knew of O’Keeffe; I was eleven years old, and the ranch was journey’s end of a long family road trip west.
The summer days I spent there somehow lodged inside me with a sense of place–and space–that felt secure and comforting, despite the strangeness of the high desert environment to a child whose summers generally featured fireflies, long grass, cornfields, and leafy suburban streets. Ghost Ranch embraced me with its mesas curving around the flat, open scrubby meadow where the corral block houses sat. Chimney Rock watched over me. Pedernal loomed mysteriously in the deep, blue-purple distance. I still cannot explain why the place felt, and still feels, like a second home to me. If I believed in the existence of past lives, I would say I had lived there before. Topophilia.
Ann E. Michael, Topophilia

I’m really happy to be in issue 44 of Brittle Star, with a piece of semi-autobiographical prose that is ostensibly about walking, but also examines my relationship, as a poet, with the place I live. Like many writers, I find walking beneficial, although I tend not to write whilst walking. At the moment, it wouldn’t help anyway because the novel I’m working on is set elsewhere, a fictional South American country devastated by pollution (which is about as far as possible from the South Yorkshire market town where I live).
Yesterday, I read a couple of poems on the theme of trees as part of the Urban Forest festival in Sheffield. This also involved walking, well, more of a saunter to be honest, interspersed with readings from a group of Sheffield-based poets. It’s been three years since I took part in the original event, and I was worried that the poem I wrote for the Urban Forest anthology might not be any good. Fortunately, when I reread it I was happy with it. What’s really unnerving is the surprise I felt at that.
Julie Mellor (untitled post)

Now some of the rye is falling over, and some of it has aphids. The seamy, seedy (!) side of the patch. But this evening, I spotted one ladybug, a small red gem.
And that is my reward for close attention. I’ve been reading about how close attention can lead to reverie. In my case, I’m hoping for stronger, more startling metaphors. In the meantime, I get practice looking, and the joy, occasionally, of seeing.
Joannie Stangeland, Rye diary: Days eleven, twelve, and thirteen

The pavement ends, but the road continues. Keep going. Hot summer sun. Ruts in the dirt, left there by wheels on the rainy days. Holes and low spots. Keep going. No breeze at all, no clouds. The road ends at a trailhead. A path through tall, dead weeds. Keep going.
James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘The pavement ends, but the road..’

So I took the kids to a family retreat at a Zen monastery. The monks and nuns organized the children by age group, and the kids were quickly all in: The 12 year old was shooing me away right after orientation and by the second day the 18 year old was asking when she could come back. Meanwhile I meditated, and talked with people, and enjoyed some silence and a lot of mindfulness bells. One evening we all walked up a big hill to eat veggie burgers and watch what turned out to be one of the most fantastic sunsets I’ve ever seen. And then turning around, we noticed that the sunset was accompanied by a simultaneous double rainbow in the opposite direction. The hills and rocks were painted all over with deep red light. Above us, the indigo sky on the verge of becoming the blackness of space. The universe puts on the most amazing show, and sometimes we are in the right place, at just the right time, to notice it.
rotating planet ::
a million perfect sunsets at every instant
D. F. Tweney (untitled haibun)

I think it’s easy, when you have MS, to not go out in nature as often because it takes some advance planning and some help. But for me it’s worth the effort. Being in the woods brings me more clarity. I like taking time off from technology for a bit and thinking about life and milestones around a roaring river and old trees. It’s a great place for deep thoughts. There’s no way you can’t feel happier around trees and waterfalls. It’s a fact. It’s the kind of place where you start bursting into song like a freaking Disney princess.

So, all in all, an inspiring and romantic escape in between the rain that’s been surprising newcomers to Seattle (in the old days, July was always a little dreary.) I was happy I could still get into the forest and fields of flowers and the various waterfalls and celebrate 25 years of marriage in a fantastic setting. The night we stayed over, the moon glowed a pinkish orange, and it set at about 1 in the morning, and we watched it go down, and the stars were so bright. Pretty magical. I’m lucky to be married to someone I’m still happy to be around after 25 years, in a place that’s filled with some of the best scenery in the world. So I’ve had some health issues recently, and I’ve felt a little discouraged about PoetryWorld, but I can’t deny feeling a little sunnier and a little more hopeful. I’ll have to rest for a day after all this activity, but it will have been worth it, and I feel I’m leaving the forest with more perspective.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A 25th Anniversary with Waterfalls and Mountains and How MS Can Limit Your Hiking (But Not Your Love of Nature)

How do the
locusts count
to seventeen

in their long
darkness of
waiting? Why

do they sing
all summer
in their time?

What does their
pregnant silence
mean in other

years? What else
am I not
meant to know?
Tom Montag, THE LOCUSTS

I don’t know why, but I never really accepted the fact that poets had stories to tell.

I think of world travelers with unique experiences having stories to tell. Or, persons who have survived some illness or torture, or with some remarkable life discovery having a story to tell. I think it all boils down to is this a story worthy of being heard? Sometimes I think about memoirs that I have read that had very dysfunctional people in them. I think about what caused me to consider such a story worthy of being told, of being read. I don’t think we always can know what another will be interested in, but if we write, and write with a creative flair that makes what we say interesting. Sylvia Plath used to say that everything was writable.

What I wonder today, is what stories that are waiting to be told at our southern border? What stories need to be told? Who will step up and fill this need? I confess that I think about this and it troubles me. [long pause for reflection here]
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Poem finds Home Edition

I’ve only got one month in the office before I start grad school, after which I will be a full time student and that will be my only job for the next ten months. I don’t yet know what my school schedule will be so I can’t really plan my day – when I’ll exercise, when I’ll write, when I’ll study. Apparently the first week of August, the first week of classes, I’ll get everything necessary for the semester: books, schedule, etc. For someone with a Type A personality, not knowing it’s driving me insane. Because I have to plan, because I need to know what my schedule will look like, because I’m working on a new writing project that is unlike anything I’ve ever undertaken and it’s exhilarating and terrifying: friends, I’m writing creative nonfiction. And while I’m not quite ready to call it a memoir, it looks something like a memoir.
The idea had been ruminating for a while in my brain and I kept ignoring it and pushing it aside. I’m a poet, I don’t know anything about writing full pages, about writing paragraphs, about full sentences and dialogue and moving a story forward. But it wouldn’t go away and it kept popping into my head, lines writing themselves as I was walking Piper or working out or just sitting in the backyard, drinking wine. And so I gave in and started writing.
Thus far the words have come fast and furious. For someone who writes poems that rarely exceed one page, writing 3,000 words the first night I sat down was a surreal and bizarre feeling. But also an amazing one.
Courtney LeBlanc, Something New

Rob Taylor: Your debut poetry collection, Fresh Pack of Smokes (Nightwood Editions), is described by your publisher as a book exploring your years “living a transient life that included time spent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a bonafide drug addict” in which you “write plainly about violence, drug use, and sex work.” From that description, and from the raw honesty of the poems themselves, it feels like a memoir-in-verse. Do you think of it in that way: as a memoir as opposed to something more creatively detached from you? Is the distinction important to you?

Cassandra Blanchard: I have written poetry since I was a young teenager and it is a medium that I am very comfortable with. It is also the best way in which I express my feelings and experiences. As for Fresh Pack of Smokes, I would say that it is a creative memoir. I write of my life experiences like a memoir but in a creative form. I would also say that this book has been a cathartic process for me, something that releases all the pent-up emotion. So it is a mix between creativity and memoir, though it is all nonfiction.

Rob: Yes, you can absolutely feel the pent-up energy being released in so many of these poems. You mention that you’ve written poetry since a young age. Is that why you turned to poetry instead of a more traditional prose memoir?

Cassandra: I didn’t start with the intention of doing a traditional memoir. I didn’t even really think that much about how these poems would fit within the definition of a memoir itself. I wanted to make a record of what happened to me and poetry was the easiest way to do that. I also thought it would be more interesting for the reader to read poems than straight-up prose.

I was drawn to poetry as a means of communicating my story because it was the best way for me to express myself. As I went along, I found that it was also the best way to lay out descriptions of events, people, and locations. The poems are basically one long sentence and I find this captures the reader better than the traditional form.
Rob Taylor, Therapy for me and an education for others: “Fresh Packs of Smokes” by Cassandra Blanchard

I was barely aware of David Constantine until about four years ago. It seems to me now like being unaware of, say, Geoffrey Hill or Tony Harrison. How did it happen?…perhaps because despite being a much-acclaimed translator, the co-editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and author of the stunning Bloodaxe Collected Poems, he attracts no controversy, his work is crafted, elegant, and educated (as well as passionate, humane, and given to wearing its heart on its sleeve). In short, he is not fashionable. For me, he sits alongside Harrison, Fanthorpe, Causley and MacCaig; but apart from Kim Moore in one of her blog posts, no one had ever said to me have you read x or y by David Constantine? So I’m taking a punt on some of you out there, like me, not knowing, and I’m hoping that after you’ve read this, you, like me, will want to rush out and buy his Collected Poems.

I met him by accident at a reading/party for the 30^thbirthday of The Poetry Business at Dean Clough in Halifax. I was reading from my new first collection and David was top of the bill.
It was wonderful. He reads apparently effortlessly, he reads the meaning of the words, so it sounds like unrehearsed speech until you become aware of the patterning of rhythm, of rhyme, the lovely craftedness of it. I bought his Collected Poems (more than embarassed to find it was £12 and my collection was £9.95. Jeepers) and once I’d finished a year of reading Fanthorpe, I spent a year of reading David’s poems, three or four every morning, listening to the work of words, the deft management of unobtrusive rhyme and assonance, relishing the huge range of reference, the lightly-worn scholarship, the management of voices.
John Foggin, My kind of poetry: David Constantine

The morning is yielding
its foggy pastels to brighter
tempera. Soon,
I will slip into familiar skin,
utter the names
of these almost forgotten
alleys of veins and arteries,
learn to inhabit again
the labyrinth of my body.
Romana Iorga, Minotaur

4. I started playing around with writing poems again but I don’t know if my ideas will work out or not. My ideas are about the body, but in a much different way that I’ve written about it in the past, and I’m not sure where it’s going to take me. I want to write about the body from the point of view of strength and power, mastery and discipline, grace and balance, joy and gratitude, ownership and inhabiting, rather than the body as enemy, the body as victim, the body as a burden, the body as wounded. I may be able to do this, but then again I may not.

5. I awoke in the night with a very sad memory that I’m not sure is a real memory or not. I recalled being in fifth grade, very tall and very skinny. I was all alone on a basketball court, practicing shooting baskets. I was wearing a beige sweater, and I felt excruciatingly lonely. I think the strength training is jarring loose some old pain around my life-long sense of physical failure.

6. I quit eating dairy some time ago and over all, I feel much better for it. I didn’t feel like mentioning it because there is nothing more boring than listening to someone go on and on about their personal dietary decisions, and I feel no need to proselytize about it. It was a good decision for me personally, that’s all. The only drawback is that I do really miss fancy cheese. I have to deliberately not look at it in the grocery store or I get sad.

7. The reason I haven’t written about poetry much is because the only poet I want to read lately is Wallace Stevens. I bought an anthology of his in Sitka years ago and I’ve been reading it every day and it’s astounding and I’ve come to realize that he’s a genius and that he has bumped Anne Sexton from the top spot of my favorite poets. However, I have taken breaks to read the new anthology from Rose Alley Press, “Footbridge Over the Falls,” and you should get it and read it too as it is full of excellent-ness: http://www.rosealleypress.com/works/horowitz/footbridge/
Kristen McHenry, A Full List of Things I Haven’t Really Wanted to Talk About

Research is always about a question, sometimes posed in different ways or approached from various routes. And this too is poetry. Some of the poems I’m editing are interesting but lack a central question. This is what can come of writing from the middle of research — one feels briefly as if one knows something! But to reach back into the central question is essential to make art. Art comes out of the not-knowing, the search. Otherwise, you’re just presenting an academic theory.
There’s a local man who makes hundreds of paintings of local landmarks. They’re okay, in that they have some personality to them and a signature style. But there is no mystery, somehow, no way in which the artist is admitting he doesn’t know something about his subject matter. I’m not even sure what I mean by that. I just know there’s a blandness to the presentation such that I’m fine with looking at it once, but it’s not something I’ll bother to look at again. In contrast, I have a landscape hanging on my wall that I look at often. I’ll find a new streak of color I haven’t noticed before, or haven’t admired in a while. I’ll enjoy anew the shadowed trees, a smear of light on the pond edge.
Marilyn McCabe, What’s Love Got To Do With It?; or, Art and the Question

How did my daughters get so old?
Today my twins–Pearl and Annie–those tiny babies that we brought home in 1993–turn 26.
I have been reading old notebooks that I scribbled in when they were much younger (playing soccer, needing rides to friends’ houses and to the swimming pool), and I found this passage from the introduction to Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop:
Poetry, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small-minded. To write poetry is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s poems are full of rage, lamentation and despair. To write poetry of a higher order demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our art with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.
You could substitute parenting–and though I wish I could deny the moments of rage, lamentation and despair, there they are, inked across the pages of my notebooks. So, with my apologies to Kowit:
Parenting, in the end, is a spiritual endeavor. Though there is plenty of room to be playful and silly, there is much less room to be false, self-righteous, or small minded. To be a mother or a father is to perform an act of homage and celebration–even if one’s family life is sometimes buffeted by rage, lamentation and despair. To parent in this higher way demands that we excise from our lives as much as we can that is petty and meretricious and that we open our hearts to the suffering of this world, imbuing our interactions with our children with as luminous and compassionate a spirit as we can.
Bethany Reid, Luminous and Compassionate: Good Goals

“Watch this, Mom, watch me.”
My son jumps into the pool,
surfacing to ask “was that
a perfect pencil dive?” Or
“look at this, do I look
like a dolphin,” wiggling
through the water, “or more
like a whale?” breaching
and landing with a splash.
If I don’t witness, it’s
as though it didn’t happen.
Rachel Barenblat, Watch me

On the first day of my two-week placement with Seren, I was asked to read Erato, the new poetry collection by Deryn Rees-Jones.
“Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here, however, as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones asks questions about the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, she asks in one poem, between a sigh and a song?” (from the Seren website)
That sounds like a cushy number, doesn’t it! Sit down at your desk, read a book of poetry and then go home and get paid for it! well, there was slightly more to it than that! I was asked to draft some questions for Deryn to answer on the Seren blog once Erato had been published. I was a bit bewildered by this task. Similar blog posts relating to collections by other poets, such as one with Jonathan Edwards on 1 January 2019, which followed the publication of his new collection, Jenn, showed that knowing Jonathan’s previous collection, the Costa Prize-winning My Family and Other Superheroes informed the questions asked in the interview for Jenn. How should I approach interviewing Deryn without having read her previous four collections?
I drew on my previous experience of interviewing musicians and bands for two years on the magazine Splinter, which I co-founded, and another two years doing so for Atlanta Music Guide when I lived in Atlanta. It’s been thirteen years since Splinter and eight since Atlanta Music Guide so I worried I might be a bit rusty! I didn’t get any feedback on my draft questions so figured Seren would salvage whatever they could and probably write most of it themselves. I wasn’t really expecting to hear anything more.
I subscribe to the Seren email newsletter and noticed a link this week to Erato, an Interview with Deryn Rees-Jones and my heart hop, skip and jumped! Should I prepare to sigh or sing?
The interview posted on the Seren blog is my exact interview! There are a couple of minor edits when I’d used I and it had been changed to we, which is a perfect example of my rustiness, and the penultimate question wasn’t one of mine but, other than that, the interview is exactly as I wrote it on Monday 20th May.
I’m really grateful to Mick Felton and the small team at Seren for making me so welcome. Mick acted as sighted guide between my Air BnB place to the Seren office each morning and back again in the evening, and made sure other Seren staff could do that if he was out of the office. It was very important for me to find out how easy I’d find it to work on an office computer using my screen reading software which, at Seren, included listening to the books I was required to read, typing my interview questions and copy editing a creative non-fiction book and the current issue of Poetry Wales. The experience was most definitely positive and, on that basis, I’ve applied for a job in Swansea and hope to be offered an interview during the last two weeks of July … more on that once I know if I am offered an interview :)
Giles L. Turnbull, Poetically Productive

6) The same poet very often submits one dazzler and one dud.
7) Stunning imagery and phrasing can make me re-read a poem but craft that’s more subtle and quiet will always beat this in a battle, hands down. If the images don’t pull together as a team then the underlying structure’s unsound and the poem satisfies less each time it’s read again.
8) When I encounter a poem that takes outrageous risks and pulls them off it’s an absolute joy.
9) I almost always wish I could award far more than the allotted number of commendations. So many poems have little things about them I love and I want the poet to know they brought me a slice of happiness. Sometimes I try telepathy. Let me know if this has ever worked.
10) Seriously, don’t use those fonts that look like squiggly handwriting. Not even for a shopping list. Not even for a memo to yourself. Someone, somewhere in a parallel universe will take offence.
Guest Blog: Confessions of a Poetry Competition Judge by John McCullough (Josephine Corcoran’s blog)

As a writer, you have probably met, and read, the poetry of a number of authors who chose self-publication. There is a grand tradition in literature of self-publication: Edgar Allen Poe, Margaret Atwood and E.E. Cummings etc. It starts with belief in one’s own work, and the willingness to invest in it. But it also has advantages that should not be discounted: no long waits for an editor’s response; control over everything from cover design to purchase and sales price. The burden will fall on you for marketing, but that will be part of the process. A major publishing house, no matter how well-intentioned is unlikely to put an announcement of your new book in the latest issue of your college alumni magazine, or your church bulletin. They don’t know about the local book fair and are unlikely to do the leg work necessary to get you a reading at your local independent bookstore. That will be up to you… and it would have been up to you even with a major publisher. So why not consider self-publication?
Surprisingly, it may not be as expensive as you expected. A local poetry organization has just printed and anthology of ekphrastic poetry with 96 pages, including color pages with the art works in question. The first run of 100 copies ran $700. Seven dollars per copy. Your local printer may charge even less. Services like CreateSpace offer low prices, but charge for added services which may be worth it to you. And while you may make a very significant investment, I believe that going the traditional route you would also be very likely to buy many copies yourself, to take to readings and for the friends and family who will be your natural buyers. Remember that the traditional publishers would have made the decision to publish your work because they believe that it is salable… and that they can make a profit in doing so. Remember that they are in business, and that although they may have the greatest respect and love for poetry, they are looking for a profit. Why shouldn’t that profit be yours? Basically our local printer, who does a beautiful job, is happy to be “print on demand.” After the initial run of copies they have our manuscript on a disc and will gladly print additional copies at or close to the same price.
Of course we must admit that self-publication is more work in many areas: the research to find a printer and to make the selections of cover art, paper and binding. Do you want an ISBN (that will cost you more). How many pages/poems? Is this a chapbook or a full length manuscript? Most libraries require that the spine of a full length manuscript be wide enough to have the title on it. Would you like to have blurbs on the cover? A traditional publisher may send out copies to established poets hoping that they will be willing to blurb for you, but within your own network of poets there may be many whose work you respect who will do the same.
Considering Self-Publishing – guest blog post by Kathy Lundy Derengowski (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

I’ve just spent two weeks on holiday in Scotland, out of routine, barely writing. The first week I was away from my family, relaxing. I wrote in my journal about my trip and took notes of images and lines that popped into my head about what I was experiencing, but I didn’t work on any poems. A lot of rejections came in, unsubmitted poems piled up. It felt weird and strangely liberating. I missed my daily routine, but enjoyed soaking up the new experiences which I will hopefully work into poems in the future.

While on the island of Jura, I took a long walk to Barnhill, George Orwell’s house, where he wrote 1984. We got lucky to manage the 12 miles between the rain showers and had a beautiful view to eat our lunch just below Barnhill. Twelve miles was too much for me, I was pretty tired and sore by the end, but earned my shower and wine reward at the hotel. My friend walked all three Paps of Jura the next day, so I feel like a total weakling.
I’ve ordered a copy of Barnhill by Norman Bissell to read when I get back home. It’s about Orwell’s time on Jura, writing the novel. I had hoped it would arrive before I left for Jura, so I could read it while I was there, but it will be a nice chance to relive the place.
Gerry Stewart, Holiday Break and Barnhill

Lenin burns
brief in the sunset. Then the shadows blur
that too familiar gaze and now confer
upon the flats the anonymity
of dusk. Rocked home in a crosstown tram, we,
the gilded pilgrims from the rotten West,
witnessed the ancient world – a horse at rest,
the stacking of the sheaves through dust, the drift
of a mower’s scythe, the steady lap and lift
of sleep, of awakening. A harvest, it seems:
a gathering in of those early summer dreams.
Dick Jones, A RED SUN SETS IN THE WEST

I remember very few dates without having to look them up to be sure, but I do know that the storming of the Bastille happened in 1789–and by reversing those last 2 numbers, I can remember that Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. I can make the case that both events forever shaped the future.

Today is also the birthday of Woodie Guthrie, an artist who always had compassion for the oppressed. I find Guthrie fascinating as an artist. Here’s a singer-songwriter who doesn’t know music theory, who left behind a treasure trove of lyrics but no music written on musical staffs or chords–because he didn’t know how to do it. For many of the songs that he wrote, he simply used melodies that already existed.

I think of Woody Guthrie as one of those artists who only needed 3 chords and the truth–but in fact, he said that anyone who used more than two chords is showing off. In my later years, I’ve wondered if he developed this mantra because he couldn’t handle more than 2 chords.

I love this vision I have of Guthrie as an artist who didn’t let his lack of knowledge hold him back. I love how he turned the deficits that might have held a lesser artist back into strengths. I love that he’s created a whole body of work, but his most famous song (“This Land Is Your Land”) is still sung by schoolchildren everywhere, and how subversive is that? The lyrics are much more inclusive than you might remember, and there’s a verse that we didn’t sing as children, a verse that talks about how no one owns the land.

If I could create a body of poems that bring comfort and hope to activists, as well as one or two poems that everyone learns as schoolchildren, well I’d be happy with that artistic life. If I could inspire future generations the way that Guthrie did, how marvelous that would be. I could make the argument that artists like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the members of U2 would be different artists today, had there been no Woody Guthrie (better artists? worse? that’s a subject for a different post).

So, Alons, enfants de la patria! There’s work to do and people who need us to do it.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Bastille Day Bastions

June 9, 2019June 9, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 23

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 poetry bloggers pondering existential themes: being at home, surviving, healing, cultivating acceptance, dealing with digital ghosts, coming to terms with evil, learning from trees, (not) procrastinating, being whole.

No matter the journey. No matter other roads taken. No matter you misplaced the map of your life behind a wheel of grief. No matter you took a multitude of detours.
Because as you look out the plane window, you understand the agency of this place. How it has been etched in your mind over decades of slow accrual through streams you have fished, forests you have hiked, mountains you have climbed, lakes you have swam in, oceans you have sailed.
And how like its great river that flows to the sea, it also flows through you, and you call it by name—home.
Carey Taylor, Return Flight

It seems to me that all the poets I originally gravitated towards, and whose books I bought were ‘northern’. Or, at the least, not metropolitan. When they weren’t self-evidently ‘northern’ they were ‘regional’; they came with distinct voices that could not be described as RP, and would lose something important if they were read in RP…and I guess that what they would lose would be music, rhythm, texture. I’ve shared the idea with other writers that this poetry was somehow more ‘committed’, less inclined to be ironic, more inclined to wear its heart on its sleeve. I know it’s teetering on the edge of a generalising sentimentality, but I’m trying hard to be honest, to nail some kind of felt truth. One of my northern poet friends opined that ‘metropolitan’ poetry was ‘too cool for school’, that it prided itself in its avoidance of a felt emotional engagement. I don’t know if that’s accurate or fair. But something about it resonates enough for me to want to try to pin down that elusive idea of ‘north’ and ‘northernness’.
Let’s start with ‘accent’, and (predictably) with a quotation from Tony Harrison’s ‘Them and Uz’.
“All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see
‘s been dubbed by [ɅS] into RP,
Received Pronunciation please believe [ɅS]
your speech is in the hands of the Receivers”
Harrison spoke for tens of thousands of us who, in the 50’s, were harried for our accents in the Grammar Schools we sat scholarships to get into. It goes deeper than accent…which we can train ourselves to change. It springs from lexis, the words themselves, their resonance, their heft and texture. All the Old English, Germanic, Scandinavian words.
John Foggin, Northwords: Bob Beagrie

It took a long time to get here,
sailing, drifting,
and dreaming, curled,
homesick
and world-sick,
so much alike,
the young and the old.
Past lives peeled off like skins,
and I turned and tumbled and traveled
only to find myself
in front of these closed gates.
Claudia Serea, Young/Old

I started counting the months that we’ve been recovering. We’re mostly recovered in the big house, except for some of the difficult decisions about what comes back in the house from the cottage. But the cottage needs serious attention, and I am just so tired.

I’m also thinking of a poem I wrote years ago. I got the title from a powerful essay by Philip Gerard that appears in one of the very first books about how to teach creative non-fiction. My poem was written years after after Hurricane Wilma (which wreaked devestation in 2 months after Katrina, just after we had finished up our hurricane Katrina clean-up) when I found myself weeping in the car, flooded by post-hurricane despair, even though the clean-up had been done and regular life mostly restored:

What They Don’t Tell You About Hurricanes

You expected the ache in your lazy
muscles, as you hauled debris
to the curb, day after day.

You expected your insurance
agent to treat
you like a lover spurned.

You expected to curse
your bad luck,
but then feel grateful
when you met someone suffering
an even more devastating loss.

You did not expect
that months, even years afterwards
you would find yourself inexplicably
weeping in your car, parked
in a garage that overlooks
an industrial wasteland.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hurricane Season Begins

I spent almost a whole day going to my hematologist down at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. My doctor there I have known for fifteen years. The last time we talked it was when we thought I might be dying of liver cancer, and we talked about safe biopsies and chemo and surgery obstacles. This time I brought her my newest book and we discussed my mild anemia (she’s worried about it, but I’m not) and MS drug risks and pain drugs and pain clinic consultations. I sat in the reclining chairs watching the beautiful Puget sound blue by all the people getting chemo and waiting to get chemo. I wound through the blood lab around patients much worse off than me. It gives you perspective, these kinds of visits. The doctor, which was very unusual, gave me a hug at the end of the appointment. It felt like a blessing, a sort of hopeful encouragement. I walked out into the rainy early evening, feeling the ghost of my previous experiences, of the fear of death, and the gratefulness of feeling alive.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poems Up at WordGathering, Woodinville Wine Country, and a Day at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance

I walked up to Renshin afterward and said: I have a problem with this idea. There is a similar concept in Byron Katie, that you can’t argue with life because it’s perfect exactly as it is. And it shows up in all kinds of Zen books. It makes a certain kind of sense, and it does help in achieving a certain level of equanimity. But it’s one thing for me to apply that insight to my own life, another thing entirely to tell someone else that.
Ah, but you’re making a big jump there, Renshin said. Who said anything about telling someone else what to do or what to think?
And then she added: Watch out for that first step – it’s a doozy.
I was briefly stunned. She had in fact identified something about the way my particular mind works, and showed it to me in a few seconds of casual conversation. All I could think to do was bow.
Later, as I was leaving, I was sort of backing out the front door of the church while saying goodbye to a few people in the breezeway. And I almost fell over because there was a step down from the door – a tiny little step.
stumbling ::
the gap between the sky
and the ground
D. F. Tweney, Watch out for that first step

So how can I react to these digital ghosts and the griefs they awaken: online reminders of my wedding, or of my mother who has died, or of friendships that evaporated or hopes that didn’t come to pass? The only answer I have is to feel whatever I feel — the sorrow, the wistfulness, the regret — and to thank my heart for its capacity to feel both the bitter and the sweet.
And I can choose to be real, even in digital spaces. Even when what’s real is a hurt or an ache, a memory or a sorrow. Because I think being real with ourselves and one another is what we’re here for in this life. Because I think spiritual life asks our authenticity. Because life is too short for pretense. Because being real comes with its own blessings, its own reward.
Rachel Barenblat, Fragments: digital ghosts, gratitude, and grief

Here is what I want you to know about the silence, still as death and colder: it moved from you to me, see, here in this bonecage gone titanium, this immune system propped by goblin armies:

couplets emerge from scar, relentlessly enjambed. This body is a verse form dealing with both loss and love, but choked by anaphylaxis there is no scheme. The poet’s moniker appears at the end.

Once I took you all the way in, once I choked. They are peculiar twins, vulnerability and memory: I am made and remade as neural network linking like things, a synesthesia.
JJS, June 4, 2019: Ghazalish, The Flood

John Sibley Williams’ As One Fire Consumes Another presents a familiar world full of burnings carried out on both the grand and intimate scale. I love the way the newspaper-like columns of prose poetry in his work provide a social critique of violence in American culture while working within the boundaries of self, family, and the natural world. The book permeates an apocalyptic tension, but what makes it so great is the way in which his poems envision the kind of fires that not only provide destruction but also illuminate a spark of hope. And I also interviewed Williams about his book, which will be coming out on NBP podcast soon (seems like most of my poetry reading is focused around my podcasting work these days).
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: May 2019

There was a rash of gang shootings in Seattle over the last month, and my precious, gentle friend and co-worker recently saw the fresh body of a seventeen-year-old kid shot to death, bleeding out on the sidewalk at the hospital campus she works at. I didn’t realize the extent of her trauma until a recent get-together with my colleagues from my hospital’s other campuses. My co-worker is someone who I would consider a classic “good person,” a warm, kind human being who is probably a little too trusting. Part of her trauma came from the shock of seeing true evil at play.

I am coming to realize that it’s been been a luxury for me to go through life believing that people are essentially good. We hear about horrible things happening all of the time, but until we come face to face with them, they remain more or less theoretical. We can’t really process that human beings have darkness and savagery within them until we see something like that. And because we don’t see it in other people, it’s very hard to see it in ourselves. And that’s the really dangerous part. In trying to process this local tragedy, I spent the morning listening to a podcast about the much bigger and far more atrocious My Lai massacre. It drove home to me how important it is to not get complacent about our own potential for evil. Believing that humanity is essentially good is dangerous and foolish. We have to face the truth of who we are as human beings and be vigilant, or we will fall to prey to savagery, violence and acts of inhumanity, no matter how “good” we convince ourselves we are.
Kristen McHenry, Good People, Dark Places

A great deal of thought and planning had gone into the manner of the preservation of Bergen-Belsen. The absence of any of the accommodation huts, the vehicle parks, the workshops, the guards’ quarters, the administrative buildings that had once filled the grim estate and the restitution of the heathland and copses that had gone under their foundations creates a powerfully moving sense of a territory both haunted by the unendurable horrors of the past and yet now salved and dignified by nature. It’s an extraordinary place – an eloquent testimony both to utter destruction and tenacious survival. I shall never forget our quiet, slow day amongst the harebells and the graves.
ARTEFACTS
There is the heaped equality
of spectacles, the comfort
of linked arms –
wire, gold and tortoiseshell,
the white opacity
of the tilted lens.
There is the kicking scramble
of empty shoes, piled
like bean pods, shelled
of movement, scuffed and dusty
from the longest walk
in the world.
There is the hollow clothing,
the empty-handed gloves,
the headless hats and cap,
the hanks of hair, bagged,
sprung teeth in boxes,
stamped and labelled.
Bones we know;
we scrambled up and out
of the millennium
on bones. These clothes,
these artefacts endure,
undiminished, unconsumed.
Dick Jones, BERGEN-BELSEN

I’ve been thinking about trees because I’m reading Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 book The Hidden Life of Trees. The text reads like a friendly forester inviting readers to learn what he loves about trees and their encounters with us, with the environment (soil, air, sun, water, pollutants, pests, fungi), and with one another. I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical about the scientific veracity of his source material, but I do enjoy his warm enthusiasm for his subjects and his reminders that we humans don’t know even the smallest fraction of what goes on in the planet’s interconnected and unplumbed depths.
Although some critics object to what they see as too much anthropomorphism in Wohllebehn’s book, his use of the analogy of the human and the tree “bodies” makes his information about how trees and forests work easy to grasp.
For science nerds, there are other texts. The Hidden Life of Trees is meant to make the less scientifically-inclined reader more aware of his or her environment, to convince the average human being to consider plant life more consciously.
~
I take many photos of trees; and they appear in my poems pretty regularly, not as main characters but in supporting roles–not symbolic, but actual. Wohllebehn’s book may influence my work somehow…possible inspiration? But then, the trees themselves, especially the oldest ones, are inspiration enough.
Ann E. Michael, Trees

This is a beautiful and gentle book. It does not claim to be poetry, but it is written by a poet and it begins with a powerful image, comparing the children of a large family to pansies, which “are a persistent breed. They take to the same soil, year after year.” If you didn’t read the back of the book it would take you until the third of these finely crafted vignettes to find out what is going on; this is the story of a compassionate woman who needs a babysitter and ends up learning about a sub-culture very different from her own. The young woman she hires teaches her bit by bit about another way of living, of understanding one’s place in the world.
Young people, who only hear bad stories about different peoples, such as Muslims or unwanted immigrants, should read this book. So should those who are older and weary of bad news. The writing is concise, elegant, and honest about the narrator’s mistakes and misunderstandings, as well as about the limits to the relationship.
No, these are not prose poems, but they are close cousins. I will share it with my poetry group and I expect that they will like it as well as I do.
Ellen Roberts Young, Recommendation: Pansies by Carol Barrett

When we were in our first years of library programming endeavors, people often wondered how we had so many ideas. For workshops, for panels, for focus topics. What I didn’t share were the back burners, or the ones that were a little too costly or the effort vs result ratio was poor. I have suggestions for workshop ideas in my notebook that have been there for 3 or more years that I’m still hoping to make happen down the line. And maybe they’ll happen, or maybe they’ll get pushed out of the way by newer, better ideas.

In my notebook, there is a page full of tiny post-its for art projects, another with writing projects. Another with anthology projects and other press doings. Another with crafty things I’d like to make for the shop. This is all in addition to the half finished things–like unusual creatures, postcards from the blue swallow, the mermaid anthology, swim. They stand like a weight in my other hand while the things I do finish or see to the end balance in the other. I try not to let them get too out of whack, otherwise I flounder about feeling like I never finish anything I’ve started. But I remind myself I do. Just not those particular things.
Kristy Bowen, on ideas, and too many of them

This also made me remember something that happened in (or to) my writing life many years ago. My daughters were young, I had my first full-time teaching job, and I told a writing friend that I would write…later. I may have said that maybe I wouldn’t ever get back to writing. In any case, I gave the clear impression that despite an MFA in poetry and all my huge writing goals, which my friend knew all about, I was going to put off writing.
She wrote me a letter — old school, sat down and wrote it in long-hand and mailed it to me (of course, that happened more often back then, but we did have email). She said something like this:
No one cares if you write. The world is not going to come and pound on your door and insist that you write. No one will miss it if you don’t write. They won’t even know. Meanwhile, life will unfold. You’ll get older. You’ll get farther and farther from your writing dreams. Eventually you’ll say to your grandchildren, “I used to write.” But your grandchildren won’t especially care either. It makes no difference whether you write or not. EXCEPT TO YOU. A place inside YOU will dry up and never be expressed if you don’t write. YOU will miss it. YOU will care. The only way to keep your writing alive, to keep this important part of yourself alive, is to write.
I probably have this letter somewhere. I should have framed it. I took it seriously (even though it was like that small, inner voice that I so often don’t heed). And I kept writing. Often, I didn’t have much time; I had little kids for a lot of years; I had a teaching career; I had teenagers and a mother who was ill. Nonetheless, I made a little time every day and I wrote. Some days the little bit of time turned into enough time.
And it has mattered. It has mattered to me. Writing has sustained me and saved me and even made things like parenting and teaching richer and more enjoyable. I am glad that I kept writing.
Bethany Reid, Procrastination Kills

A hot day. That’s OK. If I hated the heat I wouldn’t love the Sacramento Valley like I do. I like a hot, dry summer and a cool, wet winter.

There’s a lot going on. There’s my two on-going poetry reading series. There’s the events I attend as poet laureate, another one tomorrow. I am giving a reading in Sacramento this coming Monday. The homeless shelter where I volunteer as a board member is always active. My church is always active. My wife and I are part of an extended family group that I love very much. And then there’s all the chores that I put off. Never put off for tomorrow the procrastination you can do today.

And I love all those things. But what do I love best? Simply being. I meditate twice a day, write poems, wander around town. There’s a park right across the street from my house. I can watch the light changing against the huge pine trees as the hours pass. There’s an owl – at least one. At night, when it’s cool I like to go out there and listen for the owl. 2 AM, 3 AM, just whenever I happen to wake up. I see what the clouds and the moon are up to. Then I go back to bed.

And you?
James Lee Jobe, Journal Update – 04 June 2019

That Poem You Wrote

is only half of something unsaid
hold it next to the mirror
so that it looks whole
do you look whole? how
can you tell?
Romana Iorga, That Poem You Wrote

May 5, 2019May 5, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 18

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.

The end of Poetry Month last week prompted not just progress reports and posts about favorite books and poems, but also led a number of poets to ponder larger questions about productivity, ambition, and the nature of work. Several wrote about sleep and insomnia, and others talked about the importance of writing in community. And as usual there were a few miscellaneous posts that didn’t really fit anywhere but were too damn fun to leave out. Enjoy.

Today I clicked on a random link to a recent poem in a fancier journal (someone liked it, I’m not sure why) and reading through was kind of embarassed for the journal for publishing it. (and kinda for the dude for writing it.) It committed the cardinal sin in my poetry church–the breaking of sentences into lines with no real “poetry” quality about it except it looked like one on the page. Also, it was boring, and in places abstract and cliched. The venue in question misses the mark quite a bit, but this was supposed to be one of the poetry world darlings, someone who people hold up as an idol (not me, but other people). I started laughing and literally could not stop for about 5 minutes.

I realized for every time I think to myself, question myself, that I do not know what I’m doing…my own work, even at it’s very throwaway worst was far better than this sampling. That yes, maybe I totally DO know what I’m doing and am doing it pretty damn well. And in fact all of us–poet friends, dgp authors, the mss. I help out with –ALL of us are doing so much better than this fancy poet with our work. If this came across my desk as an editor it would be an immediate “no” not even a “maybe.” I’ve met poets who have been writing for a year or less who are considerably stronger than this. Don’t worry, we got this.
Kristy Bowen, poet pep talk # 786

We can get used to all sorts of fashions and default settings in poetry, getting comfortable with psalms, and sestinas, and free verse, and minimalism, and stanzaic bits of ekphrasis and sonnets, and narratives. Which reminds me of a writing course I went on where elegant lyricism and exquisitely crafted velleities were the name of the game, and, en passant, one lady of letters remarked, languidly enough: ‘The anecdotal, the bus-stop conversation, has its own charm.’ by which I understood that it has no place in serious poetry at all.
This set me to think of my own predilection for narrative in poetry, and my inability to engage with, or be engaged by, self-referential stylistic games with fleeting moments, and the fragility of, say, a lemon. It also made me think of what does engage me. Emotional and intellectual surprise and challenge… that grabs me. I like novels like ‘The Name of the Rose’, and ‘Tristram Shandy’. I like MacCaig’s outrageous similes. I like the Metaphysicals. I like early Tony Harrison. I like ‘The Waste land’. I like to be out of my comfort zone, put slightly off -balance; I like creative disturbance. And so I came to like Yvonne Reddick’s idiosyncratic take on the world and its multifariousness.
The first time I met her was (regular readers, you can now roll your eyes and get it over with) at a Poetry Business Writing Day. After all, that’s where I get all my new poetry and poets. I may be wrong, but I think that was the one where she brought a distinctly eccentric poem to workshop. The title gives you due warning: Holocene Extinction Memorial. Nineteen irregular stanzas, each of which might be an idiosyncratic label in a room full of unnervingly strange exhibits.
‘The Indefatigable Galapagos Mouse from Indefatigable Island wants to be invincible’
‘The Hacaath of Vancouver struggle with smallpox’
‘The quagga hopes Burchell’s zebra remembers her’
I have no idea if she made some of them up, or all, or none; I could Google them but I have no desire to find out. The thing is, she read with such emphatic conviction that I had no choice but to be convinced. I have no idea if anyone else was as taken as I, or even if it was ‘a Good Poem’. All I know is it was unexpected, and memorable, and that’s not the case with everything you hear in a workshop. It was like the poem equivalent of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford before it was tidied up and curated into rationality. Like the cabinets of curiosities beloved of the incumbents of Victorian rectories.
John Foggin, A polished gem revisited: Yvonne Reddick

I have returned to the poems in QUANTUM HERESIES many times in the last two months. How can a debut collection of poems be so arresting, so superb? One answer is that Mary Peelen has been hard at work on her craft for years; she is not a dilettante but rather a true poet. Also, she has lived a fascinating and hard-won life.

Take for example these lines from “String Theory,”

Here at the horizon of theoretical extinction,
we cut flowers for the table.
We sing the way weary mourners do,
praising geometry as if miracles could happen.
The environment, mathematics, love, and loss in two couplets. I am in awe of these lines and from many other poems as well including: “x”, “Unified Theory,” and “Sunday Morning” to name but a few stellar examples of Peelen’s deft and spare language.

Elizabeth Bishop once said that what she liked best in a poem was “to see a mind in motion.” And she then added that this was of course an impossibility. That the poems that did their best to mirror the mind’s movement were working hard to display such ease.
Susan Rich, Mary Peelen’s QUANTUM HERESIES is here and you want to read it!

I confess that I love finishing books because it gives me a chance to move to another one on my to read pile. That pile grows like the National Debt. But I’ve finished another and will be looking to start another. I’ve finished reading The Veronica Maneuver by Jennifer Moore. I will be doing a review of the book soon. (adding to my growing to do list).

Goat Yoga. There is such a thing. I kid you not. (no pun intended) Yesterday I joined others at Paradise Park for a session of goat yoga. The cute little things wander around among us and challenge our focus. They will occasionally have accidents. My mat was missed by inches. Their poop looks like Raisinets. See photo to right. Aside from, the experience was fun and we did get some light yoga in, which at this stage is about where I am at in the yoga experience overall. Anyone who knows me well quite possibly knows my affinity towards goats.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – OM to the Goats Edition

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s terrifyingly useful PR For Poets is packed with ideas completely new to me, even though this is my third book. (Or fifth, depending on how such things are counted.) […]
Like nearly every other writer I know, I’m a friendly hermit with a serious allergy* to self-promotion. So I didn’t follow most of Jeannine’s good advice, like developing a PR kit or getting a headshot. But her book did foster another idea. “Hide in the house,” I said to myself. “Make something fun to help sell the new book.”
Book swag can include postcards, magnets, bookmarks, t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, pens, custom-decorated cookies, toys, and more. All the stuff most writers, let alone most publishers, can’t possibly afford. Jeannine calmly explains postcards and business cards are the most useful, and how to produce them at a reasonable cost. Of course I wanted to do something complicated. […]
Initially I hoped to create tiny replica book necklaces that could open to a poetry sample, somewhat like this project on Buttons & Paint. The time required, however, was too daunting, especially with time constraints like my actual editing job.
Then I decided to make book pendants that could be worn or used to mark one’s place. It seemed simple.
Laura Grace Weldon, How Not To Make Book Swag

Here are my thoughts as I read, and reread this poem. What caught me up first was the detail of slow description of what is a fairly brief event: details like noting when the boy is seeing the bulbous end or the tapering end of the carrot.
Second, the word choices. “Bulbous” is not a plain word. I particularly notice the way “whisker” is used as a verb and applied to the carrot, not the white hairs on a chin. The “same glints” on the two caught my attention also, because I’ve seen such glints in early morning sun.
Another good touch is the delaying of the boy’s age until the short second stanza. Now we meet the one for whom this very ordinary event is not ordinary at all. And when the poem ends on “the world outside this garden” how could this garden not be Eden?
John C. Mannone has contributed to Sin Fronteras Journal, of which I am one of the editors. I look forward to seeing more of his work wherever it appears.
Ellen Roberts Young, Reading a Poem: Mannone’s “Carrots”

When pondering what to post today, the last day of April and therefore the last post in this series of Great Poems for April—no pressure!—I realized a strange thing. Even though I’d been concentrating on going through my own trove of favorite poems through the month, I hadn’t really thought about which one poem is my very favorite. You know, that one that accompanies you through life, whose lines remain with you like bits of a song that you find yourself humming while doing dishes or driving to work. As soon as I thought that, I immediately knew which one was my favorite: “After Apple-Picking.”

What I love most about this poem is its unusual rhyme scheme. This being Frost, of course there’s a pattern. But it’s so erratic, so—dare I say—rebellious that I wonder if Frost was thinking, screw the establishment; I’m gonna go all Picasso on the old end rhyme. And he was a master of the old end rhyme. And yet he was young when he wrote this. And probably somebody out there knows what that was all about, but I’m kind of glad I don’t know, in the same way I’m glad I don’t know for sure what the different kinds of sleep are that he talks about. Or whether this is about the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the banishment from Eden. Or about the burdens of fame (that’s my go-to—“I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired”—but again, he was young, so I’m not so sure). And if you want to see what other people think about all those things, spend an amusing hour or so surfing the internet, looking at the different theories. Those people are all so sure they know what this poem means.

What I do know about this poem is that it’s beautiful. Phrases of this poem are, I think, among the best in American poetry (“ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,” “load on load of apples coming in,” and that low-geared, four-word musical breakdown of a line, “As of no worth”). I love the way he changes up the rhythm and sentence length, and of course those erratic line lengths that sneak the rhymes in there among all the truncation where you can barely hear it. The phrasing is so memorable that I literally can’t pick up a stepladder without whispering “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still,” or cut open an apple without thinking “Stem end and blossom end.” And this line—“Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.” I can go back and read that for a lifetime and never get tired of it.

Every year that I reread this poem, it means something different to me; I find some small part I hadn’t thought much about before. (Right now it’s the “pane of glass / I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough”—can’t you see it? Don’t you sometimes go a whole day, unable to rub that strangeness from your sight?) Loving a good poem is like a friendship. You go through time together, and even though you never know everything about that poem, you keep discovering things that it didn’t tell you before. And your relationship with it changes too. If it’s really a great poem, the poem weathers the changes. And so do you.
Amy Miller, 30 Great Poems for April, Day 30: “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost

As we come to the end of National Poetry Month I wanted to share with you a few poems I read and absolutely loved this month. Do yourself a favor and read them.
This one is an old poem – published in April 2017. But I only just discovered it earlier this month and it’s worth sharing:
I try to say—
I am lonely.
I try to say—
I want to come home,
to Earth, to Ithaca.
That this
was all a mistake.
~ from Yellowshirt Elegy by Meghan Phillips, published by Barrelhouse
Another one that was published back in July but thanks to the powers of Twitter, I just discovered it this month:
An analogy:
Pac-Man fills his mouth with pellets: you fill
your house with wine, your head with songs.
~from Nine Ways in Which Pac-Man Speaks to the Human Condition by Katie Willingham, published by Paper Darts
Courtney LeBlanc, Read These Poems

April is finished, thank goodness, it’s been a tough month for a variety of reasons. Now I can do a review of my efforts over GloPoWriMo, the Global Poetry Writing Month – my attempts to write at least one, sometimes two poems a day for my two online courses.

I wrote 22 poems that I consider done or almost done and 12 poems that still need a lot of work or will probably never make it past draft stage. There are also some drafts that I couldn’t count as going anywhere, so I haven’t counted them. That’s just over 30, so I’m very pleased with that. Some days I wrote nothing, some I wrote two, but I sat down regularly enough to have a poem a day for the month.

Forcing myself to write a rough draft of a poem a day has pushed me to not avoid difficult subjects, to delve deeper into moments that have weight for me, but might not necessarily be an interesting telling on the face of it at first. I have pushed myself to write even when I’m not in the mood or don’t like where my writing is going. Sometimes just ranting on the page or exploring those emotionally charged subjects helps me to deal with them in a healthier way than bottling them up and letting them fizz inside me until I explode over nothing.
Gerry Stewart, My April GloPoWriMo Assessment

I wrote 30 poems, one each day, as a sonnet cycle. It was surprisingly easy to keep going, as every day I had a prompt from the previous poem. By about 4/12, I found that I didn’t have to count lines, I just wrote 14 and stopped. The form entered me. I will be working on revisions for a good while, but I’m hopeful that I have something here. The cycle starts and ends with this line:
It was a warm day in April when the coleus died.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with My April Roundup

& so, I did what I set out to do: I exercised the necessary discipline to draft a poem a day during National Poetry Month, and I pushed against my “comfort zone” by publicly posting those drafts as they came to me. Usually I do not share my initial drafts with anyone other than fellow writers in my writer’s group or a few poets with whom I correspond. This was an interesting experiment on the personal level, therefore, a sort of forced extroversion as well as effort in productivity. I now have 30 new drafts to reflect upon, revise, or ignore.
It has been years since I came up with that much work in four weeks’ time. For the last decade or so, my average has been closer to six or seven poems a month. And I would not have posted any of them as they “hatched.” I would have waited until I spent some time with them and figured out how best to say what they seemed to want to say.
That’s not an unwise approach in general; I see nothing wrong with letting poems stew awhile. And quite a few would have ended up in the “dead poems” folder. Nevertheless, trying something innovative tends to prove valuable. The takeaway is that I am glad I finally managed the NaPoWriMo challenge. A few of the poem drafts you may have read here stand a chance of evolving into better poems. Maybe some will end up in a collection (years down the road). That result feels good.
The takeaway is also the realization that I no longer worry about how others judge my poems, the way I did when I was starting out and discouraged about having my stuff rejected by magazines. Not because there’s less at stake–indeed, I feel as invested in my writing as I ever was. The difference comes with the kind of investment, the ambition to write something meaningful or beautiful, and not viewing the poems as results waiting to be determined as valuable by someone more authoritative.
I’m 60 years old and well-educated in poetic craft, style, purpose, analysis. I’ve been writing poetry for over four decades. At this point in my life, that’s authority enough.
Ann E. Michael, The takeaway

Here’s wishing you a happy May Day and hoping that you enjoyed a marvelous Poetry Month.
In the photo, you can make out a couple of stones. Those make the line between the lawn’s lush green abundance and the scraggly patch of winter rye. Okay, some lawn grass is mixed in between the rye and the irises. But it’s had me thinking about what we cut and what we keep, about censoring and not censoring, about how we tend our writing. Even about where I’m putting my energy.
In thinking about writing, I’m seeing the two kinds of grasses not as separate things but as the different attentions required. There’s letting the creative rush run over, there’s perhaps (for me, always) the need to trim, to shape, and there’s the need to tend, to wait patiently.
Joannie Stangeland, Rye diary: Day four

If you’re reading this, it must be some time between 3 -5 am and I am up listening to Vampire Weekend’s new song “Harmony Hill” on repeat.

I’ve written 2 poems and answered a few emails. I haven’t spoken to anyone in 36 hours, and this is the gift of the writing residency. I wonder–what if I didn’t talk to people for days in real life, would I have more to write? It seems the less I talk, the more I have to say when I write.

I know it would be almost impossible to achieve this at home, but it encourages me on my next retreat to see how long I could go without speaking.

Solitude, when chosen, is a gift.
Solitude, when forced upon someone, is a punishment.
Solitude, when not wanted, is loneliness in disguise.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Making the Most of Insomnia…

So we know all kinds of stuff about how the mind works, but we don’t know what this feeling is of knowing. Which makes me so confused I feel sleepy. And, let me tell you, from all the articles people insist on forwarding to me, we really know very little about sleep — how it works, why it works, why it works the way it works, and what’s going on when it doesn’t work, not to mention how to fix it. So we not only don’t know what this thing called “I” is but we don’t know why “I” can’t sleep. I’ll tell you, it keeps me awake at night.
Marilyn McCabe, Wake Me Up When It’s Over

One after the other you fall asleep
as the light moves on and wakes up
the ones at the other end of the line
We move so fast that we cannot see
A merry-go-round of dreams
Magda Kapa, Globally Speaking

Staying up most of the night working on poems. Oh Lonely Bones – can’t you rest? Why should I? Even now now a strong wind carries some pine seeds to the earth. Even now the boats slide down the long Sacramento River to the bay. A new day begins and I am alive.
James Lee Jobe, ‘Staying up most of the night working on poems.’

The buzz bang clatter shatter whooshing rush
of restaurant chatter. I just smile and nod.
This is not an aura, but a shockwave
pulsing against my skin with each heartbeat,
an auditory strobe staccato sheet
of porcupine pins flying in close shave
formation, grinding at 300 baud.
PF Anderson, On Aurality

The wipe-out of my hard drive and the subsequent computer clean-up continues. I went into my main drive this weekend to organize my years of fiction and poetry output, and was at once heartened and saddened by it, the sad part of which threw me immediately into the throes of writing self-pity, a very unbecoming state of being in which I lamented the failure of my novel, wallowed in my fear that writing poetry about my new-found passion for shooting will be roundly rejected by anti-gun leftist poetry publishers everywhere, as poets are almost universally anti-gun leftists, and lamented the fact that I am hopelessly prone to writing run-on sentences. But I am also proud to report that I was fairly pleased overall with my review of my previous work. I read some things that I had forgotten I wrote and that can firmly say I stand by to this day, despite their thickness and amateur-ness. To balance this, the most hopeless amongst them were unceremoniously deleted. So it’s been a mixed bag.
Kristen McHenry, Fun with Projection, Ear to Mouth Ratio, Self-Pity Sunday

I’ve been ruthless this week, in a way that feels quite alien to me. I’ve shelved so many jobs in order to stick to my goal of writing two (yes, just two) pages of my notebook every day. The things I’ve put to one side include reading (poetry and prose, weekend supplements) making art/ collages, cleaning the bathroom, weeding the garden (although the weather was against me on this week). Still, you get the picture. What’s interesting is that because my target is quite low, in terms of word count, I’ve exceeded it nearly every day. This has been really positive. It’s given me that ‘Can do’ feeling, and made me keen to carry on, so much so that yesterday I treated myself to a new notebook, in anticipation of finishing the current one. I’ve stuck to A5 so I can keep the momentum – there’s something about turning the page that makes me feel I’m being more productive.
Writing is important to me, and I’ve said for a while now that I’ve embraced distractions as a way of feeding the work, but the bottom line is, if you’re not setting aside time to do the work, then anything you’ve gleaned from these distractions isn’t being given a fair chance to flourish into something new on the page. So, instead of finding excuses (or allowing the distractions to take over) I’m concentrating on finding ways to fit my writing into what seems, at times, an impossibly short day.
Julie Mellor, No excuses

Many years ago the doctor told me the best thing I could do for my mental health was to keep a routine. Take the mornings predictably, and slowly.
So since my kids hit their teens, I have been up early to run, write and do meditation. And for the past year, I have included a morning flow sequence.
How I wish I had done this when my children were young. I’ve spent most of my life – all of my adult life – obsessively attempting to be productive. The unquestioned belief being that my life would be of value only if I left something important behind; that I am somehow required to justify my time on earth by creating works of art. On days, and during months scattered with rejection slips from publishers, I’d rethink my life’s choices and feel obligated to toss my humanity degrees and get a nursing degree, or a counselling certification: the kind of thing that makes a person valuable, makes them the kind of person who can sign up with Médecins Sans Frontières and do good in the world.
Ren Powell, An Art of Living – Day 1

After that glass of wine, I walked home through a small town under construction and swarming with alumnae/i, pondering ambition. It was very much on my mind in my mid-forties, when I started writing the poems in my forthcoming collection. My current working title for the latter is The State She’s In, but whether or not my editor ultimately agrees about that, I’m polishing the ms now and the book will be out in March or April 2020. The collection, in fact, contains a sequence of five list-poems called “Ambitions,” and I considered whether I could or should incorporate the word in my book title. I guess I was asking common midlife questions: what is all this striving for? Am I on a path towards something good, goals I genuinely care about? Am I fulfilling my responsibilities to other people, to my work, and as a citizen–not the trivial stuff, but the deep obligations? Then an ambitious woman ran for office, and a man who despises women trumped her, and some of my struggle over that episode is in the book, too.
As I veered off Main St. onto the smaller road that leads home, I realized I may have turned a corner where ambition is concerned. I’m not sure how much of the change comes from turning fifty, or other revolutions in my life, or even just the fact that three books I worked on for years all have contracts now, so I can afford to be less anxious! Maybe my state of relative equilibrium is temporary. But while I still think many kinds of ambition are good and important, and anyone who’s nervous about ambition in women is a sexist jerk, I find I’m not fretting about productivity this summer, for once. I can’t even drum up worry about the reception my poetry book will eventually meet (the novel’s a bit different–still feel like an imposter there). I have a number of writing projects percolating, and I’ll be helping my kids launch into college and the working world, but I’m mainly grateful that a summer slow-down is allowing me to strengthen these mss and plan for how I can help them find audiences. My chief ambition, I’m realizing, is to make the books as moving and crafty and complicated and inspiring as possible.
Lesley Wheeler, The ambit of ambition

I’m thinking about trying to start a series of get-togethers at my house, since it’s become more difficult to get out and about but I’m still an extrovert who gets inspired by spending time with other creative people. My house is pretty good for entertaining, and Glenn is good at making snacks. Should I try to create a new writers feedback group, like the one I was in for thirteen plus years, or try salons, with a bunch of different kind of artists? I’ve been finishing up a series of Virginia Woolf letters, and I’m inspired by the way, though she was limited in the amount she went out or went to London, she brought a circle of artists around her houses, not always together at the same time, but encouraged them, published them, provided tea and conversation. She really did get inspired and enjoy helping others.
I was thinking about ways to help others and maybe start working again, a little bit, from home. But what? Technical writing or marketing writing? Offering manuscript consults again? Or perhaps some coaching for doing basic PR for poets with new books? When I’m feeling good, I’m pretty effective, but I do have these “slips” in time that happen when I’m sick, so I need something that’s flexible.
Women Writing Despite…
In fact, many of the “major” women writers that we read, including Flannery O’Conner, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Charlotte Bronte, all had limits on their health – physical and mental illnesses, constraints on their time and energy. They still managed to produce a ton of work, not just published books, but tons of journals and letters that I find fascinating and great research for women writers – how they succeed, how they struggled, how they maintained friendships and family demands. (Frida Kahlo is kind of the patron-saint of sick women creatives, too. Not only is her art getting more attention these days, but I read that her garden was recently restored – how I would love to see that!)
I think one reason I’ve been attracted to researching the lives of these writers is that they succeeded despite. Despite family opposition, money problems, health problems, during a literary time that was – shall we say – unfriendly to women’s voices. How they guarded their writing time, and struggled with “doing it all” – a woman’s problem for centuries, not just now, the expectations that women will be supportive of their family’s needs, domestic work, taking care of spouses or family members, plus write and spend time and cultivate connections with other creative people. So what I’m saying is, really, in this age of phones and internets and social media, it’s easier for me than it would have been for any of those writers, despite my illnesses, the physical limitations I might face, the frustrations I feel.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Another Birthday, Spring and All, Thinking About the Modern Salon and Writing Groups, Women Writing Despite, and Planning for the Year Ahead

As I’ve traveled, from AWP a month ago to the creativity retreat last week, I’ve been thinking about tribes, the tribes we choose and the tribes that claim us. I saw many AWP posts that talked about the ecstasy of being back with one’s tribe, but I don’t feel that way at AWP. I’m a different kind of participant, with a very different kind of non-writing job for pay than most people there. I still have a good time, but it’s a much more industrial feel for me–it’s not the sigh of relief, the “I’m home again!” feeling for me.

Last week’s retreat was that way. Let me preface by saying that I don’t always feel that way. I’ve been coming to this retreat since 2003, and I’m not sure why some years it’s easy to settle in to the retreat rhythm and some years I never capture it. This year I felt like I knew fewer people (in part, because we had a larger crowd with more new people), yet surprisingly, I had that return to the tribe feeling.

I don’t have many areas of my life when I’m surrounded by people who are interested in the intersections of creativity and spirituality; in fact, this retreat might be the only place where I am in a larger group of those kinds of people. There are a few at my local church, but at the retreat, I’m with 70+ people who are. And we’re interested in a wide variety of creative expressions. It’s exhilarating.

It does take me away from poetry writing, which is strange since the retreat almost always happens during National Poetry Month. But it’s great to be distracted by a retreat, not by the drudgery of administrative work.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Tribes and Poetry and the Focus of a Month

This week I submitted a proposal for AWP 2020, which will take place in San Antonio, TX. I haven’t had a panel picked up for the conference in a few years, so maybe I’m due. I hope it’s accepted — it gives me a chance to collaborate with a couple of my friends: one from college, J.C., who is a playwright and TV/film writer and essayist who lives now in Los Angeles. The topic is on DIY residencies and retreats — granting yourself time and space to write — and she’s been doing these kinds of things for years now; also with C.Y.M., who completed an Artist Residency in Motherhood a short while ago.

M.S. and I have been planning, and putting the final necessary pieces in place, for doing our own Artist Residency in Motherhood this summer, for a week in July. We have all of our kiddos signed up for day camps, and we’re renting a tiny apartment not far from the camps. We’re going to use an apartment booked through AirBnB as a joint workspace. The plan is to use 3-4 hours in the morning for work on writing and art-making, break briefly for lunch, and then either go back to work or go on some kind of excursion we wouldn’t normally be able to do with three kids in tow. Also, our work, our writing and art, will be focused around a joint theme — so that possibly we can exhibit or publish it somewhere together. Or maybe we won’t. We’re trying not to put too much pressure on the week — just enough to provides some focus or direction.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Returning to Blogging, More Bathroom Renovating, DIY Residency Planning, and a Cover Reveal

windless our sails of blood and bone become moons in a jar
when all else is emptied your name takes on the shape of a swan
Johannes S. H. Bjerg, seq. 30.04 2019/sekv. 30.04 2019

April 14, 2019April 14, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 15

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.

Poetry Month continues. We write about writing (of course), family, and flowers real and artificial, we write about favorite poems and the poetics of travel, teaching exercises, abilities and disabilities. We pay attention.

Along with the fiery nature of Aries and the blossoming of spring comes April and National Poetry Month in the US.
One of my main inspirations has been the poetry of Jericho Brown and his new collection, The Tradition.
His essay about invention (titled “Invention”) and how writing poetry was how he confronted the panic of possible death has also inspired me to write every day. Poetry is a means of survival.
I’ve been trying to write at least some lines of poetry every day as a challenge to extract myself from the mini-depression I went through this winter.
Winter was dark, rainy, muddy. Even in March, depression clung to me, like sticky hands holding me down.
When the sticky webs started to feel like a cocoon, I understood on a more personal level TS Eliot’s opening lines in The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers
Christine Swint, NaPoWriMo 2019

I have written maybe five poems that I’ve liked so far this month, and lots of weird fragments. The black hole (of course) inspired one, and somehow every time I have to walk into a hospital in spring I write a poem about it. I’m also working up the courage to send out my two in-progress poetry manuscripts out some more – one is very political and feminist, and the other is more somber in tone, about getting diagnosed with cancer and then MS, and all the surrounding solar flares and eclipses. I also have to send out some work – during my down time after AWP, I’ve gotten lots of poems back (hello rejections!) so I have to get on the ball. I was encouraged that I got a positive, ‘send more’ rejection from the one piece of fiction I had out – I don’t have more, but it was nice. I may try to write another fiction piece this month if I get inspired – it’s much harder work for me than writing poems. I listened to a Sylvia Plath reading and realized how much her sense of line and sound – I started reading her at around 19 – had influenced my own work. Her voice was pretty great, too, kind of deep and clipped and a pronounced New England accent. I also have a review or two to do. I find that reviewing takes a different kind of mental energy than poetry writing – or even fiction writing. I also have plenty of reading from the stack I brought home from AWP!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy National Poetry Month, April Gloom (and Blooms,) and More Post-AWP Thoughts

Each day I’m carving out a little time–maybe just fifteen minutes–to draft something, a poem or the seed of one. This morning I responded to a request from someone who wants poems about Mina Loy. I ended up rereading most of The Lost Lunar Baedeker, which is really teaching-prep, too, because I’ll teach Modern U.S. Poetry in the fall and book orders are just around the corner. I hadn’t spent serious hours with this collection in years and was newly struck by all the beautiful poems about aging. When I was 49, I thought I’d write a suite of poems about my poetic idols when THEY were 49. I ended up writing one sonnet about Edna St. Vincent Millay then quit, because it was so damn depressing. 49 is apparently not the happiest age for women poets. Now, past the hinge of 50, finding Loy’s intelligent take on what she calls the “excessive incognito” of “An Aged Woman” is such a gift. Plus Loy’s coinage “Bewilderness,” which appears in a poem about widowhood called “Letters of the Unliving,” is my new favorite word. I have the most fun when wandering a vague landscape you could call by that name–sort of working, sort of playing around.
Lesley Wheeler, Errant in the Bewilderness

Writing a poem a day or even two for GloPoWriMo means I often have to scurry around for subjects. I’ve been doing prompt a day since August and it’s no surprise that sometimes the same theme comes up. I’ve had Brexit twice, mythical animals, smells, colours about four times, pets, ect. I don’t want to rehash old subjects unless I can really see a new avenue to explore, so I’m not holding myself back from looking at ideas that maybe feel a bit too personal or too close to the bone if they pop into my head for a prompt.

I’ve often avoiding writing about my family, my childhood in the past, not because anything too horrible happened, but it feels like it’s not only mine to use. Many of the people I could write about are alive and might take my delving into past moments they are connected to as an invasion of their privacy. Others are dead, but living members might not like their ‘dirty laundry’ being aired in public, however limited the poetry reading public may be. I don’t use names, but I guess if you know my family it wouldn’t be hard to trace relationships.
Gerry Stewart, Home Truths

Did the fire in my brain come before or after the fire
in my mouth? My mother will never tell, and the records
have all been lost. All we know is there was burning, a pyre,
nerves gone haywire; we know there was a scream, a cry, a cord
anchoring one end of a wire at a fixed place, flashpoint
channeled from this, here, toward infinite possibility.
PF Anderson, It Happened So Long Ago

Talk to me about
department store windows,
or that lime-green bag
you took from my closet.
Your friend who’s divorcing:
what’s her new house like?
Tell me about the red buds
on the tips of the maple
or my grandson’s new haircut
that makes him look thirteen.
Tell me something about the world
that will make me miss being alive.
Rachel Barenblat, Request

After-life is waiting, treading water.
Hovering there beyond the sun as I sit
in my bones and pull blankets over
my head. Church bells count the hours
until there is no more weaving of fine wool
or forging of metal.
Charlotte Hamrick, Call and Response

According to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, between now and the late April rains one should tend to the graves of one’s ancestors. This period goes by the name 清明, or qīngmíng, and the weeks are designated “clear and bright.”
In my part of the world, we experience a mix of rainy and clear; but the days are warming and the grass greener. The annual winter weeds pull up easily, and the tough perennial weeds emerge before the grasses. The moist, newly-thawed soil makes levering those weeds less difficult now than later in the year.
I, however, do not live anywhere near my ancestors’ graves.
~
Clearing
Clear the patch that yields
to memory
clutch the hand hoe
and the trowel
disturbing early spring’s
small bees and gnats
beneath the plum’s
blossoming branches […]
Ann E. Michael, Tending, clearing

The outlandish pink trees
shake their stiff crinolines
and the whole theater stirs.
The audience feels
loved like brides
in a world of divorces.

Too frilly,
too old-fashioned,
the critics huffed.
The management closed the show,
closed the whole theater.

Only the caretaker
sees the pink trees dance.
They still dance,
so out of hand,
so outlandishly beautiful,
to the wind’s applause.
Anne Higgins, The Pink Trees of Emmitsburg

They say she was barely nineteen
when she was widowed
soaked her body in kashayam made with liquorice root
embalmed the face in neem paste.

There is a type of plant that serves as fences
even goats do not eat the leaves
breeze does not pass between the branches

whorls of leaves
masquerade as flowers.
Uma Gowrishankar, A story for the month: Panguni

I love this poem because I don’t know it; it makes me wander off and research things. It’s a sort of crossword puzzle that I’m not sure I’ll ever fully solve, but which feels like a life-giving exercise. I had to look up another reader’s explication of this poem just to understand that the title is a reference to Audre Lorde’s 1984 essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” That shows how far I still have to go with this poem (and, obviously, my education in many things). Some poems you get in a heartbeat; others make you look and wonder and read.
Amy Miller, 30 Great Poems for April, Day 12: “The Master’s House” by Solmaz Sharif

Just two things to say about a poem that speaks richly for itself: first off, it demands to be read aloud; you need to hear the repetitions of the rondeau redouble, it’s assonance and consonance, and not be distracted by how it looks on the page. The second thing, for me, is the business of belonging, the tug of distance and of the rhythms of migration. The fear of stasis. I love the clinching snap of that triplet
My life has become a segment of white
that my family fold neatly and stow –
all clasps on the trunk snapped tight
John Foggin, Wise sisters (2). Elizabeth Sennitt Clough

I’d never heard of Ari Banias before and never heard of the poem – which you can read here. I chose it because I like the word ‘Fountain’ and I also like fountains, there’s something cheerful and lively about them although, thinking about it, perhaps they waste a lot of water? Anyway, without ever having read the poem and knowing nothing about it, I started cycling and listening.
The first thing I noticed and liked about ‘Fountain’ is the breath of the poem, if you understand what I mean. It seems composed of short lines, or lines of unequal lengths, and short thoughts, as opposed to longer thoughts and sentences. The poem has a fragmentary, breathless feel. I found the poem interesting, I wanted to keep listening, to know what was happening and what the poem’s speaker was doing/thinking, although it starts off as simply someone sitting by a fountain in Paris and describing what they see. In the short preamble before we hear ‘Fountain’ read, the editors and the poet explain that the poem captures some of Banias’ observations while he was living in Paris for a few months. He aimed to pay close attention to close details, it was explained, but also to notice what was happening next to famous sights and landmarks.
My ears pricked up at these comments because I’m interested in getting better at writing about place. True to his word, the poet does observe small details about what is happening next to the famous landmark ie: “When the language teacher talks about le capitalisme: / the gesture of three fingers rubbing imaginary fabric” and “Across the courtyard, this T-shirt on a hanger out the window / turns in the light breeze as if trying to look behind itself.” The poet also tells us about himself – “I’m a tourist, vulnerable and stupid, / my legs showing, shoes practical, face red.” and later “I’m consumed with not knowing where to buy paper, safety pins, stamps.”
Josephine Corcoran, Listening to ‘Fountain’ by Ari Banias & other poems

Except for work, I could go for weeks without conversation.
Weekends, a 25 cent streetcar ride to Ocean Beach.
Poetry readings somewhere almost every night,
Sit in the back and scribble in my notebook.
Smoking pot openly on the street, never a problem.
Or spend all day in the stacks at the SF library
Reading books from 1910, forgotten poets.
I had no past, no future, lived day to day.
Lucky Strikes. Street vendor hot dogs. Jack Spicer poems.
That summertime layer of fog across the city and the bay.
James Lee Jobe, ‘The 1970s. San Francisco, Mission St, between 2nd St & 16th.’

So, I walked. Where do all those kilometers of pattern lead? I wondered. To the plazas, certainly, but then they wind out, up another hill, into a narrow maze of streets, curving out and down again to the edge of the sea, along the edges of buildings the color of marigolds, lavender, sky, up into the maze again. It is a city that leads the walker to walk, but toward what? Toward incompleteness itself, perhaps. The image at the top of this post shows the only conclusion I found: a place where the pattern changed into green growth and light, at the end of a small dark tunnel.
I also kept a journal with some drawings, which I’m still adding to; I’ll probably share them here as time goes on. But I struggled with making art there. I had the sense that drawing and photographing were, to some extent, futile — I left Lisbon feeling that it was impossible to capture its essence, because we cannot capture incompleteness, absence, and longing, even in the present age where the emphasis is on having a “complete experience”, of checking items off a list, taking selfies at the proscribed spots to prove we were there. The Time Out Market, a concept that was first tried in Lisbon, is a perfect example: the tourist doesn’t need to discover anything for him or herself; they can just go to a centrally-located and packaged “destination market” where a curated selection of upscale restaurants and shops have stalls with the same signage, the same style, offering a sample of their wares. It’s enticing on the first visit; on the second, not so much. All major cities will soon have these markets, and they will all look alike, too.
Better then, perhaps, to write in fragments, like Pessoa, or to express feelings in music, or simply to reflect on experience in solitude. Even as a brief visitor, I sensed Lisbon’s elusive, melancholic undercurrent, and I find I’m appreciating it even more now that I am home.
Beth Adams, Lisbon

Sometimes I read over a student’s response and realize they’ve missed the historical context or have no knowledge of an entire school of thought. I panic. How can I give them what they need to advance their work? How can I help them fill this gap in their education?
Then I remind myself that we all have gaps, also wens, scars, and willful blindspots. That the best thing I can offer to my students are maps and questions. I can’t give them the destination to which I’ve already traveled, because the journey is the purpose.
I can keep reminding them to pay attention. That good writing (and good living) is made out of 100% paying attention. This means allocating space, filtering distractions, and making choices that foster awareness.
For me, it’s all about the walk in the woods that turns up a volunteer pansy blossoming too early in the season. A small yellow amongst so much leaf litter. And then at my desk, remembering that the name “pansy” is thought to be derived from pensée, French for thought or remembrance. And that another name for pansy is “heart’s ease.” All the layers, all of the focused attention on this world. All of it poetry.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Mind the gap

Alison Peligran does a lot with origami:

–Students write poems on origami paper, fold their poems into shapes, and then leave them across campus, a harmless “vandalism.” She offers this site for learning how to make these shapes, and she recommends the videos.

–Students could make poems into origami boats that they set sail in the water.

–Her students left strips of poems in a huge oak tree on campus.

–She also created a poetry scavenger hunt, where students looked for lines that she had hidden on campus and assembled them into a poem.

She says that transforming the poem into an object is transformative. Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil agrees. She said that creating a 3 dimensional object leads us to new places , letting our guard down when creating together. She talked about creating poems pasted to bowling balls, murals, matchbooks, and of course, the chapbook–there’s a slide that shows how to make a staple-less chapbook, but it looks quite complicated, although she claimed it’s simple.

I was most intrigued by Nezhukumatathil’s snow globe erasure poem idea. She creates snow globes out of jars, glue, glitter, and a poem inside. As the clumps of glitter fall on the poem, voila! an erasure poem. She gives them to students during week 1, and each week, they shake the globe and get a new poem idea from the erasure.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Artistic Play in the Creative Writing Classroom and Beyond

Dear Reader:

It’s been 2,259 frequent flyer miles, one published poem, a ton of new books and literary reviews to read, one reading in Portland, an introduction to yoga and one month since my last confession.

It’s National Poetry Month. Take a poetry pill for your anxiety. It’s good for you and will do you no harm.

It’s been a busy month since my last confession with AWP at the end of March. I confess that seeing Portland for the first time was interesting. The scenery and topography were surprising to me. I must confess I had visited Oregon numerous times in the past on the Oregon trail, but I don’t think Portland as such existed back then. I was usually running low on supplies and had lost other people in my party to dysteria. That’s what I remember most about it.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – So Many Books To Read

This is a follow-up to my previous post, Access all Poetry in which I talked about poetry in terms of its accessibility for disabled poets and audiences. I spent Thursday night reading poetry at Spike Island with deaf poet Donna Williams and paralysed poet Stephen Lightbown. […]
Stephen was launching his first full collection, Only Air published by Burning Eye books.
Stephen’s range of poetry was as varied as Donna’s. There were reflective ones about his life since the sledging accident that left him paralysed — the cover photo of his collection is of the tree in question. There were also humorous ones such as one about footballer Alan Shearer who, when he played for Blackburn Rovers, visited the hospital where Stephen was recovering. Alan was present at Spike Island courtesy of a huge poster of him in his Blackburn Rovers kit which fell off the wall during the reading of the poem … I reckon he thought he was in the penalty area and took a dive ;)
Giles L. Turnbull, Spiky Poetry

Exercises for Achilles
Finding comfort in discomfort.
An involuntary but necessary
slowing
at the bottom of the staircase –
attention to healing
Ren Powell, April 11, 2019

You were the quick thing, and I. The
dull, heavy. The sliding shut thing.
The narrowing of breath until it grew
still. The not knowing what to. The
hands, big. The fingers, blunt. What
to do with big, blunt, but squeeze.
Romana Iorga, The Snare

Finally, after my 100^th round, I stopped overthinking every single thing and just let the instruction in. Even though bullets and brass were flying all around me, everything went silent and still. My mind let go, and all that existed in the universe was that front sight on my target. My shots hit the bullseye in quick succession, and I was flooded with pure joy at the elegance of it all. Finding that moment of perfect attention and focus felt like magic. Everything vanished except the exact moment I was in and the task that was before me. It’s a feeling I have had sometimes while doing things that require total focus, like stage acting, but I’ve also had it when simply walking along a lake or standing in line at Burger King. I know better than to chase after it, but I sure would like more of it in my life.
Kristen McHenry, Electricity Shamed, Unorthodox Meditation, Sprucin’ Up

We ask, is this poem desirable? Is this poem fuckable? The slip of sex between the garter and the thigh. The high of swing sets and car accidents. The fragments of the self cast off like feathers. I was a monster in the mix and no one could see it. Scribbling my words across the backs of men that were other women’s husbands. When asked, I could lie and say I made it up.
Kristy Bowen, napowrimo #12 & #13

January 6, 2019January 7, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 16, 2018December 16, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 50

Many poetry blogs are falling silent—’tis the season—but a surprising number of new posts have appeared in my feed reader this week regardless. If they have anything in common, it’s a more contemplative tone. As if the long nights are leading many of us to turn inward. Or maybe it’s just an end-of-year, taking-stock kind of thing.

Speaking of taking stock, whither the revival tour in 2019? This digest will probably continue in some form regardless, but I’m wondering how people who revived their blogging practice this year feel about it? Now that the old band has completed one more tour, is it time to throw in the towel?

Whenever I’m writing I’m also fully, hyper-aware that there are other responsibilities I’m ignoring; at these points, I try to remember all of those interviews with writers and artists I’ve read (and taught!) that stress the necessity of making your writing time “intractable and nonnegotiable.”

This semester, I’ve been MUCH better about keeping writing time sacred, but once again everything fell apart at the end of the term, from writing to exercising to eating well to getting enough sleep.

One more week, tho. And then final grades in, and then holidays and some travel to Virginia, and then maybe, maybe, writing and running and rest. Maybe.

And on a last note: This is my three hundredth post for this blog . . . since. . . 2011? I’ll have to fact check that. Anyway. I don’t know what that means. I whine at the internet a lot, I suppose. Thanks for absorbing my panic and myopia, Interwebs! Yer the best!
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Mother of the Year, Teacher of the Year, and Other Awards I’m Not Earning

Yesterday we had quite an adventure! We had been planning to go to Copper Canyon‘s Holiday party and book release for Ursula Le Guin’s final poetry collection. But an hour before we planned to leave, I started hearing branches hitting the window, and the power went out. Then we had to eat dinner without power or light (hard), dress (harder), and do makeup (hardest by far), which was exciting. The Hugo House still had power (although I heard later 100,000 people ended up losing power throughout the area) so we set out in our car with branches and even whole trees down on both sides of us, wind whipping our car around on the Floating Bridge, and when we got there, I could barely stand up against the wind, let alone walk! […]
The readers did a wonderful job with their tribute to Ursula, including Karen Finneyfrock, Jane Wong, and fellow Two Sylvias author Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. One person talked about a memorial where Margaret Atwood said Ursula had “the best dragons in fiction” and Jane Wong talked about feeding our inner dragons lettuce, which was such a wonderful image.
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
I was very moved, and remembered the gigantic windstorm that hit the night about ten years ago that I heard Ursula read poetry on the Oregon Coast and talk about science fiction poetry years ago in Oregon. She insisted women science fiction writers should not be placed in a literary ghetto, that speculative poetry should not be considered non-literary, and that poetry should not be ignored and women should not be ignored – she was very feisty! And there was a giant wall of glass facing the outdoors, and it kept banging with thunder and wind, but it seemed to accompany her, not compete. She was a force of nature that deserved the tribute of the storm.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry Parties, Windstorms and Power Outages, and Ursula Le Guin’s Dragons

There are rumors of big cats. I’ve seen two elk—
one stared through me as if she knew my secrets, the other,
roadkill. You once told me my poems are too grim
and I should try my hand at something more pastoral.
I’ve seen powdered snow on Cedars, and I’ve grown
passably fond of rain. Everyday, the clouds amaze.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with Powers that Be

Two years ago, I wrote a post overflowing with admiration for a January Gill O’Neil poem and then added a prompt to go with it on this site. What unmitigated joy to see this same poem in the brand new pages of Rewilding, just out from Cavaan Kerry Press.

If Sharon Olds and Robert Hayden had a love child, I think it would be January O’Neil. She employs the smooth, shiny surface of a Sharon Olds poem with the more emotionally nuanced and extended outlook of poet Robert Hayden (think “Water Lillies” and “Those Winter Sundays”). [Click through to read two poems from the book.]
Susan Rich, Best Holiday Present for Poets: Rewilding by January Gill O’Neil

As writers, we put a lot of focus on producing – writing poems or prose pieces, editing, editing again, editing one more time (at least), then getting those polished pieces out the door and hopefully published. Of course, the point of all that work is to share. And in a world where we can post links to thousands of others via social media, we certainly hope that we are sharing, but it’s hard to know how many people are really reading. If they are reading, are they delving into the piece, sitting with it? Or is the writing just getting a cursory glance on the way to work/school/daycare pickup/grocery shopping, etc.?
Given all that, what a pleasure to take an evening and do with poems what we are meant to do – enjoy them. Everyone around the table loved writing, and found profound emotional connections in certain pieces. So, for the price of admission (which was nothing! you can sit around a table with your friends absolutely for free!) we got a curated reading. We shared some of our own pieces, and we shared the pieces that keep us inspired. Amazing poetry and CNF, chosen by writers forwriters. Adrian Bleins, Maggie Deets, Jill McDonough, Ross Gay, Diane Seuss, Hayden Carruth, Jack Gilbert, J. Robert Lennon, Ted Kooser. Every piece made your breath catch in your throat. Every piece made you want more.
So let’s bring back the salon. Get some friends together. Have coffee, tea, an adult beverage if you like. Ask everyone to bring a few pieces of writing that just knock their proverbial socks off, and read to each other.
Bring Back the Salon – guest blog post by Sonja Johanson (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

I have been looking for a poem to read at the memorial of the young man who died recently. Death is supposed to be the subject matter best suited to poets, and the obvious purview of poetry, but after perusing many poems on the topic, I’m now convinced that most poets don’t know how to write about it very effectively. We are good at writing about our personal pain and our own cynicism and our clever detachment from both, but as a group, I’m not convinced that we have much of a grip on the topic of death. The two groups of poets who I find write about death the most effectively and clear-headedly are physicians and war veterans, and I don’t know of many who are poets. I wish that more doctors and vets wrote poetry, but alas, that is not the case, and I think that’s a huge loss. Their insights count at least as much as English majors with pricey MFA’s. We need to design poetry workshops specifically for docs and vets. I’m fully up to spearhead this. Who’s with me??
Kristen McHenry, The Problem with Poetry, Get After It, Bad Cat Redux

I have been making my way slowly through Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. Slowly because it is tough stuff, both the — what should I call it? theology? the study of his own faith/God/self-in-God?, and the intensity of it: a dying man sending dispatches from the edge.
Diagnosed with a rare and fitful disease, Wiman has been dragging himself through years of treatment sometimes as ravaging as the disease, approaching death only to have death pull away, only to catch up to it again, like some long drag race in the desert. Throughout much of it he has been trying to make sense of his call toward God or Christ or some ineffable -ness that is not captured by the wan word “religion,” with its weight of institutions and hierarchies.
Marilyn McCabe, Postcards from the Edge; or, On Reading Wiman’s My Bright Abyss

My first podcast interview at New Books in Poetry is live! I had a lovely conversation with Emily Jungmin Yoon regarding her first full-length collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco Books, 2018), which examines forms of violence against women. At its core these poems delve into the lives of Korean comfort women of the 1930s and 40s, reflecting on not only the history of sexual slavery, but also considering its ongoing impact. Her poems beautifully lift the voices of these women, helping to make them heard and remembered — while also providing insight into current events, environmentalism, and her own personal experiences as a woman in the world.
I loved this collection of poetry, which was so moving in how it addressed intense subject matters. Her words are lyrical, vivid, and enriched with a playful examination of language, the way mean slips depending on perspective and how language can be a powerful tool. These poems help to give voice to women whose stories are not commonly told. It’s beautifully done.
Andrea Blythe, New Books in Poetry: A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily Jungmin Yoon

My friends liked me because I listened to them. One of them referred to me as her psychologist. Through these young women, I learned about love, lust, yearning, sex, educational aspirations, the behaviors of men, family stresses, jobs, career hopes, personal values, fears, thrills, recreational drugs, alcohol, birth control, popular music, dancing, concert-going, lies, mistakes, and heartbreak. The only thing I can think of that has taught me as much is the reading of books, particularly poems, novels, and memoirs.
Years later, I asked my parents whether they ever felt concerned about my choice of friends. Did they ever worry that these young people were somehow bad influences on me? My dad paused a moment, thoughtful, and answered, “I don’t think we ever worried about your friends being bad influences on you. I kind of thought you were maybe a good influence on them.” I’m not sure that’s accurate; but looking back, perhaps my parents, or my family, presented a positive “model” for my friends who endured much more challenging home lives and had less support for education, career, and independent futures. And most of them have grown up to have successful lives–but that’s not because of me.

Four or five years ago I found myself reminiscing through writing poems; it was quite accidental on my part, and initially just a response to a Bruce Springsteen song. Influences: popular song, teen friends, the suburban environment of my youth. I ended up with at least 40 poems, of which there may be enough good ones to make up a chapbook collection someday. [In 2014, I blogged a bit about the project here.] I call them my Barefoot Girls poems. They provide, I suppose, one aspect to answering the question posed in my last blog. My friends’ experiences, flowing through me.
Ann E. Michael, More on influences

Travel completely engages me when I’m there, and then feels almost unreal when return to my own space. And yet, flight makes those sudden shifts in reality possible. I wouldn’t call it disorienting, per se, but it is certainly strange to find yourself inhabiting an image like the one above, that you’ve seen in countless sources, from textbooks to travel videos. We don’t go on tours but figure out our itinerary and plans completely from scratch, and unexpected things happen, so during the trips we always feel like we’re very heads-up, paying sharp attention; there’s a high level of intensity. I try hard to really be in a place — to feel it and engage with it with all my senses as well as my mind — and not just be a person behind a camera, capturing moments like trophies. It takes time to think about a significant journey and to see what I’ve learned and how it has changed me; I’m doing that now and will be doing it for quite a long time. And I already want to go back. There were good reasons why, as a young girl, Greece got under my skin. I see that better now, and am glad I wasn’t disappointed by being face to face with the real thing. Yet I also see that I made the right decision to live a less linear and more personally creative life; it was a better fit with who I really am, but in many ways, it has been a reflection of the values and ideals that attracted me to the Greeks in the first place. As a woman, I’m lucky I live now, though, instead of back then.
Beth Adams, Home from a Journey

My twenties were fine, full of a lot of learning experiences, including quitting college to follow a boy to the Caribbean, buying a home at the top of the market, right before the bottom fell away, and a short-lived, ill-fated marriage. With a bit of serendipity, I got out of the house (at a huge loss but ce la vie) and my divorce was finalized a month before I turned thirty which meant I started my thirties as a whole different person. And my thirties have been great, I really felt like I became the person I was supposed to be and I checked off a bunch of milestones too – I found a career I liked, was good at, and started getting paid well for doing it. I bought a condo and when I sold it five years later, it wasn’t at a loss. I started taking my writing seriously and published two chapbooks and applied to an MFA program. I traveled to places I’d always dreamed of visiting. I found a partner and we married. We bought a house and two cars. I’m in a great book club, I have a great group of friends. In short, my thirties have turned me into a bonafide adult. So if my thirties have been so great, why do I feel so strange about entering my forties?
Courtney LeBlanc, Aging

Because it was an early night, I got up in the wee, small hours of the morning. I’ve been reading a variety of interesting things, working on a poem that weaves together the cracking of the older Arctic ice and home repairs/grading/writing, putting together a poem submission for the Tampa Review–in other words, the kind of morning I like best.

I loved this piece at the On Being blog. It’s full of wisdom and ideas for writing and heartbreaking observations. This bit led to some interesting research on both Wittgenstein and Spinoza: “For a time, I required my students to write a Wittgensteinian essay: Start with one idea. Notice where it goes. Number each idea. Keep them short. Don’t worry if you hop around. Read and play with what emerges. It may take a while to understand what you are trying to say. To yourself.”

He also makes lots of spiritual connections: “I discovered that the Desert Fathers and other ascetics employed this approach. They sought a way to move from contemplative sense to paper. Sometimes they called what they wrote a century: 100 pieces of heart-sourced inklings. Heart to hand to ink. Follow what comes. Only the numbers seem orderly. Like prayer.”

I am interested in the composition of these short pieces. I also stumbled across this site which talks about the writing practice of William Stafford. He, too, began his writing day by writing a short observation: “Some prose notes from a recent experience, a few sentences about a recent connection with friends, an account of a dream. This short passage of ‘throwaway’ writing, it turns out, is very important, as it keeps the pen moving and gets the mind sniffing along through ‘ordinary’ experience. You are beginning the act of writing without needing to write anything profound. No struggle, no effort, no heroic reach. Just writing.”

This morning, I also went outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of a meteor in these waning days of the Geminid meteor shower. No luck. I stood on the sidewalk, looking up and looking at the 3 small trees that lit up my front windowsill.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Wittgensteinian Wanderings

Maybe I need to blog about poetic self-doubt more often. As soon as I did, my luck seemed to shift under my feet. I had been doing math some of you have surely done, too: I’ve been showing the ms around for a while now. What if this poetry collection I thought was so great doesn’t strike any editors the same way? The poems have done well in magazines, but what would I do with the larger structure, with its support beams and fancy finials, if no press wanted I genuinely wanted to work with returned my affections? Keep trying while I write another one, I realized.
I don’t feel that way about literary criticism; blogging about poetry is fun and I care very much about boosting the poetry that inspires me, but there’s no way I’d keep writing footnoted articles if no one wanted to publish them. I’ll write the best poetry I can for as long as I can, however. It’s work I love desperately. Returning to it after occasional absences, with renewed interest, joy, and creative ambition–that’s been one of the deepest rhythms of my adult life.
Then a piece of fan mail popped up from Molly Sutton Kiefer at Tinderbox Editions, to whom I sent the ms a year ago. Submittable still said “In Progress” but I figured she’d given it a pass. Au contraire. She loved the book. Was it still available?
Lesley Wheeler, Pleased as punch (with recipe)

Q~Your partner is also a writer. What’s that like?
A~Mostly, it’s good! Chris is a scholar of comics who has started working in visual modes, so he and I started collaborating this year. Our first poetry comic was just accepted by Split Lip Magazine, and that’s giving me delusions of hipsterism. It’s called “Made for Each Other,” which sounds romantic, but it’s about ambivalent, aging, gender-ambiguous robots, so it addresses marriage from a pretty strange slant. He’s also my first reader and a very helpful one. One tougher aspect of two writers making a life together: it was hard for two desperate writers to negotiate time when the kids were little. And now that our youngest is about to fly the coop, I’m worried that he and I will have to work hard NOT to work hard all the time, just out of sadness and confusion. We were so time-starved for so long.
Belief / an interview with poet Lesley Wheeler (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 49

A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, plus occasional other poetry bloggers in my feed reader. If you’ve missed earlier editions of the digest, here’s the archive. (Note that I’ve just corrected the numbering of the weeks going back to early September, when I began miscounting. Sheesh.)

A somewhat shorter digest than usual this week, as the end of the semester looms and the holiday season gathers steam, but those bloggers who are finding the time to post seem to be in an especially lyrical mood, as you’ll see. On a geekier note, Friday saw the release of a major new version of WordPress (for self-hosted sites; not sure when it rolls out at WordPress.com) with a completely redesigned post editor and site builder called Gutenberg. Of interest to poets: one of the basic tools they include is a Verse block, as an alternative to the standard prose paragraph. It wraps everything in Pre tags so that all formatting, including intraline spaces, will be preserved exactly as you type it. And there’s a style definition so that one can easily specify a preferred font, font size, line height, etc. using CSS in the customizer. Anyway, if that’s all a little over your head, don’t worry about it. The main point is that the WordPress lead developers are looking out for us poets. Which makes sense, because the WordPress motto has always been “Code is poetry.” Now at long last, poetry has its own code.

One of them keeps sticking a stray beach ball from god knows where down her shirt to make a mono-boob, or up her shirt to make a nine-months-blown. Another keeps collapsing into howling giggles, falling out of her chair. I’m giving them words: poema, poeisis, onomatopoeia: the creation, the act of creation, the summoning of a thing by its name.

I call her name, the collapsed one, and say, in the midst of trying to define the etymologic relationship between psyche and breath, inspiration and the necessity of oxygen for life, I don’t even know what’s going on with you right now, and laughing a little, I hold out my hand to the one fooling around with the beach ball—give it up, here. I take it when she passes it, put it on the desk behind me. She says: we made you laugh, though, didn’t we, and I nod. You always look so sad.

Gut punch, her notice.

I take the etymology lesson and wrap it around some fairy tales, then ask them to write: inhabit someone, I say. A character, maybe minor. Write in their voice. Summon them into being. Make of their voice a creation: their story, from their point of view. Make us understand.

What are you going to write, one asks. I share some ways I have answered this particular prompt in the past, and get them started.

Their pencils stutter, then stroll, then gallop.

I do not say

I will write the voice of a frozen river, black
under feet of ice; I will envy that ice, forming
into carillon bridges, islands and trunks; the voice
of a woman under ice screaming the last air
from frozen lungs, each bubble become an ice bell
someone stops by the side of the road to photograph.
JJS, December 9, 2018: ice bells

When I read a wonderful poem, I do feel the piece has exerted its power, that language, words, imagery have the strength to sway my emotional field. After reading an entire collection by a good writer, I sense a resonance–intuitive, unsettling. Sometimes, the work evokes in me a desire to do what that writer has done. That’s one type of influence. The list of such writers would be lengthy indeed.

~~

Other influences, though–amazing works of art, thrilling architecture, deeply moving music or dance–I could not exempt those as streaming into my consciousness, awakening me to something new. Or human beings, especially those I love best.

And places. Environment matters to my poetry. In the city, I wrote city poems. In the country, I write country poems. After I’ve traveled somewhere new to me, I conjure the place in my mind and it exerts its own kind of power on me.

Influences, in my writing life, are generally bound to experiences; I’m not a very imaginative writer. “A change in the weather is sufficient for us to create the world and ourselves anew,” wrote Proust. I am not contradicting myself in this paragraph. But I think I will have more to say on this topic soon, once I mull it over a little longer.
Ann E. Michael, Influences, personal & poetic

Q~Your contributions helping other poets through your blog and social media were part of the inspiration for this interview series. What made you decide to do this work?

A~I’m so thrilled to hear that my blog helped to inspire your interview series! My blog really has been a happy accident. I originally created the site just as a place to post poems for others to read when asked about my work. As I started submitting and looking for writing resources online, I found that my blog was a good place to save them. Then I shared one of my posts in a Facebook group and received such positive response, I decided to keep sharing. I also noticed that in the writing community some writers are competitive—they don’t want to share opportunities for fear that someone else will be published or win the contest instead. It seems to me that poetry just does not get enough attention in general, and the more I can share, the numbers of poetry readers might just grow, which means a larger market for my work while supporting other poets along the way. I kept trying new things based on my own research, like lit mag submission calls, then interviews with editors, guest blog posts, etc. and continued to get more followers and great feedback. I’ve learned so much along the way and I’m still learning every day.

Q~How do you balance your time between your own writing, the work you do to help other writers and your life outside of writing?

A~This is a great question. I do have a lot of poetry projects going on, locally with my poetry group Rock Canyon Poets, Provo Poetry poemball machines, Poetry Happens (a monthly radio feature of poetry events in Utah), an annual community writing workshop, two annual anthologies, festivals, readings, open mics, the list goes on and on. And, of course, a full-time career in software product management, my blog, and my own writing. It’s a delicate balance to be sure. Ultimately, all the work I do for poetry feeds and supports my own writing practice as well. I’m continually learning, finding inspiration, and growing as a writer. Timewise, I focus a lot on efficiency, large blocks of time to work on specific projects or to write, so I’m not stopping and starting too often. And, I have a very patient husband and family, who let me spend hours in my office uninterrupted. They know how important poetry is to me and have been an amazing support system. I often combine poetry activities with other things—like weekend trips, family time, dinner before or after an event, etc.
Resurrection Party / an interview with poet Trish Hopkinson (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

–“I have a uterus with puppies in it”: you can either file this under comments one usually doesn’t hear in the halls of academe as I did this week–or you could use it as a line of a poem–or you could create an interesting short story. And for those of you who are wondering, we have a Vet Tech dep’t, and I overheard one of the faculty members discussing visual aids that she has to show students.

–I posted this haiku-esque creation on Facebook, but I want to keep it in a place where it will be easier to find:

Write me from the camps.
Be my Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Teach me how to live.

–I am still enjoying my online journaling class immensely. It’s interesting to see how our sketches are informing all of the future sketches–and also interesting to see how I have begun to recognize each person’s individual style.

–Here’s one of my favorite quotes from this week of the journaling class. It didn’t come from the book we’re reading together, but I might not have noticed the Rumi quote if my classmates hadn’t been quoting Rumi. I found it in Anne Lamott’s “Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace”: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure.”
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Saturday Snippets: Fetal Puppies and Other Vagaries

Intentions: Double my submissions next year.

Should I pay more in entry fees? I don’t think so. This amount [$350] made me gulp, but it supports a variety of publishers I want to support, and that feels supportive of my work, whether it got accepted or not.

Is it all worth it? Can’t I just be content making work?
No. I want it out there. I want it read or viewed. I want it appreciated. Or criticized, or whatever.

Yeah, I know, friends, that I get down at the mouth throughout the year. But I also feel buoyed sometimes, amused often, engaged in my work, and hopeful. Do I fail to mention that? Remind me to mention that.

I sometimes get the sense from people that they think I should be content just making the work, that there’s some kind of purity in that. That the search for publication success is somehow a sullied enterprise. Egotistical, perhaps. Or at best, a fool’s errand.
I say, it’s part of the artistic process — do the work, put it out into the world, take your shots and huzzahs as they come. Complain bitterly along the way; dance foolishly around with glee. It’s all part of the equation.
Marilyn McCabe, An Accounting; or, Writing Submissions by the Numbers

I was reading The Fish the other day, the classic anthologized Elizabeth Bishop poem, and it is just so good. And I read Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath (the book before Ariel–I like this one better for some reason, though its considered transitional), and it is so very good. Listening to the Daily Poem podcast, they played Mending Wall by Robert Frost — as anthologized and read and reread as it is, it is so good and worth reading and rereading. I want to write poetry like that! Like Robert Lowell and Louise Gluck, Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson.

I don’t want to be famous–I don’t even care if I write these poems and only my family reads them. But I want to be able to write. those. poems.

How do I get there? Chances are, my talent has taken me about as far as it goes and I’ll only get better in little increments, never reaching the lofty heights of a truly great poet like the ones I so very much wish I could write like.

But maybe that is ok, and that is what drives me to keep writing–the tension between what I can create and what I envision creating.
Renee Emerson, Mediocrity

Funny how I got here. I woke up thinking about the earthquake that just hit Anchorage Alaska, which was a 7 magnitude with all-day aftershocks and how quickly these life-threatening events dissipate on the news “cycle”. Amazingly there were no deaths reported and no tsunami. I was also thinking about how magnitude is reported in logs. I’ve felt a couple of distant 4-5 magnitude quakes; a 7 magnitude is 100 times stronger than a 5; and a 9 would be 10,000 times stronger. Although I’m not sure that magnitude equals strength exactly, so I’ll just think : ten thousand times worse.

But there is still poetry. For now.

Here’s a poem about rain:

Rain

Most days, I no longer long
for you. The rain has become
my welcome mat.

I soak clothes and skin in it,
bleach these personal stains,
staunch my body’s needs.

I dream in haiku
as it taps at my window
in tart syllables.

Nowhere is it fully documented
how terrifying it is to be me.

Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse in the Rain

In response to a challenge at Ekphrastic Review. Here are all the poems generated by this photo of a Colombian Breastplate. Thanks, Lorette, for including my poem with the others!

A golden, first century breastplate —
mythic protection in battle. Mortals
have sought aegis from the gods
since time began, it seems.

When my youngest was three,
he wore an Incredible Hulk T-shirt
every day for a year, certain his kinship
with the angry green goliath
could transmogrify a toddler
to a Titan older kids would fear.

I hope the Columbian warrior
with a flying deity on his chest
found more success than my guileless,
doomed boy, whose brother and sister
held him down and made him smell
the lint in their belly buttons.

Sarah Russell, Birdman, Colombian

I’m so grateful of the reading and work that went into this in depth and thoughtful review of my chapbook Footnote by Deborah Hauser published by Stirring, one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet. And they are always open for submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. A link to their submission guidelines is below.

Hauser’s careful reading and insight captured so much of what I was after in this collection of poems. She gives thoughtful descriptions and commentary on several of the poems along with samples. I couldn’t be more honored by the time she spent with my work and in writing this review! Here’s the first paragraph of the review where she describes the format and theme of the collection:

“Footnote, Trish Hopkinson’s clever new chapbook, is a multi-layered journey through literary history and popular culture. Each poem reads well on its own, but the footnotes (represented with an appealing * at the bottom of the page rather than the usual, academic 1) add context and meaning. Hopkinson embraces the anxiety of influence and openly engages with her predecessors who include the canonical (Emily Dickinson), the avant-garde (David Lynch), and the radical (Janis Joplin). It’s as if, in these poems, Hopkinson is answering the question “Which artists would you invite to a dinner party?” and the reader has been invited to eavesdrop on the ensuing conversation.”
Trish Hopkinson, Book Review: Footnote, by Trish Hopkinson – by Deborah Hauser via Stirring (always open for submissions!)

I have been a huge fan of KateLynn Hibbard’s work since her first book, Sleeping Upside Down, was published in 2006. She followed this up with her luscious collection, Sweet Weight. And now, after way too many years, her third full length collection, Simples, published by Howling Bird Press has just been released — a haunting collection of historical poetry inspired by women’s experiences living on the Great Plains frontier.

This is a book you do not want to miss. And while the music of the lines allows you to feel you are floating across the page, there is also true pathos in the work. Hibbard time travels through the Great Plains employing a variety of personas: healer, teacher, locust swarm and Jewish bride-to-be. In a lesser poet’s hands these characters might seem contrived but not in Hibbard’s hands.

Trees bowed over with the weight of them and they ate—
the tall grass the wheat the corn the sunflowers
the oats the barley the buckwheat the bark

(from Swarm)

The poems accrue and create a dreamscape of life where the work is unrelenting and the landscape both awe inspiring and cruel. Hibbard’s background in Women’s Studies (both as a poet and a scholar) is integral to this project.
Susan Rich, Simples: The Joy of Reading KateLynn Hibbard’s New Book

There is a lot that I don’t talk about on this blog, as I am very conscious of respecting the privacy of those around me. So I will keep this brief. There was a sudden and tragic death of a young man in my family this week, and we are all reeling from it. I am shocked and saddened and very concerned for those who were closest to him. I’m unable to concentrate well enough to write anything at all today. So I will simply leave you with some poems, and a plea to hold your loved ones close. […]

On Emptiness
by Kristen McHenry

When I stick my hands in there to feel around there’s nothing. Once I sat for emptiness alone, entire months, flailing blindly in the spaces where emptiness had weight. Nothing rolls off of my palms, nothing mocks my efforts. I’m parched and have received bad information. All that time I sat, breathing in, only to know my own low feelings. To kneel there open-handed and say, this is all I have to offer. My palms no longer ferry light.

They say within a void lies all possibilities, but I think there are only two persuasions: Corpulent emptiness, and a nothingness that drifts above our heads, that will not acknowledge us. In second grade we planted seedlings. They came up vivid, lusty shoots. I understood then there was a kind of order, that this was nature’s outcome. It was impersonal and pleasing. Could I now proclaim, I am feeling full, or I must fill up, or, I am fully felt. I flounder with seeds and window boxes. The problem is that emptiness has teeth, and wishes of its own. The emptiness is un-content. It will not do with the least it can survive on. No stones, no feathers, no shells settle in my hands. Only a crusted thing, grown around its nut, seed of all nourishment, jewel of the essential.

Sit and think of nothing. Sit and engage only in the hollowness of breath, its motion in your veins. I tell people all day long because I believe it is important: We breathe in oxygen, we breathe out carbon dioxide, the lungs lunge, the lungs do their job. There is nothing easy in the effortless.

I remain to this day faithless despite everything I knew my heart could do. I stick my hands in there to feel around. I bring up tangled in my fingers a clear and weightless substance that slips off into space.
Kristen McHenry, Hard Days

Even as this term’s portfolios and papers come snowing down and I organize next term’s particulars, however, I’m trying to bask in another grand finale: the re-launch of Shenandoah. It’s stunning how much Editor-in-Chief Beth Staples has accomplished since she started in August: the dated-looking website has been radically redesigned on a new server, but most importantly she recruited exciting new work–a few pieces by distinguished writers who’d appeared in the magazine under R. T. Smith’s editorship, but many, many others from writers who might not have considered sending to us before, so that the issue is more inclusive than ever along every possible axis. I say “us” because Beth, who has a collaborative spirit, included her new colleagues as volunteer readers from the beginning, and by mid-fall had appointed several of us as genre editors, including Seth Michelson for translation, Chris Gavaler for comics, and me for poetry. I didn’t read every entry or make every call on acceptance or rejection in my genre, and that will be true of the next issue as well (towards which a lot of work has already been accepted) but I did read thousands of pieces (and am still processing the last few from our fall reading period).

So, OF COURSE I’ll be teaching poems from the new issue next term. My syllabi always include plenty of books on paper; I love print as a medium. But a digital issue can be a great addition to the mix: free, ultra-contemporary, and diversifying a reading list in interesting ways.
Lesley Wheeler, Teaching from online magazines

And after over a decade of submitting to Shenandoah, I have a poem in their newly relaunched issue. When Beth Staples, who recently took over the literary journal at Washington and Lee, sent me the e-mail a few months ago, I was in shock. A dream journal for me for sure, and happy to be part of the relaunch. The poem is called “Introduction to Writer’s Block.” It’s also an extremely personal poem for me, as it describes trying to write poetry again after a severe MS flare hospitalized me last fall, and I was struggling with memory loss and aphasia, trying to literally find my words again. Anyway, so happy to be in the issue! […]

Today the morning is clear and cold again, Stellar jays darting in the trees, hummingbirds around our feeders. I am looking forward to seeing some writer and artist friends for “art dates” in the next two weeks. I am thankful for publishers who send out royalty checks (this time, thanks to Two Sylvias – they always send royalty checks right before the holidays, which seems a lucky time to get a check) and thankful for people who volunteer at our zoo to keep red pandas and snow leopards alive and healthy, thankful to all people who create art – and those who support art with their time and money. I am thankful for days I have enough energy to get up and go out of the house to experience the lucky world I have around me – flowers, trees, holiday lights – and thankful that this year I am not as sick as I was last year around this time. I am starting to think, in a hopeful way, about 2019. May it be a better year for all of us.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Lots to Celebrate Edition- New Poems up at the newly relaunched Shenandoah and SWWIM, Zoolights and Red Panda Cubs, Thanks to Escape Into Life for a Pushcart Nomination

November 18, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 46

This week we begin with a confession and end with a spell. In between there’s politics, wildness and rewilding, reports from the writing trenches, love, death, you name it.

Dear Reader, all is not well. You know it (some of you anyway) and I know it. This country is ill. I’ve watched as the fever rises. I’ve observed its unsteadiness in the world community. I’ve seen its values denied by some. Hate is perhaps at an all-time high. The patient seems listless and those of us with concern are gathered with Lady Liberty at her bedside. Who will offer blood for a transfusion? Who will give comfort and support? Who will help her stand again and walk? I confess it is so easy to be hateful at these times because one hate breads another. This is a challenge we face. But I think we have to be certain that not meeting hate with more hate means we simply roll over and do nothing. The absence of hates is not weakness. It is even a greater strength than the haters have. It is a will to defend, to support our democracy and that means be there for the inclusiveness of others. It is to have very wide arms.
Michael Allyn Wells, Mega-Confession On Tuesday

But the bottom line is this: what [Facebook] is doing is wrong. George Soros is right when he says it’s a threat to democracy. Yet we have all become hostage to it because it preys on all our deepest insecurities and desires. I don’t want to lose the blog traffic I have. I don’t want to lose the ability to publicize events, or a new book from Phoenicia — though buying paid advertising is a business transaction, and I am more OK with that. And I don’t want to lose touch with certain friends — but, you know, email still exists. It just takes a little more effort.

It’s like so much else that’s wrong with our world. We choose convenience and connection and take the easy way out, even when it makes us complicit in data-mining schemes or the spread of fake news, even when it enriches unscrupulous people, even when our actions harm the planet. We are sheep. Human beings don’t seem to have the will to do what is right in large enough numbers to make the differences that needs to be made, or to send the message to both government and business that we won’t tolerate their behavior any longer. If I delete my FB account, it will be a useless gesture that will have no effect other than making a statement like this one; I’ll only be hurting myself. But it still may be the right thing to do.
Beth Adams, Complicity: The FB Scandal and Our Individual Responsibility

In October, I was happily writing a poem about gardening, when it took a sudden turn and revealed its true topic: the calamity of immigrant children held in cages at the US/Mexico Border. That day, I posted “For some reason my nature poems keep turning into political poems” to my Facebook page.

In her essay “On Theme,” from Madness, Rack and Honey, Mary Ruefle writes, “theme is always an extrapolation, a projection, an extension of an original idea, if such a thing as an original idea exists…sometimes we seem to extrapolate so strangely that it is the supposedly known source itself that becomes unknown, becomes unrecognizably distorted and weird.” When I finished the poem about the immigrant children in cages, gardening – the idea I’d started out with – was still part of the poem, but utterly submersed.

I’ve never set out to write a deliberately political poem. Like most of my poems, the political ones start the same as the non-political poems: with a fragment of conversation, an experience, something I came across while reading, a dream, or an idea that showed up in my brain. […]

“As a maker of poems, a poet is always engaged in battle, though the opponents may be unclear, the stakes unknowable, and the victories and defeats felt far away, in different domains, by people other than himself,” writes David Orr in “The Political,” an essay from his book Beautiful & Pointless, a Guide to Modern Poetry.

Politics has intruded on my consciousness in a whole new way. I see politics in everything, including gardening, an activity that involves being outside and observing the changing climate, which politicians seem incapable of addressing in spite of clear evidence based in scientific research.
Erica Goss, Politics, Theme and Poetry

I would tell you a story
about a brother and sister
who walked and walked
and walked, trying to find
their way to a safe
place, whose hearts lifted
in hope when their
(mind’s) eye spied
the sweet house, when
they thought they could
finally stop fearing.

But you know the story
of Hansel and Gretel
already, and you know
what they found when
they reached it.
Laura M Kaminski, Sharing the Journey, 13-November-2018

Roads wetted like the day of my Father’s funeral
First snow of the year, last snow of the year
18-wheelers hauling ass at 90 mph
Windshield covered in slosh and spit

Black soot and my heart rate vibrating
out of my chest, I see the first of three deer
resting on the side of the highway
Eyes frosted, silent – shocked by the flash

of headlights, she was ruddy and soft
My own skin reminiscent of pain measured
by silence – I turn the radio down
take my foot off the gas, it feels so much

late night and bedtime, and the whole world
is asleep – crawling the dark like a fearful child
Jennifer E. Hudgens, Three Deer I-35 South 7/30

If any of you are still out there coming to this site, I’m sure it would make Paula [Tatarunis] happy. I haven’t posted here for over a year..but oh, I still miss her so….the grief has maybe changed, but it will never go away.

I haven’t done very well in my quest to get her more published, but haven’t given up.

In the meantime, I put out a new album…it has settings of two of Paula’s poems, those being To An Angel, and How to Clean A Sewer (in a piece called Windfall Lemons). And: Rebecca Shrimpton extracted a song from Paula’s writing on this blog about the loss of a dear friend. From this House of Toast post.

This is the disc….the art work on the front (and the back) is, of course Paula’s…
Darrell Katz, Rats Live On No Evil Star

The setting sun fills the darkening blue-purple sky with pink and orange streaks, vivid enough to catch my attention through the kitchen window. I step out onto the deck and the cool air on my face reminds me: It’s all still here. The sky, the air, the trees, the space around me. Nothing has gone away. I take a deep breath and release it slowly. The neighbor’s dying oak stands out, its naked limbs stark against the dusk.

bread dough ::
the way we coax it into life
Dylan Tweney (untitled post)

I become obsessed with the idea of responding to Ken Smith’s ‘Fox Running’ in some way. But I felt that even the act of reading Smith’s poem had exhausted the image of Fox for me, or rather confirmed a sense that to chase Fox further would be futile or arrogant. My own response would have to follow a different animal. ‘Fox Running’ gave me the confidence – the permission almost – to do so, to find a totem or an emblem that preoccupied me.

I first sat down to write my response in Suffolk in 2015. I was staying in a house that made me perpetually alert: it was full of windows and empty beds, overlooking the solitary grey line of the beach. The rooms made me think of M.R. James ghost stories. Every night before I slept, I drew the curtains obsessively, terrified by the idea of glass and openness to the sea. At the time, I was working on a collection of poems which explored the representation of women in climbing literature and I was interested in women as both too visible and invisible in social contexts. I knew that the totem animal of my poem should be a dog, half-domestic and half wild.
Helen Mort, Fox & Bloodhound (hat-tip: John Foggin)

I track the absence of dogs: how quickly they disappear. A tether, a run gone, and no trace now of the pale-eyed mutt, wolf-like, who spoke such dangerous violence until I learned her name and sang it out, perplexing her with an intimate song of sweetness: I would whisper-sing her name, songs of her ice-pale eyes and their glinting fire, and her snarling terrors would turn to aching whimper, a plea for me not to pass by. Come back, she would whisper-sing around long canine teeth, and sing to me that I am beautiful, again?
JJS, November 17, 2018: the mountain that isn’t there

At Home Poetry Retreat:
On Wednesday, my friend Ronda Broach came over to write poems with me. She got her at 3ish, we put out snacks and started writing poems (from openings of lines, from prompts, from word lists, etc.). By midnight, we had written about 14 poems. She spent the night and the next morning, we woke up and wrote a few more poems. When all was said and done, I had about 17 new drafts. I know, it’s a bit of a poetry marathon, but it’s kind of my favorite way to write poems.

And while we were writing, Ronda said, “Oh, I have a new favorite book to show you…” and I said, “Me too!” Then we both pulled out January Gill O’Neil’s new book REWILDING (just out from CavanKerry Press).

Mini Review:
January is one of my very favorite poets writing today. I have every one of her books and have been a fan of her work since the wayback days–I actually met her through the blog community.

Her poems always get my attention, but this book is really some of the best poetry I’ve read. It’s immediate. It smart, strong, it breaks your heart while you are falling in love with this. For me, these poems remind me what is means to be alive–they deal with loss (from divorce to death), fear, beauty, love of family, love of life, and how absolutely complicated this world is and life can be.

They are not afraid to deal with any topic or subject, and this book is award-winning–in fact, if this book doesn’t win some award, there is something really wrong in the world because I am one of the pickiest poetry readers around, and this book hits me hard and in all the right ways, and I know how strong it is.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Mini Book Review: Rewilding by January Gill O’Neil & At Home Poetry Writing Retreat

Fall is funny. The cool weather brings people outside – the trails are busier, the wineries more crowded, the neighborhoods filled with people who’ve been waiting out the heat and humidity from the comfort of their air-conditioned homes. And I don’t blame them, fall is a great time to get outside. But the leaves changing is actually trees withdrawing nutrients from them, pulling them back into their core so they can survive the cold winters. Fall, in reality, is about dying. This fact inspired a poem, of course.

Hike Toward the End of the Affair

We’ve done this trail before, each mis-timed – either

too early and the leaves still lush with green or too late,

and naked trees staring back at us. Today the timing

is perfect, when we reach the top, a kaleidoscope

of fall – burnt orange, scarlet, amber – these trees

the first fire of autumn. I don’t mention that these brilliant

colors are the trees’ final hurrah, I don’t mention the brush

with death they are avoiding.
Courtney LeBlanc, Falling for Fall

The world stands perfectly still.
The world hasn’t moved an inch in weeks.
Crows have gone under, dreaming
that Spring lies limpid in their beaks. Earth
is off the hook entirely.
We shall expect
nothing of it. What’s required now,
my friends,
is scarves—not for their warmth
but for their brilliance: Lime and
scarlet, fire and turquoise,
coral, fuchsia and polished plum, plumage
fanned around our pallid necks, its dazzle
meant to send a message
in no uncertain terms:

We will not
ourselves go bald and
rigid as the trees. We will not be frozen out.
Kristen McHenry, A Nation of Natterers, Loom Dyslexia, “Manifesto”

As part of my Ginkgo Projects/Bloor Homes commission to write new poems that engage with the landscape and heritage of the area in and around Amesbury, Wiltshire, I bought a return ticket to travel on the number 49 bus from Trowbridge to Avebury. A persistent knee injury is making it difficult for me to drive a car at the moment – and you can’t deny that travelling by public transport is a greener option than taking a car, plus it’s much easier to observe the scenery. So, on a glorious October morning, I packed a sandwich, a pen, a notebook and my mobile phone and set off for Avebury.

At about 10am on a Tuesday, I had the whole of the front row to myself. It was such a treat to be driven! I found myself thinking that I was missing out by not taking the bus more often. The downside is the time it takes, of course. But on a clear Autumn day of gorgeous blue skies, and with no pressure to do anything but look out of the window, think and write poems, I settled in for the ride. […]

Once on the bus, there were new snippets of conversations to collect at every bus stop. From somewhere, I heard two people fill the air with maliciousness about a man who’d done them wrong. In Devizes, our driver braked to let a lady with a limp cross the road.

Thank you for not killing me!

Meanwhile, two fellow bus passengers continued with their character assassination

… indistinguishable, indistinguisable…DIPSTICK.

Avebury was as beautiful and mysterious as always. When visiting henges, I personally prefer Avebury to Stonehenge. For one thing there is no charge (and no queues) – although there is a charge to go into the adjacent National Trust owned Avebury Manor which is highly recommended – and the public share the site with sheep who graze freely around the standing stones.
Josephine Corcoran, Trowbridge to Avebury on the Number 49 Bus

I went to the Manchester Art Gallery this weekend and saw the ‘Speech Acts’ exhibition, which includes a piece by Chris Ofili (Untitled 1996). I’ve not been able to find a picture of it on the internet so I’ll have a go at describing it: it’s a sort of intricate doodle in pencil, but when you look closely, hidden names (and therefore hidden meanings) appear. I made out Mike Tyson, Tito Jackson, Gill Scott Heron to name but a few. Maybe it wasn’t asemic writing, because it was legible to some extent, but the viewer had to work hard and really engage with it in order to arrive at some sort of reading.

I’m always interested in process, and there’s something in the process of creating asemic writing that really appeals to me. I know because I’ve had a go at it, although I’m not happy enough with my efforts to post them yet. Anyway, the process is strange. You’re somehow working away from meaning, and at some point the mark/making becomes more important than what’s being said, if that makes sense. Cecil Touchon, whose work appears below, says: ‘I felt there was a meditational element to working with silence and illegibility to express the indescribable.’ I love this description, and I love his piece below, an overlapped and overwritten poem, beautiful in its own right.
Julie Mellor, Asemic writing

When I signed up for the [online journaling] class, I didn’t realize I’d be inspired to make a sketch a day. It’s been amazing. Even when I think I have nothing to say/write/sketch, something has bubbled up and often multiple times a day.

I’m enjoying the class beyond just the motivation. I really like seeing what others are sketching. We’re making interesting comments, even though we don’t know each other. I’m loving seeing the sketching/drawing techniques that others are using–and it’s not like any of us are trained artists (at least, I don’t think we are). We’re all women, although the class was open to everyone. I’m not sure why it all interests me so much–well, actually, I am–because we all seem to be wrestling with similar questions (albeit in different arenas): what next?

I’ve been taking the Rupp book, my small sketchbook (8 x 6), and my markers with me everywhere I go, and I’ve been doing a bit of sketching that way. It really helps to have it all with me.

I’ve also been writing a poem a day since November started (the class started Nov. 4). I haven’t been this prolific in ages.

What does any of this mean for the future? I don’t know yet. But it’s good to feel some creative juices flowing.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Process Notes on a Time of Visual Journaling

11.13.18: Just logging this here, as one does when one keeps a blog that tracks one’s writing process: I’ve reached a weird, uncomfortable place with the poetry manuscript. Here’s a list of my ridiculous fears/problems:

I fear I’ve jinxed myself by calling this collection of poems a manuscript.

I’ve written myself into a weird space with the narrative arc. I don’t know where to go next.

I’m not having as much fun writing the poems, which tells me they probably aren’t good.

Part of this is because my mind feels pretty divided. Feeling like I should be grading instead of writing really squashes creativity.

Blergh.

Sarah Kain Gutowski, Blergh and More Blergh: Notes from the Week

I turned down a chapbook publisher a few months ago because they required their authors to do a lot of publicizing and with us moving and a new baby on the way, I didn’t have time for that.

The hard truth is that even if a book deal landed in my lap today, I don’t have time to publicize a book properly–no time for readings, travels, conferences. No time for social media really. My family life is demanding right now, at a fever pitch of demanding, and even though I think continuing to work on my writing is Vitally important, publishing a manuscript needs to wait.

I’ve decided to wait until our last baby is 1 year old before I send out any manuscripts again.

Typing that sentence goes against every bone in my firstborndaughterambitious body but at the same time I know it is what I need to do, it is right for my work, right for me, and right for my family.
Renee Emerson, Wait, Wait…don’t tell me…

Yes, it’s been nearly two years since they discovered that my liver had a bunch of tumors in it, which look like cancer, but may or may not be cancer, so I have to keep having tumor marker tests and getting MRIs to make sure they haven’t spread or grown. I don’t like having MRIs, and I don’t like being reminded of the many many thing that are wrong with me, so these tests always put me in a bit one edge. I’m also claustrophobic and I lost my liver cancer specialist when he took a new job on the East coast, so I’m meeting with a new guy at the end of the month. My MS new drug stuff has been put on hold briefly because the MS drug can be dangerous for livers, so I’ve got to go complete a whole new batch of blood work. Fun stuff, right? You can see why I’ve been needing the cheer factor.

But I’m trying to glean some lessons on surviving the tough rigors of the life of a poet from Sylvia Plath – The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, which just came out. You know, we assume that Plath had little or no success while she was alive, but W.S. Merwin and T.S. Eliot tried to help her out, she had her first poetry book, The Colossus, in the US published by Knopf (not too shabby, even though she was discouraged that Marianne Moore gave it a bad review and she had been aiming for the Yale Younger Prize.) Even with Merwin’s good word at the New Yorker, it took her ten years to get her first poem published there, and that was after a year’s worth of back-and-forth edits on her poem. She had written and published The Bell Jar, been anthologized in several big time anthologies of American and English poetry, and been paid to read her poems on the radio. She talked of needing “a little of our callousness and brazenness to be a proper sender-out of MSS” – I definitely need that as I’m sending out my sixth book manuscript to publishers. All this is to say that she worked at poetry like a “real job,” besides being a typist, teaching, researching, and other side gigs, on top of having two babies and a pretty solidly terrible husband who messed around on her and didn’t do much cleaning up, cooking, or childcare. I think a little more money would have helped her too – she had to side hustle pretty much all the time to make ends meet. All in all a kind of cautionary tale – she had a lot of ingredients for success, and sometimes I think, if she’d waited a few years, if the medications of the time (right before the birth control pill and a bunch of mental health breakthrough drugs) had been better, if she’d cultivated friendships with women poets instead of getting so wrapped up in her toxic husband, if the literary world hadn’t been so solidly misogynist during her time – I mean, sometimes I think, if I could only tell her how successful she’ll be. She’d be around 85 now. Anyway, in no way was she a perfect person – she had a mean streak which probably lessened her social support circle and was deeply flawed as well as talented – but I do think that anyone who thought she was weak or didn’t work hard for her success should read these letters. It’s a wonderful (and terrifying) portrait of the woman writer’s life in the late fifties and early sixties. I’ve been working my way through the letters of women with different illnesses – Flannery O’Connor’s life as a writer with her lupus, Elizabeth Bishop and her depression and alcoholism, Sylvia Plath – in order to glean something – strength? Advice? Lessons in what to do and not do? All of these women were very prodigious letter writers, too – in turns, funny, warm, bitter, and a lot about money stress and success (or the lack of it.) I think I’m looking for a path that may not exist yet.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Fighting Back Against Sad with Penguins and Holiday Scenes, More Cancer Tests and Poetry Lessons from Plath

And here is a poem for a friend:

I first saw cancer

I first saw cancer in winter, rocking gently
as if to mollify a small child by keening
a lullaby. She murmured a promise,
a truss of blossoms.

After a chill, in the thaw of spring,
wisps of hair returned, a limp corkscrew crown,
while pain cracked open bones and shred
them into lacy stalks.

Cancer rocked gently again in autumn, smothering
the lumpish soil with a thin coat of saltpeter.
And when it dried out like a codfish on the shore,
she offered her caress.

This was first published online on YB in 2009. YB is a no longer available journal, produced by Rose Hunter and Sherry O’Keefe– both wonderful poets, who were some of the very first poets to publish my work.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with Topical Memes

From page 100 of a childhood compendium of Brontë novels: “Threading this chaos,” Charlotte writes in Jane Eyre, “I at last reached the larder; there I took possession of a cold chicken, a roll of bread, some tarts, a plate or two and a knife and fork: with this booty I made a hasty retreat.” Sounds like Thanksgiving week, during which I am retreating with pies and poultry. Let there be solitude for any writer who needs it, and let it be filling.

Let the editors also have quiet brains, the better to appreciate your and my genius, and let them offer us contracts for our masterworks–lo, promptly and with praise! Let our laptops pant with the warmth of our email exchanges.

In the sage-scented steam, let every brain in these territories brim with new metaphors and opening lines of poems yet to be. Let lying politicians swoon under sonnet attacks and be unable to utter any words except in meditative strains of iambic pentameter. Let swords be beaten into sibilance, power-abusers shuffled off in pantoums, and every vacated position find a feminine rhyme.
Lesley Wheeler, November invocations