Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 44

Poetry Blogging Network

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.

November in the northern hemisphere might be one of the hardest months to love, but it’s always struck me as a time for remembrance, contemplation, and strange, misfit thoughts that might seem out of place at other times of the year. This week’s harvest from the poetry blogs seems to bear me out. See what you think.

This month marks the 4th anniversary of Terrapin Books and we’re celebrating! Back in 2015 I decided to open a small press for poetry books. Getting started involved a lot of work and new learning, but I approached it one day at a time and kept telling myself I could do it. I practiced my personal mantra: Patience and Persistence.

I first did all the business stuff that had to be done—formed an LLC, obtained an FEIN and a state ID, opened a business account at the bank, registered a domain name, built a website, researched printing options, and opened an Ingram account. Then came the biggest challenge—learning how to format a book.

I needed help along the way so when I needed it, I reached out and asked. Everyone I asked for help seemed happy to provide it. By January 2016 I was ready to put out my first call for submissions. That first book was the anthology, The Doll Collection. I took those first submissions by email, but have since joined Submittable.

In spite of the amount of work involved, I’ve never regretted opening the press. In fact, I love the work. It is a huge source of satisfaction to have built and launched the press, and it’s a joy to publish books for poets.

Diane Lockward, Anniversary for Terrapin Books

This morning, checking my emails, feeling guilty about not writing, feeling anxious about not having anything to write about, suddenly, starlings descended, all at once and on the same tree, the black elder, Sambuca Black Lace, its leaves thinned by the cold and the wind, its berries black and ripe and taut as eyes, and the starlings hit it with their bodies and pecked as though it were alive, a baited thing, and berries were grabbed and swallowed and berries fell on the stone flags where more starlings jostled and snatched and I’d been at such a loss to begin anything and using the emails as an excuse that when the starlings came I rushed for my camera with the intention of photographing them for my blog, though when I approached the patio doors I startled them and they grabbed their things and ran, but it was a moment of clarity, when time slows and you’re pulled into something which is not your life, as though you’ve left yourself, stepped out of the shoes that were holding you down and escaped for a moment, passing into a more heightened and receptive state where you can observe things, even though they are small and probably insignificant to others, but somehow you understand that they are of more value to you than events in your ‘real’ life, so you allow yourself to be there, in this new world, knowing it won’t last, that you’ll have to go back, but hopefully something will stay with you, a gleaming eye, a scattering of black berries, the intention to capture it, to set it down, perhaps make art from it, not just to record it but to process it.

Julie Mellor, Where do poems come from?

These days, there are many online thesauruses; but they tend to give short shrift to English’s wide range of approximate synonyms, each with their connotations. My students’ papers often suffer from vague and random use of online thesaurus “suggestions.” The electronic thesaurus, like the dictionaries and encyclopedias online, fail in another important way: it turns out that groping around for a word or a meaning can lead to stumbling upon new words, new connotations, and interesting forays into the depths that our language has to offer.

Anyway, I appreciate an out-of-date reference text for historical and linguistic reasons and because–you never know–sometimes those archaic words inspire, influence, or appear in one of my poem drafts. Groping and guessing may impel a Parnassian to chivy exceptional words through the adit of English and wraxel with new expressions.

Ann E. Michael, Thesaurus obscurus

What next: it was the range, archaeological, geographical, historical, of the poem’s titles that sent me googling. These poems will takes you to the mammoth burial sites of Siberia and North America ..the Laplev Sea, Lugoskoe, Waco; to the bay of Mont Saint-Michel and estuary of La Sélune; to the salt pans of Sečovlje in Slovenia; to the Hebridean ghost-crofts of Hirta; to Sithylemenkat Lake in the bowl of a gigantic meteor strike in the Yukon, and to Beringia that was the land bridge between Russia and America. You have no need to worry about the ‘facts’ behind the places. The poems tell you all you need to know about small significant extinctions; the thing is that they are precisely located, and this is important.

So much for names and titles. What about the moments that memorise themselves as you read? The collection is packed with them. As a whistlestop tour will show. How about the painted horses of the Lascaux caves, threatened by the very breath of visitors? “They watch us with their oilbloom eyes. / We breathe and they may disappear.” Jane Lovell does brilliant opening lines, too, like these:

     They all ended up the same way, of course,
     deep in the silt and swirl of the Thames,

I love the insouciance of this, the crafty pronoun that starts it. And this, too: “He remembers, briefly, plummeting,/ tilting slowly like a tree.”
Think about the way those two verbs apparently work against each other until you visualise a man falling from a height, and realise how exact it really is.

John Foggin, Thinking about extinctions: ‘This Tilting Earth’, by Jane Lovell

This weekend, instead of traveling, I committed to teach myself basic embroidery stitches, with the idea of incorporating embroidery into a found poem or two.

I’ve taken a normal needle and thread to the page before, also for Misery. I printed instructions and navigated the mission for equipment (hoop, floss and needles) in Spanish (aro, hilo y agujas). There were so many colors of floss, which was wonderful but also overwhelming. Then I found small bundles that looked like some smart person had combined a selection of harmonious colors. It turned out the bundles were all one strand whose color changed at intervals. That wasn’t what I wanted but it was still fine to work with. Otherwise, embroidering was easier than I expected.

I gave it a whirl with a couple pages from a Japanese novella, complete with coffee stains. After a night of embroidering thick paper, my fingers were killing me (and I fear I’ve injured a tooth, having resorted to pulling the needle through with my teeth at times. Pray for me.) So this morning I zeroed in on pages with little text, and embroidered through the unwanted words. In one I used the backstitch, in the other the split stitch. Nothing fancy. 

I’m looking forward to experimenting further, also in collage. Most important is making it look right, not like an awkward, alien thing that doesn’t belong.

Sarah J. Sloat, Nothing fancy

I’ve agreed to read some of my work at a poetry reading coming up at end of the month, and I really want to have some fresh material written for it, but my poem confidence is lacking. I don’t like it when emotionally fragile poets like me whine about their writing insecurities, but here I go: I’m not sure about my work. As I mentioned on this blog some months ago, I’m writing about the body again, but in a way that’s different from my previous work. I’ve become very interested in physical strength and power, in what the body can do rather than what is done to it. I’m worried that my writing lacks clarity. My latest poem is about the back muscles, but it might be nonsensical to anyone but me. I suppose time and the poetry reading will tell.

Kristen McHenry, Petty Complaints Sunday

I’ve started a new online daily prompt course this month, but so far the prompts haven’t been able to kick me from this doldrum. I’m taking notes and trying to form ideas, but they just don’t have any momentum or inspiration behind them.

It doesn’t help that the weather has turned here. The beautiful colours of autumn have been replaced by wet, brown mud and dark skies. We had a couple days of bright frost, but that just reminds me of what is coming. After ten years I still dread the coming cold darkness. It makes everything difficult. I’m at that stage of just wanting to wrap up in wool and hibernate for the next 4 months. So that’s what I’m doing tonight, sketching notes on the couch with my cats and a blanket, chocolate and red wine, the rain blashing against the windows. 

Gerry Stewart, Creeping into Winter

I can’t rival anything like Abegail Morley’s iconic Poetry Shed, alas, BUT I couldn’t help but insert a poetry element: a wall of poems! I’ve often wailed about the number of poetry magazines I have and how they take up an inordinate amount of space on the bookshelves. SO how about tearing out a bunch of poems from various mags, and use them to paper a wall in the ‘pottery’ (as we’re calling it – don’t ask!)? First of all I thought I’d look for ‘garden’ or outdoor-related poems. But it expanded to other topics too – basically poems I just liked and wanted to be able to read and enjoy anytime I’m pottering in my pottery! Also, we do have two very small grandchildren, and part of my vision is to welcome them into the pottery as they get older, to do some gardening fun and get them interested in gardening (the older one is already getting into it) – so how about poetry too??

So out came the mags – I started with the earliest and worked from there – so actually ended up with a lot of poems from 2010 – 2017 and maybe not many more recent, but hey. I took out all the Rattles, Agendas, Proles, Frogmore Papers, Poetry Reviews, Poetry, Rialtos, Tears in the Fence, Obsessed with Pipework and so forth, got out a sharp knife and started excising…

And a funny thing happened. (I should use that as the title for this post, in true Clickbait style!) I read. And read, and realised I’d either not  read these magazines properly or it was so long ago I’d forgotten all the great poems. I took several days over it, but really enjoyed the process, because I discovered/rediscovered some wonderful poems. (In the comments on my last post, Claire Booker noted that many poets don’t actually read the magazines in which their poems appear, or even subscribe to... and I had a twinge of guilt when I read that. I thought I had read these magazines but clearly a cursory lookie didn’t really cut it.)

So I ended up with more poems than I needed to paper the wall. Plus a few air bubbles that I tried to ‘mend’, some more successfully than others. I was careful to place poems with ‘swearage’ (a term I’ve learned from a poet friend – although autocorrect wants to change it to ‘sewerage’ – how appropriate!) further up the wall so that four-year-olds don’t read it and do the classic “nana what does X$%!@ mean?”

Robin Houghton, A birthday post and on magazines

As we near up on the second anniversary of my mother’s death, I still feel a need to circle around it carefully.  To test the wind, the barometric pressure of the first couple week’s of November, unsure of how I will fare.  The other day, I was discussing every mother’s tendency to over worry about threats in any proximity to their child, ie, my own mother, whenever she heard that something happened in Chicago, would assume I was in some danger, even if it was literally the very opposite end of a pretty large urban area.  When I said the words “my mother used to..” the tenses seemed weird, and I have a general tendency to begin every story in presence tense, as if she were still alive. Or maybe it felt weird that it feels less weird as time goes on.Not that it gets less strange, less painful, only that maybe I avoid tripping in the hole of it better. 

And in fact, it always feels less than real here in my general daily life..as if I could easily pick up the phone and call her.  More real when I’m in Rockford, where the tangibility of her absence is something I’ve grown much more used to.  And yet, I find myself thinking of every good story in the way I would tell her.  Stupid things like stuff I saw on facebook, or things the cats did. What I bought, or movies I watched that she would like.   Saturday, I made her ghoulash recipe, as close as I could get it. But it’s never exactly right, and I know, in years past, when I tried I would have to ask her next phone call how much of this or that.   I use too many tomatoes or not enough.  Too much pepper or not enough.

Kristy Bowen, talking to the dead

I’m often amazed at how differently people think. For example, we have had a very stressful past few months, culminating in a very risky open heart surgery for our baby daughter, yet my husband and I react in opposite ways to the stress of it all. He basically goes to sleep–complete shut-down–while I get hyperactive, spinning off into a billion directions at once.

Because of that, I’ve taken on a few projects the past few months…I normally don’t share projects I’m working on until they are fully formed and thought out, but in my frantic project-creating madness, I haven’t really fully fleshed out many of these.

Renee’s Stress Projects
1. teaching two online classes (of course this is done–outside obligations, so not really optional!)
2. decluttering the house (finished. but might do it again. I love decluttering when I’m stressed.)
3. reorganizing the girls winter wardrobes and creating capsule wardrobes for each of them (this took awhile since there are 5 of them)
4. writing a poem a week (mostly accomplished)
5. creating a new poetry manuscript (haven’t quite started yet, but there is a file on my computer for it)
6. publishing my CL manuscript (I entered a few contests but I probably could try harder here)
7. creating a new style and capsule wardrobe for MYSELF! (this is so frivolous. I decided that I would be 90s grunge from now on but quickly decided that isn’t really the direction a mom of 5 should go in? so I might return to this project, suggestions welcome)
8. writing a nonfiction book (not  started yet, see next point)
9. studying how to write good literary nonfiction (in process)
10. keeping us on schedule with homeschool (check check check. but taking a break for the surgery)
11. running (big fail, no time for it)
12. making new heart mom friends (yes, I think so! mostly online, but still, progress?)
13. planning an amazing themed secret christmas present for the girls (done, bought, hidden in my mother’s basement)

Renee Emerson, What to Do with Yourself When Your Baby Is In the ICU

– Whatever foolishness is defined by my mind as being ‘James’ does not cast a shadow or make a reflection. It is nothing but thought, and perhaps not even an honest thought.

– Geese fly overhead. They need nothing from me. 

– The shadow of ‘James’ leaves no footprints, makes no trash, causes no pollution.

– One son is dead, another son seems to be going mad. His hold on reality is weak, at best. How does one convince a 35 year old man that he needs help?

– I am by far happiest alone, reading.

– My mother died on the telephone, speaking to me. I was changing planes in the Phoenix airport, trying to get to her. Her last word was ‘love.’ It was all she could say.

– My belief system is simple. I do not believe in fate, destiny, any kind of afterlife, or luck. Random can be both wonderful and horrible at various times. 

– I have faith in this moment, now. I do my best.

James Lee Jobe, journal – 28 Oct 2019

And today, the Feast of All Saints, which most Halloween lovers won’t be celebrating.  These days, I am more aware than ever of Halloween’s linking to All Saints Day, which we celebrate today. Traditionally, this day celebrates the saints who have gone on before us. Traditionalists would only celebrate the lives of the truly beatified and the lives of those martyred for the faith; we’d celebrate the more recently dead tomorrow, with the Feast of All Souls. Many modern churches have expanded this feast day (or collapsed the 2 feast days) to become a day when we remember our dead.

One reason why I love this trio of holidays is that it reminds us that life is short and that we’d better get on with the important work that we want to do.  Let me also expand this mission:  life is short, and we need to start seizing the joy that we often neglect to notice.

In terms of work, I want to put together a new book-length manuscript, while still continuing to make one last push to get the other manuscript published.  In terms of the mix of work and joy, I want to mail the application for the spiritual direction certificate program.  In terms of sheer joy, I want more times of close connection with friends and family.

Let us resolve that we won’t be zombies, shuffling through life as we navigate some undead space between life and death.  As the year wanes, let’s think about where we want to be this time next year.  Let’s look into the gloom and murk and see what we can shape.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejecting Zombiehood

Today’s treat was reading a splendid new anthology I am lucky enough to have a poem in: the brand-new Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, edited by Rose McLarney and Laura-Gray Street. They commissioned pieces on various plants and creatures from poets with connections to the region, and so many of the poems are gorgeous and moving. Each species, too, is described by naturalist L.L. Gaddy and illustrated in black-and-white by seven Southern Appalachian artists. The resulting book is both local and diverse, and truly a stunner.

The next task: prepping for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference starting on 11/8, because I’ll be away this weekend, visiting the kids (it’s Haverford’s Family Weekend). That’s downtime I sorely need, as I keep telling myself as I watch work pile up on either side of it… but I’ll be striving to be in the moment there, and at the conference, too. Check out the program; it looks kind of brilliant.

What I want to do most of all is work on a short story I’m feeling excited about; the poetry hasn’t been coming lately. And that leads to one last Samhainish thought: one of the funny things about publication is that by the time the work gets out there, you’re often mentally and emotionally moving on to new ideas. When you give a reading or do other kinds of promotion, you can feel like you’re trying to call up the dead and hoping the doors to the otherworld open, as they’re supposed to do this time of year. Come, ghosts, and help me out. I have, in fact, been thinking about my father and dreaming about my maternal grandmother, as if spirits are visiting–and I’ve also been remembering that tarot card reading I got around New Year’s, when the psychic told me two ghosts were following me around. If they are, and they want to be of use, maybe they could help with the committee work?

Lesley Wheeler, In a Samhain state of mind

My coveted lazy mornings matter because they give me a chance to confide in myself. Ideally, I do so in a poem, but that’s not a requirement. It can also happen in a blog post or collage or, frankly, in … doing nothing at all.

Until just this moment, I’d forgotten about something Angie Estes, one of the mentors from my MFA program, shared with us. I’m paraphrasing, but she said, “It’s important to work every day. And sometimes, ‘working’ means staring out the window.”

It’s quite likely that I’ll have to re-learn this all over again at some point (see past pep talks), but I’m writing this post during one of those lazy mornings. Except that this lazy morning is a little bit special because it’s one in a series of lazy mornings that I have planned and protected ahead of time. I have been placing it at the top of the list every weekend and working other activities and commitments around it.

As Olds said, I need to confide in a reader who is myself. When I fail to do this, I have nothing to share with the world. And I’m not talking only about poems.

Carolee Bennett, a reader who was myself

Some early mornings when I speak tombstone, I am Death’s only friend. Shadows cut across our wrists like trails of blackbirds soaring towards more harmonious places. Death and I build a small Victrola from huckleberries in bloom and the howls of a wild moon. We listen to music until the sun rises. In this life of bones and circuses, Death says, one should fear less the fall from great heights and consider more the courage it takes to ascend from ashes. Earth’s black flowers, Death tells me, remind us to breathe. Life is short, sometimes heartbreaking. But our song of rising can be ever so sweet.

Rich Ferguson, Of Bones & Circuses

Moscow of eclectisms. Moscow of vast spaces. Moscow of KGB, and crossroads of empires, Moscow of mayonnaise salads. All those old things are still there, now layered with the new — Moscow of 100 open kitchens with tattooed chefs, young girls with velvet pasha pants working the maitre d’ desk. Moscow of boulevards, wind-swept, as long as the steppes, full of men and women in kick-ass boots chatting, gossiping. Shiny food courts that seems to spin like a lit aquarium of world cultures. The young with a niche passion, a slash of bone, pale oyster cheek. There are still drivers guarding their Mercedes tank, bald-headed, spread-legged and packing as they wait for the owner. That part of the dark ambitious ’90s is evolving as Moscow claims its place, transforming old kultur into a place on the culture map.

Jill Pearlman, Moscow Mania

We often in the poetry world talk about “loving poet X’s work,” and I easily fall into that habit of speech, but in truth there are no poets whose work I unequivocably love; rather, there are poems I love. Sometimes it so happens that many of those poems are by the same poet.

The “who’s your favorite poet” question just does not equate with my actual experience of reading poetry, which is much more “yawn, yawn, hunh?, WOW, yawn, yawn, hunh?” in nature. Even the poets I think I can turn to with fairly reliable pleasure can, at some stages of my lumpy development, leave me cold.

I think I’ve talked about this with regard to Tomas Transtromer and how perplexed I’ve been every time I encounter his poem “The Baltics,” even by the same translator: sometimes with a shrug and sometimes with a WOW. I can’t explain it, because I can’t see inside the tinker-toy structure of my state-of-being in any given moment.

I have this experience with Keats — I read excerpts from his poems, that is, lines cited by someone else, and think wow, I need to read this. Then I do. And I fail to find whatever was the frisson that made me interested in the first place. It’s like seeing a star best by looking at it out the corner of your eye. Keats in full frontal is just not much of a view for me, at least — again — at the stages of development I’ve gone through thus far.

Marilyn McCabe, I need you to need me; or, On Favorite Poems

It was Sylvia Plath’s birthday this week and this got me thinking about women’s age, midlife goals and stresses, and the publishing world. Reading Plath’s complete letters and journals in the last couple of years, you really get a sense of Plath’s ambition – and a lot of thwarted ambition at that. She felt closed in by the expectations on her of women, of mothers, and some of that was well-founded (see: Marianne Moore’s letter refusing her Guggenheim because she reproduced. True story. She also hurt Gwendolyn Brooks’ career advancement. Dang.)

The question is: is a middle-aged woman today better off than in Sylvia Plath’s day? Well, we have birth control (though of course some politicians and states would prefer that we not have it), and we have slightly better mental health care. We don’t have better financial support of writers – she didn’t want to teach, so made her living freelance writing and winning contests and getting scholarships and fellowships, and therefore was pretty much always struggling. I know a lot of women writers in her position (and that’s what I try to do too, although I’m a much worse grant-writer).

We are still held to weird levels of examination over our looks, morals, and the way we navigate social mores in ways that men aren’t. I can say as a woman over forty – and having lots of friends in that group as well – that you have to shout a bit harder to be heard in a crowd as a female after 40, in the literary world, especially if you aren’t “connected,” the “hot new thing,” don’t live in NYC, etc. I am currently shopping around two manuscripts and it feels hard. I have five published books, and it still feels like I’m banging at a wall that says “no girls allowed” or “only the right girls allowed,” perhaps. It feels hard to get blurbs and reviews, it feels hard to get books out in front of readers, it feels easier sometimes to just…give up.  Sylvia Plath was sixteen years younger than me when she died. If she had made it to 46, would she have produced wonderful books that we can only imagine, or perhaps had the opportunity to mentor other women writers or be mentored, or become only more and more frustrated by the way she couldn’t seem to achieve the things she thought she needed to achieve?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Halloween, Midlife Musings on Sylvia Plath and Why I Still Blog, and Spooky Poems and Art at Roq La Rue

I dreamt I won a poetry competition I hadn’t entered I wrote in my diary this morning and all at once it was November, month of daily blog posting, National Blog Posting Month or #NaBloPoMo.  So I am writing a blog post while the dream carries on glowing inside my mattress even though it is past midday and the bedclothes are cold and straightened.  But dreams persist beyond tidiness.

Josephine Corcoran, I dreamt I won a poetry competition I hadn’t entered
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 42

Poetry Blogging Network

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: gathering and tidying, drawing in, broken and whole, acedia, poetry exhaustion, the humor in horror movies, thinking about excess, embracing vulnerability, cargo memories, eating at poetry readings, going to readings on public transport, women in yellow, dead girls, deep and not-so-deep thinkers, gendered and sexual violence in “The Waste Land,” participating in one’s own oppression, the Queen of Swords, invincible heart tattoos, gold-starred poems, and the touch of wings.

I’m not sure where the week has gone. I have managed to get some writing done, but with my computer in the shop and learning to use my son’s with Google Docs instead of Word which is so, so slow and having the kids around half the week, I’ve not done as much as I would have liked. But I’ve written a few poems, submitted to a few mags, had three poems accepted by a magazine and an anthology. So a good week from that perspective.

It’s rained most of the week, so even with the beautiful colours going on just now, it hasn’t been a get outdoors type of week, though we’ve picked a lot of apples, have been eating lots of apple crumble and I got most of my garden jobs done. I spent some time sorting and cleaning out the kids’ stuff, their over-flowing baskets, drawers and boxes and I painted a few things that have needed it for months or years.

None of which really have much to do with writing, but it was a week for gathering and tidying, doing the little jobs that I don’t have time for while working and doing the rounds of hobbies and appointments. For sitting still and writing, for reading curled on the couch. So hopefully I can go into next week with a slightly clearer mind and a bit more energy for the long, dark slog to the winter holidays. 

Gerry Stewart, Sodden Catch-Up

The days are dimming, growing shorter. The nights are darker.

This can be comforting. Darkness and shadow can be a fertile space for transformation — bulbs and seeds lie hidden within the earth, gestating, awaiting their moment to burst forth and bloom.

I suppose what I’m saying is that I’m feeling a desire to draw in, close off outside influences, and wrap myself in the comfort of hearth and home. I long for rich, warm foods, good books, and quiet.

What I’m desiring is not only an external drawing in, but an internal one. As I settle into what comforts me, I’m wondering what lies within the shadowy places within myself. What have I kept hidden? What fruits can I reap from this year’s work? What do I want to plant anew? What do I wish to nurture and grow?

Andrea Blythe, Learning to Grow, So You May Reap

This is wholeness: a person with a broken heart. At first glance it’s almost a koan. Broken equals whole? How does that work, exactly? I spent some time with this koan this week, and here’s how I’ve come to understand it this year.

A person whose heart isn’t broken, at least some of the time, isn’t paying attention. A person whose heart isn’t sometimes cracked-open by the exquisite and sometimes devastating fragility of this world isn’t paying attention.

A person whose heart is so impermeable — whether to our dangerously warming planet, or to the inevitable griefs and losses that come with loving human beings who disappoint us, and who will die — that’s not wholeness. That’s bypassing.

Some of you told me that after Yom Kippur you felt like your skin was too thin and your hearts were so open that re-entry into the “regular world” was almost more than you could bear. Sukkot says: keep your heart open a little longer.

Sukkot is an opportunity to keep our hearts open wide. We build and decorate these fragile little houses. Their roofs have to be made out of plants that are harvested from the earth, and open enough to let in the stars and the rain.

A sukkah is almost a sketch of a house, a parody of a house. A hint of a house. You can see the outlines of a house, but it’s flimsy and the roof leaks and as soon as it’s built, it starts succumbing to the rain and the wind and the weather.

Rachel Barenblat, Broken and whole: a d’varling for Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot

It is what looked up at you
from the eyes of the wounded doe
what the clock said to itself
when the mainspring gave way.

It is the last few shudders
your father’s body made
when his heart wrote hopeless
on the hospital bed

the long sigh of a black dog
and your beloved’s parched skin
when she could make no more tears
and told you go now.

Ann E. Michael, Acedia

And then I read this in Anthony Wilson’s Lifesaving Poems: “If you write poetry (and I assume that if you do, you are also actively engaged in reading it), sooner or later Poetry Exhaustion is going to happen to you. By Poetry Exhaustion I mean the complete lack of that shock of recognition you’ve always been able to count on from a favourite unputdownable book of poems. Or the sudden knowledge that the poems you have been working on for the last two months are certainly not your best work and actually not  even worth keeping (though you do, in case).”

It sums up exactly the kind of ennui, mental blankness that’s stopped me writing posts and reviews and poems. It happens. You just have to hunker down and wait for something to change you. Like a poem, you can’t just will it into existence.

Last week, out of the blue, I decide to re-read Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. And suddenly, phrases come jumping off the page, .moments that get you in. Phrases like these:
The cold like a wire in the nose.
Snow caused everything to exceed itself
starlings…feathers sleekly black as sheaves of photographic negatives
big gulls…monitoring us with lackadaisical, violent eyes
a dolphin….a sliding bump beneath the water..like a tongue moving under a cheek
star patterns..the grandiose slosh of the Milky Way
gannets bursting up out of the sea…like white flowers unfurling…avian origami
[and, after a hard long hike] … feet puffy as rising dough

It was lovely. Language well-wrought can galvanise you like that. I’ve had a review waiting to be written for months. Macfarlane let me know that it was time I got on with it.

John Foggin, Two pamphlets: Victoria Gatehouse and John-Paul Burns

The other night I wrote a horror poem about a town that killed all its children and I was like “Wow, that’s dark” and then someone posted a quote from one of my other poems that was so dark I didn’t recognize it immediately and I was like, “Wow, dark.” So I guess we have to realize our own core competencies, to use the language of the corporate world. I could try to write uplifting poems about flowers and it would probably still have some pop culture or horror aspect to it – it’s just part of who I am.

I’ve been trying to heal up from getting sick so I can get some dental work done (horror story on its own) and trying to do uplifting things that boost my immune system, but of course some of that involves listening to Nick Drake (depressing) and watching scary movies on cable late at night. One of my big coping mechanisms to life is humor, but I find humor in horror movies and MST3K Westerns and pointing out tropes that were stolen from Westworld. (My husband didn’t even know there was an original Westworld movie in the seventies! Scandal!)  One of my coping mechanisms is coloring my hair (I put in a purple streak this week for Halloween – a great thing to do if you have enforced rest!)

Maybe we have to look at the things that make us happy and do those things instead of things other people think make us happy. Does that make sense? I enjoy sipping apple cider and taking pictures of pumpkins and leaves but I also enjoy reading Japanese ghost stories or gothic tales in translation. I hope that I get healthy enough to take care of my tooth troubles but also to do a little more socializing, especially with other writers, because this time of year draws writers together in a unique way. I’m ready to see my friends, to hear some poetry in the air, to laugh. If you’re a hummingbird with a purple streak, don’t be afraid to stand out.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Poems up in Waxwing and Nine Mile, New Reviews in Guest 5, and Realizing Your Core Competencies

I often use this poem to talk about contemporary poetry’s value on parallel structure, anaphora, and excess. The reaction tends to be polarized–some readers love it, others really resist it. In particular I always enjoy the telescoping of those penultimate lines, as the poem’s “camera” seems to zoom in on a particular room and a particular speaker (one with a cold). I was delighted that this time the students found their way organically to thinking of how funerals are often the cause for a profusion of flowers.

Since I didn’t want to create an utterly morose atmosphere, I found another way to think about excess: Neko Atsume, the Japanese mobile game of cat collecting.

Sandra Beasley, Echoes

The scariest part of Dr. [Brené] Brown’s recommendation is embracing vulnerability.  If this is how we become authentically ourselves, then I confess it is frightening. I can handle it in small doses, but the larger the chance of feeling like I am making a fool of myself, the harder it is.

Another writer friend of mine was asking me why with all the writing I have been doing, that I have no book. I’ve toyed with a manuscript – I’ve even entered one, maybe two manuscript contests. So I have gone back and looked at a lot of my poems – especially those that have been published. and I put them together struggling to see clearly a theme. Feeling that perhaps I am too close to this, I sent her a file with the collection I pulled together. We had spoken about this in advance and I already knew that she was willing to look at it. This was a big step – exposing the very vulnerabilities that have been holding me back. I confess that now, I am happy I did this. Going back over all these years of work reminded me, I got Poetry!

Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Searching for Authenticity

Rob [Taylor]: You mention how helpful writing was in giving you a “retreat” in yourself – what a wonderful way to phrase it! But then in “Cargo memories” you write “I’m guilty thinking of poetry as not being a life // preserver”. What are your current thoughts about the role of poetry in your life/the world? Has publishing These are not the potatoes of my youth and seeing it travel out into the world affected your thinking on this?

Matthew [Walsh]: I think poetry can be extremely helpful to the brain and body, and I think it’s good to write things down and think things out on paper if you’re writing something personal because it can be like peeling out of an old skin and into a new one. But I don’t think it can do everything for me, personally. That’s what I was getting at in “Cargo memories.”

I think poetry—reading or writing it—can help healing or start healing. What I feel is that the real life preserver is the writing community. Those people are so good. If you’re a writer then you share this special little thing with all the other writers out there.

Rob Taylor, A Little Retreat in Myself: An Interview with Matthew Walsh

This was the first reading I’ve ever done where the audience was eating dinner. And I loved that, and now I’ll always want people to be eating. There was something wonderfully assuring about the clink of forks and the light glinting off wineglasses while I read my work; some little existential cell inside me was happy that these people were getting sustenance. I have a longstanding blood-sugar issue—an aftereffect from a scary health crisis about 12 years ago—and I tend to get glucose crashes at inconvenient moments, like right in the middle of a reading*. So I’m obsessive about eating a solid meal before doing a reading. At the Barkin’ Dog I was able to order a full sit-down meal (and a giant glass of iced tea), and then ate half of it while the first reader performed. This was pretty much a perfect scenario; by the time I got to read, I was warm and tanked up, and there was still food left to polish off after my show was over. All the eating and waitstaff did make for a little extra noise during the reading, but it was nothing a seasoned open mike veteran can’t handle. (What poet hasn’t had to shout over a growling cappuccino machine or a phone ringing or a fight breaking out in the bar?)

Amy Miller, Writers & One-Nighters

Deborah and Colin at The Leaping Word kindly invited me to be their guest poet at Silver Street Poets’ monthly meeting in October. This is a gathering of interesting and friendly poets in a super venue – close to the centre, just the right size, good natural light and good acoustics. Book-sales were encouraging, too. The bus journeys there and back gave me useful time for thinking, observing, writing and knitting!

I’ll go again for some high-quality live poetry whenever I’m free on the first Friday of the month. November’s guest is Chaucer Cameron, whose latest work, Wild Whispers, is an international poetry film project working with collaborators from ten countries. Chaucer co-edits the online poetry film journal, Poetry Film Live, well worth a visit.

I was thrilled to learn that I was on the long-list for the Winchester Poetry Prize. I very much enjoyed the day-trip by train to Winchester last Saturday. On the absurdly overcrowded Virgin train from Basingstoke we were sardine-packed next to the first-class loo with Mark Totterdell and Jane. Such a pleasure to meet them. Later we did a book-swap. Mapping is a great collection, well-observed, intelligent and witty, beautifully written without being at all showy.

Ama Bolton, Poetry in Bristol and Winchester

I never forgot her. The young woman wore a yellow dress and her smile seemed to glow in the sunshine. I’m pretty sure she was with a young man, but as a child that didn’t interest me. I was on another of our family’s summer trips. These were starkly frugal, multi-week affairs meant to educate us at every free historical site possible. Our days were spent in a hot car, our nights in our tiny travel trailer. Much of the time I was carsick or asthmatic, or both. I longed for my library books, my pink bike, and all the other comforts of home.

On this day I stood in a crowd of tourists watching a demonstration of colonial candle-dipping or blacksmithing. Trapped at armpit height behind people holding cameras, I couldn’t see a thing. That’s when I noticed Yellow Dress Woman strolling on the grass nearby. I squinted at the aliveness she radiated.

It occurred to me that she wanted to be there and I realized with a sudden full-body shiver that growing up wasn’t an abstraction. This was a revelation — that a time would come when I too could make my own choices. Her image stayed with me like a beacon through the rest of my growing up years. […]

It’s strange how fleeting images manage to plug into a waiting receptor. A man stopping to help an elder or a woman unselfconsciously nursing her baby may expand your awareness, give you new resolve, or offer clarity. We gather and hold these moments, none of us knowing what moments from our lives are carried by others.

Laura Grace Weldon, Yellow Dress Woman

Courtney’s laugh

drifts down
        from the floor
                above

like a shower
        of ginkgo leaves
                in an autumn breeze

Jason Crane, POEM: Courtney’s laugh

“Zombie Girl writes down her name.  Writes a letter to her congressman. A classified ad.  Dead Girl seeking.  Dead Girl seeping through her days.  Zombie Girl makes a chalk drawing of her former lovers on the floor beside the bed.  Decides sex is beside the point when you are all body, all hunger. All meat moving through the world.”
___________

In honor of Halloween, I’ve been exploring some past spooky poems via social media the past couple weeks, but I have a whole new treat on hand today, an as yet unreleased as a complete series, songs for dead girls.  Originally part of my little apocalypse manuscript, these poems fit in well with its end of the world ways, but only a couple of the poems have seen light of day on their own.

read the entire series here:

http://www.kristybowen.net/songs_for_dead_girls_zine.pdf

Kristy Bowen, songs for dead girls

In addition to tinkering with various poems, I enjoyed being at The Big Poetry Weekend in Swindon a few weeks ago, meeting up with several poetry friends I’ve made over the years.  In particular, I liked hearing the poems and ideas of poet Nuar Alsadir in conversation with Hilda Sheehan.  I’ve been dipping in and out of NA’s book Fourth Person Singular ever since it was first published in 2017.  Sometimes, I feel I’m not clever enough for the book, other times I experience the thrill of being in the company of someone who is alive with clever ideas and thoughts – you know that experience of spending time with someone brainy,  communicative and interesting?  NA’s work plays and interacts with ideas about the lyrical I in poetry, about who is speaking and who the reader assumes is speaking.  This is fascinating even at moments when I’m not sure I’ve grasped what is being said (and by whom!).  Some notes I made from Nuar’s talk include:

originality is a narcissistic delusion

and, on editing:

leave it alone

I love both of these quotes.  If you’d like to read about Nuar Alsadir’s work in more detail, Dave Coates has written a more in-depth blog here.

Josephine Corcoran, Mid-October Notes and looking ahead to November

When I heard that Harold Bloom died yesterday, my first thought was that I was seeing an old piece of news that had made it into my Facebook feed.  I thought he had died several years ago.  But no, it was yesterday.

I thought, how appropriate that Bloom dies on the same day that both Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo won the Booker prize, in spite of the rule that the prize can only go to one author.

I confess that I haven’t read the work of Evaristo, but I plan to.  I am also rather astonished to realize that I have never finished a work written by Bloom.  I understand his importance, but his work seems important to a different century.

If I was a younger student in grad school, perhaps I would write a paper considering how the anxiety of influence is different in our current age, where there can be such a variety of influences, and it seems harder to know which mediums will shake out to be most important.  Maybe I would argue that one of Bloom’s most important ideas isn’t really important anymore.  Or maybe I’d see it as more important than ever.

During my own grad school years, in the late 80’s to early 90’s, Bloom seemed like a rather shrill voice, going on and on about the traditional canon and how women and minorities were ruining it all.  Or maybe that’s just how he was interpreted by the larger news outlets who still gave him a voice.

And yet, here is Bloom once again bulldozing his way into a post that had been intended to celebrate the accomplishments of female writers.  Can we never get away from these old white guy bloviators?

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Bloviators and New Waves

I started teaching modernism as a graduate student, leading discussion sections for Walt Litz at Princeton in ’91. When I arrived at W&L in ’94, I resolved to teach much more diverse syllabi: I put the version of modernism I’d studied in conversation with the New Negro Renaissance and included many women writers (Walt’s syllabus was all white and male). Soon I was bringing in formalist modernism, too–featuring the so-called “songbird poets” and analyzing various kinds of experiment that earlier discussions of the field hadn’t made much space for. Something I love about teaching, though, is that you can’t just rest on your laurels: I’m teaching you a version of modernism that’s fuller and more complicated than the one I received–aren’t I the greatest? Changes in scholarship and theory demand renovated approaches, but so do the students themselves.

I posted on Facebook recently that my students have never been so alert to questions of gendered and sexual violence in “The Waste Land” as they were this October. I was really glad I had this recent suite of short essays from Modernism/ modernity to bring to class, organized by Megan Quigley and centered on how #metoo has changed conversations about a modernist poetic monument. My current students think sexual violation, as reality and metaphor, is at the very foundation of modernism, and while I’ve always highlighted those elements in certain poems, I’m still trying to get my head around that as a perspective shift on the whole field. They’re very interested, too, in modernist portrayals of mental illness and how it’s persistently feminized; the more I consider those questions, the more foundational they seem, as well. Honestly, I wish I had more than twelve weeks with these students, so we could deepen our reading together.

Lesley Wheeler, Teaching US Poetry from 1900-1950

Fissures on Twitter are so mundane that people are barely talking about this one anymore, but I’m still ruminating on it, both as a female in America and as a writer.

So let me start with this: kindness is a false flag here. (While kindness is definitely “on brand” for Ellen, I don’t think it requires us to set aside our other principles and play nice with everyone.) What this is actually about (as far as I’m concerned) is what “civil society” keeps asking of women: instead of telling men to not commit war crimes, for example, it instructs women to be polite even if they do.

Instead of challenging this, Ellen’s explanation doubles down on kindness and in doing so, it perpetuates the expectation that women shall not rock the boat. You already know how it works: if we walk out, we’re rude; if we’re dismissive, we’re uppity bitches. At the same time, if we stay in our seats, we’re complicit in the aggression against us. (Cue this the “asking for it” argument.) Ellen understands politics and celebrity and has both benefited from these and been battered by these. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that she chose a reductive argument for “staying” instead of a more nuanced one.

We’re up to our elbows in shit as citizens in this dysfunctional democracy/republic and could really benefit from deep, meaningful reflection and conversation. Oversimplified, kindness as a platform maintains the status quo. It allows those in power (and those abusing that power) to keep their power, and the only benefactors of Ellen’s kindness are those for whom the truth is uncomfortable.

To put it bluntly, one of the ways the patriarchy persists is because women have been trained not to make anyone uncomfortable. As a writer (and this is a writing blog, after all), everything hinges on this idea. The truth often discomforts, and it matters who gets to speak it.

In just the last couple of weeks, the following have made headlines: how much AOC spends on her hair, whether or not Elizabeth Warren dominated a marine in the bedroom and Kamala Harris getting mocked for her laughter. Women are expected to tend to our appearance. Just not too extravagantly. Women are expected to like sex. But not too much. Women are treated like children — expected to be seen not heard and certainly not to laugh too loudly at anything the president’s son doesn’t think is funny.

The expectation to be pleasing is a weapon.

“Thanks” to Ellen conjuring kindness, I’m reflecting on times that I have censored myself — both face to face and in my writing — to avoid making anyone uncomfortable. And that includes myself. Sometimes, it’s easier to be polite than to make waves. We’re habituated to it.

“Thanks” to Ellen, I have a better understanding of “the personal is political” and how, as writers, that plays out in our poems and essays. It’s not kindness to swallow our truths. It’s called participating in our own oppression. The truth can be scary… but *we* are not the ones who should be unnerved.

Carolee Bennett, i read the news today, oh boy

All of this is to say that I only read the cards for my own purposes, although from time to time I’ll get out my deck with friends and let them tell me what they think their cards mean to them. It’s like helping someone interpret a dream. Only the dreamer knows for sure if your interpretation rings true.

Without going into all the free writing I did for this Awareness Spread, I will share a few of my conclusions. For the third card, representing worries or mental habits that might be interfering with my creative endeavors, I pulled the Devil.

Honestly, I didn’t need to ponder this one too much. I’ve gotten into a habit of scouring the news every day to find some sign that maybe the Orange Menace will be deposed. It’s an unhealthy preoccupation. I’ve let that devil take up too much mental real estate.

The Queen of Swords represents my higher self. This card is part of my birth card constellation in the sun sign of Libra, so I immediately identified with her. Swords are ruled by the element of air. It’s Libra season and the air is cooler finally. In Ayurvedic health teachings, fall is the season of vata, the air element, and this dosha happens to be the strongest for me. In fact, I tend to be highly anxious if I don’t tend to grounding myself.

I love this time of year, before the holidays when it’s good to be outdoors again in Georgia. I feel the confidence this queen of swords displays. Clear minded, able to express myself, and excited about the possibilities that await with my writing and with a bit of dabbling with paint.

Christine Swint, Creative Explorations With Tarot

Those who’ve have made an impression upon us throughout our lifetime tattoo us in some way—skull, rose, a flaming crown of thorns. Perhaps a black cat curled around a quarter moon, a dolphin leaping from our inner sea, or a dream catcher below the throat reminding us our own song is a dazzling one. Some tattoo our flesh with darker inks, hushed moments hidden from the public. Others ink us with light so bright, we’re often mistaken for the sun. Invincible heart tattoos through which no bullets can pass, leaving feeling bold as love when next we meet. 

Rich Ferguson, Land of the Inked People

As you can see from the above picture, I keep a note of everything I send out. If I get an acceptance, I mark it with a foil star. Childish? Perhaps. But it works like a little affirmation that I’m doing the right thing, a way of acknowledging that something I’ve created has found its way out into the world.  I think I got the idea from reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, although I’ve been doing it for such a long time now I might be mistaken. Anyway, I know some poets use spreadsheets, but I like the hands on approach!

Julie Mellor, Give yourself a gold star

Can you hear croaking amid the whispers of midnight?​ ​It’s the splashing against the wings of finer things,​ ​those beings and creatures that some people deny.​ ​This noise is axe-heavy with the taste of iron and the fear of death.​ ​This sound haunted the Puritans and the Jacobites,​ ​and felt rough against the skin, but soft against the mind.​ ​Who will now wade in the silver waters?​ ​Who will take the plunge and croak with the toads?​ ​You and I, that’s who.​ ​Begin slowly and then pick up the pace along the muddy riverbank.​ ​The fear of death is nothing more than the fear of life.​ ​The taste of iron, the croaking, the whispers,​ ​and the touch of wings; these things await. I’m ready when you are.​ ​

James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Can you hear croaking’
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 41

Poetry Blogging Network

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.

Blogging turned 25 years old this week, using tech blogger Dave Winer’s first post as a starting point. And it’s been 20 years since Blogger and LiveJournal opened up blogging to the less-geeky masses in 1999. As John Naughton observes in The Guardian, “The furore over social media and its impact on democracy has obscured the fact that the blogosphere not only continues to exist, but also to fulfill many of the functions of a functioning public sphere.”

Via Negativa is coming up on its 16th birthday next month, and it occurs to me that its evolution has mirrored a big shift in blogging practice generally: away from miscellany toward more specialized content—in this case, poetry. Thanks to social media giving us ample spaces to share our more throw-away observations, as well as the sheer ease of starting new blogs where we can hive off some of our other specialized interests (e.g. my herbal brewing blog), blogging communities united by topic such as the Poetry Blogging Network can flourish.

That said, I do love it when poetry bloggers write more widely about their lives, because that’s where the poetry comes from. For many poets, there’s no such thing as a throw-away observation.

At any rate, Happy Birthday to blogging! In a world that feels increasingly fractious and fractured, let’s resolve to keep building and defending this public sphere.

On Thursday, I met a man with a grammatical error in his tattoo. This was rather sad. It was a quote from a Neil Young song.

On Friday morning, I found myself humming ‘Hi-Lili Hi-Lo’ and on Friday night I was watching a TV show in which the song was the background music.

Most days I was overwhelmed. There was so much minutia to keep track of, many staff concerns, interviews, decisions to make. I was supposed to be writing the last bits of my book before a deadline but I was working long days, no lunch, no exercise. 

On Saturday, I listened to Phoebe Snow’s ‘Poetry Man.’ My son arrived for a week. He admired my robe. I told him his sister talked me into it. He read Oliver Twist on the couch. 

On Sunday, I bought a book that consists of pictures of hands. Some were pointing or gesturing or straightening up, but mostly they were holding instruments.

Sarah J. Sloat, The week that was

There are days when it feels like we can drag a fine-tooth comb through our troubles but still can’t remove all the tangles. When the panic closet in our heart is closed for repairs. Or everybody’s way too tense in the present tense, taking far too many swigs off the haterade. Then there are days when hope is in high resolution, packing a solution for every problem under the sun. Or how, when this living war gets to be too much, we’re guided back down into the foxhole of friendship. Or when kisses taste like home sweet home. When our Lady of Bandages doesn’t seek our bondage, only our healed release.

Rich Ferguson, What My Granny Told Me After Packing a Wad of Chewing Tobacco

Yesterday a student asked if I had an extra notebook; her mom hadn’t had time to do the back to school shopping.  I said that I didn’t have a notebook, but I had paper.  I gave her a legal pad.  When she returned it to me, she had written me a note, thanking me for all I did to make the school a better place.  She specifically mentioned the bread and the butterfly garden.

When I think of things I’ve done to influence retention, I, too, think of the bread and the butterfly garden.  I do not think of increasing the Average Registered Credit (ARC), that idea that if we could just get every student to take one more class, all sorts of problems would be solved; every male administrator to whom I’ve ever reported has been a big believer in increasing ARC.

Let me record a poem thought that just jabbed me.  I’ve been at with a group planning a retreat around the theme of Noah and that ark–let me write something that weaves together that ancient thought of an ark, and the modern idol of the ARC.  Let my subconscious chew on that–maybe on Thursday I’ll have a poem.

I also thought about writing a poem in the voice of the water.  I’ve also thought of the fairy tale of the Little Mermaid and her sea foam destiny.  Sea foam and dead sailors and some explanation for why the sea always wants to swamp us.

I feel better knowing that I have poems percolating, even if I don’t have time to do much writing these days.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Bread and Butterfly Initiatives, and All of our Arcs

I was out this morning picking up windfall apples. I still need to get the kids into the last tree to pick the hanging ones. I’ll spend this week ignoring my phone as I’m not waiting on work calls, cleaning up the garden, cooking the apples, putting away the trampoline and summer furniture, sleeping and writing as much as I can.

This weekend I’ve tried to catch up on some of the prompts I didn’t finish in my last course. This morning I stared out the window and wrote a poem based on what I saw, one of the prompts I regularly suggest to my students. I’m mulling over a prompt on conkers I’ve had in my head for the past two weeks, lots of images but nothing to tie them together yet. And I’m sure there’s a poem stuck to the burr that came back inside with me today.

I will wallow in autumn, in autumn writing full of spice and warmth, damp and earthy. 

Gerry Stewart, Half-Term Wallow

Somehow we had this gift, probably luck, for finding the right trees for the job. In our style of tree fort, you needed three or four trees. They were the main structural supports. They had to be close enough together that our frame boards could reach, reasonably straight and not too rotten. For our largest and most well-built tree fort we used four trees growing out of a hill so one side was closer to the ground than the other, which made it easier to build a ramp to get to it. I think about those support trees when thinking about poems. Their position determined a lot—the shape and size of the rooms especially—and I’ve asked myself what the equivalent would be in a poem. It varies of course, but having some secure starting place to hang your first board, or your first line, and build on that, can be the difference between a fort that leaks and gets overrun by raccoons and one that you can spend the night in without fearing collapse.

“You use what you have, you learn to work the structure to create what you need.” writes Julia Alvarez about writing sonnets in her essay Housekeeping Cages. This was our approach, my friends and I. We had plenty of woods with tall trees. We had access to limited building materials (from our parents or stolen from construction sites) and we had time on our hands. Our materials gave us a start, even gave us the ideas to work with, but they didn’t limit us. We took risks (like building a hibachi and old tin pipe into a fireplace 40 feet off the ground), and got creative (we sealed cracks with melted candle wax, which of course melted away in the summer.)

We also had a reasonable arsenal of tools for the job. Hammers and saws mostly, buckets of nails, because we were crude builders making up the rules as we went along. “One has to know the tools, so he doesn’t work against himself. Tools make the job easier.” writes Yusef Komunyakaa about a period in the ’80s when he discovered the voice and form for some of his poems. Our forts would probably have gone higher, lasted longer and looked less like trash heaps with better tools.

Grant Clauser, On Tree Forts and Poetry, Structure and Support

and then the chimneys fell,
one by one by the ton of
ancient soot billowing applause
from the lads in the sidings 
wagoned in trammelled bravado.

some by explosive nostalgia,
some by pick and prop and fire 
and hope for the tugged heart strings,
bricked in piles, taking the stacks
down brick by brick, upending the past.

Jim Young, and then the chimneys fell

Back in April, which is ironically National Poetry Month, I did a bit of reorganizing and moved my to-be-read poetry pile to the bookshelf in my office. Now given their own space, I realized I had quite a stack to work through.

After seeing the unread books lined up I vowed to not buy any new books of poetry until I’d read at least half on this shelf. True to my word, I started working my way through the stack and refrained from buying from any additional books. By the end of September, my shelf looked decidedly emptier.

Then in quick succession I bought boy/girl/ghost by torrin a. greathouse, Odes to Lithium by Shira Erlichman, Diary of a Ghost Girl by Shay Alexi, How to Cook a Ghost by Logan February, and Good Grief by Mikey Swanberg. I did this for two reasons:

1. I love poetry and am always interested in reading new poets that I find and love.
2. I want to support poets and independent presses.

Not only do the above two reasons serve as huge motivators to keep buying poetry, but my new book, Beautiful & Full of Monsters, is now available for pre-order from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. It would be hypocritical of me to ask others to order my book if I’m not ordering theirs. So I keep buying and reading poetry and I keep asking others to buy and read mine.

Of course, one thing I didn’t exactly plan for was the twice-annual library book sale. Not only do I attend every year but I volunteer every year as well, spending hours arranging and rearranging and reshelving books. And because I volunteer and am a lifetime Friends of the Arlington Library (FOAL) member, I get to purchase up to 20 books at a 50% discount (10 books for being a FOAL member, 10 books for volunteering). You can see where this is going…

Courtney LeBlanc, Supporting Poetry

I’m very happy to announce that my new chapbook, The Green Waves: Poems from Roblin Lake, has just been published by London, Ontario based 845 Press!

The chapbook contains 15 poems, written before, during and after my family’s stay at the Al Purdy A-frame. The poems feature my family (the boy was barely toddling at the time), the A-frame, Al and Eurithe Purdy, disgusting pancakes, bonfires (book and otherwise), carbon monoxide poisoning, black holes, drowned mice, a heron named Ike, lilacs, frozen turtles, Nick Thran, etc. Mostly they are about making space in your life for the things you love.

Here are three sample poems:

County Roads
Last Embers
Lyric

For only the second time in my life (the first being “Oh Not So Great”: Poems from the Depression Project), something I wrote has blurbs! I like blurbs but hate nothing more than asking someone to blurb my books, so I was overjoyed when the wonderful team at 845 Press (Aaron Schneider and Amy Mitchell) went and organized blurbs on my behalf. It even inspired me to ask a couple more people, which led to a very imbalanced poem-to-blurb ratio (15 to 4 – one blurb for every 4 poems!).

Rob Taylor, The Green Waves: Poems from Roblin Lake

As the New York Times reports, we’re seeing industry-wide hand-wringing right now about how rarely books are fact-checked, following scandals involving Naomi Wolff and others. I’m proud that Shenandoah editor Beth Staples makes fact-checking a priority: the interns comb through every piece we publish, following up on names, dates, and a host of other check-able details. Not every poem needs fact-checking, of course, but some do. For example, I posted my own poem about the moon landing recently. Most people wouldn’t notice if I got the date wrong, but some would, and spotting the error might impair their faith in me as a writer.

So what level of precision do poets owe their audiences? Spelling proper nouns correctly, and checking dates and quotes, seems important, if a poem references real-world people and events. The trivia doesn’t matter, really–if I tell you right now that my teapot is as blue as loneliness, but it’s actually an unromantic beige, that seems like a reasonable bit of poetic trickery. (Gotcha! It’s orange.) Even in a persona poem like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a piece that’s obviously fictional, you’d want to check the Dante quote before you hit send.

I just handed in copy-edits for my next book, The State She’s In–overcoming the usual Prufrockian abulia to do so, because finalizing a book makes me REALLY ANXIOUS–and the process involved a final round of fact-checking on my end. Several poems involve public history that’s important to get right. While I know I was careful during the period of composition, what if I made a bad mistake in a poem about slavery, say, or Confederate history? The vultures aren’t wheeling around my publications the way they do around high-profile nonfiction, but still, I’m addressing sensitive material.

Lesley Wheeler, Copy-editing and fact-checking poems

– It’s way past time to cut loose from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram. Sure, Elizabeth Warren is right; it’s too big, but there’s something else. It isn’t fun anymore. Facebook feels kind of like rock music did when the corporations got control of it. […]

– I have a conure, a sort of smallish type of parrot. At 11 years old, he understands a lot of English, even though he doesn’t talk. Pico Verde Jobe is his name.

  He’s holding something in his claw, eating it while standing on one leg.

   “What are you eating, Pico?”
   He holds it up and shows me. A nut.

   “Is is it good?”
   Pico vigorously nods yes. 

James Lee Jobe, Journal notes – 12 Oct 2019

We could play
at poetry
the way men

play at war,
except not
blood shed, it

would be stars
lost to us.
Warring poets

would darken
the sky […]

Tom Montag, We Could Play

I like to tell my friends that I never, ever have writer’s block, and yes, I rarely have the full-blown version. I do, however, experience creative slowdowns, periods where I produce less work than I’d like, or my ideas seem stale, or I feel a lack of interest in writing. This is more dangerous than it sounds: lack of energy, interest, and concentration are also symptoms of depression. In order to avoid falling into this pit of despair, I’ve tried to build a practice that anticipates and mitigates writer’s block as much as possible.

History is rife with examples of artists who self-medicated with drugs and alcohol (poets are over-represented in this area) during unproductive periods. Clearly, this is unwise. Writer’s block is always temporary, and there’s plenty a writer can do to address it when it does occur.

Here are a few things I do when I get stuck. 

I take a nap. Sometimes I just need a rest. Often, I wake up from a nap in the middle of a “light bulb” moment. As Shakespeare put it in Julius Caesar: “Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.”

I go for a walk. A couple of days ago, I was working on a review and a short piece for my newsletter. After a 45-minute walk, I had solutions for both. Had I stayed home, I would have stared at my computer for 45 minutes, become more and more frustrated, and probably not had any ideas.

I turn to my collection of craft books. I pull them out of the bookshelf, grab my notebook and pen, and sit on the floor. Eventually, I’ll find something that kick-starts my writing. […]

Erica Goss, How I Banish Writer’s Block

The university takes a long weekend in October; I thought it a propitious time to snare some solitude for writing and revising and thus betook myself and a mountain of my work to a semi-secluded cabin. Designed and largely built by Jack Fisher, the place offers light, comfort, memories, art, nature and spaciousness of environment. While I had no particular plan in mind–in retrospect, possibly a mistake–I imagined these days would act as a mini-writing retreat.

I love the cabin, the memories, the aesthetics of the house and generally I love solitude as long as it does not extend for too many days. The circumstance I discovered once I opened up my pile of poetry drafts, however, led me to one conclusion: I was going to have to organize, read, evaluate, consider, and cull before even getting to the “fun” part of revising. This level of work tends to discomfit me, feels tedious and draining and sometimes fruitless–which is why I have pretty much put it off since…oh…graduate school. Almost two decades.

But I made myself time to be alone and undisturbed, so let my work disturb me as it must. If a writer never allows herself to experience discomfort, she is unlikely to move her work forward in any meaningful or craft-related way.

Ann E. Michael, (Dis)order & (dis)comfort

A friend once told me something a friend told her that had been told to him by a mentor, and it’s basically this about writing: It’s okay to climb the same mountain again and again, but you need to be going up by different routes. I think of this often. In other words, it’s find that I’m obsessed by a subject matter, with trying to get to some new way of understanding it, but my poems need to approach it by different means.

Makes total sense. But at the moment I feel I’m trodding a well-worn path. I think I’m trying different things, but all I’m doing really is skirting a bit the old route only to find my way back there again.

The solution I’m pursuing is my same old solution, which is not necessarily a bad thing — exposing myself to other people’s art. (And reading widely [wildly?].) I like rattling around in the art world looking for something that stops me and twirls me around. Sometimes this dizziment can open a pathway to a new way to approach my own work.

Marilyn McCabe, With Sally in the Alley; or, Finding New Ways Into the Poetry Work

With the oil pastels and the picture cropped this way, I really like the strong cobalt blue with the lavender and dull green of the mountain. The foreground is missing in this crop, but the gouache helps me see better what to do with it. In addition to the beautiful, iconic trees, one of the most striking aspects of this landscape was the circular pattern of rocks and scrubby growth of the mountain behind the cedars. I like how the oil pastels have worked to capture that — it’s subtle, not detailed, but effective. Now I’m thinking about making a larger painting, in oils, based on what I’ve discovered by analyzing these pictures. The main message is simplify.
—
While I was working on this piece, I found a suite of poems by Seamus Heaney that he had written in Greece. One of them is set in Delphi, and it speaks of Heaney’s desire to drink from the spring where all visitors to Delphi who came to consult the oracle stopped to wash and drink; the same spring was used by the Pythia and the priests for a ritual cleansing before giving an oracular pronouncement or interpreting an oracle.

The Greeks believed that the spring was located at the center of the earth. Zeus, king of the gods, had loosed two eagles from opposite ends of the world, and, flying at the same speed, they crossed paths above Delphi. Zeus let a stone fall from the air where they crossed, and where it fell became the sacred site, marked by a stone called the omphalos, or navel of the world. Under the omphalos was buried the mythological monster called Python, which had guarded the sacred spring, until it was killed by the god Apollo, to whom Delphi and the Oracle became sacred. We saw a Roman copy of this large carved stone in the museum in Delphi. The carved pattern represents a woolen net that was once thought to cover the stone.

If you’ve been to Delphi, you would have thought, as I did, what a long, difficult journey it must have been to get there from any of the major city-states of Greece, and then to have to add the arduous climb up the side of Mt Parnassus. I wish I had known that the spring still exists, and that there’s a modern fountain by the side of the road for modern travelers, but I had no idea! Heaney, visiting in the 1960s, did know this, and of course — as a poet who had been steeped in the Greek classics, translated some, and used so many references and stories in his own poems and plays — he was determined to drink from it himself.

Beth Adams, The Navel of the World

Reading Groundspeed, I took note of how [Emilia] Phillips’ narrator refuses to let her own traumas (in this case her own cancer or the death of a half brother) carry any more weight in the collection than the tragic events and lives around her. Our suffering truly is ordinary, and in treating it as such, Groundspeed mimics for us what life is actually like: one long road trip, hotel overnights and stops at home, all interspersed with encounters we have, dramas large and small, our own and everyone else’s. My tendency in my own work — including when I’ve put manuscripts together — is to visit my obsessions (distance, intimacy, romance, etc.) far too often. I learn from this book that our obsessions/favorite themes carry a little more weight when they don’t tag along in every… single… poem. I’m grateful for this model.

I love how Phillips creates scenery from ordinary observations, as though the poems are movies. As pseudo- short films, the poems in Groundspeed celebrate “the glories of their mundane” (a line from one of the poems) as they include beer cans, chewing gum, pollen in the ditch, etc.

In a contributor spotlight in Memorious, Phillips says, “For years I’ve been seduced again and again by two lines of Fanny Howe: ‘My vagabondage is unlonelied by poems.’ In some ways, this statement has become a kind of mantra for me, especially in difficult times. ‘My vagabondage / is unlonelied by poems.’ Not only does it recognize the loneliness of one’s life in that word ‘vagabondage,’ it also speaks to the restlessness I’ve felt my whole life—this draw to move from one place, physical or otherwise, to another.” Howe’s phrase will stick with me, along with Phillips’ mention of it. Unlonelied by poems. Amen.

Carolee Bennett, “the glories of their mundane”

Yesterday, at the end of the reading at the Field Museum, someone in the audience asked if I consider myself a nature poet.  I realized I’d just spent a good  half hour or so talking about how I can’t stop writing about birds.  About how a project that was supposed to be about dinosaurs and extinction would up also being largely bird-laden.  About the Cornell Boxes andmy second book, in the bird museum. About how I’d made a bee-line on my first visit, not to the Evolving Planet exhibit, but to the Hall of Birds, the very same hall where I was giving that very reading.  And yet, I faltered and wasn’t sure what to say.

When I think nature, I often think of Mary Oliver, whose poems, while I find a lot of them sort of facile, usually use nature as a means to teach us something about humanity. The nature is the tool by which we come to understand something more about ourselves.  I know many poets who write similar observances and explorations of the natural world, and in fact, have published a good many (much better than Oliver) with dgp.  But as for me, it’s strange to claim it.  […]

As I worked on extinction event, I’ve been reading idly a few pieces on the eco-gothic, whose gist is largely that nature is not just a background for human activity to occur in, but a force itself.  The menacing forest.  The haunted garden. The terrible sea. That nature (including plants, animals, landscape, weather) is just as much a character in any story as the ones with speaking parts.

I like this sort of nature, the kind that is dangerous and may just kill you.  Much of that is where extinction event comes from. My answer to the question, in the moment, was that I tended to write a lot about horror and the supernatural lately–scary movies, serial killers, stabby adolescents urged on by Slenderman. But that nature is always present in them–weird or twisted as it may be.

Kristy Bowen, nature, writing, & the ecogothic imagination

Please tell us about the genesis of your new chapbook, little ditch. What is the collection about and how did it come into being?

little ditch is a chapbook about survival through sexual abuse, rape culture, & internalized misogyny. This is also a book about being sexualized as a young, non-binary person growing up in rape culture. About being a preteen on the verge of something shattering. About the fur.   

As I was completing my first book, Field Guide to Autobiography, I was visited by these urgent, dark spells or calls to action to write a way towards these poems. These poems felt caked in dirt, but very alive – I felt the need to dig deeper. Using various creative exercises like trance, tarot, & cut-ups, I tried to summon the hidden. There were times where I’d not be able to recall anything, other times I’d feel immersed in sense memory. All these gaps and leaks where trauma holds in the body. I later referred to these as “the ditch poems.”

Many of the poems in your collection explore the intersection between body and the natural and human-made world. What drew you to this imagery? 

Many of the poems in this collection are based on a type of mineral. The more I explored the language of minerals, the more I came to see the connections between that vocabulary and the oppressive vocabularies of patriarchy. Using found language from field guides, these poems tell a story of the nature of patriarchy; how we build upon & reinforce this hegemonic palimpsest. It also begins to explore how the sedimentary foundation of American rape culture is inherent in mineral structures of the Earth’s crust. This book is about trusting yourself enough to claw your way out.

Do you feel that writing and engaging with poetry is one of the ways a person can help find their way out of these structures? 

Yes. I think poetry allows us to reimagine and reshape how we perceive language, and the larger world. I’ve found this to be especially true of experimental poetry, which sometimes feel to me like a great puzzle, or an algebraic equation. Poetry = music + math. Wrestling with diction or meter can lead to creative solutions or enhance our understanding of the world of a poem, and that praxis forges new neural pathways in the brain that expand consciousness as we know it.

Andrea Blythe, Poet Spotlight: Melissa Eleftherion on survival and how language reshapes our perception of the world

And now the thin edge of an eastern wind brings
tears of resin, a scent of green disorder, a cataract
of leaves and berries far ahead. Darkness crowds us
back onto the train. Rocked but sleepless, we sit
and stand by night-curtained windows, watching
the dim images of ourselves watching the flying trees.

Dick Jones, MOTHER RUSSIA.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 39

Poetry Blogging Network

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 poets settling into an autumn mindset, with all that implies. Considering how momentous the political news has been in the US and the UK, it’s frankly amazing that anyone took the time to blog at all. But there are still poems to read, and to write, and—for many—to teach. There are manuscripts to revise. There are creative partnerships to nurture. And always there are new surprises to wonder at, a tiny minority of which ever make the news.

Those short,
sharp lines of autumn, and the last
lightning bugs grounded now
by the density of their own end.
The Milky Way, just there, close
enough to touch.

JJS, Pinhole

If we lived in an earlier culture, we would celebrate Michaelmas today.  It’s one of the harvest holidays, one of the quarterly celebrations that kept people rooted to traditions of the seasonal cycles. […]

I am trying to slow down, even as the world encourages us to zoom, zoom, zoom.  I want to savor the way the afternoon light slides into evening from a different angle now.  I want to enjoy the seasonal decorations that we have now.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Hinge Holiday of Michaelmas

It is, for me at least, a new year. Wishing everyone a happy Rosh Hashanah with hopes for a year in which we all move forward in all of the ways that we are able, hold on to one another in health and illness, and hang on to our own and each others’ goodness.

My new year starts with retirement in exactly 8 weeks. The scramble is on to apply for Medicare supplemental insurance and social security benefits. and then, at Thanksgiving, I am leaving my peninsula home for a month of family visits. More about that another time. But I am still looking for someone who would like to retreat at a lovely private home with water and mountain views in exchange for catsitting while I am away, in case you know anyone who might be interested.

And ! There are new chapbook reviews to check out!

I have a review and interview with Carl Phillips up at the Adroit Journal!

And there are new chapbook Reviews at The Poetry Cafe!

Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Musing over What’s Next?

Shortly after I published a post about the connection between writing and self-care, I received an email notice about a new post from Trish Hopkinson’s blog* on reframing your poetry manuscript. The post — which is a guest post by  Natasha Kochicheril Moni — caught my eye because I’d been contemplating publishing an update about the status of my poetry manuscript.

That update is simple: I no longer know who it is.

I can relate to the standstill/stare-down Natasha describes in the opening of her post. When I go visit my manuscript, it doesn’t even welcome me. There’s no room for me in it anywhere. Not even space for me to park my car out front. Like the warning I saw on a recent trip to Brattleboro, VT: “No parking EVER. Violators will be towed.”

I have been telling myself to grab the poems that still mean the most and start over. But for months and months that felt too much like a break-up (a feeling Natasha also identifies), and I wasn’t ready. I’d nurtured the thing for more than six years. And anyway: I don’t have enough new material to make a clean break. At least not yet.

But new things are brewing.

Carolee Bennett, violators will be towed: a manuscript update

Every
day is like
this, a white

bird in the sun.

Tom Montag, Old Man

This has been a super-hard September, beginning with emotional transitions–dropping my son off for his first year at college, establishing my daughter in her first apartment–and proceeding through too many doctor visits and grant applications on top of the usual stuff. And the usual stuff brings its own challenges. It’s hard to kick off classes well; students and advisees need and deserve a lot of attention. One of this month’s biggest difficulties, though, arose from the good luck of having two books scheduled for spring publication. Edits for my poetry collection arrived in late August, but while finalizing any ms makes me super-anxious, those edits weren’t heavy. As soon as I turned them in, though, the novel edits began arriving, and they have been much more demanding, in large part because I’m newer at prose fiction. I had more to learn about economy and precision than I realized. […]

I’m most likely to push myself when the writing obligation involves someone else’s time and effort, as is the case in delivering mss to editors, and if you’re like that, too, you can find ways to create obligations that don’t involve imminent book contracts. One colleague made a lot of writing progress this summer, for instance, by blocking off non-negotiable writing time on her calendar and making public commitments to get a certain amount done. Another has started a writing group for two hours a week: with snacks, in silent camaraderie, we sit together and work on something not related to teaching, then set goals aloud for what we’ll do in the week ahead. I’m usually very solitary about writing–I’ll always choose a shut door and a quiet room over a cafe, for instance–so I’m surprised to be enjoying it, at least in small doses. I’ll probably be happier when I can use that time on new work rather than face up to the endless failings of this endless ms, but it’s good to be reminded that all the writers you know are waging similar battles with themselves.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever just hang up the towel on the stress of publication, but I guess this post is one possible answer: I would keep writing even if no one wanted to listen anymore. I seem to rest from writing by writing in other modes, or at least reading. Lunacy, probably, but here I am.

Lesley Wheeler, Pacing

Clear from the first poem, “Blessing for Beauty,” is the indisputable truth that the speaker has cancer.

Maybe the universe wants to spare me the apocalypse,
maybe it wants me to counsel the dead,
maybe the cancer finds me so delicious
it wants to eat me from the inside out…
Oh trees, flowers, small animals at the bird feeder—

And so the poems unspool, sometimes in high lyric and sometimes in plain truth. Many of the poems are also love poems to Kusnetz’s husband, poet and writer, Brian Turner. One of my (many) favorites comes late in the book and is not technically a love poem at all, “Meditation on “Cottage Window, St. Remy de Provence.”

And so perhaps we cannot furl the lit hours
inside ourselves, relive their sinuous grace

The poems range from the philosophical to science fiction, to nature, to a love of ginormous proportions. In my copy the pages are folded back, marked and reread again. I promise Angel Bones will make a difference in your life. It has in mine.

Susan Rich, A Must Read: ANGEL BONES by Ilyse Kusnetz

I recently read a new and very special pamphlet by Valerie Morton and Karen Dennison where the two co-writers respond to each other — a conversation with poems. Two of the poems from their sequence, and ordering information is here. I asked Valerie a few questions about the project. When answering, she first passed along this quote:

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”       Seneca

Elly: How did Still Born come to be?

Valerie: It has been an enormous pleasure and privilege to work with Karen Dennison on this pamphlet which began as an idea after I had been reading about response poems and how they could inspire and rejuvenate poets into discovering places they may not have visited before. Karen and I both had ‘a poem in waiting’ and the pamphlet was born.

As we continued we realised we had created something special and that we could put it together into a collection and publish in the hope that we could raise some money for a charity.

Elly: Please say something about the title. After reading the poems, I was struck by how well it reflects, what seems to me the themes and multiple possible ways to respond  to the pamphlet.

Valerie: I am glad you read it that way. The title plays on the word stillborn because I believe that even though this is such a big loss that person stays very much alive in the mind and memory and so they are still born and with you, if that makes sense?

E.E. Nobbs, Two Poets & Their New Pamphlet “Still Born”

Often I am asked about what it’s like to work–I always think the verb should be dance–with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins. He has illuminated and beautified my books for a long time now. I often thought of us as metaphysical twins (I can’t remember who first came up with that thought) when we first tumbled into correspondence. The first year of exchanging letters was so inspiring! It’s marvelous when you meet a person who inspires you and whom you inspire in turn. […]

Somehow when I’m in a Clivean-Marlyan mode, congruence seems to increase, and not just a congruence of minds. Surprise happens: things happen that suggest that the world is a more enchanted, spark-lit, symbolic place than we commonly know. It’s as if we are turning around a hidden center, that we live in a place of abundance. And for moments I’m more congruent with the deep shapes and patterns of the world, and I feel heart-struck and tied in spirit to someone on the other side of the sea.

Marly Youmans, Hands across enchanted seas

Soon, he closes his eyes to listen
            to my new poem.          Soon,
                        I stumble.   Again,
again.     These words
            don’t relate to us.   They are torn
from the fragile body of things
                          that can be told simply.

I walked slowly with my father.

Romana Iorga, Genesis

Do you find that the writing of poetry can be a way to process the kind of intense emotions you have gone through?

Poetry is the way I have been expressing myself since I was a teenager. I’ve always loved horror fiction and films so as an adult I found that combining my real life experiences with horror imagery was a way I could deal with my sorrows from a distance. Horror in my work is like a distorted lens I can use.

One of the ways your poems seem to work through the horrors of adulthood and loss is through traditional horror imagery of blood and monstrousness? What is the value of horror as a genre in addressing emotional experience? 

I turn subject matter like cancer, chemo and child abuse into the horrors that they truly are but allow the readers to feel their own pain. The value is that readers can can see their own monsters in the words. They can step into my shoes or draw on their own pain. We all have monsters hiding under the bed. We all have moments, that if we were deranged, we’d kill the ones who caused pain or watched us, with dead eyes, groveling in the dirt of our horrors.

Andrea Blythe, Poet Spotlight: Michelle Scalise on the horrors of grief

A dog barks;
a man calls.
The sounds curl away.

The men sleep
wrapped around
their prey
like lovers.

Dick Jones, Night Poachers

This five week hospital stay I think I’ve only drafted two poems, but they are two very  hard won poems. I used to think of writing as something like exercise…like “oh I haven’t gone for a jog in a few weeks, suppose I should…” except I was always far more diligent with writing than I ever have (ever!) been with any sort of exercise. Instead I think of the habit or hobby or practice, whichever you prefer, of writing as a gift. Not necessarily a “gifting” but a gift. When I come to another mid-week of driving hours in the car to and from the hospital with the children, trying to keep things a little balanced and half normal for them as I work so hard to just get the chance to hold my baby, when I come again to that mid-week, I know that I always have the gift of writing. I can use that to sift all of it through, to categorize it, put words to it. I can put words to it. And that is a gift, it is truly a gift.

Renee Emerson, writing in hospitals

Have you been reading the depressing news about the extinction of trees in Europe (in particular, the Horse Chestnut tree is in trouble) and the disappearance of about half of the bird population in North America since the seventies? Oh, right, you were focused on all the impeachment stuff in the news? Totally understand. But it is a reminder to appreciate and notice the birds and trees around us, especially the ones that are difficult to grow and maintain, the birds and plants susceptible to changes in habitat and climate and invasive species. Also, there have been some really interesting articles about how spending time in nature literally helps your body heal, and I believe that’s probably true. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten more interested in planting things, and trying to appreciate the work that goes into maintaining public spaces, parks and gardens. I’ve been trying to plant things around the garden that butterflies and hummingbirds like, and planting sunflowers for finches and other small birds. […]

I hope you have had a good beginning to fall, full of promise and good cheer, celebrating the changing seasons as much as you can. I am hoping to fill the increasingly dark and rainy days with writing and reading (I just got a new stack of library books) and hoping to find good publishers for my two book manuscripts, placing poems and hopefully getting to do some writing-related social things (I have a reading scheduled for the first week of October in Auburn so hopefully I will be better for that!)

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Glass Pumpkins, Appreciating Fragile Things, and the End of September

Don’t want us to become Hitler-haired hate machines. Don’t want us to become snuffer-outers of incense and childhood dreams. Don’t want us to make our bed to now only lie in it. Don’t want us to become the uncorrected manuscript all about treating one another incorrectly. Don’t want the alphabet to ever lose the letters MLK. Don’t want Mother America to become a scullery maid for the criminally corrupt. Don’t want us to become a movable feast that loses its groove. Don’t want us to become the strange fruit in bitter homes and gardens.

Rich Ferguson, When My Therapist Asked What I Didn’t Want Outta Life

talking to my cat
slowly the sunshine returns
an autumn morning

Jim Young, [untitled haiku]
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Weeks 36-37

Poetry Blogging Network

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 edition is based on two week’s worth of posts, since last Sunday I was off on holiday. But since I keep to my rule of no more than one post per blogger, it does an even poorer job than usual of representing the richness and variety of posts in my feed. So if you read something you like, remember there’s likely to be quite a bit more where that came from.

September evening —
a moth flies into
her pocket

Bill Waters, September evening

Suddenly the two stately trees
outside my window are shot through

with sprays of gold. My heart rails
against the turning season

like a child resisting bedtime, but
the trees hear the shofar’s call.

Come alive, flare up, be
who you are: let your light shine!

The katydids and crickets sing
the time is now, the time is now.

Rachel Barenblat, Now

It wasn’t until Thursday I actually had a morning to write. It made the writing I accomplished that day a tiny bit sweeter. I had worked hard, earned a small pay check, earned the time to commit to my calling. Amidst the exhaustion, there was a sense of accomplishment, I can work and single parent and write. Maybe not to the extent I would prefer on all sides, but it is possible, messy, tiring, but possible.

Fittingly, there’s been a trend on Twitter at the moment, maybe it circles around regularly, but I’m a newbie remember, of writers posting about procrastination, how they are not writing. Is it guilt that makes these writers post this type of self-depreciating post, to shame themselves into writing? Or is it to gain commiseration or likes because we all get distracted by research rabbit holes or social twitterings sometimes? Both probably.

Gerry Stewart, Juggling it All

There’s a story told about Lucille Clifton–it may or may not be literally true, but it points to a truth for many of us.  Someone asked why she wrote short poems when she was younger and longer poems as she got older.  I suspect the questioner was expecting an answer that had something to do with wisdom and skill.

Instead, Lucille Clifton talked about the lives of her children shaping the short poems in terms of the amount of time she had to get thoughts on paper.

I, too, tend to write poems that are shorter.  Part of it’s habitual, part of it has to do with how much time I have, and part of it has to do with ideas that run out of steam so the poem is over.  Most of my poems are a little longer than an 8 x 11 sheet of paper with regular lines.

Yesterday I wrote 4 pages.  Will it all be one poem?  I don’t know, but it was an amazing experience.

I had been having a good poetry writing morning, after weeks of feeling dry and drained when it comes to writing and life in general.  Yesterday I had already written one poem and some various lines when I decided to freewrite a bit about harvest moons and harvests and elegies and prophets.  The freewriting didn’t really go anywhere, but all of a sudden whole stanzas popped into my head.  I wrote and wrote–4 pages worth.  Wow.

And then I kept my legal pad nearby.  I’d do something else, and then another stanza popped into my head.  It was great.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Long Page Poetry Morning

I was thinking about how it’s the 15th anniversary of the dancing girl press chapbook series, and realized  that also makes it the 15th birthday of my first chap bloody mary.  

In the spring of 2004, a lot was going on.   I’d been editing wicked alice for a couple years at that point and had a dream of a possible print operation companion.  I was finishing out my first year of grad school getting my MFA and had started sending out my first full-length mss..  I had just won a pretty big Chicago based prize and the 1000 bucks attached to it (and thus had a little wiggle money to devote to poetry). 

The previous year, Moon Journal Press had taken my first chap, The Archaeologists Daughter, but it would still be another year before it was published.  I was doing a lot of readings locally and fending off incredibly flattering inquiries about whether I had a book people could buy.  Also engaging in a flourishing online writing community where everyone was always trading work.   I thought to myself, if this press thing was going to be a go, I might want to start with issue-ing something that, if I botched it or found it horrible, only I would be affected. It actually worked out pretty well–since I was clueless, I taught myself how to layout something that could be manually double sided (something almost comical in these days of duplex booklet printing).  I bought some nice resume parchment paper for a the cover, used the library’s pamphlet stapler, and I had a book.

Kristy Bowen, all sugar, all milk

On August 30, Praxis Magazine Online published the first digital chapbook in the 2019/2020 Poetry Chapbook Series, edited by JK Anowe. If you haven’t seen it already, you don’t want to miss BOOK OF THE MISSING by Heidi Grunebaum.

And here, at the beginning of this series, I am reminiscing a little, and want to share a bit of the history. In 2015, Praxis Magazine‘s publisher Tee Jay Dan (Daniel John Tukura) asked me if I’d be open to coming on as an editor…and I was worried about the time commitment, worried about the amount of emotional and mental investment it takes to be on the team of an online literary and arts journal. I was already (and still am) on staff at Right Hand Pointing, where editor Dale Wisely gave me an opportunity to learn how to BE an editor…with integrity, discretion, and compassion. And I’d already learned that it takes a LOT of hard work, and that many of the people who submit to journals don’t realize how much work goes into it, how much of their own time editorial team members at online journals have to dedicate to bring other people’s works to publication. (I know I certainly didn’t have any concept of the time commitment involved while I was still submitting poems to journals, but not volunteering at a journal myself.)

So I’d declined Tee Jay’s invitation initially, not feeling sure I was prepared to dedicate that kind of time.

Laura M Kaminski, BOOK OF THE MISSING by Heidi Grunebaum…Praxis Magazine Online digital poetry chapbook

I’d been working on a poetry feature at Escape Into Life—of poems with birds in them—when the Audubon Society informed me, via Facebook, that we were coming up on National Wildlife Day, so why not celebrate with birds?! Happy National Wildlife Day! And Poetry Someday here in my blog. And Random Coinciday! (It’s fun to be blogging again!) (Where was I?!)(Oh, yeah.*)

Please enjoy Birds of a Feather: Poetry & Art at Escape Into Life! The flamingo painting you see here is by Ilya Zomb.

*I have been oddly busy in a number of different ways. I told you about walking in the Labor Day Parade, twice, and that was only this past Monday. Over the last few years, I have walked in many local parades and attended various meetings, vigils, rallies, and marches because OMG, I have to do something, right?! Writing poetry and submitting it got a little pushed to one side, but that’s started up again, as has my heart, and creativity pushed on me enough to put me back in a play or two. My body, again, had to do something.

Today I began walking the precinct again, collecting signatures (3) to run again as Democratic Precinct Committeeperson—to help get out the vote on March 17, 2020 and November 3, 2020. Hoping to help turn things around.

Kathleen Kirk, Birds of a Feather

Yes, submission season for poets has started in earnest, and I’ve been revising my two book manuscripts, and writing new poems, and gathering poems into groups for different journals. I’m also ready to start reading for real again – I mean, doesn’t September suggest the reading of serious literature, for things that make you think? What are you reading to get you in the mood for fall?

Thinking hard about where to send book manuscripts and which journals to send new poems. It reminds me of the birds showing their plumage and the flowers showing off their brightest color right before they disappear. We are all trying to get noticed, poets, birds, petals – an evolutionary imperative. I think that the last couple of years have given me more perspective, but also given me the desire to aim a little higher, work a little harder on making the poems and manuscripts the best they can be. When my brain is working, and I have energy, I have to remember to work during those times. With multiple sclerosis, you can’t take emotional or mental energy for granted.

There’s a certain amount of luck, chaos, and sheer force of will involved in sending out your work and getting published. Submitting poems during a thunderstorm seems somehow appropriate.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Writing from Inside the Thunderstorm, Fall Color, and Submission Season

Sometimes we will undoubtedly measure ourselves against others and fall short, but other times, as we see in sports and other competitions it will be inspiring, just the nudge we need to make it across the finish line.

Frankly, making a living from poetry is a rare accomplishment. Still there are professors of literature, song lyricists and even those who write for greeting card companies. it is not impossible, but also, I think, not a true measure of success.

Success in poetry may be far more elusive than in other fields. It is likely that more than half of Americans could not name the current poet laureate. So if fame is your criteria for success then perhaps you could consider being a fiction writer instead… But if one of your poems causes your audience to laugh out loud, or conversely, moves someone to tears, then you have succeeded. And if sitting down with your pen, and a blank page before you, words tumbling out, into stanzas, rhyme, free verse, cadence and chorus, if that excites and satisfies you then you are already a successful poet.

What Constitutes Poetic Success? – guest blog post by Kathy Lundy Derengowski (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

I’m in this place of doubt — not necessarily doubt about my work, but doubt about my ability to understand what in the work is working. And what isn’t. I know I’ve been here before. I know the mood has passed. I don’t know if I had discovered some way out of this fog, or whether it’s just time, and distraction. I’ve forgotten. I know I come back to two things: that time is the best editor; and that there is something at gut-level that knows things about my work. But when time and gut still says it likes a work that has been getting rejected for years? I know I’ve written in this very space about honing one’s own editorial sense. But can I really believe myself? I dunno.

Rational Self rolls her eyes.

The editing process takes inner calm, perspective, and confidence. This is especially true when it comes to “knowing” that something is ready to send out. My own process is too often to send stuff out too soon, get it back rejected, and suddenly see a new editing angle. But hey, it’s a process. But there are some times in which I just can’t muster up the guts to do good editing on my own work, or see it with a sufficiently cold eye. (And I do think there are some of my works that I’ll just never get perspective on. I’m just going to love their flawed selves and that’s it. I’ll tuck them into a manuscript somehow or incorporate them into a visual project maybe. But I won’t abandon them to my C-level folder! I won’t!)

A friend of mine who breeds and raises dogs talks about puppy panic periods: something a puppy did without fear a day before suddenly turns it into a whites-around-the-eyes, stiff-legged-no-way-I-ain’t-doin’-that trembling mess, and pretty soon pretty much everything freaks it out. The periods generally only last a few days, although the puppy might have another such period some time later in its development. I think I have puppy panic periods throughout my whole life. Different things set me off at different times (there are some things, of course, that set me off EVERY time). (Spider!) I think I must be in one now.

Marilyn McCabe, Down to the Crossroads; or, Confidence and the Editing Process

I’m doing final edits on my forthcoming poetry book, The State She’s In, this week. Hard work, but fun, too.
We have a launch date for the poetry book: March 17th, with prelaunch copies available at AWP!
Awesome! Terrifying!
This poetry book, my fifth full-length collection, feels like a big one.
Everything feels momentous right now. Cusp, limen, hinge.
My cat Ursula isn’t interested. She alternately sits on my neck, so I can’t type this post, and bites my toes, so I can’t type this post.
When my daughter was applying for policy jobs in D.C., she felt anxious about it. Understandable, I thought–what a transition!–but I also admit I felt impatient. What would be the next step in her life, and therefore in mine?
When she started applying for teaching jobs instead, her anxiety shifted to excitement. (Oh, I thought: it wasn’t just anxiety before, but inner struggle over a deeper uncertainty.) This Thursday, exactly one week after submitting her first four teaching applications, everything clicked. She was hired by a progressive preschool, a place that seems like a great fit for her–to start five days later. Double yikes.
Follow the excitement is a pretty good life motto. It’s certainly a good way to write. If a project feels bogged down, I try to pivot, play around, think about what would make it fun again.
Paychecks are important; doing useful work in the world is important. But the biggest question on my mind (besides, um, can I really meet all my obligations this school year?) is: how can I make these sad, hard, exhausting, exciting, whirlwind changes also, somehow, fun?

Lesley Wheeler, Work: 25 notions & reveries

When in crisis, I’m especially thankful for poetry. Writing poetry helps me to sit with my emotions and accept them and mull them over in a way I don’t know that I would without poetry. To set that darkness echoing…

One of the hospital psychologists, on her rounds stopping by patient rooms to make sure the parents aren’t suicidal (I think that is the main goal of the screening), I told her a little bit about my feelings of anxiety, especially at night, my heart beating so fast and the breathlessness, and she reassures me how normal it is, and said that having my children must help me. I had not thought of that but they certainly do–when I’m taking care of my girls, it is just next thing to next thing, no time to sift around in the mucky waters on the edges of the nihilistic abyss I tend to skirt when..well when these hospitalized babies tend to happen.

When I do want to wade a little deeper, I feel like poetry is a good way to do it–sort of a rope around the waist you can use to pull yourself back out. Not that I write any of this to cause anyone to worry about me–if I weren’t writing about it, then that might be cause for worry. But writing about it, for me, is sorting through it, categorizing, turning it over in my hands. And when I do that I’m not afraid of it anymore.

Renee Emerson, writing through it

Tony Harrison wrote that in the silence that surrounds all poetry
‘articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting’  .
I believe articulation is healing, a way to atonement and to being able to forgive yourself. The serenity to accept the things you cannot change. Articulation can be confessional, too. You can’t change the past; ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’ simply make you spiritually ill. We know this, rationally, consciously, but living by it needs help. Two poets have given me that help. Clare Shaw’s credo “I do not believe in silence” and her unwavering frank gaze at her history of self-harm, and psychological disturbance gave me courage. As did Kim Moore’s decision to use poetry to deal with her experience of domestic abuse. And, finally, one moment in a writing class that Kim was running that somehow unlocked suppressed and unarticulated belief, guilt, knowledge. I remember I wept silently all the time I was writing. It only lasted five minutes, that task. But an insight, an acknowledgement takes only a moment no matter how long the process that leads up to it. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine says Prospero at the end. I think I understand the release he must have felt in that split second.

John Foggin, A loss you can’t imagine: young men and suicide

O Death, I have loved you,
but I have not slept with you.
Were you hiding there,
In the shadows on the landing?

Navy blue sky,
tornado slithering toward her
like a shearing train.

Anne Higgins, Hurricane Coming

The morning after you left I drew
the curtains on the seven-acre field.

Two hares were bowling through the stubble,
wind-blown, skidding like broken wheels.

They danced and sprung apart and danced again
and then were gone, beyond the tidemark

of the tree line.

Dick Jones, THE TIES THAT BIND

A few weeks ago I started to write a post about my resolve not to purchase any more fancy journals, because they were becoming a barrier to my writing for various reasons. Then I thought, “Ms. Typist, get real. Nobody wants to hear your inane fancy-journal theories,” and I scrapped the post. I had bought a plain, lined school notebook some time ago that I’ve been scribbling in, and my no-fancy-journal will power has been strong….up until Friday. Friday destroyed my last shred of resolve. I shall explain: Every quarter, I have an all-day, off-site meeting with my colleagues at the other hospitals who do the same job that I do. There’s only four of us throughout the system, so we have to stick together. We take turns hosting these little shindigs, in which we get together and eat lunch and talk about…business things. And sometimes there is shopping for…business purposes. My colleague who set this one up arranged to have us go to a wholesale art and gift outlet in the depths of the industrial district that the owner agreed to open by appointment just for us. I’m not really a big shop-for-pleasure person, and I didn’t need anything, but I thought it would be fun to look at jewelry and art and pretty things. 

What I did not expect were three huge aisles dedicated entirely to—you guessed it–fancy journals. Beautiful, shiny, sleek, artistic journals, some with gold leafing, and all at wholesale prices. At first I thought I was having a near-death experience and had drifted into a custom-designed heaven. Then I was certain it was a trap. This is how they were going to get me. They would lure me into a fancy-journal paradise and then, while I was too entranced by embossed leather to notice my surroundings, they would put the hood over my head and haul me off. I was stunned. As my colleagues roamed the kitchen-supply and handbag areas, I remained in the fancy-journal section, poring over one gorgeously-designed book after another and fighting down the mild panic that arose from having too many choices. As a warning, I texted Mr. Typist and told him that I could not be held responsible for my actions.

Kristen McHenry, Fancy-Journal Heaven, My Pound of Bacon, 80’s Flashback

I folded the sheet of newspaper into a hat the way my mother did when I was a child. If I made two more folds it would have become a boat, but I stop at the hat, and I place it on my head. Once upon a time, I did this to please my mother, so that she would know that I learned from her. Years later, I wore the hat to make children laugh. Now? My mother is gone and so are the children. In the silence of the house I wear the foolish hat, a hat made of folded newspaper. No one sees, no one laughs. Outside, the sound of a blue jay. It is a lonely sound. 

James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘I folded the sheet of newspaper into a hat’

We were children in the years of Sunday drives, burning fossil fuels to tour the countryside and leave the city’s skyline, obscured in puce-yellow, lead-bearing smog, for tree-lined back roads and a picnic lunch. Sometimes over bridge, sometimes under the Hudson. Each crossing tested our bravery: fear of heights, of darkness. We had a song for the bridge which we sang while watching cables’ span. We were too small to see out the windows down to sailboats and barge traffic. The tunnel had no song. We hunched in the backseat, held hands, squeezed shut our eyes, expecting to drown. On the curved ascent in New Jersey my sister chose the house she wanted to live in—many-dormered, stone, with a round tower, it jutted over Weehawken. Once we’d learned to read, we realized it was the town library, which suited her imagined lifestyle. She would choose that even today, retire to a library and work part-time in a bookshop. She imagines I will join here there, perhaps I might.

Ann E. Michael, Prose poem, memoir

The other day, clouds began dripping from the sky. So did golden drops of sunshine and birds in mid-flight. It was like that Dali painting, only more than melting clocks. Condos, markets, and palm trees puddled in the streets. Ditto with the Hollywood sign and Angelyne’s pink Corvette. Drip by drip, drop by drop, I collected up all the slippity slops of my city into nearby buckets. My city was deconstructing quicker than I could reconstruct it. I worked faster; tried putting Echo Park back where Echo Park belonged, Venice where Venice belonged. I worked long into the night, determined to get my city back to the way it looked in my mind.

Rich Ferguson, Dali, California

I’m just back from a few days in Spain with my family.  I felt bad about flying, even though I haven’t flown since I went to Portugal in 2015.  I will try not to fly again for at least a year, maybe longer.  I haven’t signed up for the #flightfree2020 pledge but I am thinking about it.  Generally I’m thinking more and more about climate change and trying to take steps to make my own small contributions.   As Greta Thunberg says “No One is Too Small to Make a Difference.

A turning point, for me, was attending the Ginkgo Prize readings last year at Poetry in Aldeburgh, followed by increased news coverage of our planet’s climate crisis, actions by Greta Thunberg, the Magma‘s Climate Change Issue and Carol Ann Duffy’s selection of poems for our vanishing insect world. Yes, all these small actions have impacted on me.

But apart from the guilt about flying, it was lovely to be with my husband, Andrew, and our two children who are now 20 and 18.  We are rarely together any more.  Our daughter is going into her final year at university this autumn and our son is starting in September.  We will be empty nesters.

I took the latest issue of Under the Radar magazine with me and found it an ideal poolside companion.  The magazine has had a makeover and it’s looking splendid.

Josephine Corcoran, Mid-September Notes

I also read three wonderful poetry collections this month. The first was Deborah L. Davitt’s The Gates of Never, a beautifully accessible collection of poetry that explores and blends history, mythology, and magic with science and science fiction. These poems morph between being moving, irreverent, and erotic — a great collection of work. (I interviewed Davitt for the New Books in Poetry podcast, which I’ll be able to share soon.)

little ditch by Melissa Eleftherion and The Dragonfly and Other Songs of Mourning by Michelle Scalise are two stunning poetry chapbooks. little ditch looks at the intersections between the body and the natural world in order to examine issues surrounding sexual abuse, rape culture, and internalized misogyny. Dragonfly is a beautiful exploration of the horrors of mourning and childhood abuse.

Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: August 2019

Further to last week’s post in which I mentioned about intending to record a poem for the Belfast Poetry Jukebox, I did indeed record one of my poems. I found the quietest time to make the recording was at midnight and the quietest place was in my walk-in wardrobe with its door closed. The street I live on is perpetually busy so around midnight is the point at which there can be 5 minutes of silence without a car or van driving past.

Then my parents visited this weekend and I asked them to set my combi boiler to do heat as well as hot water. In doing so I scuppered any chance of making a recording with as-close-to-silent level of background noise as possible. Downstairs the freezer has a perpetual hum. Upstairs the combi boiler constantly hums. There is nowhere I can record where one of those hums does not appear on the recording. Applying a noise reduction filter works to a degree, but tends to deaden the vibrancy of the sound.

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky,
and lost among the subway crowds I try to catch your eye.
(from Stories of the Street by Leonard Cohen on AZ Lyrics)

So I’m going to try taking my recording out onto the street at midnight! I’ll be away from the humming and, if I don’t read too loudly, I shouldn’t wake the neighbours! Of course, Sod’s law says it’ll be raining so that’d scupper a silent background noise, but maybe the circumstances will come together :)

Giles L. Turnbull, Poetry of the street

“Some beetle trilling its midnight utterance.” 

Beetle song opens Denise Levertov’s “Continuum,” a poem of late-summer return.  Returns can be precarious transitions…maybe you’re like me, having come back home with a certain euphoria, having recalibrated by quieting the melancholy news junkie part of self.  I’d been lucky enough to overhear in my own voice too much cynicism and slid off that lid.  In doing so, I unleashed a new creative flow.

Levertov continues:
I recall how each year/returning from voyages, flights/over sundown snowpeaks/cities crouched over darkening lakes/hamlets of wood and smoke, I feel…

Even the feeling part is confusing.  Does your whole self come back?  Does part of self get shut down amidst the weight of “reality?”  Is the conversation with self still audible? 

Using a September metaphor, strands of our reality seem to swing like hammacks strung between tall trees. One loose strand is the reality TV show of Donald Trump trying to steer weather according to his whims. Serena Williams as falling hero. There is real suffering in the catastrophe of the Bahamas which demands an open heart.  

How can we hold values of openness and maintain the pole of poetic value?  It’s a tricky challenge that requires ongoing practice and community involvements. I’d also posit querying and challenging the self — but don’t take my example of insomnia, with long sessions of inter-self conversation.

Jill Pearlman, Continuum

See how he keeps
pointing at things,
they say.

See how things
keep pointing back,
he responds.

It is not
enough to see,
he says.

We must also
be seen
to understand.

Tom Montag, SEEING
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 33

Poetry Blogging Network

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 saw an unusually small number of new posts in the Poetry Bloggers category of my Feedly, which I attribute to the end of summer vacation season and the already or imminent beginning of the academic year, with all the time commitments and stressors that implies. (Stress was, in fact, one of the themes in the poetry blogs.) That despite the fact that I’ve added two more blogs to my subscriptions—including Rich Ferguson’s, which I’ve quoted below—bringing the total to 126.

That got me thinking about which bloggers post most often, and whether they have anything in common. And I think they do. At least among the bloggers I follow, the ones who blog the most dependably, week after week or even day after day, are those who don’t limit themselves to writing about just poetry and the writing life, but who post about anything and everything… which makes me happy, because Via Negativa started out as just that sort of miscellaneous blog, too, and I think that the push to specialize is sometimes unfortunate. Though these days, I rarely post anything but erasure poems and these weekly round-ups. Which feels like enough. Better to save my brain farts for social media, humbled by the high quality of social commentary and essays from other poets in my feed.

It’s a bad idea to get into gardening if one happens to be someone who requires complete control of things. Nature’s behavior, it turns out, manages seldom to be controllable by human beings. One reason I enjoy gardening is the chance to keep trying a new approach, a new variety, a new method; if I cannot control the environment, I may at least find an adaptation that works for awhile.

Ann E. Michael, Agency

I am sitting on the ground weeding our tomato plants. I gratefully take refuge in useful tasks like gardening and cooking. Busy hands almost always un-busy my mind. But that’s not working for me right now.

Instead I’m thinking about several editing projects nearly due. I also need to plan a class, complete a volunteer training program, deal with a health insurance hassle, and prepare because we have nine people coming over for a meal tomorrow. Mental fuss is erasing me from the garden.

I take a deep breath, choosing to put myself right back where I am. That works. I hear birdsong, hear the plop of a frog in the pond. Soon I’m complimenting our plants on their sturdy stems and reveling in the breeze.

I learned the word eustress while researching my first book.  The term was created by adding the Greek prefix “eu” — meaning “good, healthy” to the word “stress,” It’s defined as a positive stress response, often generated by a demanding but worthwhile effort. Stress is inherent in growth-producing situations. We stress our bodies to reach greater levels of physical ability, breaking down muscle to build it stronger. We tear down old limitations when challenging ourselves to something hard for us like taking on a public speaking role, mastering a new job, or asserting ourselves in a tough situation. Stressors like these, even if we haven’t exactly welcomed them, help to strengthen us.

Laura Grace Weldon, Thank Eustress

Lots of stress on this bucket of bolts lately–family, health, and writing-related–but I’m tickled to report that my first poetry comic has been published by the gorgeously-redesigned Split Lip Magazine. My spouse Chris Gavaler and I created it a couple of years ago; he made the images and I wrote the words, although there was some cross-influence in revision, more or less as we’ve cross-influenced each other in life (“Go for it!”/ “Don’t wear that!”). To me, this comic is about a pretty-long-running partnership from a midlife perspective, very much inflected by the self-reassessment that happens when your kids grow up and move on (my daughter graduated in May and just returned home after a summer gig, and my son starts college in about 10 days). We’ve changed so much since we were undergrads together, and I love the way the images capture our disintegrations and haphazard rebuildings from odd materials at hand, bringing forward the idea of resourcefulness under constraint. Chris built these robots rather laboriously in an outmoded program; my constraints were spatial, meaning seven lines per poem, with the line-length controlled by panel-width and the letters of Chris’ homemade font. It’s so gratifying when you make something weird in a weird way, for fun, and other people like it enough to publish it!

Not much other luck in that department lately. Rejections are flying; I haven’t had a poem accepted in months. As I’ve said here before, though, I actually feel more philosophical about that since beginning to work on Shenandoah. You just have to keep trying, revising and targeting your work as intelligently as you can, but knowing there’s a heap of luck involved. Submission rates are very high, and chances of hitting the right reader in the right way at the right moment are low, so it’s a numbers game. I did some poetry revision/ submission work this week, though, and I’ll keep at it until the semester swallows me whole–I’ve also got essays to tweak and keep in circulation plus a difficult grant application to finish. The meetings and new-tech-training-sessions, all that late summer jazz, starts tomorrow.

Lesley Wheeler, Rusting robot poetics

As I was reading the e-mail, I thought about the familiarity of this language of rejection.  The language is so similar to the rejection letters I used to get back when I did my most aggressive job hunting.  It’s a version of “it’s not you, it’s me” that I first heard about in a Seinfeld episode.

In a way, the news is good.  My manuscript does stand out in a field of 400 manuscripts from poets who have yet to publish a first book.  I haven’t always gotten that feedback from earlier submission years.

Let me not spend too much time thinking about how many earlier submission years there have been.  Let me keep going with my plan:  to make judicious submissions, to contests where I see a judge who resonates with me or to contests where I’m supporting a press I believe in or to contests which give me a book in exchange for my submission.

Let me keep working on other projects too.  I’ve put together a new chapbook this year, and that process has made me feel hopeful too.

Next week, I want to put a plan into place that will lead to me work on my apocalyptic novel on a more regular basis.  I need to create that plan.

The weeks are zooming by.  I am astonished at how long I’ve been at this writing and publishing process.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejection Evening

How easy to live
in this reconfigured world:
an exchange of horizons,
alternative sunsets, a hill,
or no hill at all.

But easy too the swift
self-gathering into
one’s own shadow
on street, in hallway,
or on that same staircase
when tears reflux
without warning
and there is only
what was.

Dick Jones, JOY

A man might lose himself inside the blankets of his own life, go to sleep, and wake up one day as a dog, or a giraffe, or a wren. “What was my name, before, when I was a man? Or did I just dream it all?” He might think that as he moves through this new life, and the morning sunlight filters down through the green summer leaves of the trees.

James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘A man might lose himself…’

My head is, as expected filled with ideas after my Field Museum visit on Thursday, and I got started that very evening drafting bits of something that I think will be promising.   I initially went in with a vague idea of writing about extinction and dinosaurs and the earth over time, but of course got distracted by the birds (it happens) and then the maze of mammals, which had me mulling over taxidermy techniques and the work of diorama artists and the whole points of museums, the houses of the muses, and preservation, particularly when it comes to extinction (even our own).  And then of course, from my last visit, Audubon and his giant book.   And somehow, a kernel of sense-making came into being and I think I might have something. 

Kristy Bowen, extinction event

How freeing to discover the curious way French acquaintances and friends are judging the US.  Fortunately Trump is not sucking out all the oxygen.  While they despise him, they’re perplexed by this passing nightmare and don’t hold it against us.  They’re too sophisticated to think people are defined by government, or a job, or whatever.

The residual image I heard evoked is the North American sky.  Our big sky, our wide horizon that stretches imaginatively from one invisible pole to another.  The immensity of that sky, the cut-freeness makes them sigh. It signifies space apart from set patterns and expectations, from deep tradition.  These same people are staunchly defending their core French values – egalité, civility and decency. The sigh is about regimen, tradition, shuffling to the same beat. Americans might find it charming that everyone rushes to lunch at midi, less charming to sit in six hours of traffic crossing from Spain to France because everyone takes the same vacation schedule. That big open permissable sky is the one they talk of reverently and breathe deeply.

Baudelaire wrote a wonderful poem in which a stranger is asked what he loves: country, God, family.  He denies it all.  The only thing he loves are clouds.  That can’t take that away from him.   The stranger brings valuable vision and truth. As an antidote to the stifling weight of the US now, I’m bringing along the stranger’s vision of big clouds and big sky. 

Jill Pearlman, Cut Me Loose

How can we not value the gumbo of us, the jambalaya we are, chunky and piquant? Our language itself is a mongrel; or no, a palanquin, a vessel, a ship, a hammock. I can barely talk to you without calling down the whole array of immigrants to our shores, plus the people who were here when they got here.

Yes, English is a difficult language to rhyme in, with all its variety of endings, which is why poetry in English has long gone in different directions from the old endy-rhymey road, and American poetry has been perhaps particularly jittery and digressive, if also ahistorical and culture-centric. But also wide-armed and ribald and jazz-bit.

The diverse rabble of us elbow-jab and glare, and sigh together, and laugh, which itself is one language. Maybe laughter and music are the two things that will save this species from itself.

Marilyn McCabe, You’re the Salt in My Stew; or, Viva la difference; or, Diversity

Endless moments filled with meditators & road ragers. Dog walkers & streetwalkers. Depressives & dreamers. Picturesque bungalows & fruit vendors beneath rainbow umbrellas. Post-apocalyptic homeless encampments & Venice Beach mystics with eyes like cracked crystal balls. Days of gloriously rapped rhythms rising from low-riders. Money-grubbing landlords handing out eviction notices like they’re Mardi Gras beads. My city’s rhythm: a drumbeat in the skull. Pounding, pounding. Some driven to dance, while others barely manage to move forward.

Rich Ferguson, L.A.’s Tranquil & Turbulent Days

So the one thing I didn’t stop doing when I thought I was dying was writing. I’d finished the first draft of my sixth manuscript in six months. And I really didn’t stop doing most things – although  it was certainly interrupted by a lot of unpleasant tests – but I signed the mortgage on my house, I brought home my re-homed delinquent kitten Sylvia (who to this day I call my “cancer-curing” kitty.) Here she is posing with all my poetry books to date.

Then I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I spent months learning to talk, walk, and swallow normally(ish) again after the damage the brain stem had sustained. This changed the book – it began to contain this disorientation, that I may have survived my cancer diagnosis, but now I had a different, incurable, debilitating disease. I lost words, often. But I still wrote. The book also contains documentation of the sheer weirdness of the weather and solar events of the past few years. It seemed like my body and the weather were misfiring at the same time.

Then, after Trump’s election, I felt an increased urgency – probably like many poets – to write poetry that was more political. For me, that meant writing about women that were survivors – and also women that had been oppressed, suppressed, raped, and literally burned at the stake – and what our future as women might look like. If women are going to survive the violence of men, we must change.  As I write this, by the way, the news is reporting a Bellingham college student murdered, shot by an ex-boyfriend in her home.  I continue to write poems. Writing under the stress of health issues, of the oppressive political climate, under the stress of  in the hopes that maybe these poems will make things better for others.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Plath Poetry Project Feature Today, Facebook Memories from Three Years Ago, Publishing and Writing Under Stress

I’m honored to have my poem “Other Ways” published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry for their Poets Resist feature. This poem, newly written, is my response to the mass shootings we’ve experienced here in the U.S. It was one of those poems I had to write to process my own disappointment and grief. I’m incredibly thankful to Glass Poets Resist editor Michael Carter for his quick response and acceptance and to friend and fellow poet Anthony Frame, whom I truly admire for his own poetry as well as his gracious support of poetry in general. I’m grateful for all the great work Glass and their staff do for their contributors and for the literary community. If you are not a frequent visitor to their site, I highly recommend you spend some of your screen time in their pages.

Glass’ Poets Resist is a current events poetry series, with guest editors, published by Glass Poetry Press as part of Glass: A Journal of Poetry. They are “looking for poems that reflect the immediacy of the world around us. . . . poems that are targeted, and unafraid. . . . poems that actively resist by condemning horrors and by celebrating collective strength. Engage. Write. Resist.”

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Other Ways” published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry–Poets Resist

Form in poetry is more than just meter, stanza, and line break. It’s also a way of thinking. It’s the direction, pace and energy of the poem, and one of the main ways a writer can direct the reader’s experience. And, at least in my way of understanding, it’s also not something that’s simply visible on the page or scannable across a line. Shape and structure is metaphysical as much as it’s physical.

And this all is a way into my idea that all poems are triangles. Poems are kinds of vessels of energy. You cram a bunch of things in one end (images, concepts, sounds, ideas) and something else emerges from the other. Like a triangle, poems have a wide end and a narrow end. From a content point of view, a poem can start with a small point (a particular image, moment, or idea) and then expand, the way an ant hill expands as it gets to the base. Or the poem can start out large, with a wide idea that that covers everything, then narrows to make a particularly sharp point at the end. Think of that as a large funnel you dump the poem into, and it comes out a small opening at the bottom.

Grant Clauser, Is a Poem a Sandwich if you Cut It Into Triangles?

The most recent poem I’m working on (or let’s be honest, thinking about working on but not actually writing) is about the knee. There are so many problems with everyone’s knees all of the time, sometimes to the point that they need to be replaced. The knees carry the largest burden of the body and they get injured easily and they’re generally poor abused bastards. The knees never get credit for their incredible feats of endurance, but they get a lot of blame for poor biomechanics and imbalances that aren’t their fault. In my ongoing efforts to put off the actual writing of this poem, I typed “the knee” into Duck Duck Go and was beset with numerous images, not of actual knees, but of knee-high boots. Some actual knees, but mostly knee-high boots. Beautiful, sassy boots. It made me really miss boots. I’m looking forward to the fall when I will be able to wear them again and will have an excuse to stock up on some nice suede lace-ups. This paragraph took an odd ADD-ish turn. My apologies.

Kristen McHenry, The Not-Yet Poem, Bullying the Body, Mini Book Review

Green air
beneath
empty sky.

August’s
promise
is not kept.

Shadows
leap at
silence.

Tom Montag, GREEN AIR

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 32

Poetry Blogging Network

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, poetry bloggers seemed to be channeling the general unease of the political moment and the restlessness of the soon-to-change season. There was an elegiac mood to many of the posts I read, but there were still flashes of humor, and as Sarah Stockton observed, creativity is a potent antidote to futility.

First was this from 1984: “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” In 1984 not only is history rewritten daily but language itself is being narrowed, and as language narrowed, thought itself stultified. Thinking and language is, for us, our wag-tongued species, inextricable. “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

I have always loved words, even as a little tiny kid would leaf through a book on the family shelf called How to Build a Better Vocabulary. Words were as magic as magic, and as delightful in the mouth as chocolate chip cookies, as cake with candles. And I can almost remember a visceral sense of my mind expanding as I encountered new words that struck me, words that opening up new worlds, new ways of thinking.

I just read Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, a wonderful book about books and words, specifically words of regional dialect that describe things specific to regional experiences: how the fog creeps across the moor, the way certain rock formations sparkle, how the regular passage of a small animal through a hedge creates a hole. Worlds and worlds, words and worlds.

Marilyn McCabe, You Can Leave Your Hat On; or, Rethinking Writing and Editing

Shelter is always a two-way street, turning on the hinge of hospitality/prison.  In the ancient world, Greek hospitality served the purpose of putting the wandering stranger under control.  So it was in 1939 when the Spanish and Catalan Republicans fled Franco’s conquest and thought they were coming to a friendly country.  But the country wasn’t friendly.  It treated the wretched refugees whose numbers and socialist ideas were threatening, with lack of food, water and medical help.  So it was with Jews who thought they were fleeing from Germany and other countries to a safe zone, “free France.”  They were housed in Rivesaltes barracks “safely” until Vichy cut a deal with Nazis to keep their territory soldier free and delivered 2,251 Jews to Drancy and eventually to Auschwitz.  (Another half were helped to escape.)  Gypsies were brought from the north of France and detained as undesirables.  

The list goes on with successions of needs of a state’s questionable history – Algerians who fought for the French became hot potatoes, wanted nowhere, not thanked for their help, housed here until society repositioned them.

Rivesaltes also rings bells as the site of the Perignan airport – a small, Lego-like structure which is the windiest airport in France.  Riversaltes also the name of a wonderful sweet wine.  Oh, the multivalence of words!  Shelter, internment camps, hospitality centers, and all these hedgings speak of the uncertainties, fissures and failures of society to rest, humanely, with the familiar other. 

Jill Pearlman, Refugees: The Tragedy of Frenemies

“Admit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country, that we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelganger in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal.” (page 108)

“This land was Mexican once/ was Indian always/ and is./ And will be again.” (page 113)

“So this is what happened to someone living at the border like me: My ancestors have always lived with the land here in Texas. My indigenous ancestors go back twenty to twenty-five thousand years and that is how old I am in this country. My Spanish ancestors have been in this land since the European takeover which pulled migration from Spain to Mexico. Texas was part of a Mexican state called Tamaulipas. And Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of California and Colorado, were part of the northern section of Mexico. It was almost half of Mexico that the U.S. cheated Mexico out of when they bought it by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. By doing so they created the borderlands.” (Interview, page 274)

The above quotes are from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition. The book was first published in 1987; I encountered it a couple of years later, in graduate school, although I can no longer find my first copy. I’ve been meaning to reread it, because I’m advising a senior who wants to make it part of her thesis next year.

This was definitely the week. I’m sickened by U.S. gun violence and epidemic hatred without having a new or insightful word to say about them, but it felt just slightly sanity-restoring to spend time with Anzaldúa. After all, how can there be a “Hispanic invasion,” as the Texas shooter alleged, in a place to which the U.S. government has only the most recent and most dubious of many claims? Aside from the book’s reminders about history, it’s also big-hearted and wise and full of insights about language, culture, queerness, trauma, depression, artistic process, sacredness, and dreams. Plus, I loved remembering my twenty-something astonishment at its hybrid of prose and poetry: holy shit, you can do that?!

Lesley Wheeler, A slightly terrifying amount of reading

If you’re ever stuck for something to do with a damaged book, try cutting up some of the text and interspersing it with a couple of other sources to create a found poem. [Click through to view an example. —Dave]

Julie Mellor, The Observer’s Book of Birds

I’m re-sharing some of my collage poems from the recent past.  These were written for an Instagram competition (#aquietpassionpoetrycompetition) run by The Poetry School and Soda Pictures (‘A Quiet Passion’ was their biopic of Emily Dickinson released two years ago).  The judges stated that they wanted to see “poems which use the concentrated visual qualities of an Instagram post to deliver a punch as strong as an Emily Dickinson line.” [Click through to view the collages.]

Josephine Corcoran, Collage Poems

Years ago, my aunt gave me a stack of cool  victorian cabinet cards she’d been sent from relatives in Nebraska, where she and my mother were born. There were some young pics of my grandmother in the 20’s and 30’s among them, but most of the people were unrecognizeable and unknown..maybe a trace of resemblance at most–a set of brow, a curve of lip that echoed through my great grandmother, but little else.  She gave them to be to do “something artsy”  and they eventually, without their actual heads, became he unusual creatures pieces. At first,  I debated collageing on the photos themselves.  On one hand, it would ruin them. On the other, no one much cared, least of all my aunt..The originals, tucked somewhere in my studio even now, will one day be inconsequential to whoever stumbles across them. I wound up reproducing them on cardstock and then working with them.  But it scarce matters. Ultimately, they’ll ed up in the trash sooner or later.

The strange thing about being childless I suppose is knowing that my legacy, whatever that is, dies with me. Some day, I’ll grow old and die and people, probably strangers, will throw the bulk of my things in the trash –the poems, the artwork, the random bits of my life I’ve collected.  This makes me hurt. it makes me heavy in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. My dad & sister were pretty quick about dealing with my mother’s things after her death–alarmingly so, but it was probably necessary mental health-wise–the closet full of clothes, her jewelry box, a linen closet stuffed with half  burnt candles and semi-filled bottles of lotion.  Her presence is still very real in the house–the art she chose for the walls, the furniture, the photos, her dishes. .  But at the same time, she is also more absent–and in a way that has nothing to do with her physically missing.  But who can hold on to ghosts?  Or maybe ghosts are all we have?

Kristy Bowen, detritus

Not sure what I fear more:
that your house will feel the same
or that it won’t. The wheelchair
and hospital machines will be gone, but

the books in the library will still
be arranged by color, abstract
modern art constructed from their spines’
gradations. The heavy crystal bowls

of roasted nuts for cocktail hour
will still adorn the living room
where you used to hold court with
vodka soda and lime in hand, where

you let us take a family photo
that last Shabbat. I was shocked
you let us bring out the camera:
your hair was wild, unwashed.

You smiled as though nothing hurt.

Rachel Barenblat, Return

I said that her poem ‘unnerves and confronts’; I think I should qualify that. It’s not confrontational, it doesn’t insist. What Ann Gray does is to look unwaveringingly at her own trauma. There are three key verbs. I wanted. I was afraid. I watched. While she stands by the body of the man she loves the morgue attendant watched me through the window. He’s separated from the human story by glass, and by his bureaucratic routine that demands she uses the official, distancing, dehumanising formula
“He said take as long as you want, but he watched me
through a window and everything I wanted seemed
undignified and hopeless”
Meanwhile, what she ‘wants’ is to touch, and to touch passionately, but she’s afraid to hurt this man who can never hurt again. He’s gone, essentially, and separate. It makes me think of the agony of the dead miner’s wife in Lawrence’s ‘Odor of crysanthemums’. It’s this absolute honesty that told me I want to read and hear more and more of Ann Gray. So we will.

John Foggin, Poetry that really matters: Ann Gray (Part Two)

As writers, we are not limited by the boxes we fit into or those we don’t. The pot of opportunities does not have to be finite if we’re willing to push ourselves and try new things. More jobs can be created, more books published, more awards, grants and residencies offered if a greater interest is shown by poets, poetry readers and book buyers. If you don’t exactly fit the brief, be brave and try anyway. Always follow the guidelines and ask if you have any uncertainties, of course, but sometimes you might be the unexpected that gets noticed because you’ve approached things a little differently.

Gerry Stewart, Taking Yourself Out of the Box

Don’t build. Just find intact
(albeit cracked and leaky)
a house that’s there already,

one that’s rooted
firm and knows its skin;
that’s free of pain

and ghosts, with trees
and half-forgotten gardens,
mossy cold-frames, twisted

vines and sudden sundials
in the long, uncultivated
grass. Then let us blow

like puffball parachutes
in a random wind,
the achene fruit

that falls and germinates
when and where
it will.

Dick Jones, How to Build a School

You will study the maps,
make a plan, pack
the right clothes, only to find
yourself in a different country,
the one you didn’t know
you needed to explore.

It is here you find the answers
to the unspoken questions.
Here is the journal written
in a language you can’t understand.
Here the box of letters
written between two souls
you do not know.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Publications

I took a bunch of pictures of roses at twilight with a flash, and got really interesting results. The best nature picture we got was this great blue heron at the penguin exhibit, and we got a flyby by a bald eagle on the way in to the zoo, too. There’s also a patch of wildflowers inside the raptor exhibit. We also had a close encounter in our own driveway with a great horned owl, which hooted at us with much urgency from a neighbor’s pine tree! Too bad no picture of that guy – it was definitely too dark by then. The garden smelled amazing at night – something beyond the roses must be a night-bloomer. The rose garden, usually almost done by August, was still in full bloom thanks to the little bits of rain we’ve gotten this August, in between the wildfire smoke and blazing hot days we’ve been having. Like the garden, in August, I’m definitely better at nighttime, out of the sun. Glenn always jokes that I’m really a vampire (I am allergic to garlic, the sun, and hate mornings) but there is something – biorhythms? poetness? – I am always at my best after dark.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry News in August, Fiolet & Wing and Poetry Prompts Contributor Copies, and Night Zoos, Birds, and Roses

Night. A waxing half-moon over the Sacramento Valley. 2 AM, nearly moonset. Somewhere close by, a great-horned owl announces its territory. Perhaps it is declaring its life, its joy, as in, “I’m here. I’m alive.” At my desk by the open window, I wait a moment, and the owl calls again. “I’m here, too, my friend.” I say it aloud in the dark room, but the words only fall to the floor and lay there like frightened puppies.

James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Night. A waxing half-moon over…’

Wagging is an art.
Dogs do it well with their tails.
You don’t have a tail, one would hope,
so a finger must do.
Wagging with any other
body part will get you in trouble.

And last but not least, what’s at stake.
Who gets the prize, takes
home the spoils, writes the poem.
Who’s crowned and whose
head must fall. Hint:
too often it’s one and the same.
In other words, you.

Romana Iorga, Finger-wagging

When I was younger I thought writer’s block was a lack of will, a kind of cowardice even, certainly my fault in some character defect kind of way. Now, after some long years of learning not to judge myself so hard, I experience writer’s block as something else- the body, mind and spirit telling me there is not enough, right now, to give. Just that. No judgement, no blame, just self-compassion, although there is still plenty of sorrow at times, and a kind of existential loneliness.

There’s another kind of writer’s block though: adversary-silencing.  This has its own pain scale, from Enthusiasm to Despair. Sometimes it seems the world is conspiring to silence the voices of compassion and kindness. The voices of vision and hope, of calls for reparation and change.  It’s shaming and discouraging and the most toxic of all, it can contribute to our own internal silencing. On days when I’m ok physically, I can still stop myself from writing a poem, or an essay, because who am I to say anything at all, or  it has all been said, or what I write will be wrong or worse of all, no one will ever care whether I write or not.  This is a mindset brought on by the assaultive effects of bullying, gaslighting, and fear. And the outcome is soul hurt and mental pain.

Yet, because at this point in my life I finally have the time, the means, and the luxury to spend my energy on more than the basics of survival (as so, so many do not), I must evolve beyond the comforts of privilege I might prefer to cling to. Push past the silencing effects of mental, physical, and emotional violence happening on so many levels in our country, in our world. Sometimes that means being justly and painfully held accountable for what I believe and say (thank you especially, wise millennials, for teaching me so much). We (and by we, I mostly mean white people) are rightly  being called to change at this crucial time in our human community. We all suffer when we let complacency or even despair, kill our gift of creativity.

Creativity, when practiced with a good heart, is a potent catalyst for change, no matter who is doing the work, or who the gatekeepers are, or who is sanctifying it. Creativity is a potent antidote to futility. That is something we can bring to the world, that is how we keep going, and that is how we can find a way to persevere and even to laugh sometimes in the face of the reductive absurdity of white privilege and fear; ours, or someone else’s. Creativity, at its best, seeks to alleviate suffering and to free all of us. So at least for today, I will take a minute to locate myself on the pain scale, even if I am so far up the scale that all I can do is think about what I might write if I had the energy to do so. Or perhaps I can’t think at all, but can just be a part of all creation. That’s ok too. I will at least try to remember to bow with respect to my own and the world’s beautiful and powerful resilience, and go on.

Sarah Stockton, The Energy Scale of Creativity

The blessing
of this poem,
he said, is

when it’s done
it stays done.

Tom Montag, THE BLESSING
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 31

Poetry Blogging Network

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, lamentation and celebration—like every week, I suppose, only thrown into sharper relief by current events. But mostly the joy of reading and writing poems.

America is now a map of lies, a map of bigotry. Perhaps it always was, and I just didn’t see it. It is easier to buy a gun than it is to find a safe place to live. If you hate the right people, the bulk of the population will love you; your hatred will be admirable, like an achievement. If you hate the right people, the brown ones, the map of lies will unfold at your feet. At last you will have a place to go where hate is love, where servitude is equality. The collective hatred and bigotry will take on the shape of hot air balloon to lift the true believers up to their make-believe heaven.

James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘America is now a map of lies’

I’ve curated a new prayer for Tisha b’Av that interweaves quotes from Lamentations with quotes from migrants and refugees on the United States’ southern border today. In reading the prayer aloud, we put the words of refugees — parents separated from their children; children separated from their parents; human beings suffering in atrocious conditions — into our own mouths. May hearing ourselves speak these words galvanize us to action.

Here’s a taste:

They told me, ‘you don’t have any rights here,
and you don’t have any rights to stay with your son.’

I died at that moment. They ripped my heart out of me.
For me, it would have been better if I had dropped dead.

For me, the world ended at that point.
How can a mother not have the right to be with her son?…

The prayer is online (and also available as a downloadable PDF) at Bayit‘s Builders Blog, and you can find it here: Lamentations (Then and Now).

Rachel Barenblat, A new prayer for Tisha b’Av

This poem [“Your Body” by Ann Gray] confronts and unnerves because, unlike the Victorians, we have removed ourselves from physical contact with the dead. Some of their customs persisted into the 1950s. As a child I was shocked when a classmate of mine in Primary School, Geoffrey Brooke, died of meningitis (none of us knew what that was; just that it was frightening, that it could visit any of us). More shocked when his mother invited us, his 8 and 9 year old classmates, to come and see him laid out in his coffin in the single downstairs room of their terrace house. When it came to it, I stayed outside. Some of my friends went in, and when they came out they would say nothing about it. Not then, and not later.

When my dad died, and years later, my mother, they were whisked away before I could see them. They vanished.

I wonder what I ever made of Sassoon’s line from The Dugout
You are too young to fall asleep forever;
And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.

It was just an idea, a notion. I think we too often persuade ourselves we understand. Unlike Hamlet, we are happy to conflate sleep and death and leave it there.

Which is why I need poems like Your body. One of my sons committed suicide by jumping from a high rise block of flats. The police told me that I wouldn’t want to see him, and I was too stunned to argue. I have no idea who identified him, or how, but it wasn’t his mother, or me. We couldn’t have a funeral until a long-postponed inquest was over, and his body was released. In his coffin, only his face was visible. His face was like the death mask of a beautiful stranger. It was unmarked, and he really did seem unnaturally asleep. I kissed him, but he didn’t wake.

Years later I had to go with my partner to identify the body of her ex-husband in the morgue in Wakefield. It was so bizarre, so unreal, like a piece of theatrical still life. I thought I would never find words for it and maybe I shouldn’t try. Now I know I was wrong in that, as in so many things, because of this lovely, tender, terrible, astonishing poem. 

John Foggin, Poetry that really matters: Ann Gray [Part One]

We text. She sends me Poké gifts,
and I say thank you. She says for what, and I flash
my phone so she can see we’re both in the same app.
We roll our eyes at the same time. We drip. We drift.
We cheered the drag queens, hot sun on glitter and sequins.
Drag queens still dance, music pounds, but us? We are done.

PF Anderson, After Performing at Pride

There are so many magazine and literary journals out there, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and to not know where to start. For me, Twitter is a great place to discover new poems, poets, and journals I want to follow. Here are a few poems I read recently and loved. And yes, I discovered all of them via Twitter.

“People call her Bride of. The Bride of. Of this broken man
who made a broken man from parts of broken men.”
~ from The Bride of Frankenstein Considers Her Options by Meghan Phillips, published by Strange Horizons

” —& so i am learning to call unpleasant histories by their real names—such as what i demand of love—and that i used to be a boy—to think that if this body was a prison what happened when i escaped”
~ from If the Body is a Prison-House Where is the Warden I Have Some Complaints About the Plumbing by Danielle Rose, published by Third Point Press

” In other news, this is the top. Weep for what little things
would make them jealous. I publish a poem”
~ from In Which I Am Accused of Sleeping My Way to the Top by Jill McDonough, published by The Threepenny Review

Courtney LeBlanc, A Few More Poems I Love

Away from my normal routines for ten days in Portugal, I looked at Twitter occasionally and kept seeing references to “that essay” by poet Bob Hicok. I’ll scout it out later, I thought, first busy with the MLA International Symposium in Lisbon; then laid up in my hotel room with a stomach bug; and finally traipsing around Porto, making up for lost time and calories. I arrived home late this Thursday, and catching up with other people and tasks seemed more important. Scrolling through social media Saturday morning, though, I saw a smart set of questions Paisley Rekdal had posted in response to the piece, along with a link to the essay itself (which had been a little hard to find–people clearly don’t want to promote it). Okay, okay, FINE, I grumbled, brewed another pot of chai, and read it.

The essay isn’t good, no matter what you think of the argument. It belabors its point, which is basically that Hicok is “dying as a poet” (meaning, apparently, not attracting as many readers as he used to), and while it’s good, he concedes, that writers who are not “straight white men” like him are now getting attention, and he’s grateful to have had a good run, he’s sad to lose the limelight. If a writer-friend had told me this privately, over drinks, I would have felt embarrassed for him–listen to yourself, dude! Literature is not a zero-sum game, and nobody has taken your micro-celebrity away from you! I suppose it’s useful, though, that someone has voiced all this in print. I know other people think similarly: I’ve heard the asides, and seen the facial expressions, by white writers of various ages and genders, although whenever I’ve sensed a lament like this emerging in my company, I’ve either cut it short or walked away. […]

It is certainly true that while there are more presses and contests than ever before, there’s now a larger pool of people competing for them, as well as a real hunger from readers for stories and poems from less-familiar perspectives. I’m one of those readers, and I’m very glad publishing is more inclusive than it used to be–I hope the trend continues, and as poetry editor of Shenandoah, I try to help it along. Such richness benefits everyone who cares about literature. It’s also true that I’m striving, meanwhile, for my own foothold in the scene, and I get sad about the difficulty of that sometimes. What I keep coming back to: the only way to stay sane is to make sure your writing is urgent, well-crafted stuff, and to use whatever space and advantages you have to help others do good work, too, and feel some love for it. Then, whether or not you earn a lucky spot on the stage yourself one day, you’ll feel okay about how you’ve spent your hours.

Lesley Wheeler, Sharing space in poetry (“that essay”)

So, I posted a couple of observations on that Utne reader Bob Hicok essay on Facebook (if you are interested, you can read the threads here) and thought I might develop further here. This is not just to pile on to Bob’s racist/sexist/privilege issues but to discuss other issues his essay brings up. I think he’s missing a few larger issues in publishing, book sales, and mindset.

  • Bob has won two (!!) NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim, as well as a pretty cushy teaching gig, and has published ten books. I just, sorry, don’t feel like weeping for him because I (and most of my friends) have never had any of those things. Never been in Poetry or the New Yorker either. So, you know, he needs to check his privilege before he gets whine-y. Lots of poets have never been the flavor of the month, but Bob has had a lot of time in the sun. So it was an insensitive essay in more than one way.
  • My friend Kelli is always talking about “scarcity mentality” in poetry – the feeling that because someone else gets something, you get less. She points out that it is not true, even if it feels true, and not only that, it’s destructive. I wrote a little last week about poets cheering on other poets and how important that is. It definitely makes being the poetry world more rewarding. Helping others – by mentoring or reviewing or publishing – will increase your happiness, I guarantee. Everyone feels hurt when their book doesn’t sell or get reviewed or their book or grant gets rejected – but that hurt can be mitigated.
  • What Bob is lamenting – that his books sell less, that he gets fewer reviews – has nothing to do with poets of color, LGBTQ writers, or women getting more air time. It has to do with the landscape of publishing. The print book market is very fragmented, and I’d bet that most poets are selling fewer books and getting fewer reviews because there are so many books out there now. Gen Z have their own book buying tastes and habits – very different than his generation. Instagram poets, for instance. It’s not bad, just different, than it used to be. I’m sure, say, Billy Collins is still doing fine. Book publishing in general is changing. Book reviewing is in flux, too.
  • Also, it seems strange to talk about how all these troublesome non-white-male poets are taking up space when most of the prestige poetry presses and journals ARE STILL RUN BY WHITE MEN. I was trying to name the poetry presses run by women and people of color – can you help me? Are they the ones most poets want to be published by with, or get good distribution? (People have mentioned: University of Akron Press, Mayapple Press, Alice James Books, Sundress, Two Sylvias Press. as presses led by women..I’d love to hear more (especially presses run by people of color?)
  • Most tenure track teaching jobs are still given to men. In academia in general, women have much less chance of being offered tenure, and I’m sure poets of color and poets with disabilities could talk more about their experience with this. You’ve already lucked out if you’re an older poet with a tenured teaching job.
  • I don’t know about other reviewers, but there’s a reason I like to shine a spotlight when I do reviews of poets of color, women, LGBTQ poets, and poets with disabilities. In general, these poets are more vulnerable to prejudice, so I think it’s more important that their voices are heard above the crowd.
  • What am I missing? Anything else to add to the discussion?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Taking the Fall, A Few Thoughts on that Utne Poetry Essay, and Poetry Reviews, Sales, and Empowerment

Ammons’s poetry is a poetry of open-endedness, rather than of closed forms.  In line 121 [of “Corson’s Inlet’], he eschews the “easy victory” of traditional formal poetry (identified in the “narrow orders, limited tightness” of line 120), knowing that the deeper nature of the world is anything other than such “narrowness” of form might imply.

In some sense, poetry, of course, is inescapably form.  So Ammons admits in his conclusion to “Corson’s Inlet” that he has no choice but to try
     to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
     that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

This statement suggests that, at least in Ammons’ view, a new poem must also create poetry itself anew, that a poet cannot simply rely on the predictable patterns of form but must allow the poem to find its own form in response to nature and the changing world it grapples with.  Ammons asserts that that world is necessarily disordered and in a state of ongoing change and that, therefore, instead of trying to show one’s poetic mastery by imposing a predetermined form over it, the poet must listen to nature, must listen to language itself, and allow him- or herself to “go with the flow” of that flux: “I have perceived nothing completely” — a nor can one ever, for all is mediated by the particular dynamics of the mind.

It is interesting to compare this poem with another Ammons piece, which is overtly an ars poetica, being titled “Poetics” (pp. 26-27).  It does very similar things.  Where, in “Corson’s Inlet,” the poem runs “like a stream,” here it is “spiralling from a center” (line 3).  Ammons opens himself to “the shape / things will take to come forth in” (4-5), yet when they do, as the birch tree in lines 6-10, it is merely or even “totally its apparent self.”  The poem, for Ammons, is not only the shape of the poem as written down, “but the / uninterfering means on paper” (17-18) — and more important is that the poet be
     available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours. (20-24)

In other words, it is not about the individual poet, the supposedly autonomous individual artist (as “great,” or what have you) but in fact more about forgetting the self, the ego, and opening up outwardly to — let’s call it the “cosmos,” at the risk of sounding over-serious and for lack of a less grandiose word.

Mike Begnal, On A. R. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet” & “Poetics”

The last few months, I’ve been working on a more meta project, spawned by some less coherent thoughts I had when I was working on my actual artist statement. How to convey a whole world–a whole aesthetic framework, without delving into something a little more creative when it feels like you are supposed to be more expository somehow.  What wound up resulting was a lot of fun.  How to write about the endeavor of writing poems (and I use “poetry” loosely since most of my stuff takes the form of prose lately).

The subject matter of the pieces take a lot from my experience writing as a woman, of subject matter, of the academic-poetry complex.  Of desire and sex and writing.  The closest thing I can compare it to in my past writings would be this poem, which opens major characters in minor films, which touches on some of the similar ideas, but in a less specific way. Some of the artist statement pieces are coming soon in an issue of TYPEHOUSE, so watch for that to get a sampling. 

Kristy Bowen, artist statements

So I have some news. It’s kind of stellar and I just can’t stop smiling. It’s been almost a week and the effect hasn’t worn off yet. I am beyond thrilled and mega excited to announce that my book, GALLERY of POSTCARDS and MAPS: NEW and SELECTED, will be published by Salmon Press of Ireland (with US distribution). This makes this getting older thing not so hard to take. 

Over the past 20 years I’ve published four books of poetry starting with THE CARTOGRAPHER’S TONGUE / POEMS of the WORLD which focused on my time in the Peace Corps in West Africa, my Fulbright in South Africa and the death of both my parents. This book won both the PEN USA Award and the Peace Corps Writers Award. Next was CURES INCLUDE TRAVEL and then THE ALCHEMIST’s KITCHEN and CLOUD PHARMACY, all published by White Pine Press. You might notice they all seem to be on sale at the moment!

There are so many people to thank for helping make this book and its publication a reality (well, it’s not going to be out for a little while) but let me start with the main inspirations: Ilya Kaminsky, Geraldine Mills, Sandy Yaonne, and of course, the amazing Jessie Lendennie.  Sometimes the stars really do align. Or as my dear friend, the poet Kelli Russell Agodon says, maybe it was the chipmunk that came out of nowhere to stare at me for a good long while on a summer morning.

Susan Rich, Announcing a Forthcoming Miracle from Salmon Press: GALLERY OF POSTCARDS AND MAPS

One of my favorite poems in the collection – since I also mine pop culture for images and inspiration – is “Mission Dolores.” That’s the church in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart follows Kim Novak when she leaves flowers on the grave of Carlotta Valdez. The poem not only summons up Hitchcock and Novak, but Dusty Springfield, Pet Shop Boys and Bridget Bardot, while noting that the 80s have become reminiscent of the 50s for the fearmongering and dread. Let’s not forget that it was nearly a  decade into the plague before President Reagan even uttered the word AIDS.

The mythology derived from the symbol might be an illusion
but not the reality in the fact that Thank God and thank you
General Motors Cadillacs are getting bigger again
so that this dreadful era becomes reminiscent of the ’50s
as if escape were indeed possible
as I walk by the Mission’s garden and all at once a stiff breeze
affects even my pompadour stiff with pomade 
and from out of the fog a long black Cadillac passes me by
and I needn’t wonder if inside the body is still alive. 

That poem was written on my birthday, Sept. 17, in 1989. It’s just another incident of synchronicity and a sign from the other side as I begin compiling my next manuscript, which focuses on my late uncle, Terry Graves, his time in San Francisco and his death from AIDS just a year before Karl. Terry and Karl were in San Francisco at the same time, and I can’t help but wonder if they encountered each other. Maybe in a poem they will.

I have a love//hate relationship with San Francisco, but I’ve been feeling the need to return. Urgently. And Karl’s poems only solidified that. It’s amazing when poetry can move and motivate you enough to want to travel across a continent. That’s what Karl Tierney’s will do for you.

Thank you, Sibling Rivarly, for bringing this book [Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney] into the world and making Karl Tierney immortal.

Collin Kelley, In the Castro with Karl Tierney

I love breaking words apart, especially words in foreign languages, and learning their etymology and usage. The idea of having a word warehouse in my head feels like the perfect analogy. The words all stored in various boxes and filing cabinents. I’m sure the organisation is an absolute mess, like most of my real-life storage. Items organised by need, use and more random connections rather than some systematic method. When I lived with my parents I kept my library card in a laundry basket in the basement. If someone moved it, I could never think where it should sensibly be, but I could always find it with my way. Our own systems work.

So when I look for the word ‘door’ in Finnish, I know I’d be shuffling through files of Scottish Gaelic to find it. I was just watching a video of the Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay reciting her poem ‘Threshold’ to the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 2016. She mentioned that in Gaelic they say ‘dùin an doras‘ for ‘shut the door’ and that took me back to learning Gaelic in Glasgow, so many years ago. ‘Don’t shut the door’ was also one of the first phrases I learned in Finnish when my son shouted it over and over at nursery when it was time for me leave. These memories pile up on top of the word ‘door’ in a wonderful scrapbook.

It’s also how my writing works, I start with a prompt, specific or more general and I just follow it where it leads me, jumping from one image or connection to the next. I might look at crafting a poem from the idea of shutting the door in several languages just from writing that paragraph. My poems have begun to cross over into Finnish and other languages more and more as I shuffle through the collected images and memories in my brain while I write. 

Gerry Stewart, Scattershot

And then the door swung wide
and the music bloomed like a tin flower:
John McCormack singing The Rose of Tralee.
And a four-square farmer’s wife came stepping
high over the tussocks, scarved and booted,
ringing a bucket like a broken bell.

And she’s singing too, singing in a wild
soprano, keen as the edge of a spinning
slate, plaiting her voice around McCormack’s
skinny tenor, scattering the gulls and lifting
a fishing heron out of the shallows
and into the all-accommodating sky.

Dick Jones, Looking for U2…
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 29

Poetry Blogging Network

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
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 27

Poetry Blogging Network

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, the Independence Day holiday seems to have depressed blogging activity a bit from the American contingent, and I think a lot of people are off on holiday as well. But I still found some fine summery posts about butterflies and caterpillars, writing in unusual forms, and being in unusual places such as labyrinths, Acadia, or the present moment.

Morning wakes hours before its city creatures.
I see light through the shutters:
cool insides while their clapboards communicate color — 
hydrangea pink, hydrangea blue —
to the morning.  Slate gray street, 
a herribone brick sidewalk.

Couples inside, 
coffee darker than their peignoirs.  
It’s a holiday.
The 4th of the seventh month, almost mid-summer,
almost tipping over. 

Jill Pearlman, Independence EveryDay

Hey, you guys feeling the Fourth of July this year? Yeah, me neither. Instead of grinding our teeth over 45 spending millions on tanks (and taking it away from our parks) in our capital, let’s take a moment to enjoy the wonders of summer all around us. Swallowtail butterflies! Kittens napping next to roses cut from garden!

And if you want to do something positive on July 4, consider donating to RAICES, which helps unaccompanied children and detained immigrants seeking asylum in the United States. And plant a tree and some milkweed. Feed your hummingbirds. Say hi to a neighbor. Little things that can make our country better.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, New poems in Summer 2019’s Spoon River Poetry Review, Butterflies, Kittens, July 4 and 25th Anniversaries

And I dream of the grass
of prairies, lost highways that pass,
relentless and unbending, by abandoned outposts,
forts and cowtowns whose brave boothill ghosts

still ride the range; the empty-hearted homesteads
whose screendoors bang on windy nights; dry riverbeds
enclosed by old barbed wire, and oil-well donkeys, one end
gazing at the sand, the other at the stars.

Dick Jones, 50 years since the first moon landing. What of Michael Collins, who stayed on board Apollo 11..?

from the top of my head paper ships set out

Johannes S. H. Bjerg, ku 11.07 2011 (1)

On my Italian parsley plant:
a fat green stripey caterpillar.

It’s a black swallowtail
in fourth instar, readying

for its chrysalis. Unlike
the monarch, predictable

in its cycle of rebirth, these
take an indeterminate time

encased in green or brown
before emerging wet-winged.

Rachel Barenblat, Chrysalis

–On Monday, as I drove to work, I thought about the sonnet I had written on Friday, and this thought flitted through my brain:  I wonder if I could write a crown of sonnets.  I wrote a second sonnet, and then went on to write a third and a fourth.  Yesterday I got a head start on the fifth.

–I’ve realized that I can rhyme Holocaust with Pentecost. My crown of sonnets may be headed in an unusual direction.  I have yet to use that rhyme, but seeds have been planted.

–Speaking of seeds, the butterfly garden continues to enchant.  On Monday, I realized that one of the bushes had caterpillars. And then I realized how much of the milkweed bush they had eaten: [image]

–More than once this week, I’ve thought of the book The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar.  And more than once, I’ve wondered if I’m remembering it correctly.

–Yesterday, I got three more plants that my pastor picked up for me.  He said that it can take 2 or more weeks for the milkweed to spring back from the relentless munching.

–The fact that  the bush can survive and come back seems like a good metaphor if I could avoid the potential pitfall of triteness and cliche.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Of Sonnet Crowns, Butterfly Gardens, and Discernment

I’m writing in haste as this looks like the day we’re going to tackle our back garden meadow (grass uncut all season) and the sunshine and garden shears are calling me. I’m putting together an informal, low-key workshop for Trowbridge Stanza based on the pantoum, which the Poetry Foundation explains well here and includes sample poems. The Poetry Foundation’s glossary describes the pantoum as

A Malaysian verse form adapted by French poets and occasionally imitated in English. It comprises a series of quatrains, with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the next. The second and fourth lines of the final stanza repeat the first and third lines of the first stanza.

I first found out about the pantoum form by reading a blog from Warwick University by David Morley which unfortunately I can’t find online any more. I know that David Morley has included pantoums in some of his collections and that he is an aficionado of the form.  A. E. Stallings, John Ashbery and Donald Justice are other poets famous for writing pantoums.  You probably know many more – please tell me!

One of my favourite pantoum poems is ‘Incident’ by Natasha Trethewey, a stunning poem about lynching which I return to many times.

The subtle repetition of lines and circular nature of the form suits subjects that we revisit and strive to make sense of over time but that doesn’t mean to say that any poet should feel obliged to obey strict rules (as if!).  There is more to read about the pantoum at the Academy of American Poets here.

Josephine Corcoran, Collecting Pantoums

Jeffery Beam has long been a devotee of beauty, and his Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements is one of the prettiest books to appear in recent years. This poetry collection is another in the realm of the book-length series of poems, and is also an addition to the world of ekphrastic poetry. It is a book of free verse responses to paintings–and since the art is intricately tied together in a series, naturally the poems are as well. And internally they are held together, elaborate parallelism often binding the lines, so there is a kind of macrocosmic and microcosmic structure in the form.

Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements display a different way of thinking about what a book of poetry is, and it strikes me that the book is determined to create its own audience–that is, to create the reader’s understanding and sympathy for the project–through what is included. Short excerpts from Lindsay Clarke and Joseph Campbell serve as a kind of preface, nudging us in a desired direction. The poems and art form the core of the book, but they are followed by three essays about the poetry and the art. So the book itself teaches how to read it, and also how to look at the art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins… Then there’s a whole other dimension to the book in which music and poems join in the CD. It’s an interesting and rare way of looking at the making of a poetry collection, and one that must have taken a lot of love and care.

Marly Youmans, Midsummer reads

I was advising a writer-friend lately to celebrate small wins. Then I thought, hey, I should do that, too. Since my last couple of posts explored self-doubt, and a lot of people in my orbit are having rough summers (for example, catch up with Jeannine Hall Gailey’s inspiring posts), I thought I’d share some shine.

I’m getting ready for more visibility in 2020-2021 by applying for conferences, festivals, etc., and making lists of opportunities to apply for later. For instance, I’ll be attending the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference this November for the first time. I organized a panel, recently accepted, called Uncanny Activisms, about poems that resemble spells, prayers, and curses. My co-panelists include writers I know as well as writers I’ve never met but have been admiring from a distance: Cynthia Hogue, Anna Maria Hong, Hyejung Kook, Ashley M. Jones, and Anna Lena Phillips Bell. I’m very excited to hear what these smart women have to say about a poetic mode I’ve found indispensable these last few years.

On that note: two of my poems just appeared in the new issue of Ecotone. “State Song,” pictured above, is the shorter piece, and I’m SO delighted it’s placed near an essay called “Erasing the Border” by artist Ana Teresa Fernández (the image above is hers). “State Song,” from my forthcoming collection, is in that spiritual-political zone my panel will be addressing, and I hope it speaks against borders and fences, too. (The other poem of mine is “Turning Fifty in the Confederacy”–yikes.) Do read the whole issue if you can, for it’s full of challenging, beautiful writing. I love Ecotone‘s new department, “Various Instructions,” plus I found a new menopause-themed poem there for my growing collection: “Elegy for Estrogen,” by V. Penelope Pelizzon.

More fireworks: Amy Lemmon just published an essay in Diane Lockward’s July Poetry Newsletter about how to mine another poet’s book for writing prompts–and then revise out traces of the other writer’s words to create poems fully your own. The nicest part: the book that inspired her was my last one, Radioland! Lemmon’s piece is inspiring and accessible–check it out.

Lesley Wheeler, Some sparklers on a dark, hot night

Some experiences seem beyond words. That’s how I’m feeling about my week in Chartres. And yes, I know it was a writing workshop, and that I should be perfectly at home, writing about it. But.

So I went to Chartres for a writing workshop with Christine Valters Paintner. I wasn’t expecting a  spiritual workshop focused on Chartres Cathedral and its nearly 1000 year old labyrinth (and its 2000 year history, pre-current cathedral). Even had I known that the labyrinth would be a central aspect of our week, I don’t think I could have fathomed how profoundly meaningful this location was going to become for me.

Bethany Reid, Writing the Labyrinth

[…] I decided I needed to take a chunk of leave this summer. As such, I embarked upon a month-long break. But of course being the Type A woman I am, I made myself a long to-do list of things I needed to accomplish while on leave.

I started with ten days in Maine. The first week was spend at the Poetry Residency at Maine Media, followed by a few days in Acadia National Park. Jay flew up that Friday night and we spend the weekend hiking and exploring the park. Acadia has been on my list for a while so I was glad to finally cross it off. Also, it’s beautiful and has some excellent hiking so it made for a great weekend.

Once home from Acadia I moved on to the next item on my to-do list: adopting a dog.

I said goodbye to Daisy at the end of January. At fifteen years old, she had a long, wonderful life but I was still devastated when she died. I felt like part of me had died too and I vowed to take a long break from being a dog owner. But then…well, then I realized that there was a dog-shaped hole in my heart and there was only one thing that could adequately fill it: another dog.

Courtney LeBlanc, One Month

I had read the news as usual that morning and fell into the now-usual doom gloom. Then the radio reminded me that another of my music pantheon died recently. Dr. John has ascended.

And the station played a tribute to him for a few hours, but I was vacuuming and stuff so heard a bit here and bit there, nodding to the beat when I could hear it, otherwise swept in my own to-and-fro, but they closed with “There Must Be a Better World Somewhere,” and I thought, Right, Mac? Right?

But then I opened up Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.

The Book of Delights is Ross Gay’s almost-daily, always-exuberant, sometimes-funny, sometimes-poignant record of his days’ delights. Which are often found in not so obvious places.

Although that groovy dude — and here I’m talking about Dr. John, although Ross Gay is indeed also one groovy dude — Dr. John’s oddball let’s-face-it-a-bit-whiny sly if-I-don’t-do-it-somebody-else-will devil on his angelic shoulder (have you HEARD the “Boogie Woogie Twins” with Jools Holland? Shut. Up.) makes it almost impossible for me to not leap up and boogie around the kitchen, there’s often a dark undercurrent in his music, that undeniable blue note, a hint of wrong-place-right-time. Some might call it duende.

And just as you might tire, thinking, all right, enough, you perky sonofabitch — and here I’m talking about Ross Gay — I don’t know that anyone would call Dr. John a perky sonofabitch — Gay will slip in an essayette that reminds us ever so subtly of that yin to yang, the old no-joy-without-sorrow note that sometimes being a black man in this world causes him to stumble over even in the midst of this practice of delight, or even just being a human in the world, and doing the hard work of loving in the face of losing.

Marilyn McCabe, Sweet Confusion Under the Moonlight; or, The kingdom of God is within you; or, Making the Better World

Perhaps we evolved this way so that someone would be there to bury the dogs and the cats, so that someone might be available to shoot the horse that would only suffer. Life and death leave a certain amount of cleaning up that must be done, and so we have minds that reason, we have hands that can grasp a shovel or squeeze a trigger.

Help me now as I gather the wood. The fire I am building needs to be very large, and very hot.

James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Perhaps we evolved this way so..’

The cedar
in the window

is somehow
changed by

my seeing.
I am

somehow
changed by

its being
there. Neither

of us speaks
of this in

ordinary moments.

Tom Montag, THE CEDAR / IN THE WINDOW