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. You can also browse the blog digest archive or subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite feed reader. This week, poets were mostly back from vacation and gearing up for the fall, but life is throwing curve balls at some. I guess it’s the perilous times in which we find ourselves, but there’s a certain feeling of malaise in many of these posts. But exciting new books and works in progress continue to motivate and inspire.
April 19, 2022. 11:35 am. A pile of calendars, datebooks and diaries heaped in the middle of the yard. A red gasoline tank. Gas poured. A match lit. The huge, the huge conflagration of everything that has happened. Also, because represented in the burning heap were days, weeks, months and years that were yet to happen, they too are gone, turned to fire, heat, ash, crackling. My face flushed. Clouds puffy in the sky. The sound of traffic on a nearby road.
Gary Barwin, Thursday
I have this “image” in my mind. Except it’s not an image—I think it’s a sensual memory. Indistinct. Life of some sort in the palm of my hand. I curl my fingers inward to hold it, but carefully. This thing is delicate. Easily disfigured.
Easily killed.
A heartbeat flutters sketching a ghostly sonogram on my skin. It’s a game of peek-a-boo and “careful-careful” and I feel like a toddler not knowing how to control my body with tenderness. I feel like a toddler confronting the wonder of it all.
But these moments pass so quickly. Something shiny just out of reach catches my eye. And “living in the moment” too often means a singular attention focused on this immediate thing. Too often the drama.
And it means something irreparably damaged. Lost before I knew what it was.
Ren Powell, Holding Life Loosely
melt me
like ice in a
cool drinklinger like pie
steaming in a windowhaunt me
Charlotte Hamrick, Small Death
an explorer for a fool’s
soft lies
I took the summer off, almost entirely, from any of the familiar measures of writing productivity.
I fought this break early on. (I’m often really hard on myself.) But then I embraced it. As we say in my home state of Maine, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” So, much like the weather (especially the weather *these* days!), my POV on what success means to me in my writing life fluctuates WILDLY.
Here’s my best guess at what happened.
I got close to finishing my Gertie poetry manuscript and had a crisis of confidence. Instead of despairing — ok, I despaired a bit (wherever I go there I am LOL) — I went with it and reflected on priorities, asking questions like
– Why do I want to finish this manuscript?
– What do I want from the writing life?
– What does success look like for me?
– Does it matter how many times you pause and start over?
– Are those separate attempts or part of one long life’s work? (and does it matter? who’s counting?)I weighed the answers against everything going on — most notably summer vibes and tectonic shifts in parenting — and decided that writing wasn’t currently at the top of the list. It was freeing!
I’ve continued to dabble, taking myself on a DIY writing retreat and tackling a low-stress daily challenge from Sarah Freligh this month. However, I let go of the “musts” and “shoulds” and stopped obsessing over finishing the damn book.
So what did I do instead? EVERYTHING.
Carolee Bennett, what does success even look like?
Today’s feature at Escape Into Life marks nine years of showcasing artists — emerging, mid-career, and established — from around the world. It also marks my last Artist Watch column for the magazine. Nearing age 70, though still without a bucket list, I know it’s time to pass the virtual pen to a new editor.
As Artist Watch editor, I have given significant virtual room to artists who are women and artists who work in highly varied media. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many painters, sculptors, photographers, paper-cut artists, portraitists, installation artists, mixed media artists, collagists, illustrators, printmakers, and digital art wizards who accepted my invitations and generously shared their marvelous work. They made creation of my monthly Artist Watch columns a joyous endeavor and filled with beauty my days (and nights) of looking at art. Joy and beauty, especially as found in art, remain the two essential things I look for each day.
Maureen E. Doallas, New Artist Watch Feature at Escape Into Life
The pandemic has made it difficult to think expansively over these past few years. Our emphasis has been on hunkering down and surviving. But I came into the summer with something like Big Hope, in part because a next nonfiction book (a collection of essays in unconventional forms) has been coming into focus. After the brief spring “tests” of driving first to AWP in Philadelphia back in March, then a literary festival at Clemson University, I lined up substantive summer travel in the form of two residencies–first ten days at A.I.R. Studio in Paducah, Kentucky, and then all of June at the Storyknife Writers Retreat in Homer, Alaska. Both offered responsible options for quarantining (if needed) and staying safe, while also furnishing the community I’ve craved.
Those residencies were amazing. Full stop. Storyknife, in particular–we were on the Ring of Fire, with volcanos on the horizon! in the solstice season, meaning, 20 hours of light a day! six women writers, gathering around a dinner table!–took my breath away.
I used my time at these two residencies to read, write, and refresh. So there’s no easy way to segue to what came next: on my last full day in Alaska, I got the call that my husband was in the hospital back in our home of Washington, D.C. He spent most of July in the ICU. Now we’re wrapping our heads around what comes next. I had to resign my Visiting Writer-in-Residence position at American University for Fall 2022. I had to defer a plan to join the faculty of the University of Nebraska’s low-res MFA. I have no choice but to slow down, to be present in the moment, and to be grateful for the company I’m keeping. (And, in a brief nod to the fickle cruelties of the American medical system: to remember, money isn’t real.)
That’s the thing about life–it keeps changing, right out from under us.
Sandra Beasley, Buckle Up
I’ve written two poems about this over the week that we were losing him. I feel like my brain is trying to process his very quick demise. I’ve been thinking about whether it was the right thing to have the operation, to take that risk, worrying that we pushed him into it, worrying that my mum will always wonder what would have happened otherwise, if we’d chosen death by cancer, had turned down the chance the operation offered. But we didn’t make the decision, how could we? No one made a decision for my dad, dad made all his own choices, whether we disagreed or not, and it was him that chose the chance to be a whole person – vital, present, capable of another fifteen years to complete his projects, to have holidays, to build memories. When they tell you the risks in an operation, they are real risks, not just something they have to tell you to tick a box. And this was a very high risk operation. But still, so quick, so hard to align the vital presence of my dad, with the old man who looked so much like my grandad, in the ITU.
When he left us, striding across the car park, he’d removed all his jewellery. The letter he got from the hospital told him to bring nothing but himself. He took them literally and didn’t even take a mobile phone. We had no contact with him at all. I thought at the time how it felt like some sort of religious ceremony, a baptism perhaps; the stripping away of all worldly goods. But actually, it was much more primal than that. Much more like a warrior facing a final challenge. Much more like a man going into the desert alone. Something he knew he had to do himself, a rite of passage. He entered into a place where there were only two outcomes. I don’t see that as losing any sort of fight. His faith gave him two options, not one death and one life. And I have never met a braver person in my life, how brave must you be to make that decision, to take that chance. That was the bravest thing I’ve seen anyone do. He did it for himself and he did it so he could continue to be married to my mum. And he was a warrior, did fight this, with every sinew, he fought to keep the life that he had with my mum. He fought to continue to suck the marrow out of every experience. I like to think of life as a journey, and our job within that life, as we move around it in the vessels; the bodies that we are in, is to experience every part of it, to find joy where you can, to be compassionate, to live a full life. My dad did that. I like to think of him continuing to journey. Journey well, dad, journey well.
Wendy Pratt, Saying Goodbye to Dad
I can frame my own space
Rajani Radhakrishnan, Part 09
now, hear my own voice. But the
universe still reveals no premise for
why something is, why it wants, why
it is denied and why it grieves into
poetry. There is also no explanation
for why a monsoon sky is the colour
of a sonnet, why a heart breaks in
the way day doesn’t, why a moment
shapes the poet when the poet shapes
the moment, but in the reverse
direction, as if time and poetry
are mirror reflections staring at
each other from opposite worlds.
Here in August, during the Sealey Challenge, I love the immersion in lives, languages, and cultures not my own. In this book, The Wild Fox of Yemen, by Threa Almontaser (Graywolf Press, 2021), I also loved tracking the wild fox, its brief appearances, its changing meanings…and, as keeps happening, tracking the coincidences–how the books or images in them keep connecting, or how my mind is doing that. I encountered the Tooth Fairy in the nonfiction book, The Tales Teeth Tell, but I was surprised to find her here, in the very first poem, “Hunting Girliness,” “It is not tasteful / to fuck with the Tooth Fairy, baby teeth planted // in the oleanders.” (And I just made the connection that she is “hunting” girliness, like a fox!)
Teeth again, and precise dental terminology, in “Recognized Language,” “Now the words shed from my mouth like deciduous teeth.”
Kathleen Kirk, Wild Fox of Yemen
My favorite line in John Palen’s new chapbook is unpacked in the final poem, “Riding With the Diaspora,” which is the shared title of his book. He writes, “At 6:00 on a winter evening / we’re all diaspora, all a little homesick.” Even in the thick of summer, in the wander-about in full sun and high temperatures, this line takes me straight into the heart of winter, into that collective confusion from where is it we actually hail.
Kersten Christianson, The Great Scattering: Reading John Palen’s Riding With the Diaspora
Another poem I like from the same haibun is this one:
day and night equal:
as celandines close
the stars come out
What I like here is how much is implied, rather than actually stated. The shapes and colours of both the stars and the flowers are there, but not in words! And in the context of the haibun they also colour the prose and bring the landscape and Cobb’s journey vividly to life.
As you might have guessed, it’s been a bit of a haibun week, both in terms of reading and writing. How fortunate I feel, to have reading and writing time. Two weeks to go before the start of term – and believe me it always comes around too quickly. So, I’ll finish with this fun haiku, taken from the haibun ‘The School Christmas Show’:a child blows
into a balloon
the balloon blows backCobb, David, Business in Eden, Equinox, 2006
Julie Mellor, Business in Eden
“The Yellow Toothbrush” is a searingly honest, literary exploration of trauma and the burdens that fall to mothers. The speaker does not condemn her daughter, seeing her as a victim of circumstance, unable to seek help for lactation psychosis due to the fear of losing custody of her baby son who was loved and wanted, after a series of abandonments. Her daughter’s imprisonment seems to be punishment enough. However, the speaker does not abandon her daughter. She still visits. Though the question remains: how much [of the] responsibility for that fatal night was her daughter’s or is blame to be laid at the feet of a society that works against mothers, and what about the baby’s father, the daughter’s father? It’s a tough, non-judgemental read.
Emma Lee, “The Yellow Toothbrush” Kathryn Gahl (Two Shrews Press) – book review
People talk a lot these days about the divisions in our country and our world. With good reason, they lament the brokenness we see among a large swath of the population, and the despair many feel that the “normal” world will never be regained.
I have a different view. I come at this chaos with the idea that we are making a hairpin turn in civilization, and won’t be returning to “normal”. There will be a new humanity to live in a new world. And poetry will record the changes of the heart.
Such abrupt changes in often leave behind a lot of broken crockery. Even broken earth. But within the human heart lies unity. If I did not feel that, know that every day, I could not get out of bed. I would not want to wander such a lonely world. Reaching the broken ones with kindness can go a long way to heal the rifts and fill the gaps in those hearts. It reminds me of the Japanese practice of mending broken ceramics with gold, a substance even more precious than what you are mending. Kindness is the gold to mend our broken world.
Rachel Dacus, Mending Our Broken World with Gold
Some see God
Dick Jones, Dog Latitudes §22
in the suddenness
of the sun
out of a cloud.
Surprised by
an event so much
bigger than
the monotony of
thought (the telling
of the same
old story of
doubt and fear),
they glory in
this brief gift
of external light.
For me
when caught
unawares
I understand
in the moment
that the light
that matters
is always
bright within
and the shadows
are of your choosing.
Last week, I was finishing up a lesson on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, a woman who started off an English major and wound up switching to Biology, the reverse of my trajectory. I was once a bright-eyed 18-year-old convinced she could save the world by saving the oceans. A year later, being terrible at math, I sought other ways to save the world. By the time I graduated I was less bright-eyed and fighting to live in the world, let alone save it. I feel like this happens to most of us.
Kristy Bowen, postcard from a thousand miles
Some years ago now I visited Orford Ness Nature Reserve, a strange and mysterious place on the coast of Suffolk. Strange in the same way as any place with ‘Ness’ in the name, mysterious because of its history as an atomic test site and before that as a place of experimentation in radar and ballistics. Even though wildlife has reclaimed this marginal sweep of land, the area is dotted with derelict structures and unexplained features some of which are still off-limits to the visiting public.
A few months later my poem ‘Searching for the Police Tower, Orford Ness’ won the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2014, fuelling my (long-gone) belief that I was destined to be the Next Best Thing in poetry. I had no idea at that point that a zillion poets had already ‘discovered’ Orford Ness. Those were heady days – that period many poets go through, in which you imagine yourself being snapped up by Faber and consequently winning the Forward Prize. Although I now see the folly of it, I would never laugh at anyone for having such a dream. Rejoice in each and every early or small success! Live for that moment, as it may never return!
Anyway, my point is that even your oldest, earliest successes can have a longer shelf life than you think. A few weeks ago I got an email from someone at the National Trust who had been looking for poems about Orford Ness to display in the Visitor Centre there next year, as part of some kind of festival. She’d discovered my poem on the Poetry Society website and would I mind if mine was one of the poems to be displayed. Why would I say no? It’s so nice (and unusual) to get such a request. Will anyone waiting for their ferry ride over to the Ness in 2023 bother to read my wee poem, up on the wall with plenty of others? And will it enhance the enjoyment of their visit? Will they remember (or even read) my name? Who knows. But there’s no harm in imagining it.
Robin Houghton, Orford Ness
Magma has published my poem ‘Seen while walking: one high-heeled boot, black suede, in a public flower bed’ in its ‘Solitude’ issue. This is my first time in Magma after submitting multiple times. This poem was one of a series I wrote last year while taking part in ‘Walk to Write’ an online course offered by Sarah Byrne at The Well Review. It coincided with a time of being alone or with my immediate family for long periods, during various lockdowns, and going for daily walks around the town where I live, noticing and sometimes taking a photo of things I saw. Apparently there were over 5000 poems submitted for consideration so I’m feeling very lucky to have sidled in this time!
Josephine Corcoran, Two New Poems in Magma Poetry and Raceme magazine
As life has afforded few spare moments of uncluttered mind-time in which to write, I’m back to scribbling notes, phrases, and ideas on random pieces of paper and in my journal. This fallback method works well for me, an old-school pen & paper poet. Quite a few colleagues-in-poetry use various smart phones and electronic devices to write notes-to-self and even to draft poems, but when I resort to that–on the rare occasion that I have my cell phone but not a writing implement or bit of paper–I forget about my ideas, which are filed somewhere “in there” (on Samsung Notes’ app). It’s a good thing I am not considered a significant author whose work is worthy of preserving, because my poet-life drafts and mementos would be challenging to archive.
For the moment, my writing has a work-centered locus: curriculum, to-do lists, meeting schedules and agendas, orientation and presentation scripts, group emails to announce this or that Important Thing that likely 80% of the recipients will ignore. I get home, eat dinner, pick beans, tomatoes, zucchini, and zinnias. And I read. The one thing I always seem to have time for!
Ann E. Michael, There’s always a book
It’s another day when boredom is looking for its passport to have an exciting adventure in a strange land.
Perhaps it’ll visit a house made of hellos.
Maybe it’ll date a crossword puzzle.
And while, at first glance, the puzzle may appear to be blank, just below the surface are wisdoms waiting to be discovered.
Once boredom finds its passport, it opens its front door and looks out upon the land.
A voice lingers in the air:
this is a collect call from the world. Will you accept the dream?
Rich Ferguson, A House Made of Hellos
Moving my way through the stunning new collection On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase, I had foolishly presumed I hadn’t actually heard his name prior to this, only to discover I’d read his essay “Niedecker and the Evolutional Sublime,” included as part of the late Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Moving through that essay once more, the cover price alone. As the press release for On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays offers: “On Autumn Lake collects four decades of prose (1976-2020) by renowned poet and beloved cult figure Douglas Crase, with an emphasis on idiosyncratic essays about quintessentially American poets and the enduring transcendentalist tradition.” Some of the essays collected here, truly, are revelatory, and he writes repeatedly, thoroughly and thoughtfully on poets such as Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), John Ashbery (1927-2017) and James Schuyler (1923-1991), among multiple other pieces on an array of literary activity, centred around his attentions across some four decades. […]
There is such a delight in his examinations, offering a joyous and rapt attention and passionate engagement on very specific poets, poems and moments, while simultaneously able to see how the threads of his particular subject’s work fits into the larger fabric of literary production, culture and politics. As he writes as part of the essay “THE LEFTOVER LANDSCAPE,” “Much of art is the struggle to make emotion less embarrassing.” There is something quite staggering in that simple, short sentence that Crase manages to get, and get to. Honestly, go to page 135 and read the whole paragraph that sits at the bottom of the page. It’s breathtaking. And read the whole essay. And then read the whole collection. This is easily the finest collection of prose I’ve read in years.
rob mclennan, Douglas Crase, On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays
[Pearl Pirie]: […] What’s your life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
[rob mclennan]: I spent much of July re-entering the novel manuscript, set aside since November or so, as I worked on poems, until I had to return to reviews again, where I am currently (my list of titles-in-progress include poetry books by Polina Barskova, Krisjana Gunnars, CJ Evans, Gary Barwin, Nicole Brossard, Laynie Browne, Su Cho, Joshua Bennett, Billy Mavreas, Janice Lee, etcetera).
PP: mentally notes: Nicole Brossard and Billy Mavreas have something new?
rm: Our young ladies had various day-camps throughout July and into August, which allowed me a different kind of attention, so I was attempting to take advantage of that, for the novel. I’m hoping I can spend the rest of August pushing a few weeks ahead of reviews on the blog (and periodicities) to be able to return again to fiction come September, once our young ladies return to in-person schooling (something we haven’t engaged with since March 2020).
I’m also working on a handful of further festschrifts through above/ground press, as well as a variety of other projects in that direction, including a third ‘best of’ anthology to cover the press’ third decade, scheduled for release next fall with Invisible Publishing.
PP: Ooh, you heard it here first, folks, probably.
rm: Otherwise, I’m currently spending weekdays with our young ladies at their outdoor swim lessons, sitting a daily hour poolside with notebook, books and pen at Riverside’s RA Centre, a building I hadn’t actually been in or near before, despite years of driving by. Not long before my widower father died in 2020, I discovered my parents actually held their wedding reception there, so it’s a curious space for me to engage with. A very retro-vibe. Very calming, even despite the array of greenery leans up into the back windows of a government building. Perhaps today I might wave up at them.
Pearl Pirie, Checking in: With rob mclennan
As I drove through the mountains from my house in North Carolina to the DC area, I thought about the coming year, how it will be both familiar and different. I’ve taken seminary classes before, so I know that I can slip back into that rhythm. But this year, I’ll be taking a mix of online and in person classes. This year, I’ll live on the campus, where I hope to have amazing opportunities. But I’ll also be living by myself for longer periods of time when my spouse is fixing up the house in North Carolina.
Yesterday as I drove through the mountains, I thought about how I could structure my days and weeks. I want to get back to doing more creative writing. I’d like to do that early in the morning, and then go for a walk a bit later, like I have been doing for the past month. I’d like to do more submitting to journals, if I can still find some that don’t charge high submission fees, which I define as anything that costs more than a few stamps would cost. I’d like to spend afternoons either going to class or getting ready for class.
And of course, I want to make sure I explore DC. The other day, as I read an article in The Washington Post about the re-opening of the Kennedy Center and what it means for restaurants in the surrounding area, I thought, I wonder if there are still any tickets to Hamilton, which is in town for two more months–and there are! In the past, there used to be a way to get great same day prices on tickets that hadn’t sold yet. I never figured out a way to do that in South Florida. I’m going to figure out how to see some great theatre in the next 2 years while I’m here.
I know that I’m claiming a huge gift. I will likely never be able to afford to live in a city like DC again. I want to make sure I squeeze everything out of it that I can.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Move In Day!
My goal this year is to get 100 rejections. You heard that right. So far I’ve managed 98 submissions of poetry, essays, or my poetry ms. And I’ve had (I’m guessing) about 30 acceptances. That means I still have at least 32 more submissions to make — and (horrors!) if any of those are accepted, then a few more for good measure.
Someone else gave me advice — and sent an adorable video of a three-year-old to illustrate it — of what might be called “radical acceptance.” The idea is to spend some time each day saying, “I LOVE my house,” “I LOVE my car,” “I LOVE this plant…this kid…this dog…this ratty old couch….” You get the picture. Just to flip that usual mode of noticing what isn’t okay, isn’t good enough, etc.
I love these rejections and how they’re helping me get closer to my goal of 100 rejections this year.
Well, it all sounds rather silly, now that I’m typing it up. I get bogged down by big stuff — and why shouldn’t I? Just like everyone, I often get caught by the little stuff and do some serious whining. On the other hand, sometimes I already practice this. A grown daughter hijacks a day when I really wanted to get other things done, and I decide to embrace it. My husband gets in a fender-bender, and I’m shot through the heart with gratitude that it was just a fender-bender and not anything worse. I get a headache and a voice from somewhere says, “I wonder what that’s asking you to pay attention to?”
Bethany Reid, Rejection City
I haven’t been up to much this week as we had several days of 90 degrees and not-great-air quality, so it was nice today, a slightly cooler day, to get out and about – I got my hair cut (see left,) walked around Kirkland a bit admiring some roses, and stopped by our local garden to pick up sweet corn. Even that much exhausted me – summer is not a great time for MS patients, as you may know if you have any MS folks in your life – the heat and humidity can feel like a nauseating weighted blanket. I haven’t had as much energy for writing or submitting as I wanted, but I’m hoping to get back in the groove by September.
I’m also considering starting up an hourly PR coaching business, maybe just a few hours a month to start, to help people get going on their books, small businesses, or projects. What do you think? I feel like I want to do more than just freelance writing, something that helps people, and also something that helps me dip my toes back it the working world. Even with MS, I feel like I have more to give than I’ve been giving, if you know what I mean.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Poem Up On Verse Daily, AWP News, Hot Air Balloons, Hot Weather and MS, Woodinville Read Between the Vines Book Club
We’re listening to Ani DiFranco as I wash the dishes following another of Christian’s amazing meals. Talking about the heady days of the early ’90s when we drove from town to town in the northeast following Ani and Andy the way others followed Jerry and Bob. In church basements and college halls and small-town theaters that used to be vaudeville houses we joined in with ever growing groups of fellow misfits, trying to figure out where the hell we belonged. I think of how young Ani was then — the same age as us, just a few years older than my kids are now — and how wise and powerful she seemed. Not seemed, was. Black tape on her fingers, slamming against the strings. Head shaved except for one wild lock of hair. I was probably the squarest person in all of those rooms but that guitar and those lyrics and that voice and those drums started to sand down the corners of my box. Now it’s thirty years later and all that’s left of the box are the occasional lines I draw for myself. The music, sadly, is still as relevant as ever.
Thursday night in Ithaca
Jason Crane, haibun: 17 August 2022
dozens of us on a concrete floor
not even noticing
I am giving up my current day job, no more market research for me…No more data tables, no more questionnaires, no more significance testing, etc. Nope, not for me, I’m now a car mechanic. I will be fixing cars for a living.
This is categorically not true, but I am proud of myself for finally fixing the boot of our car yesterday. It’s only taken me the best part of two years to do it. Four hours of swearing, sweating and repeated viewing of what may be the best video ever on YouTube has saved me the best part of 400 quid. I am happy. Are there any other poet mechanics? Come on people, announce yourselves.
In other news, there isn’t really any. I’m home alone this weekend—Come over if you fancy it—so in-between the mechanicery (I’m getting the lingo now) and the cleaning, drinking, etc, I’ve managed to work on some poems for the book. I think I’m almost…ALMOST…done with the second pass at them all, so it will be time to get them all in order again soon and go again…
I’ve finished a review and sent that off. I was so close to being up to date, and have somehow ended up agreeing to two more, so I now have 4 to do. Bloody heckers, like, Riches…learn the word no..
I managed to “attend” via Zoom/YouTube the launches of Jess Mookherjee, Ramona Herdman and Tania Hershman midweek. All three were amazing. I’ve not managed to buy Jess or Tania’s books yet (I will, I will, Jane…), but I got Ramona’s last week and read it quickly this week. It’s a wonderful thing. I love her work. It’s one of the four reviews I need to do, so I’m looking forward too going back over it in more depth and to revisiting her other work for context (and basically because it’s bloody great).
Mat Riches, Mechanicals, Blade Runner & A Brief Note About Reviews
Barbara Leonhard’s work appears in Spillwords, Anti-Heroin Chic, Free Verse Revolution, October Hill Magazine, Vita Brevis, Silver Birch Press, Amethyst Review, anthologies Well-Versed, Prometheus Amok and Wounds I Healed: The Poetry of Strong Women. Her poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, will be published in the fall of 2022 by IEF (Experiments in Fiction). Barbara enjoys bringing writers together and has been sponsoring informal open mics on Zoom during the pandemic. You can follow her on https://www.extraordinarysunshineweaver.blog.
What are you working on?
I’m currently polishing a manuscript to submit to my publisher, EIF (Experiments in Fiction, a company in England owned by Ingrid Wilson). It’s called Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir. The poetry collection is about my mother and me. Our lives were interwoven in many ways. We each suffered from conditions that affected memory. Hers was Alzheimer’s and mine was encephalitis. Also, she was able to have seven children, but I was infertile because she was prescribed diethylstilbesterol (DES) when I was in utero. As I was the eldest daughter, she chose to move close to me so that I could help her in her senior years.
The trigger for this collection of poetry was my uncle’s question, “Do you love her?” The very thought that my love for my mother was questioned sent me into grief counseling. Throughout my care for her as her case of Alzheimer’s developed, I doubted my worth. To understand our relationship, I reviewed the ways my mother’s life and mine intersected. Could I grow to love the stranger my mother was becoming?
The book title is based on an experience I had in Mom’s last few days. My brothers and I were going to grab lunch. When I was stepping out of the car, I saw three shiny new pennies lined up perfectly on the hot asphalt parking lot. Mom would always pick up pennies and insist that I do the same. However, I would refuse, which caused some conflict. I knew these pennies were a message, and indeed, she died on April 3, 2016.
The book is a poetic memoir, so it has an arc. I set the book up in three sections: Light (my years with Mom before she moved close to me; Dust (her time in an independent living facility and her decline due to Alzheimer’s); and Echo (her move to assisted living and death, and the resolution of the existential dilemma about my love for my her).
Thomas Whyte, Barbara Leonhard : part one
there it goes again
Jim Young [no title]
the angst of a long summer
in that one song
These days are loud, though:
the billow of wind, the sermons
of thunder; the undercurrent of all
nostalgias turning into somethingwe only think we understand. O trigger
releasing a spring, tensing a mechanism,
seething with too much feeling.O outrigger. I am an island and you are
Luisa A. Igloria, Outrigger
an island and everyone else is an island
and we could be an archipelago.
6. Yikes. I’m also Department Head (seven-hour chair’s retreat Friday, oy); about to teach two writing-intensive classes; and trying to finish an article on creative criticism, a version of which has to also become an ALSCW paper for a seminar on “confession” run by Gregory Pardlo, to be submitted in early September. Also also, I have a body with limits and a life. My personal and professional to-do lists grow like the reddening Virginia creeper in my garden, to which I am intensely allergic and so are a lot of other people, so I can’t seem to hire someone to dig it out. To do.
7. On the subject of spending money, my son begins his senior year at Haverford shortly, so our house is about to become much quieter. We had to buy a car, which I advise against, if you can help it, in this inflationary, troubled-supply-chain moment. New cars, at least economical, fuel-efficient ones, are not to be had for love or money. We scored a slightly used one after much research and a billion dollars.
8. On the bright side, I also bought a long-wanted new sofa to replace the stained, cat-shredded one. It’s a lovely shade of blue, and velvet, a fabric that cats, they claim, are less interested in using as scratching posts.
9. I’d like to read more poems on my new sofa, #sealeychallenge and all, but it’s been hard, given all the creative criticism I need to catch up on and the state of my in-box. The last I finished is Jenn Givhan’s Belly to the Brutal, which I highly recommend. I think it’s gonna win some prizes, at least if the judges can handle its emotionally intense explorations of motherhood, sexual assault, fatness, and tarot cards.
Lesley Wheeler, To do, poetically–or just some human sleep
The weather has been crazy hot this week, like much of Europe. Finland’s not used to reaching 30C in August. Thunderstorms are promised for today, but it’s still clear blue out there. Need to go water my allotment.
I recorded three poems with Helsinki Open Waves recently as part of a project with Helsinki Writers Group. This weekend I have been going through my takes, choosing how to put the poems together. I’m getting used to hearing myself read my work, but I’m not sure if I’m very good at it yet. I usually only need three takes to get a decent read-through, though we’re lucky that the audio technician is happy to cut and paste bits together so I don’t need a perfect take. What I’m still learning is how to emphasise the poem and read it with some expression that suits the words. It’s strange to hear something that you put so much energy into that by the end your body was a tense mess and to realise it didn’t come across the airwaves like it sounded in your head. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make it sound better with a bit of tinkering.
Gerry Stewart, Back to Busy Catch-up
As we were getting ready to come home, I reminded Cane that I almost didn’t make the trip because of the issues with my back. We had such a rich and wonderful two weeks with his siblings and extended family, a longer stretch of time than he’s had with them in decades. I expressed how glad I am that I didn’t miss it.
“You know,” he said, “if your back had gone out a week later, I’m sure we wouldn’t have bought the house.”
I’m sure we wouldn’t. Life swings on the smallest of chances sometimes, on serendipity and luck and things you didn’t know you were looking for until you found them.
Rita Ott Ramstad, Life is funny. And short. Seize the day.
we broke all the glass
in all the windowsno one stopped us
it took timebut the sounds were so addictive
the crack and cascade of glasseyeless in autumn
a cold wind hummed in the gapsthe snow went wherever it would
Paul Tobin, SUMMER PROJECT