Kristin Berkey-Abbott – Page 28

December 2, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 48

A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, plus occasional other poetry bloggers in my feed reader. If you’ve missed earlier editions of the digest, here’s the archive.

This week’s topics: the uses of poetry, the usefulness of external validation, the usefulness of blogging and other creative practices, the uselessness of consistency of style, the usefulness of having consistent topics to write around, the usefulness of group submittathons, the potential usefulness of self-doubt, the pleasures of community poetry festivals, the pleasures of Fatimah Asghar’s poetry, the pleasures of Christopher’s North’s poetry, the dubious utility of writing within constraints, the difficulty of assessing one’s own face, and the existential crisis of living and writing during a planet-wide extinction.

I like poems that do little useful things for you
like telling a friend you’ve been such a jerk,
keeping one company when bored in a long queue,
or teaching some manners to a misanthropic, rude clerk.
Magda Kapa, Once More, Thoughts on Poetry

It is so very much easier to “act” like a poet or writer once you feel like a poet or writer — i.e. when you have the external validation of publication. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is. Of course, in some ways, it’s the easy way, the “lazy man’s way” of writing. The external validation is a shortcut in the path to self-esteem that’s large enough to incorporate a regular writing practice. Honestly — I’m beginning to think that I resisted setting up a regular writing practice — these morning writing sessions — because I didn’t feel like I deserved them. Sometimes I still don’t. But lately I tell that part of myself to fuck off and I go back to the page.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Writing Practices, Processes, and Productivity

Once I started blogging I discovered that–for whatever reason–I don’t get all uptight and perfection-y about writing blogposts. I just type stuff and go over it a couple times for errors and post. It reminds me of showing up to teach at the college–ready or not, here it is.
Bethany Reid, Why do I blog?

This morning, I wrote a poem–and with that poem, I’ve written a poem every day in November. I’m not sure I’ve ever been successful at writing a poem a day for a month. There have been several Aprils that I have tried.

I’ve also been very active in my online journaling course which started Nov. 4, and in addition to writing a poem a day, I’ve done at least one sketch a day. I’ve been interested in how they feed each other.

The blogging feeds the work too.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, From Blog Post to Sketch to Poem

When I was working on my MFA, I had to compile a poetry manuscript for my final thesis. I gave my thesis advisor (who was usually very supportive) about 100 pages of poetry. She read around 40 pages of it, gave it back to me, and said, rather miffed, “I can’t read this! Make it sound like one person wrote the whole manuscript.”

I remember thinking, why? (I should have asked her why but was too flummoxed to say anything.) Why is it necessary for a book of poems to be uniform in voice, or for a writer to have a consistency of style? Perhaps for marketability—though poetry is so nonlucrative, marketability seems like an absurd concern.

Eventually some of the poems in this thesis manuscript wound up in other collections that were published. I edited my other collections of poetry, memoir, and fiction based on theme and intuition; they were more consistent than the one I gave my advisor back in 2005. I do consistently want my work to be sensual and honest, and for there to be a sense of humility in the narrative voice. Still, I don’t see the value in consistency, not in a poetry book. I like surprises when I read.
In Her Famous Fur-Lined Skirt / an interview with poet Colleen McKee (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

Someone noted in a post I talked about writing “on a project” and “outside of a project,” and asked me to talk a little bit about writing on poetry projects. I don’t usually start a book project knowing in advance what the book is going to be about. Usually I start by getting interested in a certain topic, then more interested, then research that topic, writing a bunch of poems around it, and then later noticing that the poems seem to cluster around a certain subject, and exploring that topic in different ways. Usually I decide I have a book project when I get about fifty poems that hang together, and then I work on arranging, filling gaps, and maybe examining the subject in a different way or in different forms.

In fact, I can feel a little un-moored when I don’t have a subject or topic I’m working on, but it’s a necessary part of the process, because I don’t think anyone’s book should start out over-determined, and we need some creative open spaces – just like it’s good to get out of the house, even in this kind of cold and rainy season, to remind ourselves of the beauties and possibilities of the larger world. It’s especially important, when you’ve maybe reached the end of a large project, you’ve sort of exhausted a subject, and you want to start to explore again. It’s a good time to try a different type of poetry and to read more widely and even to use poetry prompts to get your brain working in a new way. I like to read novels and books of literary biography and writers’ letters in between projects, to give my mind something new to work on. Different voices that can help me develop my own writing in a different way – this seems especially true for me when I read books in translation. I hope this was helpful!
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A New Poem in Scoundrel Time, Talking About Poetry Projects, Giving Tuesday and Women-Run-or-Owned Lit Mags and Presses

Today after a long hiatus, I submitted poems from a Submittathon at SSU. MP Carver set up for 9 a.m.-1 p.m. MP describes it as “a community event designed to get Salem State voices and creative works out into the publishing world. We’ll have people there to help first timers learn the ins and outs of submitting (including cover letters, finding journals, etc). For those with experience submitting work for publication, it’s a dedicated time to focus on sending out your work. There will be snacks and prizes as well!” Jill McDonough is the first poet I know to do this. We’re just following in her literary footsteps.

I was on the early side, but 12 people showed up with laptops and poems to send their poems into the world. This is the second time I’ve participated. The first time (in May, or was it last December?), I didn’t have anything to submit. I’m coming off of one of the worst writing droughts I’ve ever had. As someone who likes to grind it out, I think I’ve written maybe 20 poems in two years. My math may be off, however. When I look at my Poetry 2018 file, there are at least 50 poems. I have enough for a terrible manuscript. But I do have a few gems that need a little polish. Just getting them into the light is a big step.
January Gill O’Neil, Submittathon!

I see a therapist from time to time and we had an hour this week in which we talked mostly about self-doubt. She rightly points out that I have a pretty good resume, career-wise; my loved ones, though afflicted sometimes with crises, are basically okay; that I would do well to ease up and slow down. I do not have to be so afraid, say, of never publishing a ms or writing a great poem or getting pats on the head from the prize-dispensers again. I agree with her and we talked about ways to balance my commitments better. I also argued, however, as I argue to myself sometimes, that self-doubt is a necessary part of being a decent artist, and maybe a decent human being. If you don’t stand back and say, “hey, maybe that writing sample wasn’t really good enough to ensure a grant win,” how do you grow? Isn’t a drive to keep upping the bar a necessary pressure? Shouldn’t I keep questioning myself and my work?

Well, I’m probably rationalizing, because that’s what people do. I doubt my self-doubt. Happy December, my writer friends. Put up those twinkly lights, and don’t mind the darkness encroaching.
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry and self-doubt, with footnotes

I was going to tell you about going to North Carolina for the West End Poetry Festival–where the Carrboro Poets Council partners with the town to produce four days of reading upon reading upon reading, inclusive of all styles and topics. (A 12-person council that hangs out in someone’s living room once a month, and is trusted and given the resources to organize. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could so easily facilitate the DC government’s relationship to poetry and the arts? Ahem.) I got to talk about poetry of food, I got to hear Ruth Awad, the Chief of Police volunteered to be on-site monitor so we could drink wine in the Century Center, and signs that would usually direct traffic instead directed “Slow Down for Poetry.” I was going to tell you about helping someone write an ode to barbecue, and watching that same gentleman (husband to our hosting Poets Council member) run the toy trains in the garage-loft where we’d been staying. I was going to tell you about buying hatch chiles and okra from the Farmer’s Market.
Sandra Beasley, Six Posts I Didn’t Write & Alex Guarnaschelli

Among the things I adore is the beautiful physicality found in many of these poems, in which the body is sketched out in vivid detail — and not just the pretty bits, but the full reality of a body that makes up a human being. A body is where “mosquito bites bloom” or where exist “hairs crawling out.” In “Oil,” she writes, “The walk to school makes the oil pool on my forehead / a lake spilling under my armpits.” The specifics of existing in a human body in these poems feel as though the speaker is declaring their existence in a world that doesn’t always want them. It’s a lovely way to claim space.
Andrea Blythe, Book Love: If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar

I really like the filmic quality of this, a film by Peter Greenaway…the draughtsman’s contract. The story of the bunch of tipsy chums stumbling around in the dark under a huge starlit sky, stumbling over silvered lawns, declaiming of bits of Shakespeare, the absurdity of it that gradually comes to its senses, and back to earth as The town below lolled in sodium. I love the way the declaiming poet comes back to the role of the measuring and sensible surveyor and the group of friends who became a chain of hands. The whole thing is witty, elegantly constructed, and ultimately life-affirming, lyrical and loving.
John Foggin, Well met; a Polished Gem: Christopher North

I have had spasms of trying to write in form. I still shudder to remember the crap I’ve written. Sometimes my poems do, though, begin to take the form of a form: I’ve had poems that seem to take the shape of a sonnet, have had poems begin to exhibit a rhyme scheme, or that show the kind of obsession a form like a villanelle brings out. I could be more willing and try to be more able at encouraging/allowing that, and making the best of it. But to start out with the intention to write in a form? It makes me shudder.

As for the other tricks, the only thing I do — and this only when I haven’t been writing at all — is substitution. That is, I’ll take someone else’s poem, ideally someone whose work is different from mine, so I’m off-balance to begin with, and then word by word substitute my own words. So “…while I pondered weak and weary” becomes “after we made assumptions, burly and full of ourselves,” perhaps. I do this to shake up my work, or push me into process when I’ve lapsed into lassitude.

They do feel like tricks, these constraint games. And I feel like I can feel the artifice in the final product. Which for some people is the point. My own mind, imagination, abilities, proclivities, ignorances, prejudices, blindnesses, laziness, insistence on some kind of logic…well…etcetera…are constraint enough. Aren’t they?

I want the poem to become its own organic thing, growing in bumps and spurts to whatever lumpy, limpy, or suave form it fits itself. My job is to give it some oomph and stay out of the way.
Marilyn McCabe, The Name is Bond; or, Writing Within Constraints…or Not

Editor John Wilson once told me that half my face was like that of the nice lady in line behind him at the post office, and the other half belonged to a poet or a murderer. Writers are murderers of a sort. But the look–that’s the work of The Wayward Eyebrow.
Marly Youmans, Book-and-birthday headshots…

A loss of bees leads to a loss of any plant requiring bees for pollination. A loss of beetles and dragonflies and mayflies and even the much-maligned mosquito leads to birds that starve, not to mention amphibians, reptiles, and some omnivorous or insectivorous mammals–particularly vulnerable bat and marsupial populations. The bottom of the food chain matters more than most human beings ever stop to consider.

One part of this article mentions the important, even crucial, role of people who study nature without having gotten degrees…the so-called amateur botanists, lepidopterists, and hemiptera observers. Another reason I find this article so interesting has to do with how Jarvis employs thoughtful, reflective moments in the piece, while maintaining a journalistic stance:

We’ve begun to talk about living in the Anthropocene, a world shaped by humans. But E.O. Wilson, the naturalist and prophet of environmental degradation, has suggested another name: the Eremocine, the age of loneliness.

Wilson began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects — about as far as you can get from charismatic megafauna — are not what we’re usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson’s words, “the little things that run the natural world.” He means it literally. Insects are a case study in the invisible importance of the common.

Maybe it’s my personal inclination towards the natural observation, but I find some resonance here. It’s what I tend to do when I write poems–to celebrate the common, or at any rate to notice it. I notice, too, the diminishment.

Some readers have told me my poems feel sorrowful, and maybe that sense of diminishment hunkers behind even the more celebratory poems I write. That’s an idea worth my consideration as I revise my work. Maybe Diminishment should be the title of my next collection.

Anyway–read Jarvis’ article. You will learn much. Even if you’re one of those folks who “hates bugs.”
Ann E. Michael, Diminishment

November 18, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 46

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hike Toward the End of the Affair

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

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

and naked trees staring back at us. Today the timing

is perfect, when we reach the top, a kaleidoscope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for not killing me!

Meanwhile, two fellow bus passengers continued with their character assassination

… indistinguishable, indistinguisable…DIPSTICK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blergh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is a poem for a friend:

I first saw cancer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 45

Current events were inescapable this week, but so were events of a hundred years ago: bookends for our culture of violence and genocide. So poetry bloggers had plenty to say about the US election, the ending of World War I, politics in general, and how to preserve sanity and make time for what matters (writing, obviously). But there were also posts about new publications and recently read books, plus Collin Kelley had the genius idea (which I for one intend to steal) of blogging a Spotify playlist of songs that inspired his forthcoming collection, and Giles Turnbull calculated the amount of daily exercise he gets from making coffee.

Those of us lucky enough to live in a land that’s not currently wracked by war might think about our luck. We might strengthen our resolve to quit wasting time and to start/continue/finish the work we were put on this earth to do. History shows us that we can’t always or even often count on peace. The world plunges into war for the flimsiest of reasons: an archduke is assassinated, and the world goes up in flames.

So if we have stability now, let us seize the day. Let us not waste time on Facebook, bad movies, wretched television, or any of the other countless ways we’ve devised to waste our freedom. Generations of humans have laid down their lives to secure us this precious liberty; let’s resolve that their blood hasn’t been shed just so that we can fritter day after day away.

If we haven’t always done a good job of shepherding our talents, let’s declare today to be Armistice Day. Let’s forgive ourselves for every opportunity we haven’t followed. Let’s see if any of those doors are still open to us. And if not, let’s rest easy in the assurance that there will be new doors if only we stay alert for them.

For those of us who are activists, we might think about how to use our talents to create a world where we practice war no more. Or maybe we want to raise funds for those who are damaged by war. On a day like Veteran’s Day, it seems appropriate. We can be the voices for those who have been cruelly silenced.

For those of us who teach, we might want to think about how artists and writers might speak to current generations, many of whom do not know any veterans. On Veteran’s Day, which began as Armistice Day, you might bring the work of Wilfred Owen into your classrooms. You can find some poems at this site; I particularly like “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Pair this poem with some artistic works, perhaps the works of Picasso that look at war, a work like “Guenica” (here’s a site with the image). For this generation of instant access to facts and information, it would be worth discussing whether or not creative explorations enrich our understanding of war and its aftermath. Is photography and documentary film more worthwhile? Another kind of art?
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Approaches to Armistice Day

The first two Native-American women. First two Muslim women. First Somali-American, a former refugee. Youngest woman ever, a Latina. First black female congresswoman from her state…They are the hope for me today: the brown female faces of those who won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with many white women who also won races, and the first gay male state governor. These are the faces of the future — though their majority power may be very far away, beyond my lifetime even.

When I look at the map, the polarization is depressingly clear, and I can’t even feel smug about Quebec being better, after our last election. It was just the same: most of the rural, homogeneous French-Canadian areas went conservative, while the diverse metropolitan areas (chiefly Montreal) were solidly progressive. The real question in so many places today seems to be: do you want someone who will actually work for the things that benefit all people, or do you want someone who looks like you, expresses the same fears, and wants to go back to the past? […]

I’ve been on the side of immigrants and non-whites all my life, and especially so since marrying into an Arab/Armenian immigrant family, with multiple personal histories of genocide and narrow escapes from persecution to begin life again in new places. Twelve years of being a Canadian-American, and having opportunities to travel, especially in Latin America, have only made me MORE sympathetic and more identified with migrants and refugees. I’m grateful for my life experiences and fervently wish I could share them with a lot more people, because I think if you don’t live it, or have very close relationships with people who do, it’s hard to really get it. Thus, the map we keep seeing, and the fears that keep being exploited.

Besides this endemic hatred of “the other”, the environment is the other issue that creates ongoing despair for me. There is so little time, and so little will on the parts of governments — in fact I believe we’ve already passed a critical window where reversal was possible. So much of what I have valued and loved about the Earth is in danger of being lost forever. To me, this is the fundamental issue of our time, and even here in Quebec, where many people say they do care about the natural world and live close to it, the new government feels it is not important, and secondary to economic concerns. How shortsighted can we be?

Today is a day to rejoice in a first step back from the precipice Trump’s presidency has placed us in. Frankly, though, we can’t let up for a minute.
Beth Adams, Bright Faces of Hope, and a Long Uphill Road Ahead

I’ve been thinking about the loud controversies of late and the various ways we Americans have changed the meaning of our identity as human beings. An American man or woman shopping at the mall is human—that’s a given, right? A consumer is important; is human. A voter is human, but these days it is only if he or she believes the same things we do and trusts in the same proper steps to transform the country (rather than some other, surely evil steps) and so votes for “our” party. The ideal of respect (sadly, not always fulfilled over the centuries) for one another is in pronounced abeyance. That’s natural, of course, because the ideas that the image of God shines through all mortal flesh is dead in what is essentially a post-Christian society. […]

In great part, we mean in this country because we shop. I shop, therefore I am. Likewise, we are tiny parts in the voting apparatus, continually pestered to think according to correct party lines. If we are too young to shop or vote or too ill or decrepit, we just don’t matter much to the system—we’re not quite human, and others decide what to do about us.

But this is wholly wrong, isn’t it? We have forgotten what it is to be human if we believe that either consuming or voting correctly grounds us and makes us human, much less fully human (another large question!) But that akilter definition of the human is the strong impression one gets from vocal campus outbursts and the standard media and the blizzard of advertising tumbling around us….
Marly Youmans, Shop. Vote. Don’t forget to be human.

The hinge of words swings back and forth, creaking,

unable to decide what direction

they should take. My knees argue, unable

to agree on where we’re going. They want

to take a vote, but it’s just them, the two

of them. They aren’t listening to me, or

anyone else. How can I walk, half snow,

half heat?
PF Anderson, Knees (Bodymap, 2)

You know I love taking pictures of hummingbirds. They represent something about my soul – always in a hurry, and attracted to flowers. I think that we have to watch how to take in the stories of our world – reading books an antidote to the confusing and jarring barrage of bad news and bad things happening in the world – because they force us to slow down and consider things more deeply. Spending time with people on the phone or in real life is different than e-mail or texting – it helps us integrate with our communities.

When you’re a writer, and if you feel your writing in important, it is essential to guard your writing time. For me, it’s after everyone is asleep – when the inner editor is quieter (editors often go to sleep at 10 PM, I think) and my mind is freer to make connections. I’ve been writing poems outside of any planned “book project” – letting myself write whatever it wants, from flash fiction involving time travel to poems about Game of Thrones. It’s clear from the insomnia and nightmares that I’m sensitive to what’s going on in the world, not to mention the stress of trying to get all my medical tests and appointments in before the end of the year, when my deductible flips over and I have to start paying out of pocket again. Emily Dickinson is my symbol of the poet isolated from the world, and yet, had a tremendous life of the mind in her rooms and gardens. She really allowed herself time to write and even more, time to notice things. Instead of allowing our minds and attention to be constantly drawn to the latest scandal and tragedy (and there are plenty of those), scanning instead of truly paying attnetion, how do we hold ourselves steady? Meditation, prayer, reading and writing, and if possible (which it isn’t always, in winter) spending time out in nature. If you have other answers to this modern dilemma, let me know. How do we put into practice embracing the things that are truly important to us?
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Urge to Protect and Post-Election Insomnia, Looking for the Magic, and Guarding Your Mind/Time

Ten Reasons for (not) writing:

California is burning.

Our white nationalist president is blaming California for the fires.

There is a civil war going on in this country, and the right is better armed.

Mass shootings r/t #3.

Refugees walking hundreds of miles to be greeted by armed troops at the US border.

Initiative 1631 (a policy to combat climate change) failed to pass in Washington State, funded by big oil, so we may as well just prepare for the worst.

It’s a big season for deaths. I attend deaths, hence, I’ve been busy.

Prop 2 failed. No new library for Sequim, Washington. Property owners win.

Promises to keep.

The new kitten is eating all of my plants and then taking naps on the keyboard.

Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Afternoon

Okay. Just over 1500 words of my play Accountability Partners for this week’s Long Form Friday, which took place in the afternoon because I had to attend some training for the college in the morning. Also, four poems written this week, two of which I (kinda) finalized this morning. When I should have been running. *Cough*

I’m being really, really, REALLY stubborn by keeping to these early morning and Friday writing sessions, considering all of the grading I’m backed up with, but damnit, I made a commitment to my writing for this academic year, and I did it by abandoning a shit-load of committees and other responsibilities, and if I wasn’t backed up with grading because of my writing at this point in the semester, I’d be backed up with grading because of all the committee meetings and driving between campuses and other time-sucks that make this job absolutely maddening. […]

[W]hile it appears that nothing has really changed, everything has changed. I am so much calmer, and enjoy teaching so much more, when I protect my writing time. (I’m also so much happier and healthier when I protect my running time, but we can’t have everything, can we?)
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Writing, Grading, & the End of Soccer Season

Have you ever read the right book at precisely the right time? One Beautiful Dream by Jennifer Fulwiler is about a religious mom of 6 kids (under age 8) navigating the season of having babies while also pursuing her dream to write. So we have a little in common! And so often I have felt like my dreams conflict–my husband and I want a large family so obviously I have to set writing down, to quit. I’ve tried to quit so many times, but I find myself there again, writing a poem, a book of poems, sending them to publishers. […]

I desperately wish I were a better writer. I desperately wish I were a better mother. But the answer to being better at both isn’t necessarily for me to give up on either one. God gave me a unique calling that is made up of some different moving parts but it is all going in the same direction. Something about writing is important and I need to keep doing it. Welcoming all these little baby-strangers into my life, one at a time, is also part of that calling, and I don’t fully understand how it is all going to work out together in the end.

This book helped me though. It made me feel like although my big family dream and my poetry dream are both crazy dreams to so many (most!) people, God made me for this, so even if I fail, I don’t really fail. I feel inspired to keep going. And I don’t think that right now that is going to look like starting a new book or a novel, but it might, if that inspiration comes, and I’m not too afraid to follow it.
Renee Emerson, dreaming big dreams

100 years since the end of WW1. My granddad, Alfred, was a sergeant in the Kings Own Yorkshire Life Infantry. He joined as a territorial some years before the war, working as a journeyman housepainter. For some time, on Armistice day I’ve posted a poem I wrote for him, and also for my grandma, Ethel. I never knew her.

Everyone dutifully remembers the men who died in uniform, and that is right and proper. I wish we would publicly remember their wives and mothers, the ones left behind to bring up big families; there was no social security for them. They were left to fend, and those working class women often struggled to make ends meet. They often had big families. Alfred never saw active service. He wanted to, but instead of going off with the lads he called his comrades, he was admitted to hospital and died in 2016 of Hodgkinson’s lymphoma.

Ethel managed to bring up my mum, my two aunts and my uncle. She gradually grew profoundly deaf. The isolation fed depression and in the 1930s she took her own life. Remember the women left behind. Remember them. [Click through for the poem.]
John Foggin, Centenary

The air shimmers and stiffens
and Mary shatters it

like a pane of glass.
There is a quality
of sound – a mud-born
eructation from the throat

of a marsh bird, or
some searing midnight
heartbreak called from ridge
or hillside – that curls

around the edge of time
to bear witness to what
we have never known,
should never have to know.

And Mary shrieks from that
elemental place, her mouth
split earth and her voice
magma, sudden and naked

in the wrong world.
Dick Jones, Binners

For a workshop on Tuesday, Election Day, one of my undergraduates submitted a poem based on the day he hid in a closet during a middle school shooting. A different student said there had been a shooting in her school, too; another described an active shooter just last week in the high school her sister attended; a fourth said a friend had died in the Parkland massacre. Stunned, I responded with something like, “Are you telling me that four out of the fifteen of you have had a near miss with a school shooting?” Then two more raised their hands. Six. […]

In short, teachers now have dangerous jobs, students are always vulnerable to random violence, and nowhere is safe. So all together, now: let’s write pantoums! Seriously, teaching poetry during any of the crises we’ve been negotiating lately could seem frivolous, but I’ve been feeling the opposite. My poetry classes keep turning into spaces for analyzing and reflecting on disaster in ways that feel more emotionally useful than, say, reading the news.

Some of that is chance resonance between syllabi and world events. Well, sort of chance. For a different course, my mid-20th-century US poetry seminar, we’re studying the usual characters–O’Hara, Brooks, Rich, and others–but I replaced a session I used to devote to Vietnam war protest poetry with several readings from an anthology I’ve really come to admire: Words of Protest, Words of Freedom, edited by Jeffrey Lamar Coleman. It’s been clear especially since Trump’s rise that we remain in the middle of Civil Rights battles that defined the country fifty years ago, or perhaps in a never-ending backlash against them, so I knew it was time to represent Civil Rights poetry more robustly on my syllabus. Coleman clearly did his research, because while the book contains many famous poems by our best US poets, it also features more obscure work culled from little magazines of the era, and the friction is riveting. I’ve been so impressed by how eagerly and intelligently my students are working through material that is even more relevant than I intended. The KKK leaflets were distributed here on a Friday, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting occurred the next morning, and for Monday, the assignment was to discuss poems about the KKK bombing of a Baptist church that killed four young girls in Birmingham in 1963. That synchronicity has definitely brought urgency to our discussions.

But is it synchronicity, now, or just the permanent daily texture of the world? Since I started drafting this post, there’s been another mass shooting. The election cheered me, but the administration immediately punched back with more ways of undermining the law. Poetry gives me access to other minds confronting related crises thoughtfully–it’s personally useful to read Giovanni, Hayden, Brooks, and many others as they work through anger and hope and grief–but it’s also providing small collections of us with a nonpartisan angle of discussion on the human toll of violence, the way it ripples out in space and time, and I’m grateful for that, too. It makes me feel warmly connected to other anxious human beings working through serious questions, and I hope it does the same for them.
Lesley Wheeler, Keeping the minutes on violence, with Lucille Clifton

Shell shock. Combat fatigue. Delayed hysteria. Contemporary psychology and medicine have another name for it now, post-traumatic stress disorder, and have extended the concept of delayed stress response to victims of trauma other than combat: abuse and catastrophe victims, anyone who has survived a traumatizing experience, of which the world offers many options. […]

Lately, I feel a bit as though the country in which I live–the citizens, popular culture, government and also the environment itself, geological, ecological, biological–has exhibited PTSD responses. Probably, now that I think about it, that’s been true for a long time. So I find myself contemplating the long view (see the Clock of the Long Now for a theoretical 10,000-year perspective!)

As an individual, I do not have a long reach nor a significant number of years to dwell on the planet. That need not keep me from using the long-view perspective; indeed, I sense that the type of curating that I have begun in terms of compiling another manuscript and thinking about the life of work I have contributed over the years through child-raising, landscaping, gardening, teaching, helping young people in university, assisting family members, and whatever other small drops one person can add to the ocean of existence, suggests my comfort level with the long now has deepened.

Likewise, I accept that suffering just pretty much covers the human condition from beginning to end, and without it we would never recognize how amazing the earth and its diverse communities are nor appreciate our joy nearly as much. Despite the difficulty involved in recalling trauma, we may need to face it, with the compassionate support of other humans, in order to more fully live our ordinary lives and understand the long view.
Ann E. Michael, Post traumatic stress

After voting (or perhaps while you are waiting in line), check out the stellar work in the Poets Resist 2018 Midterm Elections Special Feature! I’m still pinching myself because I can’t quite believe I’m in this lineup, which I feel compelled to share in its entirety: Yanyi, Luther Hughes, Sage, Sumita Chakraborty, Lynn Melnick, Hazem Fahmy, Linette Reeman, Melissa Crowe, Arielle Tipa, Simone Person, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Ally Ang, Jesse Rice-Evans, Dena Igusti, Stephen S. Mills, Chen Chen, Bailey Cohen, Heather Derr-Smith, Bryan Borland, Zefyr Lisowski, Allie Marini, Erika Walsh, Gemma Cooper-Novack, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Hannah Cohen, Fargo Tbakhi, Cassandra de Alba, and George Abraham.

I’m so grateful to Anthony Frame for reaching out about contributing to this special issue of Glass: A Journal of Poetry. “The Day Dr. Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I Teach My Daughter the Names of the Parts of Female Anatomy” would not have been written otherwise. I tried and failed to write something for three months, then this poem was completed in less than three weeks, which is very quickly for me.

My poem is indebted not only to Dr. Ford’s brave testimony but also to “Naming of Parts,” written by Henry Reed, who served in the British Army during World War II. You can hear Henry Reed and Frank Duncan reading the poem, the first part of “Lessons From the War,” here.

Poets Resist!
Hyejung Kook

Recently, I have been spending most of my time redacting texts and doing cut ups from newspapers and magazines. However, I haven’t produced any composite fictions along the lines of the one above for a while. When I came across Frances Revel’s work [in 3:AM Magazine] I felt so inspired I promised myself I would go back to this type of work. After all, the nights are lengthening and collaging is a great way to pass an evening.

3am magazine published Revel’s work in their Poem Brut section, which is well worth a look if you’re interested in the way poetry and art collide. There’s some interesting and challenging work on their site that really widens the definition of what poetry is and how it looks on the page/ screen. I’ve said before that the internet is a great platform for this sort of experimental literature, primarily because of the speed at which new work can be published, and also because it costs much less than traditional print to publish texts like Revel’s.

3am magazine also publish asemic poetry in their Poem Brut section. I only came across this term recently, after fellow poets Marion New and Sue Riley returned from a writing residential and introduced me to it. I was sceptical at first – a kind of gut reaction that said, ‘it’s not poetry’. Well, maybe it’s not the sort of poetry I’m familiar with, I began to reason, because partly, my love of poetry is to do with its fringe status. I’m often drawn to poems that stand outside the (lyrical) mainstream.
Julie Mellor, Whatever it is, we’re against it: 3am magazine

I find myself in the midst of some terrific reads right now, piles of jewels of books that I’m rolling around in like Midas.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass is a gentle murmur of profound wisdom, the breeze ticking the corn leaves, quaking the aspen as this botanist and member of the Potawotami people braids together different ways of knowing. I’m taking small bites of it, rare for me, a voracious eater. But it’s the proper way to absorb this book.

Ruth L. Schwartz’s Miraculum is poems of close observation, of some duende, and the intimacy of conversation with an old friend. I love encountering books whose authors seem like someone I’d like to know.

Bruce Beasley’s All Soul Parts Returned is quick becoming a new favorite, sprawling, witty poems considering the soul and the sanity, tweaking the sacred mutterings of catechisms. Love his work, which always makes me laugh and be amazed at his creativity.

Lucia Perilla’s On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths is so full of life, often wry, vivid. Mortality is much on the mind of these lively poems, so it was especially startling for me to learn that this wonderful poet I just discovered died a few years ago.
Marilyn McCabe, Easy on the Eyes; or, Book Report on Recent Reading

With Midnight in a Perfect World officially released next week by Sibling Rivalry Press, here’s a Spotify playlist of the songs and music that inspired and informed the poetry in the collection. There are tunes by Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Marianne Faithfull, Iggy Pop, Kylie Minogue, T. Rex, Miles Davis and, of course, DJ Shadow.

Midnight in a Perfect World – DJ Shadow: Insight, foresight, more sight – the clock on the wall reads a quarter past midnight. So begins DJ Shadow’s epic slice of trip-hop built on a plethora of samples including the opening words from Organized Konfusion. I first heard this dreamy song from Shadow’s debut, Entroducing…, in 1996 on my second visit to London. It remains one of my favorite pieces of music and its mood informed the entire collection.
[Click through for the full playlist]
Collin Kelley, A playlist of songs & music that inspired “Midnight in a Perfect World”

The Road Most Travelled: My room to the Kettle

door to kettle: 23 steps

kettle to tap: 10 steps

tap back to kettle base: 10 steps

take plastic jug, cup with coffee granules in, and carton of milk to sink: 10 steps

return to kettle when boiled and take it to sink: 20 steps

return milk and plastic jug back to cupboard and return to sink: 20 steps

re-fill kettle and return to plug and then return to sink: 20 steps

take cup of coffee back to room: 25 steps

So the most exercise I get, other than walking to my workshops, is through making coffee! 138 steps per cup of coffee … I suspect I do 1,000 steps per day just imbibing coffee and making my dinner! :)
Giles L. Turnbull, The Research Roundabout

October 28, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 43

Forgive me if I editorialize here just a little. This week, I’ve been reminded of how much we need poetry, whether we know it or not. The racist lies from Trump and Fox News about the migrant caravan of desperate Hondurans led directly to the most violent anti-Semitic attack in the history of the U.S., capping off a week in which pipe bombs were mailed to Trump’s perceived enemies (starting with that bogeyman of anti-Semites, George Soros), and a gunman killed two African Americans in a grocery store after trying and failing to enter a Black church. And today we learn that Brazilians have elected a straight-up fascist demagogue despite—or perhaps because of—his violent threats against his opponents. This lurch toward intolerance and xenophobia is world-wide and didn’t begin with Trump, and poetry alone is far from sufficient to counter it, but if we’re going to retain any shred of sanity in the weeks, months, and years ahead, I believe we need honest and unflinching language more than almost anything except love itself.

Poets have certainly been rising to the challenges of the political moment — none more so than Natalie Diaz. So I’d like to begin this week with the latest poetry film from Motionpoems, director Mohammed Hammad’s adaptation of Diaz’s poem “American Arithmetic,” which had its web debut at the blog Directors Notes on Monday.

Taking a statistical approach to the underreported issue of systemic injustice directed at the Native American community in modern-day America, New York based, Saudi born filmmaker Mohammed Hammad’s revelatory documentary American Arithmetic adapts Native educator and poet Natalie Diaz’s original poem for screen as part of season 8 of non-profit arts initiative Motionpoems. Making its online premiere here today, DN asked Mohammed to share how he created this intimate look at a community of organizers reclaiming land and culture, whose lives have all too often been derailed by police intervention. […]

How did your conceptualization of Natalie Diaz’s poem evolve from an initially abstract narrative to its current form and how do you feel the use of portraiture and mixed format cinematography strengthened your interpretation of the poem?

I initially had a visual treatment that was more abstract and super ambitious production-wise relative to the budget we were working with. Part of the initial concept was to film portraits of residents of the reservations. After much consideration and a push from my producers, we decided it would be best to have the film feature portraits of indigenous people living in a city to better relate to Natalie Diaz’s depiction. We felt it would create moments of intimacy that would contextualize the statistics mentioned in the poem.

I felt that the camcorder footage would add that extra layer of intimacy between the film and the viewer, to show a more intimate perspective of the illuminating conversations happening behind the scenes.

From its opening moments, American Arithmetic’s soundtrack is peppered with a multitude of vocal fragments discussing the hostile environment encountered by the Native American community. Could you tell us more about the process of building the film’s soundtrack?

The more I embraced the portraiture treatment of the film, the more the pieces of the puzzle came together more, especially with regards to the audio part of the film. It just made sense to add snippets of our subjects’ interviews and to weave together a collection of reflections, each contributing to the conversation on what it’s like to be a Native person in America today.

Do you feel that your experience of having lived in several countries meant that you approached this project from a particular vantage point?

My experience living in several countries taught me to be malleable and I definitely applied that into the process of making this film. The film itself took me out of my comfort zone as I was making a stylized hybrid poetic documentary/narrative piece which I can’t say I’ve ever done before.
MarBelle, Mohammed Hammad Explores the Influence of Police Intervention on Native American Lives in ‘American Arithmetic’

Today I’m going to get up early and get ready for a “virtual” book club visit to talk about Field Guide to the End of the World. It’s a good opportunity to talk about poetry with other people who care about books, which is always cheering. One of the ways I cheered myself this week despite rejections and relentlessly terrible news was turning off the television and computer and reading books. Books remind me of how I developed my own set of ethics as a kid – how The Lorax helped me develop into an environmentalist and Horton Hatches a Who a reminder of keeping promises. How reading books by different authors from different countries helped me imagine what it was like to live in a different country, speak a different language – how The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Weisel helped me understand the horrors of what people did to Jewish people just because they were Jewish, how reading Cry, the Beloved Country helped me know the evils of apartheid, all the dystopias I read about as a kid – from Handmaid’s Tale to Brave New World to 1984, from Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone stories – illustrated the possibilities of evil, and how to stand up against it. Madeleine L’Engle’s Swiftly Tilting Planet and the nuclear fears of the seventies and eighties. Books changed who I was and how I saw the world, how I saw right and wrong, and this gave me hope. Maybe by writing something – we can help others understand and empathize and connect with a world not their own. We should fight for libraries and help teach books that reach beyond out own experiences and encourage others to read and talk about books as much as we can.

How to Do Good

If you, like me, have been struggling with despair in the face of horrific hate, racism, and evil, think of what we can do to bring light. Yes, books – reading and writing and encouraging others to read them. Yes, voting – even if you feel like it’s a pain and you’re worried your one vote won’t make a difference, it can. Yes, giving money to charities – from fighting diseases to fighting childhood poverty to support for causes like the environment or ending racism or rights for the oppressed and refugees – and if you can’t afford to give money, as I couldn’t for some years, you can volunteer, which always helps you to connect to your local community, which can lessen a feeling of alienation. I had a dream last night where I was asking famous women about how to do good, and they sat down and talked to me about practical ways to put good into your world instead of evil. Spreading a little kindness – I talked in my last blog post about telling writers who have inspired you about how they’ve impacted you, but calling a lonely relative or friend who’s been going through a hard time, standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves – all work. I woke up feeling less despairing – the brief blue sky that appeared this morning didn’t hurt – and maybe I’m naive, but I still believe – just as much as when I was a kid – in facing evil and fighting it with the resources we have.

As October comes to an end, I hope you get a chance to see the moon through the clouds – and the light, even as the darkness seems to stretch out and overpower it.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poems on the Moon, Going to Book Club, and How to Try to Do Good and not Despair

A powerhouse poet and my friend, Jeannine Hall Gailey, has been blogging and posting about her own discouragement and trying to restore herself by focusing on literature she loves. Thinking of her, and also about the Civil-Rights-inspired poetry my students are currently reading, I asked the members of an undergraduate seminar why they were studying English and creative writing, why that seemed worthwhile to them when there’s so much anti-humanities rhetoric swirling around. What can poetry do? Why read, write, and study it?

They gave practical answers about learning to write and wry answers about being too unhappy to thrive without English class in their daily lives. They also talked about how reading certain books had educated them, extended their empathy, and set them intellectually afire. They referenced poems and prose that had reassured them they were not alone and not crazy, although the world has gone mad and it can be hard to find your people. Yes to all of those reasons. I definitely treasure the company, these days, of the poets and bloggers, the English majors and Creative Writing minors, and everyone else who loves literary art enough to get a little obsessive about it. So many Americans seem angry at the wrong people or, what’s even more bewildering to me, too apathetic to take even the smallest of stands against this administration’s destructiveness: to vote.

The poets, though–they’re trying to change the world. I see them writing their way out of insanity in the books, the magazines, and in the submission pile. I’m doing it, too, even as I remain skeptical that poems (or blog posts) are effective places to fight political battles. Certainly they’re not the ONLY place we should be fighting. But they can constitute zones of kindness and good company, alternate worlds of clearer thinking and human connection and occasionally something more magical than that–something like sustenance or transformation. Like Jeannine and like my students, I continue to feel relief and wonder when I visit them.
Lesley Wheeler, Scary days, undignified cats

Last night I read about the death of Ntozake Shange, most famous for her play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. I remember the line of the play which seemed so revolutionary when I heard it at a performance I saw in grad school (early 90’s):

“i found god in myself / and i loved her / i loved her fiercely.” My grad school feminist mind glommed onto the idea of a god as female. Only later did I think about the other idea in this quote, the idea that we find God already inside us. It reminds me of much spiritual teaching, that we already have everything we need. Some traditions take an opposite approach, that we’re born broken and only when we heal our brokenness will be be redeemed/find what we’re looking for.

Her work transformed me in other ways, too. That relentless exploration of how difficult life is for modern women seemed radical at the time. Her work was part of the feminist work of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s that told us that regular life was worthy of artistic exploration and expression too, and it was such a strong counterpoint to the message I got in grad school.

And of course, her work looked at the lives of minority women who faced problems unique to them. I haven’t read her work in decades, but I imagine that it still seems sadly relevant.

Many of our social scientists tell us that we won’t see societal transformation until we have done the work of recognizing and naming the problems that afflict a society. It is often through the work of writers like Shange that we are able to empathize, even if the problems don’t afflict us. It is often through the visionary work of a variety of writers, spiritual and otherwise, that we can start to imagine what a better world could be.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Loss and Reformation

I work as a nurse practitioner at a rural family medicine clinic. Although I call myself a poet, I have worked all of my adult life in the health care system. We had a staff retreat yesterday, which turned into an emotional event, changing (at least my own) irritation at having to go to a early meeting on Saturday morning to gratefulness that I have a job that matters and work with people who matter to me. It could have been a gripe session– as medical providers we are, of course, very privileged economically, and yet find plenty to gripe about in our work settings. So it was heartening to find that our strongest consensus concerned asking leadership to be more generous and more committed to our support staff– the nurses and medical assistants, the front desk and call center staff– without whom nothing would happen at the clinic. There has always been something family-like about working in health care, whether in the ER at Beth Israel Hospital in NYC; doing abortions in Tallahassee, Florida; providing care to HIV positive women in the South Bronx; or providing palliative care to trauma patients at Harborview in Seattle. There is the sense that we understand what’s at stake and therefore, are able to look beyond our differences and actually care about each other, take care of each other.

So unlike the way the world seems to be working these days.

On the poetry front, I have a review of Robin Becker’s The Black Bear Inside Me up at the Rumpus. […]

Things I think I know for sure:

I’m voting against tyranny and hatred.
I’m working, at least until I retire, which I expect to do in 2020
when I turn 70.
Poetry has saved my life. More than a few times.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning from Moue to Musing

I had a couple of perfect days recently: one was an exquisite balance of walking, friends, color, nature, and the absorbing work of editing. The other was a wonderful balance of solitude, making applesauce, and the absorbing work of editing.

I love editing far more than I love the act of making work. I often do the work of writing by having one eye winced closed in case I’m making crap. Or I’ll write while pretending to think of other things, the way a cat friend of mine used to look away insouciantly as he hooked a plastic spider ring and flung it to one side. Then he’d leap after it as if it were prey. In this way I sometimes find half-forgotten things in my notebook that I can leap upon with edit-lust.

This time though I had the rare pleasure of feedback from people whose opinions I care about, and could delve in to their notes and make multiple copies of possible versions of the poems while muttering things like, yes, yes, okay, you may be correct here, or no, no, you’re wrong, utterly wrong, or, not infrequently, both in reverse succession.

But I also love the balance of mind and body, the meditation of walking, the pleasurable act of squishing apples in my hand-turned apple squisher device. The act of editing is both such things — establishing rhythm, noting details, turning chopped stuff into smooth, and balancing words and silence.
Marilyn McCabe, Callooh Callay; or, A Brief Note on Editing

Dear Editors, why I won’t pay you to reject me

Because I’m work-from-home online adjunct, mom of four (soon to be five) kids whose husband works in the food industry.

Because your contest fee means a night of not ordering pizza out even though morning sickness has me on the floor OR telling my kid she has to wait a while for her new shoes OR missing out on the field trip because even though its five dollars a kid, we have a lot of kids.

Because I don’t believe that literary magazines and contests should “narrow the pool” financially, keeping those who don’t have professional development funds or wealthy spouses or deep pockets from being able to enter.

Because if this is how the literary world always revolved, you would be pre-rejecting Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde, Gwendolyn Brooks, if the patriarchy didn’t get to it first.

It isn’t about “not believing in my work” or “not supporting the arts”–it is about $20 not being much to you, but being too much of a risk for me.

Because I know you work hard, and for little, but so do I. And my work is not worthless, and it is not worth so little that I must pay an editor to even look at it.
Renee Emerson, Dear Editors, why I won’t pay you to reject me

I only have two.

They grow and shrink, lumps

and bones, distorted

and perfectly flawed.

They arc in lovely

lines, dangling toe-buds

like pearl drops & chains.

They fracture/fragile.

They are beautugly.
PF Anderson, Feet (Bodymap, 1)

When William Burroughs did his cut ups, he often cut two pages of text down the middle and juxtaposed the different halves. I’ve been messing about with this method, using fiction texts to see what might surface. I’ve moved from two to three juxtaposed texts which seems to widen the ‘phrase field’ a bit, and the one above generated the line ‘overlap of a moth’. I decided to coin the term ‘overlap’ for this type of poem. The result is quite open and experimental; the words still seem to be in flux. I like this – the way meaning doesn’t seem to be fixed. Anyway, here’s the poem. See what you think.

moth

I don’t know exactly
its paralysis
the bit I see infallibly
through daylight

the glass door
respectful and cold
the way she talks about
the inner significance of things

gone soon enough
to the window
feverish at eye level
thrumming

between good and evil
free to acknowledge this
all the time very uncertain

pitiful isn’t it?
talking
Julie Mellor, Overlap of a moth

[Jeanne] Oliver suggests making your storyboard from “colors, textures, images, art, magazine pages, objects, travel, architecture, history, family, vintage ephemera, fabrics, and online searches regarding people or places.” I decided to make a storyboard out of the things I’d gathered as well as new images. I pulled out some old magazines, papers I’d saved, old photographs, and other bits and pieces.

In a short while, I had a pile. I selected items from the pile and taped them, more or less at random, to a piece of poster board. When I was finished, I saw that I had placed a photo of my father from 1957 next to the word “Stay” in the upper right-hand corner.

In the opposite corner, I had taped a photo of my German grandparents’ house in Mexico City below to the word “bones.” Above that, the words “a beautiful life” and “lost.” In the middle of the collage, I placed a picture of Little Red Riding Hood facing the wolf.

Other things on the storyboard include a page from To Kill a Mockingbird, the words “dreams & theories,” photographs of my grandparents, a forest scene, and a piece of handmade paper.

The next step in this process is to explore those connections through writing. Oliver: “Is there something in your past or present that you never considered incorporating into your art? Could there be new inspiration right in front of you?” From this exercise, I’m able to ask myself what connections there might be between a house in 1936 Mexico City, Little Red Riding Hood, and a conversation between Jem, Scout and Dill in front of Boo Radley’s house.

“I find the gathering part of this exercise extremely relaxing and meditative,” Oliver writes. I enjoyed the hunter-gatherer aspect as well, paging through my notebooks, ripping pictures from magazines, and adding the odd bits I’ve collected over the years.
Erica Goss, Storyboards for Creative Writing

Recently, I dreamt of falling water and gently swaying scarves and weavers who crafted magical cloth. I dreamt of dancing, silver bracelets shimmering on my arms, and resting on a mystical shore used for healing sleep. And for the first time in what seems like forever, I sat down yesterday and spent a few hours writing in my poetry journal. I now have the seed of an idea for a new poetry chapbook.

For a long time, I’ve puzzled over why I’ve been struggling with writing poetry. I don’t want to poo-poo the idea that learning difficult things is valuable. There is a great value in learning something that requires time, study, scholarship and devotion. But isn’t the point of all that said scholarship to then to take it into the greater world and share it for the good of others? Or to put it to some sort of practical use? There is much lamenting in the poetry world about how no one reads poetry. Yet poets by and large have spent a lot of time in narrow enclaves, writing for each other in a specific, learned language that isn’t interesting or accessible to the general public. By the time I stepped away from poetry to focus on writing my novel, I was worried that I would begin to cement that same language, with its inscrutable trends and impenetrable aura, into my own poetry. Writing poetry felt constricting rather than expansive; anxiety-producing rather than joyous.

Is poetry to be hoarded amongst those who can devote their lives to its mysteries– something holy to be gate-kept by a few high-appointed guardians? Or do we as poets have a responsibility to ensure its ideas and joys are shareable to a wider audience? I guess the answer to that conundrum lies in what one believes the function of poetry is, or if you even believe it needs a function beyond itself. Personally, I believe all art should be functional to some degree or another, but I’m sure greater minds than mine would disagree. If the role of the poet is to experiment with language and push boundaries, then is the sacrifice inevitably accessibility? Then again, isn’t the ultimate point of language communication? And why am I wasting my time and my readers time ruminating on these questions when all I really want to do is write a game review for the vintage “Vampire: The Masquerade?” I don’t have any answers. I just want to see if it’s possible to write poetry that would appeal to people who would normally never read poetry. Anyone with actual intellectual depth, please feel free to weigh in. Two paragraphs of this and I’m already mentally exhausted. (A PhD in the making I am not.)
Kristen McHenry, Choking in the Shallow Water, Vintage Game Review Tease

After our grandmother died a long month after a cancer diagnosis, Mark started to get terrified. Suddenly, everything, including himself, was mortal. He lay in bed, eight, and I sat beside him, eleven and a half, and he asked quivering questions to the ceiling, no light except for the occasional blue blinking of his computer’s power button:

“What does it mean to die?

“When will I die?

“When will you die?

“Where do we go when we die?

“Why do people have to die?”

And to all these I would answer, “That’s very, very far away, don’t think about it now.”

Then I’d go back to my own bed, walking through the hallway with my eyes closed, in case I saw her ghost. Some nights I would have nightmares.

The worst dream I had I was in Mark’s room with Mark, and he was asking those questions, and then her ghost appeared, suddenly, leaning over a lamp. I pointed to her, and Mark turned around, but he didn’t see her…

*

We were like turtles in the dark, wanting to swim up towards the moon’s shape on the surface of water. But we kept mistaking each other’s pale lit shell below us for the moon, and so we’d spiral back, and back.
“This space is how much I love you” – guest blog post by Rainie Oet (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

Travel and illness are both estranging, and I’ve managed quite enough of both of late. Yesterday I felt like myself again and promptly wrote a poem about a visit to the Chihuly show at the Vanderbilt estate, Biltmore. I found this surprising because I no longer write many poems where the “I” is so clearly related to me. Lately I’ve written two long series of poems that ostensibly have nothing at all to do with my days, though of course that’s a feint, a bull’s red flag, a dropped handkerchief. Maybe the little poem was just grounding me–hey, I’m back in my life!

After that, I worked on a forthcoming novel. I had a dead man to tote to another part of the manuscript, and then I–poof!–turned a long passage of description into a scene starring the main character interacting with various things, including the hair of that aforesaid dead man.

The dead are heavy but portable. Sometimes they make more sense in one place than another. This is true in life also, but we don’t get to choose. Although I do know a few people who carry around the dead in urns. On a mantlepiece, the dead are strangely magnetic. They provide a kind of focus to a room. Not the fashionable kind that house decorators desire… This seems wrong, of course. The dead are already magnetic without being physically present in a room. They follow us whether we will or no. They crowd around as we grow older. We ignore them most of the time, but now and then one becomes vivid.
Marly Youmans, The dead man in the huckleberries

The first time I came to Skye on my own was to Write. The capital letter is deliberate. I’d signed up for an MA in Creative Writing. As I’ve said before, it was rubbish, but that was at least in part because I was, too. Suishnish, on the left, and Boreraig are sites of 19thC. Clearances, and I was going to Write Poems about them having read everything John Prebble could tell me about the business. Anyway, I hiked over the moor to Boreraig, and on another day, tramped up the metalled track to Suishnish, where there’s a house that was inhabited until relatively recently, and also big fank…a sheep station barn. There are only ruined walls at Boreraig. The crofters were driven to subsist on the poorer land on the opposite shore, or shipped off to Canada. Or they just died.

That was over 12 years ago, and the past is another country. I wrote poems about it all, but as Helen Mort said to me “You can make a poem be, but it won’t be any good”. They weren’t. However. There’s a circular walk of 12 miles or so that starts on the other side of that Boreraig skyline. It starts from the ruined church of Kin Criosdh on the Elgol road, and can be walked clockwise, passing the doomed marble quarries to go over to Boreraig and then along the shore below the cliffs, up a cliff path and on to the Suishnish headland and track..it’s a bit of a plod along the road back to Kil Criosdh. I had always wanted to walk it, and when I hit 65 I had both hips replaced and six months later I did the walk, counterclockwise. The following year I did it again, clockwise. For my money, counter- clockwise is best…it gets the road and the lorries from the Torrin quarries out of the way while you’re fresh, and after that, you may see no one for the rest of the trip. If it’s pissing down they’ll let you shelter in the fank if they’re working that day. Golden eagles haunt the cliff above the track, and there’s often the sight of one being harassed by crows.

I’m conflicted by that bit of coast in so many ways. I want to walk it again, but my ankle’s useless, and I can forget it. I regret the whole business of the MA and the ill-considered writing. And every year, there they are, Suishnish and Boreraig, the first thing I see in a morning for a week in the year. Or don’t see.

They are shapeshifters. They vanish in a scrim of wet muslin. They shine in the sun. They are scoured by squalls of snow. Sometimes, after a snowfall one of the Red Cuillin peaks rises like a moon, and Bla Bheinn towers beyond the headland. I love them and miss them.
John Foggin, Notes from a small island

Q~What’s one piece of advice you want to share?

A~Write from the gut. Go to that dark place you want to avoid. Explore those issues that make you sick to your stomach. That’s where the poem is. I give myself this advice every day.

Q~Do you find yourself returning to certain themes or subjects in your work?

A~I’m a white, privileged, bisexual woman from rural Alabama. As a child I was sexually abused by the Baptist minister’s foster son and have been sexually harassed for much of my professional life. My poetry is largely female-centered about issues that girls and women struggle with. The personal is political. Recently, I’ve worked with Greek myth, looking at those women whose stories weren’t told because women weren’t telling the stories. For instance, I imagine different poetic truths out of the mouths of Medusa, Medea, Leda, Eurydice et al. Much of the #MeToo Movement echoes the silenced history of these Greek archetypes.

Q~Who was your poetry first love?

A~Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” when I was sixteen. My eleventh-grade English teacher handed the class section one and asked us to respond. Like many teenagers, I was a disconsolate kid, always feeling alone and seeking something more. I felt like a lost soul and poetry became my refuge. A couple of years later I read Plath’s “Daddy” and felt confirmed. As Audre Lorde says, “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

Q~Who are you reading now?

A~If Not, Winter Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson; The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald; Tropicalia by Emma Trelles; and Averno by Louise Gluck.
Bekah Steimel, Jeopardy / An interview with poet Chella Courington

We were four generations in Pittsburgh; my grandfather grew up in the Hill District, then moved to Squirrel Hill. He was an old-style family doctor who made house calls with stethoscope in his leather kit. He sometimes took his payment in garden vegetables, or a chicken. When the Hill became mainly black neighborhood, he stayed working there and some patients, the story goes, named their kids after him (Reuben).

They davened in Synagogue Beth Shalom; were long members there until my parents moved to Rodef Shalom. I can’t imagine the decades were easy. I heard stories of some families during the Depression having to put their kids in Jewish adoption homes, and were lucky if the kids were there when money came back in.

My father worked outside the city in the mining counties. It took not recklessness but confidence to be that “Jewish buccaneer.” It was possible. Sometimes he had to shine a powerful flashlight down those hollers.

How far have we not come? We’re subjects of history’s hills and shadowed valleys. My grand-parents and parents, who have all passed, would have been surprised if they’d been told to take literally the psalm: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—

Many people are reminding us alongside the darkness there is abundant light. So be it.
Jill Pearlman, Hills, Shadowed Valleys, Squirrel Hill

October 21, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 42

Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but this week I found myself drawn to that most ubiquitous type of writer’s blog post: the announcement of recent writing or publishing success. Though often brief and unassuming, taken together, I think they showcase the incredible variety of opportunities for expression and publication that are out there these days, not to mention the imaginative depth and versatility of the poets I follow. First, though, let’s have a few reviews…

Friday & Saturday I had the opportunity to hear poet Lola Haskins read and to teach a workshop.

It’s my first exposure to Haskins though I had heard good things about her. Her Friday night reading was remarkable in that she read everything from memory, her voice is soft and yet words chosen in her work are profound. Each and everyone with a purpose. It was especially intimate because she was so in tune with the audience and not a page in front of her.

Saturday she quickly set out to provide sound advise and tool for eradicating the dreaded boredom that creeps into our writing and takes over. To stop writing from safety and write from risk.
Michael Allyn Wells, Breaking Out of Boredom with Lola Haskins

Sometimes, if I wake up extra-early, I’ll make a pot of tea and read one of the many bound-to-be-good poetry books stacked on the cyborg (what we call the sideboard, for obscure reasons). This morning I read Diane Seuss’ Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and Girl. It’s full of elegy and ekphrasis, a very rich book I can’t do justice to here. As far as analytic sharpness, I’m tapped out at the moment by teaching and student conferences; I’m just reading receptively, to fill the well. But I’m moved by her poems mourning a father lost in childhood, friends lost to AIDS, and her own lost girl-self. I’m also processing a brilliant reading and visit from Rebecca Makkai, whose much-acclaimed novel The Great Believers concerns the arrival of HIV to Chicago’s Boystown in the eighties. Rebecca was my student here in the nineties; I remember her fierce intelligence well, how she blew in like a wind ready to strip away stupid traditions, as the best of my students do now. But that version of myself feels long gone. All these texts and memories mirror each other fractionally, so my head feels busy with bright shards.

I’m also especially taken by Seuss’s self-portrait series, perhaps because one of my classes is deep in discussion about confessionalism. Here’s one: “Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid.” But I like “Self-Portrait with Levitation” even better: “Embodiment has never been my strong suit.” Here’s to learning to float again, one of these days.
Lesley Wheeler, Still life with two relaxed superheroes and a sparkle pen

September is coming to an end and the falling temperatures leave north-east England sharp but bright. I am on a train from my home town in Northumberland en route to Münster in the German province of Westphalia. The 2018 ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival awaits at the end of my long train ride: three days of poetry and film in a city reaching summer’s end. It is a good time of the year for poems, I think, and a good time of the year for films.

My excitement is tinged with the knowledge that this may be my last visit to the continent as a fully-fledged citizen of the EU. I’ve always wanted to visit ZEBRA. It seems to be an important place for poetry and film but when one of my films screened here four years ago, I couldn’t afford to come. I’m expecting an international affair: a reminder that, regardless of who is playing games with our borders and our nationhood, people will get together with others to write poems and make films. I am heartened by the fact that the very act of making a poetry film defies and challenges creative and political borders.

As I trundle my way through France and Belgium, I reflect on how the poetry film community is naturally collaborative. It needs more than the single artist in order to exist. That’s not to say that a person can’t make a poetry film on their own – I have done this and many of the films at the festival will surely be author made – but rather that if everyone worked in isolation, as much of the UK’s mainstream poetry world does, the world of poetry film would not be so rich and diverse. Part of this seems inherent in the medium: the juxtaposition gap often works best with two other-thinking minds. It sits at an intersection between several worlds: those of poetry, film-making, television, experimental art, music, sound art and artist’s moving image. Arguably, the poem is the only essential ingredient because without it, the form does not exist.
Stevie Ronnie, Film Ab!: A personal report on the Zebra Poetry Film Festival 2018

This summer I was wildly honored to have my poem “To The New Journal” published in the Summer Issue of the Southern Review. This is the third time I’ve been published in SR and I am a true fan of both the words and the visual art that they publish. There editors are professional, kind, and smart. But there’s one thing.

The Southern Review doesn’t feature much work on their website and so once the physical object of the journal is read and put on the shelf (and maybe tossed from libraries at a later date) most of the poems and prose are gone. Enter the Academy of American Poets with a new project: to showcase more poems on their website. Through an agreement with the Southern Review and Tin House, poems that were published in these print journals may now have a forever home as part of the Academy’s curated collection. This is the reason I can share “To the New Journal” with you.
.
Much like the Poetry Foundation website, the Academy of American Poets website seeks to provide an essential resources of poems, essays on poetry, poet bios, and lesson plans to anyone who is interested. Need a poem to read for a wedding or for a divorce? These websites can help! Teaching a poet and want to bring their voice into the classroom? These are great sites to access.

However, sometimes poems swing the other way: from the worldwide ether onto the printed pages of a book. My poem, “Boketto” based on the Japanese word which loosely translates to, to stare into space with no purpose, appeared on the Academy of American Poets site two years ago. This month, “Boketto” stars in the new craft book, The Practicing Poet, Writing Beyond the Basics, by editor, poet, and publisher extraordinaire, Diane Lockward.

Diane contacted me and asked for permission to reprint “Boketto” in her newest anthology / craft book (this is her third and each one is worth owning) and I happily agreed. In The Practicing Poet, Diane has created a prompt for a “weird word poem” based on my work. She has also done an explication of the poem that showed she had read the work carefully noticing the focus on double-barreled words and chiasmus (and no, I didn’t know the word chiasmus before yesterday but I like it and it describes a key strategy of the poem.

So this month I get to swing both ways: page poems onto the web and web poems onto new pages. I’m feeling very lucky indeed.
Susan Rich, The Joy of Poetry (That Swings Both Ways) Academy of American Poets, Practicing Poet, and the Southern Review

Many thanks to Matt DeBenedictis and John Carroll for having me as a guest on the Lit & Bruised literary podcast. We talk poetry, travel, London and the forthcoming publication of Midnight in a Perfect World. You can listen at this link.

And don’t forget to preorder the new collection and be entered to win a free manuscript/chapbook evaluation from me! Preorder from Sibling Rivalry Press at this link.
Collin Kelley, Talking poetry and travel on the Lit & Bruised podcast

Spent three and a half hours writing just over 1500 words of Accountability Partners today (my non-verse play). And in the morning, before the kids woke up, I wrote another poem for the new manuscript. That makes over 60 poems written since the end of June!

Sorry for the blog brag, but I had to share my good news with the universe. I’m on some kind of unprecedented tear here, and thoroughly enjoying it. I mean, not all of those 1500 words are golden, and I sincerely doubt all of the poems are publishable (certainly not right now — most need the benefit of time and careful revision) . . . but I’m so, so happy and grateful for the generation. And, yes, relieved. Because at this time last year, I was already having serious doubts about my abilities and future as a writer (even before the bad news/sabbatical debacle). After all — while it goes a long way toward helping with validation, publication is not necessarily the thing that makes one feel like the genuine article. It’s the ability to commit and get the thing that you want to write done. And after many years of just fucking around, treading water, I’m finally moving in an actual direction. Making progress. Yay!
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Long Form Friday Report

I’m really enjoying writing poems for ‘Frames of Reference’, part of the public art programme for King’s Gate, Amesbury, commissioned by Ginkgo Projects and funded by Bloor Homes.

I’m one of six Wiltshire-based artists who’ve been given a Local Artist Bursary for this project. You can read about some of the other artists and see examples of their work on the Ginkgo Projects’ site. The brief for this project is to create new work in response to the landscape and heritage of the area in and near Amesbury, so I’ve been working on some Wiltshire poems for the last couple of months, in between my other work.

For some poems, I’ve been thinking about my own life in Wiltshire and the ways I interact with the landscape and history here. For others, I’ve taken a different approach. For instance in my poem Circles and Wildflowers, which I’ve recorded onto SoundCloud and which you can read below, my starting point was the word ‘circle’ and some of its synonyms, combined with the names of wildflowers native to Wiltshire – names so gorgeous they are poems in themselves. Circles are an important feature of the landscape here with, to give some examples, the World Heritage sites of Stonehenge, Woodhenge and Avebury Stone Circle nearby, not to mention crop circles which mysteriously appear. [Click through to read the poem.]
Josephine Corcoran, Circles and Wildflowers

Before we get too far away from last week, and the week before that, let me record 2 publishing successes. I got my contributor copy of Gather, which published my article “Praying with Medieval Mystics.” In it, I explore Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich–longtime readers of my blogs know that I’ve explored the lives of those women before, but I like the ways I wove the ideas together.

I also got my contributor copy of Adanna, which published my poem “Blistered Palms,” which I wrote in the aftermath of last year’s hurricane season. It was one of those strange moments, reading the poem, when I recognized the inspiration for some of it, but not the rest; I don’t remember the writing process, the way I do with some poems. I remember driving by the huge piles of brush which had shreds of trash blowing in a breeze. It was close to Halloween, and at first I thought I might be seeing a Halloween decoration that had migrated, a ghost in those branches. I remember the time when it seemed that every morning, a different piece of jewelry broke.

Do I see this poem as hopeful? Yes, in a way. I also see some of the spiritual elements of my Christian tradition, that direction to try fishing again, maybe from a different side of the boat. And of course, there is the title, which talks to me of both the palms of hands, whether they be crucified hands or hands blistered from clearing away hurricane damaged palm trees. [Click through to read the poem.]
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Monday: “Blistered Palms”

I have been lucky in print this year. Two literary journals that I’ve long admired, Bellevue Literary Review and Prairie Schooner, published my poems. This is “a big deal” to me, because it is always exciting to be admitted into the pages of a magazine I like and because, despite the advantages of online/cloud-based literary journals, I love print!

There’s something inexpressibly marvelous about holding a book in my hands, turning the pages, and having a physical object–paper, binding, print–to carry with me.

Online magazines, theoretically at least, have a longer reach and can capture more readers (“hits”) than print. Literature requires audience, and the interwebs offer potentially millions of visitors to the poem online; but the operating word here is potential. What’s possible isn’t what generally happens. The readers of online literature, those people who stay on the poem long enough to read it–and then read the next poem, and the next, on-site–are not as legion as we poets might wish.

Through moderate use of social media, I do publicize my own work when it appears online (see links to the right on this page!). I welcomed the appearance of literature on the internet because one of my purposes for writing is to communicate with people. Readers matter to me. Getting my words into the public domain is the only way to begin that process of communication, and though online journals seem like the most ephemeral form of ephemera, they do make it easier for me to “share” (thanks to Facebook, I am beginning to despise that word) the poems or essays I’ve crafted.
Ann E. Michael, In print

Thank you to Escape Into Life for including an art and poetry feature containing my poems about the moon and some gorgeous art work. And I promise you, these are not your old run of the mill moon poems. There are universes being torn asunder, menacing Blood Moons, magical nightflowers, and some gorgeous art work. Here’s the link and a sneak peek:

Escape Into Life Moon Feature by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escape Into Life Moon Feature Poems, Autumn Scenes from Seattle

I’m over the moon to have a poem in the latest edition of Rise Up Review, a US based online magazine that publishes exciting and innovative new work. I know how hard it is to keep up with everything that’s being published, but if you have time, check out their Found/ erased section too, showcasing some excellent cut ups and composite fictions by Kathleen Loomis and J L Kleinberg (whom I first came across in Streetcake, an online journal that publishes experimental writing).
Julie Mellor, Rise Up Review

One of the most daunting challenges that confronts every struggling and submitting poet is the demand for “previously unpublished” poems. We have grown used to it by now, and most of us have developed elaborate systems for keeping track of what poems have already found a home, which are somewhere in the submission process, and which are virgin territory. We work with it, but we are not required to like it, and I would like to take this chance to say that it doesn’t serve us, the poetry community, or the poetic canon well.

It is understandable that publications and editors want fresh work, want publication rights and exclusivity, yet in asking, always, for work that has not yet found an audience they are eliminating the opportunity to re-publish some of the finest poems being written today.

In a hypothetical scenario a fledgling poet may write a poem that is, against all odds, a minor masterpiece, and since he or she is new at the game the poem will be submitted to a local anthology, or even a chapbook published by a local writer’s group. And…there the poem stays, unread, unhonored and unquoted save for the fortunate few who stumble across it.

One would think that publishers and lit mags would want the best of the best but their insistence on previously unpublished effectively screens out and eliminates many of the finest poems being written today. I believe that this may be one of the reasons that poetry is less in fashion today, because there is so little poetry that receives popular acclaim (and in no way am I implying that popularity indicates excellence). However, our audience, as poets, has to hear our voice and read our words in order to respond. The likelihood of any single poem becoming well-known or well-loved when it has a single publication, and often in a magazine with quite limited circulation, is small indeed.
Re-thinking Previously Published Poetry – guest blog post by Kathy Lundy Derengowski (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

This time it’s not just one poem. I’m staring down a bunch of poems. Make that a chapbook-length collection of poems. I’ve been sending them out individually and as a chapbook. With no luck. But I’ve long had this little hmm of concern about them. So I keep revisiting them, and having an argument with Me and Other Me:

– I read these poems and get a little glurgling in my gut. What is wrong, what is wrong?

– Is it the burrito we had for lunch?

– No. It is not the burrito we had for lunch. I’m sorry, I have to, again, come to the conclusion that the emotions of the poems are obscured. Or overly intellectualized. Or not well realized. Or, frankly, nonexistent. Too many of the poems feel like intellectual exercises.

– But we’ve been working on these for almost two years!!! There are some very interesting parts of many of these poems. There is emotion in some of them.

– But the sum? No. we just have to face the fact.

– But wait, two years worth of work? Must we chuck it?

– Quite possibly. In economics that time and effort is called a sunk cost. You can’t worry about it. It’s done and gone. The product just doesn’t work. It’s the clunker of chapbooks. A lemon.

– But, wait, let’s be reasonable. What about the parts that work? Can’t we start there?

– Yes. We can, clear-eyed and with renewed energy, start there. But there are no guarantees. Isn’t there a column in some magazine: “Can this relationship be saved?” That’s where we are. The answer could possibly be “no.” It’s also quite possible that we have not a chapbook-length collection but just a few good poems. They can be used toward some other as-yet-to-be-realized collection. The rest can go in the chuck-it bucket.

– Eesh. Okay, I might be able to live with that.

– Frankly, remember, all of these poems started out as imitations. So to some degree, they ARE intellectual exercises. We were trying on other poets’ rhythms and thought processes.

– Yeah, but we were inserting our own thoughts, our own nouns and verbs and clauses, so they did arise out of our own concerns. And then we edited them toward our authentic voice.

– But I can still detect that disconnection, that roundabout route to the poem. We have not shown what is at stake in these thoughts, situations, these descriptions, flights of fancy. We have not truly plumbed what these poems are “about” for us.

– This question, “what is at stake,” annoys me. What is ever at stake in a mere poem? No lives are lost or saved here.

– No? We are an uttering animal. We cry out in words. We jubilate in words. A poem can be a little cannon of power. What’s at stake? If I, the reader, don’t feel that something vital is at hand, some deep energy impelled the poem to being, then the poem misses the mark. I can indulge in memory and fantasy and philosophical meanderings. I can tell you my dream. But if I have not conveyed the deep “why” of what turned those into utterance, then I am wasting the reader’s time.
Marilyn McCabe, I Second That…; or, Considering the Emotional Gravitas in Poems

October 7, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 40

I sense a bit of exhaustion in the poetry blogosphere this week, as witnessed by the relative paucity of posts. Among those who did blog, there’s a certain introspection as political outrage gives way to resolve and a quest for pursuits that truly sustain us. Such as poetry, yes, but also photography, gardening, and other “useless things,” to quote Claudia Serea in her ongoing blogging collaboration with photographer Maria Haro, Twoism. “Around me, the world tilts, rocks, spills, / burns, crashes, cooks, / dies, laughs, cries. // And I plant thunderseeds…”

I have a deep weariness. It’s interesting to pay attention to my levels of weariness, which are often only somewhat connected to how much sleep I’m getting. This week’s weariness has to do with last week’s news, and the realization that this level of bad news of our incivility and worse is the new normal–or are we just back to what was always normal? This week’s weariness has to do with the fact that we’re at week 1 of our new quarter, which means longer hours at work. This week’s weariness has to do with the home repairs, which are progressing, but we’re still far from done.

I’m so weary that I can’t even envision what would fill my well. I want to write, but my brain feels dehydrated. It’s been awhile since I had a good meal, but nothing sounds appetizing. I’d like to sleep, but in a room that doesn’t also contain a refrigerator and other items stored there for a home remodel.

I realize that I might sound like I’m depressed, but I’m not depressed so much as I am just bone tired.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Weariness update

Trying to teach Robert Hayden on Friday, I had such a mother of a hot flash that my glasses fogged up. I’m not sure my students even noticed. We were discussing Hayden’s complicated elegy for Malcolm X, a small star releasing its own fire, and the seminar is full of canny astronomers with their own strong opinions and expertise. On the whole, it felt like a good space in which to vent the engines–for them, I hope, as well as for me.

I probably won’t blow–my inner Scotty has always been an alarmist–but the past few weeks have certainly been a test. I feel terrible, but not surprised, that after his public temper tantrum of privilege challenged, Kavanaugh is about to join the nation’s highest court. I feel terrible, but not surprised, at how some of my students feel unheard and disrespected on my own campus, which continues to be roiled by arguments over its racist history. And I feel sick about irreparable harms to immigrant children, voting rights, and the more-than-human world that sustains us despite our poisonings. The damage feels so massive–and so gleefully perpetrated–that it’s hard to know where to stand while voicing your own small resistance.

Literature sustains me more than anything else–reading it, teaching it, editing it. Less so writing it, in October, but I’ll get back to drafting someday, and in the meantime I’m trying to keep serving the writing by handling proofs and edits of articles, interviews, and poems in a timely way, plus keeping work under submission. My inner Mr. Spock, that is, keeps the priorities rational and the ship on course, knowing I’m precariously low on fuel. AWP labors dominate this weekend, and I’ll be attending my last AWP board meeting as a trustee next weekend (San Antonio), although I’m on the search committee for a new executive director and that work will continue for months yet. My work for the AWP has felt useful and important, but I’m ready to turn to other modes of literary service. Beth Staples has now appointed me Poetry Editor of Shenandoah, which honestly is a role I don’t feel quite deserving of yet, and hence I’ve been shy about announcing–but I’m working hard and learning a ton from her and also from the great teacher that is the submissions pile, so full speed ahead, I guess, on this little enterprise through which maybe I can help do some good.
Lesley Wheeler, She cannae take any more, cap’n

I had some good news this week about my PR for Poets book but the buzz of the good news was hard to celebrate with all the terrible things happening in the news and the slowness of my recovery (always slow with MS, way slower than I like.) Then I got my royalty statement from Moon City Books for Field Guide to the End of the World (thanks, everyone who taught and bought the book) which was a nice boost too. Then I did some research on the new MS drug they want to put me on – Aubagio and that was terrifying.

And I watched five minutes of news recaps which was equally horrifying. It’s not good for the immune system to dwell on the absolutely horrifying things happening in our country (and I went on a little unfriending spree on Facebook because I’m not actually going to be friends with anyone who says hateful things about rape victims and positive things about rapists. (Remember who voted how in 2020, kids! Remember who laughed at Dr. Ford’s pain at Trump’s rally and fist-bumped getting an attempted rapist onto the Supreme Court.) I wrote a really angry poem but I realized I already have a book about what being a rape victim – besides the horrifying physical pain, there’s the mental and psychological damage that lasts…forever – Becoming the Villainess. It’s about how women in every society from ancient Greece to modern America can only choose between the roles of victim (pretty princess) and the villainess (evil witch) and that the rage and brokenness that results from sexual assault has repercussions.

By the way, you will never be “nice” enough to protect yourself from the men that want to violate you without any consequences. So, maybe stop being nice. The men in charge right now definitely don’t deserve nice. Anyone who victim-blames doesn’t deserve nice, either. My nice energy will be reserved for the victims, not the perpetrators.

Friday was a rainfest so we retreated to our local gardening center (Mobak’s) to celebrate the Harvest Festival and also goof around their Harvest Festival photo ops. I listened to the rain on the greenhouse roof and looked at flowers and then we came home and planted 40 daffodil and tulips and hyacinths bulbs. A sign of hope. I thought, we can make the world a slightly better place – we can donate money and vote and be kind to those that deserve it and we can plant growing things and adopt animals and believe women and we can meet and talk about ways to make things better. It is awfully hard to not lose hope. I am a creative type so doing creative things and being out with plants is a way for me to not lose my mind. Go do something that brings you joy and then take a step, then another step. I am counting my steps.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Rough Week, Harvest Festivals and Pumpkin Patches, and Poets Managing Good and Bad News

Just a short post today to link to a poem I read this morning, “Sunday Morning in the Church of Air” by Catherine Abbey Hodges in Swwim Lit Mag. It’s a beautiful poem that felt like a breath of fresh air after way too many days in pollution. Lately, I feel like I’m surrounded by toxic energy because of the dirty politics in our country, the finger-pointing, the screaming, the anger. I feel like so many are filled with hate and retribution and I don’t think they realize how it’s poisoning them and our country. Social Media has given everyone a voice and most of those voices, lately, are used to tear down, bully, ridicule. The intolerance is crushing.

I’m taking steps to severely limit toxic, angry voices in my online and television time. Yes, there are reasons to be angry but not.all.the.time. Don’t let it take over your life. It’s bad mental health. And, remember, everyone is entitled to their opinions and no one is right all the time.

Thank goodness for Poets who write about the beautiful in life, the good, the light. I’ll always choose the road to light over darkness. I will not allow anger, violence, and hate to change who I am. I have that power and so do you.

And none of this depends

on me, though I see now that somehow

I depend on it—the river, the stooped

heron and the one rising on great wings

above its reflection

**Steps off soap box.*

Have a beautiful day, friends.
Charlotte Hamrick, On Beauty and Poison

I’ve been waking up with my jaw already clenched, too many days in a row now, in dread of each day’s news. Sometimes really fantastic things happen–the MacArthur “genius” grant recipients for this year include Natalie Diaz and Kelly Link–and sometimes someone shows me a video of a basket of baby sloths or a baby flamingo taking it’s first steps, and sometimes it’s just enough to be in the same space as a friend, laughing. Sometimes solace lasts for the length of a poem. But it’s all a bulwark against the sense that our checks and balances no longer operate as they should. Perhaps they never did. The calls of “Remember all this on November 6!” ring a bit hollow when you’re a resident of Washington, D.C.–almost 700,000 of us, and not one seat in the Senate. Imagine how differently the last few weeks might have gone, had we had voting representation.

Teju Cole visited American University this past week. My undergraduate students for “Writers in Print and Person” read Blind Spot, photographs juxtaposed with flash nonfiction texts. The book is physically gorgeous as an artifact and gave us means to discuss Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, “studium” and “punctum.” Barthes developed this vocabulary to talk primarily about portraiture; in moving the approach to landscape photography, which Cole does–and largely devoid of people’s faces–I’d argue that the explicit text teases a “punctum” to the surface that would otherwise stay invisible, but inherent to the impulse of the photographer. His lecture did the thing great art does, selfishly, which was that it made me want to hole up and think and write.
Sandra Beasley, Holding Space

Somewhere recently–was it the Sunday New York Times?–I read an opinion essay about how recent surveys of US citizens indicate that we have fewer hobbies than we have had in years past. The columnist wondered whether that lack is due to a zeal to be the best at whatever we engage in–the best jogger we can be, the most avid cyclist, the best collector, knitter, paper-crafter, woodworker, violinist, what-have-you. She suggested we’ve somehow lost the joys of being hobbyists: amateurs who do or create something because it is fun or relaxing, or because trying to learn a new skill makes us feel good. A true hobby is something we don’t have to be perfect at, because that is not the point.

As my students wrestle with the tasks of college and their concerns about their futures, the concept of vocation arises often. What to do with a life? Earn enough money to live reasonably comfortably, even if the job is not a passion? What if it’s not even satisfying? Should people choose a bearable career and find enjoyment in avocations? Or persist at what they love even if society doesn’t always reward the path they’ve chosen? Or–the options are legion.

~

I believe in vocation as passion, and I also practice hobbies. My career is in higher education, and I enjoy and learn from my job. My vocation is writing, particularly writing poetry; my passion lies in that direction more than any other, but poetry has not been a career path in my case.

~

My hobbies have evolved over the years. For decades, gardening has kept me happily occupied out of doors–but I have no need to become a Master Gardener, and my gardens are often minor failures in one respect or another. The garden, however, soothes me, distracts me from anxieties, helps me to become a better observer, teaches me much. When learning about plants, I got interested in botany and wild flower identification, so I am a more informed hiker and nature-saunterer than I used to be.

Photography’s also a hobby I pursue, an interest of mine since my late teen years (back before digital). The view through the frame has always intrigued me, as well as the opportunities that different lens lengths offer the photographer as to framing and focus. I especially enjoy macro lenses. It’s fun to zoom in closely on insects, flowers, and small areas of everyday objects. Photography encourages different types of observation.
Ann E. Michael, Vocation, avocation

Let’s invent useless things,
the ultimate freedom.

I’ll make marble eggs,
headless dolls,
and stringless violins.

I’ll write poems
that don’t put food on the table
with words no one understands:

paperheart,
mailpill,
painstain,
bloodfence.
Claudia Serea, Useless things

Forty years ago I proposed a research project to answer this question: Do chipmunks follow set paths as they go about their nut gathering? This was high school senior year research bio class. I have no recollection of trying to justify the significance of that research question. I have no idea how I’d answer that. But Monsieurs Rehm and Cederstrom (R.I.P., lovely man) okayed the project.

I then spent very little time actually gathering data — which required sitting endlessly, motionlessly, in the park noting the movements of chipmunks I could in no way tell apart. I then, unsurprisingly with such little data, wrote a paper concluding there were no set patterns.

Now I find myself sitting in this chair (with the pleasure of having little else to do at the moment) almost every morning for the past two weeks out in this yard, with, as it happens, this chipmunk going about its business. From the hole in the brush behind me, it generally moves roughly south, pauses at a chair in front of the house, then disappears into the brush in front of that. Eventually, it returns, roughly from that direction, crosses the yard generally from the south, sometimes right along the edge of the house, or at least within five feet of it. It has many other paths, I know, as I’ve seen it rustling around across the road, or slipping into the outdoor shower and into the hole under that. But its return to this particular hole seems to follow a particular path. So lo and behold, I do think it has a general set pattern. Hunh.

I don’t know that I have much point here. Except that, you know, isn’t life funny?

In spite of my lazy approach to gathering data for that project, I have always been an observer. I had wanted to be a detective when I was a kid. Then a research biologist. Then I studied anthropology. Then public policy, which in a way is, if policy is well thought out, a combination of all those things. Then I studied poetry, which also, at least the poetry I write, is a combination of all those things: whodunit, and why, and what do we as a culture understand about it, how do we talk about it, and what can we make of it all.

If the chipmunk has a pattern then, as a predator, I could catch it. Or as a rival for its acorns, I could follow the chipmunk to its source and plunder. Or I can just notice. Maybe that’s what my role is here.

If human beings could be said to have some kind of unique role in life, maybe this is all it is — observe, note patterns, make art. And try not to kill too many things while we’re here.
Marilyn McCabe, No Straight Lines; or, What’s a Human For?

Maybe there’s been so much going on that when it stops you’re mildly disorientated. That must be it. I remind myself of the episode in John Hillaby’s book Journey through Britain. In the early sixties he walked from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, using, as far as was feasible, only footpaths and drovers’ roads and bridleways. Arriving in Bristol tired and jaded he seeks the advice of a boxing trainer who examines his legs, looks up, and says: what you need, sir, is exercise. Which turns out to be sound advice. When in doubt, just do it. So I shall.

I have no excuse; last Monday was a day I’d looked forward to for months. The guest poets at Puzzle Poets Live were two of my inspirations. Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. What a double bill! Poets whose reading makes you more alive, who electrify and excite you. One of the folk in the audience was David Spencer (cobweb guest in July) who had cycled from Huddersfield to Sowerby Bridge to be there. Valley to valley over a big Pennine hill with the M62 at its top. And then had to cycle back. That’s how good they are. It was a brilliant night. Along with their new work, Kim read Train from Barrow to Sheffield and In that year ; Clare read This baby and I do not believe in silence, and I could not have been happier. This week I found a warm review of my pamphlet Advice to a traveller in Indigo Dreams’ Reach Poetry 241 (thank you, Lynn Woollacott, and then…..

I’ve had a summer of doing stuff, pretty well non-stop; brickwork, woodwork, paintwork, garden work. I looked forward to it all being done, and then it was and suddenly I’d nothing to do. Except that I have…a review that should have been sent off months ago and which I keep rewriting and scrapping; feedback on lots of poems for two special friends. Why don’t I just do it? I’ve a horror of not being busy. I always have. It’s that Conradian thing, the need to work and work to avoid reality, or something. I dreaded retirement …and it was destabilising when it came, that lack of imposed obligations. What I’m not so good at is dealing with self-imposed obligations. A bit like the feeling that most teachers know, the Sunday afternoon feeling, the knowledge that there’s a pile of marking that must be done for Monday, that’s grown because you didn’t do it when you could have done, because you’ve put it off.

What saved me was finding poetry and writing. I have a fear of unemployment and silence. Like Clare Shaw, I do not believe in silence. I cannot sit still. I cannot be quiet.
John Foggin, The return of Polished Gems Revisited : with Laura Potts

September 30, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 39

If there’s one thing poets are good at, it’s finding words for the unspeakable and the outrageous. That quality was at the forefront this week among American poetry bloggers. Also, no surprise, we seek solace in reading and writing poems. So much of this digest is concerned directly or indirectly with the Kavanaugh hearings, but there’s also some fascinating miscellaneous stuff toward the end, so if you find some of the initial posts triggering, scroll quickly to about two-thirds of the way down.

How intense it was this week to be alternately following and averting my eyes from the Senate hearings as I taught Sylvia Plath to seventeen stingingly sharp students–trying to open up space to talk about anger, violence, gender, and race in powerful but often disturbing poems. Plath’s handling of metaphors related to the Holocaust, slavery, and Civil Rights always seemed problematic to me–it was a big topic in the early nineties, when I attended grad school–but I am now wondering how defensible it is even to keep the poem “Ariel” in particular on an undergraduate syllabus. While Plath’s use of terrible slurs wears worse and worse over the years, however, her bee poems–explorations of rage and other dark drives, sometimes encoded in racial metaphors–also feel more and more fundamental. Plus last year’s news about her abusive marriage , especially as captured in Emily Van Duyne’s “Why are we so unwilling to take Plath at her word?”, is crucial right now. We need to do a way better job at respecting survivors and understanding the costs they suffer.
Lesley Wheeler, The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

As I have mentioned before, my new book of poetry The Lure of Impermanence came out in July. I included in this collection a poem called 9 to 5. I wrote this poem when the #MeToo movement had just begun its groundswell.

Today, Bill Cosby was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in jail for sexual assault and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is currently being scrutinized for a number of behaviors with women that are at best disturbing. And these are just a few of so, so many more stories just like them.

I have lost confidence in the ability of the news to report in any unbiased manner and therefore I am more often than not left to my own judgment and experience by which to consider stories reported in the media.

And what my experience considers is that I personally know girls and women who have been abused by boyfriends, family members and spouses.

What I do know is that I was carried to a bedroom by a man who was much older than me when I was barely of legal age and stoned on marijuana. A man who held a position of respect in the community.

What I do know is I am shaking as I write that last sentence because I recall that night as vividly as if it were today. Only it wasn’t today. It was 45 years ago.

What I do know is that I told no one. What I do know is that I was ashamed.

What I do know is that I am someone’s mother, wife, daughter and friend and none of them knew. What I do know is I am not sure I want them to know now.

What I do know is that all women deserve the simple right to be respected and have control of what happens to her body and if I could ask anything of you it would be to consider the women you love. Consider their experience. Because it is possible that the people who love her most, don’t know the dark places she has been afraid to shed the light on. Because to do so is to expose herself to being rejected, silenced, not believed or worst yet blamed.

And until history proves it unnecessary, may we all slash, slash, slash, this roughshod blazing path.
[Click through to hear and read the poem.]
Carey Taylor, 9 to 5

I’m feeling a strange mix of anger and resignation. How can we not be any further along towards a vision of a just world than we are right now? How can we be decades after the Anita Hill hearings and still be no better at handling these kinds of allegations?

But let me also remember that these times are not those times. This year, 2018, is still a better time to be a woman than 1918 or 1818–or even 1991. A woman can bring a charge forward, and she has a better chance of being believed. We are better at knowing what boundaries should be, even if those boundaries are not always respected. There are laws that might protect us all–once those laws didn’t exist, and the idea that they should would not have existed.

Still, we have not yet arrived at the future that I hoped for when Anita Hill testified, and I was a younger woman in grad school. Let me hold onto that idea of a time when people’s bodies are respected, when boundaries are maintained, when people will not trespass even when we are unconscious, when the powerful do not prey on the weak. Let that time come soon.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Self Care on a Day of Many Triggers

It says something that most of my women friends are posting today about the courage of Christine Blasey Ford and how difficult and deeply discouraging these days are for them, while most of the men — even the liberal ones — are posting…well, let’s just say, the usual stuff. For many of us women, it is impossible to look away or to think of much else right now. There is a disconnect between the sexes that goes very deep in our society, just as there is a deep disconnect between the races, and until that changes fundamentally, we will keep repeating the pain. I have appreciated the men, like my own husband, who have expressed their understanding and dismay, and I would ask that those of you who haven’t please try to put yourselves in our places as people who have endured behaviors, harassment and assaults that have affected us all our lives – and yet we have tried our best to forgive those who hurt us, to love and trust other men, and enter into full, loving relationships with them. Please try to think about that, and what it takes.
Beth Adams, #BelieveSurvivors

Just in time for the Halloween season. I Am Not Your Final Girl is a collection of horror-themed poetry draws on the female characters of horror cinema — the survivors, victims, villains, and monsters — who prowl through dark worlds, facing oppression, persecution, violence, and death. In her introduction, Claire C. Holland notes, “I draw strength from the many strong women around me, both real and fictional.” The women in this collection channel their pain and rage into a galvanizing force. They fight. They claim power over their own bodies. They take their power back. They do not relent.

“I have known monsters and I have known men.
I have stood in their long shadows, propped
them up with my own two hands, reached
for their inscrutable faces in the dark. They
are harder to set apart than you know.
— “Clarice,” The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

As a horror fan, I know many of the characters and movies referenced, and it’s fascinating to peer in at them from the unique perspective of these Holland’s words. That said, there just as many that I haven’t seen and a few I had not hear of — but not knowing the direct reference in each case did not stop me from enjoying the poem for its own sake, the words drawing me in. And now I have a list of movies that I need to seek out and watch.

“Separate yourself, like sliding wire through
clay. Divide your organs – heart, lungs, tongue,
and brain. You think you need them all?
You’d be shocked what a woman can live
without. We’re like roaches, we thrive”
— from “Shideh,” Under the Shadow (2016)
Andrea Blythe, Book Love: I Am Not Your Final Girl by Claire C. Holland

I took this photograph less than one week ago but so much has changed since then that I can hardly recognize that it wasn’t so long ago: before Dr. Blasey-Ford’s testimony, before two brave women, Maria Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila, confronted Senator Flake (R-AZ) in an elevator and before he changed the course of history — at least for one week; we hope more.

Lucille Clifton and Adrienne Rich are two important poets for me (for American poetry) that I return to again and again. The day after the 2016 election I shared the Clifton poem with my Highline College students. I’ll never forget one young man sitting with this poem and then articulating his thoughts and ideas about it beyond anything he had done in class before. He illuminated the levels of this piece for me, for the entire class, in a new and necessary way. He brought in the idea of immigration, the trip many of my students have taken in boats, in braving a new world. I share these pieces now as a way to hold onto sanity in this new insane time. May they be of help to you, too. [Click through to read the poems.]
Susan Rich, Two Poems for Right Now

If you’re a woman, or a rape survivor, you probably had, like me, a very tough week. It’s hard to watch rape victims who bravely come forward against powerful (and terrible) men be jeered, or things being said like “it’s no big deal” and “boys will be boys.” Infuriating to those who have had that happen to us.
That was on top of the fact that I’m still recovering from a month of MS illness, still getting my legs literally back under me again, starting to eat solid food, coaching myself in swallowing, in catching a ball, in using a cane.

So to keep my sanity, as I was recovering, I decided to read A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf and signed up for a Masterclass on writing with Margaret Atwood, and started watching Netflix’s Alias Grace at the same time. Woolf is tough and unemotional in her journals – quite a departure from my last journal/letters of Sylvia Plath – she mainly gives an account of her walks, what she’s reading and what she thinks of it (she can be quite a snippy critic), some thoughts on feminism and literary notes about what she’s writing, stress about deadlines and money. The last bit – right before her suicide – she mostly talks about the bombings on London in a remarkable chipper tone (I want to live! she says over and over in these pages) even after one of her houses is destroyed by a bomb, while the countryside around her is showing signs of destruction, while Germany is threatening in invade. She talked about wanting to live, but then a few days later, she’s dead. Woolf was a driven writer, ambitious and sharp, an intellectual aiming to change the culture. Like Plath, deeply flawed, and though she was much older than Plath when she took her life, it’s almost incomprehensible, even when you know it’s coming.

On the other hand, the bracing wisdoms of Margaret Atwood – also intellectual and very sharp – in her Masterclass (about $90, a bargain I think, which includes teaching video modules, pdf worksheets, and outside resources like Lorrie Moore’s book review of one of Margaret’s books and an hour long panel on speculative writing) gave me inspiration, homework, real insight into her own rewriting of her books and her own journey to becoming a writer, feminism, speculative writing – I’m not done with all the modules yet and I’ve already written a short story (very rare for me) and two poems as part of my homework. If anyone could be an antidote to this week’s terrible misogyny by men in power, it’s Margaret. I’ve read all her books, but her descriptions of rewriting Alias Grace inspired me to watch Netflix’s version of the story, which I’ve found more subtle and also, more hopeful than Handmaid’s Tale.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Margaret Atwood and Virginia Woolf during a Tough Week, Healing and the Last Fall Flowers, and Poems of Resistance

Still I dream. Last night, seven dead mice
strewn across my coverlet, harking back
to an arresting image—Bodily Harm—

rat emerging from vagina. I do not
make these things up, I’m too weary.
There is not enough salve

on the continent to swathe this busted body,
nor breath to resuscitate this heartbreak.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning with Heartbreak

Wislawa Szymborska’s poems are in my head today, prompted by finding a dead beetle on my porch. Novice entomologist identifies dead bug, then thinks of poems. […]

In Joanna Trzeciak‘s translation, the second stanza begins:

For our peace of mind, animals do not pass away,
but die a seemingly shallower death

…a phrasing that evokes more clearly (to me) how humans use a sort of euphemistic, possibly spiritual phrase for being dead. And in this translation, the last stanza reads:

So here it is: the dead beetle in the road
gleams unlamented at the sun.
A glance would be as good as a thought:
it seems that nothing happened here.
Important supposedly applies only to us.
Only to our life, only to our death,
a death which enjoys a forced right of way.

Both translations are lovely, but I think I prefer the Trzeciak version, though I would be hard-pressed to say why; and I certainly cannot compare either to the original, since I do not know Polish.

What I love about this poem is its perspective, as reflected in the stances of title and stanzas. Literally, the speaker is above–looking down at a beetle husk. Tidiness in an insect’s demise–as opposed to our own. Then the point of view shifts, suggesting we humans are “above” the animals, their deaths less upsetting to the cosmos. But we are the cosmos, in our egotistical narcissism; and then, at last, death reminds us how unimportant we are…no matter how we think of ourselves.
Ann E. Michael, Seen from above

Chief Uniform bans the attachment
of the inferior where he is
in front. The band is found descending
on the borders. These bands serve, produce
character. They are scattered. They spread
out. Uniforms form beings. They form
layers. They become and form the coat.
PF Anderson, Uniforms

If you want to write, if you want to be the writer you dream of being, then you have to write. And yes, you, too, have a life. So how do you carve writing time from that busy life?

Write first thing in the morning, before everything else gets in the way.

Write for a short, doable amount of time. Decide how much time that is, and if it’s only 15 minutes or 5, don’t fret about it. Set a timer and write.

Write an email to yourself (or to your mother), but instead of “Hello, how are you / I am fine,” write a few lines for a poem, or a character sketch or a summary of the greatest blog post ever. (I find that I dash off emails, and within that framework I can sometimes circumvent what’s keeping me from writing.)

Write ONE great 140-character line and Tweet it. Apply this principle (see #3) to whatever sort of writing you find easiest–just hijack it and go.

Write in your car (parked of course, preferably in a very safe park, but a parking lot will do). Five or even fifteen minutes of writing in your car will not make you (too) late to dinner.

Write during meetings. If nothing else, write a character description of the person leading the meeting. (I have a very interesting poem in which my former boss morphs into a dragon.)

When you feel blocked–try writing out someone else’s words (attribute them clearly, of course) as a way to kick start your own words. Try following up with a close imitation, but with your own subject matter.

If you’re a teacher–here’s one more suggestions: WRITE WHILE YOUR STUDENTS WRITE.
Bethany Reid, 7 Ways to Get More Writing Time

It feels a little strange not to be in a school in September but it’s also rather pleasant! I’m really enjoying writing poems about Wiltshire with my Ginkgo Projects/Bloor Homes Bursary. The brief for this project is fairly broad but I’m responding in poetry to the landscape and heritage of the area in and around Amesbury. I can’t share any work here yet (I’ve written a few poems but I’ve sent them out somewhere for consideration so need to keep them under wraps for now). I’m quite excited, though, that some of these ‘Wiltshire’ poems might also tie in with themes that seem to be emerging in other new poems I’m writing, which are to do with being in a long-term relationship, ageing, the menopause, being an older parent, being a parent to young adults, and other matters. How to package all of these ideas into a concept that will sound enticing on the back of a book?? I think I need to work on that!
Josephine Corcoran, Mid-week catch-up

The poetry-book publishing world remains a strange place. There’s not much money for anyone in it, really, and not much social capital beyond our relatively small circle of poets and poetry readers. Whether you have a book is not reflective of your worth as an artist. I know all this. And yet it means so much to me. The idea of having my poems made into a book that I can hold, that maybe someone else will hold and even read? It’s magic, or at least I’ve built it up to that in my mind. […]

The story isn’t done yet. It gets weird at the end. Weird in a good way, mostly. Literally the day I wrote the first draft of this essay, with the manuscript pending at three final presses and the rejections due any day, I received an email from a small press accepting Seducing the Asparagus Queen.

I was stunned, happy. It felt like cheating. It felt undeserved, in the way that such good news often does. It didn’t feel quite real. Really? An acceptance on the same day I began drafting the goodbye essay? Sounds made up for the movie version. But there it was.

I told only my wife and a friend or two, waiting to make the announcement to the world until I’d signed a contract. A contract, it turned out, that was not forthcoming. I mentioned to the publisher that I’d like to get it signed and that I didn’t want to withdraw the manuscript from consideration at the other two presses where it remained without a contract. No problem, I was assured. But no contract. Another reminder from me a month later, a quick response to the email, but still no contract. I was starting to get worried, began to think I might need to revisit that goodbye essay after all.

Two months and a day after the acceptance, still no contract in sight, I heard from the very last place that had the manuscript under consideration: Seducing the Asparagus Queen had won the Vern Rutsala Prize from Cloudbank Books and they would be publishing it late in the summer. They sent me the contract the same day.

I didn’t feel good withdrawing it from the first place that had said yes. I talked to several writers to make sure I was doing the right thing. Everyone assured me that yes, I was well within my rights to accept the prize from Cloudbank. So I did. I still feel a good bit of guilt about that first press, which is a small operation that puts out good-looking books, but I did spend two months asking for a contract, and if I’d received one, I would have instantly withdrawn it from Cloudbank. But I never got one, I didn’t withdraw, and now the book is a physical thing in the world.

When I tell people this story, they often say something about persistence paying off. And yeah, submissions 50 and 51 were the ones to get a yes after hearing no from 1-49. I did the work and eventually got the result I wanted. But I could have decided to shelve the collection one round earlier, which honestly I would have if not for a heartbreakingly kind “almost” rejection I received the previous summer from a press I love. Both Cloudbank and the other press certainly could easily have picked someone else. To me, the fact that they picked my collection feels more like a bit of arbitrary good luck more than a reward for my continued efforts.

When I decided to put this collection in a drawer, I was at peace with that decision. I had given it a fair shot and then some. Not every poem I write needs to be in a book. Now that these particular poems will, in fact, end up in a book together, I’m pretty glad about that, too. It means something to me. Probably more than it should. When I finally held the physical book in my hands this week, I knew how close it came to not happening. Here’s something else I know: I was not entitled to this result. There is no deserve to this. I did the work, yes, and I do think the poems are pretty good, but lots of writers do the work; lots of poems are pretty good or better. I got lucky, and I know it.
Publishing The Asparagus Queen – guest blog post by Amorak Huey (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

The dreams themselves are on another storey,
where the concierge uses the master key to let himself in
using the mathematics of the number 3,
a magic number, relevant to everything we do,
so our lives are in this book too, like the man
who makes it his business to track down the au-pair
who drowned his only child in the bath
using a series of calculations based on the probability
that any closing chapter ends in a rented room,
the television talking quietly to itself,
a couple asleep on their backs.
Julie Mellor, Life: A User’s Manual

Q~Why do you write poetry?

A~Honestly, because I don’t sing very well. When I write poetry, and it flows, I feel a kind of catharsis similar to singing drunk in the bathtub: it’s an emotional and physical release. It’s like orgasm. It’s like running. I wonder if any scientist will ever hook up with a poet and measure their serotonin and oxytocin and all that, just as she finishes the line that pulls it all together. I would volunteer.

Q~On Twitter, you mention that your two passions are writing and running. Do you see a connection between the two?

A~I think running clears the space for me to write. I run in the mornings and then come home and write for fifteen minutes to an hour and a half, depending on the workday. Running is about breathing and taking in the smells and sounds of the world. It’s about listening. I had a project a few years ago called Running Metaphors that I’m excited to be starting up again from my blog and on Instagram.

Q~You said you have an “ambivalence and confusion regarding social media and what being part of a poetry ‘community’ means.” Can you explain what you mean?

A~Norway doesn’t have a tradition of academic writing programs in the Universities. My whole goal of getting a PhD and becoming “a poet” (i.e. teaching poetry at a university) and finding a tribe (as they say) went *poof* when I decided to stay here in Norway. I live here, and I write in English. That makes me an outsider. I am lucky to have an amazing translator, but I’ll always be considered an American poet by my colleagues here.

And yet, having been here so long, I no longer write to the American experience, and especially these days, that makes me an outsider in virtual poetry communities.

I don’t go to conferences or residencies. I see Instagram posts with hashtags like #poetshavingfun and get as jealous as a teenager. I guess I still crave the validation and community I’d planned for and imagined.

But then, I get eyes off the computer and go for a run, handwrite a poem in my journal and remember it was all a consumer package that I wanted. This is what I’ve got, and I make it work.
Bekah Steimel, Spinster’s Shroud / an interview with poet Ren Powell

September 23, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 38

My Poetry Bloggers feed was unusually full this week, thanks to the reemergence of several of the more infrequent bloggers (who in my opinion have nothing to be ashamed about; some of my favorite bloggers only post once in a blue moon). Not surprisingly, one of the more popular topics was blogging itself — is it merely a form of “obliterature”? (See Lesley Wheeler’s post.) People also wrote about sickness and recovery, new publications, travel, the changing seasons… and don’t miss Jayne Stanton’s account of the Forward Prizes reading! So much good stuff this week. Enjoy.

Last year around this time I was also in the hospital for similar symptoms, and they diagnosed me with MS. This year they did tons of tests, and now they know I have MS, but not why I have the symptoms I do or how to control them. This is very frightening, of course. But I didn’t give up, and I didn’t let the doctors give up. A lot of them shrugged their shoulders at me over the past month – infuriating when you’re looking for help – but eventually I actually got help. So one lesson: Do not give up and do not stop asking for help. Second lesson: Remind yourself (and your body) of the good things in life, the beauty, the reasons you want to keep being alive. […]

This was reminding me of the writing life too. The writing life can feel like these awful stretches of rejection, of non-recognition, of not getting the grants or jobs you feel you’ve got a shot at. Why are you even writing when it feels like no one cares or pays attention? The same frustration you can feel in the doctor’s office in a sea of shrugs. Why do we do this? Why do we bother? But then an editor will call with an acceptance and some perceptive advice or you’ll get someone, somewhere who cares and shows it and it will make your month. It can feel like a terrible slog, most of the time, reading and writing and practicing in a vacuum. I think a lot of women writers, especially, tend to over-give and over-volunteer and forget to take time for themselves (I managed to get myself in some trouble this month because while I was in the hospital, I had an editing project and a contest I’d promised to judge – and I was absolutely out of my mind – intractable brain problems tend to do this – and not able to do jack. Sometimes that happens. We have to forgive ourselves and also, maybe don’t commit to too many projects in the first place.) There was a conversation today on Twitter about how many male “geniuses” are only where they are because of the support of the women around them – unpaid editors, caretakers, supporters. Treat yourself like your time is limited. Because, not to be too grave here, but it is.

So I have to think of some of the same “survival” skills that apply to recovering from illness and apply them to the writing life. Say you haven’t been writing, you haven’t been feeling like you’re doing enough to promote your work, you don’t feel like you have a support network for your writing, etc. Be kind to yourself – relax and give yourself downtime. Be kind to your support system. Subscribe to journals that support you. Write a thank-you note. Read a book just for fun, not for self-improvement or critique, but fun. And if a bunch of editors are virtually shrugging their shoulders at your work, just like with doctors, keep going until you find the editor that gets you. Remind yourself why you are writing in the first place, spend time with what is beautiful, and try to give yourself some joy.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, In the Recovery Zone, and How to Avoid Despair with Illness (and Writing)

The world is never, really quiet. There are waves in the darkness that beat a rhythm through our very cells. Dance.
Ren Powell, September 18

I’m sitting at my favorite spot in Starbucks trying to get organized. Not writing. But today after so many months I decided to upload something new on the blog. I think I’m officially switching to a Website with the option of blogging. It’s clear that I don’t have the time or energy to keep it up like I should. Time to move forward. There are so many things on my radar, so many changes I won’t go through right now. I’ll certainly post now and then. I have to update my fall schedule, dates, etc.

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Today is the equinox. Summer is over. Could not be sadder about that.

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OK a few things. We adopted a puppy. I’m up for tenure. Some festival changes happening. And next year I’m moving to Mississippi for a year with the kids and said puppy. All of these items require their own blog post.

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Did I mention Rewilding is available for preorder?
January Gill O’Neil, Rewilding is here!

If you pre-order a copy of my new collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, by Nov. 1, you will be entered to win a free poetry manuscript or chapbook consultation/evaluation by me. The winner can transfer or donate the evaluation to another person if so desired. I have helped many poets organize and sequence their manuscripts, along with critiquing individual poems, creating titles and more. Just call me the “manuscript whisperer.”

Pre-order and enter to win at the Sibling Rivalry Press website at this link.
Collin Kelley, Win a manuscript evaluation by pre-ordering “Midnight in a Perfect World”

A. and I spent two really quick days (really more like one) in Venice, Italy and then spent most of today traveling to the medieval city of Erice, which is in Sicily.

So far: Italian food is just as amazing as everyone believes, in Europe a glass of water is still more difficult to come by than alcohol, Alitalia DID lose my luggage and I’ve yet to hear what happened to it, AND I’ve written two poems on two different flights (and they might be crap poems, but at least I was writing).

Also, the view from the hotel is fucking amazing. And no, my photos don’t really do it justice.

Also also, I’m running on very little sleep.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, A Quick Post from the Sabbatical I Stole (Kind Of) By Running Away to Sicily

In high school, I listened to “American Tune” over and over again–hitting the rewind button on my Walkman–but I never expected to hear Paul Simon sing it live. When he began, “Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken, / and many times confused…” we had already been on our feet for the encore, and with eyes closed I didn’t realize everyone around us had sat down. My husband had to tug on the back of my shirt. I’d be tempted to use a line from that song as an epigraph–for this very poetry collection in hand–but Stephen King got there first; he quotes “American Tune” at a section break in The Stand. […]

Early this morning, I was thinking about how the utility of blogging has changed a little bit since we first began this process. If I want to tell you about my upcoming reading with Emily Jungmin Yoon and Lindsay Bernal […] or share my excitement about receiving a 2018 “Best of the Net” nomination from Split This Rock for “Customer Service Is,” I’ll probably use other forms of social media to do so. If I want to blunder my way through a draft of a poem or essay, I’ll keep it offline to preserve the publishing options. So this space becomes a space for…what, exactly? But this blog can host thoughts that fill larger spaces than 200-odd characters or a link + hashtag, for sure. Maybe open-ended grist for discussion, like Iggy Pop (circa 1980) telling Tom Snyder about the difference between “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” art. I got to this snippet via thinking about Paul Simon–who a commenter argued was of the “Apollonian” school. I suspect I am too, though I’d like to think I’m capable of raising a little hell on stage now and again.
Sandra Beasley, Still Digging After All These Years

–Every morning as I blog, I wonder if I should be doing a different kind of writing. But I also wonder if I’m creating and perfecting this form of writing–and will anyone care? I think of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, and I think she’d be a blogger, if she was living today–although her poverty might have kept her offline.

–I am trying to think about my successes, not my failures. In the last few weeks, I could have sent out more of my creative work. But let me think about the fact that I’ve done some actual writing.

–I’m listening to the On Point interview with Ethan Hawke. He talked about working on Boyhood, the movie that was made over 12 years. He talks about it being a movie that was made without the element of having to sell it. He says it was like being in your room painting watercolors with your friends or making music on Christmas Eve. I love that way of talking about making art.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Friday Fragments: Creativity, Anxiety, Travel, and Possessions

I just received the proof from Lulu of my first self-published book, titled STONE empty chair. It’s a collection of my best haiku, starting about ten years ago and ending in August, 2018.

It’s a little book full of little poems – just 6.5 x 4.5, with 50-odd haiku, in four chapters: Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. It would make a nice gift, and fits easily into a Christmas stocking or a 7×10 inch envelop for mailing to a friend.

I took the cover photo in my backyard, near the little pond I installed in July with the help of my youngest son. The stone is Oregon’s state rock, the thunder egg. What a great name for a rock! The chair is one I made from twigs, and it was featured in my video The Fairy House. In fact, you can see me making it in the video.
Erica Goss, STONE, empty chair: Erica’s new haiku collection

In August I pray to lesser gods,
gods drier and without Douglas Fir
gods wafting burnt laminate
gods shriveling before the crunch
church of pinecones

thunderless gods
sniffing, boneless gods with dry-needle teeth
and sweet-sugar nature—
Fall Poem / an interview with poet Rachel Warren (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

I was looking forward to some poet-spotting and saying hi to one or two familiar faces, maybe. Instead, I promptly went into introvert mode: a seat in the cafe with my nose in a book (and a novel, at that!) beforehand, an ice cream taken back to my seat during the interval and a prompt departure afterwards for the Tube at Waterloo (walking past the book stall without a sideways glance). What’s wrong with me?!

Anyway, I’m glad I went. I enjoyed my first Forward Prizes evening very much. It was a re-connection with the buzz that exists around poetry in a building full of poets and poetry lovers.

All fifteen shortlistees were there except for Jorie Graham (who sent a letter, and a recorded message and poem reading). I really hope I get the opportunity to hear her read in person, some day.

There was no second-guessing the winner of the single poem, but I thought Fiona Benson’s ‘Ruins’ was a close contender; beautifully read, too. I’d like to read more of her work (I gather there’s a forthcoming collection). I’m delighted for Liz Berry, though. Incidentally, ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ is the subject of one Jen Campbell’s Dissect a Poem videos. You can read it here.

I really enjoyed the readings by shortlistees for Best First Collection; such a range of voices and subjects. Kaveh Akbar was the audience’s darling but the award went to Phoebe Power for her Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet). Heritage was a theme common to several of the shortlisted works. I really enjoyed Shivanee Ramlochan’s readings from Everyone knows I’m a Haunting and pleased to see a Peepal Tree Press poet alongside those published by the Big Guns.

After the interval there followed strong readings from the Best Collection shortlistees. I particularly warmed to JO Morgan’s voices from Assurances (Cape) and hope to hear him read again, somewhere. Danez Smith stole the show, though, and the prize announcement was hugely popular with the audience.
Jayne Stanton, The Forward Prizes for Poetry

What is the least helpful advice you received?

“Write what you know.”
Terrible.
It should be:
Write and when you discover you don’t know what you are writing about—research, learn and then write some more.
You don’t know, what you don’t know and you are always learning so why would you stick to writing what you know?

Writing is always a journey and journeys are supposed to be meaningful and that means you are learning as you journey; sharing and teaching as you write.
As you experience life of course write about that, but let it lead you to new paths and new discoveries.

“Find your voice” is another bit of supposedly helpful advice that is also problematic.
You already have a voice and while you absolutely need to explore and discover as much about yourself and therefore develop your voice, it is already a part of you.
It’s the voice that is insisting you write.

You can write in different voices, you can be a mimic, you can stretch and should stretch until you are uncomfortable and then stretch some more.
The true voice that you already have will tell you what is b.s. and what is honest if you remember to listen.

If you read and listen more than you write you’ll have an authentic voice– nothing to ‘find’, it’s already within.
Poet Chris Jarmick: Thoughts on Writing and Dealing with Dark Times (Lana Ayers’ blog)

Then there are the times when a poem comes like thunder after lightning. All you can do, then, is hang on and try to get the words down fast enough before the vibrations fade.

I’ve had a few poems come like that, over the years, in a single stream-of-consciousness burst that sends words pouring onto the paper. But those have been few, far between, and always welcomed over the drudgery of pushing limp lines around on a poem that refuses to gel.

The arrival of the Leopard Lady, however, was something different.

I was working in my journal one night when this voice began, with no prodding or priming or expectation. It was strong and sure, a voice with Appalachian cadences, and it was dictating lines, whole poems. I scribbled as fast as I could for as long as she spoke, 13 pages that included three poems almost whole and large chunks of several more. But fascinating as this visitation was, I also had a strong impulse to turn it off, turn it away. She was a biracial woman from an era before mine, and the carnival she called home was entirely alien. And so I focused on other projects, working on novels and other kinds of poems, and I let the Leopard Lady rest. Or tried to. But the poems kept coming, slowly building a life story.
When the Voice Arrives: Making of the Leopard Lady – guest blog post by Valerie Nieman (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

I don’t do radio nowadays. The old passion that would have me winding the aerial up its 40’ mast in a force 9 gale so that I could catch the Australians between 05.00 and 07.00 has been necessarily stilled. No more chasing the fluctuating ionospheric conditions to bag a 5-second contact with that lone operator on some lump of rock in the Indian Ocean. No more regular ‘skeds’ with the guy in San Antonio who sounded just like Jack Nicholson; or the Russian doctor in a desolate oil pipeline outpost in Northern Siberia who wanted to learn English; or the Australian fence-mender 50 k. from the nearest shop and bar; or, as once, the panicky weekend sailor whose yacht was shipping water fast off Mauritius on whose behalf I had to phone the Grand Bay coastguard. It was always the romance of contact with the beleaguered or self-exiled individuals in exotic locations, the two of us fighting against fading signals or interference from the hundreds of other stations out there on the same wavelength wanting to touch base with the rare DX station with whom you alone are in contact. Those few minutes of shared alternative culture across thousands of miles of earth and sky are worth all the solitary hours of static crackle and atmospheric hiss.

There aren’t very many poems about people talking into two-way radios. In fact, I’ve never come across any! So for the time being this is it. So whether this poem is a work of quality is hardly the issue. That anyone should want to produce a piece about people talking into a radio microphone should be enough to turn our heads…
Dick Jones, WAVELENGTHS.

In past decades, let’s say my pre-teen years through my forties, I often read more than 50 novels in a year. Then, in my fifties I started reading poetry in earnest. A poetry lover since childhood, I was less likely to buy books of poetry than to buy novels; less likely to read all the way through a book of poetry than a novel; less likely to have poetry friends to talk with about the poetry I was reading. Then, I started writing poems myself. Now I spend most of my reading time with books of poetry. […]

I read more slowly than I used to and this means that, though I spend about the same amount of time reading as I used to (given the vagaries of other obligations, for example, work, running a press, writing, volunteering) but digest fewer words. This is partly due to changes in vision which are common at my age, partly due to the slowing-down effect that reading poetry has on its readers, partly due to the distracting effect of screen reading and social media, but in some part, I’m not sure why my appetite is so much less voracious for novels than it used to be. When it comes to novels, I buy few, but often pick up 1/2 dozen at a time from the library. Why? Because these days, I have a new novel reading habit: I often start novels but don’t finish them. In fact, I often go 30-50 pages in and decide “no, I don’t want to read this.” Let’s just call it, “time is running out” for anything that doesn’t enlighten me or bring me pleasure.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with an Embarrassment of Novel Riches

For about 20 years I kept this one poem in my wallet. Then it lived on a bulletin board in my office and recently, it migrated to the kitchen. I like that it’s been with me since December 1994. I think this was my first year subscribing to the New Yorker Magazine. I had just let my apartment in Harvard Square for the wilds of the Pacific Northwest for graduate school. I missed the grit of the Boston accent, the cold stare of strangers, the bookstores. This poem spoke to me — my decade plus of living faraway. More than two years away from the US, I entered New York via JFK only to have the customs officer question if I was making up the country of Niger.

Seamus Heaney never included this (as far as I know) in any of his books. I don’t know why but I suspect that perhaps it was too internal, so common and uncommon at once. See what you think.

Far Away

When I answered that I came from “far away”
The policeman at the roadblock snapped “where’s that”?
He’d only half heard what I said and thought
It was the name of some place up the country.

And now it is both where I have been living
And where I left — a distance still to go
Like starlight that is light years on the go
From faraway and takes light years returning.

~Seamus Heaney, The New Yorker, December 26, 1994
Susan Rich, Such a Good Mix: The Poetry of Travel and the Travel of Poetry

“Obliterature draws attention to the gendered formation of literary value while also denoting the casual, minor, repurposed, and ephemeral writing expelled from literary criticism’s traditional purview. Such writing might include letters to the editor, junk mail, diary entries and their twenty-first-century digital descendants: blog entries, comments on a newspaper and magazine site, Instagram posts, LiveJournals, Snapchats, Tumblrs, or tweets. Obliterature, fittingly enough, is also popular parlance for a ‘letter or email written while drunk off your ass’…The concept, as we develop it in this article, explains the literary phenomenon of not being fully in control of one’s words and the labor phenomenon of not being fully in control of one’s work.”

– from “Obliterature: Towards an Amateur Criticism” by Melanie Micir and Aarthi Vadde in the September 2018 Modernism/ modernity, a special issue on “weak theory”

None of us knows if our writing careers will be of much interest to literary critics in the future–or whether there will continue to be literary critics, or a future–but I have to add a few more categories of ephemeral writing that consume a LOT of my time these days: comments on student poems, response papers, quizzes, and essays; assignment sheets; teaching notes; course descriptions; recommendation letters; private editorial comments on Submittable; and the smartphone text-i-verse with its debris of emoticons. I’ve also been a lead drafter on a surprising number of university-related guidelines and reports, having been here for 24 years and generally preferring to do the writing portion of committee work over other tasks.

So I like this term “obliterature” a lot, although it’s from an article I’ve so far only read a portion of, because I’m tight on time but got snagged by the title as I was sorting mail. I recognize obliterature as an object of fascination for me as a critic–all the scraps and commonplace books kept by Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Anne Spencer, and many other women as they tried to find time for poetry amid domestic chores, tough jobs, and political urgencies. I also recognize it, with more chagrin, as denoting a body of seemingly-necessary writing I constantly perform, obliterating time for other kinds of writing I am constantly saying I should prioritize.
Lesley Wheeler, Obliterature

Doubt. I decided to write today about doubt in reviewing because doubt is crippling and prevalent. It is also a private experience; on the surface we struggle to seem reasonably confident, we repress a lot of our fears and doubts so we can function in a world that often would rather not know our current interior state of being. People turn to reviews for reading recommendations, to discover writers they’ve never heard of, and to deepen their engagement with a text that often has yet to be, or perhaps might never be, critically examined by literary theorists. They come with an expectation that the reviewer has enough knowledge of the genre to give an informed opinion or analysis. This is a reasonable expectation. Let me say, if you have doubt, like me, doubt that you can review a certain book, or that you know enough to review that book, you are in a good place, this doubt shows that you take the review seriously and want it to be as good as possible.

Not all reviews are created equal: some are glorified yelp reviews, some simply lackluster, some start off beautifully but then fall apart, some miss the point entirely, some are pompous and painful to digest, some are unbelievably brilliant, but most fall into the useful category. They help readers find books, and isn’t that what most reviewers ultimately want to do? Above all, I want my reviews to be useful, but hope they can be artful as well.

If you’re thinking about writing book reviews for the first time, I say please, yes, we need more reviews and reviewers in the literary community. If you are nervous, if you feel doubt, just keep working through it, there’s a way through. Sometimes I experience this doubt before I begin a review, I finish a book and think, but I don’t know what that was about! Then, I start putting words down on the page and suddenly I have more ideas than I can possibly use. Or sometimes I finish a review, and then I go to post it on my blog, Fork and Page, or I go to submit it to the journal I write reviews for and I think, what if I’m wrong about something, what if I didn’t understand the author’s intentions this time, perhaps I should just scrap it all together. But when I read the review again, I realize that it is the best I can do at this time, that my doubt is part of a larger struggle with self-confidence. I share this to help normalize these feelings, as ultimately reviewing itself has taught me so much about writing, and I hope that doubt does not hold other writers back from writing reviews.
Overcoming Doubt as a Book Reviewer – guest blog post by Anita Olivia Koester (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

All night, even as rain pounded
the crickets called and called
their high-pitched throb offering
a different perspective
on the downpour’s
thrum, a bass string’s thump
on windows, roof, the dark’s
wild fullness that we don’t
understand and thus fear.

Shiver of screech owl, damp in its
hickory-tree perch
sad dreams, body aches, waking
into memory. We animals
amid bedsheets, sweaty and tossed,
find ourselves alert, listening.
Rain drums sown in long bands
and crickets sing.
Ann E. Michael, Wet Year

There is this reach, this angle of fingertip-catch on entry, this strong pull initiated between iliac and pubic crests: between each wave the fire of core muscle on a long diagonal across belly, back, shoulders, alighting in palm of hand and the strong pull set free on ballistic recovery, loose and relaxed. Now the other, the next: ravenous for reach, for glide. A rolling, easy kick to balance. Scything through water for miles, unconscious of power, so fearless there is nothing but animal power, nothing but joy so still and deep it barely resembles emotion: it is an element, it is body and water and sky, bone and forest and eel, fish, orca, raven in flight. It is the dead brought back from the abyss: it is the living bone they animate. Abalone. Driftwood, bleached white and knobby. Pearlescent shell of former lives holding the single drop of now: now the entire lake, forest, sky, muscle and bone articulated in water-breath, the drum of heart perhaps the lake’s, perhaps mine, perhaps K’s, perhaps the rhythm of the boat’s oar, perhaps the pounding of earth itself far, far beneath this ashen wave, this drop, this almost imperceptible and tiny life as vast as sky, as ocean.

Shhhhh, says the boat.
Now, says the body.

Now.
JJS, Skaha Part III: 8:30am—10:30am, fearless joy and power

September 16, 2018December 9, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Weeks 36 and 37

I wasn’t able to post a round-up last week because I was in the midst of packing for my semi-annual migration across the Atlantic. So here are my picks from two weeks of poetry-blogging goodness, brought to you by jet-lag and coffee. Perhaps because I had twice as many posts to choose from as usual, I was especially struck by the variety on display, though there were a few recurring topics, such as how to organize poetry manuscripts, and the centrality of grief and loss.

You recently published your first collection of poetry, Glimmerglass Girl. Tell us about the project and how it came into being.

Some time ago I realized I’d written a lot of poems centered on the idea of femininity. It made sense to me to compile them into a collection. Many were poems I loved but that weren’t getting a lot of attention publication-wise. I think the most surprising thing about putting the collection together was that those poems (which at the time seemed like failures to me) suddenly made sense as a part of a collective whole. They spoke to each other in a new way. So that was my process, finding the pieces that I loved and wanted to contrast with each other to create new meaning.

What lessons did you learn in the process of pulling together your debut collection of poetry? What was the biggest challenge in finishing the project?

For me, the writing of a thing is the easiest part. I already had these poems I wanted to share with the world. The biggest challenge was marketing and getting those ideas out there. It is a lot of work to market a book as an indie author. You’re doing everything yourself: reaching out to people to ask for help, contacting reviewers, updating your website and social media. It’s exhausting in many ways but also thrilling because each bit of effort has a huge payoff. I feel forever indebted to the people who’ve supported my work and helped me get through it all. […]

You self-identify as a “weird writer.” How do you define weird writing? What attracts you to the weird?

Weird writing inhabits a liminal place between genres. It’s the stuff of the strange and not-quite-definable, a hybrid kind of writing that sings its own song and creates the instruments as it goes. Basically, it’s anything that doesn’t fit the mold. I think this approach excites me because I don’t really think or dream in the ways that are expected. For example, in Glimmerglass Girl, the poems could be called prose, and there are illustrations along with the words. This is just what felt natural to me while writing, and the fact that it’s weird is just a bonus.
Andrea Blythe, Poet Spotlight: Holly Lyn Walrath on hybrid writing and the idea of femininity

Roll up! Roll up!
By particular wishing
And for your delectable entertainment
The Circus of the Marvellously Menopausal Woman
Is in town.

Before your very eyes
You will not see her
Playing the object of desire
In a mainstream movie.

Gasp in amazement
At the wondrous curiosity
Of her living out her life
unnoticed.

There she isn’t!!
In line for promotion;
On advertising hoardings;
Anchoring a Talk Show.
Josephine Corcoran, The Circus of the Marvellously Menopausal Woman

I believe I first came in contact with Joseph Cornell through the poetry of Charles Simic. Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy published in 1992 was one of the first hardback books of poetry I bought. I have to admit that the cover had a good deal to do with my choice — as did the title, Dime-Store Alchemy. Rereading this book now I realize it was one of the first project-based collections that I had encountered. Simic stated that he wanted to approximate in poetry what Cornell did with visual assemblage. […]

Much is known (and repeated) about Cornell. He lived on Utopia Parkway, Flushing, NY and never left the Northeastern United States. He lived with his mother and his younger brother, living alone after they’d both passed on. Cornell had no formal training as an artist, he made his living selling textiles. By all accounts, his life experiences were not vast or wide. And yet that mattered little in the making of his art.

And long after many mid-century artists seem forgotten or locked in another time, Cornell seems to only become more relevant, more exciting.
Susan Rich, Returning to an Old Love – Joseph Cornell

12:30 PM
We drive home and kiddo falls asleep in the car. EARLY NAP FTW. Once we get home, I transport him inside, and grab my laptop. IT’S ACTUAL WRITING TIME. Sometimes this is grading time, but for once, I am gloriously caught up, and have graded all of my students’ narrative essays. (They were lovely—pieces on what brought the students to their current career, nursing.)

I start by working on this piece about my Writing Day itself. Then I duck out of this document and get to work on my current project—a long poem/essay thing that does’t know what genre it wants to be. It’s “about” flowers, empathy, storytelling, and politics. It’s been a very slow process as I figured out what it would look like. I feel that it’s over halfway done, but am not quite sure where it’s heading. I’m on page 12—yesterday I added one page. My mom and stepdad took Henson to the zoo and I had some unexpected free time to work on it. It was my birthday yesterday, and that felt like a huge gift.

1:45 PM
I have found myself on Twitter somehow. This piece I’m working on requires research and frequent Googling. It’s both good and bad…it leads me down the internet rabbithole. I don’t think that Twitter is a waste of time (necessarily). For me, it’s frequently a place of helpful and intriguing ideas. And I leave it when it’s too much of a distraction. But for example, the other day, I asked about how other artists handle the balance of creativity and research (especially when their language starts to feel dry). I’m trying to get back to the magic and strangeness of this piece. It’s sort of working, so far.
Hannah Stephenson : My Writing Day (August 24, 2018)

All the fruit looks spoiled
in my cart, yet I just picked it
from the bin. I can almost see
the tomato shriveling inside
its skin. A little bit of vine is
still hanging by its stem.
When the farmer tore it
from its vine, did it make a
snap? Or did it make a crack?
Crystal Ignatowski, In The Grocery Store After My Mother Broke Her Neck

Ultimately, I decided that as much as I would love to be a literary magazine editor, poet laureate, and/or tenured professor, my gotta-have-it level of fame is that I would like Some people to have Read my Poems. Not everyone–I’m not shooting for “household name” level of fame (no, impossible for poets– “creative writing student can remember your name” level of fame?), just some people to really have read my poems and maybe liked them.

So knowing that goal is important–it lets me know it is ok for me to quit all the side hustling things that are great but that aren’t important to my ultimate goal of Some People Reading My Poems–for me this means pretty much anything that isn’t just reading poems, writing poems, and occasionally on social media linking to poems I’ve written and poems I’ve liked that others have written. So literary magazine involvement to a minimum, social media at a minimum, readings at a once-a-year.

And it, probably most importantly, lets me know what to do with my current work! I don’t need to be Mary Oliver, so a big contest isn’t really worth my money–I need to buy diapers, y’all, I’m not wasting my hard-earned diaper money on contest fees!
Renee Emerson, Poets: How famous do you need to be?

I recently got hold of a friend’s fresh manuscript. She is concerned about the order she’s established for the book of poems. So with this in mind, I started from page 1 and read right through. The sections were grouped with a clear idea of why. This appeals to my orderly mind. (Or maybe it’s a disorderly mind, which is why I like order.) But did the order enhance my enjoyment of the collection? I’m just not sure. Under ordinary circumstances, I’m not sure I’d notice much.

Nevertheless, because I was asked to think about order, I started wondering what the collection would read like if the distinctive poems in one section appeared dotted throughout the section. Would this give me a little thrill of insider perspective when I encountered this kind of internal rhythm of certain kinds of poems woven throughout? Maybe. Again, that is, once I settled to read from cover to cover, and if I read from cover to cover in one sitting or in sittings that were relatively close together so that that mind referenced above would remember.

So, does order matter? Maybe. Of course, if it’s a “concept” collection in which something is unfolding or the reader needs to be familiarized with how to read the poems in the collection, then certainly order concerns matter. But how many of us are writing collections like that?

I know that when I read for a contest, I taste from beginning, middle, and end. If every poem I encounter interests me, then that manuscript goes in the Maybe Yes pile. If even one poem falls short, the ms goes in the Maybe pile. If several of the poems fail to interest me, it goes in the No pile. That’s just the way it is. (For more on my experience as a first round reader, see links below.) So in this case, order doesn’t matter very much. But as an author, I want my collection to have a flow, a weave, a pulse of some sort. So in that, case order does matter, if only to me.

So I guess here it is: Does a disorderly order sink a manuscript? I don’t really think so. Can an interesting order enhance it? Yes, indeed.

Am I finding it enjoyable to think about the order of my poems in my ms? If yes, then I should go ahead and shuffle them around as long as I’m having fun. Is it a drag? I guess I wouldn’t expend too much energy, then.

But I’m enjoying shuffling this friend’s poems around, so maybe it’s worth asking someone else to look at order, if that person finds it fun.

But the bottom line is, if every poem doesn’t pull its weight, then no reordering is going to save the ms. It’s all down to the individual poem. Again.
Marilyn McCabe, The Cheese Stands Alone; or On Ordering Poems in a Manuscript

Dennis Casling, New and Selected Poems, edited by Julia Copus and Annie Freud (Smith/Doorstop, 2018)

I’ve just had the pleasure of reading this new collection and I wanted to share my thoughts about it on the blog. It’s an extremely moving book comprised of the reprint of Casling’s earlier Endorphin Angels, along with other, presumably later poems, written up until Casling’s death in 2016.

Dennis Casling was blind. Maybe we need to know this, maybe not. On the back cover it says: ‘The act of seeing is informed by the imagination … I spend my time looking at the invisible’ (Casling). Sometimes what he ‘sees’ is memory, other times it’s imagined situations and characters, which links up with Philip Gross’s comment: ‘His poetry is a balance of different voices’.

The different voices are more noticeable in the first section (the reprint of Endorphin Angels takes up the first half of this book). Towards the second half of the book though, there’s a sense of the poet finding a voice which is perhaps less ‘poetic’ but, for me, is more rewarding to read.

Somewhere near the middle of the collection is ‘Holding On’ which seems to mark a shift from a poet consciously writing POETRY, to a poet who has the courage to set aside the more adorned use of language for something paired back. If this sounds as if I didn’t enjoy the first half, that’s not the case; I did. The beauty of the writing is enviable, with some lyrical language and, time and again, really fresh similes that expand the image in the reader’s mind. Here, for example, from the poem ‘In the Farmyard’ (p. 13) ‘the flat milk sack warm on the hand/ like a child’s fever’. Observant and sensual details like this abound.

Casling’s poetry is concerned with darkness and silence, absence and return, and above all, how we negotiate loss.
Julie Mellor, Dennis Casling – new and selected poems

Things are looking up for this old bird.

The first week of classes has come and gone and they were pleasantly uneventful, blissfully routine. I continued my morning writing ritual and wrote three new poems. And today I begin the first of what will be, with luck and perseverance and a little bit of selfishness thrown in, the first of what I’m calling Long Form Fridays. (Because, you know, like the true dork I am, I love to give everything alliterative titles . . .)

Long Form Fridays are going to entail taking my butt to the Starbucks where I wrote while the kids were in camp and parking myself at a table to write for three hours. It seems like as good a place as any — far enough away from my house and its chaos, definitely far enough from the campus and ITS noise and chaos — where I can begin work again on my long-form projects: first, my Accountability Partners play, and after that, the verse play that’s officially in Title Limbo (one of the reasons I need to sit and work on it more). […]

Word on the street (hahahaha, what am I, an 80s drug dealer?) is that almost all colleges across the nation are going through this panic moment of OH MY GOD WE HAVE NO MONEY because they all ignored the fact that about 20 years ago people were having fewer babies, and now fewer 20 year olds are seeking out higher education simply because there are fewer of them, and fewer students means lower revenue from student tuition and student fees but we’re still operating as if it’s the early 2000s recession and EVERYONE and their mom wanted to go back to college because they couldn’t find jobs but now the economy’s on an upswing and people have jobs and, as A.P. pointed out, there’s mounting evidence that having a college education doesn’t really guarantee “economic empowerment” (**eyeroll**) and so everyone’s saying fuck college and so BIG DEFICITS. Also also, top heavy administrations, irresponsible spending, yadda yadda yadda.

Which means that sabbaticals and money for professional development will probably, albeit slowly, dry up and disappear. So . . . self-granted residencies like Long Form Fridays and self-imposed exiles from college service and committee nonsense (i.e. My Year of Being Bad) will become more and more important to teaching artists — and hell, run-of-the-mill academics — in higher ed.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, The Self-Granted Residency and My Year of Being Bad: First Week

Cast from a cheap, bad, bronze mold,
my eyes don’t line up quite right.

My eyes are from a statue.
Stone-blind. Like weeping angels,

they look at nothing, nothing,
shifting in micro-jolts. There.

Vibrating at the level
of electrons. There. Again.

My eyes are from a robot.
They rotate on a gear shaft,

jerking. They need to be oiled.
My eyes are seeing something.

I don’t know what it is, but
they look so hard at nothing.
PF Anderson, On Being Asked What Is Triggering

People have asked me many times while doing talks on the subject, “How do I get my book reviewed?”

The book review process can seem mysterious – but as a poetry book reviewer myself for the last fifteen years, hopefully I can take some of the mystery out of the process.

First Steps

I usually talk first about building a poetry community way before your book comes out. That means things like, joining or starting a writing group, going to other people’s book launches (and trying to learn from them), and…writing some book reviews yourself. It makes sense that you would start contributing to the literary world when you’re starting to even think about having your own book come out. If you don’t feel like putting in the work, well, how can you expect other writers to do so?

If you’re worried about your book reviewing skills, every book reviewer has had to start somewhere, even the reviewers at The New York Times Review of Books and Poetry Magazine. I started out reviewing for NewPages.com, a venue friendly to new reviewers. I recommend that you read lots of literary magazines and online review outlets to see what kind of book reviews you like and what you aspire to, style-wise. I like The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, and many of the literary magazines that run reviews. I noticed that there was a formula you can follow in many of the big review outlets. Then, send out some queries to literary magazines that take book reviews. Sometimes you even get paid!
PR for Poets – How Can I Get My Book Reviewed? – guest blog post by Jeannine Hall Gailey (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

On the walk home, I thought about one of the early hurricanes we experienced here, when we were still renting a duplex in the fall of 1998. We had a close brush with hurricane Georges that went south into the Keys. The surf was the highest I’ve ever seen at Hollywood beach.

Here’s a poem that came from that walk which I still like. I look at my current poems and see how much I’ve grown as a poet. But I’m glad that poems like these still make me happy.

Clean Sweep

While other folks board
up their windows,
she opens hers wide
to the hurricane winds.

She goes to the beach.
Unlike the surfers,
she has no interest in waves
that crash against the shore.

The sand abrades her skin.
The wind sweeps into every crevice.
Behind her, transformers pop and crackle.
Energy explodes.

Even though the palms bow
to the storm, she lifts
her arms above her head,
struggles to remain standing.

That night, she sleeps
soundly. Even though the wind
howls and hoots and hammers at the walls,
she breathes clean air and dreams fresh visions.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poetry Monday: “Clean Sweep”

Risa [Denenberg]: How did it feel to have poems published in Poetry in 2002 and then to not have your book, Acid and Tender (which was a finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize) published until 2016 (by Headmistress Press)? Were you submitting the manuscript and getting rejections during those years? Or, did you take a hiatus from writing poetry?

Jen [Rouse]: Ha! It was the thrill of my life to have a poem next to Maxine Kumin’s in that issue of Poetry. What a trip. And, it was an even bigger thrill when I got the Headmistress email, saying my first book was accepted. Such a full heart for Headmistress! I was doing something I hate—clothes shopping—that afternoon, when I checked my phone and the message about my book was there. My sister was with me, and we totally flipped out in the store. The person helping us even gave me an extra discount on my purchase that day.

As for the years in between, I was still writing. I never stop writing. But, I had to do a lot of relationship work during that time. I moved to Iowa with my partner. I finally came out to my mom—because we would be near her in Iowa. I landed my job at Cornell College—where I have been for 15 years now and will go up for full professor this year. I gave birth to my now 13-year- old daughter, Madeline.

Risa: Did you feel that your identity as a poet was marginalized during those years?

Jen: My major mentor, the one who guest edited that issue of Poetry, rejected me when I had our child, basically treating me as though that decision was the one that would end my career as a writer. I’m a very devoted and loyal friend, and the sting of that still lingers. It wasn’t until one of my amazing poet friends—Paulette Beete—from my MFA program at American University asked me to participate in an online writing group that I really started thinking about the trajectory of my writing career, of getting better, of publishing again. A wonderful writing group. I am deeply indebted.
Anne Sexton Talks to God / an interview with poet Jen Rouse (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

Turns out there’s some good news about rejection I never really grasped before. I’m reading poetry for Shenandoah in earnest now and realizing rejected poems DO reach sympathetic readers, at least if you send them to well-edited magazines: the editors and staff readers themselves.

I am moved, entertained, impressed, and intrigued by far more work than Shenandoah can accept. I’m sure some journal readers are burnt-out or ego-tripping, but I’m inclined to guess magazine editors are often a good audience–smart about the field and in love with the art. You’d think I would know this by now. I’ve definitely felt that connection with certain editors who reject my work with personal notes like “admired these” or “came close.” But being on the other side makes it more vivid, and it cheers me.
Lesley Wheeler, On first looking into Shenandoah’s submissions

[Lana Ayers:] What is the process like creating a new & selected works? Has your relationship to the earlier poems shifted? Have you discovered anything new in the process?

[Patricia Fargnoli:] This is the one year anniversary of the publication of Hallowed: New & Selected Poems so it is a good time to reflect on the process of creating it.

I knew that I wanted to have a volume that recognized my previous books while it also included the new work I’ve written since Winter was published.

And I wanted to do it by my 80th birthday so as to recognize that scary (to me) landmark.

I contacted my previous publishers for permission to use poems from those books and Jeffrey Levine at Tupelo Press said that they wanted to publish it since they had published two of my previous books and considered me to be part of “The Tupelo Family.”

The process of putting the manuscript together was quite easy: I simply chose the best of the new poems I’d written…24 of them, and then arranged them as I would arrange the poems in any book… paying attention especially to the first and last poems but also to the arc of the them and how they connected to each other.

Choosing the poems from previous books was even easier. I knew that I wanted a representative sample from each book, but didn’t want a lot of poems from each book…so I went through each front to back, choosing poems that seemed to encompass the themes of that book and that had gotten recognition through audience appreciation and/or publication…plus those that were personal favorites.

A friend pointed out that I left many strong poems behind and I guess I did but I didn’t want the book to become too long.

What I learned was that some of my themes are lifelong themes: especially grief and loss, how to find meaning and beauty in nature and life, those consolations.

I also recognized that the poems of the first book, Necessary Light, tend to be more narrative than those of later books which tend first toward my lyrical and later to more and more meditative as I aged and began to be more concerned with issues of aging and with the search for spirituality and meaning in a world where there are no (for me at least) certain answers.

Amazingly, when I had finished the choosing and arranging, the poems from all the books seem to become a cohesive book….something that both surprised and delighted me.
Lana Ayers, Poet Patricia Fargnoli Talks Writing, Love of Words, Advice

It is not blood or bits of bone that resonate when I think of you.
I ripped the plastic bag with my largest car key,
when I held the ash between my palms hollering at the sky:
Float, let the stuck un-stick.
Let our bodies loosen,
teeth unclench.
It’s time we stopped existing like we’re dying around these parts,
Like we’re full of cement and sludge, of your damned ghost.
Let our smiles return, those that burned down a little
when you became
so dry.
Jennifer E. Hudgens, New Poem “Letting”

A couple of times a year, I search my submission spreadsheets for poems with the dubious distinction of having collected the most rejections so far. If these poems are not currently under consideration for publication, they go into a special category: Most Rejected Poems.Then I print them out and spread them on the floor of my office. One by one, I read them slowly and carefully, trying very hard not to judge them. I imagine the editors I’ve sent these poems to reading through piles of unsolicited work, looking for that intangible thing – a mood, metaphor, imagery, or narrative – that sets a poem apart. I read the poems again, those rejected babies of mine, searching for those very qualities. What are they missing? Does the poem need a tune-up? Or a rest from constant submitting?

About half the time, the poem needs a little work. I often consult Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, eds. Scott Wiggerman & David Meischen. I’ve saved many a poem with, for example, a better title (Susan Terris’s chapter “Twenty Ideas for Titles to Pique the Curiosity of Poetry Editors” is a favorite of mine) or by re-writing the poem in an unusual form, as in Ravi Shankar’s chapter “A Manipulated Fourteen-Line Poem.” Other books that help include Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet and The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.
Erica Goss, Saving the Most-Rejected Poems

From time to time I have tried to embrace the stop-making-sense school of poetry. I like poems of all kinds, after all, even the absurd ones that spin a kind of magic spell over a reader, transporting us to another world. Mom’s world.

Tonight–back home–I get up at midnight, after my young-adult children have finally abandoned the living room. I turn on the TV and find a 73-minute movie called “A Poet in New York.” That title is all I have to go on, but I start the movie and discover that it is about Dylan Thomas. I think of my favorite poetry professor, not the “stop making sense one,” but a professor who liked my story-heavy, narrative poems. I think of how he adored Thomas. He could do a fair impersonation of him, with a swaggering, Welsh accent. “When I was young and easy under the apple boughs.” There is frightfully little of Thomas’s poetry in this movie. Mostly there is whiskey and sex and poor Caitlin Thomas’s mad passion for Dylan (he pronounces her name Cat-lin and writes her letters telling her how much he misses fondling her breasts). The movie does not make a lot of sense, but that, in itself, makes a kind of sense to me. Tonight it does.

Immediately after the stroke, while still in the hospital, Mom told me, “Bury me on the hill beside your father.” (My sister, hearing this exchange from the doorway, slapped her forehead and said, “Geez, I hadn’t thought of that!”) The slow slide into complete dependency—into nonsense—continues, though she no longer has to be reminded that she can’t get out of bed, or that she can’t walk. She no longer asks to be buried on the hillside.

In my mother’s non-narrative, non-linear mind, of course she can walk. She is a child, running through a field (and I picture the young Dylan Thomas running through a field of tall grass). Her brother’s horses spook and wheel and she runs after them. This is the world, too, of the poem. We want to make sense of it. But we might allow ourselves a little more rein to be in the non-sense. To take the poem’s hand, and run with it.
Bethany Reid, Stop Making Sense

I lay in my hammock under the trees and worried about the lanternflies. Which accomplished nothing (I think of a James Wright poem at this point…).

What was there not to despair about? So much anxiety surrounds me. Even the damned bugs. If only starlings were to take a liking to spotted lanternflies, I mused.

A butterfly went past. I looked down at the zinnias blossoming their stems off in the garden and felt pleased to count four monarchs there. It has been a good year for monarch butterflies in my yard, and green darners and other dragonflies, and hummingbirds–which used to be quite uncommon visitors here. The little brown bats are returning each dusk, recovering slowly from the decimation of white-nose virus.

The balance may seem off in many ways. But there are restorative moments.

Even if “I have wasted my life.”
Ann E. Michael, Reverie, with interruption

I think about bees when I drip honey on challah and apple slices. Tonight is the eve of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, which always seems a more natural time for reflection and endings than in the deadness of winter. The harvest moon. The start of the school year. The end of summer, time to account for whether enough grain has been stored to get us through the inevitable winter months. Although there is argument for January 1st too, a moment when we are poised over the dark abyss, but take heart in remembering that we are going back into the light. Again. I wonder how we bear all of this repetition, so eagerly anticipated in childhood, and so foreboding as we age. Another year, expectations of ritual celebrations and foods and annual mammograms. […]

The manuscript I am working on now is titled, “why I hate to cry”. I cried yesterday listening to a radio program that spoke about social isolation (specifically, the way men–not just straight men– are groomed to avoid emotional relationships with other men, to their detriment.) This interested me, but why was I crying? I suppose I understood that I am “like that”, I avoid emotional relationships, but is it too my detriment? I really can’t say with any certainty.

This is all very complicated, as I contemplate retirement. For so many years I have spent so much of my emotional reserve in taking care of people-as-patients, I don’t seem to have much left for friendship. I wonder if I will be like one of those “men” who retire and find themselves at a loss for meaning. Who fail quickly; who die shortly. Who am I, if this is how I see myself in retirement? And yet, I am longing for the freedom to pursue the possibilities of connection. Of traveling and meeting all the poets that I only know on Facebook and Twitter. Of having meaningful conversations. Of learning to cry again without hating myself for it.

I wish each of us some sweetness in the new year. Layered into what we all fear, even know, is happening. The wrecking ball, the earthquake, the failure of democracy, the loss of habitat, the disappearance of bees, famine and war, cancer, overdoses. All of it. May it be mingled with some sweetness. Some tears. Some love.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with Bitter Honey

September 2, 2018September 2, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 35

This week, poets have been looking back on their summers, and those who teach are girding their loins for the fall semester. There were several intriguing posts about new approaches to poetry composition. And a few larger social/political issues came up for discussion: the insidiousness of social media, ageism in the poetry business, and white supremacy in higher education. Lesley Wheeler reports seeing “a revolutionary glimmer in some colleagues’ eyes”. Here’s hoping!

Suddenly, it’s September. I have been up since 4 a.m. Putting by tomato sauce and getting ready for the day of doing, this and that. Labor Day weekend. The crickets are still pulsating beneath the open window. I can smell the campfires from Hamlin State park. Summer is smouldering…

Brockport’s Fall semester began this past week. St. John Fisher begins next week. It’s hard to believe that I am standing at this threshold. […]

So grateful to the editors who have accepted this work. I have more to write, but settling back in our daily life has made me focus on what’s happening around me. This summer has been a waterfall of creativity. I am not sure where all of this energy is coming from, but it’s a godsend. I am seeing things that I’ve overlooked. Thank goodness for the 100 days of summer.
M.J. Iuppa, End of Summer… Let the Harvest begin…

I’ve written no poems at all this past month. It is really hard to write when you are in the middle of house hunting, moving, homeschooling four kids under the age of 7, and your husband is five hours away because he has already started his new job. Sometimes writing is the first thing to go. As much as it helps me to write, sometimes I choose to shower instead. Or to teach my online classes, or sweep, or cook a meal. As always, when I spend any amount of days alone with all the kids, I have a renewed sense of wonder for single moms! Going it alone is no fun. My goal this week as a writer is to take five minutes at the end of each day to read a little poetry–it isn’t much, but I think it is something my poet-heart needs.
Renee Emerson, the times they are a changin’

My much awaited book launch in Bothell, Washington two weeks ago was not stellar. I had laryngitis and did not sound my best poetic self. However, the venue was lovely, poets and friends showed up, and my editor, Sandra Kleven hosted with lots of wine and cheese and her usual unflappable grace.

A week later, my readings in Portland and Bellingham went on without me as I was still horizontal on the couch. And so is life. If I have learned anything these past few weeks, it is to let go, as best one can, to expectations. Things happen. People get sick. Life moves forward with or without you. Accept your disappointment and begin again.

This past Monday, my books showed up, and slowly over the course of the week, I realized I have a published book of poems. Seven years of work now gathered together in one place. AND I AM THRILLED! In the end, the book turned out beautiful and for that I am grateful to Cirque Press.

And of course I would love it if you would consider buying one of my books.

We write to share our story and our view of the world. We write with the hope to connect to another human soul. We write to say for one small moment, I was here.
Carey Taylor, I have books!

Learn to grovel, spread thinly
on the ground as
the mud banks crack
hiss out the moisture

of deep earth
coat the shells and scales
as swathes of life
net the land and

carpet polish seashores
with a rubbery ooze.
Uma Gowrishankar, The story of the Earth

The last three months have been really good — one of the best summers I’ve had in a long time, and primarily because I didn’t have a damn thing planned, aside from the kids’ week at camp (glorious! oh the hours of writing time!) and the trips to see my family. I could have done with a little less depression/mood swing nonsense, but I feel like I’m coming out of that somewhat (at least I hope so — I don’t have a lot of patience with myself when I’m mopey).

So — to sum up — this summer resulted in:

16 new pages of my play, and a significant shift in its structure, from a one-act to a two-act;

30 new poems — 23 of which belong to one emerging manuscript, and 7 which may belong to my collaborative project with M.S.; AND

10 new blog posts.

Additionally, I ACTUALLY READ AND FINISHED BOOKS, YOU GUYS. As you may remember from earlier posts, I managed to finish Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan, Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon, and The Halo by C. Dale Young. Just this past week, I finished Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado — which I am completely in love with. It’s the most gorgeous, beautifully weird, moving collection of short stories. Love love love. To the point where I probably won’t teach from it because I don’t want my students to ruin it for me. But anyway. GET THEE TO A LIBRARY OR BOOKSTORE AND READ THIS BOOK.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Summer Stats and Cautious Optimism for the New Semester

Yesterday, August 31st, I dropped a postcard with a poem on it into my favorite mailbox here in Ashland, and I was done—that was my last card for this year’s August Poetry Postcard Fest. This was my sixth year participating in the Fest, a month-long writing marathon founded by Paul Nelson and Lana Hechtman Ayers, in which people around the world write original poems onto postcards and send them off to other Fest participants. This year I managed to hit a personal best, writing 33 poems in the month of August.

As I’ve said in this blog before, the Postcard Fest is an unusually intimate writing marathon because only one person, the recipient, might ever see that poem. And with about 300 Fest participants this year, the recipient might be in Schenectady or Seattle or County Wexford, Ireland. So along with that intimacy, paradoxically, there’s a pleasant anonymity to Fest—since the recipient usually doesn’t know me, in my mind, that means that absolutely anything goes. That person doesn’t care if I’m writing about ants or tacos or Trump, so I tend to give my postcard poems a very loose rein.

This year I wrote almost all of the poems on the same theme, something I’ve never managed to do before. I can’t say I really planned that, but as we got toward the end of July, my region of southern Oregon was suffering from a hellacious, early fire season—several forest fires raged nearby, and we were choking with smoke that settled into our valley and didn’t budge for weeks. Like a lot of people in the area, I became obsessed with the Air Quality Index; several times a day I was checking two apps on my phone, plus a website, to see how bad the air was. Several days we got up into the maroon “hazardous” readings (over 300, the chart’s highest range), days of a strange, omnipresent white fog that felt almost moist in the lungs. People got sick, people fled town for the coast, people actually moved away, it was so bad.

And like my house, car, office, lungs, and very cells, my poems were permeated by smoke as I began writing them for the Postcard Fest. It seemed pointless to write about anything else, it was so pervasive, so all-encompassing. We are a mountain town, and we literally could not see the mountains around us; it looked like we were living in some kind of flat war zone. After a couple of sputtering starts at smoke/fire poems, I got into a groove one night and wrote one that ended up too long for a postcard. But I just went with it, spent a couple of days polishing it up, and ended up sending it to Rattle’s Poets Respond, since it was about a news story that had gone viral, a photo of five firefighters sleeping in a yard in Redding, California, two hours south of here, during the Carr Fire. Rattle published it on their site the following Tuesday, and to my astonishment, it was shared more than 1,000 times from their web page.

Still, the fires burned on and the smoke blanketed us with its netherworld. So I just stuck with it, writing poems about smoke and fire, each with that day’s air quality index noted on it. There were poems about angry meteorologists, weary berry pickers, finding ash inside the car, the language of evacuation orders, and fashion-forward smoke masks. It was like a bottomless well; writing them was almost effortless. Out of the 33 poems I wrote in August, only 4 weren’t about smoke or fire. And then, late in the month, we suddenly got a clear day, and then one that wasn’t too bad. A few days later, we got two incredibly beautiful, clear days in a row. Now we’ve had about a week of good air. And either I was sick of writing about smoke or the muse had finally blown away, because the fire poems didn’t come as easily without that smoke right in front of my face, right in my nose. One of the last poems of the month was about a horse. Just a horse, not a horse breathing smoke or running from fire.
Amy Miller, Smokin’ August Poetry Postcard Fest Wrap-Up

I have been trying a new approach to writing poems these days, very different for me, who usually has a stranglehold on word and idea. I’ve been kitchen-sink-ing it these days.

I start with an image and anything that occurs to me around that image which seems at all relevant to why the image caught my eye, I throw down on paper. And I do this for a while, leaving a file open on my desktop to add stuff to as it occurs to me as I wander around my day. After a while I start rereading them to rediscover what’s there.

If it seems like I’ve got a heap of stuff that has some relation — a bunch of silverware perhaps, or cups and saucers — then I pick through to try to create short, more orderly passages. I try to find threads to weave and gaps to fill. I toss to the bottom things that either don’t seem to quite fit or are blathery or boring, but I don’t want to throw away just yet. Often I find similar versions of the same idea, so I have to decide which one is most interesting, or twist a handle here, ding a tine there, so there’s enough different that I can keep them both. And I start to try line breaks, stanza thingies, start to clip and shift my way toward rhythms. And I try to find the point beyond which an idea I’ve thrown in just cannot stay.

It’s in this editing process that I bring some order to the mess. I do insist, it seems, on having some kind of organizing principle or through-line of reason. (Which it seems puts me out of touch with so much of contemporary poetry I read, poetry that tolerates the, to me, wholly tangential, the inexplicable, the, what I call, “hunh? quotient.” Of course, these contemporary authors may indeed have their own organizing principle for the seemingly random utterances. But what is it? What is it? What the hell is it?)

I am concerned about making sure there’s some kind of connective tissue at work in a poem, a line of thinking that at least somewhat clearly loops back upon itself. I want the reader to happily take leaps with me, not find themselves legs flailing over an abyss.
Marilyn McCabe, Order! Order!; or, On Finding a Unifying Principle in the Disorderly Poem

There is an adage in most monotheistic religions that collectively advises practitioners to pray when you don’t want to, and especially when you feel like you can’t. I think the act of writing poetry might function the same way; there are points in all our writing journeys when the purposeful trudge is necessary, when the pen feels more like a pick axe than a nimble sword. While this is in no way the only method, I almost always find myself searching out the structure of poetic forms when I feel stuck in those slog-moments.
Just Keep Writing: 3 Forms to Re-energize Your Poetry – guest blog post by Jerrod Schwarz (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)

I know when I was at school I’d be asked, or told, to write a story; and when I was a young and not especially reflective teacher, I’d be the one to do the asking or telling. There was always the one or two or three who would very reasonably say: I don’t know what to write about, Sir / Miss. I guess they were written off in school reports: ‘Lacks imagination’. I was OK at school, because although I knew very little, I read a lot and I’d figured out the tricks of writing a story. Poems, not so much. But we were rarely asked to write a poem, so that was OK.

And then, many years later (in my case) you find yourself, for reasons you can’t fathom, writing, or trying to write, poems; meeting other bewildered and enthusiastic folk in the same pickle. And every now and again hearing (or reading on Facebook) the complaint that someone is ‘blocked’ or ‘stuck’ or has ‘hit a blank period’. It’s the voice from childhood, all over again. Please, Miss. I don’t know what to write. I’ll stick my neck out. Here’s the answer. It’s because, for one reason or another, you have nothing to say. Not for ever. But just now. It’s because nothing is exciting or puzzling you.

You can make a list of what ought to intrigue you: your childhood, relationships, friends, school….the whole autobiographical shtick. But if it doesn’t excite or puzzle you, why should it interest anyone else? Places, landscapes, other lives? Ditto. Stuff you know you know about? History, science, cars, philately? Ditto.

So I’m going to stick my neck out again and say it’s the stuff that takes you by surprise, that’s exciting but something you don’t understand, something you want to understand…that’s what you wait for or go hunting for.

I was talking to the poet Helen Mort a week or so ago and she said something that caught my attention (she said a lot of things that did that) and I had to write it down. She said that when she went to Cambridge she was thrown by the way so many students took the place for granted, as though they didn’t actually ‘see’ it. Whereas she, as an outsider, an incomer, was gobsmacked and excited and baffled and all that…And I was immediately transported back to the interview I had in Cambridge, aged 17. I felt like an alien. Which meant, I suppose, that I was differently observant. It was like trying to learn a four-dimensional foreign language. And then Helen said:

Ideally, writers are on the outside, looking in

They are ideally, I suppose, the dark watchers I wrote about last week. They are writing to discover, because that’s the medium they make their discoveries in. Helen said:

I can make poems to be written, and they might be OK, but that’s all

By which I understood: if you’re not puzzled by what you’re writing about then you won’t be writing the poems that need to be written. I’m really glad I was there to hear that.
John Foggin, From the back catalogue (3)

I’ve started thinking about, and writing, new poems for what might be a second collection. These are mostly poems to do with human ageing, the menopause, being an older mother, being a parent to teenagers and young adults, and small town living. Does this sound like these are poems that might make a book? Anyway, a book is a far away thought as I’m just filling up my notebooks with lines and fragments at this point – although some finished poems have emerged. I’ve also written some themed poems for competitions – I just fancied it and I wanted to support the people organising them. Occasionally I’ve won or been a runner-up in a poetry comp so we’ll see what happens.

I’ve also made a stab at some prose writing – thinking that I might be writing a novel – but when I’ve read through this work it seems that it is a series of poems hidden inside many pages of words, rather like word search puzzles.
Josephine Corcoran, Reading, writing, planning, etc.

To Speak or Not to Speak?

That is indeed the question! I don’t mean speaking the poem, that goes without saying, so to speak … I mean giving a brief introduction to some of the poems, the way I do when reading to an audience. My initial idea was just to record the audiobook as a verbatim rendition of the text in the pamphlet, but my experience of audiobooks over the last year has been changing my thoughts about this.

The National Poetry Library at the South Bank Centre on The Thames in London, will lend poetry audio CDs and I’ve been receiving two CDs per month. My favourites so far have included Jo Shapcott and Lavinia Greenlaw, and vintage recordings of T. S. Eliot and Philip Larkin. Approaches differ from poet to poet — some introduce their poems with information about how, when and why they wrote the poem, whilst other poets just read their work with no elaboration. My preference is definitely the former, though generally speaking the CDs are ‘So-and-so reading from his/her poems’ and cover a few of their published works, not a literal reading of one single book.

Since readers of the paperback copy of Dressing Up don’t get any explanatory notes on details pertaining to the poem (even in the poem The Kapluna Effect, in which I intended to footnote translations of 3 Inuit words I use in the poem but plum forgot to!) and will only hear those insights if they come and hear me read live, is it fair to include them on the audiobook version? I’m inclined to think it is, but that I might put a page on this blog, on which I detail the things I mention when introducing the poems live, plus some small edits I have made to the poems since publication, which I came to through the act of performing them.
Giles L. Turnbull, The Poetry Professional

I don’t know if my failure at Twitter has to do with my introversion, or simply my complete lack of interest in sharing all of my fascinating opinions with the world. I can’t imagine having a thought and immediately feeling an overwhelming urge to hammer it out and announce it to all and sundry on social media. Also, Twitter is a garbage barge under the best of circumstances. It’s a terrible form of electronic crack that caters to the absolute worst of our instincts. It’s a rage factory, a sewer and a societal blight. Yet I cannot bring myself to delete my account, because I am no better than anyone else and I get a little smirky, feel-good charge out of observing the gladiatorial verbal death-matches. Also, I keep thinking there has to be a more interesting way to use it, like writing a short story in a series of Tweets, or posting short poems…and then I could build a huge following and get Twitter-famous! See, I barely even use it and yet I’m still addicted and plotting some grubby rise to cheap fame through its auspices. It’s bad news.
Kristen McHenry, Bad at Twitter, Edwardian Trolling, Belated Buddy Update

I posted something on Facebook about the dearth of opportunities for poets after that first or second book prize, the lack of prestige presses reading open submissions or anything but first book contest entries, a whole poetry system that seems to spin on publicizing the young and the new. I guess they are more photogenic! LOL. Not to be bitter and old, but you know, great poets aren’t always the most photogenic or the hippest. Sometimes they are (gasp) over 40! They don’t always go to Iowa or live in NYC! Sigh.

Anyway, the post generated so many responses (some heated) that I had to hide the thread, but it was interesting to read the variety of responses – older poets saying that had given up on “the po biz” or publishing even one book altogether, older poets saying they wanted to encourage younger poets but also wanted more outlets for poets their age. Some folks pointing out that this could be a problem of scarcity – a feeling that the majority of scarce energy, time, money, publicity was going only to some poets, leaving the rest empty-handed. The weird thing is, there’s less scarcity in poetry than usual – poetry books, everbody’s telling us, are selling more than ever. Or “how dare you? Don’t you want to encourage young poets?” (I do!) Or “You should only write for the joy of writing the poem.” (Yes, to a point…but I also write to share that with others…) […]

I wrote an essay a while back for The Rumpus called “the Amazing Disappearing Woman Writer,” talking about Ellen Bass’s rise to fame in her early years, her disappearance from the map of mainstream poetry, and a bit of a late triumphal return. That seems to be a pattern – people seem more willing to embrace a woman poet when she is young and sexy, forget about her in middle age, and cheer her again when (perhaps) she is seen as less of a threat, more of a mother figure, in her later years? It takes a lot of courage and persistence and work to try to stay in the spotlight. The ones that stay there, they are fighting to stay there. Or other people are fighting for them. Anyway, this is why you may notice that my book reviews often focus on women, and women in middle age particularly, ones that I don’t feel have had enough written about them. Some poets get way too much review space, and others way too little, and I’ll do what I can when I have the energy to try to put a spotlight on these women in their middle years.

But there remains the problem – the culture of poetry’s fetishism of young poets. The desire for the new. Instagram poetry could be a great way to reach more people with poetry – or a great way to shallow-up the world of poetry, focusing on the pretty image and the tiny, easily digestible poem. I don’t have the answers. But you might – if you have the power to buy a book of poetry, or reviewing one, think about giving your attention to a poet who might not be the flavor of the month or in the spotlight, but might speak uniquely to you. If you are a publisher or editor, think about your gatekeepers – if they’re all 22, that might be affecting what gets past them, because at 22, you feel 30 is old – and that gives you a different worldview than someone, say, in their fifties. (If they’re all 22 white able-bodied males, you may have even more thinking to do.) Think about diversifying opportunity. After all, Ellen Bass never stopped being a terrific writer – she just dropped off the radar for a while.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Grappling with Middle Age and Being a Mid-Career Poet

I’m in on this: reading women poets in September, which, if you follow on Twitter, you will see delicious suggestions of many, many books you will want to read (or re-read), some poets you’ve never heard of but are grateful to know about, and a sudden urge to spend all of your allowance on (yes) books of poetry by women.

There is no sign-up; there are no rules, no commitment, but the idea of reading books of poetry, reading women poets, reading while thinking “this is a woman, a poet, a book of poetry by a woman” gives a certain delight.

Even if you have been doing this all year long for many years.

I have a pile of books that I intend to read (at least some of) this month, and hope to write reviews of (at least a few) here on my Sunday Morning Muse blog.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with #SeptWomenPoets

In May 2018, the Commission issued a long report recommending many changes, some of which involve altering the role of the chapel in university life; renaming buildings and changing the balance of what’s memorialized; and correcting myths to present a far more complex picture of [Robert E.] Lee. After 24 years of being upset by the way [Washington and Lee University] presents Lee, I appreciated much of the straight talk in the report, although I know plenty of people who didn’t think it went far enough. The Commission included stakeholders from many generations, backgrounds, and political persuasions, so its consensus surprised me and gave me a little bit of wary hope.

Well, the president just issued a response that started the flaggers cheering (and presumably plenty of deep-pocketed conservative older alums, too). Basically, he was very specific about keeping intact the tradition of whitewashing Lee, and very vague about how other report recommendations might one day, possibly, very quietly be partially adopted. I’m not surprised, but like all the other professors I’ve been talking to, I’m sad and disappointed. What a waste of momentum towards change. What a way, too, to disrespect an already demoralized teaching community. I feel particularly bad for colleagues and students who put hundreds of hours of work into the commission, many of which involved fielding bile from enraged right-wingers, who are invariably louder than anyone with a moderate or left-of-center perspective.

Am I angry? Not really; too tired. I am mad at myself for signing up to moderate diversity discussions during first-year orientation, which will add up to 10-12 hours of unpaid labor, some of them over this “holiday” weekend. Why volunteer to facilitate those conversations when the larger organization won’t support the values behind them? I am worried about the students, though–the first-years moving in this morning as well as my returning students and advisees. I want everyone to feel welcomed, supported, and able to be full participants in the intellectual and artistic community we try to foster. I know many students who felt disenfranchised and demoralized last year; I’m afraid the president’s letter just made things much worse. What DOES seem utterly worthwhile, and what I’ll try to keep my focus on, is continuing to give students what help I can in my classrooms and office hours. Aside from the extra dose of complicity in white supremacy (!!!), I like teaching here a great deal: small classes, great resources, talented students, talented colleagues. It’s not the worst corner a poet can get backed into.

Plus, in meetings yesterday, I saw a revolutionary glimmer in some colleagues’ eyes. Roanoke College professor and general education expert Paul Hanstedt was leading an outstanding workshop on general education and I think the hard-core university citizens in the room were realizing: maybe donors will win all the debates about names, statues, and institutional rhetoric. But the FACULTY is in charge of the curriculum. We can make CHANGES that COUNT.

In the meantime, I loaded some extra protest poetry into fall syllabi. More on poetry teaching soon, and on reading poetry for Shenandoah, which, it turns out, I LOVE—it’s so much fun to read new work pouring in. W&L’s distinguished literary magazine, currently being redesigned by a new Editor in Chief, Beth Staples, is open for submissions now, all genres, no cost to submit, and if you’re accepted, it pays actual money! We’ll do good work with W&L’s resources yet.
Lesley Wheeler, Flagging

A river enlivened my childhood. Several rivers, in fact–the Hudson, the Delaware–but the one that comes to me at this moment is the Eel River in Indiana, pictured in my recent post here. By coincidence, just this week Streetlight, an online literary review, published my poem “Eel River Meditation.” In less cheerful news, someone whose presence I associate with South Whitley, IN has entered hospice care. These associations summon memories that carry me into that realm of family tales, rituals, jokes, sorrows, generational mythology.

My grandmother lived beside the Eel. A self-taught artist, she painted the bridge over the river many times, in all seasons. It must have steadied her sense of being in the world, of being in place; certainly, her paintings evoke that place, a small Indiana town, in those of us who knew and loved her.

And what could be more metaphorical than a bridge? Than a river? Than the changing seasons?

Locally, this rainy summer in my valley region, the feeder streams are full to overflowing and rushing to the Lehigh River, flooding the low-lying marshy areas, stranding the occasional cow or motorist. The fall semester has begun, and the garden’s mostly abandoned to the aforementioned weeds. My mind and heart are full, too. Maybe there will be poetry.
Ann E. Michael, Feeder streams

If you want a book-length treatment of hurricane Katrina in poems, I recommend two wonderful books. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler does amazing things, an astonishing collection of poems that deal with Hurricane Katrina. I love the way that Katrina comes to life. I love that a dog makes its way through these poems. I love the multitude of voices, so many inanimate things brought to life (a poem in the voice of the Superdome–what a cool idea!). I love the mix of formalist poetry with more free form verse and the influence of jazz and blues music. An amazing book.

In Colosseum, Katie Ford also does amazing things. She, too, writes poems of Hurricane Katrina. But she also looks back to the ancient world, with poems that ponder great civilizations buried under the sands of time. What is the nature of catastrophe? What can be saved? What will be lost?

I fear we’ll be asking these questions more and more in the 21st century.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Hurricane Katrina on the Ground and in Poetry

This gold and green shield bug was crawling around on my Crossandra this morning. His under side was an iridescent gold which I tried to photograph but it just didn’t translate well. Plus, he seemed to sense I was getting pretty close as he twisted and turned and crawled until he was on a very slender stem, clinging for dear life and seemingly discombobulated to the point of not knowing where to go for safety. It reminded me of myself when I’m stressed out, my mind a jumble of crossed wires. I guess in some ways we’re not so different, bugs and humans.
Charlotte Hamrick, Morning Meditation: Shield Bug