Laura Grace Weldon – Page 7

December 29, 2019December 29, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 52

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week, bloggers were looking backward, forward, inward and outward. Like most weeks, really. Only with a bit more seemingly at stake.

The closet in my study
holds picture frames, half-empty
boxes of stationery, old books,
pillows and blankets
for the guest bed. And tucked in
amid all of these, a small box
emblazoned Priority Mail,
addressed in your handwriting,
postmarked two years ago.
It slipped behind the quilts
and the crates of journals,
unseen and forgotten.
As I slice open the packing tape
I can scarcely breathe.
Rachel Barenblat, Chanukah gift

It’s so easy now (spoken from the vantage point of a contentious political climate in the U.S. and from the utter devastation we continue to cause on our planet) to imagine that the only writing that could possibly carry weight is writing that challenges systems like government and capitalism. But Oceanic is a good reminder that it’s okay to write about love. (And honestly, what’s a better counter to greed than affection?) As Aimee Nezhukumatathil says in an interview in BookPage, the poems are her way of “following environmentalist Rachel Carson’s belief that the more attention we pay to the natural world around us, the less appetite we have for destruction.”
Also on that note, she tells Tin House, “I want readers to really sit, really think about words and beauty and what brings you joy and wonder and how you can also reflect on past hurts but use that as a strength in facing the future, especially when there are little ones like my son who are looking to me and my husband and others for how to interact in this wild and disappointing and confusing and buoyant world.”
The natural world is so carefully woven into these poems that the collection is a good reminder that we are not separate from the skies and oceans. We are part of one another.
Carolee Bennett, “every mighty beast”

–I have really enjoyed the ability to sit on a balcony and gaze at the ocean. I’ve watched the sky change and the ocean change, and it’s been amazing–but in a different color palette than I’m used to. Lots of grays and silvers and subdued blues–there’s a slate and flintiness that keeps the colors away from the Caribbean colors on my side of the Florida coast.
–One of the books I’ve been reading has been Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker Prize winner along with Margaret Atwood. When I first picked it up and flipped through it, I thought I wouldn’t be able to make my way through it. There’s a startling lack of punctuation and capital letters, except when there’s not, and that kind of inconsistency usually drives me nuts. But the content is so good that I don’t even notice.
–Most of the people in my family are beyond the age of enchantment. It’s been great being on vacation at a resort area where there are plenty of little ones who are still enchantable. There’s a melancholy, too–missing the times when we had enchanted littles amongst us. But enchantment can still be found, even if we must now try harder for ourselves. And if we can’t manage it, we can smile at the wonder of others.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Vacation Snapshots in Words

There is a silent murmuration of starlings over the neighbor’s house. I’ve been wondering if the new bright red bird feeder has frightened the sparrows. I haven’t seen one in days.
The dog needs walking. And he’ll pull and pull on his harness. Like he knows where he is going.
I told E. today that I don’t want to know what the dog is thinking.
It might be a huge disappointment.
Ren Powell, Solstice

We cannot always get things right. We can be gentler with ourselves when we fall. Some years the frost kills the blossom, bees abandon the hive, a single swallow cuts the dusk for one evening and never returns. But here we are still looking up at the sky, grateful for what we saw, that one small bird found its way home.
Lynne Rees, New Year 2020

Who can summon the voice of the river weighed by slurry?
In my city even the crows have grown less clamorous.
It is left for someone to bring home what lies cold in unturned earth
that hasn’t known the warmth of a worm’s breath.
Uma Gowrishankar, Writing A Poem Through The Solar Eclipse

This morning we watched
four grebes float across rain-pocked water,
watched as one dropped from sight,
then another, then all, and all popping up again
in comic succession, lifting small white wings
and throwing back their heads as if to crow.
What draws us beneath the surface of our lives,
if not minnow or eelgrass, insight
braided, strong enough to pull us deeper?
Bethany Reid, The Pear Tree

Boxing Day. Traditionally, this has been a day of curling up on the couch with a new Christmas book, but for the first time I can remember, I didn’t receive a single one! I wonder if this is a trend among readers of this blog too. We don’t buy or receive as many physical books, and maybe our friends and families are less likely to give them to us. I wonder, and, as a publisher, I worry. No matter — trends haven’t affected my reading patterns very much, except for the change to reading e-books borrowed from the Overdrive service at my library, or purchased on Kindle. I read almost exclusively on my phone, unless I’ve borrowed a physical book from the library. And though I did buy myself a couple of books about Greece that haven’t arrived yet, I’m trying not to acquire too many these days — the shelves are already overburdened. But read, I do.
Beth Adams, Books of 2019: eclectic as usual

I don’t make resolutions or choose a word for the coming year, valuable as those traditions may be for others. But I do have a ritual for the end of the year. I take down my old wall calendar (where a Luddite like me keeps track of life) and refer to it as I enter birthdays and anniversaries into the new calendar. There are plenty of digital solutions that would relieve me of this task, but I like going back over the last 12 months. Each day is scribbled with names, places, and events. As I write important dates in next year’s calendar, here are some of my 2019’s most memorable contents, randomly ordered. […]
Vigils, rallies, marches. Fewer this year than last because I simply feel broken by all that’s going on, although what needs to change is ever more urgent. And I am ever more likely to cry at these things. Tears are not a useful measure because I also tear up at musical performances, fire trucks hurtling by, and any act of kindness.
Wonderful opportunities to read poetry at Loganberry Books, Wm. Skirball Writing Center, Lit Youngstown, Visible Voice Books, Wick Poetry Center, Ohio Poetry Day Association, Second Sunday Poets, and Literary Cleveland.

The incredible honor of having an excerpt from one of my poems stamped in a public sidewalk, thanks to Lit Youngstown. […]

A poetry appreciation group called Flat Tire Poetry Society, so-named because the idea for the group came about when four of us were stranded late at night somewhere in Cleveland on our way home from a poetry workshop. In the hour it took for a tow truck to arrive we talked about poetry that had changed our lives and decided we wanted to do this more often. Not the stranded part but the poetry discussion part. Now we meet seasonally with whoever of 20-some members can make it.
Laura Grace Weldon, 2019: What A Year

It always good to get new year plans ready in the the week before New Year’s Day. This week has been luxurious and slow moving, and I have had time to write without interruption, which feels very serious and determined, but I hope as the days move on in the break, I will find another rhythm, something that is a bit less serious, yet still mine. Hopefully, I will be able to carry this through the Spring semester. Again, six courses. But, at the end of this semester, the Earth will be green and ready to encourage us to take off our sensible shoes. I will be listening. I know I am in a position to make each day significant in big and small ways, and like a cat I will see what I will see. I will nap, purr, hiss, mess around, ignore, annoy, hide all the day long. It will be quite a year. Hope it is for you, too.
M. J. Iuppa, Not Chinese Calendar, but this Year, 2020, is self-declared The Year of the Cat.

As we inch closer to 2020, we also inch closer to the impending release of sex & violence from Black Lawrence and some attendant festivities..I am determined to make a book trailer in the next few weeks, and get a start on planning some sort of release party in early summer. I’ve talked a bit about the genesis and nature of the entire book before here, where I wrote:
It was on the heels of some weird and troubling times for women in general, during which I’d been working on some prose poem series centered on some of my favorite things—Plath, horror movies, the work of Salvador Dali, while also working on a series of pieces about relationships and how difficult it is to reconcile love as a straight woman with male privilege and violence. I started to notice threads of ideas connecting all these disparate bits and suddenly had a manuscript that made sense thematically as an encapsulation of all sorts of anxieties that I foster as a woman in the world-about love, about violence and fear, about artmaking itself.
And it’s true—so much of this book and pulling it together was shaped by a few things that were coinciding in 2017 as I was finishing it– our visit to the Death Museum in New Orleans (very much a church to the terrible things men do (usually to women), the Me Too movement, mass shootings, my own relationship and anxieties (all of these explored in the how to write a love poem in a time of war pieces). The dirty blonde section, which is older, is about uncomfortableness with female sexuality and agency. The Plath centos in honey machine are about domestic routine and the idea of “the wife.” The Dali poems are told from the point of view largely of Dali’s wife in the guise of the ghostly little blue dog.
Kristy Bowen, love and fear

Sometimes I write.‬
‪Sometimes I don’t.‬
‪If it never came back – so what?‬
‪I’ll read what I have already written, ‬
‪and maybe I’ll write about that,‬
‪maybe not.‬
‪Who cares?‬
‪There are many acorns but‬
‪not many trees.‬
‪From a chopped tree make a coffin‬
‪and fill it with acorns.‬
Jim Young, Acorn I can’t

Like an old shirt or nightgown lost in the attic, sometimes the dark needs to hold onto a little piece of us for comfort. And certain nights, a lonesome wind will blow our way, write its legends of wreckage across our skin. Nothing in this life is as solid as love and trust. But sometimes those things break. Sometimes they slip away. There are times the songs of sorrow need our voices more than those of joy.
Rich Ferguson, Sometimes the Dark

the wrecking ball swoops past textile warehouses
skims the metaphors of decline: buckled street signs
an abandoned car the grainy image of a bird
which must be a crumpled piece of newspaper
blown on the stateless wind
not one scrap of nature here
unless you count the man behind the camera
or the woman on the swing
Julie Mellor, What does time mean to you?

A poet friend and I often talk about how writing poetry gets harder to write, not easier. The voice in my head that chides, you’ve spent decades of your life on this and where has it gotten you? seems to grow louder with each passing year. And yes, I’ve been writing and publishing poems since my late twenties, the voice has a point.
I am not the next Shakespeare.
And yet. Now in the last day of my stay I can see the clipboards lined-up on the countertop with poems I’ve completed, poems I’ve begun, poems in that sweet spot in the middle—the space when I know that they will actually be completed but aren’t completed yet.
I’ve generated new work with the help of the Two Sylvias Advent Calendar (it has a gorgeous design and presentation) and scoured my writing notebooks for drafts written over the past 12 months. And although no one would accuse me of being especially woo-woo, I’ve been faithfully pulling Poet Tarot cards each day and for the last three days, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath have all showed up. I don’t know how many cards a tarot deck has (a lot) but statistically speaking, these three favorite poets visiting here everyday is against the odds.
And along with my poets, I’ve had visits from a family of deer, a gang of bald eagles and many birds I cannot identify but they certainly know how to sing. And I bet they aren’t concerned with how good their voice sounds or if the chickadee or nuthatch in the next tree sound better.
If there is one thing I’ve learned is that writing poems is not a sprint but a marathon, it’s a relationship developed over a lifetime with words like samovar and seesaw, atlas and archipelago. The writing of poems has made me live more intensely, persist even when there’s a 1001 reasons not to, and brought incredible people into my life. And so yes, I’ll be back next year. And hopefully, the next.
Susan Rich, The Christmas Eve and Hanukah Edition 2019

I know that for most people, the ability to set a physical goal and execute on it is a normal, non-earth shattering experience, but for me it’s been huge. I literally didn’t know I was capable of it. I am stunned to find that I enjoy the physical sensation of pushing myself hard, overcoming my physical fatigue and my mental self-doubt, and seeing progress. It’s strengthening me both in body and mind. In essence, I am finding the spiritual through the physical, which is the last place I ever would have looked. In all honestly, I always had a slight contempt for people who I deemed “too into” their physicality. I made the incorrect assumption that they didn’t have anything going on in their brains and that they didn’t have very much depth as people. I was wrong to let my bitterness blind me in that way, but I’ve turned over a new barbell and shall move forward all the wiser for my mistakes. This new series will be an evolution of my poems on The Body. I don’t know where it will take me, but I’m interested to see what emerges.
Kristen McHenry, Body Verses Body, Lessons in Strength, My Date with Kahlil Gibran

I walk a circular path among the oaks,
listening to the news of the world.
Not to brag, but I’m quite skilled
at going in circles. In fact it may be
the only pursuit to which I’ve devoted
ten thousand hours.
Jason Crane, POEM: Lederer Park

Today, at almost the end of the year, I’m trying to stay healthy, battling off various bugs, worried about my father in the hospital for pneumonia (a lot of bad germs going around this year, folks, so be careful!) and still awaiting my first root canal, it’s easy to feel anxious about what the next year will bring. My manuscripts are making the rounds. I have 45 active poetry submissions out right now. I’m trying not to worry about what kind of havoc multiple sclerosis might wreak in the coming years, on my life, my body, my work, my marriage, given that we don’t have a lot of good treatment options or a cure. But I try to continue to have hope.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Last Days of the Decade, Post-Christmas, What to Do with Long Cold Nights, Looking Forward to 2020, and Grateful for Artist Friends

I’m still trying to edit my collection, I have a pile of forms I need to fill out for my son’s therapy support and I need to go over my numbers for my submissions and publications as I sometimes log things wrong, have to chase up long-held submissions or miss publications like my two poems recently published at Nine Muses Poetry. There’s more application forms waiting in the wings. […]

Every year for Christmas I make a photo book of favourite pictures of the kids and our year, so I can be reminded of the good things, the fun we had. As soon as I click print, I come across another memory I want to add or I take photos that should be there. I will add them to next year’s book, but it’s a nice reminder that things keep moving on and that there will always be something more.
Gerry Stewart, A Messy End to 2019

While re-reading May Sarton’s At Seventy: A Journal, I recalled reading this essay about the book, by Jeffrey Levine, in June. I first read At Seventy when I was, I think, 40 years old…I recommended it to my mother-in-law, who–like Sarton–lived alone and loved to garden. I now recognize in Sarton’s journal aspects of life and aging and creativity that I had not thought much of when I was younger–at 40, I felt envious of her freedom as a single woman. I was raising young teens, managing a busy household, working on a master’s degree, feeling I had no time to myself.
One thing that interests me about Sarton is her decision to keep journals intended for publication, beginning I think with her journal about recovering from cancer, though she had written at least one memoir before that journal. […]

The concept of writing a daily journal intended to be read seems either brave or a bit dishonest, like a persona. Then again–many early weblogs were exactly that: daily public journals read by whatever online audience stumbled upon them. And perhaps this blog acts as my public journal, mostly about what I read, what’s in the garden, and what I’m teaching. Those pursuits, made public, do not mask who I am. They are the things I choose to reveal.
Ann E. Michael, Journals

I believe and have believed for years that Christmas would be much improved if it occurred in February in that long bleak stretch of unbroken winter where nothing is green and the sky and water jostle for a bit of blue I could really bring the joy in February now of course we are in that liminal space between Christmas and New Year’s day where everything seems to stop completely except the eating of cheese and chocolates of course

yesterday I drove to Mount Vernon to look at the snow geese and the trumpeter swans and hawks and eagles that live there in abundance in the now abandoned cornfields that drive along Old Pioneer Highway is gorgeous to me and absolutely teeming with Animal Gods three times now I have seen red foxes standing alert in those cornfields I stopped and looked at the Skagit River of course I got out of my car and slid down the muddy bank and just stood there breathing
Rebecca Loudon, Pig and farm report

It was in part that tendency I had anyway of sitting and watching and taking note that had attracted me to animal behavior studies in the first place. And, as it has turned out, is the skill I use most as a writer of poetry. Thanks to my anthropology studies, I can understand what I’m up to as I sit in whatever milieu, observing, and trying to look like I belong there.
I was reminded of all this recently as I have been reading Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. The book is Busch’s extended meditation on the powers and prisons of invisibility. I’m not entirely sure what the takeaway is from this book as a whole, but each chapter provided an interesting set of thoughts ranging from the deliberate invisibility of some species’ adaptations to the imposed invisibility of homeless people on busy streets.
She talks in one chapter of Keats’s assertion that the poet specializes in being a chameleon: of becoming a planet, a creature, another person. Busch was moved to write the book, she says, by the vehemence with which society insists on flouting the self, branding the self, identifying the self as a political act. Maybe, she suggests, a little wallflowering isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe if we keep still, we can see more clearly.
Marilyn McCabe, Somebody was watchin’; or, On Participant Observation and the Artistic Urge to Tell

The cook is
frying a ham steak.
The sear of it,
the aroma.
The waitress is
pouring coffee,
hot and black
and slightly burned.
Somewhere
in the distance,
a siren.
There are stories
you can tell and
stories you can’t.
Tom Montag, ANOTHER MORNING

The most profound experience for me as a human being so far has been parenthood. It’s testing one’s greatnesses and inner devils everyday. It trully means sacrifice and everyday self-restriction. Of course there is a chance that when children become adults everything will get easier and their lives will run fine and thus the work you’ve done will be rewarded with gratitude and obvious results. But the reward is much more immediate, though not obvious, and already there. For this kind of love you grow a prophet everyday, if lucky, if strong enough. You go to the desert every morning and come back to the well at night. Circle after circle your heart gets stronger.
Last but not least: Our body. Our body will, as a friend put it in his wonderful essay about his battle with his own once female body, finally betray us at some point, but it won’t ever go down silently. Our body doesn’t care about others. It exists on its own terms. It won’t care about motherhood or marriage or age, won’t care about your female or male strangles, won’t care about distances or time. The body won’t care because its mind is the sensual touch. Your body will always seek the tasty food, the good light, the warm water, the other skin, this earth itself. For most of us it is the only mythical relationship we’ll have, and the one we must constantly manage with all its dramatic ups and downs. We’re animal and human, we live in reality and in our physically real at the same time. We’re centaurs, we are minotaurs, we are wanderers between Olympus and Hades. Decade after decade.
Magda Kapa, Decade after Decade

Let me be a weed in the river, let me be one speck of dust in the desert. A thought that came and went. Let me be the dream that could not be remembered upon awakening. That’s for me. Let me be small, the universe is so large. Inhale, exhale. Life is what is happening right now.
James Lee Jobe, Let me be a weed in the river, let me be one speck of dust in the desert.

October 20, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 42

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: gathering and tidying, drawing in, broken and whole, acedia, poetry exhaustion, the humor in horror movies, thinking about excess, embracing vulnerability, cargo memories, eating at poetry readings, going to readings on public transport, women in yellow, dead girls, deep and not-so-deep thinkers, gendered and sexual violence in “The Waste Land,” participating in one’s own oppression, the Queen of Swords, invincible heart tattoos, gold-starred poems, and the touch of wings.

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

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

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

The days are dimming, growing shorter. The nights are darker.
This can be comforting. Darkness and shadow can be a fertile space for transformation — bulbs and seeds lie hidden within the earth, gestating, awaiting their moment to burst forth and bloom.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I’m feeling a desire to draw in, close off outside influences, and wrap myself in the comfort of hearth and home. I long for rich, warm foods, good books, and quiet.
What I’m desiring is not only an external drawing in, but an internal one. As I settle into what comforts me, I’m wondering what lies within the shadowy places within myself. What have I kept hidden? What fruits can I reap from this year’s work? What do I want to plant anew? What do I wish to nurture and grow?
Andrea Blythe, Learning to Grow, So You May Reap

This is wholeness: a person with a broken heart. At first glance it’s almost a koan. Broken equals whole? How does that work, exactly? I spent some time with this koan this week, and here’s how I’ve come to understand it this year.
A person whose heart isn’t broken, at least some of the time, isn’t paying attention. A person whose heart isn’t sometimes cracked-open by the exquisite and sometimes devastating fragility of this world isn’t paying attention.
A person whose heart is so impermeable — whether to our dangerously warming planet, or to the inevitable griefs and losses that come with loving human beings who disappoint us, and who will die — that’s not wholeness. That’s bypassing.
Some of you told me that after Yom Kippur you felt like your skin was too thin and your hearts were so open that re-entry into the “regular world” was almost more than you could bear. Sukkot says: keep your heart open a little longer.
Sukkot is an opportunity to keep our hearts open wide. We build and decorate these fragile little houses. Their roofs have to be made out of plants that are harvested from the earth, and open enough to let in the stars and the rain.
A sukkah is almost a sketch of a house, a parody of a house. A hint of a house. You can see the outlines of a house, but it’s flimsy and the roof leaks and as soon as it’s built, it starts succumbing to the rain and the wind and the weather.
Rachel Barenblat, Broken and whole: a d’varling for Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot

It is what looked up at you
from the eyes of the wounded doe
what the clock said to itself
when the mainspring gave way.
It is the last few shudders
your father’s body made
when his heart wrote hopeless
on the hospital bed
the long sigh of a black dog
and your beloved’s parched skin
when she could make no more tears
and told you go now.
Ann E. Michael, Acedia

And then I read this in Anthony Wilson’s Lifesaving Poems: “If you write poetry (and I assume that if you do, you are also actively engaged in reading it), sooner or later Poetry Exhaustion is going to happen to you. By Poetry Exhaustion I mean the complete lack of that shock of recognition you’ve always been able to count on from a favourite unputdownable book of poems. Or the sudden knowledge that the poems you have been working on for the last two months are certainly not your best work and actually not even worth keeping (though you do, in case).”
It sums up exactly the kind of ennui, mental blankness that’s stopped me writing posts and reviews and poems. It happens. You just have to hunker down and wait for something to change you. Like a poem, you can’t just will it into existence.
Last week, out of the blue, I decide to re-read Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. And suddenly, phrases come jumping off the page, .moments that get you in. Phrases like these:
The cold like a wire in the nose.
Snow caused everything to exceed itself
starlings…feathers sleekly black as sheaves of photographic negatives
big gulls…monitoring us with lackadaisical, violent eyes
a dolphin….a sliding bump beneath the water..like a tongue moving under a cheek
star patterns..the grandiose slosh of the Milky Way
gannets bursting up out of the sea…like white flowers unfurling…avian origami
[and, after a hard long hike] … feet puffy as rising dough
It was lovely. Language well-wrought can galvanise you like that. I’ve had a review waiting to be written for months. Macfarlane let me know that it was time I got on with it.
John Foggin, Two pamphlets: Victoria Gatehouse and John-Paul Burns

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

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

Maybe we have to look at the things that make us happy and do those things instead of things other people think make us happy. Does that make sense? I enjoy sipping apple cider and taking pictures of pumpkins and leaves but I also enjoy reading Japanese ghost stories or gothic tales in translation. I hope that I get healthy enough to take care of my tooth troubles but also to do a little more socializing, especially with other writers, because this time of year draws writers together in a unique way. I’m ready to see my friends, to hear some poetry in the air, to laugh. If you’re a hummingbird with a purple streak, don’t be afraid to stand out.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, New Poems up in Waxwing and Nine Mile, New Reviews in Guest 5, and Realizing Your Core Competencies

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

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

The scariest part of Dr. [Brené] Brown’s recommendation is embracing vulnerability. If this is how we become authentically ourselves, then I confess it is frightening. I can handle it in small doses, but the larger the chance of feeling like I am making a fool of myself, the harder it is.
Another writer friend of mine was asking me why with all the writing I have been doing, that I have no book. I’ve toyed with a manuscript – I’ve even entered one, maybe two manuscript contests. So I have gone back and looked at a lot of my poems – especially those that have been published. and I put them together struggling to see clearly a theme. Feeling that perhaps I am too close to this, I sent her a file with the collection I pulled together. We had spoken about this in advance and I already knew that she was willing to look at it. This was a big step – exposing the very vulnerabilities that have been holding me back. I confess that now, I am happy I did this. Going back over all these years of work reminded me, I got Poetry!
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Searching for Authenticity

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

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

I think poetry—reading or writing it—can help healing or start healing. What I feel is that the real life preserver is the writing community. Those people are so good. If you’re a writer then you share this special little thing with all the other writers out there.
Rob Taylor, A Little Retreat in Myself: An Interview with Matthew Walsh

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

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

I’ll go again for some high-quality live poetry whenever I’m free on the first Friday of the month. November’s guest is Chaucer Cameron, whose latest work, Wild Whispers, is an international poetry film project working with collaborators from ten countries. Chaucer co-edits the online poetry film journal, Poetry Film Live, well worth a visit.
I was thrilled to learn that I was on the long-list for the Winchester Poetry Prize. I very much enjoyed the day-trip by train to Winchester last Saturday. On the absurdly overcrowded Virgin train from Basingstoke we were sardine-packed next to the first-class loo with Mark Totterdell and Jane. Such a pleasure to meet them. Later we did a book-swap. Mapping is a great collection, well-observed, intelligent and witty, beautifully written without being at all showy.
Ama Bolton, Poetry in Bristol and Winchester

I never forgot her. The young woman wore a yellow dress and her smile seemed to glow in the sunshine. I’m pretty sure she was with a young man, but as a child that didn’t interest me. I was on another of our family’s summer trips. These were starkly frugal, multi-week affairs meant to educate us at every free historical site possible. Our days were spent in a hot car, our nights in our tiny travel trailer. Much of the time I was carsick or asthmatic, or both. I longed for my library books, my pink bike, and all the other comforts of home.
On this day I stood in a crowd of tourists watching a demonstration of colonial candle-dipping or blacksmithing. Trapped at armpit height behind people holding cameras, I couldn’t see a thing. That’s when I noticed Yellow Dress Woman strolling on the grass nearby. I squinted at the aliveness she radiated.
It occurred to me that she wanted to be there and I realized with a sudden full-body shiver that growing up wasn’t an abstraction. This was a revelation — that a time would come when I too could make my own choices. Her image stayed with me like a beacon through the rest of my growing up years. […]
It’s strange how fleeting images manage to plug into a waiting receptor. A man stopping to help an elder or a woman unselfconsciously nursing her baby may expand your awareness, give you new resolve, or offer clarity. We gather and hold these moments, none of us knowing what moments from our lives are carried by others.
Laura Grace Weldon, Yellow Dress Woman

Courtney’s laugh
drifts down
        from the floor
                above

like a shower
        of ginkgo leaves
                in an autumn breeze
Jason Crane, POEM: Courtney’s laugh

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

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

read the entire series here:

http://www.kristybowen.net/songs_for_dead_girls_zine.pdf
Kristy Bowen, songs for dead girls

In addition to tinkering with various poems, I enjoyed being at The Big Poetry Weekend in Swindon a few weeks ago, meeting up with several poetry friends I’ve made over the years. In particular, I liked hearing the poems and ideas of poet Nuar Alsadir in conversation with Hilda Sheehan. I’ve been dipping in and out of NA’s book Fourth Person Singular ever since it was first published in 2017. Sometimes, I feel I’m not clever enough for the book, other times I experience the thrill of being in the company of someone who is alive with clever ideas and thoughts – you know that experience of spending time with someone brainy, communicative and interesting? NA’s work plays and interacts with ideas about the lyrical I in poetry, about who is speaking and who the reader assumes is speaking. This is fascinating even at moments when I’m not sure I’ve grasped what is being said (and by whom!). Some notes I made from Nuar’s talk include:
originality is a narcissistic delusion
and, on editing:
leave it alone
I love both of these quotes. If you’d like to read about Nuar Alsadir’s work in more detail, Dave Coates has written a more in-depth blog here.
Josephine Corcoran, Mid-October Notes and looking ahead to November

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started teaching modernism as a graduate student, leading discussion sections for Walt Litz at Princeton in ’91. When I arrived at W&L in ’94, I resolved to teach much more diverse syllabi: I put the version of modernism I’d studied in conversation with the New Negro Renaissance and included many women writers (Walt’s syllabus was all white and male). Soon I was bringing in formalist modernism, too–featuring the so-called “songbird poets” and analyzing various kinds of experiment that earlier discussions of the field hadn’t made much space for. Something I love about teaching, though, is that you can’t just rest on your laurels: I’m teaching you a version of modernism that’s fuller and more complicated than the one I received–aren’t I the greatest? Changes in scholarship and theory demand renovated approaches, but so do the students themselves.
I posted on Facebook recently that my students have never been so alert to questions of gendered and sexual violence in “The Waste Land” as they were this October. I was really glad I had this recent suite of short essays from Modernism/ modernity to bring to class, organized by Megan Quigley and centered on how #metoo has changed conversations about a modernist poetic monument. My current students think sexual violation, as reality and metaphor, is at the very foundation of modernism, and while I’ve always highlighted those elements in certain poems, I’m still trying to get my head around that as a perspective shift on the whole field. They’re very interested, too, in modernist portrayals of mental illness and how it’s persistently feminized; the more I consider those questions, the more foundational they seem, as well. Honestly, I wish I had more than twelve weeks with these students, so we could deepen our reading together.
Lesley Wheeler, Teaching US Poetry from 1900-1950

Fissures on Twitter are so mundane that people are barely talking about this one anymore, but I’m still ruminating on it, both as a female in America and as a writer.
So let me start with this: kindness is a false flag here. (While kindness is definitely “on brand” for Ellen, I don’t think it requires us to set aside our other principles and play nice with everyone.) What this is actually about (as far as I’m concerned) is what “civil society” keeps asking of women: instead of telling men to not commit war crimes, for example, it instructs women to be polite even if they do.
Instead of challenging this, Ellen’s explanation doubles down on kindness and in doing so, it perpetuates the expectation that women shall not rock the boat. You already know how it works: if we walk out, we’re rude; if we’re dismissive, we’re uppity bitches. At the same time, if we stay in our seats, we’re complicit in the aggression against us. (Cue this the “asking for it” argument.) Ellen understands politics and celebrity and has both benefited from these and been battered by these. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that she chose a reductive argument for “staying” instead of a more nuanced one.
We’re up to our elbows in shit as citizens in this dysfunctional democracy/republic and could really benefit from deep, meaningful reflection and conversation. Oversimplified, kindness as a platform maintains the status quo. It allows those in power (and those abusing that power) to keep their power, and the only benefactors of Ellen’s kindness are those for whom the truth is uncomfortable.
To put it bluntly, one of the ways the patriarchy persists is because women have been trained not to make anyone uncomfortable. As a writer (and this is a writing blog, after all), everything hinges on this idea. The truth often discomforts, and it matters who gets to speak it.
In just the last couple of weeks, the following have made headlines: how much AOC spends on her hair, whether or not Elizabeth Warren dominated a marine in the bedroom and Kamala Harris getting mocked for her laughter. Women are expected to tend to our appearance. Just not too extravagantly. Women are expected to like sex. But not too much. Women are treated like children — expected to be seen not heard and certainly not to laugh too loudly at anything the president’s son doesn’t think is funny.
The expectation to be pleasing is a weapon.
“Thanks” to Ellen conjuring kindness, I’m reflecting on times that I have censored myself — both face to face and in my writing — to avoid making anyone uncomfortable. And that includes myself. Sometimes, it’s easier to be polite than to make waves. We’re habituated to it.
“Thanks” to Ellen, I have a better understanding of “the personal is political” and how, as writers, that plays out in our poems and essays. It’s not kindness to swallow our truths. It’s called participating in our own oppression. The truth can be scary… but *we* are not the ones who should be unnerved.
Carolee Bennett, i read the news today, oh boy

All of this is to say that I only read the cards for my own purposes, although from time to time I’ll get out my deck with friends and let them tell me what they think their cards mean to them. It’s like helping someone interpret a dream. Only the dreamer knows for sure if your interpretation rings true.
Without going into all the free writing I did for this Awareness Spread, I will share a few of my conclusions. For the third card, representing worries or mental habits that might be interfering with my creative endeavors, I pulled the Devil.
Honestly, I didn’t need to ponder this one too much. I’ve gotten into a habit of scouring the news every day to find some sign that maybe the Orange Menace will be deposed. It’s an unhealthy preoccupation. I’ve let that devil take up too much mental real estate.
The Queen of Swords represents my higher self. This card is part of my birth card constellation in the sun sign of Libra, so I immediately identified with her. Swords are ruled by the element of air. It’s Libra season and the air is cooler finally. In Ayurvedic health teachings, fall is the season of vata, the air element, and this dosha happens to be the strongest for me. In fact, I tend to be highly anxious if I don’t tend to grounding myself.
I love this time of year, before the holidays when it’s good to be outdoors again in Georgia. I feel the confidence this queen of swords displays. Clear minded, able to express myself, and excited about the possibilities that await with my writing and with a bit of dabbling with paint.
Christine Swint, Creative Explorations With Tarot

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

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

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

September 22, 2019September 22, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 38

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts.

The equinox is upon us (September 23rd again this year), and for those who like seasons to have official beginnings, this marks the beginning of fall (or spring in the southern hemisphere). In reality, seasons are notional, and most years I feel as if autumn first begins when the crickets and katydids get loud at the end of July, and that summer isn’t fully over until the last heat wave in October. But my friend the Velveteen Rabbi says “The equinox is a hinge, a doorway between seasons.” Which if true makes the autumn equinox the most poetic of days, since so much lyric poetry is concerned with liminality, and since autumn is of course the most bittersweet (and therefore poetic) of seasons. So here are some blog posts of varying degrees of bittersweetness to complete your equinoctial experience.

What is it about certain landscapes that gives them their particular emotional resonance and feeling? G.’s place always feels the same to me, regardless of the weather or time of year: it’s one of the calmest, most quiet and peaceful places I know, and I always feel restored after being there. Some of that comes from the person who lives there, in an almost monastic lifestyle. It also comes from the way he has laid out the garden, with its stream and ponds, in the middle field, between the house and the distant mountains. Wherever you are, the garden beckons, and it is always present, like a symbolic home to which you can return but which also stays in one’s memory, between the near and the far of our lives. It also contains a number of large standing rocks, and because I am tremendously fond of rocks, I revisit them each year almost like people with remembered individual personalities; I like laying my hand on them and feeling the retained warmth of the sun.
Beth Adams, A Beautiful Ending for the Summer

in the top of this stone
there’s a landscape
a mountain
a corrie
a lake

on my knees in wet grass I dip my head
to sip from the stone’s cup
rainwater soft on the lips
cold on the tongue
tilt my face to the sun
mid-heaven
mid-afternoon
midway between midsummer
and midwinter
let something go
something that’s completed
it’s done
it’s gone
move on
Ama Bolton, When stone talks

Writing prose poems as an act of resistance. Counting and naming clouds as an act of defiance. Telling children to believe their own eyes as an act of opposition to those who rule. Exiting through the entrance as an act of revolution. Choosing a new flag as a way to insult the old flag. Painting the creek in flamboyant colors as an act of artistic freedom. Refusing to accept any rules that are not self-made, self-imposed, and self-nurtured as an act of self-love. Writing prose poems as an act of resistance. Writing prose poems as an act of resistance.
James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Writing prose poems as an act of resistance.’

I write sonnets more than any other form. They’re perfect little containers, as far as I’m concerned, so when I heard Terrance Hayes talking in interviews about this book when it was forthcoming, I knew I’d grab it up. And as someone disgusted and distraught by the mess behind the desk in the Oval Office, its subject matter appealed to me, as well. None of that appeal — form, topic — prepared me for the brilliance of this book [American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin].
Technically, this front-to-back reading is a revisiting this book for me. When I first got it — and since it’s been on my shelf — I’ve flipped through several times, reading random poems. Between that and encountering the poems in journals, I was familiar with probably about 25% of the work in the book. The cover-to-cover reading — the megapoem, as they say — reveals the collection’s incredible depth and makes clear how the narrator’s experience plays out across time, how the grief and frustration accumulates (past) and how the anticipation of its continuance (future) exhausts.
Like the narrator in Carmen Gimenez-Smith’s Be Recorder, the voice in this book documents a painful past, a painful present and a painfully redundant future. It positions us in this time and in time itself. The repetition of themes/lines throughout appropriately creates echoes that force us to reconcile the following: this isn’t the first we’re hearing of these experiences and yet what has changed? And what will change tomorrow? Anything?
Carolee Bennett, “a box of darkness with a bird in its heart”

I’m 50 today. No, I can’t believe it either.

I actually haven’t had too much time to think about it because the last couple of months have been a blur of activities, vacation, a flesh-eating bacteria scare and, to be quite honest, a bit of end-of-summer malaise.

I’ve always prided myself on keeping this blog updated over the last 16 years, but I fell off the beam in August. I led a wonderful Saturday poetry workshop at the Fayette County Public Library and was thrilled with the work the attendees created and shared during our time together. It spurred me to write, too, so the creation of new poetry continues. Now I just have to get motivated to start submitting again – something I haven’t done all year as I’ve been promoting Midnight in a Perfect World.
Collin Kelly, Self-portrait at 50 and other updates

OK—the dust has settled, the postcards are mailed. The total: 36 poems written in 31 days. That’s a lot for me, a new record.
That’s my final tally for this year’s August Poetry Postcard Fest, a month-long writing marathon that I’ve been doing each August for the past seven years. This is the one where about 300 people from around the U.S. (and a few overseas) write a poem each day on a postcard and mail it to some other participant. This is one of two month-long writing marathons I do each year (the other being NaPoWriMo), and I’ve become dependent on these mini-writing retreats to generate new material and focus on cycles of poems, projects that sometimes only come together in the white-hot forge of a daily writing discipline. I lack that discipline the rest of the year, for all the usual excuses (full-time job, too tired, life…), so I really try to make the most of these 30-day pushes. […]
One of the keys, I think, to how smoothly this year’s Fest went was the fact that I settled onto a theme early: the horses I see every day on my way to work. This was a bit of an indulgence; although horses creep into my writing a lot (I grew up around them), horses are a tricky subject because the poems can often go too soft and sticky, or too hackneyed (horse pun!). In their way, they’re as dangerous as cat poems. But I’d been thinking about those horses by the road a lot—I have the world’s most beautiful commute—so I decided to give myself a challenge: write horse poems that did something I wasn’t expecting, whatever that would turn out to be. I ended up working a lot of mythology and religion into the poems, and found horses often standing in for other aspects of nature vanishing from our world. In the end, about half of the month’s poems were about horses, so that may make a chapbook or something down the road.
Amy Miller, August Poetry Postcard Fest 2019 Wrap-up: Fresh Horses

What advice would you give to poets about finding inspiration and/or prompts for a poem-a-day practice?
[Josh Medsker]: If I can sit down every single day and write a poem, then I’ve performed my earthly duty. But the trick is to just let the poem be what it is. If it’s a piece of crap, so be it. Tomorrow’s poem will be better. You have to have the courage to suck. Hahaha! And I’m not saying this lightly… because like I said earlier, I spent decades, holding myself back in self-consciousness. It’s a killer. That kind of self-sabotage will just make you throw up your hands and say ‘fuck it.’ I just persisted long enough to get over that hump. If the writing just isn’t working, at all, I might take a break and do something else I love but am terrible at—- like guitar or drawing. Then the very next day, start writing again. As far as prompts go, I think grooving with the reference works is fun as hell. I like very rigid constraints. I love Oulipo, Cut-Ups, Erasures, Found Poetry… anything that forces you to reimagine syntax… Lastly, if we are talking inspiration… whatever it is you love to read, read that. If it’s fiction, read that. If it’s drama, read that. To be perfectly honest, fiction often feels like a chore to read— and definitely to write. Once I realized that poetry was my genre, everything just sort of fell into place.
Trish Hopkinson, A poem-a-day practice (what is Medskerpedia?) – Interview with Josh Medsker

I find something really satisfying and almost meditative about putting together a collection, sorting through poems to find ones that fit my theme, figuring out an order, editing and then trying to write a synopsis to bring the whole idea together. I love carrying the rough draft manuscript around, editing each poem and shuffling through the pages. Holding close the warm knowledge that I made this, each word knitted together as a poem and then each poem layered to make a book. Hopefully they build upon each other to create a strong whole. The chance that it will get accepted is slim, but I enjoy the process in a different way to writing.
Gerry Stewart, Roller Coastering

My upcoming full-length collection due out from Black Lawrence in 2020 has a cover and it is a beauty! Really, what else says my work like a bit of Victorian bdsm, raw meat, and doll parts? It’s actually a modification of a /slash/ collage, initially created for a dgp cover and I love it so much! The pre-sale page will be up in the next couple months for an April release, so keep an eye out for that.

Work on extinction event continues to go well and I should have lots of material for my reading on October 9th at the Field Museum. Apparently, I am also getting PAID for said reading and am always incredulous when I do…seriously, I would read for nothing. And for this one, hell, I would pay to read in such an awesome venue. I will be headed back for a couple more visits (and just to also see some unrelated things I missed my first go round.) I haven’t started submitting any of the work around yet, but it’s pretty good. Weird, but good.
Kristy Bowen, writing & art bits | september edition

I was talking to my little brother about “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” It’s just Jerry Seinfeld driving around with various comedians, and often it is unfunny, uncomfortable, and thought-provoking. Comedians are sad by nature. The way they talk about comedy is the way writers talk about writing. Recently Eddie Murphy was featured, and he seemed really melancholy, distant. When I was a teenager he was such a big star. I remember seeing Louis Black on the show and I wrote down this quote: “Importance is the worst thing to put on art…if you think this is important, you’re screwed before you write the first word.” In between gigs, or the highs of careers, comedians are awkward and thoughtful, thinking hard about how to make people laugh, as hard as poets might think about creating their next poem. I have started going to therapy since my cancer and MS diagnoses, and my therapist suggested I should do stand-up. I was like, that’s the only place where I could get paid less and be treated with less respect than poetry. You don’t like being a woman in the poetry world? Try stand up! Also, I’m not sure my jokes about illness would kill with a real-life audience; I have a very specific sense of humor.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Sick in September, an Article on CBD Oil, and Stuck in the In-Between

How you touched the keyboard
tentatively with blind fingers,
ten newborn mice, hairless,
vulnerable, eyelids shut tight
against the light of the world.
How you held imaginary apples
in your downturned palms, thinking
of the bright-green orchard you were
kept out of that summer, tart moons
laughing at you from the branches.
Romana Iorga, Piano Lesson

Two of the zinnias
my son planted last spring
have sent up new buds, like
dancers reaching toward heaven
with palms outspread.
They’re trying to bloom
once more before first frost.
I don’t think there’s time,
but who am I to say I know
when death will come?
Rachel Barenblat, First day of fall

My spouse told me of how he once interviewed a woodworking craftsman, renowned for his “perfect” furniture finishes, and asked about his technique. The craftsman advised, “Take care of the edges, and the middle will take care of itself.” […]
Could that be one way to draft or rework a poem? What if I spent my efforts taking care of the poem’s edges–would the middle sort of take care of itself? (And what would be the edges of a poem? Its closing and opening phrases or stanzas? Its end-of-line words? Its beginning-of-line words?)
My gentle readers may recall that fringe landscapes and edges are a major inspiration for me–just type edges into this blog’s search bar, and quite a few past musings will show up. I will try working on my poems’ edges intentionally and see what happens.
Ann E. Michael, Edges & the middle

I’ve shared some odd pictures today, shots of my empty desk. Okay, not completely empty, but much less clutter than a month ago. Yes, there’s The Rialto, still waiting to be read, but the teetering and rather intimidating book pile has gone. While it was there (and those unread books had been accumulating for quite some time) it induced feelings of guilt and panic. Why hadn’t I got round to reading those books? When would I ever find time to read them? I realised I had to get tough with myself. With my current schedule, I had to own up to the fact that I wasn’t going to read them, at least not in the foreseeable future. So, I had to either make space for them on my already crammed bookshelf (out of shot) or I had to give them away to charity and to friends. I did both and it felt right.
Of course, I know I’ll gather more books and the book pile will soon teeter again, but clearing desk space has cleared a little mental space for me too. The first draft of my novel is slowly nearing completion.
Julie Mellor, Empty desk syndrome

My desk is extremely cluttered at the moment (unlike Julie Mellor’s desk!) and perhaps telling you this and even showing you a picture will motivate me to begin to tackle the mess. Although there is method and order in the muddle, believe me (she said to herself, trying to sound convincing). I’ve been trawling through my notebooks and collating poems (you might be able to see a pile to the left of my laptop) so the notebooks are handily placed and readily available to read. There is also an open diary – I use this to note down submission deadlines for competitions and magazines, as well as other appointments I need to keep, readings and festivals I’m attending, for example. Also, my paper diary is where I keep my ‘To Do’ list, emails to write and reply to, bookings to make. I use an electronic diary as well, but I find it useful and satisfying to note down my schedule in ink.
Other items you might notice are an empty mug – well of course it’s essential to keep myself regularly caffeinated – and two bottles of perfume – because a spritz of something delicious-smelling can be so uplifting when you’re struggling to find your way to the end of a line. I don’t know if you can make them out but there’s also a lipstick there, and a lipgloss, a hair slide (bad hair can ruin a good writing day) and a small Russian Doll (inspiration for something I’m working on). A pack of post-it notes because they are useful place markers for stray poems in notebooks, as well as markers for poems that have spoken to me recently (Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Someone I Love’ from Tender Spot (Selected Poems published by Bloodaxe) is currently at the top right hand corner of my desk with a yellow post-it note attached).
Josephine Corcoran, Notes from a Cluttered Desk

That evening, bolstered by two substantial glasses of Merlot, I finally called Dr. Zook. She explained that books are nominated by publishers, literary groups, libraries, and other independent sources — self-nominations are not accepted. No list of nominees is released. The choices are narrowed down to eight or fewer books, which the OPD judges then compare individually before voting.
She told me about the history of the award.
Back in 1938, the State of Ohio set the third Friday of every October as Ohio Poetry Day. This was the first poetry day established by a state government in the United States, thanks to Tessa Sweazy Webb who spent thirteen months lobbying the Ohio General Assembly. She argued, ‘For each living reader a living poet, for each living poet a living reader.’
And Dr. Zook told me about her years handling the details of Ohio Poetry Day and its publications, all proudly done without email or internet. She said the annual OPD event takes place the weekend of October 18-19th at the Troy Hayner Cultural Center in Troy, Ohio with workshops, readings, and all OPD awards. (She mentioned Mary Oliver was Ohio Poet of the Year in 1980!)
All this to say, I was indeed voted Ohio Poet of the Year on the strength of my newest collection, Blackbird.
My impostor syndrome is now in full flare. Vast appreciation for Tessa Sweazy Webb, Ohio Poetry Day board and judges, and my wonderful publisher at Grayson Books, Ginny Connors. Also, vast shock at finding myself in any category that includes luminaries such as these recent Ohio Poet of the Year winners: Susan Glassmeyer, Kathy Fagan, and Maggie Smith. Sometimes good news IS real.
Pinch me when you see me.
“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.” Seamus Heaney
Laura Grace Weldon, Ohio Poet of the Year 2019

September 17 is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen, mystic, herbalist, musical composer, naturalist, and Abbess. Her life was full of accomplishments, an amazing feat considering she lived in the twelfth century. For more, see this post on my theology blog.

When the calendar returns to the feast days of amazing medieval women (Hildegard, Brigid, Julian), I fight my feelings of inadequacy.

Long ago, a wise yoga teacher told me, “Don’t look at others. It won’t help you hold the pose, and it will probably make it harder.” I think I’ve embroidered her words, but I’ve captured the idea.

I would probably be more gentle with myself if I thought of what future scholars might say when they talked about me:

She was able to keep writing her poetry, along with surprising works of fiction, as she navigated the demands of various types of day jobs: teacher, administrator, . . . . She did volunteer work, often the unglamorous but necessary type, like counting the offering money after church and depositing it in the bank. She worked with first generation students, thousands of them, offering the support and encouragement they needed to make their way in the world. She did similar work with other groups who were at the margins of society, during a time when so many people found themselves being pushed to those margins.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Creative Visioning in the Voice of a Future Scholar

People dogged by hunger, poverty, and ecological malaise squirming to get comfortable in an unupholstered world where time moves too quickly. Poor souls—like a nightmare version of a 21st-century Sisyphus—heaving lifetimes of unfulfilled expectations up a mountain of obsolete computers, faulty mortgages, and forgotten social media posts. Days like these can feel like a tour of duty in the metaphysical French Foreign Legion, or that society made a wrong turn at the crossroads of redemption and ruin. I will breathe for you when the going gets too rough. I will be the heart-shaped cloud crossing the sun, rabid with a rain of flowers.
Rich Ferguson, 21st Century Sisyphus

open
the window
and let that
which wants to come in
come in
and that
which wants to get out
get out
open the window
and let
the dishes dry
Johannes S. H. Bjerg, poem / digt 21.09 2019

August 18, 2019August 18, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 33

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts.

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

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

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

I am sitting on the ground weeding our tomato plants. I gratefully take refuge in useful tasks like gardening and cooking. Busy hands almost always un-busy my mind. But that’s not working for me right now.
Instead I’m thinking about several editing projects nearly due. I also need to plan a class, complete a volunteer training program, deal with a health insurance hassle, and prepare because we have nine people coming over for a meal tomorrow. Mental fuss is erasing me from the garden.
I take a deep breath, choosing to put myself right back where I am. That works. I hear birdsong, hear the plop of a frog in the pond. Soon I’m complimenting our plants on their sturdy stems and reveling in the breeze.
I learned the word eustress while researching my first book. The term was created by adding the Greek prefix “eu” — meaning “good, healthy” to the word “stress,” It’s defined as a positive stress response, often generated by a demanding but worthwhile effort. Stress is inherent in growth-producing situations. We stress our bodies to reach greater levels of physical ability, breaking down muscle to build it stronger. We tear down old limitations when challenging ourselves to something hard for us like taking on a public speaking role, mastering a new job, or asserting ourselves in a tough situation. Stressors like these, even if we haven’t exactly welcomed them, help to strengthen us.
Laura Grace Weldon, Thank Eustress

Lots of stress on this bucket of bolts lately–family, health, and writing-related–but I’m tickled to report that my first poetry comic has been published by the gorgeously-redesigned Split Lip Magazine. My spouse Chris Gavaler and I created it a couple of years ago; he made the images and I wrote the words, although there was some cross-influence in revision, more or less as we’ve cross-influenced each other in life (“Go for it!”/ “Don’t wear that!”). To me, this comic is about a pretty-long-running partnership from a midlife perspective, very much inflected by the self-reassessment that happens when your kids grow up and move on (my daughter graduated in May and just returned home after a summer gig, and my son starts college in about 10 days). We’ve changed so much since we were undergrads together, and I love the way the images capture our disintegrations and haphazard rebuildings from odd materials at hand, bringing forward the idea of resourcefulness under constraint. Chris built these robots rather laboriously in an outmoded program; my constraints were spatial, meaning seven lines per poem, with the line-length controlled by panel-width and the letters of Chris’ homemade font. It’s so gratifying when you make something weird in a weird way, for fun, and other people like it enough to publish it!
Not much other luck in that department lately. Rejections are flying; I haven’t had a poem accepted in months. As I’ve said here before, though, I actually feel more philosophical about that since beginning to work on Shenandoah. You just have to keep trying, revising and targeting your work as intelligently as you can, but knowing there’s a heap of luck involved. Submission rates are very high, and chances of hitting the right reader in the right way at the right moment are low, so it’s a numbers game. I did some poetry revision/ submission work this week, though, and I’ll keep at it until the semester swallows me whole–I’ve also got essays to tweak and keep in circulation plus a difficult grant application to finish. The meetings and new-tech-training-sessions, all that late summer jazz, starts tomorrow.
Lesley Wheeler, Rusting robot poetics

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

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

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

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

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

The weeks are zooming by. I am astonished at how long I’ve been at this writing and publishing process.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Rejection Evening

How easy to live
in this reconfigured world:
an exchange of horizons,
alternative sunsets, a hill,
or no hill at all.
But easy too the swift
self-gathering into
one’s own shadow
on street, in hallway,
or on that same staircase
when tears reflux
without warning
and there is only
what was.
Dick Jones, JOY

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

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

How freeing to discover the curious way French acquaintances and friends are judging the US. Fortunately Trump is not sucking out all the oxygen. While they despise him, they’re perplexed by this passing nightmare and don’t hold it against us. They’re too sophisticated to think people are defined by government, or a job, or whatever.
The residual image I heard evoked is the North American sky. Our big sky, our wide horizon that stretches imaginatively from one invisible pole to another. The immensity of that sky, the cut-freeness makes them sigh. It signifies space apart from set patterns and expectations, from deep tradition. These same people are staunchly defending their core French values – egalité, civility and decency. The sigh is about regimen, tradition, shuffling to the same beat. Americans might find it charming that everyone rushes to lunch at midi, less charming to sit in six hours of traffic crossing from Spain to France because everyone takes the same vacation schedule. That big open permissable sky is the one they talk of reverently and breathe deeply.
Baudelaire wrote a wonderful poem in which a stranger is asked what he loves: country, God, family. He denies it all. The only thing he loves are clouds. That can’t take that away from him. The stranger brings valuable vision and truth. As an antidote to the stifling weight of the US now, I’m bringing along the stranger’s vision of big clouds and big sky.
Jill Pearlman, Cut Me Loose

How can we not value the gumbo of us, the jambalaya we are, chunky and piquant? Our language itself is a mongrel; or no, a palanquin, a vessel, a ship, a hammock. I can barely talk to you without calling down the whole array of immigrants to our shores, plus the people who were here when they got here.
Yes, English is a difficult language to rhyme in, with all its variety of endings, which is why poetry in English has long gone in different directions from the old endy-rhymey road, and American poetry has been perhaps particularly jittery and digressive, if also ahistorical and culture-centric. But also wide-armed and ribald and jazz-bit.
The diverse rabble of us elbow-jab and glare, and sigh together, and laugh, which itself is one language. Maybe laughter and music are the two things that will save this species from itself.
Marilyn McCabe, You’re the Salt in My Stew; or, Viva la difference; or, Diversity

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

So the one thing I didn’t stop doing when I thought I was dying was writing. I’d finished the first draft of my sixth manuscript in six months. And I really didn’t stop doing most things – although it was certainly interrupted by a lot of unpleasant tests – but I signed the mortgage on my house, I brought home my re-homed delinquent kitten Sylvia (who to this day I call my “cancer-curing” kitty.) Here she is posing with all my poetry books to date.
Then I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I spent months learning to talk, walk, and swallow normally(ish) again after the damage the brain stem had sustained. This changed the book – it began to contain this disorientation, that I may have survived my cancer diagnosis, but now I had a different, incurable, debilitating disease. I lost words, often. But I still wrote. The book also contains documentation of the sheer weirdness of the weather and solar events of the past few years. It seemed like my body and the weather were misfiring at the same time.
Then, after Trump’s election, I felt an increased urgency – probably like many poets – to write poetry that was more political. For me, that meant writing about women that were survivors – and also women that had been oppressed, suppressed, raped, and literally burned at the stake – and what our future as women might look like. If women are going to survive the violence of men, we must change. As I write this, by the way, the news is reporting a Bellingham college student murdered, shot by an ex-boyfriend in her home. I continue to write poems. Writing under the stress of health issues, of the oppressive political climate, under the stress of in the hopes that maybe these poems will make things better for others.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Plath Poetry Project Feature Today, Facebook Memories from Three Years Ago, Publishing and Writing Under Stress

I’m honored to have my poem “Other Ways” published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry for their Poets Resist feature. This poem, newly written, is my response to the mass shootings we’ve experienced here in the U.S. It was one of those poems I had to write to process my own disappointment and grief. I’m incredibly thankful to Glass Poets Resist editor Michael Carter for his quick response and acceptance and to friend and fellow poet Anthony Frame, whom I truly admire for his own poetry as well as his gracious support of poetry in general. I’m grateful for all the great work Glass and their staff do for their contributors and for the literary community. If you are not a frequent visitor to their site, I highly recommend you spend some of your screen time in their pages.
Glass’ Poets Resist is a current events poetry series, with guest editors, published by Glass Poetry Press as part of Glass: A Journal of Poetry. They are “looking for poems that reflect the immediacy of the world around us. . . . poems that are targeted, and unafraid. . . . poems that actively resist by condemning horrors and by celebrating collective strength. Engage. Write. Resist.”
Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Other Ways” published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry–Poets Resist

Form in poetry is more than just meter, stanza, and line break. It’s also a way of thinking. It’s the direction, pace and energy of the poem, and one of the main ways a writer can direct the reader’s experience. And, at least in my way of understanding, it’s also not something that’s simply visible on the page or scannable across a line. Shape and structure is metaphysical as much as it’s physical.
And this all is a way into my idea that all poems are triangles. Poems are kinds of vessels of energy. You cram a bunch of things in one end (images, concepts, sounds, ideas) and something else emerges from the other. Like a triangle, poems have a wide end and a narrow end. From a content point of view, a poem can start with a small point (a particular image, moment, or idea) and then expand, the way an ant hill expands as it gets to the base. Or the poem can start out large, with a wide idea that that covers everything, then narrows to make a particularly sharp point at the end. Think of that as a large funnel you dump the poem into, and it comes out a small opening at the bottom.
Grant Clauser, Is a Poem a Sandwich if you Cut It Into Triangles?

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

Green air
beneath
empty sky.

August’s
promise
is not kept.

Shadows
leap at
silence.
Tom Montag, GREEN AIR

June 23, 2019June 23, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 25

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week: the solstice, sources of inspiration, circles, wounds, downtime, Joy Harjo, and more.

I spent the long evening at a poetry gathering at a house called Sunnyfield up in the hills about Emmitsburg. Lovely, peaceful place. Horses grazing on the lawn, long shadows of the trees, robins, wood thrushes and pewees calling.
Anne Higgins, Summer Solstice

Sunshine on sunshine, it builds up like snow, the light growing deeper and brighter throughout the day. To live in the big valley is to know light. Moving across this flat land, I try to keep my westward travels in the morning, and save the east for the evening, keeping the sun at my back. Feet upon the valley. Eyes upon the sky.
James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Sunshine on sunshine, it builds up like snow’

It’s officially the beginning of celestial summer, or should be, despite the fact that earlier this week I was reaching for heavier jackets and the space heater whenever the windows were open too long. Even tonight, which is a little milder, is still dropping into the 50’s–no doubt probably some weirdness of climate warming/jet stream wonkiness. I have a blissfully unencumbered weekend excepts for some dgp proofing and getting things ready to print on slew of new titles and clearing out the inbox. I’m set to start reading submissions in about a week, so I am trying to get my organizational ducks in a row.

I am trying to enjoy these long evenings, though, chilly as they are, because beginning now, we will start to lose them bit by bit, and since I was spending a good chunk of time in the studio tonight, took a couple nights off this week and was home before the daylight was gone. I’ve been dragging, and feeling my 7 vs. 8 hours of sleep more than usual. (it does not help that sometimes it’s closer to 6 if I get streaming something good and want to get in one more episode (this week it was Dead to Me.) Despite my mind and body being tired, I’ve actually been a little more level emotionally than I was for a bit there, so even a cold summer does wonders in terms of seasonal affective disorder. And actually, with no A/C I’d love a milder summer topping in the 70’s during the day.

Writing-wise, this week brought some final edits on my piece that was accepted at The Journal, and some good news about an opportunity to read at the Field Museum this September (more on that soon.) I’ll get free access to the museum to write about something there on exhibit, so I am already brainstorming ideas. It’s one of my favorite places in the city, and my favorite museum (it edges out the Art Institute by a hair.) I’m incredibly nostalgic about it–it was our field trip destination that fateful day at 15 years old when I glimpsed Chicago for the first time and decided I wanted to live here, so every time I’m in there I get a certain euphoria.
Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 6/21/2019

As I walk past the rye, sometimes I have to stop and just watch it. The smallest breeze makes it sway, which is one reason it’s so hard to take pictures that aren’t blurry.
This morning, a mizzling rain falls, but I’ll share photos from some earlier days. I’ve wanted to draw grand, insightful parallels to writing, but lately the rye has felt more like a meditation, a graceful and ragged silence.
Joannie Stangeland, Rye diary: Days eight, nine, and ten

At every turn in this trip, there were elements of research that have fueled my recent writing. I have written several poems and lyric essays about our experience there. I wish we had stayed on a bit longer, or forever. I was just starting to settle in, especially in Grange. We stayed in a gorgeous stone house, with walking lanes and gardens, and one particular crow that would sit on our bedroom’s window ledge and knock against the windowpane every morning.

Now back to our little farm and the onset of the growing season. The weather while we were gone was very rainy and gloomy. Our garden plot, which is very large area, was floating, so we had to wait it out before we could turn it over. Yesterday, (6/22) the second day of summer, we began making the rows, laying down paper, planting a variety of tomatoes and peppers(4.5 rows worth).

Our plants were getting tall and pot bound. You could actually hear their sigh of relief when I placed them in the soil.
M. J. Iuppa, Late May: Travels to Western Ireland. A Dream Around Every Corner . . .

Between 1996 and 1998 I lived on Glanmor Crescent. It didn’t really have a back garden but the back of the property bordered Cwmdonkin Park, the location of poems like The Hunchback in the Park by Dylan Thomas. The house I lived in with four friends was mid-way between two entrances to the park, each no more than two dozen paces from the park.
Cwmdonkin Park is in the Uplands residential area to the west of the city of Swansea. It covers an area of 13 acres and has a Grade II listing as a well preserved Victorian urban public park, which retains much of its original layout. […]
The park is famous primarily for its associations with Dylan Thomas but the history of its creation also covers an interesting period in Swansea’s history when the city’s water supply and public parks were being developed by the municipal authorities. Cwmdonkin Park grew up around Cwmdonkin Reservoir […] The formation of the park is part of the general movement seen from the 1830s onwards to secure for the people some green open spaces in increasingly industrial towns.
(Samantha Edwards, A History of Cwmdonkin Park. From Dissertation for Diploma in Local History, University of Wales Swansea, August 1991.)
Any time I walked from my rental house to Cwmdonkin Park I passed by the birthplace and residence of Dylan Thomas. I like to think that poetic influence pervaded the air that I breathed as I walked past and maybe that’s why my poetry life has taken off now, eleven years later :)
Giles L. Turnbull, Potentially Perfect Poetic Place

There are so many poets and writers I admire it would be ridiculous to list them. However, what I need at the moment is not so much the influence of their work, but the influence of their way of living whilst writing. It’s a very long time indeed since I was drunk before noon and I don’t think the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle would help my writing one bit, but I do feel I need to make some changes to the way I balance life and writing in order to see the novel through to completion. Fortunately, the summer holidays are almost here, and I’m looking forward to having some time to ‘plant clues, post fetishes’ and create the conditions for interesting writing to occur.
Julie Mellor, Drunk before noon

Last year I had the pleasure of interviewing innovative math educator and founder of Natural Math, Maria Droujkova, in “Math is Child’s Play” where she talks about learning math through free play in the context of families and communities. More recently, she and I were talking via social media when she mentioned magic circles. I was instantly intrigued and asked her to explain. She wrote:
One of my consulting topics is game/experience design. One of my favorite design concepts is magic circle: a playspace co-created by the participants, where they suspend their disbelief and behave as if they inhabit another world. I’ve been collecting tools for building cool magic circles from all creative fields, from writing to engineering. Tools like pretend-play, problem-posing, or name-giving. Math circles are magic circles. The maker goal: learn to pop up constructive, emotionally secure, creative spaces wherever we go.
I had to know more. My questions to her turned into this interview.
What was your first experience with a magic circle?
That feeling when an activity is the thing and the whole of the thing? When the rest of the world and the rest of me pretty much disappears? I’ve been experiencing that for as long as I remember. Early on, at three or four, I rearranged stones to make tiny spring snowmelt creeks gurgle merrier. I made canals, dams, and waterfalls till my hands grew red and numb. I remember long pretend-play with my mom, dad, and my imaginary friends, like the red velvet bow that was a fire-butterfly who’d gently land on my hand to play with me. Or the friend called Reflection who could escape its mirror, turning invisible. In another couple of years, there were elaborate handicrafts, hours in the making, while my grandpa was meticulously arranging his stamp collection in hand-crafted albums. He worked at the same table, and my crafts only happened if he started his. There was a very different energy, but some of the same timeless feeling, when me and other rough neighbor kids let go of our constant low-key fighting for living as action heroes in one of the traditional games, also rough, like “Cossacks and robbers.”
Once again, it was a different energy and a very recognizable feeling when I started to spend long hours solving delicious problems before my first Math Olympiad.
I don’t think I can live for long without the magic circle experience. It’s somewhere between water and food on the hierarchy of needs. Yet when I first read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience I felt uneasy about the authors’ claims that there are people of the flow, and communities of the flow, maybe even nations of the flow, while other people and groups are not.
Am I doing enough of immersive, productive, joyful work? Are my communities? I’d had none of these worries between building elaborate snowmelt waterworks and making up fantastic worlds for fire butterflies.
Laura Grace Weldon, Magic Circles

But one pair
of open-toed sandals beckoned.
Against all odds they fit, but
February is winter here. They went
on a shelf in my closet to wait.
Mom, last night we shared shoes
again. Were you watching as
I walked circles around the house,
relearning how heels swing my hips
playing dress-up in my mother’s
shoes, now my own?
Rachel Barenblat, In your shoes

I read recently this quote from Yo Yo Ma: “Any experience that you’ve had has to be somehow revealed in the process of making music. And I think that almost forces you to make yourself vulnerable to whatever is there to be vulnerable to. Because that, actually, is your strength.”
Surely that’s true also of writing poetry.
Vulnerable is a word that alarms me — the v tumbling into the deep well of the u, the nervousness of the ner, the complicated movement from l to n that gets stuck briefly in the mouth. It comes from the Latin vulnus, or wound, after all.
So much of surviving life is about girding oneself against vulnerability — all that thick skin growing, that growing of water-shedding feathers so stuff will roll off our backs, that creation of a strong center around which the winds can swirl, that hollowing oneself out like a reed. To deliberately pull back the tough skin, part the feathers, to probe the wounds to make art is terrifying. Also, which wounds? How deep do we scrape into the scar?
To make art from the wound, though, is not to make art of the wound, necessarily.
Marilyn McCabe, A Cold and Lonely Hallelujah; or, Art and Vulnerability

The shimmer of heat waves,
a mirage, a bending
of light and hope that makes
something seem near when it
isn’t, when it is far
away. Cascades of light
like a waterfall, drops
becoming curves and lines,
becoming sparks and pricks.
The fluted melody
lyrical as longing;
voices blend and balance
at the edge of hearing.
Imagined pebbles plop
in imagined waters
sweet as amusement, yet
there is no sound, no joke,
no water, no liquid
love paused and suspended
in midair like ripe fruit
waiting for a open
mouth to find it. There is
beauty here, but is it
what I see, what you see?
PF Anderson, Our Lady of Love Lost

Arthur W. Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, which I’m currently reading, deals with medical ethics, personal narrative, illness, and the community (all of us, really) who may need care, give care, and/or who realize there is a socio-emotional impact when friends, coworkers, and family members become ill and thus require care. A sociologist by training, Frank examines illness stories as testimonies that point to a social ethic and asks all of us both to tell more when we experience pain and to listen better when others are telling us about their experiences of illness.
“Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
—Mary Oliver, from “Wild Geese”
At first this idea sounds unpleasant–one thinks of the stereotype of tedious conversations among the elderly about various surgeries and too-intimate revelations about prostates, livers, stomachs, and bowels (my dad calls these monologues “organ recitals”). That response–evasion, withdrawal, revulsion–is exactly what Frank seeks to change.

But then I consider the way I have heard stories of illness experience from hospice patients. How varied they can be. Some fragmented, some specific, some pious, some stoic, some anxious. And some that are beautiful. These stories aren’t just for (about) the person who has undergone the suffering. They are also for me, the listener. “When any person recovers his voice,” says Frank, “many people begin to speak through that story.”
Ann E. Michael, Listen better

Summer has never been my healthiest period – it’s when I usually catch the flu or pneumonia, when I’ve been hospitalized for MS, caught various bugs, and broken bones. I’m not sure why, but summer and I just do not get along. It’s also almost my 25th (!!) anniversary and I’m hoping I’ll be healthy enough to celebrate!
I can feel frustrated with myself and my physicality or just embrace the concept of downtime itself and allow myself to rest and recover. I’m trying to keep the television off and audiobooks and creativity guides around. I spend time sketching (which I’m terrible at) or dreaming over gardening magazines, listening to music, and sleeping.
I believe as creative writers – or even just as humans – we need a little downtime. We are not productivity machines. There are rises and falls, times when I write several poems a day and weeks when I don’t write anything. We don’t need to submit poetry every single day (and besides, you probably know fewer journal read during the summer – although there are exceptions.) They say children need to spend time being bored in order to grow problem-solving skills, imagination and creativity. Maybe adults are the same. We need to allow ourselves some unscheduled time, especially during the summer, when deadlines are less likely to be pressing, and people are on vacation anyway. Remind yourself you are valuable outside of what you produce. Maybe start up a hobby you’re not good at (see aforementioned sketching) and listen to music you’re unfamiliar with. Snip flowers from the garden and keep them in a small vase next to the bed while you nap (I particularly like roses, lavender and sweetpeas.) I bet you will be feel better emotionally and physically, and creatively refreshed.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Solstices and Strawberry Moons, How to Tell It’s Summer in Seattle, and Thinking About Summer Downtime

I have been feeling a strange sense of accomplishment because I finished a book in the same week I started it. It’s not that I don’t read books anymore, although I don’t read them the way I used to. But it takes me forever to finish them, unless they’re super compelling or unless I’m on a plane or somewhere where the Internet doesn’t distract me.

I am the person who always had her nose stuck in a book–as a child, as a teen, as a student, as a commuter, in every facet of life. Now I’m still reading, but I’m more likely to have my nose stuck in front of a computer screen. I still read a lot, but I read shorter pieces.

News that might have once taken days or weeks to get to me now finds me in a matter of minutes. As we all know, that can be a good thing or a bad thing. Yesterday, I read the breaking news that Joy Harjo has been named the next poet laureate of the U.S.

I saw a Facebook comment that remarked that the recent choices for poet laureate have been fabulous. I agree: Natasha Trethewey, Tracy Smith–beyond that, I’d have to look up the list, but I’m rarely annoyed at the pick.

Sure, I’d like it to be me, but I also know I’m nowhere near accomplished enough. That’s O.K. I have time. I turn 54 in a few weeks, and Harjo is 68. But even if I’m never accomplished enough, I’m happy that I’ve kept writing, kept submitting, kept checking in with this deepest part of myself that I access through poetry.

Poetry–both poems written by me and poems written by others–has taken me to places I wouldn’t have found otherwise. If you asked me to define good art, worthy art, that kind of definition would leap to mind.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, A New Poet Laureate and Thoughts on What Makes Art Valuable

I am somebody ::
but the moon knows
that’s not the whole story
D. F. Tweney (untitled post)

Q: Hi Professor,
I have been published a bunch of times but never poems I expect – my best stuff hasn’t been picked up yet and I am curious – how do you go about editing or curating your poems so that you can get them published?
A: The short version: time/distance plus persistence, with a garnish of recognizing how random publishing can be.
In more detail: I wait for months until the poem is strange to me, so I can be objective about its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve just been rereading poems I drafted during the past year or two, preparing to submit or re-submit them, and I found a few gems; a lot of poems with strong potential but clunky or underdeveloped passages; and some I was once excited about but now realize might not go anywhere. Some poems I thought were shiny and near-complete disappoint me now, and that’s common–with critical distance, I’m better able to admit that a certain element doesn’t work, even though I’m fond of it. Sometimes I have to excise an opening stanza or two, but for me, problems more often occur at or near the end of the poem. (I’ve observed that some poets are great at punchy beginnings and weaker on closure, and others reverse those traits.) You have to be a ruthless trimmer/ re-developer, both for the good of the art and for publishing success, and it just takes a lot of time. There are SO many good poems out there competing for an editor’s attention: the winners are great, or lucky.
Having a few fellow writers to bounce work off of helps, too, whether it’s an informal/ online writing group or an official class. And sending in batches that hang together well, the poems illuminating one other, can help deepen an editor’s sense what you’re up to.
All that said, I’ve heard multiple book editors and contest judges note that the best poems in a book, when you check the acknowledgments, aren’t ones that have been taken by magazines. I’m polishing my next book ms now, including 50-something poems, most of which have been published independently. I still shake my head over the ones that haven’t been, because I feel they’re among my best. Sometimes that’s because they’re risky in some way that’s supported by the book as a whole, but might seem off to a magazine editor with less context. Other times it just seems random. Or am I just wrong about “my best”?…In any case, in addition to bringing your own work to the highest possible shine, keep reading magazines, thinking about fit, and getting the work out there. Hard work and persistence are under your control but the rest is “Crass Casualty,” as Thomas Hardy might say if he were blogging about the po-biz.
Lesley Wheeler, Dear poetry professor on submissions (plus dropped balls, tombstones, & “Hap”)

Isn’t it nice to take new books out of the bag and look at them, the shape of them, the colors, the covers and spines. Of course you primarily enjoy the anticipation of reading something new, but just seeing three promising, unread paperbacks piled up is crazy delightful too.
Sarah J Sloat, Daunt

Maine Media offers other workshops too – in film, photography, videography, and book arts. Because they offer these things they were kind enough to open the studio to the poets and let us play with the letterpress. […]
I was so enamored with the process that I think I’m going to do a few broadsides of a poem or two to sell during the launch of my book next spring. Stay tuned for further details!
All week Nick had us writing from different prompts: pictures and news articles, poems by other poets and even using some of our own, older poems as inspiration. Then we took everything we’d been writing and started breaking it apart and putting it together in a new way. It was creative, it was physical, it was unlike any poem creation I’ve ever attempted. And it yielded a pretty good poem, one that took leaps I might not have ever attempted otherwise. I’ll share it with you soon, I promise.

At the end of the week we had an evening where we all gathered – each poet reading one poem they’d written that week, the photography students showing off their pictures, the film students showcasing their work. It was a wonderfully supportive, creative environment. I can’t wait to go back.
Courtney LeBlanc, Writing in Maine

I went to Sorrento on a school trip
I went to the local gasworks
I asked them not to come with ideas
borrowed keys and sprockets
hand-painted birds and animals
a cork and sealing-wax
the Western mind is trained
to set the colophon again
it seems to me quite normal
I do a lot of hanging
last-minuting
I was printing at 4am
they lose their hollyness
without the pines and the poplars
in the garden at 8 o’clock eating roses
Ama Bolton, ABCD at midsummer

May 5, 2019May 5, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 18

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts.

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

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

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

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

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

Take for example these lines from “String Theory,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 31, 2019March 31, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 13

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts.

This week: world-building and destroying, drafting and revision, travel and homelessness… “How do we go on, heart open, in the presence of mortality?” as Jessamyn puts it. Let’s join Josephine Corcoran in toasting: “Here’s to poems, wildflowers, insects and weeds.”

My mother was the earliest form of Google I knew. People called her with questions all the time. She kept files of clippings with financial advice, addresses of agencies, lists of experts, research findings — all updated with her ballpoint wiki. She had her travel skills to reference, her training as a registered nurse to summon, her experience with the dying to share when, inevitably, people needed her counsel.
Before the Internet, people were our search engines.
Laura Grace Weldon, Humanity is a Search Engine

I spent most of last night on Mars. All of it, actually. And the night before that. And the night before that. And the year before that …….
Colonizing Mars, actually, although that sounds grander and empowering than the experience. Let me tell you, Mars feels a lot like Kansas or Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. Well, except for spacesuits and cold.
There’s this grinding isolation, which I’m okay with, surprisingly, but it flattens everything. A numbness that comes with having a really predictable daily experience. I guess kids can adjust to all kinds of things as long as it seems normal to them. It was normal for me to study, do my chores, watch threads of wind scour the flat plains, lift the dust, and drop it back down.
PF Anderson, Mars Memories

In Los Angeles, I had to forget that entire tent city I’d seen five minutes before arriving at a gorgeous art space, Hauser and Wirth, forget the waste spaces of highway with people like driftwood, to get to the art. The scale of homeless population reflected the west – vast, long vistas I wasn’t prepared for. We’d landed an hour earlier. Welcome to confusion.
The art, fortunately, didn’t exclude life – Annie Leibovitz’s retrospective was excessive and marked by raw vital messiness, mostly of another era of culture clash, the 70s, both seemingly more violent and more innocent. The humanness of desire and struggle was poignant, marking a swath of human history. In the maelstrom was music, drunkenness, ecstasy, sadness, communion.
It took me a while to get onto the thing about LA – the wastespaces and no-places are the thing, and the places where people gather to eat, drink, play are little happenings.
Jill Pearlman, One Big Tented L.A. Thing

There’s a story here:
Something was built.
Something was broken.
That’s the essence of story, but I have no idea of the particulars. Make them up for yourself; the possibilities are numerous.
Ellen Roberts Young, Spring Walk and Story

I find whenever I’m in Portland and especially in Old Town, someone interacts with me–all the interactions have ended up okay, but there have been some odd moments (Note: not all the interactions have been homeless/drug user related, there is just an energy to this city I can’t describe, but it usually shows itself by feeling as if you’re in one big impromptu improv event.)

An example of what I’m talking about is once I was standing at a crosswalk and a man jumps out of nowhere, puts a cup of “water” ?? (I hope) over the head of a friend I was with and then directly in front of my face and yells, “You are hypnotized!” before deciding we were not hypnotized and wandering away. While these moments make me laugh afterward, the “that was weird” part of the trip, they remind me to tell you to keep your eyes open and do travel with a buddy, especially if you’re a woman.

Again, I have been to Portland numerous times without incident, but every. single. time. It’s something. Someone wants to dance with me on a sidewalk, someone is yelling something my direction from across the street, someone is shouting “let me hold your kneecap” out a car window, someone is blowing bubbles at everyone who passes by, someone has decided to ask random people their favorite type of shoe. It’s both inspiring and tiring. It’s “I’ll use this in a poem” and “I think we’re done here.”
Kelli Russell Agodon, #AWP19: Need a break? My Favorite Things in Portland

On a flight crowded with sleepy creative writing professors—the kind with teaching-intensive jobs who can’t escape to the AWP convention until late on Wednesday—I probe for existential dread the way you tongue a loose tooth. No, not sore, not yet.
This surprises me, given how my children’s current transitions have predisposed us all to panic. My daughter is applying for jobs plus finishing her senior honors thesis at Wesleyan; her adviser is moody and keeps missing meetings. My son will hear about the rest of his college applications while we’re at the conference, and he’s anxious, too. I’m not actually worried about either of them, not in the long run, but suspense is keen.
This is my first AWP since stepping off the Board of Trustees and even though I have a few residual duties, I feel giddy. Or is that jetlag? On Thursday morning before heading to the convention center, I pull out a small sewing kit I’d packed, intending to reattach a button on my favorite velvet jacket. The needle has rusted from disuse and I can’t thread it. I’m having issues with orderliness and containment.
Lesley Wheeler, Time out of joint at #AWP19

Last Sunday, 3 members (myself and two others) of our poetry club, Casa los Altos, collaborated with the PoetrySlam group of our city in their annual “Grito de la Mujer” (Woman’s Scream) live performance event. This year, it was held in our Central Park.
Guatemala consistently ranks, unfortunately, as one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. This annual event invites poets from our city and the surrounding region, both men and women, to give voice to the often invisible and unspoken fears, heartbreaks, hopes, desires, experiences, spirit, anger, and more that we are often called upon to suppress. The power of the written and spoken word to shine light into places that affect us, cannot be overstated. This event is not for poetry that is merely “pretty” or that sounds “nice.” Our presenters this year talked about being mistresses, about balancing motherhood with career, about being accosted in the streets, about being young, about being men trying to navigate a world where power dynamics are changing.
Marie Anzalone, “A Woman’s Scream” Live Poetry Event

The first session I attended in the afternoon was Revelation or Resistance: Form or Narrative at the End of the World. I was less interested in the authors reading their works than in the discussion that followed. It was a good discussion, but if you know me, you know that my Apocalypse Gal self can talk end-of-the-world for days and never get tired of it. I wanted more conversation about what to do in terms of retirement planning and the knowledge that the world is seriously screwed, but I understand that not everyone has floor boards that are 2 feet above sea level. One of the presenters did early on present information from the latest, most serious climate report that came out a month or two ago; I’ve only heard from a few people who have actually read the whole thing, and he’s one of them. He mentioned 20-30 feet of sea level rise in the next few decades, which is a much more compressed time frame than originally thought and a much greater volume of water.

I made lots of notes of my own thoughts during this session, and they ran along the lines of future generations who will be aghast at the fact that we spent lots of time and money in fancy conferences talking about narrative form and planetary destruction and not much time actually working on the issue. I do agree with the one presenter who observed that this slow motion apocalypse on many fronts is moving so slowly that it’s impossible for us to react effectively. It’s not like a world war that might galvanize and mobilize us.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, AWP: Report on Day 1

What an inspiring day! The March meeting of Bath Writers and Artists was co-chaired by Sue Boyle and Peter Reason. Sue began the morning workshop by reading a thoughtful and passionate essay by Chrissy Banks, “The Place of Poetry in a Time of Catastrophe”. Are we fiddling, she asks, while real people burn? […]
I came home with an altered (less anthropocentric, I hope) perspective and a heightened awareness of “hyper-objects”: things that are everywhere but too big to see — like anthropocentrism and other habits of thinking and feeling that lead, not deliberately but inevitably, to disaster. I think I have already demonstrated that I can morph into a fictional post-apocalyptic unicellular extremophile, but it’s time to face the apocalypse head-on and do something about it. The expression it’s not the end of the world has gained a horrible new relevance.
Ama Bolton, Of Trees and Tygers and Catastrophe

From one perspective, the idea that art needs to wallow in the ugly that we want to avert our eyes from is condescending in terms of respecting the life experiences that other people have and how they choose to deal with them.
Not everyone needs to be confronted with a mimesis of each of life’s horrors, nor do they need to be overwhelmed with expressionistic/exhibitionistic sharing of other people’s feelings in order to “understand” or “appreciate”, or feel empathy for other people.
Not everyone is healed by a performance of their pain.
Isn’t the drive to create a beautiful moment from the complexity of such an experience as real and as authentic as it is to focus on the ugly? Can’t a glam shot of a new mother in her clean sheets also be interpreted as an expressionistic portrait of the joy inherent in the moment?
Staged is staged. Regardless of the fact that we seem to unconsciously hold up the “ugly” as authentic, and the beautiful as false or narcissistic. Could a case be made for our fascination with our own flaws as being more honest than our filtered selfies?
Ren Powell, March 31st, 2019

Of course, there is no real risk. I know that. I can save each and every draft, if I want, and trace my way back if I get lost. But reason has no standing where irrational fears hold sway. What I am really fearing is that I’m not up to the challenge. No longer a careless writer of what comes to mind, no playing child, but an editor, choicemaker; which words will I befriend, what voice will I take on?
And will any of the strangers I meet like the result? In editing mode, that question rises, grim as the sun on the hot sidewalk on the walk to the first day of school.
I wonder if other people share this editing dread. It’s normal to fall in love with a fresh draft of something exciting and new. Why mar the lovely face of this beloved with some virtual red mark of the editing pen? Surely it’s brilliant as is. First word, best word. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But I won’t know until I voyage into the process of questioning what’s there — does this belong? does that sound best or is there a better way? does it contain more vitality if I turn it upside-down? — and come to the destination on the other side.
Marilyn McCabe, Off We Go Into the Wild Red-Penciled Yonder; or The Hesitant Editor

And what do we do as writers but build worlds? I suppose this applies to poets as much as fiction writers, maybe even creative non-fiction. Some writing may have more in common with the non-created world, may live and breathe inside it, may exist alongside it simultaneously and occasionally wander back and forth. Things may be plucked from reality and stretched or bent into the shape, even amongst the most autobiographical work. These are perhaps the most interesting kinds of worlds, the ones that disorient you somewhere along the way, not sure where you are–in fact or fiction, and that confusion is part of the point.
Kristy Bowen, worlds within worlds

I’ve been waiting in my writing, setting poems aside, picking them up again, panicking because I might not have the most recent draft. Sometimes, the poems grow on me, and I see opportunities for nuance, for the subtle shadings. Sometimes, I grow tired of them, convinced that they are terrible. Time for waiting is running out, with just over a month before I turn in my thesis. But I can still get close to the ground of them, inspect their stems and blades, their rhythms and imagery (and I suspect that imagery is at the root of my worries). A garden is always in revision—something for me to keep in mind as I keep working at these poems.
Joannie Stangeland, Rye diary: Day three

Once I get past the initial rush to lay out images or the plot, I love the fine tuning, the balancing of all the finer points of writing, playing with the language, weighting words by their placement, drawing out imagery. I try to keep the reader in my mind, what they need, how much I want to lead them and how much I want them to run off on their own with my words. But also giving precedence to what I want the poem to do and say. It’s a delicate act of balance above the poem while stepping within it.

Sometimes it works and sometimes I focus too much on what I want, the ‘thing’ I’m trying to make the poem do that I force it into shape and it shows in its reluctance. This is when I need mentors, writing group companions and other readers to step up and tell me something isn’t working. I find it so helpful to have these dialogues because I am mired deeper within my own writing than another reader and often I cannot see where the problem is, even though I may have a sense of their being one.
Gerry Stewart, Finding Balance

Go easy on yourself: NaPoWriMo is a bit of fun, not another chore. If you miss a day, start again the following day. If need to take a day to catch your breath, same. Don’t write off the whole challenge because of a couple of missed days. At the end of the month, you will still have achieved much more than you normally would or had even thought possible.
Manage your mindset: The challenge is derived from NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month in November, where the focus is on quantity, not quality. Think of it as a 30-day scavenger hunt – you want to spark an idea, capture the essence of it and move on. Switch off your critical voice. Knowing that these are fast first drafts takes the pressure off. As Jodi Picoult says: ‘You might not write well every day but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.’
Angela T. Carr, Surviving NaPoWriMo: Tips for a 30-Day Poetry Challenge

Among other things, I’m teaching ancient Near Eastern epics this semester. I don’t often get to do this, and it’s my favorite.
My students read the Enuma Elish. They read the Hymns to Inanna. They read my beloved Epic of Gilgamesh. We study archetypal character and archetypal story, the role of catharsis in human survival, the integral nature of creation/destruction and eros/thanatos, sacred marriages and descents to underworlds, hero’s journeys.

I say, and say again:
The question at the center is: how do we go on, heart open, in the presence of mortality?
Heart open. Not numb.
In the presence of suffering and death.
At the intersection of medicine and Humanities, heh.
How?
JJS, Two Years: An(other) Open Letter to my Surgeon

When Depression Talks Over Me by Lannie Stabile in Kissing Dynamite – This is one of the most expressive poems I’ve read about depression and anxiety that doesn’t slam you like a sledgehammer. No, it’s calmly desperate which is a large part of its strength. Lannie is a poet to watch.
“I remember the first time I unhinged my jaw,
vomiting the swollen stories,
watching them gurgle in the open air”
*
Burn Barrel by Allie Marini in The New Southern Fugitives – This poem begins with how to assemble an actual burn barrel. It caught my attention because when I was a kid in rural Mississippi, we had a burn barrel and it was my chore to burn the household trash. As the poem progresses the barrel transforms, becoming a metaphor for the poet’s own suppression. It’s so very skillfully written.
“refashion yourself
into something clean & less—become a grate, a burn cover, become hardware cloth & trap hot cinders in
your mouth. limit the risk of combustion. just swallow everything down.“
Charlotte Hamrick, First Quarter Favorites: The Poets

Never passed it on to me
who watched her pinching
pastry: butter, sugar, flour;
how it fell from her fingers,
how it fell through the air.

She tried. She did. But grew impatient
with the way the mix would clump
and stick. O, give it here she’d say.
The pastry would flake, and fall.

You need cold hands she’d say.
Yours are too warm.
John Foggin, On Mothers Day, for my mum, Marjorie 1911-2007

At the end of shiva I wrapped myself
in your monogrammed sable stole
and walked around my neighborhood,
blinking like a mole bewildered by sun.
Like my child, still wrapping himself
in the plush blanket from your funeral
carrying you with him from bedroom
to living room sofa and back again.
As I prepare to leave this first month
I’m still learning how to carry you.
Rachel Barenblat, Four weeks

Editing poems at night
Under the influence of hot chocolate.
Life opens like a flower.
James Lee Jobe, ‘Editing poems at night’

When I was much younger, I considered myself “spiritual.” I stopped using the term once I began a more serious exploration of my life and began to study philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, phenomenology, and consciousness more intentionally. But the crucial components–connection, relation to and with others (sentient and not), and love–those I have always understood as necessary. Even though my ego has never “dissolved” quite the way [Michael] Pollan describes [in How to Change Your Mind].
So maybe I can go back to considering myself somewhat spiritual. At this moment in life, Nature and Others matter more than accomplishments and outcomes.
Welcome Spring, welcome Spirit. Namaste, Amen.
Ann E. Michael, Book review, mind review

I’m not taking part in #NaPoWriMo as such but I am going to make a concerted effort to sit down with my notebooks every day and work on some new poems. […]
Meanwhile, we’re trying to encourage more pollinating insects into our garden so we’ve abandoned our lawnmower for the time being – although we (I really mean Andrew since he is the chief gardener in our house) have mowed a sort of path around our wild lawn.
Roll on April – here’s to poems, wildflowers, insects and weeds.
Josephine Corcoran, #NaPoWriMo

March 17, 2019March 17, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 11

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts.

This week: aging, mortality, ambition, procrastination, and books; preparing for the AWP; preparing for spring.

I don’t remember the first time I read W. S. Merwin’s work. I feel as if his words and spirit have always been with me. I do remember the first time I met him in person. Another student poet I knew, Andie, from Pamela Alexander’s weekly poetry class (held in Pam’s living room outside Central Square) had heard that Merwin would be at Harvard for a reading and reception. This very quiet poet and total rule follower asked me if I would attend the reading with her — and then crash the reception.

My friend and I (young, awkward, and brave) sidled up to the very small group where Merwin was chatting and joined in. Was it a Harvard Review event? The fancy pants people (dresses and heels and perfect make-up) stared at us. We did not fit in. My friend addressed Merwin telling him in a flash flood of words how important his poems had been to her, how they allowed her to believe she had permission to write her own. Andie went on for awhile. I had never heard her talk so much. And when she was finished, perhaps believing that we were both about to be ejected from the premises, she stepped back. And then I remember — as if it was not 34 years ago though it was — Merwin smiled broadly and said, “Thank you. That makes me feel useful.”

And there was no doubt that he meant this. Andie’s effusiveness, her awkward praise, visibly filled him with a humble gratitude. There were so many ways the conversation could have gone but this gentle thanks from Merwin altered the universe of poetry for me. This poetry god had just ambled down the mountain and spoke to us as if we were his trusted friends. He was the only one in that stuffy room who welcomed us in and made us feel as if we had a right to inhabit the poetry world. Or at least try.
Susan Rich, Remembering W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)

At 76, I’ve lived longer than anyone on the male side of my Dad’s family (and all his sisters, too). Sometimes I’ll do the maths, and think something like, “well, with a following wind I could probably have five or six or seven years left. Four would be good. Every day’s a bonus. You’re a lucky man.” It’s not for a moment depressing, but it’s made me notice that I’m reading poems I might not have taken much notice of before. Life enhancing poems that didn’t seem that relevant or interesting at one time. Your stories will be similar, I imagine. When I was in my 30s and my Dad was dying I found myself reading and re-reading Tony Harrison’s sequence of sonnets from The school of eloquence… Book ends(especially), Continuous, Marked with D.They gave me a vocabulary, a language to shape my grief. In the break-up of my first marriage, and in finding a new love, it was A kumquat for John Keats, that midlife thankyou for coming through, for love, for survival. I remember him reading it when it had just come out, the relish with which he read the lines
I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew
against my palate. Fine, for 42
I loved the way it came after:
Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness round them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.
I saw him reading last summer, still going strong at 80. And I wondered how those lines sound to him now. I think he might give them a wry smile. It’s the same kind of wry smile I reserve for young men’s poems about their imagined end. Rupert Brooke, for instance
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England……….
a pulse in the eternal mind, no less
I don’t imagine for a moment that he had any intention of ending up like that; he just thought he did. Since he never got to the Front he never got to rethink it, unlike Sassoon, or Rosenberg, or Owen and the rest. But I’m pretty sure it spoke to me differently when I was 16, when I believed sincerely (because of the H Bomb) that I’d not see 21. We read who and where we are. We change and the poems change with us.
John Foggin, Staying Alive: me and Mr MacCaig

In 62 years this body has become worn;
Lumps and bumps and bald spots. Aches.
Places that hurt and I’m not sure why.
Other things have changed with age, too;
I spend more time thinking about the sun and moon,
The trees and watersheds.
Much less thought goes to the curve of a shapely thigh.
James Lee Jobe, ‘In 62 years this body has become worn’

I have been reading Hayden Carruth’s poems, admiring the breadth of his experiments in styles from sonnets to jazzy free verse to prose poems and extremely short poems–even haiku. One thing becomes clear after awhile: his appreciation of song, of the poem as song, of the need to create song as an expression of life and against the things one wishes to resist, even when (especially when) it is impossible to resist.
His poem “Mother” says all of the things I wanted to write about my mother-in-law’s death, and more. It is achingly honest and achingly sad and deeply loving.
After reading it, I thought to myself, “You do not need to write those poems; Carruth has achieved what you are trying to accomplish.” But we compose poems under individual circumstances and for personal reasons, and I suspect that reading “Mother” will help me to revise my own poems in probing ways.
This is why we read other poets’ work. One reason why, anyway.
Ann E. Michael, Come let us sing

It’s only as “swift” sank in, and I felt the distance of “landscape” that I “got it.” The paved path is a road; I’m on that Interstate, if it is one, not beside it.
Because she doesn’t name it as road, and because she delays the fact that the pines are gone and doesn’t spell out why or how (removed for farming? cut down to build the road?) I have wandered inside her poem and so find myself complicit at the end in all that taking the fast road ignores or denies.
Thank you, Carol Barrett, for this reading experience. Carol has two books, Pansies, just out, and Calling in the Bones. I’m looking forward to reading both.
Ellen Roberts Young, Reading a Poem: Barrett’s “The American Dream”

This morning I was feeling like a dried out husk, with no ideas for writing, a poet who would never write a poem again. I thought about approaches that often work: taking a real or fictional character and writing a poem from a different angle or taking a minor character and giving the character a voice. Nothing.

I scrolled through my blog posts that get an “inspiration” tag so that I can find them when I need inspiration. I went back several years and again, nothing.

Then a line drifted across my brain: I keep this garlic press although it only has one purpose. I thought of my juicer, which also only has one purpose but takes up more room in the cabinet. I was off–and I finally wrote a poem.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Of Poem Composing and Travel Fretting

I happened upon this great piece from Susan Minot this weekend and it got me thinking about not so much how we write, but how the world, in fact, opens itself up to us in possibility every day. I’ll be sitting on a bus, or pushing a cart of books through the library, and there it is, that shimmering idea. Or in that weird morning space between waking up enough to look at my phone to check the time and the alarm actually going off. Admittedly, so much is lost because I didn’t write it down. Didn’t force myself to commit it to memory for later when I had time to consider it as creative impulse. This week, one night, I was up in the stacks and heard strange inexplicable noises a few rows away and got to thinking about the plot of a horror movie or novel where a woman is haunted by the ghost of herself from the future. She would then have to solve her own death like a puzzle. Or a title for a poem, or a concept for a book will come to me. Friday, I was tweaking the dgp website and for a second “&nsbp” or “non breaking space” seemed like a great title for a book of poems written in html code style.
Kristy Bowen, sometimes the world writes itself

In a desert zoo, a jaguar slashes a stupid tourist who felt entitled: all I can think of is her cage, her pacing, her desperate desire to kill something. I nightwalk on ice, in dark, on thickly beaten-down snow. It’s exhausting, how fast it slips out of our hands, claws, teeth. How hungry we are. To be ourselves. All things are happening at once, they say, as though this is news. All the endings. All the beginnings. Vitality and decay, simultaneous.
JJS, March 10, 2019: jaguar stars

If we’re to be nothing after death
let it be nothing like nothing on,
like a dress you take off
on a very hot night
to feel the slightest breeze,
a dim light that gives you goosebumps.
Magda Kapa, Like Nothing On

I took the train from Paris to Chartres. It was a Friday in Lent, and on those Fridays, they take the chairs off the Labyrinth, which is designed right into the cathedral floor.

Not too many other people there. I walked it.

Later, I wrote this poem:
Thin Place

I walk the labyrinth at Chartres.
The subtle knife can cut the veil.
I hear the whisper on the other side.
I stretch my hand and touch the air.

The subtle knife can cut the veil
where walls are thin as plastic wrap.
I stretch my hand and touch the air.
Heaven and earth just feet apart

where walls are thin as plastic wrap. […]
Anne Higgins, On this day last year

The picture of my cats contemplating the excellent Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Women’s Writing is here to inspire some pre-AWP reading – of course you’ll come home with a bunch of new reading material, but I’m trying to warm up – trying to place a review of a new book, Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, (excellent!) and I’ve been trying to mix up my feminist reading material – sometimes being outside of academia I feel I miss out of some books that are familiar talking material in the academic world, and this book is one of them. (It was mentioned heavily in Sophie Collins’ Who is Mary Sue?) It’s a fascinating, fairly easy read, sharp and funny in places. Joanna is a science fiction writer as well as a critic, so I’m going to look for more of her work.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Getting Ready for AWP, Part I: Schedule, Packing Tips, And How Not to Panic

Speaking of the bookfair– The bookfair has become SO LARGE, you actually need to spend A LOT of time there… AND it’s worth it.

Here’s why–while sitting in on a panel, may feel like “wow, I am learning important things,” walking around a bookfair actually connects you with people and publishers and poets and presses. You will make connections, you will learn about the presses you want to publish you, and you will meet the editors behind the scenes.

This is SO important as a poet or writer. You will have the opportunity to hold the books they publish, look at the covers, read the words and decide if this is a press you’d want to have publish your work.

So take the time. Buy books. Support presses and poets. Look at the books and educate yourself in what kind work presses publish. Ask questions. Present your best self. Be professional. Learn about all the presses and what they do.
Kelli Russell Agodon, AWP 2019: Tips from an Introvert #AWP2019 #AWPTips

Looking awkward is one of my natural gifts. I probably look awkward in photos because I am awkward in real life. Like the time I was attacked by vegetation. Or the time I threw myself into a cute boy’s locker while trying to play hard-to-get.
But now, to my horror, I’m told I need an author photo to promote my new book. Although I successfully eluded requests to put my picture on the back cover, I’m told I need such a photo for publicity materials. Whaaa? This is my third book (or fourth, or fifth, depending on how you count) and I’ve never had to assemble anything resembling publicity. But book reviewers, apparently, want to check the flesh-covered skull I smile from before they consider cracking open a copy.
In an effort to put this off longer, I have procrastinated by looking up what sort of photos truly laudable writers have gotten away with over the years. [Click through to view examples.]
Laura Grace Weldon, Author Photo Angst

I’ve been making a lot of stuff lately, not just found poems but collages to compliment them, even a found poem in a box (see below). I loosely term all this stuff ‘composite fictions’ and last week I started to realise I’d got quite a number of these pieces. So, I’ve created a gallery page on this blog where you can view them under that heading.
Sometimes, the cutting and sticking has felt like it’s taking over from the poetry all together, but I’ve kept at it, in the belief that that you learn through doing, and completing, things. That’s not to say I’m happy with every finished piece, but completing is a stage in the process. Unfinished work makes me feel uncomfortable. What would it have been if I’d got round to finishing it? Good or bad, I’ll never know – unless I complete it. And it’s reassuring to be able to put one project aside in order to concentrate on something else, then go back to the first one later.
Julie Mellor, Side projects and procrastination

Not really a blog post but an ageing woman cycling on a static bicycle half crying, half laughing listening to an old George Michael song and thinking that she used to imagine George was singing to her about
oh there was so much unrequited love in those days! and she never imagined anyone wasn’t straight, she was very young
now Paul McCartney is duetting with George, she didn’t know about this version, the wonder of spotify, looking sideways through the windows she could almost be cycling down a country lane
it would be a good idea
Josephine Corcoran, Not really a blog post

What’s it all about? The tendency of “life” to want to live in the now and onward. The meaning of life? Well, I don’t think there is intrinsic meaning to this random fallout. You want meaning? Make it yourself. We just flail around, a bunch of bacteria and dividing cells, and then it’s over. Well, except for the bacteria.
Which brings a certain amount of perspective on the idea of success, something else about which I’ve been thinking.
I’ve tried a number of pursuits in my life. Had a number of ambitions, both realistic and outlandish. Numerous fancies. Many dreams. One by one, all these things fall away. Pursuit falters; ambition lapses or faces the grim reality of oh-just-forget-it; dreams, well, dreams are forgotten, tossed aside with regret, relief, bitterness, or remain clutched in the hand like a magician’s coin, invisible but caught in the fingers.
I thought I’d be this thing, do that thing, or be that kind of person. With each passing life phase I’ve tried to get clearer who I am, what I’m here for, and how I define success. It’s an ongoing project.
Marilyn McCabe, Pass Go; collect $200; or, On Success…or Successishness

I am always smoldering
like a stubborn campfire
or a pair of new lovers
two months into their affair
I am not a flickering candle
fearful of the wind
or even a strong set of lungs
I cannot be snuffed out
blown out
Bekah Steimel, Lit

Look, Mom, he’s taking up
needle and thread to be like me, and I’m
taking them up to be like you, to finish
the canvas you started. Isn’t that what
we all do, in the end: add clumsy stitches
to the unfinished tapestry of generations?
He’s trying to make something beautiful
from hard work and yarn. I told him
I’m proud of him. I told him
wherever you are, you’re proud of him too.
Rachel Barenblat, First letter

This morning I dawdled more than usual and was a half-an-hour late to hit the trail. But it is spring now, and the sun is catching up with us. For now, a half-an-hour is the difference between running in the dark, and running in predawn’s pink and blue watercolors. Next month the sun will beat me to the trailhead every morning.
The lake is still edged with ice and roughly textured in the soft light.
The ducks’ calls can sound like mocking laughter, but I no longer mind.
They are a promise (and a reminder) for the day to come.
Let it come, and go – and keep it easy.
For now, there are sunrises.
There will be sunsets in the autumn
when it comes.
Ren Powell, March 11, 2019

February 3, 2019February 3, 2019 by Dave Bonta

Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 5

A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. And if you’re a blogger who regularly shares poems or writes about poetry, please consider joining the network (deadline: February 14).

Books, books, and more books! Writing them, reading them, collecting them: That’s what I found in my feed this week, even more so than usual. Maybe it’s the inevitable effect of a long winter. Other themes included listening and therapy, vocabulary and rhythm, getting out and about, and learning from Sylvia Plath. Enjoy.

Alfred Edward Newton, author and book collector (Not to be confused with Alfred E. Newman of Mad magazine fame) is quoted as saying, “Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity … we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.” In this context, Tsundoku appears to be a positive thing. Alternatively, I have heard it used to describe book hoarding. The latter is a less flattering description of the pastime.

Let me say that I am guilty of having more books that I have read. Or at least completed. I have a fairly extensive personal library. I make no bones about it.

I confess that I love the feel of books. Not so much the feel of e-readers. I love the sight of books. And yes, I love the smell of books. […]
According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of intellectual failings, but the opposite.

Alberto Manguel puts it very lovingly – “I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.” There may come a day in which I am no longer able to add books to my library. I hope that is not the case, But I keep reading. And yes, buying. For the time being.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Tsundoku – Pronounced sun-do-ku / Illness or Healthy?

The man who’d died, Raimond, was a bibliophile. The majority of his books were in German so I skipped the novels and history and went for art and photography, though I did surrender to some particularly beautiful books, whether for the covers or subject or gothic font. I don’t have much shelf space left at home so I tried to be disciplined and discerning. I even turned my back on his ample poetry collection.
I did give in to one small book, though. I felt like a voyeur leafing through something so personal, but in a flimsy floral notebook, Raimond had pasted poems he chose from newspapers and magazines. Some clippings were still bunched together at the back of the book. In pasting, he grouped a poet’s work together — there’d be two pages of Günter Eich, for example, before moving on to Sarah Kirsch, whom he obviously loved.
The notebook appealed to me because I have one in which I’ve done exactly the same thing. The difference is I pasted only one poem per page, accompanied by an image. I remember the hours spent carefully choosing and arranging, and enjoyed thinking of my kindred out there doing the same.
Sarah J. Sloat, The golden notebooks

Q~You mentioned that you are finishing up your MFA. What are the best/worst parts of this for you?
A~I completed my MFA in January 2019, and it was an amazing experience. I wrote so much over the past two years and finished with a full manuscript. Being in an MFA program forces you to write and to read – both fellow student’s work but also your instructors and everything that gets assigned. I felt fully immersed in poetry for two years. It’s very bittersweet to be over – I already miss the program, but I found my community there, and it has been a wonderful experience.
Q~Who are you reading now? According to your blog, you read A LOT of books. How does this inform your own writing?
A~I do read a lot; in 2018 I read 221 books which was a personal best for me! I read a little of everything – a ton of poetry, literary fiction, genre fiction (fantasy is great for audio books!), CNF, memoir, etc. (Friend me on Goodreads to follow what I read: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6611777.Courtney_LeBlanc) I get recommendations from friends and Twitter (shoutout to DC Public Library for running great book chats – https://twitter.com/dcpl). I just finished Seducing the Asparagus Queen by Amorak Huey, which is a gorgeous collection of poetry and a great way to kick off 2019. Next, I plan on reading some of Mary Oliver’s work since she just passed away, and I’m already missing her words. I recently read The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang and really enjoyed it (fiction). My favorite fantasy is Strange the Dreamer (book #1) and Muse of Nightmares (book #2) by Laini Taylor, which I recommend to everyone, haha.
When reading books of poetry I’m often inspired to write my own poems – either by something I read or just the general feeling I get from a book or a poem. I think the better read you are, the better writer you’ll be. As poet Jane Kenyon said, “Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.”
To My Ex Who Asked If Every Poem Was About Him / an interview with poet Courtney LeBlanc (Bekah Steimel’s blog)

In September, I was notified that my full-length manuscript, Fabulous Beast, was the runner-up for the X.J. Kennedy Prize and that it was selected for publication in the fall of 2019. The contract didn’t arrive until January, but it’s finally signed. (Yay!) And now we’re moving into book cover stuff and that’s making everything feel more real.

Most of the first section of this manuscript was published as a chapbook by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2015, as Fabulous Beast: The Sow. Having that little book out in the world has meant so much to me — Margaret Bashaar, the editor, creates beautiful books and supports her authors with a tireless energy. I’ve been so grateful to be a Hyacinth Girl author, and I’ve been introduced to (both in-person and electronically, over social media) a supportive community of fellow poets through the press.

But now it’s really exciting to think of the second section, a ten-chapter fairy tale written in Spenserian stanzas (hahaha, it sounds AWESOME, doesn’t it?) and the third section, poems employing the imagery of Norse and Greek myths, being out in the world, too. I worked so hard on this manuscript, and put so much time and energy (and yes, money) into submissions to various awards and calls for publication, it’s really gratifying to know the entire book will be a real-life object soon.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, The Full-Length Fabulous Beast is Going to Be A Thing in the World. Which is Pretty Cool.

Last autumn I pulled together a manuscript of poems written since my first collection was published. I know it takes a long time to find a home for a book of poetry. And since I can’t afford to submit it to publishing houses that charge reading fees or contest entry fees, the list of publishing houses I might approach is smaller. But I pulled up my optimism socks and sent it to my first choice, Grayson Books. This is the publishing house that included one of my poems in their beautiful Poetry of Presence anthology last year.
Their submission guidelines warn they only publish a few books each year, so I expected to send the manuscript along to another publisher after I got the inevitable rejection. I didn’t even open their emailed response right away in order to postpone the disappointment.
Instead I got an acceptance! (I’m pretty sure I heard trumpets.)
I am strange about my own good news, suddenly more shy, and have only told a few people since signing the book contract back in October. Each step of the process —- editing, choosing a title, approving art commissioned for the cover — has been a testament to the professionalism and patience of Grayson Books publisher Ginny Connors. I still cannot believe my good fortune.
Laura Grace Weldon, My New Book!

So apparently, one of the magical transformations of midlife is that a poet can become a novelist. I have moments of elation about that, and moments of alarm. My turn to novels is a way bigger change than anything that’s happened in my writing life since I won a prize for Heterotopia ten years ago. It’s NOT a turn away from poetry, which is still very much at the center of my daily life, but it will be a turn away from traditional scholarship, I think. My novel, Unbecoming, and my next poetry collection, whose title I’m still fiddling with, will be out in 2020 (there’s a small chance of late 2019 for the novel, but I’m not banking on it). AND I have a book of poetry-based nonfiction, a hybrid of criticism and memoir, scheduled for 2021 (more details on that soon!).
Creative writing across the genres, full speed ahead!–I’ve been drafting a lot of micro-essays and some micro-fiction this winter. Reviewing, too. But I can’t do everything. And I know where my heart lies.
Learning to write a novel has been hard and surprising and wonderful, but now I have to learn about publishing one. PLUS do my best job ever at getting the word out about my new poetry collection, simultaneously, while revising the essay collection. It’s a lot. I anticipate a big pivot next year from the introversion of writing/ revision/ submission work to the extroversion required for traveling, reading, guest-teaching, panel-surfing, and all the other stuff. Some of it at SF conventions! And all this will happen right at my empty nest moment–this is also the winter of helping my son get college applications out and waiting for the verdicts. I mean, really–what’s the appropriate cheerful-but-scared expletive for THAT?
Lesley Wheeler, Change of (literary) life

I finished three fantastic poetry collections this month. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a justifiably lauded collection of poetry and essays. The collection offers an unflinching look at the everyday realities of racism in America, with the second person narration drawing the reader directly into the experience. The blend of writing styles and art make for a powerful and necessary read.
My Body Is a Poem I Can’t Stop Writing by Kelly Lorraine Andrews is a beautiful little chapbook published by Pork Belly Press. These poems explore the physicality of existing in a body, with a blend of mortality and eroticism.
Ivy Johnson’s Born Again dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, it gives power to the female voice, rending open that which would be hidden behind closed doors. Check out my interview with Johnson on the New Books in Poetry podcast.
Andrea Blythe, Culture Consumption: January 2019

It’s not a social norm–real listening. Despite the recognition that human beings are social animals that require communication, despite the recognition that “talk therapy” (which at its foundation employs active listening) and writing therapy can heal broken psyches, even though many studies over decades have demonstrated how relationships rely upon partners’ openness to listening–listening stays a bit unconventional.
So many people think listening is passive. No, it is an active verb. Bombarded with information from numerous sources, the processes of discerning what one should listen to get tattered and confused. Our brains want to chunk information, to ignore, to elide, to suppress and glean and separate the various threads so the mind can prioritize.
Listening is difficult.
~
William Carlos Williams famously claims it’s difficult to get the news from poetry–and, in the same poem, he asks us (by way of Flossie, his wife) to listen:
…Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.
There is a hierarchy
which can be attained,
I think,
in its service.
…
the mind
that must be cured
short of death’s
intervention,
and the will becomes again
a garden. The poem
is complex and the place made
in our lives
for the poem.
[I am not html-savvy enough to code the spacing of this poem on my blog, but you can find it here (p. 20) or here; the excerpts are from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”]
Ann E. Michael, Hear me out

[…]
Birds whirl around your room, and then you die,
even though you’ve swept them from the roof beams
out the window. Birds have taught you to fly
through this world, stitched with invisible seams.
Even though you’ve swept me from your roof beams,
I come to ask you where you’ve gone and why
this world is stitched with invisible seams. […]
One of the last times I met with my therapist, a beautiful elderly woman who became like a mother to me, she was seeing clients in a home office. She had suffered a car accident, and she thought the accident was contributing to her memory loss.
That day in her office a bird flew into an adjoining room, so Joanne (a made up name to protect her privacy), got a broom and swept it through the open springtime window.
And around the same time period, we had a bird’s nest near our bedroom window, probably a wren, hence this poem.
Christine Swint, Nests in the Wall

I wrote a poem this morning that came to me yesterday as I walked across the campus of my parents’ retirement community. I reflected that it was the feast day of St. Brigid; I wondered if a retirement community was similar to a medieval abbey in significant ways.

The poem I wrote this morning was a bit different than the one I thought I would write, but it made me happy.

I also read a bit of poetry that made me happy. When I sent my book length manuscript to Copper Canyon, I got to choose 2 books, and I chose Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones by Lucia Perillo, mainly because I loved the title. It’s a new and selected collection, and wow–what powerful poems. I had no idea.

It’s been a good writing week. I could feel my well being filled by my traveling and by my reading. On the plane ride back, I finished Old in Art School by Nell Painter–what an intriguing book. It made me want to go home and paint. I did sketch on the plane, but I felt constrained by the space and the bumpiness, so I made it a quick sketch.
Kristin Berkey-Abbot, Back to Regular Life, Sweetened by Time Away

[…] Her mouth moves in prayer,

her tongue runs along the soft palate, the molars extracted after years
of the root canal: it is a soft mound like the grave at the edge of the village

she saw him dig. Her breasts produced the extra ounce of milk
at every childbirth to be squeezed into the mouth filled with soil.
Uma Gowrishankar, The Feed

In the structure of a poem, each word, as an I-beam or a column, needs to be carrying weight and be balanced with the others, or be deliberately off-balance. Multisyllabic words have to be used carefully because they can visually and sonically outweigh or overshadow other words, rocking the whole enterprise, and not in a good way. They also run the risk of sounding self-conscious. (Why use “utilize” when “use” will do, except that you think it sounds fancier?) (Or maybe you need three beats in that line, I suppose. That might be a justification…but a pretty shaky one.)
Similarly, grand and abstract words can weigh too much: love, for example, soul, universe. Even “moon” has to be handled with care. (I was advised once to not use the moon at all, as it’s been soooooo overdone. But, I mean, geez, I can’t NOT talk about the moon.)
It takes patience (and humility), I think, to not get caught up in my own extensive vocabulary options, to instead wait for, or mine for the often more simple utterance that says more than its parts.
And then to have the courage to surround it with silence, the vital partner of speech.
Marilyn McCabe, Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch; or, Finding the Right Words

I was reading my Christmas present, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963, when I came across a mention of syllabic verse. Plath’s poem “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” is written in stanzas of seven lines, each line containing seven syllables. In a letter to her brother Warren, dated June 11, 1958, she writes about the poem and the form she used:
“This is written in what’s known as ‘syllabic verse’, measuring lines not by heavy & light stresses, but by the numberof syllables, which here is 7: I find this form satisfactorily strict (a pattern varying the number of syllables in each line can be set up, as M. Moore does it) and yet it has a speaking illusion of freedom (which the measured stress doesn’t have) as stresses vary freely.” (247)
According to The Handbook of Poetic Terms (every writer should have one on her desk), “Writing in syllables is a terrific way to ‘even out’ a poem, and is useful also to writers who feel stymied when deciding where to break their lines.”
For a poet whose “mind was brilliantly off-kilter, its emphasis falling in surprising places,” to quote Dan Chiasson’s review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963, which appeared in the November 5, 2018 issue of the New Yorker, this “satisfactorily strict” form worked very well.
I just tried this with a recent poem. It started as a free-verse poem, then morphed into a prose poem, but is now a series of bouncy, mostly seven-syllable lines. I like the odd breaks this form imposes, and I think it gives the poem a kind of energetic forward motion it didn’t have before.
Give syllabic verse a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Erica Goss, Syllabic Verse

A few days with cold rain and a cold have given me time to catch up on my reading, specifically Virginia Woolf’s letters and now I’m dead in the middle of Sylvia Plath’s letters, Volume II. I thought this quote might have about today’s poetry publishing world, instead of 1959’s:
Here’s a quote regarding not getting the Yale Younger Prize in Summer, 1959:
“I am currently quite gloomy about this poetry book of about 46 poems, 37 of them published (and all written since college, which means leaving out lots of published juvenalia.) I just got word from the annual Yale Contest that I “missed by a whisper” and it so happened that a louse of a guy I know I know personally, who writes very glib light verse with no stomach to them, won, and he lives around the corner & is an editor at a good publishing house here, and I have that very annoying feeling which is tempting to write off as sour grapes that my book was deeper, if more grim, and all those other feelings of thwart. I don’t want to try a novel until I feel I am writing good salable short stories for the simple reason that the time, sweat and tears involved in a 300-page book which is rejection all round is too large to cope with while I have the book of Poems kicking about. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have pure motives (O-it’s-such-fun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used to solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism (bless my psychiatrist.) But I still want to see it ritualized in print.”
(She’s referring to George Starbuck, a neo-formalist who went on to run the Iowa Writers Workshop and may have had CIA connections…please read Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers to learn more about the CIA’s deep connections to the literary world and all we hold dear…Oh Sylvia, if you had only known how deep the cronyism and favoritism went back then for male writers…you might have been less bitter, but maybe not.)
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Winter Witch Arrives in Seattle, New Poem up at Gingerbread House Lit, Queen Anne and More Sylvia Plath, and Looking Towards Spring

In terms of poetry, things are going great. A poem I wrote for Malala is part of a multi-art performance in March. I was asked at a candlelight vigil for a murdered police officer. I was asked to read at a city council meeting, a county board of supervisors meeting, and for Martin Luther King day. Original, new poems for everyone. Also, I was part of a poets-on-posters project for downtown. I want to do a broadside project, and I seem to raised the funds for it.

I have been trying to cut down my time on Facebook and Twitter. It isn’t really good for my Buddhist practice; at least it feels that way. I am trying to cut down to just posting my poetry links (to my blog and event notices), but like an addict I get pulled back in. Working on it.

“Hi, I’m James, and I am a social media addict.”

My work with the homeless shelter has been affected by my health, but I am still on the board of directors and doing what I can. I can only be on my feet for so long at a time.

What else? I’ve been focusing on shorter poems with an emphasis on place, using Basho and Li Po as my prototypes. For years I did deeper image, somewhat ecstatic poems, and every so often one comes up, but I enjoy this a lot more. Very satisfying, these little things.
James Lee Jobe, journal update: 31 January 2019

In Miami, I had a brief residency at The Betsy. The Writer’s Room program is amazing (in return for a reading and a meet-the-artist reception, they give you a place to stay and a $50 / day tab at their restaurants). That said, one has to get past the strangeness of the entire staff knowing who you are and why you’re there. SWWIM was kind enough to host our reading, where I finally got to meet Vinegar and Char contributor Elisa Albo. (Have you signed up for SWWIM’s daily poem? You should!) I read four books in two days–Jessica Hopper’s Night Moves, David Menconi’s Ryan Adams: Losering, a Story of Whiskeytown, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick–lounging whenever I could by the Betsy’s rooftop pool. I checked into a cat cafe for an hour. And I walked down to the South Pointe Park, a walk that brought me comfort so many days back when I was living in Miami in February 2011, as part of a now-defunct artist residency. I’m working on my next nonfiction book, and this was the perfect setting. But that’s all I’ll say about that for now.
Sandra Beasley, January Tidings