Mary Biddinger – Via Negativa

May 13, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 19

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

This week, poets seemed especially cranky. Or maybe it’s just that I’m cranky, so I’ve been gravitating toward posts that reflect my mood. But I’m pleased to see the poetic blogosphere in such good health. I’ve been off Facebook for two weeks now, and surprisingly, I don’t really miss it all that much… thanks to Twitter and Instagram, LOL. I do like having places to post mind-farts, snapshots, and other ephemera; it makes for a less cluttered blog, among other things. But I was pleased to see that one of the co-founders of the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, Kelli Russell Agodon, has also left Facebook, at least for the time being (see below). Is this something we should think about doing collectively? Is there a better, less bad-boyfriend-like social media platform where we should gather instead? Or should we return to more tried-and-true ways of building community, contributing to the conversation, feeling recognized and being seen?

I spend a lot of time editing and mentoring and talking about making a sustainable writing life, but at the same time I find myself relying so much on “positive feedback” in order to propel myself forward. I think I have less, not more, confidence as I get older. Is that unusual? I suppose I’ll find out eventually.
Mary Biddinger, Take on May

Welp, in other good news, after all of my griping and whinging and whining, the universe has thrown me a bone. I’ve been accepted into the Bread Loaf Sicily program for September 2018, which means that while I may not be doing a sabbatical or a true residency next semester, I will be granted five precious days at the end of the summer to concentrate on my writing.

In Sicily.

Thank you, Universe.

Obviously, it’s been uplifting to receive good news. On the other hand, I am seriously veering into burnout.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Effusiveness and Mania and Other Qualities You’ve Come to Expect From This Blog

I’m so grateful and utterly blown away by this in depth and thoughtful review of my chapbook Footnote by Janeen Pergrin Rastall published by Connotation Press this week.

Rastall’s careful reading and insight captured so much of what I was after in this collection of poems. Her familiarity with the work of the writers and artists who inspired these poems was not only on point, but touching in so many ways. I couldn’t be more honored by the time she spent with my work and in writing this review!
Trish Hopkinson, “Book Review: Footnote, by Trish Hopkinson” – by Janeen Pergrin Rastall via Connotation Press

I am so stoked to have been invited to be Poet-in-Residence at the Seattle Review of Books for the month of May. What this means is that each Tuesday a new poem of mine will appear on the site with a small tag that states, “Susan Rich is this month’s Poet-in-Residence.” There’s something about being offered this platform by Paul Constant and Martin McClellan that makes me feel a bit more connected to my city. A bit more located.

This week, my poem “Profiled” is featured; a poem about a student I had a few years ago who was both more fascinating and more frustrating than most who had come before. It is exhausting to be challenged on each word, each sentence, each assignment. And yet. He was engaged with his educational experience and wanted to learn. For the very last reflective assignment, an assignment that students had the option of writing as a letter to me about their experience he wrote: “I no longer feel the need to be invisible. And I thank you for that.”
Susan Rich, Poet-in-Residence for the Month of May @ Seattle Review of Books

I was sitting on a sofa in the Taliesin Arts Centre on Swansea University Singleton campus and somebody came up and said, “Hello, Giles.” That sort of thing doesn’t happen to me often, certainly not on a university campus where I was last a student 24 years ago! Back in March I sat in on a Long Form Fiction 2 module workshop given by tutor Jon Gower, and it was the very same man who had recognised me and sat down to chat and, eventually, guided me into the auditorium to listen to the Dylan Thomas interviews. He mentioned that he’d seen my photo in connection with the Abergavenny Writing Festival. I think that is something I’ve always done — attending things. That is my best guiding advice … don’t just go to events you’re performing at, attend other events too … faces do get noticed and me travelling to Swansea to support the Dylan Thomas Prize and its shortlisted authors is as important as me being photographed as a performer on the last night of Abergavenny Writing Festival. I would share the Abergavenny Writing Festival photo with you here but, as with any photo, I cannot tell which one I’m in … you’ll just have to take my word for it, I was there ;)
Giles L. Turnbull, Shoot the Poet!

Let me start with the card. On the left is a photo attached to a homemade card from someone who I believe I first had contact with several years ago as a result of an April – Poetry Month Book give-a-way. This kind person sent me this card wishing me a happy Easter, it went back to her because we had moved and the post office did not forward it. She messaged me for my new address and resent it. There was a personal note in it, she shared a story about visiting the 9-11 memorial and enclosed a SF Giants window decal. Marianne is aware of my love of baseball and all things SF Giants. […]

Over the years the mail has changed. Drastically so. In fact, I rarely if ever get so much as a bill in the mail these days. I’m not complaining. Part of that is because I have almost no bills any longer, but also because account statements are usually available to me online. What I do get, is an ever-increasing amount of junk mail. This mail offers me everything from hearing aids to timeshare get-aways. There are siding offers, new windows, funeral plans, car deals, and God knows what I’ve pitched without delving too deeply into specifics. Rarely do I ever receive personal mail. Again, the arrival of a new book is about as good as it gets.
Michael Allyn Wells, Confession Tuesday – Mail Edition

This morning I received a fat paper letter from a writer and friend–it’s so marvelous to get a letter on paper! The internet has swept away such things, except for those who rebel against its winding tentacles, its sneaking power. Luckily, I know such persons.

And one of the things he asked me was why I capitalize the start of lines in poetry. […]

For me, a capital letter at the start of a line frames the line, separates the line, and forces the writer to think about the whole with its relationship to the part in a more focused way. To pluck an image from Modernism, it is like a tiny Joseph Cornell box; it needs a certain richness of sound and meaning, even when spare. Like meter and like rhyme, this framing of the line is yet another form of discipline that I set as a bulwark against the an era in which the short, self-focused lyric has dominated to the point of banishing poetic drama, long narrative, and a whole wide range of once-useful poetic modes. (Although I simply woke one day with it already in my head, Thaliad must also be part of my own rebellion against such a narrowing of poetry.)

In my own writing, I’m not attracted by the syntactical shiftings and disconnections that provide an uneasy order to so many lyrics, often suggested as the natural result of the disjunctions and chaos of “today’s world”; I’m concerned with a wholeness and clarity constructed from well-made parts. Whether or not I succeed, the framing of the line makes me more conscious of those parts, sets up a demand that each one work and be worthy. […]

Like every obsessed writer, I have made my many choices. Long ago, when such jobs were hard to obtain, I gave up a tenured job to write, to escape from a realm where poets were part of and supported by the many-tentacled system of academia. Since then, writers have made most of their income and their useful connections in academia, so it was a bad decision in a worldly sense–a bad decision in terms of worldly success and support from the system. But I persist in thinking it was the right sacrifice for a poet and writer. Outside those bounds, I have worked and groped and thought my way, making books as I felt it best. Whether I have made my choices rightly or wrongly is not for me to say. But it is essential for me as that odd creature called a writer to have made them. For a writer, for a poet, it is essential to know and follow and sometimes change those choices. That little, seemingly-wrong choice of the initial capital is, for me, one of many decisions that have made me the sort of writer I am.
Marly Youmans, A capital choice

When someone says of a movie “the special effects were great” I don’t bother to go. If that’s what the movie was then it’s not what I want to do with my time. When poetry does fancy things on the screen, or if I can “interact” with it, it better be worth my while in terms of what I get out of the experience. I can be impressed, sure. I can be diverted, yes. I’m easily distracted from tasks at hand by something shiny and moving. But give me yourself, not what your technology can do.

I struggle with this in making videopoems. My grasp of technology and visual arts is tenuous, my understanding of what sound can do rudimentary, and my distrust of the way emotions can be manipulated by sound is high, but I stick with it. Because this is the era of the audiovisual milieu, and I’m interested to explore how poetry can be engaged actively in it.

I watch a lot of videopoetry. Most of it does nothing for me, I’ll tell you the truth. Often the text puts me off. (But as I’ve discussed here, I am having a problem with much contemporary poetry, and I know the failing is often mine. But sometimes a poem that is a string of barely connected lines is just a bunch of barely connected lines.) Often the visuals are repetitive and flashy for no purpose that adds value to the equation: text+visuals+audio=videpoem.

The end product must be more than the sum of its parts. How to do this? Damned if I know.
Marilyn McCabe, Burning Bright; or, Innovation and Authenticity in Videopoetry

I start to sober up, the day is wasted. I spent my hours on magical beans that grew nothing, plus I’m out a sandal.

I’m annoyed with the world and its terrible news. And I realize my boyfriend has been making money off me– it seems he is paid for the time I spend with him because ultimately, he has stuff to sell me…and he has people who work for him that want my attention. And the more I show up, the more money he gets, which seems like a terrible deal. I lose hours of my one-time-on-this-planet and he gets a revenue stream?!

So Facebook, I am breaking up with you.

I am taking a break to reclaim my time and my mind. But with any truly dysfunctional relationship, I know I’ll be back, as I always seem to return. Facebook is like the boyfriend I don’t need but who always has the best snacks when I’m hungry for nothing.

But I’ve gotten better at staying away from you even longer because I realize, the secret to Facebook is 1) The less you’re on Facebook, the less you want Facebook. Like Fight Club except instead of hitting yourself in your own face, you’re actually writing blog posts or poems. You’re actually sitting in a lounge chair in your own backyard reading American Poetry Review and Poets and Writers.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Breaking Up with My Boyfriend, Facebook…

I find that most often the biggest frustrations I find in writing are when my visions for a project / poem / etc don’t match up to my ability to execute. More often than not, my ability to execute is limited by TIME (lack of time, lack of time). Everyone gets the same 24 hours but not everyone has so many people pulling to have some of that time. And my love language is quality time so I give my time to what and who I love–I’m not going to go to something I don’t care about or spend time with you if you mean nothing to me. I realized recently at a church ladies women’s retreat that Quality Time being my love language trickles down into a lot of decisions I make–my biggest fear in parenting? that my children won’t get enough time with me (and won’t feel loved–but that is how I feel loved, not necessarily how they feel loved!). one of my main reasons for homeschooling? so we can spend our time on what we love to learn about (not what the government bids us learn about). my favorite ritual of the day? coffee + chat time with my husband in the mornings. Time weighs heavy on me. As it should–it’s fleeting (favorite book of the bible: Ecclesiastes. A time for, a time for, a time for….). and also this: Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom (Ps. 90:12). Like any quality a person has, my appreciation/ apprehension of time can be a strength (wisdom) but it can also be a weakness (fear). I pray that God mold me to turn this to wisdom and set my eyes on things above rather than cling to my minutes and hours with a cold-hearted fear.
Renee Emerson, ambitions, love languages, and the fleeting quality of time

We do not tread nimbly upon the back of time,
we trample its soft belly.
Risa Denenberg, Forebear

Q~What would you like to share about the backstory to this poem?

A~This poem came from seeing Twitter’s collective reaction to Roy Moore’s defeat and the fact that black women showed up against him the most. We stay doing that. We stay showing up when it’s time to protect the best interests of others. No one does that for us, and I’m fuckin tired. This poem is about the black woman’s mammification and black fatigue and a little bit about politics and a little bit about Emmett Till; how no one but his mama showed up for him. Black bodies are expendable until they’re useful, and, again, I’m tired.

Q~What do you hope to accomplish with this piece?

A~I want to make people who subscribe to mammification and respectability politics feel really bad about it. I also want them to know they can fuck all the way off.

Q~Did the poem come easily to you or was it hard to write?

A~Emotionally, it was very hard to write. But, it came easy. I was, I AM, so angry.

Q~What’s your writing process usually like?

A~I smoke weed and then write whatever comes to mind. Obviously, I don’t only write when I’m high, but lately I’ve been doing that to see what I produce. I’m generally delighted with the results.
Bekah Steimel, Every Election Cycle, The Wind From Birmingham To Chicago Smells Like Ashes / and interview with Khalypso The Poet

Strange to feel inferior, but that
was the job of live-in European servants:
to confer shine for a pittance. English nurses,
Scottish maids, Estonian women doing laundry,
German POWs pruning roses.

Out through glitter, back to the dock.

Mrs. Anthony motored around town
in a humble Ford wagon, but in her garage,
a Daimler banked its gleam. I had to study
eight degrees of grandeur for the table,
a bewilderment of china. Her daughter
Kitty curtsied to me once, a faux-pas.
Those manners were too silver for the help.
Lesley Wheeler, My mother as live-in nurse, 1962

There’s a subtle hierarchy being reinforced here. [Etty] Hillesum’s talent is positioned as naive witness, “conscientious” in her craft (a backhanded compliment if there ever was one). She is a vessel. Homer, Merrill–they are agents. The irony is that this essay earnestly and sincerely wishes to wrangle with the issue of who is ignored, and why, and the legacy of poets as “legislators” of our collective spirit. The author wants to interrogate our impulses toward memory and history-making. He should begin with questioning why this essay cites who it does, and in what proportion.

My point is not to drag any one author, especially a poet whose work I admire, and one who is making time for the under-compensated track of literary scholarship. My point is that these approaches to writing about craft are endemic and entrenched. This is not a matter of the teachers who are “woke” or not “woke.” This is a process of not only wakening, but questioning the conditions of your previous slumber. That’s why I’m wary of anyone determined to enshrine a syllabus that features a particular contemporary author (“a genius!”); you’re telling me, on some level, that your mind is already made up on who the next generation of the canon should feature. That’s still changing. That’s in our hands.
Sandra Beasley, On Craft & Canon

Now that Napowrimo is over, I’m settling back into my routine of morning online reading. This is my time to look for wonder-full flash and poetry and get lost in other places and other lives.
Charlotte Hamrick, Women of Flash

I’m in the UK for the summer, so these digests will be going out about five hours earlier than before. But don’t worry, if you’re in my feed reader, I’ll still be considering later Sunday posts for the following week’s edition.

March 25, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 12

This week’s digest begins with several posts about the challenges of writing and publishing poetry collections, then spirals out into descriptions of other sorts of writing projects and the importance of connecting with others and with the earth.

I’ve probably mentioned I’ve been reading Sylvia Plath’s newest collection of letters for a while now. I’m finally getting to the end of Volume I, which ends when Sylvia’s about 24 (on page 1300). By 24, Sylvia had already been a Fullbright scholar, had poems accepted by Poetry, The Atlantic, The Nation, had an internship at Mademoiselle and sold several short stories. Looking at her, I look at myself at 44 and think: how do I measure up? I mean, she didn’t publish many books while she was alive, and I have five, but I’ve had fourteen extra years on her already! I didn’t publish my first book until after age 30! I still haven’t had acceptances at any of those magazines (and Mademoiselle is defunct.)

Now Sylvia Plath, along with a few other poets, remains one of the best poets of the past hundred years. You can watch her poetry get better in her letters over the years, from 15 to 21 to 24. Dating Ted Hughes, whatever kind of decision that was for her life-wise, was great for her poetry – she suddenly starts putting a lot of nature in her poems when she starts dating him, specific names of plants and animals, adopts the fierceness of the natural world as her own.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Measuring Up and Marching Towards Spring

I don’t envy any one poet’s path. The overnight sensation, winning an NEA fellowship before turning 30 and winning a major first book poetry competition . . . . well, some of them are lucky to be alive in the first place, and some of them are riddled with imposter complex. The long-hustling poet, gradually climbing the literary magazine food chain, from the Doglick Undergraduate Literary Review, to the Greater Rockford Quarterly, to the generic MFA Literary Magazine at State U., to the very established and tony Poetry Journal of the Stars, and then finally big time, landing something in Poetry or the American Poetry Review. The hot-shot university poet, finally getting tenure, and then somehow, going out of fashion, out of favor, getting fat, becoming fossilized. The blazing street poet, putting up that hot YouTube channel, getting thousands of subscribers, and currying all that heat into some legitimacy.

What I see is great investment of time by these artists, dealing with the improbability of getting anything published, and treading that highwire of caring and not-caring. It requires arrogance, foolishness, determination, patience, idealism, and dreaminess. All that pressure, just to stay up there, suspended, where the audience is either dazzled by your light-footedness or is hoping, just a little, to see you slip. The worst of it, of course, is our own self-questioning.

So when I consider the roads of those poets who face additional cultural and societal burdens–be it race, gender-identification, class, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity–I realize those roads have more hazards, fewer signs, fewer rest stops. That’s just a fact, one that doesn’t lessen the individual hardships I might’ve faced, but one that requires me to be alert to how my road was more level, more predictable, more well traveled. To state the obvious, my road is built on privilege, protected by privilege, and contingent on privilege.
Jim Brock, Unlikely Roads

I’m frequently victim to The What Next. The Is This Going To Be A Book. The Should I Write More Poems Like This Or Just Stop. I think awareness, and giving it a name, is a crucial first step in confronting such feelings. Then I ask myself if this particular anxiety (I have many) is one that is doing me any good, such as the nagging feeling that I really ought to clean out the cupboards and merge all the almost-empty boxes of uncooked pasta.

Sometimes this energy can encourage me to revisit a project, or to think about it with more seriousness, but usually it causes me to spin my wheels and fret and do another load of laundry just to feel as if I’ve accomplished something.

A book is like a hardy yet reclusive fruit that needs to grow in a certain degree of dark. If you keep walking into its room and flipping the fluorescent overhead lights on just to check to make sure it’s still there, you’ll make it wilt. Or so I will tell myself as I attempt to write some new poems this coming week.
Mary Biddinger, The What Next

Outliers are often difficult to place, particularly when the imagery of the poems tends toward the natural environment, and the subject of the poems tends toward the speculative, and yet nothing about the poems is particularly edgy or youthful or ground-breaking.

This book represents me, the person (not just as poet) perhaps too well. I do understand why it’s been difficult to place.

As to how [The Red Queen Hypothesis] acts as obstacle in my writing life? Um. I guess I have to say I am finding it hard to move to the NEXT manuscript when THIS one still hangs out in my psyche and on my hard drive, unpublished. I know that should not impede me; I have many colleagues who work on multiple books simultaneously, sometimes even books in different genres. How they do that remains a mystery to me, however; I guess I do not share that operating system–though I dearly wish I could learn it.
Ann E. Michael, “Next Big Thing”

Though I think I could pull the manuscript together to make a book at this point, I prefer to let it simmer. as I mentioned in my post on chapbooks, I’m not in a great place to launch a book right now, both geographically and seasonally–my life is all diapers and babies and picture books and parks, not so much readings and academia. my poetry spirit-animal right now is Wendell Berry. do you know that he spends most of his time on his farm? and that is deemed fitting? I think that route makes the most sense for me, though I know 99.999% of poetry is born out of the dusty halls of academia. not that i’m out on a farm–domesticity and suburbia is a trifle less sexy and i’m too religious to be cute and not in a religion that is fashionable (though presbyterian might sound a little less southern hillbilly than southern baptist).

all that to say, i think, when the book is done, i’ll likely have about five readers, so i might as well take my time with it and include it all. my husband reminds [me] a poet is still considered a young poet til her 40’s, so i’ve got time to wheedle away, lines to tinker with.
Renee Emerson, new poems in Dappled Things and an update on the 3rd poetry collection

Friends and family have been extremely generous about supporting my poetry — buying each book as it has come out, sometimes buying an extra copy to give away, sometimes even reading them! Sometimes even reaching out to tell me about a poem that affected them in some way. But a few have said things like “I’m sorry, I don’t really understand the poems” or “I don’t like poetry” or “I don’t read poetry at all.” With them in mind, for my last book, Glass Factory, I created a short reader’s guide, thinking that I could provide some hand-holding to those who might enter the book with trepidation, or those who might not enter at all without some guidance.

It turned out to be quite a fun process for me (although I confess, I don’t know if anyone really used the guide — perhaps it was more fun for me than anyone else….)
Marilyn McCabe, Let Me Take You By the Hand; or, On Developing a Reader’s Guide

My friend Ronda came over at 1 pm on Friday and we wrote until 11 pm at night. Since it was so late, she spent the night and we woke up, had coffee, and wrote 3 poems in the morning.

There’s a magic to these “mini-retreats” where I sit with a friend and write all day.

Maybe it’s the energy of focus, of two people each writing poems.

Or maybe it’s just intent–we intend to write poems, and we do.

Sometimes we do prompts, or sometimes we just find a line in a book of poems and use that as our jumping out spot. There are so many ways to begin a poem.

What you need to do your own writing retreat at home?

–a laptop or journal

–books of poems (for inspiration)

–snacks

–time and a semi-quiet house

Optional:
–A friend can be helpful, especially if you find yourself not making the best use of your time.

I have found the times I’ve done these retreats (or even writing dates) with other poets, I end up with a lot stronger work than if I just hang out by my own. I think sometimes the interaction, the listening to poems, the talking with another poet can get my mind working in unusual ways. It’s the back and forth that is helpful to me.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Confession Sunday.. Mini Writing Retreat

Currently I’m writing a lot of . . . just verse, and it’s a stretch to call it that, I suppose. I’m participating in the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project through a collaboration with M.S. — we alternate weeks with the sketchbook and add to its pages (me, sketches through text; her, sketches through drawing). In late April we’ll mail it back and the B.A.L. will catalog it and create a digital copy. It’s something that’s different enough from my normal mode of creating — and sharing — poems that my interest is piqued and pressure is low — it’s fun, invigorating, and keeps me from obsessing too much over what’ll happen to the work in the long run because, ultimately, I already know: It’ll be archived. Some people will see it. And M.S. and I will have created something together, accomplished something, and that’s keeping me afloat while all the other stuff tries to sink me.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, The Pressure of Silence, Poems Like People, and the Pleasures of Digging Snow

Fifteen years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq, and I started this blog. I just re-read what I wrote on March 20, 2003 (link here, scroll down to the last entry on the page), under my then-new moniker of “Cassandra,” after the Trojan princess and prophetess who was cursed to be always right, but disbelieved. Those words from 2003 still sound like me, and I still think what I wrote then is true: that we’re witnessing the death-throes of patriarchy and, especially, white male domination of the world and its systems, and that ultimately we’ll see a world with greater justice and equality for all of its people — though the fate of the natural world is not at all secure. In 2003 I tried to take a long view., and still do. But even I would not have prophesied that things would go from bad to so very much worse in the space of this decade and a half, with so much suffering for so many. […]

[M]y life changed because of this blog. In addition to the extremely valuable practice of near-daily writing, it has given me some of the best friends of my life, and relationships and conversations that continue to this day. In recent years it’s given me a forum for sharing not just my thoughts in words and photographs, but my art, and all three of those personal pursuits have improved hugely as a result. In turn, I’ve been privileged to read your words and see your bodies of work develop and change. Out of those relationships have come several collaborative efforts, including a literary magazine, qarrtsiluni, and my own publishing venture, Phoenicia. And this blog also functions for me like the diaries I kept before: as a personal record of my life and thoughts that would now fill a small shelf of books. So I can’t even find words for how significant blogging has been for me, but I’m extremely grateful.
Beth Adams, Fifteen Years

Q~What appeals to you about erasure/visual poetry?

A~This is my first foray into erasure poetry. At the time I erased this piece, my mother-in-law was staying with us for end-of-life care, and I found that though I had vast swaths of free time while she slept, the need to be on-call at all times meant I couldn’t get into the writing space in my head. So, I decided to try erasure instead, and that worked really well for me, possibly because the act of erasing mimicked the experience I was having as I watched my mother-in-law dying, disappearing slowly.

Q~So sorry for your loss. Your new book, Whiteout, is also about loss. I am fascinated to hear more about the book and your experience as writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve. How did that come about?

A~My most recent book is about my uncle who was a mountain climber. He died on Denali in what was, at the time, the worst mountain-climbing accident in US history. I applied to be a writer-in-resident in the park in order to finish that book. I stayed in a one-room cabin out by the Toklat River, with only my sister. We were in the park (Denali National Park and Preserve) for 10 days. Being there gave me an understanding of why my uncle was compelled to do such a dangerous thing as climb Denali. Wandering around the vast park, feeling completely alone in the wild, going places we knew he had been, was profoundly moving. We were there 49 years and one week after he was lost—watching the sun wheel around the sky instead of set in the evening, I knew he had seen that, too. For the park I wrote a series of poems as an artistic donation. They say better than I am doing now what my experience was. Here is one:

The Wandered

My sister’s drawn to clean-edged kettle ponds,
learning how to tell which pools were formed in basins
left behind by glaciers, and which weren’t.

I’m captivated by erratics, empty-house-sized
boulders stranded in a strange land by ice
that melted out from underneath them.

Erratic comes from the Latin errare,
meaning to wander, to stray, to err. We are
not wrong, my sister and I, to feel kindred—

kin and dread—with what remains after
a mammoth force, no longer visible,
has carved out such a tattered landscape.
Bekah Steimel, At the Landing / an interview with poet Jessica Goodfellow

It’s almost the end of March, and I haven’t begun even thinking about the garden. I have enough leftovers in the fridge so there was no need to cook. Laundry, done. The sun was out for a couple of hours, but by the time I took a shower, the sky had clouded over. I never made it out of the house. Listless. Uncommitted. Tired. A wee bit hopeless. Perhaps it was just one of those days.

Of course, there was this: I knelt in awe of students who were out in the streets speaking truth to power, demanding an end to gun violence in their schools and communities. And I was heartbroken by it too. Wanting to be hopeful, yet wondering whether demonstrating against war in the sixties really made any difference in the long haul towards a more peaceful world.

Then, Sunday blooms with possibility. There will be breakfast, coffee with a friend, a walk, some writing. Finding the effort, the will, the inner resources that allow me to find meaning, to move forward, to survive. To be grateful.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with Leftover Saturday Ennui

Yes, oh yes, it is enough to say
what you can, the gift of transcribing
ordinary suffering into
extraordinary joy, your name
hangs in the brilliant morning air, a
feather, eyelid of a magpie, closed.
Lana Ayers, In Praise of Philip Levine

February 11, 2018 by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 6

A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour. If you missed last week’s digest, here’s the archive.

This week, poets were blogging about the imagination, their vocation, the tone and shapes of poems, poetry performance, inner demons, death, resilience, taking inspiration from other artists, activists and scientists — that sort of thing.

Sunlight streams in through the windows,
but we aren’t ready for it yet. We pinch
close the curtains to shut out the day.
Light streams out the tv as if to feed us,
as if to break us. We let ourselves be broken.
We snap like a weighted bough from a tree.
Crystal Ignatowski, After the Opening Ceremony

This is a chapbook by Mary Ruefle. Its central idea: “I believe there is no difference between thinking and imagining, and that they are one.” It is an encouraging and even inspiring little book. Its style is direct and accessible and a little quirky. There are pictures facing every page of text. And, of course, there is a goat on the cover – and inside. Emily Dickinson’s goat, to be exact. An encouraging book with a goat on the cover is a thing to be recommended, I believe.
Dylan Tweney, Let’s talk about Imagination

If I meet someone at a dinner party and they ask me what I do, I say, “I’m a poet.”

Invariably: “Really, can you live off that?”

I have never been discourteous enough to ask them if they had actually meant to ask me about my finances when they asked me what I “do”. Because what I do to earn enough money to pay my bills is not the same thing as what I do to find meaning in my life. What are we really talking about at these dinner parties?
Ren Powell, Monetize Me

One student commented, after reading these poems about flowers, that she thought the poets had really noticed the flowers and taken their time looking. I thought this was an insightful observation by a young writer, and was something of a lightbulb moment for her, to have been given permission to stop and stare, and not rush about.
Josephine Corcoran, Writing poems about flowers #writerinschool

The balance of idea and tone is crucial; one must match the other, and one cannot move forward without the other, it seems.

It occurs to me that one of the editing approaches I can take with tone is to radically pare down the words, to move away and away from prose, to introduce white space and silence. Sometimes this can unsettle the plummy tone and begin to allow the poem to get its feet under it.

In contrast, with the poem that goes nowhere, one approach I can take is to keep writing, to write toward something, often starting with the prompt “what I’m really trying to say is:” and asking my mind to move around the image or memory that presented itself, and why it arrived, and why now. Then once I’ve got a lot of prosaic words that may be heading me toward the central idea the poem is wanting to consider, I can begin paring back toward something interesting.
Marilyn McCabe, Take It Away; or, Some Thoughts on Editing Poems

One of the reasons I like to try on different forms is to prevent getting stuck in a rut. I’ve seen poets who haven’t evolved their style over decades. Richard Hugo is the most obvious example, and except for 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, he wrote the same style of poetry his whole lifetime. I don’t want to get bored with my own poems, and I also want to explore new ways of doing things.
Grant Clauser, Form Decisions: How Poems Take Shape

The day was so busy that I did not have time to fret about whether I’d miss a word, inadvertently “revise” something on the fly, or flub the cadence of a line. And somehow, when I was up at the podium, it all worked out. Since the poems were new I read them extra slowly, and they were kind to me.

Reading the brand new poems when they were still brand new enabled me to return to the feelings I had when writing them. It was kind of like one of those capsules that expands into a dinosaur sponge when you toss it into the bathtub, only instead of a dinosaur it was a poem. In the wake of this sentiment, I vowed to return to the poems and get them ready to send out. Sometimes you find a “push” in the place where you’d least expect it.
Mary Biddinger, New poem who dis?

[G]ood performance, like good writing, is about continual failure. It’s always a wreck. Always. Performance, a momentary and immediate sharing with your audience, is both a glorious, generous act and an imperfect, ephemeral disappearance. Ideally, too, no performance of any one poem should be the same in new iterations (where it becomes practiced and rote). It’s about a letting go, especially at the moment of where the word is spoken, where the ego begins to evaporate and it’s just the words themselves, hopefully with a little good lighting, a smart costume, and a really, really good house.
Jim Brock, Poetry, More Theatre

I’ve written about outsider artists such as Myra Albert Wiggins and Hannah Maynard — women photographers of the late 19th century that were decades ahead of their time. More recently, I’ve focused my poems on the work of the three Surreal Friends — Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, and Remedios Varo. Women artists who emigrated from Europe during World War II and lived in Mexico City gaining acclaim for their work in a kind of sideways fashion.

For years my poems have focused on these women — and women in my own life. I know that being part of a community of women poets and artists has deeply influenced my work in subtle and less subtle ways.

This past winter while at a writing residency, needing to write out of my own traumatic past, I turned to the new anthology Nasty Women: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse to give me the extra push I needed. If these women could write eloquently and with anger concerning abortion, rape, heartbreak, and healing — who was I not to write my own truth?
Susan Rich, “Feminist Poetry is having a Renaissance” This Week’s Headline! – Poems, Events, and a Confession

What draws you to writing horror? In what ways has the horror genre enlivened your work and your life?

To me, the horror genre is all about survival and strength, which is why I feel drawn to it. I enjoy writing in a genre that doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that monsters (both real and imagined) exist, and I like to take the opportunity to teach my readers (sometimes through personal example) how to face down their demons and win. Aesthetically, I’ve always enjoyed art forms that focus on darkness and the healing properties that are associated with it, so my eye for the strange and unusual has been leaning towards romanticism and surrealism for as long as I can remember. I’m a big fan of the beautiful grotesque and I try to use that as a staple in my work as much as possible.
Andrea Blythe, Poet Spotlight: Stephanie M. Wytovich on staring down your demons

So positive things we can do to increase our resilience in the face of bad news: nature, humor, a supportive community of some sort, a willingness to look for the positive or the learning experience in a situation. I think also a certain love of risk-taking – that’s something Jenny Diski kind of encapsulates over and over in her writing and her life. (PS Her book of short fairy-tale-esque stories, The Vanishing Princess, are like what I would write if I wrote short stories, except with way more bodily functions and sex.) Am I much of a risk-taker? I think maybe I felt more adventurous when I was younger and more confident. But one good thing about getting older is letting yourself do things you might not have thought about when you were younger. I am thinking that to survive a scary diagnosis like cancer or MS – or the poetry world – you need to not be afraid to confront the difficult truths, but not let them overwhelm you. To try things even though you may (or probably will) fail, maybe repeatedly. This may boil down to: how to keep hope alive in a dark world.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, The Importance of Resilience (in the Poetry Game and in Life)

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

A~I write a lot of about death, or more so, the incredible luck it is that you are even alive to begin with, how everything had to go perfectly right since the very beginning of time. Sort of like Mary Oliver’s “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I use writing as a means of connection. I throw something out in the world and see if it resonates with anyone else. I’m basically saying, “Hey I feel this. Do you feel it, too?” Whenever that happens I feel like this human web gets a little bit tighter, a little bit stronger. Against all obvious signs I still believe in the goodness of people.
Shannon Steimel, Cloud / An interview with poet Ally Malinenko

A woman writes at a desk in a study. Furiously
awake at five a new theorem buzzing, she constructs it
with her pen – Three-Dimensional Structures
in X-Ray Crystallography Her hair is electromagnetic:
why brush it, it is white thought. Behind her a model:
molecules, a tree of them, primaries, red, yellow.

Today is blue. She allows it to happen. This is not
a woman writing her memoir. She is writing off the edge
of the planet. What mirror? What toothpaste?
Pam Thompson, Not a Suffragette Poem Exactly