Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 9

poet bloggers revival tour 2018

poet bloggers revival tour 2018 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.

An especially rich variety of offerings this week, especially on the themes of solitude vs. multitude and the making of books.

Sometimes the cloak is praise.

Sometimes the cloak is humor.

Sometimes the cloak is grief.

Sometimes the person doesn’t even realize he (not always a he) is cloaking intent.

Sometimes (s)he/them doesn’t realize what the intent will turn out to be. Sometimes a person is genuine, and yet a charmer, and an abuser, and yet a survivor of abuse, and a valuable poet, and yet a suppressor of poets, all in one. We contain multitudes.
Sandra Beasley, Multitudes

*

as universal as love and math
as personal
as the scars of our secrets
we conjure the angels of amnesia
with a cocktail of spells
Bekah Steimel, Addictions

*

I want to tell her the history of my family-gods. They are rainforest-hot,
cropland-warm, dark with every-colored skin. They have mouths
that sound like all kinds of countries. I want to tell her these gods
live wild and holy in me, in white and blue cities where my skin
is remembered or forgotten, in cities where I am always one thing, or
from anywhere.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley, When Trying to Return Home

*

I confess in general, my real life has been busier than ever, not quieter. I have spent a lot of time with friends–seeing Fran Leibowitz, teaching at Western Washington University, dinners, lunches, teaching a class in Seattle, and other moments that have dotted my calendar.

Yesterday I floated for an hour in a sensory deprivation pod. It was a surreal experience where you feel as if you might be in space, as if you are weightless.

I was hoping for some huge breakthroughs in my writing or my life, what I received was 55 minutes of absolute quiet and relaxation with minor breakthroughs about life.

While I did manage to get salt in my eye and forget to put my eyeplugs in & turn off the light and have to immediately exit the tank to reset myself up, I found that I need just time to meditate, to nap, to sit, to quiet, to float.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Confession Saturday: How To Float

*

I knew from the opening poem, “Rootless,” what [Jenny] Xie’s intentions with this book were with lines like “I sponge off the eyes, no worse for wear” alongside clear descriptions of place, “Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice farms / and no two brick houses in a row.” This was going to be a collection that employed the camera eye, an eye that seems to separate from the self in order to explore the world outside of the self, and yet what I didn’t immediately grasp was how deep into the psyche these poems would also look. As, ultimately, Eye Level is concerned with not only with what is visible, but the endless distances between people and bottomless pit within ourselves.
Anita Olivia Koester, A Solitary Gaze: Eye Level by Jenny Xie

*

Yes, I want to be a part of the community–here, the blog revival tour is an example of that. Yes, I want my credentials and awards to be certified and recognized. Yes, I want to be a part of something larger than myself. And yet, the cost of this affiliation? I think the best artists are those who do genuinely and selflessly engage with their communities, but are in continual struggle against that community, sometimes dropping out entirely, occasionally dropping in. For me, it’s about celebrating what is truly errant, digressive, resilient, unhappy, and disruptive, that part of us which is a lousy team-player, an unproductive company-man.

Everyone on the team is rushing together to put out that fire, to be a part of the decoration committee for the prom, to raise that barn–and yet, usually, there is someone who wanders off, who walks away from the commotion, a person who had always been there with us, and who has now disappeared. The committee’s work goes on. The drop out, well, she’s found another road, a pretty distraction, a quiet and uncomplicated space, where she can find something else about her gifted life.
Jim Brock, A Few Odds and Ends, & Self-Protection

*

Revolution is never convenient.
Sometimes it arrives too fast
or agonizingly slow.
It’s being televised, incentivized,
trivialized, transmogrified –
from the news cycle spin
to hashtag hagiography.
Truth is elusive in the thrum,
the drumbeat of division
on a loop, on a loop, on a loop.
Collin Kelley, Lift Every Voice

*

It’s sad (but perhaps natural?) how much communication can suffer even, or especially, when we’re in the same room with another person. Letter writing is an art that is so necessary — and so rare. Just reflecting on this makes me feel like I should devote more time to it. But with whom? Who would take the time to answer? Blogs are a form of letter writing to the world, to the universe, to the ether, I suppose, but I still like the particular audience, the fully imagined and/or perhaps fully realized Other, the best. Waiting for The Other’s answer makes one feel on edge, more alive — and receiving that answer is always satiating, thrilling, and the opportunity to craft a response worthy of The Other’s attention. A challenge. (The good kind.)
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Sunshine and Blue Sky, Tsvetaeva on the Concurrence of Souls, and the Art of Letter Writing

*

After he leaves for the airport
the dust from his shoes settles on the floor

The smell of soap lingers in the room
as I fold the warmth of his body in the blanket

It goes back to the practice from my childhood
when I wandered in the overgrown backyards of people

to collect the thumbai flowers, pinches of moon in my palm
Uma Gowrishankar, The Full Moon: A Love Poem

*

This book is careful. Odd. It’s somehow inspiring me. I keep catching ideas of my own out of the corner of my eye as I read his poems. Much of the book feels like that random, disconnected, scattershot approach that I hate in contemporary poetry — but then there are these moments that ring some gong in me. Something mysterious trembles in the disconnections. Damn. What’s going on here? These are philosophical poems, poems of consideration, of why and wherefore, mixed with birds and colors and foxes and sky, blackbirds and twigs, poems of what on earth are we doing here. That’s my question too. It all gives me paws…
Marilyn McCabe, What the what; or, Reading Siken’s War of the Foxes

*

The feeling of not believing I wrote these poems uncovers layers of emotions that are erupting now that I am watching the work transition from manuscript to actual book: a lack of faith in myself; tremendous gratitude to every poet on earth, to whom I owe my love of poetry; astonishment that the poems are good; questioning “are they good?”; the anxiety of knowing the next phase (promoting the book) is likely to lead to some mixture of joy and disappointment; and wonderment at the poetic collective witchery that was tapped into in the writing.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse with “slight faith” On My Mind

*

Through the years, I’ve heard people use this phrase: “The Buddha in me greets the Buddha in you”— by which they mean the idea that every living being already holds the seed for transformation within themselves; in other words, that in every creature, there exists the possibility of transcendence, of going beyond our flawed, imperfect nature.

That spring, quite rapidly (in just under three months) I wrote poem after poem using a variety of “Buddha” personae. Once I started, it felt like I couldn’t stop until I’d exhausted the subject. In each poem I proposed different scenarios: what if the Buddha felt the need for a therapist? what if the Buddha had a child with an Internet addiction? what if the Buddha was a mother in mid-life who had a “wardrobe malfunction” at a public beach? what if the Buddha joined a campus “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” for Women’s History Month?
Luisa A. Igloria, New book release from Phoenicia Publishing: The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis

*

This week at Phoenicia Publishing we’ve announced the pre-orders for this new book of poems by Luisa A. Igloria. […] As part of the design process, I’ve been working hard on the cover art, using hand-painted paper, cut and glued onto a painted background as collage. […]

Making art is sometimes a lonely process, filled with doubts, but at other times, there’s inspiration and collaboration. This design was my favorite of four I presented to Luisa, but at first she chose a different one. We took some time, and the next day she wrote to talk about this one with the brambles. Luisa told me what she liked here (the brambles and the ladyslipper) and said she’d like to see a bird rather than an eye. I also knew from her previous responses that she liked bright colors. Putting all of that together, and looking at some photographs of lady-slippers in their natural habitat filled with ferns and grasses in a woodland clearing, I was able to make the adjustments and changes that led to the final cover, which took several days of painting and cutting and gluing to complete because this is a new technique for me.
Beth Adams, A book and its cover

*

Then the scribes tugged our pictograms from walls
and with those tongues pushing out a bottom lip,
they penned them slowly, rush-lit night and day,
across the calfskin, line upon line. Golden ciphers,
language wrapped in arabesques, concealed in
foliate compartments, locked into floral curlicues
and stalked by fantastical beasts across the vellum.
Dick Jones, INCUNABULA

*

Basically, I’d never written directly and honestly about someone I knew…it’s the kind of thing I avoided because there was always the terrifying possibility that the someone would read it and deny that it was true. It’s a real blocker, the fear of embarrassment, for me at least. But it’s what I think I started to learn about the rag-and-bone-shop of the heart. The shops I knew. But the heart was dangerous territory. There’s a huge release in writing a line like that, feeling it directly..if you’ve not done it before. A leap. But it puts the flames in their proper place, and at this point, the poem expands outwards into everywhere. Julie died a couple of months later and never got to read what I’d written. I know I’m glad I wrote it.
John Foggin, Where all the ladders start [1]

*

How is it there is never space for death and time to grieve, that people often end up dead too quickly to say goodbye (my aunt had just been discharged from the hospital – apparently too soon – and I was waiting to call until she felt a little bit better.) I was planning my own funeral around this time last year, I remember taking pictures of the cherry blossoms wondering if I would live to see another round, the death sentence had been passed (perhaps a little early) on me by all-knowing and very experienced doctors, and I was picking out music and where I wanted my ashes scattered, who I wanted to have my books and art (the only things I have worth anything, really.) But then I didn’t die, I’m still alive, still dealing with the messy realities of many many specialist and therapy appointments for my various medical things related to 1. liver full of tumors and 2. brain full of lesions among other lesser issues like asthma. And living is complicated and full of irritations – side effects of drugs, obstacles to our goals, not enough time paid having fun, too much time in lines or working on grant applications or taxes. Life’s little annoyances take up our brainspace, we forget to say “I love you” or prioritize spending time with loved ones doing the things that make life worth living, thinking life goes on forever.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Grieving, Jenny Diski’s In Gratitude, Losing a Loved One, Winter Returns

*

This year I’m flying over 3,800 miles to Tampa, Florida, for AWP. It’ll take me two days to get there. Two days (if all the flights go as scheduled). One very full flying day and a four hour time change on the day of Daylight Savings Time switching back to get home. But in Tampa, at the Red Hen Press booth, will be my newest book. I haven’t seen it yet. I haven’t held it. I have a panel, an offsite reading, and three signing slots, all in the space of three days. I’m flying for two days to meet my newest baby. To show her to folks. To see their new babies and listen to their words.

It’s a miracle, really. Every time. An exhausting miracle, but let’s keep our eyes on the smudge of stardust. People go into their heads, pull out words, craft them, send them into the big world, and then we read those words and they live in our hearts. If that isn’t a miracle, I can’t imagine what one looks like.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Keeping the oars in the water- AWP edition

Book Trailer by Swoon (Marc Neys): The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis

Swoon (aka Marc Neys) is a Belgian video-artist and soundcreator who is, in the words of Dave Bonta, one of the most “prolific and (obviously) fast-moving, …one of the most inventive and interesting artists working in the medium” today. I have so much respect for his work, and also the great good fortune of having Swoon produce a book trailer for my new collection out this week from Phoenicia Publishing, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis.

I am also eternally grateful to Via Negativa founder and co-blogger Dave Bonta for making possible the connection to Swoon and a host of other creatives all over the world. It’s going on the eighth year of my daily poetry writing practice at Via Negativa— let me just say that when I started, I couldn’t even imagine how many full length collections and chapbooks would come out of it.

Swoon and I have collaborated before on at least 5 other video poems, which are viewable at Moving Poems— including “Foretold,” a poem I wrote in response to a “first draft” of Swoon’s video used as a prompt in the Poetry Storehouse First Anniversary Contest; and “Trauermantel” (which he turned into a triptych of video poems to include my 2 other poems “Mortal Ghazal” and “Oir.” 

This is the book trailer that Swoon (Marc Neys) produced. I hope you enjoy it, and that you will follow more of his work and visit his blog. Please also visit Phoenicia Publishing for information on how to order the book.

New book of Via Negativa-derived poems: The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis

cover of "The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis"

On Monday, Elizabeth Adams at Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, announced the arrival of my new book, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis —and for a limited time, or until March 20, 2018, Phoenicia is offering it at a special discounted pre-order price.

cover of "The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis"

I’m so grateful for Beth’s attentive eye for detail, and for the outstanding cover that she made— cutouts à la Henri Matisse, depicting a bird resting on some bramble bushes; and a lady slipper orchid. So much love and gratefulness too, to these beautiful writers who are some of the first readers of these poems as they are collected in one volume: Ira Sukrungruang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ivy Alvarez, Satya Robyn, and Tom Montgomery-Fate. Their generous words are helping to usher this book into the world. The gifted poet Marly Youmans has also done a quick early feature of the book on her blog, The Palace at 2 a.m.

There are around 53 “Buddha” poems in this volume, which is my 14th single-authored collection of poetry. I began writing them in late January or early February 2016, here on Via Negativa as part of my daily poem practice, now in its eighth year.

At the time, I didn’t really have any intention of writing a book of poems with various Buddha personae. I’m no Buddhist, though I have found myself attracted to many concepts presented on sites like Tricycle: The Buddhist Review (for instance, this month there is this discussion on “Everyday Buddhahood“).

Through the years, I’ve heard people use this phrase: “The Buddha in me greets the Buddha in you”— by which they mean the idea that every living being already holds the seed for transformation within themselves; in other words, that in every creature, there exists the possibility of transcendence, of going beyond our flawed, imperfect nature.

That spring, quite rapidly (in just under three months) I wrote poem after poem using a variety of “Buddha” personae. Once I started, it felt like I couldn’t stop until I’d exhausted the subject. In each poem I proposed different scenarios: what if the Buddha felt the need for a therapist? what if the Buddha had a child with an Internet addiction? what if the Buddha was a mother in mid-life who had a “wardrobe malfunction” at a public beach? what if the Buddha joined a campus “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” for Women’s History Month?

It wasn’t until later in the year that I returned to these “Buddha” poems to see how they might belong in a manuscript together. I was surprised at the humor that emerged in many of the poems, especially as I don’t think humor is my strongest suit. I also wrote and brought in some quieter poems— poems that could function as reflection, or as transition between sections.

Late in 2017, Beth Adams informed me that she wanted to publish my manuscript— my second title now with Phoenicia (the first being Night Willow, a book of prose poems, published in 2014). We’ve worked through most of the winter going back and forth in correspondence over the book, and I am so excited to be able to share it with readers very soon.

Pre-order prices are being offered until March 20, 2018, after which Phoenicia will make the book available at the regular price.

Please watch for events soon that will feature The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. Further, I hope you will consider using the book for course adoption in the coming year, or including it in your literary and festival programming.


Re-blogged (with a few minor changes) from my author website.

New Via Negativa-derived book in the works: Buddha poems by Luisa A. Igloria

Phoenicia Publsihing logoBreaking news this morning from Phoenicia Publishing:

Phoenicia Publishing is delighted to announce that a new book of poems by Luisa A. Igloria, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-life Crisis, will be published in March 2018. This is a collection of 53 “Buddha poems” that Luisa wrote in early 2016, many of which have appeared online at Via Negativa, where she has posted a new poem every day since November 2010.

The author says these poems began from the premise that “if the Buddha in me can greet the Buddha in you,” then the aspiration to transcendence is a daily work in progress. She writes about the constant seesaw between our appetite for worldly things and the hunger for deeper permanence; about our human imperfections and foibles; and our longing to be touched by grace, if not love and absolution, in this lifetime.

The post goes on to suggest that interested readers subscribe to their email newsletter so they won’t miss the announcement of the pre-order sale, which I guess we can expect sometime in February.

This will be Luisa’s second book with Phoenicia, following Night Willow in 2014, and her first full-length collection since Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (selected by Mark Doty for the 2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press). Both those books, along with two subsequent chapbooks, also consisted mainly of poems first drafted for Luisa’s ongoing poem-a-day practice at Via Negativa. (Visit her website for links to all of her books still in print.)

Ice Mountain now available in music form

It started as a series of poems here on Via Negativa, was turned into a book by my artist-friend Beth Adams at Phoenicia Publishing, and now has been turned into an album by another brilliant artist-friend, Marc Neys. If you’ve been wondering when the summer heat will abate, the answer is: the moment you put on headphones and start listening to Ice Mountain. And if you’ve already purchased a copy of the book, send Marc a photo of yourself holding the book and he’ll email you the download for free.

I’ve posted a mini review on my author site, but I should perhaps emphasize that one of the best things about this, as a poetry + music collection, is that you don’t just have to listen to my voice. Marc also worked in readings by both my parents, Bruce and Marcia Bonta, as well as the young daughter of some friends, and she kind of stole the show in my opinion. So there’s this great multi-vocal, multi-generational dimension.

Speaking of reviews, by the way, the online art and poetry journal Escape Into Life published a wonderful review of Ice Mountain (the book) a few weeks back. Reviewer Kathleen Kirk concluded:

As we laze or doze during the dog days of summer, it’s good to recall that “huge natural refrigerator” [the Allegheny Front] and let it remind us to do what we can do to counter global warming, lest all our windmills become flowers for the dead.

Link roundup: Photosynthesizing salamanders, revolutionary women, and single-sentence animations

Nature News: “A Solar Salamander
Holy cow! New research shows that the spotted salamander, a common species here, may be partly solar-powered thanks to a mutualistic relationship with a photosynthetic alga inside its cells, something previously unknown among vertebrates.

CommonDreams.org: “‘So This is America’: Veteran Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested At Clinton Speech
Apparently wearing a peace t-shirt and turning your back on the Secretary of State is considered provocative behavior. Even if she happens to be talking about the rights of peaceful protesters.

Heraclitean Fire: Read the World challenge
Harry Rutherford is a blogger’s blogger — someone who seems able to say something insightful on nearly any topic, from art to birding to football, and never gets stuck in any particular groove. His Read the World challenge is an on-going series of book reviews in which he attempts to read at least one book from every country in the world.

Haiku News
This is not news about haiku, but news in haiku — and good haiku, not the folk kind. Their motto is “the personal is the political is the poetical.” I’d like to see more poetry zines responding to the news in this way. Such as…

Verse Wisconsin: Poems About WI Protests
An on-going collection (scroll up for the call for submissions) proving that the news isn’t always what it seems. For example:

The state of Wisecrack is facing an immediate deficit of $137 milquetoasts for the current fishmonger year which ends July 1. In addition, bill collectors are waiting to collect over $225 milquetoasts for a prior raid of the Patriarchy Compensation Funeral.

Al Jazeera: “Women of the Revolution
Three Egyptian woman talk about their experiences during the revolt.

Moving Poems forum: “Electric Literature’s single-sentence animations: videopoems for fiction
Electric Literature magazine’s video series proves that, at least where film adaptations are concerned, sufficiently artful prose is indistinguishable from poetry.

The Observer: “What does the Arab world do when its water runs out?
Conserve?

Part 2Part 3

If you care about freedom, in Egypt or anywhere else, or use social networks, watch this. (FOSDEM=Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting.) Eben Moglen is head of the Software Freedom Law Center. In this address (part 3), he announces the formation of a new foundation to create a truly decentralized, tyranny-proof internet. Awesome.

Phoenicia Publishing’s February sale on qarrtsiluni print editions
Now through the end of the month, receive $2.00 off on our four print anthologies, including the new “Words of Power.” Details on website.

Woodrat Podcast 2: Elizabeth Adams and “Odes to Tools”

This entry is part 26 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

 

A conversation with Beth Adams about books, publishing, and music

In which I am flabbergasted by Beth’s secret plot to rescue some of my poems from a purely digital existence and give them a better life in print north of the border. We talk about the pitfalls of self-plagiarism, what writers can learn from musicians, the ins and outs of small publishing, and what the hell is up with chalk-line reels that aren’t blue. I read a few of the odes, and manage a plausible-sounding explanation for what I was thinking when I came up with the series.

Links:

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes