Tag: Sara Minges

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poet Bloggers Revival Digest: Week 33

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’ve missed earlier editions of the digest, here’s the archive.

This week, the #ShareYourRejections hashtag took off on Twitter, with poets joining other writers in detailing rejections both humorous and harrowing. Since a number of this week’s blog posts also address publishing challenges and successes, I thought it might be interesting to begin with a few of those tweets from regular Revival Tour participants before proceeding to the usual blog excerpts.

https://twitter.com/DoctorKokomojo/status/1029883954680291340

https://twitter.com/charlotteAsh/status/1029913894469427200

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Every Girl Becomes the Wolf is now available!

This chapbook explores the received images of the feminine in fairy tales. The women and girls in this collaborative chapbook resist the common tropes of red riding hoods, gilded mirrors, and iced palaces. Every girl becomes the wolf because every girl has the power to tear apart the cultural conceit of wicked stepmoms, heartless mothers, and voracious monsters. Witches, hags, and mothers of damaged creatures from myth, movies, and lore prowl through this poetry. Lilith settles in to enjoy the county fair rib-off, Grendel’s mother holds her son close, and the Sphynx bears the weight of mythic secrets. Mothers demand their own freedom, daughters refuse gendered expectations, and wives leave what spoils with rot behind. As they wrestle with their place in these stories, they transform into figures outside of the victims or villains they have been perceived to be.

I’m so proud of this chapbook of monstress poems Laura Madeline Wiseman and I coauthored and its been a delight to see that friends, family, and strangers have been receiving the book.

I received my author copies this week — with their gorgeously smooth textured covers — just in time for WorldCon 76 this weekend! If you’re going to be there, consider stopping by Room 212C to hear me read some poetry-type things along with some fellow Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) members.
Andrea Blythe, Announcements: New Poetry and an Upcoming WonderCon Reading!

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Pre-orders for my new poetry collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, are now available at Sibling Rivalry Press. You can pre-order at this link.

Many, many, many thanks to Seth Pennington for his gorgeous cover design, Colin Potts for the author photograph and SRP publisher Bryan Borland for his support of this collection. The book will be officially released on Nov. 15. Stay tuned for book launch and reading announcements! […]

“In Midnight in a Perfect World, Collin Kelley navigates the moody landscapes of desire, travels the dark edge of Eros in the 21st century of love, charting his passage in language sometimes brutal, sometimes lyrical, often both at once. And if that perfect world all lovers seek remains elusive, here we break the boundaries of the familiar and arrive in a place where we can breathe the twilight air and step, almost, into the dream of it, ourselves.” — CECILIA WOLOCH, author of Tsigan
Collin Kelley, ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ now available for pre-order

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Kansas City area poet Sara Minges brought out her new book at a well-attended reading at Prospero’s Books.

Sara’s book, Naked Toes, published by Chameleon Press, is a splash of upbeat, witty, and sometimes cathartic views world of the world around her through her wide open and perceiving poet’s eyes.

She mocks Barbie and Ken. She even tangles with Barbie; she will not be plastic or silent.

Her real-life role is that of Play and Happiness Expert. No, Really. There is such a thing.

She shares exploits of “arse kickin,” being handcuffed in the county jail, and her little black dress.

One gets the impression that publication of this book was perhaps a freeing experience. Like the freedom she gets from naked toes.
Michael Allyn Wells, Local Poet Sara Minges Brings Her Poetry to Print

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As I know you’re at work on a new manuscript of poems, does it differ from your previous books, overlap, or strike out into new territory?

Vanessa [Shields]: I just finished writing my new poetry book last night! How cool is that? Its working title is ‘thimble’. This collection began out of spiteful necessity. Meaning, I couldn’t not write poetry anymore. Come last October, I was bursting after having not written in months. I was on the fence about submitting to the Ontario Arts Council Recommenders’ Grants because I was pissed I didn’t get one the previous year (!). Out of spite, I threw some poems together and submitted. I got three grants! The most ever for me – and it floored and humbled me. Also, gave me the confidence I needed to keep writing. My confidence shifted from a drying brook to a roaring river!
Bethany Reid, The Fabulous Vanessa Shields

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The other night these lines drifted through my head: Once I saw the world as full of opportunities / now I see the trip hazards. […]

Yesterday I got an acceptance from a journal that hasn’t accepted my work before, TAB. And even better, they took not one, but two poems.

As I always do when work is accepted, I went through my submission log; happily those poems aren’t under consideration at too many other journals. As I made my way through the log, I thought about how long they’ve been looking for a home. I thought about long ago, when I read a poet who said that after 10 rejections, she assumes the poem still needs work and does a revision. But I know that the odds of acceptance are cheap–there are lots of poems out there, circulating, looking for a home.

Yesterday’s acceptance is a good reminder that progress can be made in a writing life, even if one has only scraps of time. In past years, in days of paper submissions and postage, I’d have already created packets of poems ready to be mailed at the first moment that literary journals opened for submissions in September. These days, I try to remember to send out several submissions a week, which during busy weeks, turns into only several submissions a month–which is still better than nothing.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Inner Life of the Disney Princess and Other Inspirations

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August has begun its now-typical delivery of multiple rejections, as most of the awards and contests to which I submitted my manuscript earlier in the year (and one proposal to a conference-of-which-we-won’t-speak-because-OH-MY-GOD) have reached their decision-making deadlines. So there’s that happiness. I’m watching my list of submissions dwindle on Duotrope and it’s both depressing and kind of relief-inducing. I’m nearing the point where my MS won’t be out in the world at all. That makes me both weepy (well, it would, if I was a crier) and kind of elated. One can’t be rejected if one’s not putting oneself out there. Of course, one can’t be published, either.

But there’s a small collection of poems growing still — and after I get some distance from them and then return and edit them with some discretion, perhaps I’ll begin submitting those. Maybe I should just have my sights set on journal publication and give up this book nonsense.

That last sentence is probably disingenuous but I’m more or less thinking out loud with this blog.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Persona Poems, Rejections, Decluttering, and Trash Pandas

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I’m happy to hide out at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in these waning days of summer. The first thing I noticed upon arrival was how green it smelled–I love my city, but you don’t get overlapping layers of flower and grass pine, nor all the butterflies. There’s a frog that lurks outside my studio. There’s a magnificent spider that I’m pretty sure it’s a brown widow, not a black one, but I’m staying clear just in case.

Because this is my fourth time here, it’s easier to slip into the rhythm of things: I knew to bring my own orange juice, my own blankets, and a bottle of scotch. I enjoy being social at breakfast, or at lunch, but not both. I’m trying to spend only an hour a day on email, isolating it to the leather couch in the living room. I’ve got a stack of books and lit mags to devour, and W8 has a comfy reclining chair for reading. Although I haven’t been in this studio before, I’m happy to see a number of friends as past occupants. […]

I wish I could say this time was all about recharging my creative energy. That’d be a lie. I have over 1,500 pages to evaluate (literally) of work not mine, some of which requires line edits. Yet this is also my chance to push-pin the pages of the fourth collection to the walls, and live amongst them. There’s a distinct type of edit that gets done when I can look at pages casually, skipping around, and compare adjacent shapes of poems. I catch redundancies of phrase I did not see before.

I’m still deciding three sections or four, and which poem will close the manuscript. But my resolve holds: this book is a book. I’m excited to tell you more about it soon.
Sandra Beasley, Back to VCCA

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It has been a summer of quiet. Avoiding the noise. Relinquishing the pressure of “content”, in terms of both producing and consuming.

I wrote very little. Read less than I’d like (awaiting new reading glasses). But listened.

I dropped every project on my summer to-do list, except extending my morning meditation to 20 minutes, which I have done with more ease than I anticipated. I unintentionally developed a daily yoga practice as well. I don’t recognise myself.

And yet, I do. […]

After so much rejection last fall and a winter of depression, I spent a good deal of summer thinking about how I have fetishised my identity as a writer. As a poet. What keeping up appearances has meant for the praxis of my writing. I forced myself from the fall to keep a handwritten journal, rather than an electronic one – just to remind myself that public documentation of writing does not make it any more significant.

I asked myself whether my writing time passed in a state of anxiety, of fear. Whether I was writing to prove something to the vague, indefinite judge out there of what is “good” poetry. Whether I was motivated by a fear of not being seen (ie not being “real”), … or a fear of being seen.

This week is the first week back to school. I am looking forward to meeting the students tomorrow. Looking forward to my morning routine – which includes writing.

The difference now is that I no longer think of it as the time in which I have to justify my existence.

I have been listening to John Cage’s music. Wondering what silence has to say for poetry. I’m listening to the coffee machine and its easy metered song. I’m motivated to discover what words will come from it all.
Ren Powell, The Pursuit of Silence

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[A]fter having to cancel a reading the day after I got out of the hospital, I took a whole bunch of prescription drugs and set out to conquer the world – two days after.

Brick & Mortar Books in Redmond hosted a panel on apocalypses, including me, YA author (The Last One) Alexandria Oliva, and Gather the Daughters author Jennie Melamed, last night. It was great – a good sized audience, great questions, and the two other authors were wonderful. I was so happy that I turned a corner – I was really nervous I’d have to cancel. It was a nice reminder that I am more than just a sick person or a super mutant patient of a bunch of specialists.

It was also nice to sell some copies of Field Guide to the End of the World, talk to other writers about writing, and talk to an audience about the joys of poetry. Things that remind me of the good parts of being a writer. Today I got an acceptance in my inbox of two poems, which was a nice reminder, too, that it the middle of what feels like an endless stretch of bad, there might be good things waiting.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Talking Apocalypse, End of Summer, Hospital Trips (and Other Unplanned Trips)

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I attended a lively and unpredictable poetry reading/performance recently, No River Twice. The poets who participate in the group reading develop the concepts at each performance, endeavoring to find meaningful and entertaining ways to permit audience members to sense an active engagement with poets and to experience poems more vividly. It appears to be an evolving performance process, and I enjoyed myself!

Grant Clauser explains the idea on his blog. Most of the poets involved have at least some acting or performance background. They are also active as mentors, instructors, advocates for the arts, and “working poets,” by which I mean they get their work published and performed and are constantly writing, revising, and reading the work of other poets in the service of learning new things.
Ann E. Michael, River of poetry

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It is always interesting to read poetry in a new venue — one that is new to you but has been many things in the course of its 100 year existence, or one that opened its doors last week and has hosted one jumble sale and a campaign meeting. I often record my poetry events so that I can make any necessary alterations to volume, pace and diction in my delivery, not to mention noting any memory slips; this also means that I hear how room ambience varies with venue and audience size.

If I’m reading without a mic then I prefer the smaller cosier rooms where the audience is metaphorically sitting on my knee; if I have a microphone that is nicely positioned, I like a larger venue where the sound hangs around before dissipating into the evening.

I like to hear the room ambience in a live recording, which is making me think about what my audiobook should sound like. There is ambience when I record poems from memory because I stand about 4ft away from the microphone in order to reduce pops and clicks. For the screen reader performed poems however there is no ambience. So I’ve been playing around with the reverb settings in my recording software to see how well added ambience sounds.
Giles L. Turnbull, Friends, Room Acoustic Experts, Poets, Lend me Your Ears!

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I wanted the challenge of having to write a single draft of a poem quickly, then send it off right away.

There’s pressure in knowing you only get one shot–but freedom from perfectionism too.

I bought a pack of random postcards.

I pull out a card, turn it over, and begin to write.

My only constraint (aside from the poem needing to fit in the small space)

is that the poem must have something to do with the concept of time.

It’s been quite crazy having to figure out how to work time into a poem about a giraffe or a monkey.

Even though it feels like I am writing in a vacuum, the poem is a missive to my audience of one.

Some of the poems came swiftly, without setting my pen down once.

Some of the poems have taken a bit more time.

But nearly all are silly, in some way.

Rarely, if ever, do I allow myself to just be silly.

And you know what, I can’t figure out why. It’s actually a lot of fun.

It’s okay not to take every endeavor so seriously.

Participating in the August Poetry Postcard Fest is reminding me that it’s okay to write mediocre poems.

It’s even okay to write bad poems.

As long as the postcard poems make the recipient smile, that’s good enough.

And good enough is sometimes good enough.

And I think there is a larger lesson in this postcard experience for me–

just write!

No matter what happens on the page, just write.
Lana Ayers, About half way…

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About 12 years ago I finished an MA course in Creative Writing that I was ill-advised to have started. I don’t know what my motive was, but my heart wasn’t in it. I duly got my MA, but the writing didn’t start in any meaningful way until I started going to the Poetry Business Writing Days on a regular basis a couple of years later. Even then, between 2007 and 20012 I averaged about twelve new poems a year.

Something strange (or, rather, wonderful) happened in 2013; it was like a dam bursting. I’ve written ceaselessly since. 272 new poems. I cannot account for it, but I’m happy to count my blessings. And I can now look back and see a curious process and progress.

In one of the essays I wrote for my MA I see that even then I had an idea about where I wanted to be. I wrote that my imagination was:

‘visual, excited by landscape, particularly the landscape of hills, fells, sky, sea and weather’. but that I wanted to be more: concerned with explorations of people in landscape, and the meaning of their histories.’ […]

This poem, about someone I was very fond of, only happened because of the pressure of a fast writing task that ambushed me into knowing an emotion I didn’t know I felt. Thank you for that ‘write from a postcard’ task, Jane Draycott. I plucked up the courage to give a copy to Julie’s brother at her funeral. He liked it. He shared it with people, and I sent it off for the Plough Poetry Competition, where Andrew Motion liked it and gave it the first prize. That’s what changed everything. It gave me permission to think I could write, along with the encouragement of Kim Moore (who put one of my poems on her Sunday Poem blog), and Gaia Holmes, who gave me a guest slot at the Puzzle Hall Poets. That was it. The dam broke.

Years of reading and teaching, and having a family and a history were stacked up, waiting to be dealt with and voiced. It took 70 years, but I finally got going.
John Foggin, I’ll be back

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[Larry] Levis suggests that from a poetry of place in which place was specific and represented a lost Eden, this kind of poetry of place has been shifting in favor of finding different ways to imagine the imagery and ideas of that loss. Of the poetry of place in general he notes, “It is the geography of the psyche that matters, not the place.” He notes “Eden becomes truly valuable only after a fall, after an exile that changes it, irrecoverably, from what it once was.”

“And yet most younger poets still testify precisely to this alienation and isolation, this falling from Eden. Only they have changed it. It is as if the whole tradition has become, by now, shared, held in common, a given…,” he observes. He wonders, “Again, in some unspecifiably social sense, it may be that places themselves became, throughout much of America, so homogenized that they became less and less available as spiritual locations, shabbier and sadder.” He considers, “it may be that this…new homelessness…is what a number of…new poets have in common when they practice the ‘meditational’ mode–for what they tend to hold in common is, at heart, a contradiction: an intimate, shared isolation.”

But I wonder if this isn’t exactly what poetry is, an intimate shared isolation? Don’t we sit alone with a volume in our hands seeking to find contact with another mind/body/soul/individual? Maybe I overstate it. And maybe he overstates a poetic drift away from poetry of place. But as I read desultorily across literary magazines and volumes, I do find less about exterior place and more about interior place, specifically the interior place of identity. Is this the new home that we’re writing about, the home of who we are, or think we are? And is self-identification by definition an exercise of comparison to others, in some way an oddly collective act? Funny.
Marilyn McCabe, “Who am I, why am I here, why did I cut my hair, I look like a squirrel”; or Thoughts on Poetry of Place and Self

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Time and time again, poetry shifted my gaze and restored my mental health. It gave me access to experiences I’ve never had and clarity on ones I did. So many poems made me feel less alone in my mistakes, and brought cognition to mistakes I didn’t always realize I was making.

Like Katherine Larson’s poem “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” where she reminds her lover, “every time I make love for love’s sake alone, / I betray you.”

And Lisel Mueller’s poem “Fiction,” that expresses the familiar nostalgia and grief we’ve all had at the end of a friendship. She longs in lyrics, “if only we could go on / and meet again, shy as strangers.”

And Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “For the Dogs that Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut,” which I’ve read nearly every week for the past three months, because, I too, “must apologize for how adulthood has rendered me.” and fear vulnerability. Like him, “I am afraid to touch / anyone who might stay / long enough to make leaving / an echo” and have, for awhile been “…in the mood / to be forgotten.”
The Transformative Power of Poetry – guest blog post + TEDx talk by Crystal Stone (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)