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.
A shorter digest than usual this week — no doubt because of bloggers being off on holiday — but some unusually hard-hitting posts more than make up for it.
Scrape the leftovers into a pan on the stove,
whatever was chilled in the fridge, crammed in cupboards,
canned or covered, not quite fresh but only newly
expired. Things others would throw away, like broken
laws or a person who told the right story at just
the wrong time. Call this truth.
PF Anderson, Leftovers
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I’ve been slowly and painfully reading Claudia Castro Luna’s stunningly beautiful book, Killing Marias (Two Sylvias Press, 2017), in which she celebrates in elegiac poems the “disappeared women” of Juarez, Mexico. Of course, these stories portray the same conditions that women in Central America continue to confront, conditions in no small part fostered by US policies. The added insult however, is that now families are being torn apart at US borders.
This morning I looked for my copy of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, Anne Sexton’s first book of poems, published in the early 60’s, which reflects on her first psychiatric hospitalization, an event that separated her from her young daughter. I didn’t find the book, not surprising, having moved so many times since it was placed in my hands by a friend who saw the suicide in me, back in the seventies, while I was trying to make sense of having lost contact with my son. I had already swallowed Plath’s The Bell Jar whole, and was identifying more with feeling like I was crazy, less with how power and abuse were shaping my life, and just on the verge of reading/writing poems myself. I held on to the Sexton book at least long enough to remember these lines:
I could not get you back
except for weekends.
My son was kidnapped by his father when he was four; afterwards, the legal sham of a custody war dragged on for over a year. I don’t speak about losing custody of my son often or easily; the experience was too awful and left me with unremitting feelings of shame and helplessness. I identified with Sexton when I read those lines, my own poetic line for my relationship with my son was briefly, in summers.
Risa Denenberg, Sunday Morning Muse in Bedlam
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This week I visited Virginia State University to read the papers of Amaza Lee Meredith, an African American artist, architect, and teacher who was a sometime neighbor and longtime friend to the poet Anne Spencer. I leafed through scrapbooks Meredith kept full of letters from students, memorabilia about Spencer, and poems she either copied out or clipped from magazines. She also preserved clippings about a few favorite politicians and a receipt from her $5 donation to Adlai Stevenson’s campaign. Meredith and Spencer were friends during the Jim Crow era and they clearly talked urgently and often about educational inequality and school segregation. I’m not comparing my experiences to theirs–Spencer and Meredith and their families were in physical danger, as well as being subject to daily degradations, because they were black in mid-twentieth-century Virginia–but I think negotiating this political moment is tuning my awareness to aspects of Spencer’s situation.
What sustained Spencer when social injustice and literary rejection demoralized her? Her garden. Reading and writing. And friends like Amaza Lee Meredith, to whom she signed “I love you,” late in life, in a shaky hand.
Lesley Wheeler, Poetry, politics, and friendship
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For me, it is as if, like all great art, The Waste Land were taking place in a continuous present. Furthermore, in my own condition, that present was entirely enveloping, full of echoes that shook me without my knowing quite why they did so. Perhaps I recognised the revolutionary Budapest of 1956 with its bullet and shell scarred buildings in those falling towers; perhaps the woman who drew her long black hair out tight was an incarnation of my mother and her black hair as she turned away from me to brush it; perhaps the voices of Eliot and Vivienne in the room and those of the group down at the pub echoed some experience of hearing my own mother and father at a point of tension and the presence of overheard unfamiliar others engaged in their own lives in some social space.
Perhaps all this was personal, or some core of it was. I chose to concentrate on it here because of its significance to me then, But also because the world it conjured is never quite dead. Not even now.
George Szirtes, FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH ELIOT / Little Gidding 8 July 2018
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It has no name. The thing that swells up
inside me like a hurricane. The thing
that visits me in the late afternoon.
Last week I came home and it filleted
me open like a fish.
Crystal Ignatowski, Whole
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I recently read James Geary’s entertaining book I Is an Other–The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World. Geary takes his title from one of Rimbaud‘s letters, calling this phrase metaphor’s “principal equation”:
Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things–jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike–and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.
I like this definition because it feels more complete than the typical definition of metaphor as a comparison without the use of the adverbial comparative (i.e., no “like” or “as”). Indeed, metaphor probably forms the basis of language itself; while that conclusion’s much debated in semiotics, linguistics, and other scholarly disciplines, common sense and common usage strongly suggest that even thought itself–in terms of how we think internally about the world–employs metaphor as an underpinning.
Ann E. Michael, Back to metaphor
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Jorie Graham is a master orchestrator of thought; her poems have always treated thought as a kind of entity. Graham has studied this entity and given it a language that floods, eddies, pivots, and unfolds, and yet that language is elevated beyond thought’s actuality, which is transformed through this mimesis. But what if Jorie Graham’s entity—made up of a single person’s thoughts—met another entity, a bot, full of the encyclopedic knowledge of the internet as well as the user’s voice. The first of four sections in Graham’s most recent collection Fast explores this collision of minds, of art and information, of human and machine. The resulting poems are frenetic as they are thoughtful, their pace perhaps lacks the elegance of Graham’s earlier poems, and yet this is the point. Something here of the self is lost to modernity, to the cacophony of disembodied voices and to the many horrors of information floating around the internet like sand in the ocean.
Anita Olivia Koester, Through the Looking Glass and Beyond: Fast by Jorie Graham
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Collecting Dust
Sometimes the problem with hording is remembering what you’ve hoarded or, more accurately, what is in what you’ve hoarded. The number of times I look back at lines in my (electronic) ideas pad and have no memory of several of the lines is not even funny, and that’s stuff I’ve apparently written! But, when I received the list of books in the Poetry 1 module reading list for my MA course, I was delighted to recognise names I know from the online world or have actually met in person :)
The Module Matrix
I never really understood a matrix, other than that the plural was matrices; modules I understand marginally better, though the reading list for Poetry 1 module is rather baffling: there is a list 1 and a list 2, and list 2 is further subdivided into required reading, suggested reading and recommended reading … it gets trickier when some books are on list 1 and 2, so it is quite hard to figure out in which folder to file the electronic copy of the text!
Giles L. Turnbull, A Collection of Poetry Friends
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It’s Saturday night and I am home trying to do a poetry submission.
Poetry submissions annoy me when I overthink them. I look at my work and say, “Hmm, this isn’t good, nor is this.” I say, “not this poem, this poem sucks, maybe I’ll work on this poem, hey–what’s this? I’m hungry, do we have any sliced gouda?”
I sabotage myself. I can’t figure out who to submit to, even though I have a list in front of me of journals I want to submit to.
I put the “pro” in “procrastinate,” and so much, I end up writing a blog post (which I am behind on), instead of submitting.
And wait, I’m the one who wrote that viral piece, Submit Like a Man? I could learn a lot from myself.
Kelli Russell Agodon, Friday Submission Club
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Sometimes when I’ve just “finished” a project, I get all bouncily excited. I can’t wait to get it out into the world, CERTAIN that the world will be AGOG. At times like this I wish someone would gently wrest the “Send” button from my hand.
If I do excitedly send the fresh, new piece, fortunately it takes so long for most places to respond that the rejection letters come less as a knife to the heart of Tigger as a knife to the heart of, say, Kanga, perhaps, or Roo, or, depending on the day, Eeyore.
If I’m a sensible bear, I’ll put the piece aside. I’ll come back to it later and HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. Then I’ll put it aside again and later come to it with a more measured response. Although if I wait too long, I’ll get too Wol-ish about it all, and that can be insufferable.
Marilyn McCabe, Help Me If You Can; or On the Stages of Project Completion
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Colin Potts – photographer, professor, chess enthusiast and all-around good egg – shot my new author photo, which will appear on the back cover and in publicity for the book. I wanted the photo to have a connection to my favorite poem in the collection, “In the afterlife my father is a London cab driver.” Since we couldn’t get to London, we convened in the parking garage of the MidCity Lofts in Atlanta on a hot Sunday afternoon. Fellow poet and BFF Karen Head loaned us her car. Sitting in the back seat of a hot car wearing a winter coat on a July afternoon is not recommended, but Colin did a spectacular job. He was shooting in close quarters, from a low-angle and basically blind since he couldn’t see the viewscreen on his camera. Lighting was also an issue, but the overhead “map lights” provided just enough illumination to give the photo the noir look we were after. Thank you, Colin, for making me look like a rock star!
I was asked to write a short blurb for an upcoming appearance to describe the collection, so I’ll share that with you as well:
Sibling Rivalry Press will publish Collin Kelley’s third full-length poetry collection, Midnight in a Perfect World, in Nov. 2018. This sequence of cinematic, dream-like poems is infused with travelogue, pop culture and music – from Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush to Kylie Minogue and David Bowie. With the city of London as a final destination, readers will touch down in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Denver, Atlanta and New York before crossing the pond for a cathartic reunion of ghosts from the poet’s past.
Collin Kelley, “Midnight in a Perfect World” coming Nov. 15
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July is a good time to get together one-on-one with friends, to appreciate the little beauties around us, to maybe make peach ice cream or learn one more grill-out recipe to share. We just celebrated Glenn’s birthday with my little brother and sister in law drinking cider, eating grilled-duck tacos and spent the end of a warm evening watching the hot air balloons going up in Woodinville. The goldfinch showed himself off too.
So, be sure to enjoy your summer, be sure to enjoy the little things, take advantage of downtime to do thing you forget to do during the rest of the year – watch the birds, water your garden, drink something cold outside. Read some poetry and be kind to your little poems as you revise and refresh. It’s a good time to go a little easier on ourselves.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Goldfinch and Sunflowers, Thanks to the Coil, and Celebrations
