As we get ever closer to announcing the completionists and Top 50 poems of the 2009 April PAD Challenge, I wanted to at least share some great news about one honor that's been officially decided: Marie-Elizabeth Mali has been named the 2009 Poetic Asides Poet Laureate!

Not only did Marie-Elizabeth help screen poems for two days of the challenge (and volunteered to do even more), but she also made the first cut of many other screening judges. So, she's not only a great friend and help to the poetry community, but she also has excellent writing skills.

This year's challenge produced some truly amazing work. As my wife Tammy can verify, there were days where I had to cut 20 or more great poems down to five. And these are early drafts--so the talent of this group just continually amazes me!

More April PAD Challenge updates are coming soonish, but in the meantime, please congratulate Marie-Elizabeth on her wonderful accomplishment.

I'm not going to share her poems just yet on the blog--just to try and keep her poems anonymous for any guest judges who read this blog, but you can hunt for some on the blog by viewing the Poetry Challenge 2009 category posts.

*****

In the meantime, do you have any nominations for other award categories, including who you think is most deserving of the award?

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 5:02:03 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [89] 

We had our 2nd weekly poetry conversation on Twitter today. Find it by searching for #poettues at Twitter.com.

Here are some of the highlights today:

I started off by asking: So, what's everyone's goals as a poet? Trying to get published? Write better poems? Notice the world around you? Something else?

Then, I added that, "For me, I've just always liked playing around with patterns and combinations, whether it involves numbers or letters," and, "Writing poetry is also a way of entertaining myself. Like making up music videos in my head or singing songs about whatever."

@Janet45 said, "There's something spiritual about poetry for me, a way of connecting with stillness, of going inside. It can be playful too."

@rebunting said, "Goals: fame & fortune! But really, I'm not going to lie - publication is a goal. Definitely," as well as, "Writing poetry also is a way of reducing the boil of soup in my head to a slow simmer."

@nivermoore said, "I like playing around with sounds, finding the right vowels in the right words to convey the feeling/image/subject."

And many more poets shared their goals. In this way, we all began to talking with each other and branching out into various directions.

For instance, I was really into making T-shirts today: "We should make T-shirts that read: Yes, Publication!" and "That's the next T-shirt idea: Serious la-la-la-la-la," which'll make sense in a moment, because...

We talked about making writing stick and making it important. My quote: "I love sinking into the writing, but I also love skipping along and singing la-la-la-la-la. Combine both, and I'm hooked."

Strategies for overcoming writer's block were tossed around, including listening to music, mind-mapping, reading, etc. @renkath had some great Tweets throughout the poetic discussion, but I especially liked this one: "I put myself under too much pressure and am hypercritical. That kills the muse. Then she starts to stink up the house."

Poetic forms were shared and discussed with @auntieflamingo introducing me to Scifaiku. Check out www.scifaiku.com.

We talked about how the valuation of poetry and writing has ruined (or contributed to the ruination) several relationships and marriages. We recommended poems, poets, journals, contests, writing groups, revision tips, and so much more. It's really a blast, and we do it basically as long as everyone's willing to talk shop. So, feel free to show up next week and talk poetry at Twitter.

Use and/or search for the hashtag #poettues, and if you're not following me on Twitter yet, I go by the handle: @robertleebrewer

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 12:35:54 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [8] 

We had a fun poetry discussion on Twitter yesterday. It went so well that I think we'll continue meeting on Tuesdays. If you want to find what was said, just go to Twitter and search for #poettues. Today's prompt was actually inspired during the conversation (thanks to @martinjason and @ronbaker).

For today's prompt, I want you to write a poem about finding something that doesn't belong where it is. The examples from the discussion were to find a collection of Pablo Neruda poetry in the children's section of a library with the counter-example of finding a children's book in the poetry section. Pure chaos! (By the way, I don't know if I belong on Twitter or not, but you can find me at @robertleebrewer).

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Note found beneath the wiper blade"

This is your last chance. If you don't
come to me today and confess
you were wrong, I'm on the first plane
back to Hawaii. If you won't
have me, the volcano gods will.

*****

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Wednesday, October 07, 2009 7:58:30 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [208] 

Let's start assembling on Tuesdays at Twitter to discuss poetry. I'll probably roll onto the site around 10 or so in the morning ATL time, but y'all can get started before or after that.

If you're not a follower on Twitter, find me at @robertleebrewer.

If you don't have a Twitter account, it's free and only takes a minute or so.

We'll use the hashtag, #poettues on all of our Tweets. That means, you can use the search box on the right-hand side of the page to search on "poettues" to see the conversation as it's happening.

I figure we'll try this out throughout October. If it catches on, we'll continue doing Poetry Tuesdays every week into infinity. If it doesn't, we'll always have October of 2009.

*****

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Monday, October 05, 2009 9:36:37 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [8] 

Okay, I've been meaning to cover this poetic form since like March, but yadda-yadda-yadda here we are getting ready for October. The sevenling was created by Roddy Lumsden, but it was J.P. Dancing Bear who turned me on to the form earlier this year around the time I interviewed him for the blog. (Click here to read the interview with J.P. Dancing Bear.)

So, here are the rules on the sevenling:

• The sevenling is a 7-line poem (clever, huh?) split into three stanzas.
• The first three lines should contain an element of three. It could be three connected or contrasting statements, a list of three details or names, or something else along these lines. The three things can take up all three lines or be contained anywhere within the stanza.
• The second three lines should also contain an element of three. Same deal as the first stanza, but the two stanzas do not need to relate to each other directly.
• The final line/stanza should act as either narrative summary, punchline, or unusual juxtaposition.
• Titles are not required. But when titles are present, they should be titled Sevenling followed by the first few words in parentheses.
• Tone should be mysterious, offbeat or disturbing.
• Poem should have ambience which invites guesswork from the reader.

That said, here's my attempt at one:

Sevenling (The signs all pointed)

The signs all pointed in one direction--
SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY, CARS IN THIS LANE
KEEP MOVING, and HIDDEN DRIVE--

unless they pointed in the other direction--
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS BEFORE
RETURNING TO WORK, CASH ONLY, and NO SOLICITING--

but few people bothered to read them anyway.

*****

To learn even more about sevenlings, including examples by Roddy Lumsden, CLICK HERE.

*****

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Tuesday, September 29, 2009 4:57:20 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [27] 

Getting ready to head up to Ohio for the week, but I just wanted to share the news of Patricia Fargnoli's most recent collection released earlier this month: Then, Something (Tupelo Press).

Fargnoli was interviewed on Poetic Asides back in March. Click here to read the interview.

Anyway, her latest collection is wonderful. Here's one of my favorite poems:

On the Question of the Soul

It is not iron, nor does it have anything to do
with the fleshy heart. It does not shiver

like feathers nor the arrow shot from the hunter's bow,
is not the deer that runs or falls in the snow.

It hunkers down in the invisible recesses
of the body--its closets, scrolled bureaus,
the ivory hardness of the chest,

or disperses through every cell. And also it flies
out beyond the body.

Someday watch smoke travel through the air.
Someday watch a stain spread out to no stain
in the ocean. The soul does that.

It doesn't care whether or not you believe in it.
It is unassailable and contradictory: the dog
that comes barking and wagging its tail.

It is not, I am certain, biology.
Not a cardinal or a heron, not even a thrush or wren,
but it might be a praying mantis.

It is the no color of rain
as it sweeps a field on an August morning
full of fences and wildflowers.

It is the shifting of light across the surface
of any lake, the shadows that move like muskrats
across a mountain whose shape mimics the clouds above.

Weighed down by the vested interests
of the body, it nevertheless bears us forward.

*****

Anyway, I just wanted to share.

Friday, September 25, 2009 10:56:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [7] 

As I mentioned earlier, my wife Tammy's second chapbook, No Glass Allowed, was recently published by verve bath press. Meanwhile, I've resisted the urge to interview Tammy for more than two years now. But the release of a poetry collection is too much for me to pass, especially when the poems are all so good. (Seriously, I loved Tammy's writing even before we started dating. No, really.)

Tammy's writing has been (or will soon be) published in publications such as storySouth, The Pedestal, RATTLE, and others. She received her BA in English at Georgia State University and promptly became a paralegal. She was born, raised and still resides in Atlanta, Georgia--and can be reached via e-mail at tammyfbrewer@gmail.com.

My personal favorite poem in No Glass Allowed is also framed on my desk in my Atlanta office. Here it is:

Sea Gypsies

You said you spent 5 minutes of your life
today looking for a staple remover.
Something to do with your job.
You edit, and sometimes
there is a need to pull things

apart. There are mountains
between us, and then a river.
The land swells with seeds
that fall from your pockets,
sewing the distance with deep
breaths, an entire city
in your smile.

I tell you about the Mokens,
gypsies of the Andaman Sea.
How they knew to flee the tsunami
before the first wave tore trees
from their roots, husbands from wives.
When the sky turns to salt, sometimes
there is a thirst. In their language

there is no word for want,
only an understanding
of give and take. You said
I took away your need
and you want

to share water with me.
The ground presses its pregnant
belly against my feet. I am
distracted by squirrels
in the trees. Wind.
When.

*****

What are you up to?

I've got the windows open and I'm listening to the wind and hoping baby Will stays asleep in his swing. And sipping some water and trying not to eat too many pretzel sticks.

Other than that, I have a new chapbook out from Verve Bath Press!

Within the past year, you changed your name--with earlier work as Tammy Foster Trendle and more recent publications as Tammy Foster Brewer. How have you handled that transition? And have there been any surprises (good or bad) as a result?

That's a good question. Foster is my maiden name. The first time I got married, I struggled with the idea of changing my last name. I was a Foster and I was proud of my family and my name. But, I wanted to have children and I thought it would be easier to change my name. My first poetry publications were under my married name--Tammy F. Trendle. I have a lot of publications (including my first chapbook) under that name.

I got divorced and remarried and didn't have any hesitations this time around about changing my name; however, I think I still published one or two poems under my previous name. Once I started publishing under Brewer, I decided to include in my bio my former name (in parenthesis). I joked that I didn't want anyone to think I was plagiarizing Tammy Trendle.

I don't think the name change has caused any confusion in my writing life; however, it causes lots of confusion for the pediatrician whenever I take Reese (my son from my first marriage) because he always addresses me as Ms. Trendle and then apologizes and calls me Ms. Brewer. It's weird having so many aliases--but a little mysterious, too.

The poems in No Glass Allowed have many great linebreaks. Do you have a linebreak strategy when writing poems?

Yeah, I put a lot of thought into my linebreaks. It helps me to type out my poems on the computer, so that I can see the linebreaks clearly and evenly. I like to break my lines at a thought or an image, so that the idea/image changes meaning from one line to the next. Each word in the line adds to the overall idea/image in that line. I like to have what appears to be a simple sentence broken over a few lines so that the words have multiple meanings. I hope that makes sense.

Do you spend much time on revision?

Oh yes. I recently finalized a poem that I started writing 1.5 years ago. Usually, I get the lines down and then I pour over each word methodically until I finally feel like it's done. I am a perfectionist when it comes to my poetry. Every now and then I'll write a poem that only needs a tweek or two. It's a great feeling when those poems come so easily. (By the way, the poem I just mentioned that took me 1.5 yrs to finalize is going to be published in the upcoming Winter issue of RATTLE.)

Your poetry has appeared in several publications--in addition to your two chapbooks. How do you handle your submission process?

It's funny. I think I go through phases where I write write write and then I submit submit submit. I'm not very organized with my submission process. Fortunately, I've had several instances where editors have contacted me about publishing my poetry. (I always put my e-mail address in my bio which I think helps.) I think I'm just about at a point where I've submitted all of my good stuff and now it's time for me to write more.

Speaking of writing more. Where or how do you tend to find inspiration for your writing?

A lot of times I get inspiration from reading other poets or from looking at pieces of art. Whenever I get stumped or feel like I need inspiration, I'll look at artwork and start writing out ideas that pop in my head. Also, I get a lot of inspiration from listening to other people (especially my kids). Something said in an everyday conversation becomes a line in a poem. Also, driving helps. During my long commute to Atlanta for work, I get ideas just from looking out the window. I'm a daydreamer.

When you're reading other poets, what do you look for in a good poem?

I think a good poem makes me feel. I remember reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in high school and getting goosebumps (that's when I knew I was a poetry freak). I like a poem that can take language and twist it on its head. To read something that seems ordinary and simple on the outside but has many layers of meaning beneath. I think a good poem is one that even non-poets enjoy and appreciate.

Who are you reading currently?

I just finished re-reading Jessica Dawson's chapbook, Fossil Fuels (also published by Verve Bath Press). I'm also reading Cheryl Dumesnil's In Praise of Falling. Of course, I always like to read some Bob Hicok. I am a big fan of the small press and small press poets--Pris Campbell, Amanda Oaks, Jacob Johansen, Barton Smock to name a few.

If you could offer only one piece to other poets, what would it be?

Never forget you are a poet.

Final question: Who's your favorite poet named Robert?

You, silly.

*****

Learn more about No Glass Allowed and verve bath press at http://www.wordsdance.com/intent.html

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to see how we may be able to make that happen.

*****

 

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Personal Updates | Poet Interviews | Poetry Craft Tips | Poets

Thursday, September 03, 2009 7:44:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [11] 

(Sorry for the late prompt today. The day job has required a lot of my immediate attention--like 14 hours yesterday and another 9 already today--so I'll go out on a limb and predict that the Poetry Workshop will not happen tomorrow and possibly not even next week. However, I do have some great news: We received copies of Tammy's 2nd chapbook today, No Glass Allowed, published by Amanda Oaks at verve bath press.)

For today's poem, I want you to write a mistake poem. That is, I want you to write a poem about a mistake you've made, someone else has made, or even what can happen (or has happened) as a result of a mistake. How do mistakes affect people? The environment? Etc.? There are a lot of ways you can attack this prompt.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Albuquerque"

He should've taken a left he tells her,
and she smiles. She didn't expect to find
him or this coffee shop today. "I was
just following my feet," she says, "and they
led me here." "Where are they headed next,"

he asks. "That's a pretty personal question,
mister," she says. "I had a destination,"
he says, "but it's not important now. I'm
sure my friends will understand." She
smiles, he thinks, like a model. "Anyway,

I have no plans the rest of the day."
She says, "I guess that makes two of us."

*****

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Wednesday, August 26, 2009 10:47:29 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [244] 

I discovered Sydney Lea earlier this year while reading issue five of New Ohio Review. I loved both his poems, but especially "Early Life." As the founder and former editor of New England Review, I suppose I should've already known his work. Lea has published a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of nonfiction, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness.

Lea's most recent collection, Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books), is his eighth volume of poems. Its predecessor, Pursuit of the Wound, was a Pulitzer finalist and his To the Bone: New and Selected Poems was co-winner of the Poets' Prize. He's received fellowships from nearly everywhere and currently teaches at Dartmouth College.

Here's one of my favorites from his collection Ghost Pain:

Evening Walk as the School Year Starts

When was the last lobotomy, I wonder?
Too late for Carl at least, whom it's all but hopeless
to think of as a whipsaw of hateful passion
that would if it could have torn up his mother and father,
mild as they are; but that's how old villagers say
Carl acted before he was cut. Their smiles are rueful.
They shake their heads, subtle. A raven, unsubtle,
grates from a hemlock as Carl steps into sight.

His wave's familiar: he jerks and drops one palm.
How old must he be? He's ageless. His eyes are empty--
the operation. He turns now: ninety degrees,
then ninety again like a sentry, the other way.
He turns the same on each warm evening, retreating
past the house of our mutual neighbor, who will not speak
to Carl's father, for reasons likely beyond recall.
It seems a shame not to edit grievances.

It's some awful stink nearby that draws the raven,
but the rest of the world seems fixed on the morbid too:
a squirrel keeps pouring spruce cones down at me;
a gall-blighted butternut groans; the broadleafs wilt;
there's a pair of toads at my feet that wheels have flattened
side by side, like cartoon icons of failure;
mosquitoes strafe me, a mammoth dragonfly--
one of the season's last--attacks a moth

so close to me I can hear the fatal click.
The other day a son went off to college.
His mother and I are quietly beside ourselves.
We embrace each other harder now, and vow,
as one vows, to love our children harder too.
Though I hum to distract myself, the raven dives
loud as gunfire through brush to its mess. I jump,
but Carl doesn't seem to hear. I watch him limp

to his family's drive--then again that sure right angle.
Like him, our family finds a virtue in order:
we rise at six to eat our breakfasts together,
then make a certain sandwich for one of the girls,
a certain one for the other; we leave at seven;
we gather the girls promptly at end of school.
Carl opens his door and shuts it--click--behind him.
It's after Labor Day, it's end-of-summer,

it's another season upon us. Now he scolds me,
the squirrel on his branch, his store of weapons gone.
Why me, dumb brute? I haven't done anything wrong,
I've got no grievance with him--not with anyone really.
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.
The wishing star is not enough to light
the space around me while this bit of hymn from my schooldays
plays, while daytime's creatures crawl to cover,

and night ones, having no choice, confront the night.

*****

What are you up to?

Well, I just finished a teaching term at Dartmouth. My grad students are adults, many of them high school teachers in search of an advanced degree, and I feel, in my semi-retirement (one course per term), as though I'd died and gone to heaven. The students have been around the block a bit, have had jobs, marriages, children, deaths to contend with, and so on; to that extent, they command subject matter that's often beyond undergrads experience. That's not the undergrads fault, of course. I am moved and inspired by the examples of these aspirant writers in the grad program. Teaching them, to the extent that I can call it that, allows me to stay in touch with a younger generation, have a good deal of time left over for my own writing, and--almost best of all--though I am asked to, I never go to faculty meetings.

I'm also much engaged in non-literary undertakings. I'm the vice-president of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, which is above all a literacy endeavor, literacy now including computer literacy and more and more, even here in Vermont, English as a second language. CVABE serves three Vermont counties and offers instruction to a thousand students a year. I've been a trustee for almost two decades.

I have also long been involved in a conservation effort in Washington County, Maine, where I, like my late father, have had a camp for decades and decades. Lately the local land trust bought the development rights on 345,000 acres, and bought 34,000 acres outright to be run as a sustainable community forest. Now another 22,000 acres has come on the market rather unexpectedly, so I need to help raise several million more dollars beyond the 35 that the last campaign required. In the grand scheme of things, my contribution to saving these pristine woods and waters may end up being the most important thing--beyond raising five kids--I'll have done.

I have just sold a ninth collection of poems to Four Way Books too, and am trying to finish a second novel; I hope to have it close enough to complete to let my agent look at it in fall.

You're the founder and former editor of New England Review. As an editor, what do you feel makes a good poem?

Oh, there is no short answer to that one! Fact is, I rather shy from the frequent tendency among authors, editors and publishers to choose up teams. If as a poet in my own right, for example, I tend toward formalism,  no one could ever force me into positing that approach as ipso facto superior. I love Don Justice in his formal mode, for example, but I also love Allen Ginsberg at his best. I do tend to dislike obscurantism, and ditto preciousness, and I can't for the life of me see what so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is for.

Ghost Pain was your eighth volume of poems. How do you go about assembling a collection?

I was lucky enough to have Robert Penn Warren as a mentor when I was a younger man, and his description of how he knew he was done with a book still strikes home for me. He says that you write and you write and you write, and in due course you realize that a certain curve of energy has completed itself, that the stuff you are writing now is differently motivated from what you've been doing for some time. I know that's vague, but I can't seem to do better, in that I don't conceive of collections in an aprioristic, programmatic way.

You teach at Dartmouth College. Does teaching inform or influence your writing?

I may have answered that question above, at least in part. The plain truth is that I haven't been entirely innocent of stealing "ideas" from students, ones that they may have been too new at the game to have pulled off successfully. But that's a rarity. Teaching is important to me as a hedge against adopting a mood like Hemingway's at his worst: Long time ago good, now no good. For forty years, in every course I have found at least one young woman or man who bolsters my faith not only in poetry but also in human nature. Also, by my own choice I live a long way from alleged centers of sophistication, which is helpful to me in that it keeps me from the occasional belief of writers in this era of Creeping MFAism that EVERYONE is concerned with literature. Few of my neighbors are concerned with it, at least in the way that the MFAer may be. And yet I do need the "fix" of talking passionately about poetry, fiction, creative writing" in general, and I get it via my students; I get it a lot more from them than from academic colleagues at any rate.

Ghost Pain includes the long poem "A Man Walked Out." What's the most challenging aspect of writing a long poem?

Here's the weird thing. I have written a number of long poems, starting perhaps with "The Feud" in my second collection, moving through "To the Bone" from my 1996 new and selected, into "A Man Walked Out" and most lately into something called "Birds:A Farrago" from my forthcoming book, Young of the Year. And each of these poems seems somehow to have been given to me. Each seems to have followed on a fairly long period of disinclination from writing. Not writer's block but disinclination (whose causes remain unknown to me). Then these poems come in  a rush, and I rarely do much in the way of revising them. Is that "inspiration?" I don't know, don't even know if I believe in such a thing, really; rather, I believe these gimmes are the payoff for all those hours of revision that I have put into shorter poems.

So in a sense I am a poor candidate to answer your question. I don't conceive of long poems; they present themselves to me helter skelter. Weird, as I say.

Your poetry has been published in several publications over the years. How do you manage your submissions?

Oh, nothing special: I wait until I have, say, three poems that seem to be as good as they are ever going to be, and then I send them out. After three decades plus, needless to say I have certain favorite journals and editors, and I tend to give them first crack. No, that sounds immodest. They are the readers, rather, who I hope may smile on one of the ones I send on. I have had the experience of landing so many poems with editor X, however, that I begin to feel as if he or she is not sufficiently resistant to what I am doing; I need to overcome real critical skepticism in order to trust that the poem is significant to someone beside myself.

Who or what are you currently reading?

I am rereading the two latest books by Maxine Kumin. At 66, it strengthens me to see someone almost twenty years older doing such marvelous work, probably the best of her wonderful career. I am also reading Elizabeth Strout's stunning novel, Olivia Kitteredge. I read a great deal, too, in natural history publications. A delightful advantage of having given up my specifically academic inclinations a long time ago, despite my unlamented Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is that I don't think I need to read in a muscular way, to cover a field or keep up with critical postures. I enjoy, in Eliot's delicious phrasing, "the poet's necessary laziness."

If you could offer only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Oh, I am a terrible advice-giver, or rather just not inclined to give it at all. My way to practice writing is that and that alone; it is not "right" except for me, is not necessarily shareable. To the degree that it may be shared, I prefer to pass it on by way of engaging in dialogue, not laying down rules and prescriptions. I do have one piece of advice to my students, though: write a lot for, say, a decade, in the sure faith that anything you do with diligence for a long time is something you'll get better at. You may not get great (who's to make that judgment anyhow in our lifetimes?), but you WILL get better. I suspect that there were people out there who had as much talent as Michael Jordan, to use an analogy; Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan, though, because he relentlessly practiced his moves.

*****

* To learn more about Sydney Lea, go to www.sydneylea.net

* To learn more about Sarabande Books, go to www.sarabandebooks.org

* To learn more about Four Way Books, go to www.fourwaybooks.com

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to see how we may be able to make that happen.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:59:35 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3] 

As you've probably noticed (if you've been reading this blog for any length of time), there are so many possible poems out there waiting to be written. This week's poetry workshop will look at an event poem by Jane Eamon.

Here's the original draft:

Black Friday, by Jane Eamon

I was 24 that day in '39

They call it Black Friday now

But it was a day like any other day

Ole Frank Burns rang up to say

There was a fire burning

At the pine plantation and

Would I like to come along to see it

I seen a little fire on the telly

Fought with bulldozer, a grader

11 tankers and helicopters

All to fight a scrub fire we could

Have put out with 20 men

I grabbed my horse and my rake

And went along to see

It was a fire all right, burning in the dry top of the ridge

It went right across the Rubicon

Another 20 miles

I got to working with the other boys

Me with my rake

Them with crosscut saws and shovels

It looked like we'd made a difference

But she'd only pulled in for the night

The wind had other plans

Blowing fearsome, hot from the north west

That fire roared its presence

We couldn't do anything

We couldn't go anywhere

We bedded down in the bush

In the heat of the day

So we could fight it in the cool of the night

But we weren't making no difference

That fire was burning hungry

30 miles along and

Eating everything in its path

We found Ruth

Just lying in the road

Clutching tobacco and looked to be sleeping

She must have died from the smoke

Hermon's sawmill went up in the middle of the firestorm

All them trees just disappeared

No stumps, no nothing, like they'd never been there

The river dried up

14 miles up the Acheron Way

They say the river actually stopped running

For three hours

We did our best, we fought it

It came to rest

Sated like with a full belly

It took 71 lives that day

And burned to the ground over 5,000,000 acres

It's a day I won't ever forget

Funny how it was Friday the 13, January 1939

And here's a little note that Jane included after the poem: Inspired by the 2nd largest natural disaster in Australia's history – the Victoria Bushfires of 1939. Taken from an eyewitness account of Murray Thompson.

*****

I don't think the note is needed to explain that this was a fire, but I'm glad Jane included it, because knowing this was a huge event (as opposed to a minor one) can help a poet think about scope when dealing with the subject. We'll look at scope in just a few, but first, let's look at what we have here.

First, I'm not sure how close Jane is sticking to actual accounts. Hopefully, she has taken a real account and fictionalized that account. I'm going to make the assumption that this is the case with this poem.

Second, there are some great details in this poem--from Ruth, who "must have died from the smoke," clutching her tobacco to the narrator grabbing his horse and rake. There's a lot going on here.

Third, there's a lack of punctuation. I don't see a reason not to include proper punctuation. So, that's something.

Finally, this poem feels like it could be tightened. Of course, I love the narrative voice, but we can retain that voice while still tightening up the language. For instance, I would take out the first line because it adds little to the poem. We learn he's 24, but that doesn't factor into the story at all, and we learn that it's 1939 later in the poem.

In fact, we shouldn't even mention it's 1939, because the actual year isn't overly important. It's more important that it's called Black Friday and that it's Friday the 13th.

That brings us to scope of the poem. This poem is trying to take on a huge event--much like the narrator was trying to take on a huge fire. It took a team of people to fight the fire, and I think this event probably requires a team of voices to do it justice.

Recently, I read a very good collection of poems by Ted Kooser dealing specifically with the blizzard of January 12, 1888, on the Great Plains called The Blizzard Voices. He collected several fictional accounts based on actual recollections and recorded documents and let the individual poems create a document for this huge and devastating event. This is what I think Jane should do for Black Friday.

By collecting accounts, this would give each poem the freedom to focus on the event from the perspective of each narrator and allow for a more personal connection to how this fire changed lives. Each slice would then create a more complete portrait of what Black Friday really meant.

Of course, I'm asking Jane to do a lot of work. I'm asking her to do a significatnt amount of research to figure out what the various stories are. I'm asking her to write a lot of poems in different voices. But if she does put in the work, she should have something that is not only poetically signficant but also historically valuable. To achieve greatness, one has to be willing to roll up his or her sleeves and get at it.

So here are my recommendations:

• Expand the scope of this poem/project. This poem deals with a big event that changed many lives. Instead of trying to make the poem cover everything, let it focus on one aspect. Then, write more poems--in other voices--to make the event more complete.
• Keep adding in the great details. This poem has wonderful details--the kind that really help a poem (or a collection of poems) stick with a reader. As you add more poems, keep flexing your muscles in this regard.
• Tighten the language in places. Keep the voices unique and personality-driven, but don't let them ramble. In conversation, it's easy to gloss over when narrators ramble too much. This is even more true on the printed page.
• Add punctuation. There's no reason to avoid punctuation in these poems.
• Research. As you've probably noticed, I'm making the assumption that this one poem really needs to be a series of poems. To write a series of poems based on a historical event, there needs to be at least some level of research. Don't go overboard, and don't include every detail. Use what's essential and discard the rest.

As usual, realize these are just my thoughts on this poem and that many others will probably say they love the poem just as it is. I'm not going to argue that point, because judging each poem is a very subjective process that finally comes down to what the actual poet decides. In my mind, I see a very great collection possible if you're willing to put in the time and effort to expand this one poem into a series.

Thanks so much for sharing, Jane!

*****

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*****

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Thursday, July 30, 2009 6:06:06 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [22] 

Today's prompt is still on the way, but I just wanted to link to this piece on these 8th graders from Ron Clark Academy here in Atlanta, Georgia. These kids wrote poems on what it's like to be a black teenager in America, in addition to other topics. Plus, what's cool about this piece is that you can actually view 9 of the poems from the actual article on cnn.com.

I love seeing young people create and remember how important it was for me as I struggled to figure out who I was and what I cared about. That's why I always buy paper and writing utensils for my boys and encourage them to create as well, whether that means writing a story or drawing pictures of Godzilla. (Lots and lots of pictures of Godzilla.)

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 2:46:10 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [9] 

Cati Porter is founder and editor-in-chief of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and associate editor (poetry) for Babel Fruit, and is the author of a chapbook of prose poems, small fruit songs (Pudding House Publications), and a full-length collection, Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press). Cati also participated in the April PAD Challenge this year on Poetic Asides.

small fruit songs is a fun little chapbook--not only is the entire collection prose poems, but they also all explore fruit topics. Good stuff. Meanwhile, Seven Floors Up is a little more of a traditional collection, though it is still a whole lot of fun. In fact, one of Porter's strengths as a poet is her sense of humor.

Here's one of my favorites from Seven Floors Up:

"Caution Please Do Not Try to Turn
the Head Forcefully by Hand!"

(Label found on my son's jeans after his first day of preschool)

I don't know where it came from but it's there, stuck
to his grubby little knee as though someone

saw his small head, how tragically
fragile, how it could turn, like a lid, quite

around. I am grateful to whoever had the foresight
to apply that label, grateful that they did not choose

"Open Me First" or "Discard After _____,"
grateful they turned my attention to the fact

that someday someone may turn his head.

*****

What are you up to?

Well, right now I'm listening to a screaming child tell me I'm mean. It's the last week of school for my boys before their summer vacation. What that means for me is that I'm frantically trying to finish up any projects that require quiet time. I'm now in the middle stages of putting together a second manuscript which is, I think, a departure from the poems in Seven Floors Up; it's very associative and image-driven. Most of the poems in this collection were written in the last year or so, with the core comprised of poems written during NaPoWriMo, after prompts posted to the Poetic Asides blog. I've also been forcing myself to make time to send out more of my work -- the new poems, as well as my chapbook, (al)most delicious, an ekphrastic series after Modigliani's nudes. 

I'm also just finishing my first year in Antioch University's MFA program, and preparing for the next residency which is coming up fast. I've been doing a lot of reading, some for the seminars, but mostly for my field study, and have a pile of Marilyn Nelson's and Molly Bendall's books on my desk.

Oh, and I'm beginning to read the submissions that are coming through for Poemeleon's gender issue.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Poemeleon and poetry editor of Babel Fruit, what do you feel makes a good poem?

There are lots of good poems. So so many competently and compellingly good poems. For me, though, they all have certain things in common. And that's the drawback. What's really rare, though, is the great poem, which is so much harder to define: It's the one that hits me in the gut; It's the one that makes everything become suddenly clear, or makes what was previously clear so utterly muddled that I'm dumbstruck. Good poems make me want to sit down and write until my fingers ache. Great poems leave me wondering if I'll ever be able to write again.

But great poems are difficult. In order to write great poems, we must first write good poems. (And of course, before that and in-between, the essential bad poems.)

Both good poems as well as great poems employ craft, image, music, voice, and use them to forward the ideas embedded in the poem. The devices inform, rather than dictate, the shape of the poem, become integral to the movement of a piece -- both on the page and in the head. To take a step back, what separates a good poem from a bad poem? The usage of those same devices: A bad poem uses them to ill effect -- sets out to write a sonnet and writes one, no matter whether the end rhymes are forced, syntax needlessly inverted, the phrases stilted and awkward. A good poem never does that, not without good cause.

But the difference between a good poem and a great poem? That's a little more subtle, but I think it's that gut punch. If it's not there, I might be willing to hang around with it for a while, but it's not the one I'm going to remember down the road.

small fruit songs is a collection of prose poems about fruit. What do you like about the prose poem as a poetic form?

At the time I was writing small fruit songs, I had previously been in love with received forms and was trying them all out. Often my results fell under the "bad poem" heading. But one day, after deciding that I wanted to write a series that used fruit-related terminology as its impetus, I sat down and just allowed my subconscious to take over, and what came out was very associative, unstructured, and organic, which felt like the right choice for the material.

What I like most about the prose poem is its versatility. I've read prose poems that read like stories, prose poems that read like excerpts from a training manual, lyric prose poems, prose poems as dramatic monologue, prose poems as pseudo-journalism, surrealist prose poems.... That said, as versatile as it is, I don't think the prose poem is the end-all, beat-all. It's not functional if the form is forced.

Do you have a writing routine?

I wish! I prefer writing in the very early morning when the house is quiet, but with kids and with a household to run, I have to be more fluid. I used to get up in the middle of the night, but I can only take so much sleep deprivation. I do get up at about five or five-thirty, sometimes earlier, but most days I need a couple cups of coffee -- and an empty house -- to be productive. If I can't finish what I'm working on while they're at school, it's catch-as-catch-can. And I can't use anything but a computer. My handwriting is awful so even if I manage to scribble a few lines while out running around, usually I can't read it later!

Seven Floors Up has some very funny poems in it, including poems inspired by eBay listings. What do you think helps make a humorous poem effective?

Humor is unpredictable. You never know what's going to strike someone as funny. My boys and I spent about an hour watching flashmob videos on YouTube yesterday. One of them was for the Best Funeral Ever. Later I described the scene to my husband. He said, "That's not funny." But it was to us, to me. I laughed hysterically at the sight of thirty people dressed in black showing up and pretending to know the deceased. Which now sounds so totally ludicrous, and inconsiderate.

At Poemeleon we recently published an issue on humorous poems which included a great essay by Renee Ashley on involuntary comedy. Humor is very personal. Heck, all poetry is personal. But what one person finds funny another may think is just plain dumb. I think the trick is not to set out to write a funny poem. If something strikes you as funny, and you decide you want to use it in a poem, do it right then and there before you lose the spark. When my husband was searching eBay for businesses for sale, he happened upon this thing called an inflatable church. I just started laughing. And I knew I wanted to write about it. So I stayed up late that night and got a first draft out. But it's not enough for the poem to be funny -- in order for it to be an effective poem it must also contain some other relevant nugget of wisdom or what have you. In the case of the inflatable church, I found it not just funny, but almost blasphemous (and I'm not a religious person), and in a strange way somewhat true -- thinking about prosperity churches and such, in their depiction of a church as a business opportunity.  

How did you go about putting together your collections Seven Floors Up and small fruit songs?

Seven Floors Up was a long time in the making. Before it was published, it made the rounds as a chapbook titled Where We Dwell, which itself began as a chapbook titled Seven Floors Up to the Kitchen of the Soul, a title I had hoped to return to but which my publisher thought was too long so it was shortened. The poems were written over the course of about eight years, beginning when my first son was born up until just weeks before the book went to press. And I spent hours, literally hours, laying all of the poems out and ordering them until it felt right.

With small fruit songs, I fiddled with it for a little while, but then noticed a trend -- the narrative seemed to follow the same trajectory as the alphabet, so I just put them in alphabetical order, and, Voila!, it was done. Oh, and I should mention, it was written in under seven days and had a publisher in ten. Go figure.

Who are you currently reading?

I've been reading a lot of work that's been loosely dubbed Gurlesque: Brenda Shaughnessy, Chelsea Minnis, Catherine Wagner, plus Arielle Greenberg; I've especially loved reading Ann Carson & Alice Notley. And of course Marilyn Nelson and Molly Bendall. I actually have a running list (with annotations) of books that I've read recently on the "What I'm Reading" tab on my blog.

If you could offer only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Write bad poems. Take risks. Learn from them. Don't get bogged down in endless revisions. If it's a bad poem know when to let it go. Then go write a better poem.

*****

* Learn more about Cati Porter at her blog: http://catiporter.wordpress.com/

* For more on Seven Floors Up and Mayapple Press, go to www.mayapplepress.com

* For more on small fruit songs and Pudding House Publications, go to www.puddinghouse.com

* For more on Poemeleon, go to www.poemeleon.org

* For more on Babel Fruit, go to www.babelfruit.org

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to find out how you might be able to make it happen.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 6:04:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3] 

Attendees of the Writer's Digest Conference: The Business of Getting Published will take over the Bowery Poetry Club on Friday, September 18, 2009. The event will feature three rounds of poetry with participants competing for prizes and ultimately to be chosen as the evening's Slam Champion.

Accomplished poet and poetry slam veteran Guy LeCharles Gonzalez will host the show.  Gonzales was a member of the 1998 National Poetry Slam Champions, representing the Nuyorican Poets Café. He is the founder and host of the acclaimed "a little bit louder" reading series, now known as louderARTS. Gonzales also co-authored Burning Down the House (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and launched Spindle Magazine (spindlezine.com), a NYC-centric online literary journal. Currently, he writes about old and new media with a marketing slant at http://loudpoet.com.

The poetry slam is the opening night entertainment feature of the first annual Writer's Digest Conference: The Business of Getting Published. Registration is now open for the three-day event September 18-20, 2009 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square, New York. The Writer's Digest Conference:  The Business of Getting Published offers sessions on self-publishing, social media usage, online sales, marketing, platform building, and other related topics, presented by today's proponents of new media.  Plus, each attendee gets a 15-minute personal appointment with an editorial professional to discuss their query letter, book proposal or self-published book.

Full details and registration can be found online at www.writersdigestconference.com.

Monday, July 20, 2009 7:48:53 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

Jim Schley's first full-length collection of poetry, As When, In Season, was released in 2008 by Marick Press. However, he is no stranger to poetry. Schley is the former executive director of The Frost Place, a museum and poetry center based at Robert Frost's former homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire, and he's currently a managing editor at Tupelo Press (which publishes some of my favorite poetry titles).

As When, In Season is a wonderful collection that includes nine odes for female muses. Here's one of my favorite poems:

Autumn Equinox

The morning glories
continue knowing
nothing,

but such a caprice,
that lavish clambering toward
--what? Only sunlight.
For this they open, every day.

The grief
I feel can't be
described.

In moonlight broad
as the sprawled land we look across
the blossoms are closed
like miniature umbrellas,
our clothes on the line
colorless yet bright
beneath a white platter of mercury

that orbits a world
where our dear ones
die.

These nights we hear transports
from the airbase upstate.
These days I hear fighter jets
going east
at ungodly speeds.

The morning glories are
--what color?
"Blue as our girl's eyes," or bluer.
Tinted rose, as wishful thinking is said to be.
Wrinkled slightly like crepe paper
with white centers,
on avid green vines that climb
whatever we do

defying all
but
the killing frost.

*****

What are you up to?

For the past three years I worked as director of a museum and poetry-conference center at one of Robert Frost's former homes, which was the most pressurized job I can imagine. I had the sensation of being scalded by adrenaline, continuously--I could never complete all my tasks, and the tension never, ever abated. When I was laid off last autumn I was very sad, but I've also experienced a tremendous relief and release from basically impossible responsibilities.

For me, solving the riddle of how to make a living is inextricably connected with making a haven in my mind and imagination for creative ventures. If I'm too rattled by circumstance, I read (constantly), but I don't write poems. Along with teaching adult students in a community college setting, I've now found a couple of jobs editing for pay, and I find this blend suits me well — the editor's total attention to incremental details and fine-tuned schedules and costs, and the teacher's gregarious accessibility, which is really a form of performance.

My life is much calmer than it's been in a long time. Presently I'm concentrating on finding a viable balance between the work I do for a livelihood and the more open-ended, purposeful yet (at times) "aimless" exploring a poet needs to learn and grow. I'm re-immersing myself in a long-term project that incorporates forms of prose and verse as well as documentary historical materials: the story of a mysterious heirloom, a nineteenth-century eagle-feathered headdress from the northern Plains region. My family is trying to understand where this belongs, in perpetuity, and I'm both a participant in the family quest and a chronicler, observing from a slight distance.

You've toured extensively with experimental and activist theater companies, including the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater. What was your role typically? And what were those experiences like?

I worked for a number of years with one of the most accomplished and influential theater artists of our time, sculptor and director Peter Schumann, whose unique creations with Bread and Puppet Theater are known throughout the world. Bread and Puppet is a radically pacifist, communal troupe, metamorphosing over time, and swelling from small touring ensembles to enormous crowds of performers, depending on the needs of a given project. I was involved in that theater for about eight years, and I also spent three years with another traveling theater, Les Montreurs d’Images, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland. Both are very international in atmosphere and orientation, and along with the thrill of becoming a strong performer (I'm an excellent stilt dancer and skilled in using masks) I loved the experience of working among puppeteers, dancers, and musicians from many countries, in a fantastic ferment of languages. I also loved the ways, as performers, we were each involved in all aspects of a production, with no division between "artistic" and "technical" tasks. And because I'm a good administrator and communicator, I specialized in tour coordination.

I continue to feel that theater has the most comprehensive scope of any art, from the minuscule details to the grand, sweeping movements, blending visuals and sonic elements, text and gesture, what filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky called "sculpting in time."

The theaters with which I've mainly worked aren't "naturalistic," in the typical (American) sense of portraying realistic episodes of daily life. Instead, Bread and Puppet and those who've been influenced by Peter Schumann's approach create dreamlike, physically arduous, encompassing visual and musical sequences of images and sounds, often without words, or with words used in perpendicular ways. Many of our pieces utilized the motley, manic format of circuses. The opportunity to immerse myself in work where words were seen with circumspection and even suspicion--and where the English language was by no means primary--was disorienting and provocative to me, as a writer. For years I felt as if what I most fully understood to be "poetry" could be reached more decisively with theater pieces, not with verse on a page. I'm reminded of how Wallace Stevens imperative for poetry, in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction": "It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure." Abstraction, change, and pleasure . . . these are also the qualities of virtuosic circus techniques, as practiced by many of my theater colleagues during that crucial era of my artistic life.

I suppose that now my poems, in many respects--especially their fascination with audible textures and with syntactical "choreography"--aspire to be theater pieces.

You live with your family on an "off-the-grid cooperative" in Vermont. What's that like?

Since my college days, I've been drawn to communal living. This has been a complement to also being inclined toward generous supplies of solitude. Our present arrangement is a modest miracle: in 1986, a group of individuals and couples bought a beautiful, neglected hill farm and 150 acres, and almost twenty-five years later we're still here, still largely the same group. We're incorporated as a cooperative, and while each household has a fair degree of autonomy (and legal title to a house), we share in sensibility and also take care of many practical necessities together. This is a low-key, very good-humored, really intelligent little neighborhood, and I've felt well supported here as a person, a civic activist, and an artist. My wife and I were able to build our own home entirely, from the ground up, with the help of neighbors and friends. And our electricity comes from solar modules and golf-cart batteries, because the regular power line ends a mile away, which we were emboldened to try because our neighbors were doing likewise.

In your collection As When, In Season, you have a section of nine odes. What do you feel makes an effective ode?

An ode is an ancient verbal-song of praise. Pindar's seminal odes were composed for choral voices, with cresting lines and surging acclaim for athletes and other heroes, and they combine rhythms and images in daring ways, reaching for ecstasy through reasoning and metaphor. I've loved reading and hearing the Greek myths since childhood, and that feeling was refreshed and transmuted as I rediscovered those stories, reading to our daughter when she was tiny (which I still do today, when she's sixteen). In graduate school I wrote a seventy-page essay examining every aspect of Keats's marvelously varied, fluid yet precise "Ode to a Nightingale." I wondered if a poet today could write a compelling ode in a natural contemporary idiom. There's a certain grandeur, in tone and amplitude, I was reaching toward . . .      

Years ago I had the idea of writing a series of portraits of crucial female teachers; I intended to make a set of nine, each named for one of the mythological muses, and each representing a certain domain of knowledge and action. In my view, these muses wouldn't be the inspirers of a male artist, but would be virtuosos in their own right. I couldn't find a suitable structure for this "suite" of poems, in which I knew the musical component needed to be particularly strong. In the mid-1990s I began experimenting with an invented form, which I called a chanoine after the French word for chain, and this time (probably my third or fourth attempt) the series came together steadily. Each poem has thirteen rhymes on the same sound, and there are many, many images and allusions; for some readers, my odes may seem too full, as I've tried to see how far I can push the momentum of the sentences in relation to the "staves" or measures of the lines, using syntax for flex and spring. While the form is the tightest I've ever used, the writing process was euphoric, as I learned firsthand how much artists gain (including the most absorbing pleasure) by addressing a resilient, resistive vessel of form.

The muse poems are each a portrait of a specific person (or in one instance two people, entwined), writers and artists, also my wife and our daughter. Only one of them is named outright (the poem for Grace Paley uses "grace" as the rhyme-sound). Whether these poems succeed as odes with respect to the whole tradition, I can't know, but I love reading them to audiences. I have the sense that they reach a listener through the ears more directly than they reach a reader through the eyes, and I'm making plans to do a recording of my delivery, where I can attend closely to pacing and clarity.

This is your first full-length collection, yet you're very experienced in the poetry world. How long did it take you to get this collection together?

From an early age, I knew I wanted to make a living through reading and writing, and soon after college I started work as a literary editor, apprenticing to the boundlessly dedicated and knowledgeable Sydney Lea, founder of the journal New England Review. This led to other editorial jobs, which were entwined with my theater work.

Like most young writers, I made efforts to get my work published, with only sporadic success. Meanwhile, I edited more than a hundred books in a variety of fields, including poetry, fiction, and essays. Gradually I came to an understanding of what the book I'd want to publish would be like, in texture and shape. With a state arts council grant, I published a chapbook in 1999, featuring the muse sequence and four lullabies, which was a 150% good experience, and in 2006 after I'd entered a round of book contests to no avail, I decided instead to publish another chapbook, with a new linked series. At that point the poet Ilya Kaminsky asked to see my manuscript for Marick Press. He and publisher Mariela Griffor said "Yes," and all of a sudden the book was being produced, to my surprise (and relief).

You're a managing editor at Tupelo Press, so I imagine you get to see several very fine collections that get published, as well as good and bad collections that don't quite make the grade. As an editor, what do you think makes a great poetry collection?

I'm presently most involved in the step-by-step production of Tupelo's forthcoming books, working closely with authors on editorial adjustments and working very closely with book designers and printers, a part of the process with which I have a lot of experience. It's extremely exciting to navigate the transformation of a book from word-processing to designed pages, comparable to the translation of a dance or theater work from rehearsal studio to stage.

Even after working as a professional editor since 1980, my answer to your question of what makes a powerful, moving, satisfying book isn't so different from the answer I'd have given as a child or teenaged reader (though my frame of reference is wider, as I've read hundreds and hundreds of books in a number of languages and from many eras). I remain an "innocent" reader: longing to be transported, by imagery and story; willing to be challenged, by language and ideas; most drawn to a dynamic, unfolding relationship between the details of a collection, part by part and passage by passage, and the shape of the whole.

Who are you currently reading?

I read each new book by several splendid, very inventive novelists from New England. I've recently read After You've Gone by Jeffrey Lent, which maneuvers through time in unexpected ways, and am just finishing Ernest Hebert's Spoonwood, which shifts the narrators' vantage as I've never seen before. I'm also rereading--very slowly--two new books of poems, Angela Shaw's splendid The Beginning of the Fields, which I shepherded through production for Tupelo but which is opening for me on all kinds of other levels, now that it's published; and Jody Gladding's Rooms and Their Airs (Milkweed, 2009), the first new book by this astonishingly subtle poet in many years. I'm getting ready to read the only book by W.G. Sebald I haven't yet read, The Rings of Saturn. Along with Czeslaw Milosz, I guess I think of Sebald as the greatest writer of our age. I'm also savoring the prospect of time this summer to read Marilynne Robinson's Home.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Read! Read aloud! Read to others! (Is that three pieces of advice, or one?)

*****

* Learn more about Jim Schley at www.jimschley.com.

* Learn more about As When, In Season and Marick Press at www.marickpress.com.

* Learn more about Tupelo Press at www.tupelopress.org.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in being featured in a future Poetic Asides interview, click here to find out how you might be able to make that happen.

Friday, July 17, 2009 6:40:24 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

As you may have noticed, we're workshopping poems at Poetic Asides. Once a week (or so), I'll select a poem and give feedback to the poet. While I hope the feedback helps the individual poet, my grander goal is that it'll help out the rest of the Poetic Asides group as well by providing fresh ideas for looking at their own poems.

If you're brave enough to have your own poem discussed and evaluated by hundreds of other poets, then follow these rules:

• Use the subject line: Workshop My Poem
• Submit one poem in body of your e-mail
• E-mail to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com
• Be sure to include your name

Simple as that. Not every poem submitted will be used, but every poem submitted has the same chance of being used. If your poem is used, I will send you notification and a link to my feedback when I've made the post.

(Special note: I will not be using any poems that I consider perfect as they are. The point of workshopping is to look for new ideas to work your poetry--not to hear that you're perfect as you are. Good poetry is a lifelong journey not a destination.)

Thursday, July 16, 2009 3:52:58 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [5] 

Kathryn Stripling Byer is the former poet laureate of North Carolina. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Coming to Rest (Louisiana State University Press). She's also one of those rare poets who have a business card.

Coming to Rest is a great collection--even has two Halloween poems. Here's one of my favorites:

Coastal Plain

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone's eye can see, corn's

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won't remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we call
home. Home that calls

and calls
and calls.

*****

What are you up to?

Just now I've been reading online Eavan Boland's essay in the May issue of Poetry, finding her description of the two contradictory ways of being a poet extremely helpful. With my term as North Carolina's first woman Poet Laureate coming to a close, I've felt the pull of the private grow stronger and stronger, even as I never doubted the importance of the position I held as Laureate. It's rejuvenating to find an essay giving voice to what's been milling around inside my own head, giving it context, both literary and historical, so that I can say, "Yes, I understand the lay of the land a lot better now." The two seemingly antithetical "types" exist in most of us, I think, and I know they do inside me. One minute, get me out of here, then the next, what can I do to bring more North Carolina poets to public notice? 

Having finished Boland's essay, I'm now worrying about the tomato plants in our garden. Two of them aren't thriving and one of the heirlooms is being nibbled by something. Rabbit? Raccoon? This afternoon I will hope to get back to some of my own work, print it out, scribble on the pages for a while.  I've a new manuscript I'm hoping to place, Descent, which takes me back to the landscape of the deep South from which I came. And what must be dozens of notebooks scattered all over the house containing drafts of poems, essays and stories--I have to track them down!  I'm hopelessly disorganized.

You were the poet laureate of North Carolina from 2003 to 2009. What were your responsibilities as North Carolina's poet laureate?

I was told at the outset that I could write my own job description. Well, with Fred Chappell as your predecessor, that's not going to be easy. Fred set quite a high standard, and I knew I was going to have to work hard to meet it. Mostly I wanted to help make poetry accessible in as many ways I could, whether to other poets (we have so many in our state!) or to readers, students, teachers, anyone at all who cared to listen to me on my soapbox.  

Right away the Literature Director of the NC Arts Council, Debbie McGill, and I began a web page on the Council site devoted to NC writers, with a poet of the week, new books section, and news. Finally we had to give up the week by week poet; it was a lot of work to keep that going. We moved to a Poets of the Month, and finally to a quarterly web page. I decided to set up my own laureate blog to facilitate what the Council was trying to do, especially now with the budget freeze in place.

So, what else did I do? I wrote occasional poems for libraries, events, really, all sorts of requests. One, even, for someone's 60th birthday! I visited classrooms, gave a lot of readings, answered a lot of e-mails, and wrote a lot of blurbs. I'd say my job description was "always available." I was always trying to track down new voices to share with an audience. Although the council can't afford to search for and select a new laureate till state finances improve, they've asked me to continue the blog, which I'm happy to do. Working on it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

How important do you feel community is for poets?

So many of us, of a certain generation anyway, have embedded in our imaginations the image of the solitary poet, the Romantic standing alone on the summit, brooding  over the world below and its connection with the world inside. At the same time, we know that  poets need each other, just as they always have, maybe now more than ever, and they need to feel that they are part of their own communities, where they become involved in the cultural and political life of that community. I've tried myself to become involved in various issues important to me locally—the new library, for instance, writing a poem for the groundbreaking, letters to the paper and so forth.  The moratorium on new development in our county drew me into writing guest editorials as well as poems.   

We are lucky to have a local weekly that cares about such things. The larger newspapers are turning away from their literary pages, even their guest editorials. I know the internet is picking up a lot of the slack. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. I've just joined Facebook after keeping my distance for a good while. I was warned by a friend, "You will be falling into a black hole."  So far I'm still ok, and I'm discovering that I can post news there about my latest laureate features and other literary matters of interest to me. The definition of "community" is changing, no doubt about that, and I still prefer face to face community, but I'll use what I can to make the case for poetry.

North Carolina may be the best state in which to live if you are a writer.  The NC Writers Network was begun nearly 30 years ago, and it has worked hard to bring real literary community to the state, a state that for so long had its regions strictly marked—mountain (where writers got little notice), Piedmont (Mecca, as we used to call it) and eastern/coastal, as isolated as the mountains. Now, thanks to NCWN and umbrella organizations like Netwest, among others, I can say that the whole state is Mecca. It didn't happen overnight. It took years of ground-breaking by good people, like Debbie McGill of the Arts Council, Marsha Warren and her stalwarts at NCWN, and all the local folks who came together to form their own literary organizations.  Writers need each other and they need to feel a connection with their readers and future readers. It's fine to stand on a mountain-top and brood—I've done that myself--but we have to come back down again and live in our communities. Let our voices be heard.

In Coming to Rest, location factors into several poems. How important do you feel location is to a poet?

I firmly believe a poet has to feel located somewhere, in some physical place where light falls on the ground, the earth grumbles and sings, the leaves fall, the sewage stinks, and so forth. "You have to be from somewhere before you can write about anywhere else," as Fred Chappell, our resident genius, once said. Or as Flannery O'Conner said, "Our limitations are our gateways to reality." My gateway literally squeaked, rusty and old, there was pig-stink all around, my people were hard-scrabble farmers, but it was a way into my first poems.  And from there, I could go anywhere.  Anywhere!

You work in relationships with your daughter and husband in first person narrative poems. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction?

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to draw the line. I let the poem itself guide me. The poems drawing in daughter and husband in Coming to Rest were different in that personal inclusion. So many of my earlier poems had been "persona poems," where I could work out any inner narratives through a fictional character--the mountain woman named Alma, for example, or the aging Evelyn. James Dickey's famous statement, "Poetry lies in order to tell the truth," seems apt here, as does Richard Hugo's, "You owe reality nothing, your emotions everything." What I mean is, you fictionalize, you improvise when you come up against what you can't or can't yet say or may never want to say outright. Yes, let's don't forget Dickinson's, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." There are ways of getting around reality into a poetic reality.  The poem itself has seemed to draw the line for me when I am paying adequate attention to language and craft. The reality in a poem is, finally, language and how it is used.

How do you handle the submissions process?

Right now I'm not submitting much at all,  though I'm happy to oblige if an editor asks me to submit some work. Otherwise I'm dealing with the day-to-day business of being wife, mother, daughter, laureate, friend, and as you see, at the bottom of the list, poet.  But can't poet be intertwined with all of the above?    

I used to be diligent about the submissions process, keeping records, reading Poets & Writers faithfully, but I came to find the process taking up so much energy—what to send where and when, then the irritation (that's putting it mildly) of rejections, the envy of seeing friends with poems in magazines that had rejected my work, and so on. It began to be tiresome. I'm ready to try again, though, with the new work I've done over the past few months. I've been in P0-biz for 40 years. I still get a thrill from having poems accepted, and I still get pretty testy when they are rejected. I don't want to think of myself as over and done with. I simply won't, and that's all there is to it.

Why do you write poetry?

It's the best way I know to sing with the world. And because I couldn't be Renee Fleming or Emmy Lou Harris. Or Nina Simone.

Who are you currently reading?

Stacked at my bedside are books by Mahmoud Darwish, Tomas Transtromer, Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Kanyadi, Chitra Divakaruni, Marie Ponsot, Adam Zagajewski, and Nazim Hikmet. I pick up one of them on any given night.  Chitra's novels, of course, I read straight through, but I enjoy going back to favorite passages. I'm especially fond of her The Vine of Desire and the novel that comes before it, Sister of My Heart. I'm staying away from most American poetry at the moment, but not NC poetry. You can read my laureate blog to see that I'm keeping up with that.   

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

I'll have to go with what Maxine Kumin told me years ago, "You have to be stubborn to make it as a poet." That advice was for a young poet struggling to see her first book published, but I think it still stands. By "making it," I now mean keeping it going, growing, digging in your heels and saying, "Here I am." We are a youth obsessed culture, including our literary culture. But women of a certain age like me must keep on keeping on. Living in the South, being thought "regional" by the literary powers-that-be doesn't help. But it doesn't hurt, if you pay them no mind.

It may seem paradoxical that to keep moving, you dig in your heels and stand your ground, but poetry can deal with those paradoxes. All of art can.  

*****

* Check out Kathryn's North Carolina Poet Laureate blog at: http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/

* Check out Kathryn's personal blog at: http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/

* Learn more about Coming to Rest and LSU Press at: http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on this blog, click here to find out how we might be able to make that happen.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009 12:24:27 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [9] 

Chuck Sambuchino, editor of Guide to Literary Agents and Screenwriter's & Playwright's Market, ran into Ted Kooser (former National Poet Laureate) at a writing conference (Chuck travels more than any editor I know). So Chuck had Ted sign a copy of The Blizzard Voices for me as a get well gift (from my May health scare).

Anyway, the book was a very fun read. Since it had to do with the Blizzard of 1888, it was a nice escape from the Heat Wave of 2009. Perfect poetic summer reading material?

This got me wondering if you have any poetic summer reading suggestions? If so, share with the group in the Comments below.

General | Personal Updates | Poets

Thursday, June 25, 2009 2:01:38 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [18] 

Emma Trelles is the author of Little Spells (GOSS183 press). She's a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry and an arts and culture journalist. Her work has been published nearly everywhere, including OCHO, Gulf Stream, Newsday, and the Miami Herald. She also teaches creative writing at the Art Center of South Florida and the Florida Center for the Literary Arts.

Little Spells is a fun chapbook, and here's one of my favorite poems:

Gua-Gua

Could be the cry of a dog
or a cartoon baby's mouth
open to a pink cave of tonsils,
the squiggle lines of an animator's pen
bursting from his bald head.

Guaaaaa-Guaaaaa
the blank drone you hear when
you dial out of the Casa Bella in Oaxaca,
or the bleat of dusty buses charging
streets alongside wagons dragged by mares.
In Mexico, it's boooos,
the slurred song of a beer-heavy ghost,
or the love charm Frida sang that lured
men and monkeys from the tamarind trees.

In Miami, Cuba, it's gua-gua,
the "W" sound of water brushed into a dream,
the war between why and wait.
Gua-gua,
the clipped cry from an imperfect memory,
a wish to travel in reverse to an island
shaped like a boomerang.
You can fling it as far as 90 miles and still
feel its edge in your hands.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm writing and revising poems for my full length collection, tentatively titled Tropicalia. I should be ready to start sending it out this fall and I'm looking forward to releasing it into the world. I'm also preparing to read in a few weeks at the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Besides that, I've been sending out poems, freelancing art and book stories, teaching creative nonfiction and savoring the rain that's made every garden and lawn in South Florida a blazing green.

How has working as a journalist informed your poetry writing efforts?

I've worked as a full-time journalist since I finished my M.F.A., and writing on deadline for so many years really helped me shape my voice as a poet. In grad school, I was always trying on the diction of others--Sylvia Plath and Campbell McGrath come to mind--because I couldn't quite figure out how to sound like myself and also approach language as art. Writing consistently, even in a completely different genre, helped me discover my own poetic tongue. Journalism has also led me to fodder for poems. Some of the poems in Little Spells, for example, were drafted while on assignment (such as "Gua-Gua" and "Billy Bragg Rescues Us at the F.T.A.A. Protest") and covering visual art has also made me think more deeply about how color and form are used in verse.

You teach creative writing; does that influence your writing?

Definitely. Just last week I was babbling on about how important it is to immerse yourself in a writing project, how accumulating artifacts around your desk or in your notebook is vital to creating. I cited a Diane Arbus print that hangs over my desk as an example: I often consider the photograph--a circus woman & sword swallower--as a metaphor for gender and writing. I watched while one of the writers in the group took notes, and I realized that I was not doing enough of this very immersion.

I'm working on a book; why am I not surrounding myself more with its themes? Where is my own physical shrine to its images and intent? I shared my discovery with the class, and it was a great example of how teaching teaches. You are constantly clarifying process, and your own is illuminated.

How important is location to your writing?

Thus far I've used place as a kind of bedrock for my work. I suppose that's, in part, because I've lived in Florida all my life, and I believe that staying in one place gives a writer, or any artist, the chance to peel away the cliches, the superfluous, the gauze and busyness that keeps us so often from seeing the heart of a thing.

Proust said that the real voyage of discovery exists not in having new landscapes but in having new eyes. I love that quote. Whenever I read it, I remember to burrow into a setting: the shoreline, the kitchen, the causeway serried with cars. I keep looking and writing and and trying to re-imagine it. A poem is a tiny compass that should point you to somewhere.

As a guest editor of MiPOesias (March 2008), did you gain any insight into your own writing?

It made me think about my place in the tradition of Cuban-American writers, which the issue featured, and also how that tradition is mutating as first and second generation poets move farther into this country's culture. There was a time when Cuban American poets wrote mostly about exile and loss through the lens of lament. Now I see these themes explored through speculation, surrealism, urban living or even humor. I can't wait to see what the third wave of writers will offer.

What do you feel makes a great poem?

The best words in their best order! That's Coleridge, of course, but I'll add the ubiquitous "heightened language" and "original thinking" because I think they bear repeating.

Ultimately, what I think makes a great poem is the same as what makes any work of art a stunner--the concurrent feelings of recognition and astonishing discovery.

Who are you currently reading?

Mostly poets. I'm a few pages short of finishing Mark Doty's Fire to Fire. I'm also reading The Light at the Edge of Everything, by Lisa Zimmerman; The Neighborhoods of My Past Sorrow, by Jesse Millner; Hoops, by Major Jackson; and The Life of the Skies, a nonfiction book about people and birds by Jonathan Rosen.

If you could offer up only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Cultivate your own voice and your instincts. Tend to your work.

*****

* To learn more about Emma's publisher GOSS183, go to www.mipoesias.com

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in the possibility of a Poetic Asides interview, click here to see how you might be able to make that happen.

Poet Interviews | Poetry News | Poets

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 7:31:12 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1] 

Yesterday was an awesome Father's Day. Now that I can drive again, I'm back up in Ohio visiting my two oldest sons. I took them to Dayton's Riverscape yesterday to play in this interactive fountain for kids.

As we were getting ready to leave, a man walked up to me and offered us three free tickets to watch the Dayton Dragons (a Minor League ballclub in the Cincinnati Reds' farm system). So we walked a few blocks down the street and took in half of that game before the boys started getting too hot. Joey Votto (the Reds' top batter) was even playing first base as part of his rehab.

Then, I went for a run last night after taking the boys back to their mother's house. When I got back to my brother's house (where I'm staying while in Ohio this time around), he showed me this cool interview with Paul Muldoon on Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report.

After watching it, I gave Tammy a call and went to sleep.

Monday, June 22, 2009 11:02:40 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [7] 

A poem of mine appeared in the most recent issue of Ocho, which was guest-edited by Atlanta poet Collin Kelley. You can see his post on the issue here: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-issue-of-ocho-online-now.html

To check out the issue yourself, go to http://issuu.com/didimenendez/docs/ocho24

Apparently, hard copies will be available on Amazon soonish.

This issue of Ocho gathers poems by poets who actively use Twitter. Yes, I fall into that category. If you want to follow me there, my Twitter name is: @robertleebrewer

Thursday, May 28, 2009 9:06:20 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [15]