Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer - Poets

2009 April PAD Challenge Update!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:02:03 GMT

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?

Poetry Twittering Tuesdays

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:35:54 GMT

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 Poetry Prompts: 065

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:58:30 GMT

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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Poetry Tuesdays on Twitter!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:36:37 GMT

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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Poetic Form: Sevenlings

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:57:20 GMT

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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Then, Something...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:56:49 GMT

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.

Interview With Poet (and My Wife) Tammy Foster Brewer!

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:44:52 GMT

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

*****

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*****

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 059

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:47:29 GMT

(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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Interview With Poet Sydney Lea

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:59:35 GMT

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.

Poetry Workshop: 004

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:06:06 GMT

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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Black in America and poetry

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:46:10 GMT

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.)

Interview With Poet Cati Porter

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:04:11 GMT

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.

First Ever WD Poetry Slam

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:48:53 GMT

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.

Interview With Poet Jim Schley

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:40:24 GMT

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.

Do you want your poem workshopped?

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 14:52:58 GMT

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.)

Interview with poet Kathryn Stripling Byer

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:24:27 GMT

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.

What's a good poetic summer read?

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:01:38 GMT

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.

Interview with Poet Emma Trelles

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:31:12 GMT

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.

Father's Day and Paul Muldoon

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:02:40 GMT

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.

Published in Ocho!

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:06:20 GMT

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

Good news!

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:29:22 GMT

I recently received a few contributor copies of Barn Owl Review #2 (Thanks, Mary Biddinger!). My poem "They're coming to get us" appears in the issue (on page 16) along with a lot of other great poetry, fiction, and essays.

In fact, quite a few poets with ties to Poetic Asides appeared in this issue. April PAD Challenge guest judges Seth Abramson, Edward Byrne, and J.P. Dancing Bear are published in this issue. Bear, of course, was also recently interviewed on the blog (click here to read the interview). And another interview subject, Nin Andrews, also appears in this issue of Barn Owl Review (click here to read my interview with Nin).

It's always cool to get a publication credit (whether online or in print), but there's something extra cool about holding a journal and knowing your poem is in it. And since I'm so connected to Ohio, I really appreciate the Ohiotica in the Contributors' Notes (not to mention the ad for Clampco: Worldwide Clamping Specialists).

To check out more about Barn Owl Review, go to www.barnowlreview.com.

Interview With Poet Sage Cohen

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:09:52 GMT

Sage Cohen is the author of Writer's Digest Books' most recent poetry title, Writing the Life Poetic. She's also the author of Like the Heart, the World (Queen of Wands Press). She's taught poetry at universities, hospitals and writing conferences as well as online. As principal of Sage Communications, Cohen writes the words that connect businesses with the people they want to reach.

Though I admit I'm usually suspicious of self-published titles (Queen of Wands Press is Sage's own press, named after one of the poems in the collection), both Tammy and myself found her collection Like the Heart, the World to be a great read. Here's one of my favorites:

The Irony of the Small Horn

Paul says the Great American Music Hall
should be called The Great European Music Hall.

Its gold flourishes and imperial balcony feel more
like something you'd yearn for from across the ocean.

Nothing is named right in this world.
I don't know what to call Paul's body against mine.

Dancing, maybe, but that's not enough.
It's more like a question before it is born

gathering force among the margins
of what is already known or believed.

Paul has his hand on my stomach where my shirt rides up
and I press into the beat coming through his chest.

My hips rotate with the room. Singular surrenders to plural.
Sweat and smoke and beer and bodies pulse in the darkness.

The music is a fire. Dancing is the flame.
We all depend on each other to burn.

Paul points out the enormous man playing the tiny trumpet.
All the big guys have small horns, we agree.

This poem was supposed to be about that. About the trumpet,
because that was how Paul and I planned it.

But nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.
The music ends, and then it's time to go home.

*****

What are you up to?

National Poetry Month has been great fun over here. I've launched my Writing the Life Poetic book tour by speaking at a few chapters of Willamette Writers and appearing on a variety of writing blogs throughout the month. It's week five of my six-week Poetry for the People online class, and my students have been dazzling me with their dedication and fine poems. My full-time "day job" of marketing communications consultant is clipping right along, and I've been dedicating every scrap of free time to your Poem-A-Day Challenge. Because my son Theo has been waking up every two hours or so throughout the night for the past seven months, I'm in a perpetual sleep-deprivation daze that I've decided to embrace as a poetic state of mind.

Like the Heart, the World is a self-published title. Why did you choose this route of publication?

Before deciding to self publish, I spent about a year sending my manuscript out to publication contests. It placed as finalist or semi-finalist four times, which was exciting. That was enough validation for me...I didn't want to spend any more time waiting for someone to choose my book for publication. I felt a sense of urgency to have that body of work in the world, and to have it look and feel exactly the way I wanted. I've spent years creating marketing communications materials for clients, and I always enjoy the opportunity to design and produce my own pieces. So I hired my favorite illustrator/designer to layout the book and create the cover, and within a few months, had a finished product in my hands.

What do you think is the most rewarding part of self-publishing your collection? What do you consider the most challenging?

It was very empowering deciding that my book was ready to be born, and then making it happen. The poems in Like the Heart, the World span more than 15 years and reflect time periods and thematic cycles in my life that felt complete. With this publication, I feel that they've been well honored, which gives me more breathing room to embrace the poems of this life chapter. There really haven't been any challenges or regrets.

I hope that my experience will remind other poets who feel helpless about the poetry publishing waiting process that they have options. We can decide when our manuscripts are ready to go forth into the world as books, and we can do that however we like...the traditionally prescribed way or our own way.

You've taught poetry at universities, hospitals, and writing conferences. What's the most common question you receive? What's your answer?

While the questions take many different forms, what people studying poetry seem to universally need is permission to write poems--and encouragement about their capacity to do so. I see my role as a mirror...I reflect back to my students what is powerful and true in what they are doing so they can have more fun and be more successful doing it.

Why should a poet buy a copy of Writing the Life Poetic?

The craft of poetry has been well documented in a variety of books that offer a valuable service to serious writers striving to become competent poets. Now it’s time for a poetry book that does more than lecture from the front of the classroom. Writing the Life Poetic was written to be a contagiously fun adventure in writing. Through an entertaining mix of insights, exercises, expert guidance and encouragement, I hope to get readers excited about the possibilities of poetry––and engaged in a creative practice. Leonard Cohen says: "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash." My goal is that Writing the Life Poetic be the flame fueling the life well lived.

Practicing poets, aspiring poets, and teachers of writing in a variety of settings can use Writing the Life Poetic to write, read, and enjoy poems. Both practical and inspirational, it will leave readers with a greater appreciation for the poetry they read and a greater sense of possibility for the poetry they write.

Like the Heart, the World is broken into three sections (New York, San Francisco, and Portland). How important is location to your writing?

I wouldn't say that location is important to my writing, per se, but that the writing processes that I chose in each of the cities I lived seemed to yield a kind of poetry that resonated with that particular place. In New York, I walked everywhere and carried a small, handheld tape recorder where I whispered my little slivers of street-sightings and trash tracings. Then I'd transcribe these observations into the computer later and write from there. In San Francisco, I had a regular rhythm of freewriting (in longhand, in notebooks) in cafes, often while listening to live acoustic music. These days, I have somewhat of a hybrid of my previous two practices. I carry 3x5" index cards everywhere and write down everything that comes—usually while hiking in a rainforest or taking a bath. As a result, the New York poems often echo urban alienation and are laced with street grit. The San Francisco poems are often thematically and craft-wise a little looser and more musical and the Portland poems feel to me watery and deeply green.

Do you have a favorite poetic form?

I'm fascinated by haiku. This form represents to me the quintessential art of compression that poetry asks of us: to reveal a panoramic truth in a thin, velum layer of words.

Who are you currently reading?

Tess Gallagher, Paulann Petersen, Mari L'Esperance, Jack Gilbert, Jericho Brown, Jay Leeming.

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

Welcome what comes. The poems choosing you are the ones that need to be written. Don't judge them or worry if they're "important" enough. Your poems will teach you who you are as a poet and a person. Just follow the golden thread and let them write you.

*****

If you wish to learn more about Sage Cohen, check out her website at www.sagesaidso.com.

Or you can stop by her blog at www.writingthelifepoetic.typepad.com.

*****

Are you a poet or poetry publisher interested in seeing yourself (or your authors) interviewed here on Poetic Asides? Well, figure out how to get the ball rolling on that by clicking here.

*****

Looking for more poetry information?

Check out our poetry titles (on sale in the month of April) HERE.
Read the most recent WritersDigest.com poetry-related articles HERE.
View several poetic forms HERE.
See where poetry is happening HERE.

Interview With Poet Katy Evans-Bush

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:08:58 GMT

Since I know this interview is a little on the long side (which is a good thing), I won't spend too much time introducting Katy Evans-Bush, who recently released her first collection of poetry Me and the Dead through Salt Publishing. She also maintains the very popular literary blog Baroque in Hackney.

As I've come to expect from titles published by Salt, Me and the Dead was a very enjoyable read. Here's one of my favorite poems:

Or Something

You told me the universe is doing something.
I forget what: expanding or flapping
in the wind or something--no matter which,
it's only one infinitely possible universe.
It's only ours and imperfect anyway.
Somewhere somebody else's universe
is either expanding, its particles drawing strangely
away from one another as if in horror but still,
I suppose, part of the pack--
or even shrinking (did we consider that?)
which would be caused by the atoms huddling
close for warmth or comfort
against that flapping wind or something;
rubbing together, the friction,
the blanket of static, creating our electric
storms and other interesting diversions.
The universes are, in their multitudes,
unending and also infinitesimal. Some say
they're parallel while others talk of layering.
Oh, the layered universes--I picture them
piled high like feather beds, the feathers inside them
brushing across each other or something.

*****

What are you up to?

Right now? My boyfriend's daughter just took me out for a slap-up lunch (with cheesecake) for my birthday! She's nearly 15 and she earned the money herself, so it was a huge treat.

Other than that, I'm reading up on Oscar Wilde and Henry James for a long poem called (so far) Speculation and Conjecture. It's half done, and I'm thrilled that it's going to be published in January as a pamphlet by Rack Press in Wales.

Then there's the next collection from Salt; they'd like a manuscript by the end of the year.

Then there's this novel idea.

And I'm a bit behind on essays and reviews promised.

Then there's work, kids, laundry, the kitchen…

You maintain a very popular blog at http://www.baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com. How do you feel poets can benefit from having a blog? Also, do you feel all poets should have a blog?

Well… there are maybe three ways in which a poet can benefit from having a blog, but spending time writing blog posts instead of poems probably isn't one of them!

It's a great way to establish a web presence and build a readership. BUT, it is incredibly time-consuming. Really, you need to be doing it for its own sake. You need to have something to say, and be unafraid of saying it. (Yes: I have had fear. Mainly when you realise beyond the shadow of a doubt that the poet you wrote that thing about has just read your blog. It's a great lesson in circumspection. I'd apologise here but that would mean admitting I said it in the first place.)

You also have to be interesting, so that people will come back and read you. This may seem obvious! But there are some very boring blogs out there and they reek of the devoir. (Of course, there are also lots of great ones.) Maybe it's just about looking as if you're interested in things. Humour helps, but deep thinking and being interested go a long way.

Mine is only partially a poetry blog. I say it's about all the same stuff as poetry, which of course includes poetry; but I write about anything. I maintain multiple blog identities: poetry, local neighbourhood, arts & culture, home life anecdotes, certain political issues, and grammar/copy-editing etc.

A blog is a great way to lay out your stall – if you have one to lay out: this is the "having something to say" caveat. You can use your blog to position yourself, identify and deepen your aesthetic (or other) stance, work up material even. You can establish your credentials as someone who can, for example, write reviews; editors might take you more seriously because they can see you are seriously engaged in the cultural dialogue. But this will only work if you really are engaged…

And you have to love your blog. You need to work long and hard at internet-networking, registering on blog directories, reading other blogs and commenting, building up a blogroll you can stand by, getting to know the landscape, working out RSS feeds… It all takes time. I don't want to put anyone off, but I really don't think it is for absolutely everyone and no one should feel they have to write a blog. There are other things you can do to raise profile. If you're just doing it to get a web presence you'll resent it. And if you don't do all that, you won't get the readers anyway so it won't do so much for your web presence. Also: it's a long haul. I've built up my reader base over nearly three years.

The third benefit, of course, is your readers. Mine are wonderful. I'm always amazed by the great comments they leave. Such interesting people; I really think I have the best readers in the world. I love them. And I'd never have had them without writing my blog!

Some of them tell me they've even bought Me and the Dead…

You have lived in both the United States and United Kingdom. Do you notice any differences in the voices coming out of either country?

Well, there's a massive difference! Just as there is in daily conversation, TV, pop music, etc. As Oscar Wilde famously said, two countries divided by a common language. But then, there is a lot of overlap, as demonstrated in crossovers in all those areas.

The UK "voice" is much more wry, ironic, mocking or self-mocking. There's more use of humour. Wit, word play, punning (even the serious papers here have punning headlines as the standard), double entendre – and there is much more metrical rhyming poetry from people who don't consider themselves "formalists." The political divide between "free verse" and "formalist poetry" doesn't exist in the UK. (I think it is a political, not an aesthetic, one; and it's exacerbated now by the fact that a lot of poets write free verse because it's all they know how to do.) Glyn Maxwell is an example of an English poet who writes in form, who isn't a "formalist" poet in the political sense, who has crossed over (as it were) to the USA. Most poets here use rhyme, sometimes, and metre, sometimes, and think nothing of it.

There is a sort of earnestness in the US which does spill, to ill effect, I think, into poetry. It doesn't do in the UK ever to look as if you care too much about something. But then, the UK can suffer from a surfeit of politeness and anecdotalism. You want sweep, too, and America certainly has that.

I love the multiplicity of experience and the opening-out of the more pronounced Modernist influence. I love DA Powell, and Frederick Seidel, for example. As different as they are; they both use words and cadences in really invigorating ways.

My favourite poets come from both sides of the Atlantic; I think either without the other would be much the poorer.

Me and the Dead is your first full-length collection of poetry. How long did it take to get this collection together?

In one sense you could say my whole life, as I've always read, and written, poetry. But I think the oldest poem in there goes back to maybe 2001, maybe 2000, so in that sense it took seven or eight years. The next book won't take nearly so long – partly because there were poems that didn't fit in the first book, and partly because I think I'm on more of a roll these days than I was in 2001 – or, clearly, before. At that stage I was finding my feet in terms of what and how I wanted to write. The fact that the first poem in the book is from 2001 must mean that that's when I started to find my feet.

Were you surprised by anything during the publication process after your manuscript was accepted?

Not really: as I was new to it I had few preconceptions. Also, Salt is a "small" indie press (though they publish many more poetry books than the "big" established ones), so I knew the rules might be different from what you hear about the big publishers. The main surprise I suppose was how closely they worked with me on things like the cover.

What do you think makes a good collection?

Good poems?

Seriously! People talk a lot about narrative arc and all that, and I think it doesn't matter. Why be so prescriptive? Any good book will have engagement with the world. Something to say. Depth, or truth. Either variety or a single idea used well, and fruitfully. Seriousness of purpose – even Ogden Nash had that. It will do what it does, and do it well. It will be surprising and then inevitable, but still surprising.

What is your favorite poetic form?

I don't think I really think in terms of "forms" as much as structure, or the over-arching idea of form. I write a lot of blank – or blankish – verse. And I am very attracted to sonnets, I love the dialectical structure. But I recently wrote something that feels to me like a sonnet and it has thirty dimeter lines, so don't consider me the expert please.

I think "form" is a word we don't really use correctly, anyway. EVERYTHING has form, unless it is "without form and void," like an egg white. I'm not remotely interested in reading a poem like an egg white.

Whatever the rules, whether the poet made them up or even became conscious of them, whichever bits he or she has pulled from the prosodic toolbox, every successful poem must have some sort of structure or form – something the poet decided he or she was trying to do with that poem. You know, a poem that uses only every third letter of the alphabet and has three spaces between each letter has a form.

High Modernism has form. The higher, the higher.

Language poetry and flarf don't interest me overly. Pure chance is just random and not interesting to me. The human brain is designed to seek, and make, and discern, pattern: even when there is no pattern we try to find it. And IQ tests, what they test is our ability to make pattern. Sure, there is value in being able to cope with the unexpected, but the definition of coping would probably be to make it useful in some way: i.e., to find meaning. If something has no meaning it isn't interesting.

And so on. I'm very open about what I enjoy reading, but I'm utterly attached to the idea of meaning.

Who are you currently reading?

James Merrill: I've recently been rereading his Ouija board epic The Changing Light at Sandover, which I always find very beautiful, weird and fruitful. Very funny, and haunting, and deep.

Also Mick Imlah's astonishing and rich The Lost Leader, which has added poignancy since his early death in January; I've particularly been enjoying the final section, Afterlives of the Poets – and it's only in writing it here that I realise it may be on a theme with the Ouija board romance!

I'm just about to write an essay for the Contemporary Poetry Review about Michael Donaghy's Collected Poems and his prose, The Shape of the Dance; so I've naturally been reading those, too.

Then there's Rita Dove's fascinating new book, Sonata Mullatica, featuring a mixed-race 18th century virtuoso and Beethoven, which just arrived in the post… and Roddy Lumsden's new collection, Third Wish Wasted, which is just out… and a young Hungarian poet called Ágnes Lehószky…

Also I memorised one of Shakespeare's sonnets the other week, and loved it. I said it for days. Lovely shapes in the mouth.

And then there's this book about Henry James and Oscar Wilde…

And, er, Twitter…

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

I'd say, with Henry James: "try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost."

*****

You can read Katy's blog at http://www.baroqueinhackney.wordpress.com.

Or visit her publisher at www.saltpublishing.com.

*****

Are you a published poet or poetry publisher interested in having an interview featured on this blog? Click here to learn how we might be able to make that happen.

*****

Looking for more poetry information?

Check out our poetry titles (on sale in the month of April) HERE.
Read the most recent WritersDigest.com poetry-related articles HERE.
View several poetic forms HERE.
See where poetry is happening HERE.

Interview With Poet Denise Duhamel

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:19:19 GMT

(Note to prompt-hungry poets: This is not a prompt; please don't mistakenly post your poems for prompts into the comments of this blog post.)

Okay, so I know everyone's busy with writing poems for the April PAD Challenge and reading everyone else's poems, but I've got a great interview with a great poet burning a hole in my pocket. So, I'm gonna go ahead and post it here.

I remember first reading Denise Duhamel's Queen for a Day (University of Pittsburgh Press) while flying from one place to another. I can't remember which trip now, but maybe that's because while I was in the plane (both ways), I was sucked into Duhamel's poems. Anyway, I recently learned about her most recent collection Ka-Ching! (also University of Pittsburgh Press) and used that as an excuse to interview her.

There are many great poems in Ka-Ching!, but one of my favorites is this sestina:

Delta Flight 659
--to Sean Penn

I'm writing this on a plane, Sean Penn,
with my black Pilot Razor ballpoint pen.
Ever since 9/11, I'm a nervous flyer. I leave my Pentium
Processor in Florida so TSA can't x-ray my stanzas, penetrate
my persona. Maybe this should be in iambic pentameter,
rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in a Penn

variant. I convinced myself the ticket to Baghdad was too expensive.
I contemplated going as a human shield. I read in open-
mouthed shock, that your trip there was a $56,000 expenditure.
Is that true? I watched you on Larry King Live--his suspenders
and tie, your open collar. You saw the war's impending
mess. My husband gambled on my penumbra

of doubt. So you station yourself at a food silo in Iraq. What happens
to me if you get blown up? He begged me to stay home, be his Penelope.
I sit alone in coach, but last night I sat with four poets, depending
on one another as readers, in a Pittsburgh cafe. I tried to be your pen
pal in 1987, not because of your pensive
bad boy looks, but because of a poem you'd penned

that appeared in an issue of Frank. I still see the poet in you, Sean Penn.
You probably think fans like me are your penance
for your popularity, your star bulging into a pentagon
filled with witchy wanna-bes and penniless
poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula
of glamour like so many menancing penguins.

But honest, I come in peace, Sean Penn,
writing on my plane ride home. I want no part of your penthouse
or the snowy slopes of your Aspen.
I won't stalk you like the swirling grime cloud over Pig Pen.
I have no scripts or stupendous
novel I want you to option. I even like your wife, Robin Wright Penn.

I only want to keep myself busy on this flight, to tell you of four penny-
loafered poets in Pennsylvania
who, last night, chomping on primavera penne
pasta, pondered poetry, celebrity, Iraq, the penitentiary
of free speech. And how I reminded everyone that Sean Penn
once wrote a poem. I peer out the window, caress my lucky pendant:

Look, Sean Penn, the clouds are drawn with charcoal pencils.
The sky is opening like a child's first stab at penmanship.
The sun begins to ripen orange, then deepen.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I am teaching, giving a lot of readings, and writing at least 5 minutes a day. That was my resolution for 2008. I thought I can always find five minutes, right? Even if it's in the morning before coffee or before I fall asleep.

Sean Penn won another Best Actor Oscar recently for his role in Milk. As someone who's written a sestina for Penn, what is your favorite Sean Penn role?

My favorite Sean Penn role is actually Brad Whitewood, Jr. in the movie At Close Range. Penn plays Christopher Walker's son.

It seems that I see your name all over the place when reading online literary journals. Do prefer publication in online or print? Does the medium even matter?

I'm open to online magazines as well as print magazines. I am a fetishist when it comes to paper, so I like holding literary journals in my hands, but I also am excited by the idea of having work up online. More people see it that way and, even though the work is on a flickering screen, it somehow seems more permanent.

How do you handle the process of submitting your work?

I have some magazines that I really love and send to often. So I send to those places as well as new start up magazines. I am all about supporting the smallest of mags as that is where my poems were first published when no one else wanted them.

How do you go about putting your collections together?

My friend Stephanie Strickland reads though stacks of poems and helps me find the most accomplished ones and then we start looking for themes. She helped me enormously with Ka-Ching!

In Ka-Ching!, you use form a lot--from sestinas to prose poems in the shape of money. How important do you feel forms are to a developing (or even established) poet? Also, do you think they serve a purpose for the reader?

I resisted traditional form for a long time—I had a sonnet in my first book and then it was free verse and prose poems pretty much until Two and Two. I started feeling comfortable with form because of my collaborations with Maureen Seaton who is a master/mistress of the sonnet. When I wrote forms with her, I finally "got" how they were very freeing and fun. I think it's important for me to challenge myself and change and not get too comfortable in my poetry.

In Ka-Ching!, you include many confessional poems that involve yourself, your husband (the poet Nick Carbo), and others. In your confessional poems, do you draw a line between reality and fiction? And if so, how do you determine where to make that line fuzzy?

I don't really draw the line so much. I love poetry because it is about memory and the way I remember things change and forms of poetry force me to change the story and my way of remembering.

Who (or what) are have you been reading recently?

Ed Falco's In the Park of Culture (short fictions), Bust (magazine subscription), NOR #5 (literary magazine), 5 a.m. #28 (literary magazine), and Mary Jane Ryals' The Moving Waters (poetry.)

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

Read everything! Be open to everything. Trust your process.

*****

To find out more about Duhamel and Ka-Ching!, try visiting the University of Pittsburgh Press website at http://www.upress.pitt.edu.

Interview With 2008 Poetic Asides Poet Laureate Sara Diane Doyle

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:21:27 GMT

Quick note: I plan on sharing the complete rules, how-to's, advice, etc., on the 2009 April PAD Challenge tomorrow right here on the blog. There's no special registration required--so just check back in tomorrow to get the full scoop on what's expected.

*****

Okay, so one of the cool things about the 2008 April PAD Challenge is that I was able to select a Poetic Asides Poet Laureate. It was a tough decision last year, but Sara Diane Doyle shared some truly great poems through the month. See the announcement (and read some of here April poems) by clicking here.

She even shared a new poetic form with the group after the challenge was over called The Roundabout. You can check out that poetic form by clicking here.

Anyway, she recently let me interview her to see what she's been up to and to share advice with poets new to the April PAD Challenge.

*****

What've you been up to since being named the 2008 April PAD Challenge Poet Laureate?

You mean besides enjoying life in Colorado? Well, I've spent the last year mentoring teen writers, including challenging them with a 12-week poetry project last fall. In November, I wrote a novel with National Novel Writing Month. As of January, I've been focusing on submitting my work, both poetry and prose, to markets.

Who (or what) have you been reading recently?

In 2008, I read 100 books, so I had the chance to read a lot of great writers, including: N.M. Kelby, C.S. Lewis, Alice Hoffman, Madeleine L'Engle, Jane Austen, Garth Nix, and Billy Collins. This year, I'm taking it easier. My current favorites are Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and my favorite poetry collection of the last few months is Billy Collins' Ballistics. Much of my reading time goes to reading the writings of the teenagers on the forum where I mentor.

How did you manage to write so many good poems throughout the month of April last year?

I don't have a secret recipe, if that's what you're asking! But I know that the more I'm thinking about poetry, the more I'm reading it and writing it, the better I seem to get. So being able to read the poems others were posting helped--it kept spurring me on to better poetry! Also, having the prompts helped a lot. Normally, I have one good poem every so often, largely because I wait to be hit with a great idea. But having a starting point helped get those ideas going. I also tried my hardest to find a different angle on the prompt each day. For example, on day one, when the prompt was to write about "firsts," I saw many poems about first love, first kiss, first child, etc. So I said to myself, "what is a first no one else has written about yet?" That's how I came up with the idea to write about the first time I donated blood. I love to find the tiny, hidden subjects. And if it makes anyone feel better, I had some real clunkers last year--they STILL make me cringe when I read them. So don't try to write 30 amazing poems, write 30 good poems and some of them will be amazing.

Any big plans or goals for 2009?

My goal this year is to get published. So I'm sending out submissions of both poetry and short stories on a regular basis. I'd also like to finish my current novel. And maybe learn another language. I like to have fun goals, and some that I know I can reach with a little effort. Unreachable goals aren't helpful at all.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given? And by who?

There are two that vie for first place. The first was "celebrate rejection." My high school creative writing teacher, Mrs. Warner, made this a huge part of our class--she threw a party for the first rejection slip, and really taught me how to embrace the more negative part of the writing life. Rejection is part of the writing business, and if you can't deal with it, or if you take it too personally, it's going to kill you. So I celebrate every rejection I earn--earning a rejection means I'm putting my work out there, and that's how I will get published.

The second is from one of my favorite authors, Jodi Picoult. Her advice: "You can't edit a blank page." That statement has gotten me writing more times than not. A blank page can be intimidating, and I know how easy it is to give into the white space. Sometimes, we are afraid for writing crap, afraid of what will come out, afraid it will be true, etc. But we can't do anything with that fear. We can't edit it, we can't cut out the bad parts, we can't make it better. But if we are willing to write, to fill the blank page, then we can move forward. Most writers aren't brilliant in the first draft. We all have to just get the words down. Once we've done that, it's much easier to make things better!

Do you have any advice for the poets who are entering the 2009 April PAD Challenge?

Yes! Get up and read the prompt early each day. Get it into your head. Then take some time to see it from all sides before you write. Some days, an idea will jump out right away, but some days it might take until nine at night. Don't be afraid to let the idea brew for a while! Pull out all the old tools you were taught in grade school: alliteration, meter, imagery, similes, metaphors, symbolism. Put them to good use. Try some new forms, even if the prompt doesn't call for it. I often use www.shadowpoetry.com as a resource, they list all sorts of poetic forms.

Then, just write. Get it out. Remember, you can edit it later.

And most of all, have fun! I had a blast last year, and I'm looking forward to this year's prompts. Let your friends and family know what you are doing, let them read some of your work. Be excited about poetry!

Interview With Poet Patricia Fargnoli

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:07:12 GMT

It's not every day that I get an opportunity to interview a former poet laureate. So when I was afforded the chance to read Patricia Fargnoli's Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press), I jumped at the chance to interview the former New Hampshire Poet Laureate (her term ended earlier this year).

Though Fargnoli is a retired psychotherapist, she just published her first collection of poems Necessary Light (Utah State University Press) in 1999. And has made her presence felt in the poetry community in a very short period of time with another full-length collection and chapbook in the same 10-year span. Oh yeah, Fargnoli is also in the final stages of publishing another collection with Tupelo Press.

Here's one of my favorites (I have many) from Duties of the Spirit:

The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only only he could see.

*****

What are you currently up to?

On March 22, I finished my 3 1/2-year term as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate. And my new book, Then, Something, which is due to be published in fall by Tupelo Press, is at the publishers and soon to go into production. We've already decided on the cover. I've also recently finished work with two private tutorial students...all of which should mean that I could rest a while, and, hopefully, turn my energies toward writing new work. But March's calendar is full of readings I want to attend and lunches with poet/friends and teaching my private class. And April's only a little freer. The last week in April and the beginning of May I'm going to The Dorset Writer's Colony in Vermont for a week (and would go longer if I didn't have a cat and no one for him to live with in my absence). In June, I'm teaching at an Elderhostel for a week, and leading an Ekphrasis workshop in July and a workshop for Teachers in August. In between, I'm giving a couple of readings....and will be working at proofreading my manuscript for the press...and writing a reader's guide. Whew! Would you believe I've been "retired" for 10 years now?

You've just recently finished up a stint as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate. What were your duties? Were you able to accomplish everything you wanted?

As poet laureate, I had no official duties. Some poet laureates do a little or nothing; some do a lot. I like that what I did was left entirely up to me so that I could use the skills and interests I have in the way I wanted to. I'd decided from the outset that I wanted to do something for children, something for libraries and something for New Hampshire poets. And I'm proud that I accomplished all three. With the support of the NH State Library, The Writer's Project and the NH Council on the Arts, I was able to recruit 43 poet-volunteers from around the state, and to organize a "Children's Poetry Day in the Libraries Day" the first April after I was elected. The Governor issued a proclamation proclaiming April 14th as statewide "Children's Poetry Day;" and each volunteer put on a program for children in a library near him/her. We published articles in almost every regional magazine promoting the importance of poetry in children's lives and served about 350 children and parents on that day.

I also initiated (again with the help of Art Council personnel) a "New Hampshire Poets Showcase" link to the Arts Council website. Every two weeks we featured a new NH poet with a poem, bio, photo, links and a paragraph about how their poem came to be.

I also did readings and workshops around the state and attended civil functions occasionally. And I delivered a poem at the Governor's Inauguration.

When I look back at what I accomplished I'm amazed that I could do it. I had reservations about accepting the position in the beginning because of some chronic health problems that have limited my mobility and energy. But I'm glad I didn't turn it down; the position was life-enriching. I made many friends and have some wonderful memories.

When and why did you begin publishing poetry?

I began writing and studying poetry seriously when I was in my mid-30's in a graduate class with Brendan Galvin at Central CT State University. Along with 7 other women who became my close friends (and are to this day), I took the class for several years. My first poems were published in Tendril (which has been gone for years) and Poet Lore. In fact, Brendan sent out my work to Tendril without telling me and when, one of the poems was accepted, he called me from his vacationing on Cape Cod to give me the news.

I was hooked. I've always loved poetry and had written it earlier...publishing in the high school newspaper etc., but I knew nothing then about contemporary poetry and the only two poets' names I was familiar with were Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. However, it was many years later, when I was 62, that I published my first book, Necessary Light, after Mary Oliver chose it as the May Swenson Award winner.

The "why" is harder to explain. Besides the love of poetry, there's the challenge of getting what can't be easily said into words; the thrill of connecting in a deep way to readers, the adrenaline rush when you open an acceptance letter and the way writing a poem can somehow make sense of your life.

Do you have any method to where and when you submit your poems?

Hmmm. I usually submit about 3 times a year....in late September, January, and maybe June (to those journals that accept summer submissions). But this isn't rigid and if I have some poems I want to send out and have the time, I'll send them. I have a list of journals I'd like to have my poems in...a rather long list. Over the years, I've subscribed to many of them and I know what kind of work they take. I believe strongly that poets shouldn't be expecting editors to publish them if they, themselves, aren't supporting the work of presses, literary journals, and other poets.

I only occasionally do simultaneous submissions because it's hard to keep track of them. But I do them more lately because I am 71 and time is passing far too quickly...I can't afford to wait a year to hear results anymore...especially since the competition is so fierce and rejection so frequent. And when I do submit simultaneously, I don't send to more than 3 journals at a time, or to journals that don't accept them. But other than that, I have no specific method.

Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press) won the Jane Kenyon Poetry Book Award and your first collection Necessary Light (Utah State University Press) won the May Swenson Book Award. What do you think makes a good collection?

Oh Robert, it is so, so subjective! I've several times been a judge or early-round judge of a book competition so I've read hundreds of manuscripts and I can tell what impresses me....though it probably would be different for someone else. At the top of my list is "Vision." I mean that the book presents the poet's unique way of looking at the world....some fragment of the whole. And the poems must "matter" and, when taken together, seem like a cohesive whole (even though there may be single poems that are different from most of the others)....I don't have patience with the superficial or pretentious language that reveals nothing when you look under it. I look for depth. Craft matters to me greatly. And once I gave top prize to a book (a novel in verse) mainly because I fell in love with the "voice" of the protagonist. (He was an ironic everyman.) Of course, the craft was impeccable too.

What do you look for in a good poem?

Depth, beauty, spirit, craft, sound, humanity. Sometimes fracturing and remaking of reality, so that I as a reader can see a thing newly. Some news to help me understand my own life and its meaning.

In Duties of the Spirit, you deal with nature and aging--even confronting death. These topics are big and well-traveled, yet you make them your own. I'm sure part of your success comes back to revision. So, how much time do you commit to revision? And how do you know a poem is done?

Revision is, for me, the process by which a poem comes into being. My early drafts are terrible. I often overwrite pushing myself past all the voices in my head that say "Ugh" just in order to get words onto the page where they can be worked at. I then will do maybe 3 or 4 quick revisions and put it away for at least a few days. Then I work at it again. If I can get it into what begins to feel to me like a poem and I'm as far as I can go, I'll bring it to one of my workshops (there are 2; one of them is online). That usually results in another revision. I have what I call my "WP file," which stands for "Working Poems." The revised draft (if I'm still not satisfied which is usually the case) goes into that file...and periodically, I'll pull it up and work some more.

In later drafts, often, I'm picking at single words, or perhaps upping the ante on a phrase that feels flat...or experimenting with shifting the order around or changing line-breaks...that kind of thing. I've often worked this way on a poem for years before I'm satisfied...if I ever am. And even when I send out a poem, I'll later revise it... or even after it's published. I don't know when a poem is done....it's mostly just let go.

I think of revision as being like a sculptor with a block of marble. The poet chips and chips away at the poem until the real poem (hopefully) emerges from the block of words.

Who (or what) have you been reading recently?

I read poetry every day...and not just a little. I have 7 bookcases (3 of them tall ones) in my 2 room apartment and they are all filled with books of poetry. I spend more on poetry than I do on anything else except food and rent. Currently on my bedstand (which means I'm reading them) are: Robert Hass Time and Materials (which I'm reading for the second time); Mary Oliver's New Evidence; Louise Gluck's Averno (also reading for the 2nd time); Borges This Craft of Verse; Rebecca Seiferle, Bitters; BAP, Charles Wright, ed; Henri Coles, Blackbird and Wolf; Charles Bennett's How to Make a Woman Out of Water; Ruth Stone's What Love Comes to; The Making of A Sonnet, Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland; Dante's Divine Comedy; and the current issues of several journals: The Georgia Review, Shenandoah,The Harvard Review and The American Poetry Journal.

On order are Ann Fisher-Wirth's Carta Marina and Jack Gilbert's new book (which I've forgotten the name of).

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

Read, read, read, and support other poets, publishers and the poetry community.

*****

To learn more about Patricia Fargnoli, check out her website at www.patriciafargnoli.com.

Children's poetry in April!

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:28:11 GMT

Gregory K. Pincus wanted to share the following announcement from his blog about April: http://gottabook.blogspot.com/2009/03/announcing-30-poets30-days.html

Basically, he's going to post a previously unpublished poem by a different children's poet each day in April, including poets like Jack Prelutsky, Jane Yolen, Nikki Giovanni, and many more.

Should be fun reading for all ages!

Announcing the Guest Judges for the April PAD Challenge eBook!

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:59:43 GMT

So I'm excited that some of our April PAD Challenge participants will have a chance to be featured in a well-designed eBook. The purpose of this project is not to exclude participants but to shine light on some of the very good poetry that happens on this blog in April. If you were here last year, you know what I mean.

Well, here's how the April PAD Challenge eBook is going to work. I'm going to make the deadline for consideration at midnight on April 30 (whether you're posting a poem to Day 1, Day 30, or sometime between). At that point, I'm going to go through each day (possibly with the help of my amazingly awesome wife and poet, Tammy) and select a Top 5 for each day.

(Note: As you know, a Top 5 in poetry is very, very subjective. And if this year is anything like last year, there is bound to be a ton of great poems each and every day. So please don't have any bruised feelings if you're not in this group.)

So, I choose a Top 5 each day. 5 poems per day X 30 days = 150 poems, right? But only the Top 50 poems during the month will appear in the eBook. And this is how we'll narrow it down:

* I'll be passing a group of Top 5 poems for each day to a guest judge (list below). That guest judge will pick a favorite from the Top 5 list to be the top of the day. So that'll take care of 30 of the 50 poems.

* I'll then pick out 20 from the 120 remaining poems. That'll get us to 50 poems.

Last year, more than 400 poets submitted more than 4,000 poems. So I definitely want y'all to know just how exceptional these 50 poems poems will be. And that those who are selected should feel proud, and those who aren't should feel just as good about themselves.

Apart from making it into the eBook, all those who complete the April PAD Challenge this year should receive a certificate of completion and badge for their websites/blogs (as we did last year). Plus, you should be able to make plenty of new friends (as we did last year).

So, here's the very distinguished list of judges (who are all volunteering their time and effort to the cause for free):

* Seth Abramson
* Sandra Beasley
* Shaindel Beers
* Mary Biddinger
* Jericho Brown
* Edward Byrne
* Sage Cohen
* J.P. Dancing Bear
* Jim Daniels
* Mark Doty
* Annie Finch
* Nick Flynn
* Jeannine Hall Gailey
* Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
* Vince Gotera
* S.A. Griffin
* Tom C. Hunley
* Collin Kelley
* Amy King
* Dorianne Laux
* Alex Lemon
* Reb Livingston
* Diane Lockward
* Marilyn Nelson
* Aimee Nezhukumatathil
* Chad Prevost
* Don Share
* Martha Silano
* Patricia Smith
* Anne Tardos

If I were running a literary journal, I would be overwhelmed with joy to have these fine poets published within my pages. To have them volunteering their time to help us out here is a great honor. (And if you want to learn more about them, just click on their names above.)

I won't be revealing which days they're going to judge (even to the judges themselves) until after the April 30 midnight deadline. I have several reasons for this--not least among them that I want poets to focus on writing a poem-a-day in April (as opposed to writing only on particular days). Hey, I'll be writing every day; you should, too, right?

Anyway, I'm super excited, and I hope you are as well.

Poets Helping Poets: What comes first? Poem or collection?

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:41:03 GMT

I've received differing answers from poets over the past year about what comes first when putting a collection together. Do they settle on a theme and write poems to fit the theme? Or do they write individual poems and then try to fit them together? Some poets say they do it one way; some the other; some do both (also known as the By-Any-Means-Necessary Method).

Anyway, I asked the Poetic Asides group on Facebook, and once again, so many great answers piled in that I couldn't use them all.

*****

I worry about the book element after the poems are written. Assembling poems for a collection means trying to get a thread running through them that helps them to connect to each other, or lean on other for meaning and content.

Of course, it's easier if you have sequences of poems: their running order is easier to organise, because they have a cohering quality that allows them to stand alone. But you still have the problem of what you put beforehand and what comes afterwards - because the outside poems have to be able to stand up to those sequences: not be overshadowed by the strength of the coherance of that sequence.

Barbara Smith

*****

I have done both. Generally I just write and then something evolves.

David Fraser

*****

Ordering the Storm is a collection of essays by respectable poets on that very topic. I recommend people check it out. Everyone tells you to front load and back load to wow the judges in contests and that's what I did with my first book. When I learned the book was invited to be in the VQR Poetry Series and no longer needed to pass the screen test, I reorganized the first half drastically. Now the poems form a progression and, I'd like to believe, the voice and narrative thread each together collectively.

Allen Braden

*****

My first collection, You Beckon, was put together from the poems written over an extended period of time. So the poems dictated the collection. It was amazing how once the process began it seemed to take on a life all its own and every poem seemed to find its exact perfect spot.

Peggy Eldridge-Love

*****

Charles Olson once told Ed Dorn something like, “If you study one thing deeply, you will learn everything.” Some of the premises being that everything is connected and that extreme concentration will enable you to think as the subject thinks. Dorn followed Olson’s advice and ended up with the great collection of poems called Gunslinger.

I learned about studying one thing before I knew of Olson telling that to Dorn. After I read what Olson told Dorn, I followed the advice more passionately. But for me it’s a bit different. Yes, I can see the interconnectedness of things, and the focus of studying one thing presents an amazing clarity of a sustained thinking process. But for me, as I said, it’s a bit different. For me, it’s about sustaining energy and imagination.

I’ve seven collections of poetry, three of which are published and one is forthcoming. They are all tightly themed. And that is because I stuck to the topic. The topic, for me, creates the energy to write. The topic continually stimulates my imagination. The topic is the muse. And I chase the muse whenever and wherever I can until I’m tired. In this last book, it was about 80 poems over a year until I was tired. I imagine I will pick it up again, because the content does seem endless.

But here’s the point: the theme/topic is the sustenance of my writing. And once it is gone, so is the writing.

Plus, I’m stubborn. While composing this most recent book, I wouldn’t write any poems that didn’t relate to the topic. The same is true of the other books. I wouldn’t veer. One book revolved around cosmology and particle physics and took about four or five years to write. One book fed off the energies of a Lorca poem for about five years. One book fed off a self-created writing assignment for about a month, and then revisions. One lasted for about a half year as I created a world where time moves backwards. One lasted about three or four years as I created a new mythology. One lasted about a year as I was proclaiming love. And this last one lasted about year, though really nineteen or twenty, and I still think there is another five years in it.

So, yeah. I compose by theme. Theme motivates, focuses, and stimulates me. Theme creates visions. Theme is the thing that let’s me confront the big issues, like love, death, and time, but indirectly, which is the only way one can confront those big topics today.

Theme gives me purpose.

Tom Holmes

*****

For me, the idea of a collection comes from a small selection of poems already written -- poems which, when looking back on them (ie to find places to submit them to etc) have a similar voice or touch on complementary themes. My poetry play, "Dreams of May," very much developed from the realization that I had created a character via my poems. But now, I am working on a collection that is more theme driven, and although it is starting from some previously written and published poems, it is continuing with new ones I am writing with that theme in mind. Otherwise, I suppose the answer to your question is "yes, all of the above"

Sue Guiney

*****

I have a chapbook (published) and two full size manuscripts. I put them all together with poems I had written already. It's the following my passion approach.

I'm keeping this email short. I don't know how people decide what they are going to write about and then create a book. Lots of poets do this, but I have to write what comes and then after I have a few hundred poems see what it looks like and begin to put it together. As I send out my current manuscripts I revise and continually rework poems. I am now getting edit feedback, new eyes to look at my two full size manuscripts in process, to see if I can edit them to a better book. I'd like my next publication to be a full size, but I also have chapbook sizes circulating. One chapbook was recently a finalist but didn't quite make it.

Julene Tripp Weaver

*****

Generally I write poems one at a time and later see how I can arrange them. But in all honesty, I find assembling a collection much harder than writing a poem, primarily because I feel there’s a contradiction between something being a "collection" and expecting to find in it a necessary sequence. This need for sequence or cohesion seems to be a variation on the insistence for narrative, which I don't really have an interest in. So I find myself torn between a cohesion so obvious it borders on monotony and a cohesion so subtle I can't imagine anyone else perceiving it. At this point I tend to throw up my hands and say, they are related because they all came from the same mind, it's inescapable. They're like a series of stepping stones; their relationship is simply that they all happen to be in the same river.

Two poets come to mind pondering this topic: Richard Wilbur and Louise Gluck. I remember Wilbur being asked how he assembled his collections and he said, essentially, that he didn't give it much thought. It was a collection. I envied his insouciance, since now, it seems, publishers expect thematic progression in poetry collections. To that end, Louise Gluck's collection, "Wild Iris," which won the Pulitzer, always struck me as great in its thematic cohesion, in its progressive development, but weak in its individual poems. I remember thinking after reading it, I would rather my individual poems be great though my collection lacked thematic cohesion.

Michael T. Young

*****

I've had two collections - one pamphlet and one full. In both cases I arranged the poems after they had been written. I didn't have an idea of how the final collections would look as I didn't know that they would be published. I'm still writing about whatever presents itself.

Maggie Sawkins

*****

I do both really. I have a couple of themes I like to write about, but I also write one-offs that have nothing to do with anything!

Paul De La Plante

*****

I do it both ways. That's the short answer.

Pris Campbell

*****

Ever since I began to really consciously develop my own poetics I have written with the design of the complete book in mind. Perhaps this is a Mallarme influence. For Mallarme, there is only one cosmic book, and each book is merely a reading or commentary on "the one true text"... and which, I imagine, is written in an ideal language (something like Benjamin's Messianic language perhaps, and hence, ultimately a language we no longer understand). I wrote a book length poem over a period of ten years, and then for the past ten years have written books usually composed of two or more long hybrid sequences.

Eric Selland

*****

It really does depend on the muse I think. For example, I'm currently finishing one manuscript and editing two that were done all at once on the same theme. As one thought led into the next so did each poem BUT I'm also editing four other manuscripts that are collections on a theme scattered across years (up to a decade). If the theme is one, I'm more inclined to I obviously write more of it than any other and will do that one in succession more readily (and the same goes for if the theme is a certain format ie sonnet, free verse, prose, etc).

Ronda Wicks Eller

*****

It is quite difficult to explain. I work mostly from a feeling, almost never from an idea. I say that I am always writing the same and endless poem. I meet the poems once written. What prevails is the intuition. There are exceptions: I once worked as a title or subject, with some success or not. I remember a book from the letters of Rimbaud in Africa. This project survived two or three poems that I included in a book.

Carlos Barbarito

*****

Both. Sometimes one way, sometimes the other, and sometimes both at the same time. Right now I'm working in a fully conceptualized project, but the last one had a coherent section that took up about a third of the book, with the rest taken from work done over the same two years.

Christopher Flynn

*****

I make collections after I've written the poems. To start out with an idea about a collection would shape my creative process differently than allowing myself to write each day with whatever is in front of me that prompts a poetic response (and I do write every morning, so this is not a discipline question). This way, I find that threads in my work that surprise me and keep me interested. This is not to say that I would be opposed to trying it the other way around in the future.

Kathleen Cassen Mickelson

*****

I do it both ways, depending on how the poems come to me. I am but the slave of the muse!

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers

*****

I've only done one chap/collection called Book of Aliases. I wanted to get readership on my old poems so I went through my blog archives and picked what I thought were some of the best and strongest. I had a huge amount of them and they were all over the place in terms of themes. As I was trying to sort them into piles I realized that one of the interesting things I had been considering in my writing was the idea that we all are constantly shifting from one presentation of ourselves to another -- something similar to having several aliases. Once I had that as a concept for a collection, I was able to pick 57 of my older poems that could be grouped under that theme and the book became easy to assemble.

Russell Ragsdale

*****

Most of the poetry I write tends to be the quirky, offbeat, humorous kind. After a number of my pieces were published in journals, I started working with an idea about how I'd like to organize them and finally did it in my first poetry book (and first book, too) Mugging for the Camera. I found it was a lot easier to work with a central theme of an idea, even if it was kind of loosely based.

RJ Clarken

*****

I look to see what I've been writing for the last 2 years, decide whether it's a subject or a tone or what, and then include and exclude to make a unified whole.

Then I throw all the poems on the floor, arrange them into three piles or sections, and arrange the poems within the sections. I have never written a poem FOR a collection, but I know many fine poets who do.

I'm talking about collections of individual poems, of course. My three book-length verse narratives have stories to organize them.

Penelope Scambly Schott

April PAD Challenge 2009--UPDATE!

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:02:57 GMT

Soooo... What was that special updated news about the April PAD Challenge I was hinting at during yesterday's prompt? What got me all excited? Well...

My awesome writing community leader here at F+W has given the green light on making an eBook anthology for the top 50 poems from the April PAD Challenge. This eBook will be designed by our F+W design team and will be made available for free to anyone and everyone. Isn't that awesome?!?

The eBook will include 50 poems (30 poems will be the top poem from each day's prompt; the other 20 poems will be the best of the rest). And yes, I don't mean to say that the 50 poems in the eBook will literally be the best, since that's super subjective, but it will be 50 excellent poems from the many, many, many that are part of the challenge.

But wait! Could it get even better?

This morning, pondering making the announcement of the eBook, I thought, Hey! I wonder if I could gather some guest judges to judge each day's top poem. Hmm...

Soooo, long-story short: I've already lined up 10 guest judges with 20 more to come. As soon as I have all 30 judges (for 30 days) confirmed, I'll send around another update that lists them.

I didn't think I could be even more excited about this year's challenge than last year's, but... Wow!

We'll still be offering the certificate and badge to people who complete the 30-day challenge. And I'll send around complete rules when we get even closer to April, but I just wanted to share the awesomely amazing news!

Poets Helping Poets: Breaking through a writing slump

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:51:22 GMT

Last Friday, I tossed out a question to the members of the Poetic Asides group on Facebook: How do you break through a writing slump?

Whether it's been days, weeks, months, or even years, we've all been through dry spots. Well, as I learned from the response, most of us have anyway.

In my own case, I find that reading new (to me) voices is what helps the most. Though listening to the news or going for a run, both usually work as well.

The response was so massive that I had to be selective with the answers, but here's what some of the poets wrote:

*****

For some reason, I find if I have a few even modest successes, sometimes that spooks me and makes it hard for me to believe I'll ever write anything worthwhile again. After a number of false starts, I find myself going back to some old reliable pump primers, as I've come to think of them.

Actually, someone on the Poetic Asides site led me to the Poet's Companion, by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, and I've found the exercises in there invaluable. I also love Natalie Goldberg's, Writing Down the Bones and this year she released The Essential Writer's Notebook--another gem of inspirational prompts to kick my rear-end.

For me, your prompts are also a great source of creative energy--a way for me to know I'm committed to writing poetry at least once a week, without having to dream up a topic.

And last, but not least, I try to take at least one writing course a year, just to make my mind travel along different tracks.

S.E. Ingraham

*****

Here are two strategies that work for me:

1. Go to a reading--any kind of reading, poetry or prose. The minute a reading begins, I feel that I'm being drawn "into the zone," into a community of writers that helps me reconnect with my own creativity. It's as if my writer's mind steps into line, comes into focus, re-invents and re-establishes itself.

2. Go for a long hike--in a natural setting, away from the house, the computer, the daily grind. As I walk, and gradually relax, the rhythm of unrestricted movement enables me to reconnect with the natural cadence of my poetic sensibility.

Ruth Nolan

*****

It works for me when I have people around me. Therefore, I am longing for the spring so that I can go out and sit in a nice park, with trees and flowers and hear people walking by.

Staffan in Sweden

*****

I used to believe in writing slumps and writer's blocks. But I don't anymore, because if you can challenge yourself to the simple task of writing something every day, say at least 500-600 characters (but more is better) or 125-175 words minimum (again, more is better). You could further challenge and commit yourself to either send it to a friend or friends every day for a minimum of 3 months, no matter how bad or terrible you think it is. A little exercise like this will prove that you CAN write whenever you like, and that on some level you are choosing not to. It's an important thing to realize that your talents and skills are yours and not on loan or borrowed or given to you by something else--there is no fickle muse that comes to or abandons you.

J.P. Dancing Bear

*****

I write book reviews for various online and print mags, so finding time to write my own stuff is hard. When I try to balance reviewing, family, my money jobs and my own pieces, I find that writer's block doesn't exist for me anymore. Because the reviews are on a deadline and I want to continue to be paid, I have to force myself to be a professional and write even when I don't feel like writing. Normally, when I am 5-10 minutes into the piece it starts to flow.

The reviewing and journalism has put my own writing in perspective and has made me realize, that if you're a writer, you write. Because my time is limited, I take the time that I'm given to work on my own stuff as a gift. If I have an hour or so, I apply Cory Doctorow's 20-minute method. For example, I know realistically that I do not have large chunks of time to write my novel. I give myself 25-30 minutes to write a chunk. I literally set my PDA alarm to go off in 20 minutes. The time goes by so fast, and when the alarm goes off I am usually in a white hot writing frenzy and I stop in the middle and I cannot wait to go back to it the next day.

I apply this technique to all my writing: play-writing, short stories, and even poetry. When you have finite time to write, you learn to inspire yourself. The book reviewing also teaches me to have more perspective about my own stuff. I discover quickly what works and what does not work.

My advice: Write like there is no tomorrow, because there isn't. Don't worry too much about revision or research, that's later. Get that intial draft down and write your butt off.

Lee Gooden

*****

I generally make it a practice to write some random line on a blank page. Even something that may be picked up from the newspaper lying beside me or an ad.

Then I just write around that line. Something fitting or even something equally random...

Poddar Kushal

*****

1) If it's a long slump, I remind myself, "This is input time." I actually believe this to be true, as I have noticed that's the way of it. You think nothing's happening, but when writing does return, it's made some kind of quantum leap to a new level. In a long slump, I usually have to wait for it to return spontaneously in its own good time.

2) It's strange, but (in a briefer slump) what works for me is to start playing with form, rather than seeking ideas.

Rosemary Nissen-Wade

*****

My top tip: Just write for ten minutes without pausing, editing, crossing-out. Write 'I don't know what to write' and keep writing... Write 'I feel stuck' and keep writing. After ten minutes stop and circle five random words in your piece of writing--or even better, ask someone to circle them for you. Take these words and use them to begin writing for five minutes. Then circle four words and write, then three... and so on.. until you have just one word...

Very often it is our focus on the product of writing--Is it good enough? What will it be like as a finished piece?--that stops us from writing. By learning to enjoy writing as a process, you can keep writing and writing.

Sophie Nicholls

*****

I have a job that can be pretty high-pressure and involve long hours. During these busy cycles at work, I find myself feeling completely drained during my non-work times, which I usually reserve for writing. I feel like I have nothing left over; that all of the emotion, imagination and passion has been sapped out of me. In short, I feel like a walking drone. Last summer, I went on "real vacation" for the first time in years, and I came back incredibly stimulated, refreshed and inspired. But I can't do that very often. So I've developed some ways to help keep me going during the down times, when there is no vacation in sight:

1. I wait to write until I know I have several hours at a stretch to sit down and sink into "the zone." This helps keep the pressure off. I simply give myself permission not to start something new on weeknights, after I've worked a ten or twelve hour day. If I do anything, I just do minor revisions on works in progress. Or, I just crash in front of the TV and forget about it. I've actually gotten incredible inspiration from little snippets of things I've seen while zoned out in front of the tube. Vampire squids, for example.

2. During my several-hour writing stretch, I take a journal and I "speed-write" one poem on each page. I give myself permission to be absolutely awful in every way. I heap on the cliches. I write whatever comes into my head. I don't revise. I number the poems and consider them complete. Then I go back through in an hour or two and "mine" for a line, a thought, an idea, or image that I want to work with, and I begin writing the "real poem" from that. I choose one or two at time to work on and give myself a week to complete each one. The completion timeline keeps me accountable and helps make me feel like I'm being productive.

3. I have also started trying to practice what I call, "Poets' Eyes." This is a way of going through my day in an observant, open manner. It's almost like bringing a veil down over my "normal" eyes in order to open up more awareness. As much as possible, I try listening to everything and see everything as a potential poem; it's a way of being open; of being willing to extract beauty or meaning from the banal, the annoying, the stressful, the just plain stupid. If I can even do this for five minutes at a time a few times a day, I can usually find something interesting to add to my "treasure box" of ideas I want to work with.

Kristen McHenry

*****

When I can't write, I read, read, read, and read some more; sometimes I reread novels or short stories. Sometimes I read song lyrics hoping one word or phrase will spark something.

Melissa McEwen

*****

I really do feel a daily exercise loosens my brains, and if I get five poems out of thirty that can be worked into something interesting, I'll be pleased.

Shann Palmer

*****

I'm much more conscientious about my writing when I'm NOT writing than when I am, so I usually try to shift my focus away from that internal, absent impetus into something different, enjoyable, or productive. This usually means a new haircut, delightfully awful genre fiction, and editing. If that doesn't work, I create projects for myself, like painting, developing a mix tape, or creating a little Great(ness) anthology of my favorite poems from my favorite poets. When you're stuck in a writing slump, it's easy to focus on that missing creativity energy within you without realizing it's an entirely false paradigm. It's more likely that energy’s still in you, it's just moved somewhere else in you. Find it again and reign it in, or just go with it for a while, it might be leading you somewhere unexpected.

Todd Dillard

*****

I go for a walk out in nature to unblock when stumped on a scene or dried up. Walking along a trail means no noises other than those of the birds, nothing to cloud the mind. That quiet lends to thinking and all I have to do is let the scene play through my mind while walking. Usually, I get better ideas than the ones I already had.

The unfortunate part is that frequently I don't remember when I get home! As a help, I started carrying a pen and some folded papers in a pocket then would stop to jot things down. Oddly, the more I jotted down, the more it flowed in my head.

Not only does walking help with the writing, it feeds more oxygen to the brain. Good no matter what...

Lynn Steen

*****

I recently accompanied my husband to a doctor's appointment, where I picked up National Geographic to scan so I could avoid watching Regis & Kelly. I normally don't read that magazine, but I found a totally huge amount of inspiration in the pages. I wrote notes for an hour and came away with probably 10-15 poem ideas from that experience alone. I was so excited. In the past, I've told my writing group to do that (pick up a magazine or art book you normally wouldn't look at), but I guess I should have been taking my own advice.

Kimberlee Titus Gerstmann

*****

Keep a small stack of poetry books in the bathroom, then when you are in there giving the kids a bath (or doing other things!), you can read, and be filled with inspiration to write as soon as they are in bed.

Caili Wilk

*****

It's hard to believe I used to write two or three poems a day. Now it's more like a dozen a year. Perhaps I've grown more discriminating. I'm sure a lot of those earlier poems suck!

A couple of ideas for breaking through. You've got to read a lot, broad and deep. Find a poet you enjoy and let them inspire you.

If you are absolutely stuck, try a copy change poem. Take a poem you love and put the idea into your own words.

Or try a found poem. Take lines from the paper, magazine, or lines you've overheard, and make a poem out of them. It's a start. Sometimes the result is damn good!

David Blaine

*****

Whenever I find myself in a slump with my writing, I do three things: read, ponder, riff. It's really that simple. The hard part to know is that a writer must, when shaking off that dust, read only the very kinds of literature that made him or her want to write in the first place. There are certain "go to" writers I use that will always create new work for me. But I have to read that which causes a visceral jolt in my psyche. And enjoy that reading. It's only through the enjoyment and experiencing of that reading that I start to feel my love for literature eat through the layers of despondency or boredom or responsibility. Sometimes, I'll read work by them that's new to me and read until I hit a particularly evocative line or idea, drop the book, and go write a poem or story.

When I write, then, I don't stay in the fear envelope; I give myself complete permission to write over and past it. I once heard a girl in a creative writing workshop make a comment about a piece of someone's work that had to do with whether it could be assessed as "good enough" to be canon--my response: Bullshit! That fear and expectation has to go. Writing is a muscle best kept warm. You don't have to write every piece with the idea (lofty, over-extending) that you want your every penned effort to be canon-worthy. You write because you love it, often because you have to, and because it lights you up, your brain, your idealism, your goals or agendas regarding humanity. So, that's my solution. Read, ponder, riff. It's a lucky charm. For me, it works every time.

Heather Fowler

*****

Play.

Amy Cunningham

*****

If you have your own ideas on this subject, please share them in the comments below.

Interview With Poet Jericho Brown

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:55:10 GMT

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from Dillard University, and he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. The recipient of the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego where he teaches creative writing. Western Michigan University's New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book, Please.

Brown's name has been flying around quite a bit recently--with multiple poets either praising his collection Please (New Issues) or e-mailing me directly to ask if I'd interview him. That's not typical. So, I hunted him down, and he took some time out of his busy schedule to let me interview him.

His collection Please was a great read from the very beginning. He even names the first section Repeat, which is funny, because I felt like repeating the experience of reading the beginning once I finished the end. But I'll let his words do the talking--this being one of my favorite pieces in the collection:

Why I Cannot Leave You

You bring home the food. I'm your hungry man,
Captive damsel dragged by the hair from her favorite
Streetlight to the trap of your tower, hollow icebox,
No magnets with things-to-do. No rules. It wouldn't
Be fair--you bring home the food--you can't read
Or write. I pace, check the window for my hunter. You
Bring home food and toss it onto the card table.
My teeth barely miss my fingertips--I rip
Into the bag. You like to kiss me, my mouth
Packed with the faintest franchise you could find, animal
Blood at each lip. Say carnivore, and I kiss back. I eat
My meat rare. You bare your sharpest grin. Bum
I say I love, you're my place to stay. We're against the law.
No one keeps me big as you. Fatten me, sweet ogre.
Get me some meat. Bring home food. Feed.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm trying to get a hold of any footage I can that shows news anchors Max Robinson and Jessica Savitch in action. I'm working on a few poems about and in the voices of the two of them as well as poems based on scriptures from the Bible. The second book is tentatively titled The New Testament, and I just learned that I got a Bunting Fellowship which should give me plenty of time for writing.

I'm grateful that I've been traveling a lot in order to give readings. I now get to meet really interesting people from all over the nation who love good poetry. Also, I try to make sure I have enough reading material to keep me busy on planes.

Other than that, I go to the gym a lot. I eat a lot. I talk with friends over the phone a lot. I teach a lot and read a lot in preparation for teaching. I usually go clubbing when I get the chance because I like flirting and dancing.

Please is your debut collection of poems. How long did you go about getting them together and published?

The oldest drafts of some poems in Please were written in 2000, and I wrote them when I first attended the Cave Canem workshop/retreat for African American poets. Some poems were first drafted 2007, the same year New Issues asked to publish the book.

But seven years seems dishonest when I think of how I'm prone to reading and thinking more than to writing. In the last eight years of my life, there were times I couldn't stop writing. Over a short period of weeks, I'd have many drafts of very different things and begin to think I may be quite literally possessed. Once, I actually had a car accident trying to get some scribbling done while driving. These periods were thrilling for me, but during them, I felt vulnerable in a way I have a hard time characterizing.

At other times, for periods as long as two years within the last eight, I didn't write at all. I couldn't even think to revise. This is, of course, painful and scary in a very different way. Today, I think I managed to get through these silences because I was much more interested in figuring how to write poems than I was in how to write a book. I had no goal other than the poem itself and could almost satisfy my yearnings to write by reading and discovering other poets.

The voices are strong in Please. Is there a type of sound or voice (or both) you go for in your writing?

I think of writing, first, as a process of listening and, second, as a process of embodying. I don't know that I "go for" anything in particular because I try and leave as much as I can to instinct, intuition, and reflex—even in the final stages of revision.

For me, poems usually begin with a line from which I do some vocal repeating and pushing in order to generate other lines. The lines that follow the first one often mimic the sound or make what seems to me some sort of counter-sound based on the first one. Then, because I'm so interested in both music and voice, I find myself trying to figure the personality of the sounds as I am composing. At some point in the writing of a first draft, I start to take on the characteristics of the voice that is asking to be channeled. An example of this might be something as simple as punching the computer if the voice is pissed to the point of violence.

You have a very nice website. Did you put it together, or did your publisher? Also, how helpful do you think having a website is in spreading the word about your writing?

Thanks, Robert. Jerichobrown.com is the brainchild of Nick Walker, one of my undergraduate students at the University of San Diego. He's an amazing poet, and he writes wonderful fiction too. Nick and I argued for more than a semester. He insisted that the website would be necessary, and I kept reassuring him that I had enough to do without thinking about ways to publicize my book and spending mounds of money to do it.

At any rate, Nick started making moves without me being aware of it, and the next thing I knew he had come in contact with Arlene Valdes, a very talented web designer who was looking to build a portfolio for her business. The portfolio would include a few clients for whom she'd create sites for one-tenth of what I imagine she charges now. Nick and Arlene made all the decisions and did all the work. My only job was to provide them with what I had already gathered for New Issues: a bio, the blurbs, the dates for readings, and of course, a few poems.

I don't think having a website hurts, but Buddha never had one, and the word spread pretty decently about things he had to say.

Your bio mentions that you previously worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans. What was that job like? And did your experience as a speechwriter help with your poetry?

I served the City of New Orleans for four years working for Mayor Marc H. Morial, who is now President and CEO of the National Urban League. He's an amazing leader who made his love for that city absolutely contagious. He is also a major role model for me as my fraternity brother and the man willing to take a chance on me and give me my first job right out of college. (The word "give" is supremely important here, considering the desperate shape I was in.)

A speechwriter goes into each speech knowing the message and figuring the best way to communicate the message as he goes. A poet figures ways of communicating and wonders if he has a message. I prefer the latter because it gives me a chance to question beliefs that I myself hold dear. There is no room for such questions when working to drive a message home.

While researching you online, I noticed people commenting positively on your readings. Do you have any special reading tips for other poets?

Slow down.

Who are you currently reading?

Today, I read Versed by Rae Armantrout, some Gwendolyn Brooks, a few poems online by Rodney Jack and Wayne Johns, some George Oppen, some C.S. Lewis, a little bit from Barbara Walters'memoir Audition, and the Bible.

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

Make love.

*****

To learn more about Jericho, go to www.jerichobrown.com.

To learn more about his publisher, go to www.wmich.edu/~newissue/.

AWP Update & More!

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 13:46:36 GMT

Grisel Y. Acosta has shared some more of her experience at AWP in Chicago: http://writetoright.blogspot.com/2009/02/awp-or-zombie-fest.html

Looks like there was plenty of room for surprises at the event.

*****

Also, I see that the Poetic Asides Chapbook Champion, Shann Palmer, has self-published and is selling copies of her winning chapbook: "Change." If you want to check it out, go to: http://shannpalmer.blogspot.com/2009/02/buy-my-change-chapbook.html

I'm sure Shann would appreciate your support!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:39:20 GMT

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

*****

Jacqueline Cartier, media relations with NPR, shared the following link with me earlier this week: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100619363

It's a poetry slam for Valentine's Day! Check out the link to hear some cool poems.

*****

The Poetry Foundation lists more than 1,200 love poems here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/tool.poem.cat.2.1.html?id=7

If you need a Valentine's Day idea, you can always e-mail a favorite poem from this link to that extra special person.

*****

Here's another Valentine's Day idea: Why not write a love poem for the one you love? I did so last Valentine's Day, and now I'm married to her. To check out that poem, go here: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Will+You+Be+My+Valentine.aspx

I'm not saying you'll get married if you write a love poem, but it doesn't hurt, eh?

Since I'm a man of routines, here's my Valentine's Day poem for this year:

You
-For Tammy Brewer

found me in airports. You found me
in bookstores. You found me on the
streets of Manhattan. I made you
mix CDs. We listened as we
drove to Yellow Springs, to Helen.
We fell in love as we wandered
along nature trails and city
streets--both walking at the same pace,
letting the others run past us.

AWP Update!

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:17:46 GMT

Grisel Y. Acosta sent over this link to her blog on how AWP is going for her: http://writetoright.blogspot.com/2009/02/chicago-and-awp-or-when-writers-gather.html

*****

Earlier in the week, Jane Friedman shared this post about AWP: http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/Headed+To+AWP+In+Chicago.aspx

Since I'm part of the Writer's Digest community, I oughta direct people to the Writer's Digest booth, huh? It sounds like there will be some great deals there.

*****

Found this cool account from Don Share on The Best American Poetry blog: http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/02/the-things-they-carried-at-awp-don-share.html

*****

Also, a poem of mine appears in Barn Owl Review #2, which is debuting at AWP: http://wordcage.blogspot.com/2009/02/hello-beautiful-stranger.html

So, check that out if you're up that way.

*****

Jesse Loren shared this account:

It is Friday morning. Yesterday I went to Memory of Wounds, with Laura Madeline Wiseman, Joy Castro, Karen McElmurray, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Lucy Ferriss, and Carrie Anne Tocci. Carrie Anne Tocci was most amazing with her writings about memory, wholeness and the body.

I also attended Multiformalism Postmodern Poetics of Form with Annie Finch, Hank Lazer, Susan Schultz, and K. Silero Mohammad. It got hot in there. There were well versed audience members and heated discussions about form. It should have continued in a bar or elsewhere. I left for a bit, saw the ice sculptures in the park, went to a wine tasting, then to a reading with Bill Lavender. It was in a house in Chicago, but more like a Bohemian temple; completely dreamlike.

*****

If anyone else has an update, let me know at robert.brewer@fwmedia.com. Maybe next year, I can report directly from the event.

Interview With Poet J.P. Dancing Bear

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:05:04 GMT

For a few years now, I've been aware of J.P. Dancing Bear's work--from seeing his name floating around in literary journals. It wasn't until we became friends on Facebook (a year or so ago) that I knew he was the editor of American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press, as well as host of "Out of Our Minds" (a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP). Dancing Bear is also the author of What Language (Slipstream), Billy Last Crow (Turning Point), Gacela of Narcissus City (Main Street Rag), and--most recently--Conflicted Light (Salmon Poetry).

Here's a favorite poem of mine from Conflicted Light:

Auricle

I heard the humming engine
of a heart smaller than an anvil;
in the hummingbird's forest
my ear was mistaken for a flower--
I should be complimented
for the brief moment before
the taste of my ear canal
will forever mark the thin tongue.
The hunger that was whispered
to me, woke me from a dream:

I was the drum in the redwoods,
the tongue of green prophesies,
the anvil of summer hunger,
awakened to the canopy songs
that had lain in the linens of leaves
I called my stomach. Now I hear
the hammer's rumor of sparks
on the anvil and can taste fear.
Now I realize I worked for years
in the coded silence of a paper heart.

*****

What are you currently up to?

Well, I tend to keep fairly busy most of the time. Right now, I'm working on getting Bruce Cohen's book, Disloyal Yo-Yo, published. I'm also putting the final touches on my next book, Inner Cities of Gulls, which will come out by Salmon Poetry next year. I just went through and revised my other manuscript for submission to a few contests. I've been writing two other manuscript/projects, Birthday Notes and Dancing to Orphee's Radio. Then there's reading for the Dream Horse Press and the APJ.

You're the editor of American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press; you host the "Out of Our Minds" radio show on KKUP; and you’re constantly getting your own writing published widely. How do you manage to wear so many poetic hats at once?

I try not to think about how much work there is to do. I try to remain focused on whatever the task is at hand, get it done and move on. I think it also helps that I normally don't require as much sleep as most people do. I've been a 4.5 to 6 hour sleeper since I was a kid—used to drive my parents crazy that I would stay awake until 2 sometimes 3 in the morning. And for the longest time, my writing time was between midnight and 2 a.m., but I've learned to write whenever the mood takes me. Dream Horse requires and APJ require that I set aside whole portions of a day to work on them. I like to work at least 4 to 8 hours straight on either.

Your recent collection, Conflicted Light, was released by an Irish publisher (Salmon Poetry). How did that come about?

I think Jessie Lendennie (the owner of Salmon Poetry) and I were on a large group mailing list together at one point. I tend to lurk, but I will chime in when I think I have something to offer on a topic that hasn't already been expressed. I had piped up about something and about a day later I got a message from Jessie saying she'd read my work and really liked it. I had been a fan of Salmon Poetry (I've got several titles on my shelves) for quite some time, and well… the rest just fell into place.

What do you feel makes a great collection of poems?

I think there are any number of things that work to make a great collection of poems. If you are asking me to step out of my Dream Horse Press editor's hat, then I would say that a great collection of poems is one in which every page is something to be savored. That you read the first poem and it is like a fine and delicate morsel of food. You want to take your time and enjoy it. You know just from that first poem that you are in for a gourmet meal. You do not want to rush to the next page, you may want to read one or two poems a day. And reread them. And then again.

If I'm wearing my Dream Horse Press editor's hat… I like to look for collections that hold together as a larger poem. I also enjoy crafted poems that clearly show the writer's knowledge and skill without taking away from the poem at all. In other words, I think there should be something in the poems for a second and third reading that make those just as enjoyable as the first reading.

On a poem-by-poem level, what is the typical life of one of your poems—from idea to publication?

I tend to work in projects or manuscripts first. So a project comes to me sometimes as a couple of poems that I can see go together, or I will sometimes challenge myself in some way, creating a set of rules that I have to follow. I don't have one set way of writing a poem, sometimes it's a line that comes to me, sometimes it's an idea or a thought I begin exploring, sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's a voice. I will usually play with it in my head for several days. Rolling it back and forth, adding to and taking away from it until I feel there's a core something there.

Then I will write it down, usually the first draft will take about an hour. I will then read it aloud and edit it until I think it "sounds" right. Then I have a few friends whom I might "try it out" on. I'll get feedback and "try" to incorporate that back into the poem. Then I'll set the poem aside. I will generally write about three quarters to four fifths of a manuscript (or when I know there's only a few months left) before I start sending poems from that project.

I do this for a number of reasons: One, it gives me distance from the first poems I wrote in the series, so I can stand back and look at them and decide if they are ready, or edit them to the point of being ready; Two, I will not get discouraged about the entire project if the poems are rejected, and therefore question whether I should continue working on the project; Three, the editing and submission functions, I find, are distractions from the actual creative action, so I don't like to do that until later in the project. If a poem is accepted, I may want to tinker with it a little more, nothing too big, a word or a phrase at most. If a poem is rejected, I will go back and review it, read it aloud several times, possibly revise it, and send it out again. At the point where about a quarter to half of the manuscript has been published, I will begin sending that out.

The exception to this rule has been my Birthday Notes project on Facebook. The rules I set out for myself is that the poems have to be written using an application available to me when I go to the person having a birthday that day's wall, I will also put them together and publish them on my Notes/Wall page, and I write a prose poem there on their wall and it has to be done on that day. Since it's all done on the spur of the moment, it's a different kind of writing. I have to make a decision and run with it right away. Sometimes there's been as many as nine of them to write, and you just can't deliberate choices and ideas.

How important do you feel community is to a poet?

I have mixed feelings about it. Online, I tend to enjoy being "connected" to writers all over the planet. We have fun, and I think some of us are playful. I also enjoy playing word games with other writers. And touching base with them.

The physically local writing communities really depend on where you are and who you fall in with. I think it also depends on the types of personalities that are part of the formal organization. I remember back in the late nineties a group of us used to get together, go to readings, put together potluck gatherings and had a lot of fun doing it. It was all done in the spirit of openness and we were trying to reach across political, group or community lines. The events were very informal and fun. I've been part of more formalized organizations and it frankly wasn't my cup of tea.

I appreciate those kinds of groups when they are done right, and one of them I think that does a good job is Poetry Santa Cruz, they present or sponsor a couple of readings a month (usually at least one with a writer who is visiting the area), and are involved in fostering a strong poetry community.

However, I tend to be better with the online community because I can work in being a part of them to compliment my schedule, I cannot necessarily do this with the physical ones.

Who are you currently reading?

Eesh. This is not an easy answer for me because I am constantly reading. And I could answer this with any number of parameters. So first, I'll split out the dead writers and list them (in no particular order) first: James Wright, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Larry Levis, John Logan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lynda Hull, W. H. Auden, Neruda, Paul Celan, and Reginald Shepherd (if you ask me tomorrow, I'd probably have a different list depending on memory).

I tend to read a lot of magazines (both online and printed) and there are certain names that I will naturally gravitate to and read first, and I would say the same holds true if I'm in a bookstore and I see their name on the spine of a book (and I am going to limit this list to authors with more than one book published): Nance van Winckel, Natasha Saje, Mary Ruefle, Roddy Lumsden, Kathleen Jamie, Ralph Angel, Jack Gilbert, Mary Jo Bang, Carolyn Forche, Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Jim Powell, Dorianne Laux, Margret Gibson, Mary Oliver, John Ashbury, Paul Guest, Mark Doty, Sherman Alexie, Robert Bly (and again, these were off the top of my head, and I'm sure I would have a different list tomorrow). I will also add that I read and seek out any of the authors that I've published. And just to round this off, if you are a friend of mine, naturally I'm going to read your poem if I see it.

I will also say that I like to read many different writers and have an ever-expanding list of favorites. I feel, that it is essential to keeping an open mind and to being a good editor.

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

Constantly push and challenge yourself to do new things and learn new things. If you've never written a sonnet, then challenge yourself to writing a crown of sonnets. If you've never written anything other than formal verse, write a prose poem. Breaking down things, understanding the craft behind them and rebuilding the way you write only makes you a stronger and better writer. Never, ever think you are "there"--always be on the journey.

*****

To learn more about J.P. Dancing Bear (including Dream Horse Press and American Poetry Journal), check out his website at http://home.comcast.net/~jpdancingbear/.

To learn more about Salmon Poetry, which published Conflicted Light, check out their website at www.salmonpoetry.com.

Are you attending AWP in Chicago?

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:53:04 GMT

If you are, then would you be willing to share your experiences with the rest of the Poetic Asides audience who are not able to attend (or who cannot sit in on every event--because, let's face it, there are soooooo many of them)?

If you're interested, just email updates at any time between 2/11 and 2/15 (the day after the event is over) to robert.brewer@fwmedia.com with the subject line of "AWP Update".

Please include your name so that you can get full credit for sharing the information. (If you have a website or blog, please include a URL with your name as well.)

Examples of things you could report on include:

Cool sessions you attend.
Great deals happening at publisher booths.
Parties you might be attending (or hosting).
Anything else that's going on or that strikes you.

Since this is a "first" for Poetic Asides, I'm not sure how well this will work (if at all), but I think it would be neat for those who have not experienced AWP or who won't be able to experience this year or who will be attending different sessions, parties, etc.

Depending upon participation, I'll try making frequent updates.

BAP 2008!

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:24:25 GMT

I've been meaning to do my annual post on The Best American Poetry anthology for 2008 for some time now, but I keep not getting to it. So, here we go.

As usual, David Lehman is the series editor for this anthology, with Charles Wright as the guest editor. I've found that the poems in the anthology can vary greatly in style from guest editor to guest editor--and that's a good thing.

I haven't read the entire anthology yet, but the selections have been very good so far. Some of my favorite poets are included, and there are some new (to me) names in the bunch.

But the true value of this anthology is not the actual poetry, though that is a very nice bonus. The real value for other poets are the Contributors' Notes and Comments in the back of the book, where poets write about their poems, including what inspired their poems, forms they were using, etc.

That's why I always recommend purchasing a BAP every single year. There's the inspiration of great poems, but also so much insight into the crafting of the poetry.

Interview With Poet Susan Rich

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:00:15 GMT

Susan Rich is a special kind of poet--one who has gotten out and seen the world first hand before setting pen to paper (or keystroke to word processor). She's worked in the field of human rights for nine years; lived and/or worked in Bosnia, Gaza, Ireland, South Africa and Republic of Niger; was shot at in Croatia; and photographed for a recent book on women's body images. With so many experiences, most people would be filled with good stories, but Rich is also able to craft these tales into wonderful poems.

White Pine Press published Rich's first two collections, The Cartographer's Tongue (2000) and Cures Include Travel (2006), and plans on releasing her third collection, The Alchemist's Kitchen, in 2010. Both of her published collections share the knowledge of a writer who's seen the world--as the titles indicate.

Here's a favorite of mine from Cures Include Travel:

Mohamud at the Mosque

for my student upon his graduation

And some time later in the lingering
blaze of summer, in the first days
after September 11 you phoned--

If I don't tell anyone my name I'll
pass for an African American.
And suddenly, this seemed a sensible solution--

the best protection: to be a black man
born in America, more invisible than
Somali, Muslim, asylum seeker--

Others stayed away that first Friday
but your uncle insisted that you pray.
How fortunes change so swiftly

I hear you say. And as you parallel
park across from the Tukwila
mosque, a young woman cries out--

her fears unfurling beside your battered car--
Go back where you came from!
You stand, both of you, dazzling there

in the mid-day light, her pavement
facing off along your parking strip.
You tell me she is only trying

to protect her lawn, her trees,
her untended heart--already
alarmed by its directive.

And when the neighborhood
policeman appears, asks
you, asks her, asks all the others--

So what seems to be the problem?
He actually expects an answer,
as if any of us could name it--

as if perhaps your prayers
chanted as this cop stands guard
watching over your windshield

during the entire service
might hold back the world
we did not want to know.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm working on a series of ekphrastic poems inspired by the work of Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956). Wiggins was one of the first women artists in the Pacific Northwest to make her living exclusively as an artist. She was a photographer, painter, and poet, but best known for her photographs. For a short time, she exhibited widely in New York and Europe. Alfred Stieglitz published her work in Camera Notes and George Eastman hung one of her photographs in his office at Eastman-Kodak. I'm very drawn to her photographs, in particular, probably because she works from imagined narratives and also traveled widely. I hope to have a small chapbook within my next full length collection, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, coming out in April 2010 from White Pine Press.

This is my first time working on a series of ekphrastic poems, first time writing any poems at all that are inspired by the visual arts and it's sort of magical. Working with images, especially narrative images like the ones Wiggins creates, really functions like the poem's rough draft. I can begin with a girl, a bowl, a dark spoon--and we're off to the races.

I'm also still celebrating my first prize award published in the Times Literary Supplement (of London). My good friend, the poet Kelli Agodon, figured out that my poem earned $333.33 per line or $28.98 per word! WOW! And who said poetry doesn't pay?

With one collection titled The Cartographer's Tongue and another titled Cures Include Travel, travel seems to play a very important role in your poetry. Do you think travel can help a writer grow?

I believe travel offers us a relatively safe way to shed our everyday skins and step outside the closed world we've so carefully constructed around us. In my everyday life I'm in contact with people who often have a shared sense of community, city, country--even if my background is Russian and my neighbor is Somali; but by virtue of living here in the US where I was born, I don't have to examine my everyday assumptions and suppositions.

When I worked in Gaza, I was commonly asked, whether I supported the United States military aide to Israel. In West Africa, I needed to remember, for my two years there, never to extend my left hand in greeting or--God forbid!--eat with it. In Bosnia, one didn't ever ask where a person stayed during the war. These are perhaps a sundry set of examples of how each culture has its own decorum and set of assumptions. What I find so interesting is how rarely we question our own lived ideas.

Yes, I believe travel helps a writer grow, helps anyone grow; allows us the chance to become part of a broader human spectrum of experience.

For your own travel, you've been to places such as Bosnia, Gaza and South Africa. Your poetry often deals with people and events witnessed while on the road. Do you feel you must have something important to say when you sit down to write a poem?

If I thought I needed to only write important poems, I would still be staring into this screen before me. Who needs that kind of pressure?

You've been shot at in Croatia, modeled for a recent book on women's body images, and traveled around the globe; do you feel you live an adventurous life?

When you put it that way, it does sound exciting, doesn't it? No, I am afraid everyday life centers around cups of good coffee and ministering to the cats.

For the last ten years, I have been teaching English and Film Studies at Highline Community College. I have had two sabbaticals, time off for good behavior and done some traveling, but primarily my life is very staid. Seattle is an almost perfect place for a writer to live. I feel very lucky to have found it. I'm originally from Boston, Massachusetts.

What is true is that I am often motivated by fear. If I am offered an experience--such as working in Bosnia only three months after the war--I feel compelled to react against that fear and accept the offers that present themselves in my life. I think it is called counterphobic.

How do you handle the whole submission process from submitting poems to keeping track of your submissions?

I am the odd writer who loves submitting my work. I play the license plate game only with poetry journals and aim to publish in every state--if I can. Over the years it's been a good way to not over think the rejections from the New Yorker or the Atlantic and instead rejoice in smaller, but extremely respectable journals such as the Antioch Review and Quarterly West. To date, my poems have traveled to 33 states and 7 countries. Some states are easier to find journals in than others. In Rhode Island, the choices are limited.

This year, I have had acceptances from three journals that I have been sending to regularly for fifteen years. Fifteen, that's not a typo. In two of the three cases I never even had a "try again" scrawled along the bottom of the rejection slip. In fact, I prefer the pristine, impersonal rejection. Gettysburg Review rejects with high quality paper and in a timely fashion; I like that. They accept in much the same way. As someone who has worked as a poetry editor at several journals, I understand that most of the time there is nothing personal about rejection. I understand, or like to think I understand, that editors are people with bad days and good days.

My little editor fantasy goes like this: It's a sunny afternoon and Mr. or Ms. Editor has just come back to the desk after a light lunch at a favorite restaurant. With a fresh cup of tea and a cat for company, my editor reads my poems. In other words, I believe that timing and context are key. Many different considerations go into the acceptance of a poem and it's impossible to know what they are. You can read back issues of the journal, and that can help you choose food imagery over junkyard cats, but there is still a vast element of the unknown.

My favorite submission story goes like this: A friend of a friend submitted his work to a top literary journal only to have it rejected, but with a note suggesting radical changes. The writer waited a year and then sent the same poems, exactly the same poems (no edits) again. He included a note thanking the editor for such thoughtful suggestions on his work. Final result? One of the poems was accepted. I've also had the same poem rejected and then accepted from another journal. How to explain it except to say that submitting poems is not a realm of science. We send our work out into the world hoping it finds a home; hoping against hope, that it will speak to someone and in another state or on another continent; that we will be seen.

In a previous interview, I saw that you have your students memorize a poem by another poet. Do you feel it's important for poets to memorize their own poetry?

No, I don't. Personally, I'd rather recite Elizabeth Bishop and William Butler Yeats to myself than Susan Rich. Susan Rich isn't bad, but Bishop and Yeats are better.

Who are you currently reading?

My favorite book of poems at the moment is And Her Soul Out of Nothing by Olena Kalytiak Davis. It's the first book in awhile that I find utterly satisfying in its alternating mix of lyric and narrative impulses. For fiction Night Train to Lisbon by Mercier is on my bedside table. My favorite read of the last year was The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.

If you could pass on only piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I wish I had come across W. S. Merwin's poem "Berryman" years earlier. I share "Berryman" with my students now and we read it aloud together. The sense that we will never really know if anything we write is any good I find incredibly freeing. If we aren't able to pass judgment on our work, then we are free of that burden. There's nothing that drains the pen more quickly than the rush to decide if this is the next Pulitzer prize-winning poem or not. Recently, a poem of mine won a large prize which arrived with a bucket of award money. The truth is, I was utterly flabbergasted when I learned that the judges, and then the general public, chose this poem. Please don't get me wrong. I am proud of this poem and I am thrilled to have won the award, but I never would have believed that this small piece would go so far. If I had passed judgment on its worth, instead of sending it off into the world, I would have been wrong. What I want to convey is this: Push and sweat to write your best, and after that, leave it to others to judge. Try not to second guess your craft; trust in what you cannot know.

*****

To learn more about Susan Rich, you can visit her website at http://www.susanrich.net.

To learn more about her publisher (and perhaps check out her books), you can visit the White Pine Press website at http://www.whitepine.org.

Winner of the Poetic Asides Chapbook Challenge!

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:36:31 GMT

First, it's Groundhog Day: Punxsutawney Phil (of PA) and Buckeye Chuck (of OH) have seen their shadows and forecast 6 more weeks of winter. General Beauregard Lee (of GA) did not, however, forecasting only 4 more weeks of winter. Of course, I find that funny, because as an Ohio transplant, I'm still waiting for winter to hit Georgia; so, how can there be 4 more weeks of it?

*****

Anyway, I know you're not reading this blog post to hear the state of Groundhog Day 2009; you want to know who won the first annual Poetic Asides Chapbook Challenge! (Woo-hoo!)

In November, many poets took part in this blog's November PAD Chapbook Challenge, in which I challenged poets to write a poem-a-day through the month of November around a specific theme. Then, I gave the poets all of December to revise and edit their material and put together a chapbook to be submitted by the beginning of January.

More than 50 submissions were received. My wife, Tammy, and I went through them and selected a winner and 3 honorable mentions. There were some great submissions, but we both knew and agreed upon the winner without any squabbling.

Here are the Honorable Mentions:

* "Pacing the Moon," by Sandy Green
* "One Boy, How Many Square Miles," by Taylor Graham
* "Hooks and Slaughterhouses," by Alana I. Capria

And the winner of the first ever Poetic Asides Chapbook Challenge is:

"Change," by Shann Palmer

Congratulations, Shann!

Her manuscript was one that Tammy and I both loved and agreed was the best separately. That is rare in a competition with so many good submissions, but I think it points to the great writing Shann was able to gather.

Also, it should be mentioned that she cut the manuscript down to its bare essentials. It was one of the shorter manuscripts at only 11 poems and pages long.

Hopefully, we can arrange to have Shann explain her manuscript in a future post. In the meantime, let me share one of the poems Tammy and I both enjoyed very much:

Adaptation

After all the laundry is done-
round edges folded to the right,
the soaps stacked, the tissue
turned and tucked, she can go

to the next room to begin again;
blinds open just below the latch,
vase to the left, books by the lamp-
so little time, so much disarray.

Don't suggest she see a doctor,
she doesn't wash her hands raw
or alphabetize the soup cans, she has
discovered order is its own reward,

his suits hug the closet, with those
magazines, those dirty magazines.

*****

Again, Shann, congratulations!

Out and about

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 06:01:29 GMT

In trying to keep #5 on my 2009 resolutions list (to attend more poetry-related events), Tammy and I got out to a poetry book signing at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, Georgia, Saturday afternoon. We were running late, but so was the event--so things worked out perfect.

Cherryl Floyd-Miller read poems from her recently released collection Exquisite Hearts (Salt Publishing). Tammy and I enjoyed Cherryl's performance and were impressed with her answers during a short Q&A session after the reading. (In fact, don't be surprised if I try and get her interviewed on the blog sometime in the future.)

It was nice to get out with Tammy and listen to a reading, but it was even better to meet Cherryl and Collin Kelley face-to-face (both were already Facebook friends).

And--IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT--it was Baby Will's first ever poetry event (at 5 weeks old). He seemed to enjoy the event, too.

It figures...

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:00:37 GMT

...on a day when I speak of trying to rid abstraction from your poetry that Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the inauguration of Barack Obama would rely on abstraction. I'm not trying to say the poem was bad, because it moved me. It just figures is all--and it helps show that even the best and most basic rules of poetry can be broken depending upon your audience and occasion.

You can find text of the inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day," here: http://www.nowpublic.com/world/barack-obamas-inaugural-poem-praise-song-day-full-text

It took me a while to find a copy this afternoon, but there it is.

I loved the ending (which was about as abstract as you can get): "praise song for walking forward in that light."

"That light" is mentioned earlier in the poem as "Love that casts a widening pool of light."

This poem may not work for everyone, but, for me, it achieved the goal of every inauguration day, which is to bring everyone together in a peaceful transition of power from one president to the next.

Also, the timing of the poem being read was very nice. Alexander read her poem directly after Obama gave his inauguration speech.

Interview With Poet Jeannine Hall Gailey

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:22:26 GMT

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a West Coast journalist who publishes articles on subject matter as varied as how to bake a perfect scone to how to secure your web services application. (It should also be noted that she is writing a couple pieces for me for the 2010 Poet's Market.)

Gailey's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and 32 Poems, among others. She's published a chapbook, "Female Comic Book Superheroes" (Pudding House), and a full length collection, Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books). Plus, Jeannine is quick to point out that she still reads comics.

There were many poems from Becoming the Villainess that I absolutely loved, but this is my favorite:

She Escapes the Film Noir

I slip out the door,
wearing a raincoat as disguise.
It might have wrinkles, indicating a recent tryst.
Also, I may wear a fedora.
I will certainly have a lot of hair
falling over the brim of my eyelashes, either because
I'm too busy to cut it
or I don't want anyone looking me in the eyes.
Ominous footsteps echo in an unseen room,
along with distant thunder.
We are unsure of the dialogue in this script.

You watch me lean into the wet, shining street
and peer, nervous, into shadows.
Am I looking for you?
Or the man with a gun?
Either way, I'm holding tickets to Paris.
Care to join me?
I would light a cigarette
except for the damn rain. My lipstick
in this lighting is darker than blood,
and my hands won't stop shaking.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I just finished teaching my first class for National University's MFA program, an all-online Intro to Poetry Seminar. It was fascinating to try to give feedback on poems as a class without all the little tricks of body language and voice inflection; I remembered how much I rely on non-verbal cues when I teach. But it was a great adventure.

I'm working on some new manuscripts: one that investigates female heroines in Japanese pop culture and folk tales, and the idea of "mono no aware" or "softly despairing sorrow," another about being trapped in the physical body and the stories of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, and the third is a just-begun collection about growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the shadow of the birth-place of nuclear bombs, as the daughter of a robotics scientist. The first two I'm actively seeking publishers for; the third is still in progress.

Also, I just moved to Southern California from the Pacific Northwest, so I'm still trying to get used to all the palm trees, surfers and women that wear Ugg boots when it's 60 degrees. It's definitely an alien landscape.

Becoming the Villainess is your first book-length collection. Did the manuscript develop naturally, or did it go through many versions?

I began putting together a full-length collection as soon as Pudding House Press offered to publish my little chapbook called "Female Comic Book Superheroes." Putting together the chapbook made me realize just how many poems I'd written over ten years with the same themes, the same characters, the same voices. I originally tried to create a more conventionally-poetic, uplifting manuscript, but one day my husband came along and read my manuscript and said something about how the real story of the book was how the speakers go from powerlessness to power, from innocent to corrupt, from the princess to the villainess. So I titled it "Becoming the Villainess" and stopped trying to fight the dark side of the MS or impose a happy ending on the collection. I also had terrific insight from a bunch of friends about the manuscript during the eighteen months I sent it out. Finally, I decided to rearrange it according to comic book structure--the origin story, the character arc, the final frame, and so on. That felt right. And just after I rearranged it that way, Steel Toe Books' Tom Hunley called to say they wanted to publish it.

You have a website, a blog, and a presence on social networking sites, such as FaceBook. Do you feel having an Internet presence helps spread the word about your writing?

I do feel that it has helped, although, to be honest, I'm sort of a techie geek and love to be on the computer so I'd probably do the website, blog, and Facebook stuff even if I wasn't a poet. Shameful secret: I learned to program video games in BASIC on my Dad's TRS-80 when I was six. So I don't really need an excuse to play around with technology. But if I did, I think that all writers who want to hear from their readers and peers should engage online. You'll get to know people who will never be able to attend one of your readings, whom you might never meet in person, so in that way it does extend your audience.

I do get quite a few e-mails from people who have found my work online and loved it, and I think the blog community has been very supportive. I've met a lot of people "online" and then read their work or met them in person, and was so thankful that they had a blog or website or posted on a discussion board, so I could discover their wonderful work.

On your website, you offer poetry consulting and editing services. What do you see as a common problem poets make in assembling collections?

I think it's hard for most writers (including me) to get enough distance from their own collections to really see what they are really about or what the collection is doing for the reader. What's the subtext? What's the arc? How are the poems related to one another in a larger sense? Sometimes when I read manuscripts I get interesting insights about the writer's personality, about what they choose to share with the world. That's the delightful, fun part of editing a manuscript. It's kind of like a makeover show in that way. Usually people have a bunch of great work put together in a not-so-great way. As an editor, I want to help people present their work in the most intelligent, interesting, dynamic way possible. Sometimes people put together great collections of individual poems with nothing coherent about the collection itself, just a ramshackle bunch of poems. Sometimes the manuscript is terrific and coherent, but the writer chose to put their weakest or most off-putting work first or last. Or they take ten pages to get to the real subject of the collection. Often, it's just a matter of cutting a few poems, a bit of rearrangement, and talking to the author about what they are trying to say with their manuscript and making them aware of their quirks and their strengths. Then, they're usually off and running.

You've been published widely. How do you go about submitting your work, including tracking where everything is?

In Seattle I had a group of poet friends who would meet and encourage each other to send stuff out, make goals, bring in copies of their favorite lit mags, that kind of thing. That was tremendously helpful. I also spent a year reviewing literary journals for NewPages.com, which was probably the best way ever to research a ton of literary magazines I might not ever have heard of otherwise. I encourage every aspiring poet to spend a year writing lit mag reviews for NewPages.com.

As far as nuts and bolts: I've used Writer's Market's online submission tracker, Dueotrope, and I have made my own Excel spreadsheet of poems to send out and where they've been sent. Even with all that, I still lose track once in a while, or receive a rejection or acceptance from a place I don't remember ever sending poems to. I blame my (evil and disorganized) alter ego.

In Becoming the Villainess, you have to get inside the skin of several characters. Did you find this tactic liberating as a writer?

When I first discovered persona poetry as a younger writer, I absolutely felt at home. Persona poetry allows poets to use fiction writers' tools without all the commitment of a novel! Character, plot, dialogue--and a wonderful liberation from "normalcy." I am a champion of persona poetry exercises for writers because often it requires the writer to make a leap in imagination--kind of the opposite of the old "write what you know" adage, instead "write what you can imagine"--and empathy. To write a good persona poem, a writer must develop a sense of empathy for the character they're writing about, go beyond "good" or "bad" to really identify with another person. In my case, embracing and then challenging the stereotypes about women in popular culture and mythology also allowed me to re-write stilted roles--busty superheroine, powerless princess, femme fatale, etc.--which was very satisfying.

Since you mentioned to me in an earlier e-mail that you're a "sort of comic book and sci-fi geek," I've just got to ask: Who would be the last person standing in a battle between Spider-Man, The Hulk, Batman, Superman, Catwoman, Wonder Woman, The Joker, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm, the Invisible Woman, Lex Luthor, James T. Kirk, Spock, Darth Maul, Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, and Luke Skywalker?

Why does it always have to be fighting? Wonder Woman could use her "golden lasso of truth" and they could all get in a circle and talk about how it feels to be different--I mean, alien, mutant, evil genius--these are people that could use a little group therapy.

Seriously, though, Dr. Manhattan, of course. And maybe Dark Phoenix. They'd make a great couple, wouldn't they?

But my favorite comic book character right now is Joss Whedon's Fray.

Who are you currently reading?

I just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a French novel I can't stop talking about because I love it so much. Philosophy, Japanese pop culture, action movies, class issues--it has it all! And I finally got to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which was brutal but fantastic.

As for poetry, I'm a frequent reviewer and so I'm knee-deep in new books! Suzanne Frishkorn's Lit Windowpane, Michelle Bitting's Good Friday Kiss, Jericho Brown's Please…I think that's just the top three on a stack about three feet high.

I also recently read Alicia Ostriker's book of essays, For the Love of God. There's an essay in there about Ecclesiastes that blows my mind every time I read it. And I loved Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables and Rachel Zucker's Bad Wife Handbook so much I wrote an essay about them, which I am trying to find a home for.

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

Don't be afraid to write about the subjects you care most about; not every poem has to be about snow falling on an old farmhouse. Stick with your passions. Embrace your own special weirdness.

*****

To check out Jeannine Hall Gailey's website, go to www.webbish6.com.

For more information on Steel Toe Books, go to www.steeltoebooks.com.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on this blog, click here to learn more about how to start that process.

Interview With Poet Suzanne Frischkorn

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 03:39:02 GMT

Suzanne Frischkorn gets to lead off the 2009 poet interviews on Poetic Asides. (Woo-hoo! Yay! Hurrah!)

I enjoyed reading Frischkorn's most recent--and first full length--collection, Lit Windowpane (Main Street Rag Publishing Company), for many reasons. First, the poems are "spare," which is a fancy way of saying they are unassuming poems that pack a punch. Second, the poems seem to communicate with each other throughout--making the whole even stronger than it's individual parts, which are doing fine on their own (many of them published in publications, such as Diode, MARGIE, and No Tell Motel).

Here's a personal favorite of mine from Lit Windowpane:

Ruin

In the spider and on the web. On the branch
and in the pothole. Yellowed grass, wilted
fern, blackened growth. On the skeletal
stems of black-eyed Susans and in dawn's
stretch. The glint of street lights. The sibilant
mulberry behind blinds. Empty sky. Listen
to these old windows,
how they lend themselves to rattle.

What are you currently up to?

I’m putting together a new collection of poems, working on some essays and editing the New Haven issue of Locuspoint.

Mary Oliver describes your writing as "select and elegant," while James Hoch says your writing is "spare." I noticed it, too. Is that sparseness something you consciously do with your writing?

No, when I begin writing a poem I don’t plan how that poem will end, what shape it will take, or set out for a particular style. I let the poem lead me.

How many drafts do your poems tend to make? And, do you think your poems go through more or less drafts now than when you first started getting published?

I revise a lot when I'm working on a poem, but I've never counted individual drafts, I know it's many -- many, many drafts. My writing process doesn’t seem to have changed with publication.

Many reviews mention your focus on nature in Lit Windowpane, but a lot of that nature seems focused on the water. Is there a reason for this?

Water is definitely one of the unifying elements of the book. I once read that your childhood landscape will always be your landscape no matter where you live in adulthood. After writing Lit Windowpane, I realize that's true. Most of my early childhood was spent on Miami Beach , and for many years I lived a short walk from Long Island Sound. The poems in the book were written after I had moved inland. In hindsight of course it’s obvious that I miss being close to the water.

Before Lit Windowpane, you published five chapbooks. What do you feel makes a good chapbook?

My favorite chapbooks have a focused theme, either through image, style, form, or any of the numerous ways to create a sequence of poems. I’m partial to the chapbook in any case, including the chapbook without a theme that gives a sample of the poet’s work. The bibliophile in me loves the chapbook as an art object.

You have a nice website that includes information about you, your collections, and readings. What function do you think a website should serve for a poet?

Thank you. A website allows a poet to have a web presence that’s current, directs those interested in her/his work to points of interest, and includes contact information. Basically it should function as a marketing tool.

You've been published in several journals. How do you handle submitting and tracking your submissions?

I tend to either submit a lot or not at all, meaning I’ll go through regular periods of sending my work out and then find I need a break from the administrative side of poetry. My submission tracking system is rudimentary, it’s usually a word document that lists the name of the journal, poems submitted, the date of submission, and a note on whether the journal accepts simultaneous submissions or not.

Who are you currently reading?

Jean Valentine and Ralph Angel.

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

Read, read, read and read.

*****

To check out Suzanne's website, go to: http://www.suzannefrischkorn.net/

To check out Suzanne's publisher's website, go to: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/

*****

To learn how you, too, could possibly end up interviewed on this here blog, go to: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Call+For+Poets.aspx

The reanimation of dead poets

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:36:43 GMT

For something kinda cool and really freaky, check out this piece from the NY Times blogs: http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/dead-poets-animated-society/

Apparently, an animator by the name of Jim Clark has taken old photos of poets, such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and brought them to life so that it appears the poets are reciting some of their best known poems.

Poet to speak at presidential inauguration

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:40:42 GMT

(Tammy has once again shown why she's so cool. Today, she forwarded me the link to this little piece of news.)

Apparently, Barack Obama will be only the third president to invite a poet to speak at his inauguration--the other two presidents being Bill Clinton (1993 and 1997) and John F. Kennedy (1961). Obama has chosen Elizabeth Alexander.

Alexander will be the fourth poet to speak at a presidential inauguration, following up Miller Williams (1997), Maya Angelou (1993) and Robert Frost (1961). While people can agree or disagree with Obama's politics, I think everyone can appreciate Obama giving a nod to the importance and influence of poetry on the day of his inauguration.

Here's the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/18/obama-inauguration-alexander-poetry

*****

Also, for those interested in learning more about Alexander, including reading some of her poems, here is a link to her website: http://www.elizabethalexander.net/home.html.

The site includes poems, interviews, audio, events, and more.

Interview With Poet Tom C. Hunley

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:22:46 GMT

I'm very pleased to share the following interview with Tom C. Hunley. Recently, Logan House released his third full-length collection, Octopus. He also published The Tongue (Wind Publications) and Still, There's a Glimmer (WordTech Editions) in 2004, in addition to three chapbook collections.

When he's not writing poetry, he's an assistant professor at Western Kentucky University and the director of Steel Toe Books. Plus, he never misses an opportunity to mention that he's a devoted husband to his wife Ralaina and doting father to Evan, Owen, and Blake.

Here's a poem from Octopus that I especially enjoyed (which Tom has pointed out was recently read by Garrison Keiller on October 26 at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2008/10/26):

The Dental Hygienist

She said "open up,"
so I showed her my teeth,
a chipped-white fence
that keeps my tongue penned in.

She rinsed my mouth.
She suctioned my cheek.

She said "How do you like this town?"
so I said "Mmpllff,"
though I meant "More every day,"

and she said "Gorgeous weather!"
so I said "Mmpllff"
though I meant "In my mouth?"

and she didn't say anything,
so I said "Mmpllff" and "Mmpllff"
though I'm not sure what I meant,
and she took me to mean
"Would you like to go out tonight?"
and "to an expensive restaurant?"

When I arrived with a bouquet of roses,
she stuffed them in my mouth.

She told me all about her feelings:
how she feels about fillings,
how she feels about failures.

She said "open up."
She said "It's like pulling teeth
trying to get men to talk about their feelings."

So I said "Mmpllff,"
though I meant "You smell prettier than the flowers in my mouth,"
and I said "Mmpllff,"
though I meant "I'm afraid of dying alone."

She said I was a good conversationalist
and showed me her perfect teeth.
I felt an ache in my jaw.
I felt drool crawling down my chin.

*****

And with that, let's get into the interview:

What are you currently up to?

When I'm not looking after my three small kids or my 85 not-so-small students, I'm mostly working on a poetry writing textbook tentatively titled The Poetry Gymnasium: Ninety-Five Poem-Strengthening Exercises. In my experience, most poetry writing textbooks treat exercises sort of as afterthoughts. My textbook-in-progress includes a clear learning objective for each exercise, a little historical background on the poetic subgenre the exercise aims to teach, a clear rationale for each particular exercise, model published poems, and poems written by my students using each exercise. It is the follow-up to my theoretical book, Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, and like that book, it uses the five canons of classical rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) as an organizing principle. I've been at it for almost two years, and I hope to begin shopping it in a few months.

You're the director of Steel Toe Books and accept manuscripts during open submission periods. What's the most common mistake poets make when submitting?

Failing to follow guidelines. For example, in October we advertised an open reading period for predominately formal verse, but many poets sent us manuscripts that were written primarily in free verse.

In your opinion, what makes a good collection?

Arranging poems into a collection is a lot like arranging lines into a poem. I think there should be the same kind of movement, from problem to solution, from buildup to crescendo, from exposition to denouement, whatever it may be. I also find it helpful to think of a book as a concept album. I have an exercise in my textbook-in-process that asks students to analyze the way an album like Tommy or The Marshall Mathers LP or Electric Ladyland is organized. Why does one track follow the next? How would the album be enhanced or damaged if one song were moved or taken out? Then I ask them to discover an organizing principle and try applying it to a chapbook of their own poems.

Octopus won the 2007 Holland Prize from Logan House. Do you usually enter contests, wait for open submission periods, or take a by-any-means-necessary approach to shopping a completed manuscript?

I would like to see presses put more of their energies into sales and less of their energies into running contests. I would also like to see poets put their money into buying poetry books rather than spending it on contest fees.

My first two full-length collections, The Tongue and Still, There's a Glimmer, were both published in 2004 by presses that do not run contests (Wind Publications and WordTech Editions, respectively). I am grateful to those editors, Charlie Hughes at Wind and Kevin Walzer and Lori Jareo at WordTech, not only for publishing my books but also for teaching me a good deal about the business end small-press publishing.

I won Pecan Grove Press's chapbook contest for My Life as a Minor Character (2005). I submitted to them because I had heard good things about the editors, Palmer Hall and Louie Cortez, from a couple acquaintances who had published with them.

Then I entered the Holland Prize because I got a kick out of Logan House Press's web site (http://www.loganhousepress.com). I liked the fact that they once had an "Imagining Editor," rather than a managing editor (Jim Reese, who has since moved on). The current editors, cowboy poet JV Brummels and musician/book designer Eddie Elfers, are clearly enjoying what they're doing, which was evident from the web site. Also, I liked the fact that they sell books through a subscription service called the Live Poets Society, and I like the fact that everyone who enters the contest gets a copy of the winning book; that's a win-win for the published poet and for everyone who enters the contest.

Some of your poems in Octopus (such as "Ism-Ism" and "Interdisciplinary Studies") deal with big ideas in a pretty direct way. Such poems often run the risk of getting too abstract so that the reader is not drawn into the poem, but yours work. Why do you think yours do work?

First of all, thanks. I suppose the key is finding a good hook that gets both the writer and the reader into the poem. In both cases, I didn't start out with big ideas; I started with an image which I built on and riffed off until the big issues sort of emerged out of my unconscious.

Do you have any poetic pet peeves?

I don't like poems without any clear ideas, poems without any clear emotions, humorless poems, poems that pretend to be smarter or dumber than they are, poems that disdain their audiences, political poetry that puts politics first and poetry a distant second, religious poetry that puts religion first and poetry a distant second, or poems where the poet pretends to be taking great risks but is in fact preaching to some choir. That seems to be a long list, I know, but actually my tastes are pretty eclectic; I'm open to all sorts of poetry and I'm glad there's so much diversity of style.

Who are you currently reading?

As book review editor of Poemeleon, I'm currently reading Manthology, a

2006 University of Iowa Press gathering of both male and female poets discussing the male experience. There are great poems in it by Stephen Dunn, Jane Hirshfield, Sharon Doubiago, Norman Dubie, Jeffrey Harrison, and others. I also just finished Kim Addonizio's collection What Is This Thing Called Love, which is so beautiful and poignant and bluesy.

I just finished teaching A Confederacy of Dunces which I find brilliant and hilarious but which many of my students find annoying and confusing. I just began A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, and so far I'm enjoying its formal inventiveness while also finding deep, authentic feeling in it.

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

Read as many other poets as you can. Buy their books. Get in touch with them. Learn from as many people as you can.

*****

To learn more about Tom C. Hunley, you can check out his bio through the Steel Toe Books website at http://www.wku.edu/~tom.hunley/steeltoebooks/.

And here are some of his poems found online:

* From Verse Daily

* From storySouth

* From Gumball Poetry

*****

And if you're a published poet looking for an interview opportunity, click here for more details.

Poet Interviews TOC

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:39:46 GMT

As many of you know, I've had the pleasure of interviewing several poets over the past year. To make it easier to check them out, here they are (listed in alphabetical order):

Bill Abbott
Nin Andrews
Julianna Baggott
Sandra Beasley
Helene Cardona
John M. Fitzgerald
Sheema Kalbasi
John Korn
Dorianne Laux
Diane Lockward
Tom Lombardo
Denise Low
Joseph Mills
Valerie Nieman
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Kevin Pilkington
Martha Silano
Anne Tardos
Jillian Weise

Twitterpated: Or, follow me on Twitter, yo!

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:30:59 GMT

If you're already Twittering, you can now follow me at http://twitter.com/robertleebrewer.

If you're not already Twittering, you can go check it out at http://twitter.com. Blogging poets should definitely look into this interesting (and free) online tool that allows people to concisely post updates, links, etc., to their "followers." Once you set up an account, definitely feel encouraged to follow me.

*****

If you want to see how this relates to you as a poet, then check out this link from the World Class Poetry Blog at http://www.worldclasspoetryblog.com/23-things-poets-can-do-with-twitter/11/21/2008/. This post compiles 23 things poets can do with Twitter.

*****

And if you want other poets to follow you, feel free to share your Twitter profile URLs below in the comments.

If you're looking for some free reading material...

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:06:33 GMT

I just checked my gmail this evening and saw that the most recent edition of DMQ Review is out, including a poem by yours truly. Just go to http://www.dmqreview.com/.

In addition to my poem, there is work by Chad Sweeney, Lana Hechtman Ayers, Claudia Burbank, Arlene Ang, Joan Fiset, Ellen Elder, Paul Fisher, Virginia Konchan, Fritz Ward, Robert McDonald, Rebecca Morgan Frank, and Mary Wang. Plus, the featured poet is Ellen Bass.

Cool stuff.