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General | Personal Updates

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:05:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2] 

Since it's the first prompt of summer (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), let's write a summer poem. You can write about a summer activity, summer heat, summer flowers, or summer whatever.

Here is my attempt for the day:

"Summer Song"

The fireflies rise out of the grass
as the sun fades into the west
and the cars' headlights shine through glass

to ward off the threat of a crash.
Watch for wayward deer up ahead
where fireflies rise out of the grass

and other creatures sometimes pass
like wandering souls of the dead
as the cars' headlights float by fast.

If a witch, then a spell to cast
filling children with awesome dread
when fireflies rise out of the grass.

She tells the boy to hit the gas,
though the sign reads FLAGGER AHEAD.
As the cars' headlights float by fast

boy and girl feel alive at last.
Both disappear around the bend,
and fireflies rise out of the grass
as the cars' headlights float on past.

Poetry Prompts

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 1:46:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [253] 

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

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

Gua-Gua

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

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

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

*****

What are you currently up to?

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

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

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

You teach creative writing; does that influence your writing?

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

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

How important is location to your writing?

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

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

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

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

What do you feel makes a great poem?

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

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

Who are you currently reading?

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

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

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

*****

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

*****

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

Poet Interviews | Poetry News | Poets

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

My buddy Guy Gonzalez has been doing his best to get poetry a place in Horticulture magazine. For instance, take this new contest the magazine is offering until September 1: www.hortmag.com/gardenversecomp

First place gets $250, plus publication in an issue of Horticulture. Second place receives $100 and third place $50.

General | Poetry News

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 6:45:58 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [4] 

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

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

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

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

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

Every so often, I get an unexpected review copy of a poetry collection. Such was the case with April Bernard's Romanticism (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.). Just released earlier this month, this collection was a nice little pre-summer read. In fact, I'd say the poems in Romanticism are perfect reading for summer nights.

Here's one of my favorites:

Romance

I pine. There is an obstacle to our love.

Every time I hear the postman, I think: At last, the letter!
He has overcome the obstacle--

(It is a large obstacle, an actual alp, with a tree line and sheer rock face
streaked with snow even in July)

for love of me! For three years, nine decades, and one century or so, there
has been no letter. I still wait for the letter.

But lately I wonder if my predicament is outside the human,
neither noble nor farcical; if my heart courts pain

because it aimes for immortality, something grander
than I can imagine. Most of what I imagine,

what I want, is small: Hands with mine in the sink, washing dishes,
the smell of wool, feet tangling mine in bed. I know

the gods punish the proud, but I do not yet know
why they punish the humble. Although after all

it is not humble to ask, every minute or so, for happiness.

*****

What are you up to?

I'm using the conventions, underlying ideas, and some of the forms of Romantic period poetry and song lyrics for my own purposes.

In the press release for your collection, it claims that Romanticism the book looks to investigate Romanticism the idea. What's your take on the intersection of Romanticism and poetry?  

Romanticism means many things: It means the primacy of feeling; an embrace of the irrational (in reaction to the Augustan Age of Reason); a championing of the individual in terms of democratic rights and a repudiation of the monarchy in revolutionary fervor. The great Romantic poets of the Romantic Age were of course Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats & Byron (and there were others). The impulse towards what we call the "Romantic" existed long before the actual period (circa 1770-1830) and it persisted long after. The operas of the 19th century, many writers of the Victorian age and even well into the 20th century, are participating in a Romanticist aesthetic. It exists today as one of the possibilities available to all artists. In music, painting, fiction poetry, etc.

Do you have a favorite romantic poem?

Of the classic Romantic poets, I have a hard time choosing among the many great poems, but if I had to I'd pick Keats's "To Autumn." It is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, sublime in its swoop of feeling, its tactile sense of ripeness and melancholy in the same moment.

This is your fourth poetry collection. How do you go about assembling your collections of poems?

Each one is different. The simplest way to describe how I wrote this one is to say that early on I had the idea of writing from and about the Romantic period in my head, and as poems arose they either suited my central theme or they didn't. Those that didn't I put aside. I was very excited when I got the idea of writing the "lieder" and then the opera arias, and could have continued with that indefinitely. Indeed I still am.

Your individual poems have been published in many fine publications, including A Public Space, The New Yorker, and Agni. How do you handle submitting your poems to publications?

The same way everybody does; I send out a group of poems to the editor, hoping one or two will catch his or her eye.  Luckily for me, as I have published more books I am more frequently asked to submit work and can feel sure at least that someone will read it.

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

I love teaching. I had a long career as a magazine and book editor, and I find teaching is vastly more energizing for my own work—though of course too much can also be exhausting. I am a missionary for reading; I love to teach literature, and believe that the only way to become a good writer is by reading. (By the way, I will continue to teach in the Bennington MFA program, but as of this fall I will be Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College.)

Who or what are you currently reading?

My graduate students; Dickens; Lyndall Gordon's excellent biography of T.S. Eliot; Dan Hofstadter's The Love Affair as a Work of Art; Cavafy; Ingeborg Bachman.

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

Read the greats; don't waste your time with ephemera. That includes Shakespeare, also Elizabeth Bishop, also Frank Bidart, also Henry James and G.M. Hopkins and P.G. Wodehouse. And Austen and Chekhov and Milton and Dickinson and....

*****

To learn more about April Bernard's collection Romanticism, go to the W.W. Norton site at: www.wwnorton.com

To check out other poet interviews on Poetic Asides, click here.

*****

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

Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:55:49 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2] 

Alice Pope and myself will be leading an online seminar June 25 at 1 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) that covers how to research markets and find ones that match your style, in addition to other submission tricks of the trade that will help you get published, whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or whatever. With more than 20 years of combined publishing experience, we know what works and what doesn't.

This online seminar costs $129 and includes a one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com (a $39.99 value). Between the seminar and the website subscription, you'll have few excuses for not getting published.

You can register here: https://writersonlineworkshops.webex.com/mw0306l/mywebex/default.do?siteurl=writersonlineworkshops

Thursday, June 18, 2009 3:53:26 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0] 

What would you do if you happened to win $1,000,000 today (tax-free, no less)? Would you run out and buy a house? A car? Pay off debt? Throw the biggest party ever? I'm sure we'd all react differently, soooo...

For today's prompt, I want you to write a poem related to getting a million dollars. You can focus on what you'd do with the money. Or you can focus on an object you'd buy with the money. Or you can focus on a related action. You could even write about the negative things that could happen if you were suddenly rich (think John Steinbeck's The Pearl).

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Rich"

Bye-bye debt; hello house
in two states: Ohio
and Georgia.  I travel
by plane. Make stops in New
York with Tammy. Explore
the country. Keep working,
writing and spending time
with family. Maybe
open up a bookstore.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 2:08:02 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [223] 

The folks running Writer's Digest and WritersDigest.com are searching for a student blogger who will be in an MFA program during the 2009-2010 school year. If you're going to be such a student, I'd suggest you try entering the contest as you'll get extra exposure in the writing (and publishing) world with a blog connected to WritersDigest.com. It's a free contest, so what've you got to lose?

Check out the guidelines and other details here: http://www.writersdigest.com/mfacontest

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 4:25:18 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1] 

Campbell McGrath's epic poem Shannon has just been released by Ecco. McGrath is the author of seven previous collections, including Seven Notebooks, Pax Atomica, and Capitalism, and is an award-winning poet. He teaches at Florida International University in Miami, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.

Shannon was a nice breath of fresh air. It's an epic poem and a poem that tells the story of George Shannon, the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The poem is a fictionalized account of what happens to Shannon during a 16-day stretch he was lost from the rest of the group. The poem was a very fun read.

Here's a small excerpt from one of the sections:

This land is grown chastened
& changed somewhat
These past days
Hard traveling. Dust-ridden
Scoured & coarse
Not a tree
On the horizon all day
Only buffalo herds
Unbroken some hours keeping pace.
All these grazing creatures fed upon
The grass of these plains
Is it not strange
To believe that I might feed
A host of nations
Upon my own heart, feeling it swell so?

In a land of plenty
I travel hungry.

In a country of herds
I wander alone.

On a journey of discovery
I am the lost.

*****

What are you up to?

I've got three new books I'm currently working on. One is a collection of poems "about" poetry, many of them addressed to American poets I admire, from Whitman to contemporaries. Another is a collection of lyrical prose poems, a kind of thing I haven't written in a long time. The third is another "historical" project, a book about the 20th Century, comprised of one hundred poems, one per year, each dated and in the voice of a historical figure.

Shannon is a long poem about George Shannon, the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery. How did you come across his story?

I have a poem about Meriwether Lewis in my very first book, CAPITALISM, and while researching that poem, 20 years ago, I first encountered George Shannon, who got lost and wandered alone for 16 days, and I thought--that would make a good long poem. Over the ensuing years, I would occasionally tune in to George Shannon's voice, and take down notes about his time on the prairie, but never knew exactly what to make of them. Then I had a semester off from teaching, three years ago, and sat down to really write his story.

How did you decide to write an epic poem? Also, how long did it take to write from idea to final draft?

Once I really focussed on Shannon, it went surprisingly quickly--I wrote the poem in about six or eight weeks, and then revised it for another year. Because I knew the beginning and end of the story--Shannon gets lost, then he gets found--I only had to create the narrative of those sixteen days alone. It becomes an epic poem in the sense that Shannon represents many things in American history and culture, and speaks to us from a time, two hundred years ago, when America was still creating itself, literally and symbolically.

What was the greatest challenge you found in writing this poem?

Just keeping it going. Getting the narrative to work. It was a kind of novelistic struggle--how do you keep the reader interested? How do you create tension, create a voice for Shannon, create a shape for the poem?

You teach at Florida International University. What is the most common mistake you find younger writers making?

Young writers make all kinds of mistakes, but so do not-so-young writers. I prefer the mistakes of younger writers, because they tend to be mistakes of enthusiasm rather than mistakes of excessive caution. 

How do you manage your submissions to publications?

I just send out poems to magazines when I feel I have a bunch of finished poems lying around. Sometimes, I might not really have anything for a year or two--as when my energy went into Shannon, a long poem, which I did not really submit to periodicals. Getting published is like going fishing--some days you catch a fish, some days you don't. It might have to do with the bait you are using, or your technique, or where you are casting your line--but there's a lot of luck involved, too.

Who are you currently reading?

I've been reading novels, biographies and history recently, books about Picasso, Matisse, and Chairman Mao, among others.

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

Write more poems. Ignore things you can't control--like getting published--and write as much as you possibly can. 

*****

* Check out Campbell McGrath's Wikipedia page (don't usually get to say that, huh?) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_McGrath

* You can learn more about Ecco at http://www.harpercollins.com.

*****

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

Friday, June 12, 2009 4:04:36 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [4]