Sorry for the late start this morning; I went for an early morning run, had a couple meetings, and yadda-yadda-yadda, here it is the early afternoon. Oh well, sometimes it's good to get off to a late start, right?

For this week's prompt, I want you to write a poem that has the title "Nobody's worth (blank)" in which you replace the (blank) with a word or phrase. For instance, you could have the following titles: "Nobody's worth a nickel;" "Nobody's worth that kind of headache;" or "Nobody's worth missing the Ohio State-Michigan game."

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Nobody's worth killing over"

I can get so angry sometimes
over the smallest things: a flat
tire, slow website, prerecorded
messages trying to sell me
random services and products.

Then, there's the big stuff: women and
children raped and murdered, people
exploited by the leaders of
countries and companies, long lines
when my boys need to go "potty."

While having breakfast this morning,
Reese said, "They should stop releasing
atomic bombs, because all these
monsters are getting loose." He meant
Godzilla, Mothra, and other

kaiju from Japanese monster
movies. He meant he's noticing
too many bad things happening
on this planet. It's time to quit
fighting and preparing to fight,

because nothing conflict begets
conflict. Releasing atomic
bombs creates a monster or wakes
one from its sleep. Then we all pay
whether interested or not.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009 6:52:50 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [217] 

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

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

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

General | Personal Updates | Poets

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

Here are some of my various links (in case you want to friend me, sign up for a free newsletter, or whatever):

I edit Poet's Market and the Poet's Market newsletter (which also has a free sign up)

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]