The Best American Poetry

Wed, Oct 24 at 7:30 PM: Anthony Madrid, Michael Robbins, Susan Wheeler @ Poets House

L to R: Michael Robbins, Anthony Madrid, Susan Wheeler

This just in from The Millay Colony:

Join us for a reading featuring new work and bon mots from esteemed and bedazzling poets Anthony Madrid, Michael Robbins and Susan Wheeler.

Then walk up the curvacious stairway at Poets House to sample autumnal wines, eat some delicious snacks and talk the evening while watching the moon rise over the Hudson River.

ADMISSION IS FREE

POETS HOUSE 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282

ANTHONY MADRID lives in Chicago. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Lana Turner, LIT, Poetry, Washington Square, and WEB CONJUNCTIONS. His first book is called I AM YOUR SLAVE NOW DO WHAT I SAY (Canarium Books, 2012).

MICHAEL ROBBINS is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He reviews books regularly for the London Review of Books, Poetry, The New York Observer, the Chicago Tribune, and several other publications. He received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago.

SUSAN WHEELER is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Meme (U of Iowa), a finalist for a National Book Award, and a novel, Record Palace, published by Graywolf Press. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Princeton University and lives in the New York area.

-- sdh

David St. John and Anna Journey at the New School [by Philip Brunst]

David St. John and Anna Journey stopped on their book tour at the New School on Tuesday, October 9^th to read from their respective new books of poetry, The Auroras (Harper) and Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press).

The Auroras is David St. John’s first collection of new poems in eight years, and the book begins with an exploration of the poet’s sensuous, almost brooding relationship with nature. St. John is interested in revisiting the past — indeed he later told moderator David Lehman about his love of discovering new things when re-reading poetry — and in the middle section of the book he looks back at California as it was not too long ago. Most of the poems St. John read on Tuesday night were from this section, and they’re at once dark and curious. This is from "Hungry Ghost":

            Your ghost your own ghost
            Had already come

            She sat by you at the small table
           & she was so hungry

            At one point she reached over
            Reached right inside you

            & slowly twisted of a moist
            Wafer of your hear                                      

In the final section of the book, St. John’s poems turn their attention to death and are best characterized by their ephemeral quality, like a strong but distant note of music.

After her extraordinary debut, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, from which she also read a few poems, Anna Journey strikes a new, strange and harmonious chord with Vulgar Remedies. In one poem, the well-named Journey travels through time via the shapes and textures of the insides of a fistulated cow to unknown and known realms. Her long, intriguing titles pull the listener into the context of the poems, an influence of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, she said. With a strong sense of rhyhtm and clever use of language, Journey builds upon the peculiarity that her titles immediately establish. 

The readings were followed by questions from David Lehman as well as from the audience, stimulating much discussion on the musicality of language and the devil. -- Philip Brunst

Lance was doping: What do you do to get ahead in the poetry world? by Kate Gale

They talk about po-biz which means to run with the stars, attend AWP, rub hoodies with the clerks who sort the poetry at Paris Review.  You could do all that.  And still not get any attention.  Or you could be like Emily Dickinson and write in your little house dressed in white, completely missing the Civil War, you could miss all that and yet become famous.  But you have to die first.  You have to die with seven poems published. You have to die and then you can be read.  Which might be okay with you. But probably isn’t.  Because some of us would like to be part of the party.  Part of the conversation around poetry.  Part of the dialogue around words and wordsmiths.  Some of us might want recognition.  Maybe even a job.  Yeah, if we had a job, we could write even more of that amazing poetry. 

Kay Ryan wrote great poetry and just sent it out.  And her girlfriend Carol helped to send it out.  Maybe you find your own Carol to send out your work.  To be your champion.  She’s reading for us on November 11^th in Pasadena with Dana Gioia and Jane Smiley.

Or, you could be like the young generation of poets whose performance makes you want to put down your iPhone and listen:  Doug Kearney and Camille Dungy, who pull you into the tongue and groove of their language like a slippery waterfall.  You’re in before you know it.  You have entered the kingdom.  Doug’s reading in Pasadena at Boston Court on November 27^th with another performance poet who combines visual imagery with language, Nicelle Davis, and that’s moderated by Brendan Constantine.  He’s a crowd pleaser; an electrifying performer who makes your hair stand on end.  He’s reading at the Gerding in Portland Oregon with Tess Gallager on October 29^th.  Which brings me to my next point, you notice what these active energetic poets are doing?  They are making their poems get out there and work for them.  They are not letting those poems sleep or even lie down and take a little nap.  You can’t go on vacation from poetry.  You have to feel its alive wild throbbing while you think and walk around.  I don’t believe in po-biz or in having a poetry career or being mid career or late career.  Poetry is something you choose to do instead of a career.  It’s a life and sometimes it feels like smashing watermelons, and other times it feels like waiting for watermelons to grow, but there’s always growing.  And you can’t knock water.  Or melons either for that matter.

Tonight at KGB Bar: Meghan Privitello + Mark Leidner

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Meghan Privitello + Mark Leidner

 

October 22, 2012

Hosted by Matthew Yeager and John Deming

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

Meghan Privitello is a poet living in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  She just completed her first manuscript entitled A New Language For Falling Out Of Love.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in NOÖ Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Phantom Limb, Sixth Finch, Redivider, The New Megaphone, Barn Owl Review, Bat City Review, Salt Hill Journal & Best New Poets 2012.  When she’s not sleeping, she teaches Creative Writing to old people.  

Mark Leidner is the author of Beauty Was The Case That They Gave Me (The Factory Hollow Press, 2011) andAngel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press, 2011), a book of aphorisms. He grew up in Georgia and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews: Shakespeare

Kate Gale, Guest Blogger October 22-26

Dr. Kate Gale

KATE GALE is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of America.  She is author of five books of poetry and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.  Her current projects include a creative non-fiction book Flight of the Ugly Duckling, a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto based on The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle, based on Dr. Kinsey’s life with composer Daniel Felsenfeld.

Welcome, Kate.

-- sdh

So Much Depends... on Brodsky's Thumb

 

We've really enjoyed our week on Best American Poetry. The UK Poetry Society blog tour will be moving on to the Scottish poet Rob Mackenzie's blog, Surroundings, on Tuesday; please come with us! Here to conclude the week is the Welsh poet Stephen Knight.

Stephen Knight has published one pamphlet, four books of poems – two of which were shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize – and a novel, Mr Schnitzel, which was the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year in 2001. His collection The Prince of Wails is just out with CB Editions.

Stephen Knight won the 1992 National Poetry Competition with his poem, 'The Mermaid Tank':

Beneath my weight, the duckboards bow.
Two buckets, slopping water, weigh me down.
A cold wind howls around the cages now,
    While rain sweeps in -across the town-
Again; and while our rheumy-eyed,
    Arthritic monsters fall asleep
        Or vegetate
             I kneel beside
The Songstress of The Deep
      And wait. ...

Read the rest

I first entered the National Poetry Competition when I was at university – in 1981, the fourth time it ran, so I must have been 20 or 21. I say entered, though in fact I failed miserably at the first hurdle, sending my batch of poems to the Poetry Society without an entry form. My cheque was returned with polite instructions on how to proceed. Embarrassed but undeterred, I tried every year after that, picking up a couple of £100 prizes in 1984 and 1987, then winning in 1992. It was only when the Guardian article which reported on the competition described “ten years of trying” that I was conscious of my persistence. I had simply considered it something to do every year, long before the National Lottery’s cajoling You’ve got to be in it to win it slogan. (But I’ve never bought a lottery ticket – the odds are ridiculous!)

I hadn’t tried out the poem on any magazine editors before entering it – in a batch of three, if I remember correctly – but it had had an airing at that year’s Hay Festival, when I was one of seven youngish writers fortunate to attend Joseph Brodsky’s masterclass. By the time he read “The Mermaid Tank”, he had already dismissed one or more of our poems. No one was immune. Through the week, he spent more time talking about works by Auden, Frost, Rilke and Milosz than he spent looking at his students’ poems – something none of us properly appreciated at the time. We would meet in various rooms above bookshops: small windows; generously upholstered armchairs with faded flower-patterns; doilies. While everyone was heads down in the shadows reading “The Mermaid Tank”, I caught Brodsky’s eye, and he gave me a wordless thumbs-up. I was elated.

A few months later, when it was time to select a few poems for that year’s competition, Brodsky’s thumb gave me some confidence in one of my choices. I should have thanked him.

Check the Poetry Society website to read the rest of this blog tour.

The Poetry Society also hosts the winning poems, and many of the commended poems from 24 years of National Poetry Competition.

As well as cash prizes, winners of the competition also see their poems published in Poetry Review, the leading poetry magazine published by the Poetry Society. A subscription is included in Poetry Society membership.

The National Poetry Competition - really an international competition - is open to anyone, anywhere, writing in English. The deadline is October 31. Enter here.

 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Romney's Secret Jobs Potion

A bar survives as a small business because people come in and buy drinks. How does that happen? Well, it might be because people sense a hip vibe, it might be because the beer is cheap, it might be because all the Yankees fans in the neighborhood have decided to watch the tragic series against the Tigers together on one particular flat-screen TV, it might be because the bar gives out that terrific goat cheese thing at happy hour, it might be because everybody knows your name. Any of these and more might make a bar successful.

None of these have anything to do with tax policy. Or regulation. Instead, they have to do with the existence of customers—i.e., people.

So if you’re talking about “creating jobs” or “helping the middle class,” you ought to be thinking about people. Why did the rabbi and the priest walk into a bar? They both had enough money in their pockets to splurge on a cocktail or pitcher of beer or glass of Bordeaux or whatever it is clergy order when they’re in a joke. And that money came from a job, in their case, a job with an organization that pays no taxes.

The tattered idea that lowering tax rates for business will increase hiring is absurd. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia pays $0 in tax, and yet closed St. Mary of the Assumption, along with some smaller parishes and many schools, this past summer. That means not only an out-of-work pastor, but teachers, secretaries, janitors, clerks and administrators all losing their jobs. The Roman Catholic Church’s taxes couldn’t get any lower; what the enterprise lacked was parishioners—i.e., customers—i.e., people.

And regulation? Well, The Catholic Church, along with other religious institutions, is exempt from many regulations, particularly the ones that promote equality and fairness by forbidding discrimination. For example, in Iowa, a business is not allowed to hire or fire someone “on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion, or disability,” unless it is "[a]ny bona fide religious institution or its educational facility, association, corporation or society.”

But most regulation exists to keep people from harm, not from injustice. Rules against serving toxic food or dumping slag in the drinking water or selling cars that don’t have functional braking systems are good for people—i.e., customers—and, indirectly, for businesses, because they keep customers—i.e., people—alive. The reason bars have to get liquor licenses is to protect those customers—i.e., people—from a substance that can be very dangerous if not properly handled. A dead customer will not boost revenues. A dead customer won’t enhance that hip vibe. A dead customer won’t bring his friends in next April, when the Yankees’ chances look pretty good again.

O burdensome regulations! O burdensome taxes! In Mitt Romney’s Bar & Grill, he’s pouring a secret jobs potion that’s going to jump-start our economy without even a sideways glance at the actual human beings behind economic transactions like ordering a Fuzzy Navel. The only people in his post-Citizens United wo rldview are corporations, who will pay less tax and follow fewer rules. To make up for that generous gift, he’ll slash “wasteful” government spending on such whatchacallems as: 

• teachers
• inspectors
• auditors
• analysts
• secretaries
• scientists
• researchers

Prepare to get fired, bureaucratic slackers, at which point, you’ll cease to be a customer—i.e., person. But don’t worry, that small business called St. Mary’s, just down the block from your out-of-work ass is sure to use its windfall tax break and freedom from regulation to hire more priests and nuns, folks who don’t need the contraception not covered in their health insurance. Ask your parents to send you to Divinity School. You’ll clean up in that libertarian dreamscape, that model of trickle-down economics, that no-tax, low-regulation utopia where the secret jobs potion flows freely through every empty pew.

 

 

 

Carried Away: a Reflection on Winning the UK's National Poetry Competition

Julia Copus is a poet and radio playwright. She won First Prize in the National Poetry Competition in 2002 with her poem 'Breaking the Rule', and has since been awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Last year she was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her radio sequence, Ghost.

Her three collections are all Poetry Book Society Recommendations; her third, The World's Two Smallest Humans, was published this summer by Faber & Faber.

Julia writes:

Here’s how it started. I began by entering a whole group of poems – four or five, maybe (this still strikes me as a sensible tactic, by the way) – and, as it happened, the poem that ended up winning was one I’d put in almost as an afterthought. Folding the pages into an envelope, I remember thinking, safety in numbers…

In fact, I’d written the winning poem a year or so before, in the public library at Lion Yard in Cambridge, where I’d recently declined a place on a PGCE course at the university. It felt like a rash decision at the time, turning aside from a lifetime of probable security as a schoolteacher, but I knew my heart wasn’t in it.

So the poem was finished and filed away, and by the time it occurred to me to enter the National Poetry Competition I’d moved up to Blackburn and was working part time as a TEFL teacher at the local college. I lived then in a soot-blackened weaver’s cottage at the top of a steep hill, and it was in the kitchen of this cottage that the phone rang one ordinary afternoon with the improbable news: I had won first prize.

What does elation do to you? The word comes from the Latin efferre meaning “to carry out or away”, and even in Roman times it acquired the sense of “uplifted, exalted” – carried, if you like, out of oneself.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that winning the NPC is responsible for all the good things that have happened to me since, but it certainly gave me the boost I needed at the time and, though I was unaware of it then, it may also have done something to raise my profile. Once won, such honours cannot be unwon.

But to continue with the etymology, by the time I received that implausible phone call, another kind of dissevering had already begun. In the eyes of the British poetry public “The National” is undoubtedly a major prize. Whatever my personal response to the win (and I’ll admit that after the elation, I quickly reverted to a more familiar mode of unease), there was a sense in which another self had been “carried away” into the outside world; a sense in which it was inhabiting an independent (albeit modest) life of its own.

To this day, I am surprised when students on poetry courses or audience members at readings question me about “the poem that won the National”. On occasion it has been the only thing they know about me. If it is enough to bring them out on an evening when they could be curled up in front of the fire or the television then that’s more than all right by me.

This post is part of a blog tour the UK Poetry Society is running, hosting guest posts by poets on a number of leading poetry blogs. You can find the whole tour linked on the Poetry Society website, incuding those that are here on Best American Poetry.

You can also read all the winning poems, and many of the commended poems, going back to the beginning of the competition. Winners, and 2nd and 3rd prizes, are also published in Poetry Review, the UK's leading poetry magazine, which the poetry Society publishes.

The National Poetry Competition - really an international competition - is open to anyone, anywhere, writing in English. The deadline is October 31. Enter here or by clicking the pretty picture in the sidebar! EVery journey starts with a single step...

A day in the life of Julius LaRosa -- and see Jim Periconi's show at the Grolier Club

Here's to you, Julius LaRosa. On this infamous day in show biz history, Arthur Godfrey-- what, you never heard of Walter Godfrey? -- fired singer Julius LaRosa. Godfrey was the Ed Sullivan of the morning hours on TV and radio. See Mark Rotella's book "Amore: The Story of Italian American Song" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Jim Periconi's amazing colection of Italian American publications, books and magazines, from the early decades of the 20th century, a lifetime labor of love, is on display at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street in Manhattan) and should be seen!. -- DL

Tech Electric: Poetry and the Synchronicity of Sensory by Julie E. Bloemeke

Monday’s blog began with my connection to the confluence of synchronicity as a means to the muse and poetry.  Throughout the week I have tried to open further conversation in regards to how technology is creating its own kismet through form and reach.  Today, I am hoping to both bring the conversation back to the visceral roots of Monday and send our dialogue into a new trajectory, to offer another place of intersection among technology, the sensory, the social and the "random" coincidence.

On Tuesday I explored poems that incorporate technology as an arc.  Today, I offer this question:  do you remember your first encounter with digital terminology or reference in a poem?  This may not be something that immediately comes to mind, but perhaps my experience here will further illuminate why I raise the question.  The first time I remembered seeing technology used as an integral force in creative writing was not in poetry.  It was in a Johnathan Ames short fiction piece called “A Young Girl,” published in the premiere issue of Swink (2004). In the story, the protagonist/writer, Leon David, receives an e-mail from Hallie a fan/grad student.  E-mail quickly progresses to instant message which escalates to a face-to-face meeting and sexual encounter. From anonymity to physical and sexual presence (and still a type of anonymity) in the space of three pages.  I remember being struck by the story mainly for its use of creating an intersection through technology.  Had Ames written the story before the advent of digital immediacy, its way of resonating on a variety of levels simply would not have been the same, or arguably, possible.  The unexpected e-mail—David even says “these correspondences keep me alive,”---the exchange of words over the screen before the voice, before in person, before sex, all contribute to the pace and tension of the story.  Something about it felt utterly irrevocable and fresh.

Fast forward to the present where digital reference and creative writing are not just components but are encouraging a very specific, and perhaps totally new, conversation. Earlier this week I referred to OCHO’s issue #24, an issue dedicated to poets who Twitter.*  And, while I cited one piece from the journal, I think it is important to note that a majority of the poems also offer a conversation around tech language, poetry, form and the digital world:  Two examples:  In “Village, Batanta Island,” Scott Edward Anderson creates a world where children interact because they can see themselves in a digital camera. Samuel Peralta, in “Sonnets B4 the Blaze,” plays in the language of technology, using end rhymes like “dot-com,” and “eBay.”   Both are works that could not exist without knowledge of and experience in a digital world.

But what happens when we go one step further?  When we center entire journal issues, chapbooks or anthologies around technology or a component of it?  Iron Horse Literary Review is a notable instance:  Issue 12:4 is a compelling array of poems and prose that orbit around planet Facebook.  It is a hotbed of social media inspiration, including poems that deconstruct, lament, explore and champion FB’s swerve and spectacle.  Jennifer A. Luebbers (“Ms. Barnhill is Back: A Poem in Found Facebook Status Updates”) and Tamiko Beyer (“September Update: Friend X”) create found poems from status updates culled from the FB newsfeed; Robert Fanning and Laura McCullough navigate the boundaries of F2F (face-to-face) interaction with family members versus FB lurking, poking, unfriending, etc. (And in the process, they also cause us to ponder the layers of language and technojargon in FB).  Fanning and Juliana Gray also play with form and rhyme in their poems as well—Fanning with rhyming couplets, Gray with the ghazal (end word: Facebook).  Dinty W. Moore offers his piece—“Why I Trained My Dog to Post: One Writer’s Facebook Journey,”-- with this introductory question:  “Can a chronological string of Facebook wall postings create a narrative?” and later shares an edited stream of his FB wall posts with this codicil:  “Though I’ve edited away much of the repetition and detritus, what you read below represents an accurate, purely chronological and possibly embarrassing chronicle of the time I’ve wasted.  Let it be a cautionary tale.” In essence, Moore causes us to wonder how to define, or if we can define, this particular genre.  And Steve Langan in “Ugly Kids,” goes back to the idea of kismet, of what it means when technology enables us to find the unfound, when we can “friend” a person from our past, a person often characterized more by our memory of the person than the flesh-and-blood person:

“Twenty-five years later, many of these people

start to come back into your life.

Blame technology.  Consider yourself warned.

All but the one who truly fascinated us,

over whose whereabouts, opinion and future

we speculated endlessly, back when

there was nothing else to do but think.”

On Valentine’s Day, 2012—definitely not a random day, considering-- Jasper Magazine and Muddy Ford Press took social media/social networking poetry a step further:  the chapbook.  Jasper Reads, Download is an entire collaboration that revolves around poetry and prose of the digital world.  The bent is decidedly erotic; almost every poem in the chapbook plays with the nuances and multiple entendres of technospeak.  In Nicola Waldron’s “Face Time” we experience contradictory intimacy of the sexual over video chat: “I slide down on my back/and press my fingers to the screen,/the thermal image app,/its thick curtain, then stroke it open,/touch the place that takes you,/the camera’s feral eye.” In “Smart Phone,” Lauren Wiggins makes a heady list of jargon, causing the reader to stop and consider the language on multiple levels:  “I’m not talking about/vibrate setting, call waiting,/nor voice-activated dialing,/not even 4G networking or hot spot detection.”  Often the results have a sense of humor, turning the language back on itself:  Barbara G.S. Hagerty’s “The Kids Don’t Know Everything:  “To our kids, we are so yesterday, so over it,/so you know, analogue...” 

But Jasper Reads, Download also offers a new window (dare I point out the word choice here) into the realm of connection and confluence.  The poems and prose therein are a glimpse into the tech electric—perhaps the tech erotic?-- as an exploration of the suggestiveness of communication when we are both connected and disconnected in the realm of computers and iPhones. There is a definite sense of play, tease and flirt, as in Dustin Brookshire’s found poem on Grindr: “For Midtown on Grindr,” “Message me…/if your passport has been/worked as much as your body” or in Ed Madden’s** “Sometimes its all I think about, too:”  “The dog-day cicadas are dialing up--/horny little modems buzzing in the oaks.” 

Which brings us back to this idea of how poems are becoming more of a direct sensory experience.  I think of Dickey writing about how books “call” us (again the word choice) from the shelves.  But what happens when the lines or the poems choose us more directly, flash to us—here we have to ask, randomly?—as a text message?  For instance, if you enable your cellphone to receive messages from Cellpoems, a link to a poem can buzz to you at any time.  Unlike PoemFlow, which requires its users to open the app to see the poem for the day, Cellpoems arrive directly to you on their time. Suddenly the poem becomes not just about the experience on the page, but a multi-sensory and very personal, well, encounter?  Perhaps the poem (and the body?) electric?  As the poem buzzes into your hand, it is not only visual and auditory but also tactile.  The poem, as text message, not only lends that first vibration (again, the language rife with possibilities), but also presents a text that can be immediately manipulated:  the poem can be touched on the screen, enlarged, photographed, shared.  Endless possibilities for confluence. 

As a young mom, I remembered, especially on days where poetry seemed a distant universe, waiting for the morning hour to strike 10:55 so that I might shush the baby for just a few minutes to catch Garrison Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac.  In the throes of no sleep and making a slow progression out of postpartum depression, it was these few daily moments that were often my grace.  It was here that I learned about the poetry of Barbara Crooker, Brad Sachs, Matt Cook, Wendy Cope, Michael Chitwood and was reminded of my love for other poets I may have been neglecting:  Blake. Kumin. May Sarton. 

The experience offered poetry on so many levels that resonated with me.  There was the sense of randomness, of not knowing which poem I would experience that day.  There was intrigue of hearing a poem though Keillor’s voice, the feeling of being taken outside of my life for the moment.  The poem was not on paper, not visual or tactile, but it was more in my body, reminding me often of that heady cocktail of mental and physical that I mentioned on Monday.  And the poem was always a surprise, an enticement, a journey.  And sometimes even, just for a moment, an impetus to return to my own writing.

But could there be more?  Something further sensory?  Even more direct?  I think there just may be.  I offer this as a point of muse.  Recently a fellow poet e-mailed to ask if I had a few uninterrupted minutes.  Sure.  He asked if I had my phone.  I did.  He began to text me a poem he was working on, breaking each line by hitting “send.”  So, my first experience of the poem went like this: flash of phone light up/buzz, read line. Pause. Light up/buzz, read next line.  The entire poem arrived this way:  Visual.  Auditory.  Tactile.  It demanded my attention, leaving the lingering sense of vibration in my hand.  This was not reading on the page.  It was intimate.  Direct.  Curious with possibility.  The poem touching me.  Visceral.  Rife with kismet. 

Dickey said the poem called to us from the shelves.  Maybe the reverse is true.  Maybe the poem calls us from the shelves, into the body, back into words.  The connection, or reconnection of the two.

In my case it was a calling.  I was called by name, like a song I could finally hear, like a something I—and maybe the rest of us—are only beginning to know the beginning of.

 

                               
                                                                              ----Julie E. Bloemeke 

 

It is with great thanks that I sign off this week.  Much gratitude to David Lehman and Stacy Harwood for this fantastic forum.

Thank you, dear reader, for sharing your stories and intersections, for raising questions and continuing the conversation.  Let’s keep talking.

And thank you to the following kind souls—and kismet energies!-- who were incredibly helpful in offering insight, support, discussion, enthusiasm and a keen editing eye.  Thank you for bearing with the poet of me who does not usually call prose “home”:

Beth Gylys

Bella Pollen

Howie Axelrod

Jan Clausen

Peggy Ingraham

Reb Livingston

Collin Kelley

Deborah Bernhardt

And one last note of gratitude to the haven that is VCCA. The gift of a residency granted me the time and creative space needed to compose, edit and muse properly on the words.  Oh, yes, and a lake to swim in for when the words confounded me.

 

Please keep, as we say, in touch: 

On Twitter:  @jebloemeke

 

 

*I regret to share this news.  After publishing Tuesday’s blog I learned that JS VanBuskirk died a few years ago.  My apologies for the oversight.

** Ed Madden has also compiled an arrangement of found poems on Craigslist, all gleaned from ads placed in January and February 2012. “Missed Connections: Craigslist Found Poems” was inspired by Alan Feuer’s “Inebriated Love” (New York Times, 22 January 2012)

Journey of a Poem: Paul Adrian on 'Robin in Flight'

Paul Adrian won the UK's National Poetry Competition in 2010 with his poem 'Robin in Flight' - the first poem he had ever sent out for publication.

Since then, his poems have appeared in magazines including The Moth, And Other Poems, the poetry blog Eyewear, and an anthology of young poets, Lung Jazz. He received a commission from the British Craft Council to accompany their Twenty at Twenty exhibition.

Born in 1984 in Yorkshire, he still lives there. He is a support worker for autistic adults.

Here Paul talks about the journey his poem has taken him on.

...

A poem is often a journey in itself. You start off reading or writing without knowing where it might take you, or what it might become.

Simply put, I was reluctant to expend too much energy on my poem, because I didn’t think I had a chance. No mythologizing – I wrote it recumbent on the sofa in my flat, on a pad of A4 with a HB pencil. I started with a vague idea in my head about the malleability of matter, and slowly the page became that idea. The decision to enter it into the National Poetry Competition came late on, a second thought to another poem I (mistakenly) thought better. The two went off together, after a day of the kind of circular editing where you spend hours rearranging the words only to end up with a version identical to the one you started with. They were submitted about an hour before the competition deadline, with something of a frustrated, “that’ll have to do” resignation.

I didn’t look at it again until a day or two after I found out I’d won and began to practice reading it aloud. I’d never read a poem in front of anyone before, and the first time I did was (terrified) in front of a video camera for the Poetry Society. The second time was in front of an audience of poetic notables at the award ceremony. Carol Ann Duffy was stood a few feet to my left.

Since then, the poem has come and gone. I’ve been asked to sign copies of it, and responded with bewilderment. A copy which I hand-wrote and illustrated made £100 in a charity auction (doubly a surprise, considering my handwriting is barely legible).  I’ve been in and out and around those two stanzas more times than I can remember, know it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses, every vowel and verb by heart. We are no longer intimate, but familiar. It no longer feels like something I created. Superior interpretations by other readers have taken away any ownership I may have once claimed.  Mostly, poetry readers have no idea of me until I mention Robin and then they say “Oh, that was you”. The poem is the thing. That’s what people remember. This one became something I had no idea it knew how to be.

Read the other blogs in this tour on the Poetry Society website.

See all the posts in this series on BAP.

Enter the National Poetry Competition.

Let's Get This Party Started: The Attack of the Chick Flix!!!

Over at delirious hem, Jennifer L. Knox is curating a series of essays about CHICK FLIX, however you may define that category of movies.  Here's what she writes:

The subject, Chick Flix, is wide open. You can take it from a Gone with the Wind angle, to Gaslight, to Gas, Food & Lodging, to Gidget (me), to The Good Girl, through Gena Rowlands and out the other side of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I was going to declare one chick per flick, but if two people cover Heathers or Pretty Woman, it’s not going to retread any ground. Nevertheless, I'll be posting a sign up sheet soon.

You can write a 50 word punch in the face, or a 5,000 scholarly treatise. That's why there are scroll bars. Just don’t be a bore.

The deadline is December 1 so update your Netflix queue, get out your hankies, and get started.

Details here. 

Poetry Through Divination: An Interview with Reb Livingston, Curator of the Bibliomancy Oracle by Julie E. Bloemeke

Today an interview with Reb Livingston, who began the Bibilomancy Oracle Project in May 2012.  Be sure to consult the Oracle throughout the interview for your own personal prophecy.  Just click the orb to the left or on the link at the end of the interview.
 

I am continually fascinated by this idea of kismet, technology and unexpected ways of experiencing poetry.  Can you discuss your impetus behind the Bibliomancy Oracle project?  How did you decide which poems to include?

R:  Bibliomancy is the use of books in divination. The concept is that literature contains “truths” and speak to matters of great importance. People have been using books for divination for hundreds of years. Ask a question, pick a book at random, open it to a random page, place your finger down, again, at random—and there’s your answer. According to Wikipedia, the term Bibliomancy was first recorded in 1753. The term Stichomancy, divination by lines of verse in books taken at hazard, was first recorded in 1693. Bibliomancy is definitely old technology.

I’m still selecting prophecies to include. Every week I add new prophecies and intend on doing so for some time to come. When selecting a line or several (I never include an entire poem), I try to anticipate it being an answer to the endless number of questions posed to an Oracle. It’s all about interpretation. I try to avoid obvious horrific prophecies, like “you will die in a fiery crash” – but something seemingly mild might not be so mild depending on the question and questioner’s perception. There are some very positive responses, some less positive and some seemingly ambiguous. Sometimes a question is answered with another question. Probably because the questioner is asking the wrong question.

I’ve always been interested in Tarot and dream interpretations and have used other online oracles for years. None of the online oracles I came across satisfied what I was looking for. Some gave shallow answers, others were rambling and disorganized. I wanted to make an online bibliomancy oracle because probably 75% of poems that I read are online. I noticed that Tumblr had a “random” feature, so that made it easy to create the oracle. I spent a month creating a few hundred prophecy posts and then made a page with big teal button linked to the “random” URL. That’s how it works. Tumblr randomly selects the questioner’s prophecy from the database of poem fragments I added. Today there’s almost 1000 prophecies and it’s becoming increasingly eerily jarring in its responses. I’d say accurate, but I’ll leave that up to everyone else to decide.

Please share one—or more—of your favorite stories of kismet regarding the Bibliomancy Oracle project.

R: My favorite bibliomancy example is this from Wikipedia:  “English poet Robert Browning used this method to ask about the fate of his enchantment to Elizabeth Barret (later known as Elizabeth Barret Browning). He was at first disappointed to choose the book "Cerutti’s Italian Grammar", but on randomly opening it his eyes fell on the following sentence: ‘if we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity' (which was a translation exercise).”

There are many, but I’ll just share two from the Oracle:

A friend sprained her finger and asked if her hand would feel better soon. She got this response:

And once you move them, one by one, palm circles through

the grime and cup your hands round your faces, finally able

to see through—

from “Ghosts That Need Reminding” by Dana Levin

She showed the prophecy to her husband. He tried to explain it away by saying the Oracle must have searched for keywords and matched up the answer. But you don’t type in the question, you just say or think it. No parlor tricks with the Bibliomancy Oracle.

Also, on the evening of the first presidential debate I asked the Oracle for its prophecy on the event and it responded with this:

Colonialism and business

Mark their 500th anniversary

the world is free

It’s Miller Time.

from “IT’S MILLER TIME” by Victor Hernandez Cruz

One of the many things to love about the Bibliomancy Oracle is its awesome sense of humor.

Yes!  And, of course, kismet!  Check this out.  When I asked the Bibliomancy Oracle about our energies convening for this interview this was my reply:

You will. 
You will you will. 
Ah you will.   from “Tea” by Mairéad Byrne. 

R: And we have, have we not?

Indeed, we have!  What is your long-term vision for the Oracle?

 R: The long-term vision is the current vision: for the oracle to exist, operate as an oracle and grow with possible responses. On a lesser note, it also introduces poems to people outside of the poetry community using the oracle. The oracle is more approachable, less insular, than a literary magazine or anthology. Certainly there are people who aren't coming to it for the poetry aspect as much as the prophecy aspect -- the same reasons people use Tarot, astrology, psychics, runes, ouija, etc. I can't say what, if anything, could come from that for poetry's sake. But people using the oracle are invested in reading and considering the poem fragments they're given.

What have you read lately that has grabbed your attention?

R: Recently I’m reading graphic novels, my most recent favorite is The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. Recent poetry collections that really wowed me are TRISM by Rebecca Loudon, China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin Short and Culture of One by Alice Notley. I loved and am absolutely envious at Kirsten Kaschock’s novel, Sleight. I’m seeking darker reading these days.

Right now, I have to know. Is your heart a calm potato? 

R: No. My heart is an indoor wave pool, frothing. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve saved the last word for the Oracle.  When I posed the question: Is there anything else you would like to add to our interview?  Here is what the Oracle had to say:

stop running from the gift

slow down to catch up with it

from “Muse & Drudge [why these blues come from us]”  by Harryette Mullen

And now, to Reb.  When you posed this exact question, what was the Oracle’s response for you?

Conrad longs to be Carmenized, but googles

the night away with many, with none.

from ”His Affair” by Michael Gushue

Wow!  Leave it to the Oracle to end with a mention of technology!   Hmmm, confluence?  Thank you, Bibliomancy Oracle.  Thank you, Reb.

 

To reach the Bibliomancy Oracle:

http://bibliomancyoracle.tumblr.com/askoracle

Be sure to share your divine message in the comments below.

 

To follow the Oracle on Facebook: 

http://www.facebook.com/TheBibliomancyOracle?fref=ts

To follow the Oracle on Twitter:  @BiblioOracle

 

Reb Livingston is the curator of the Bibliomancy Oracle and author of God Damsel (No Tell Books 2010) and Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books 2007). She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

Tomorrow, a wrap up of our week in technology and kismet, including a sampler of print publications that are devoting issues to social media/social networking poetry.  And a little trip into the po-tech electric.

--Julie E. Bloemeke

On Rita Hayworth's Birthday

"Long Ago and Far Away": music Jerome Kern, lyrics Ira Gershwin: 

It Starts With the Echo of Hooves...

Photo: Keith Morris

Day Two of the BAP/National Poetry Competition UK Blog Tour. Here's yesterday's Introduction, if you missed it.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, our blogger for today, has published three collections, Rockclimbing in Silk (Seren, 2001), Not in These Shoes (Picador, 2008) and most recently Banjo (Picador, 2012). Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. 'Ponting' won second prize in the 2011 competition just before its publication in Banjo, which selected by the Telegraph as one of the UK's best new poetry books of summer 2012.

...

....

Ponting

In the end we turned him into a verb:

to pont meaning to pose in ice and snow

 

until frozen. On the voyage south he’d be

tilting plates in the darkroom, in one hand

 

the developing dish, in the other a basin

of vomit. One minute he’d arrange us

 

in groups for the cinematograph, then rush

to the ship’s side... (read the rest)

....

Samantha writes about a flurry of activity, and the reality of the writer's shed:

....

Sometimes at a canter, sometimes at a gallop, I hear a strong poem coming (or what turns out to be a strong poem) months beforehand, until the sound of hooves is so loud that the poem is at my doorstep, demanding to be written. This is what happened with Ponting. I had never received a poetry prize before...

  ...so the telephone call from the Poetry Society in January this year was a lovely surprise. And it was even nicer to be published in Poetry Review for the first time. The fact that Ponting resonated with the three judges gave me the much-needed confidence to embark on my next group of poems.

Ponting took about two weeks to write (including research time) and twenty drafts. Then I left it in the drawer for six months. I always think it’s a good idea to leave your poem in the drawer for as long as you can. If I get twitchy about opening the drawer I start work on a new poem to distract myself from the temptation to coo over a piece of work which is so riddled with faults that I cannot even see there is no central image around which the poem can cohere, that I have not paid attention to making the most of my line breaks and that my narrative thread is so weak as to be non-existent.

In the wake of the prizegiving good things happened. I found myself racing from one poetry festival to the next to give readings. At Ledbury Festival I read three times over the course of a weekend, mainly from my new collection, Banjo, which came out a couple of months after the National Poetry Competition results and included Ponting. At readings many people have said how much the poems have meant to them. I enjoy giving readings. I find that speaking the poems out loud can bring something new to them, even to me.

Now I am back in the shed, scratching out words in the cold, disturbed only by the tapping of a loose tile on the shabby roof, reminding me that the reason I’m sitting in a clapboard lean-to is because of an echo of hooves I heard months ago.

You can follow the whole blog tour on the Poetry Society UK's website, and selected posts will also appear in the Huffington Post.

Poetweet as Form: An Interview with Twitter poet Margaret Ingraham by Julie E. Bloemeke

Today an interview with Twitter poet Margaret Ingraham--@InPoetweet--who began the InPoetweet project in February, 2012.

Can you give us a brief synopsis of the InPoetweet project? 

Absolutely. I am committed to composing and posting one poetweet each day for a year. Once I have completed poetweet number 366 – because I began the project in a leap year and feel duty bound to producing that additional tweet--- I will have come to the end of this first phase of my project. I say first phase, because I have found the project so positive, so brimming with possibilities, so conducive to exploration and experimentation, so exhilarating, that I do not know whether I will be able to bring it to its ultimate conclusion at the end of the year. As of this writing I have completed and posted 230 poetweets, so I am past the midpoint. In February when I began I was not certain if I would be able to sustain the project beyond the first month. But each day my allegiance grows and my belief in the importance of the project increases.

Do you think the experience of consistency in tweeting is a crucial element to understanding the range/repetition/reoccurring images that appear in your tweet poems?  Does this allow us to see them both as individual poems and as an overall collection of poems that work together? 

The short answer to your question is yes. Taken together, the poetweets provide a mother lode in terms of examining the connection between art and artist, life circumstances and subject matter and mode of expression, experience and point of view, etc. In tweets, as in longer poems, I return again and again to the same words, cadences, themes, images, turns of phrase. These are unique signatures, or fingerprints…I hope each new setting--which is what each and every poetweet is--enhances, enlarges or narrows, and nuances that which appears with frequency.

I believe that every poetweet stands alone as a viable individual poem. Certainly the quality of writing varies from tweet to tweet. But the same can be said of my other work as well, as is true for every poet. When I take time to read the entire corpus of my daily poetweets, I do perceive a wholeness (what you term a collection) emerging. Frankly, I would like to see this body of work as a print collection some day, and I spend a good deal of time contemplating how it would be best organized and arrayed.

My process is to focus primarily on that one day’s tweet and not on what has come before (and certainly not what will follow – because I don’t know that until the next day comes). There have been a couple of occasions when I have worked to produce a short related sequence, but that is the exception.  

Can you share some of your thought process behind beginning the project?  How did you initially perceive Twitter as a viable means for form poetry?  Do you think it is a viable forum?  Why or why not?

This is fun to answer, because I did not intend to begin a Twitter poems project at all. In fact, I had never tweeted, nor did I think I ever would. But I was at a friend’s birthday party one February night when a pair of strangers (seriously) suggested I tweet some poems. I responded as though I were interested in the idea but was saying to myself that it was a ridiculous notion. Or so I thought. But by the time I got home I was asking myself questions and I powered up the computer and began googling. By the next day I had found a definition of poetweet, searched out poets who were tweeting poems and established my Twitter account. I had also tweeted one poem, boldly announcing my intention to tweet one poem every day for a year. Now, mind you, no one was looking or listening then, but I was determined to be true to my word. If nothing else, I thought forcing myself into a daily routine of tweeting would be an excellent discipline and skill- honing exercise. I was right about that.

Before that night in February I had erroneously viewed twitter as a forum for what I ignorantly and arrogantly characterized as nonsense and narcissism. I wasn’t much interested then, nor am I now, in knowing people’s every movement, meal, thought--you know what I mean. At the same time, I was keenly aware of the reach, and the potential, of social media. I began almost instantly to think of it as a tool. What a marvelous way to engage folks with poetry who otherwise would steer clear of it. I was and am not the only person thinking that way and using the medium for posting poems.  So far I have not been able to find anyone else committed to tweeting a poem everyday at the present time. If there are, I hope this blog will reveal them.

And, yes, I do think that Twitter is a viable and vibrant means for form poetry. Poetry, as the late Muriel Rukeyser knew so well, is different from other modes of communication. It demands unique things of the reader: full consciousness, complete and sustained attention, response. It asks that we plunge deeply into ourselves. At first blush, those requirements seemed inconsistent with the Twitter culture and mentality. With further contemplation, and maybe imagination, I began to see that as an opportunity and the tweet as a means to create incremental steps toward a broader appreciation of poetry with a social media audience.

But that was only part of my purpose. I want to emphasize at this point that my central objective in this project is not about the medium so much as it is about working in the form. The medium is simply a platform, defining the limits and enabling the transmission/publication/sharing of the poetweet. The work should stand within and without the platform. The poet should not serve the medium any more than the poet should serve the form. Media and form are tools to serve the poet.  

How does your creative process differ with your poem tweets as compared to your usual writing process?  Do you commit to composing a “new” tweet each day or do you create tweet poems from other longer work?

There are days I have a particular idea, image or purpose in mind, but more often than not I rely on a kind of inspiration I guess you could say, as hokey as that may seem. An image, a line, a cadence is given to me, or comes to me as I read, gaze, contemplate, listen or pray, and that is the departure point.

But to me the most interesting part of your question is the definition that you seem to assign to “new.” Every daily tweet is new, regardless of its origin. Most of them – and I think this is getting to the heart of your inquiry – do emerge entirely fresh. Sometimes I do have to go actively looking for ideas. My own work is one, but only one, of the sources I consult. When I do I might borrow an image, yet never have I lifted a 140 character sequence from an existing poem. In my opinion, the creative process is most often about the work of recreating, recasting, reviewing, renewing and revising. It’s my view, but the thought and the practice are certainly not original with or unique to me. Actually, I tweeted about it recently. Here is what I wrote:   

I surmise it was from jealousy that Stravinsky said Vivaldi wrote but one concerto over 100 times I say the true work of genius is to revise

And here (ha, ha) is what that tweet looks like when it has been ever so slightly revised:

It was from jealousy I surmise That Stravinsky said Vivaldi wrote But one concerto Over 100 times I say The true work of genius Is to revise

I notice that each tweet poem seems to be close to or exactly 140 characters.  Do you try to adhere to 140 characters per tweet?  How do you find working within this character constraint?

My first tweeted poem--which represented my Ars Poetica of poetweeting I guess you could say--was by sheer luck and coincidence exactly 140 characters. The next several contained fewer characters. But by day ten, after I had done more research on the form itself and developed a clearer sense of my own purpose – that is, progressed from thinking of my daily poetweeting as a helpful personal exercise and discipline to understanding it to be a serious poetic project to which I was committing myself – I determined that each would be precisely 140 characters. Since that day each poetweet has been.  There was one exception:  I was the victim of a slip of the finger that caused me to hit the tweet button before I had finished composing. But I have the correct(ed) version of that particular poetweet in hard copy and will substitute it if the work ever appears in a traditional print format, which is my hope.

The reason for my strict adherence to 140 characters is twofold. First, the generally accepted definitions of poetweet that I can find out there in cyberspace, in places like the Urban Dictionary, all define it as conforming to that strict 140 character form. And the form itself, as well as my contributing in whatever small way I can to its ultimate and lasting acceptance and adoption as a serious poetic form-- both in and beyond the Twitter medium -- are largely what this project is about.

For me, as for many other poets, form can be extraordinarily liberating. So I find working within the character limit energizing. It demands my immediate attention to every word I consider, and it requires me to make an absolute and final decision about which is essential and which is not. In no place is Coleridge’s well known definition of poetry, “best words in the best order,” more strenuously tested than in the creation of a poetweet. Additionally, the character limit assists me in bringing the poem to closure. That is critical to the success of every poem, regardless of form. What I am doing on and learning from Twitter helps me generally perfect my skills as a poet and, therefore, influences all my work.        

I have also noticed that your poem tweets seem to follow a general pattern.   Unlike other Twitter poets, you seem to refrain from using abbreviation or symbol.  Can you discuss the reason for this choice?  How do you think we read or respond differently to a tweet poem that has symbol, abbreviation or technoabbreviation (as in LOL, OMG, etc.)? 

The generally accepted definition of poetweet clearly states that such are not permitted in the poetweet (although standard abbreviations such as contractions are permissible). So I comply. But it is not simply a matter of observing someone else’s definition or standard. It has more to do with my voice. I write in my own vernacular, and that manner of expression is just not part of my lexicon. I don’t speak, text or think that way, and neither do many of my contemporaries. So, yes, absolutely some readers respond differently to a tweet that has symbol, abbreviation or technoabbreviation. In my case, I found those limiting in terms of audience. The importance and role of audience is something that poetweet has emphasized and clarified for me. Attention to audience may be a key difference in process between poetweeting and other writing.

Can you also discuss your use of the capital letter?  In some tweet poems your use seems to denote a linebreak, in others not as much.  Can you share your process and a few examples with us?

You have zeroed in on something I have been experimenting with and talking to myself about. From the outset I struggled with the issue/question of line breaks: Should I use them?  If so, how would I indicate them? Insertion of a capital letter at the beginning of a new line does seem appropriate, and for the most part now I follow that formula.   Sometimes things get confusing if the poetweet also contains proper nouns, as many of my tweets do.

Line breaks, as we poets know, are as essential to the success of a poem as image or metaphor. Or at least that is my belief; I am pretty obsessive about placing them with precision. The line moves the poem forward, and line breaks create the balance and/or tension between the static and dynamic.

What have been some of the results of this project that have surprised you?  For example, have certain poems been retweeted more than others?   What has your connection with other tweeps been like?  Have others written you or messaged you about their reactions to your project?  What has been your favorite story so far?

Results that have surprised me? That the project seems to resonate to the extent that it has. Maybe folks are just being polite when I tell them what I am doing, but so far my project has met with almost universal interest or curiosity from those with whom I have discussed the idea or with whom I share the poetweets.

Another delightful surprise: one of my friends from grammar school days, who now teaches high school English in Georgia, recently asked if she could share my project and tweets with her students who worked on the school’s literary magazine. Hooray! It was the hope of engaging young people in a new way with poetry that initially drew me to this project. 

My friends who are poets are almost always intrigued and are a constant source of encouragement. Other unexpected gratification comes from Facebook, where my poetweets automatically publish each day. There has not been one day that I haven’t received at least one “like,” often from folks who have never expressed any interest in poetry and some who have told me outright that they don’t understand poetry.  I love to review the “likes,” not just for the personal affirmation it brings but also to see which poetweets garner the most acceptance. That teaches me a lot about audience preference, and it invariably surprises me. Surprises are rife with instruction.

Here is perhaps the most enthusiastically embraced poetweet, and that did not surprise me:

I asked the wind Are you enemy or friend First you spread forest blaze Then you send rains Wind told me What I am few know What I do all see

 Is there anything else that you would like to add or discuss?

Just this. That the brevity of the poetweet form should not be confused with a license to regard short prose or conversational speech as a substitute for poetry. I work to constrain this inclination by bringing every poetic tool and asset I use in longer work to bear in poetweets. That means that most of the literary devices and figures of speech that characteristically inform longer works should and must find their place in the poetweet. Or so I believe. That means not only strong images and compact diction but also simile, metaphor, rhythm (and sometimes rhyme), metonymy, allusion, assonance, consonance, alliteration and the music of the line – with music for me the most difficult to achieve artfully. These are the characteristic elements, the building blocks of poetry, regardless of form.

 

Thank you so much, Margaret!

 

MARGARET B. (Peggy) INGRAHAM is the is co-editor of the anthology Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on the VCCA, patterned after the Best American Poet series. The volume was described by Poet Laureate of Virginia Kelly Cherry as a “splendid, intriguing anthology” whose contributors are “all important poets, all of them exciting and adept.” 

Ingraham, who currently serves as Chair of the VCCA Fellows Council, is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award and the 2006 Sam Ragan Award. Over 100 of her poems have recently appeared in national and international print and online journals. Her book, This Holy Alphabet, a series of lyric poems based on her original translation from the Hebrew of psalm 119 (Paraclete Press 2009), was critically acclaimed as “a jewel.” Her second chapbook, Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press, 2009), was nominated for a 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry. Her collaborative work with composer Gary Davison, entitled  “Shadows Tides” a choral symphony, was commissioned and performed by Choralis at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, on September 11, 2011 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

Margaret (Peggy) lives and works in Alexandria, Virginia, where she currently serves as Executive Vice President of the National Foundation to End Senior Hunger.

 

To follow Margaret on Twitter: TraVersing Splendor@InPoetweet

To friend Margaret on Facebook: Margaret B. Ingraham

To learn more about Margaret and read some other poetry, visit her website:  www.margaretbingraham.com

 

 photo by Julie E. Bloemeke

 

Tomorrow an interview with Reb Livingston, curator of the Bibliomancy Oracle.

 

--Julie E. Bloemeke

Building Bridges: Young American and Russian Poets Share Stage and Verse (by Madge McKeithen)

From left to right: David Lehman (moderator), Russian poets Alla Gorbunova, Dina Gatina, Lev Oborin, American poets Heather Christle, Tina Chang, Matthew Yeager.

David Lehman’s scintillating introduction to Monday night’s reading of poetry by three young Russians and three young Americans at the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the New York Public Library brought Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Babel, Akhmatova, Blok, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Nabokov, and Brodsky into the room, a perfect stage for the next ninety minutes of verse in two languages.

 In an evening presented by the Debut Prize and Causa Artium, Dina Gatina, Alla Gorbunova, and Lev Oborin, winners of the prestigious Russian literary honor, read and conversed with three award-winning American poets -- Brooklyn’s Poet Laureate Tina Chang, the delightfully imaginative Heather Christle, and the inimitable Matthew Yeager. The overflow crowd thrilled to the discovery of new voices, rhythms, and images amid glimmers of recognition and recollections of the familiar. John William Narins’s translations and David Lehman’s insightful and witty moderation of the conversation kept the evening’s focus on each poet’s individual talents as well as the cross-connections of poetic heritage.

 Following are some excerpts of the poems read:

Dina Gatina, born in the Russian provinces in 1981, an illustrator and poet:

every day millions of
people die for our sins
so what
you’re repeating
yourself

so what, so what
they die
“you’re repeating yourself”
“every day”
repeat after me
and whatever

                        from “Untitled,” translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich

Tina Chang, born in 1969 in Oklahoma, poet and teacher of poetry at Sarah Lawrence:

It wasn’t holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.

Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on a farm.

In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
That is beginning.

      from “The Idea of Revelation”  

Alla Gorbunova, born in 1985 on Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg, poet, translator, reviewer, journalist and teacher of philosophy:

a monument to those who have fallen into oblivion
to the woodland villages

a temple to the profundity of the cranes;
teardrops in the hooflets of thaw-patches.

a monument to those who have fallen into oblivion

         from “in the promise of catastrophe”

Heather Christle, born in 1980 in New Hampshire, poet, teacher of poetry at Sarah Lawrence and web editor for jubilat:

It’s no good trying to talk to a roof
A roof already knows everything
It will only turn away
Better to stand on it
and yell facts at the stars
as if you were a real rocket
I’m tired of my constant apologies
All the sorrows I’ve whispered to leaves
who do nothing who tremble
who will not be appeased
I will be a leaf myself
                                                from “Up Again With The Night”

Lev Oborin, born in 1987 in Moscow, poet, critic, translator, and musician:

The crumb of the bread in a thick of ducks
is quite the black hole, no mistake
(except white, and it doesn’t act both near and far,
so it’s really a neutron star).
and inwards the birds are all sucked
towards the lump on the autumn lake
a rare and perfect day,
almost time to fly away,
                                                 from “Untitled”

 

Matthew Yeagar, graduated high school in 1998, a poet and filmmaker:

You’re Henry Hudson, and one hour ago, you were asleep,
You were in you bunk in your cabin on your back,
And the weird northern light through your porthole, etc.
Now you are watching your own ship sail away without you on it.
You’re Henry Hudson
And you are having a hard time believing so.

                                                from “poem [You’re Henry Hudson]”

  As the organizers promised beforehand, the evening of young, award-winning Russian and American poets was full of variety, richness, confidence and vibrancy, and the program one of connections, bringing to mind the ribs, cables, wires, and expanses of bridges, the similes and swagger David Lehman captured in translation in  “Brooklyn Bridge, after Vladimir Mayakovsky”

 

And finally I see –

                                here stood Mayakovsky,

                                                                        composing verse, syllable by syllable.

I look at you

                        as an Eskimo admires a train.

I stick to you

as a tick to an ear.

 Brooklyn Bridge,

                         You’re really something, aren’t you?

 Madge McKeithen teaches writing at the New School, is at work on her second book, and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com

Going Out Talking---Remembering John McCarthy (Terence Winch)

Left: Doug Lang, Myron Bretholz, John McCarthy, Terence Winch, Beth Rake, Bernard Welt, Becky Levenson, Susan Campbell, late 1970s, 1920 S St NW, DC

 

 

 

 

Nine years ago this month, I got a call at work from Beth Rake, my friend John McCarthy’s wife, informing me that John was in the hospital with a diagnosis of liver cancer.  He died about a month later, at age 60. In that last month, however, he showed such unbelievable courage and good humor that those of us close to him still marvel at the way he died. John & I grew up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx and became friends when I was about 14 and he was 17. He was the only child of a father from county Kerry and a mother from Tipperary. He was also an amazing storyteller, comedian, mimic, singer, and spoons-player. With John’s permission, I recorded 3 or 4 of our final phone conversations. When Beth asked me to write something for the funeral program, I proposed instead that I put together a “poem” taken from some of the words John spoke during those conversations. Here is that piece:

Going Out Talking

I’m not gonna get better, barring a miracle,
which I don’t close the door on. But at the same time,
I can only deal with what’s on the table.  It’s strange
enough to die, but it don’t even seem odd to me anymore.
It just seems to be my time.

My appetite hasn’t left me, but neither has
my appetite and need for spiritual nourishment.
I like the Pope personally.  I have no problem with him.
However, there is the fact that he’ll meet with terrorists
before he’ll meet with gays.

Doctors all say the same things. 
“Roll over” is one of their big ones.

Today I feel fine.  Yesterday I o.d.’ed on codeine.  It was terrible.
I called them up and told the nurse, “You know these Tylenols with codeine?
If I had the strength, I’d throw them out the window.  I’ll never take another
one again.”  I said to her, “I want morphine.”  Which I don’t have a severe
reaction to.  They brought me morphine, man.  There’s enough here
to start a business. I got morphine in the fridge, and some here by my bookcase
in case I have a problem during the night.  So far, I haven’t had much pain.
I got a new pain the other day: the inside of my liver feels like there’s a finger
pointing in it, which I began to refer to as “The Finger of Doom.”

It’s all about death.  It’s all about time, and making you comfortable,
and dying at home. That’s the deal: the doctors are out, the pain management
people are in, the nurses come to monitor the progress.  The cards are stacked
for a peaceful death. I have stuff for aggravation—if I get aggravated,
I have stuff I put on my tongue. Maybe I could get some for you. 
You could keep it in your desk at work.

The nurses were saying, “This must be terrible pain.”  I immediately
and deliberately told them—I repeated it three times, so I hope they got it—
“This is okay.” I keep saying to them, “It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t you understand? 
It’s really okay.”

I’ve become part of you.  You’ll remember things we did together. 
Things will come to you.  Stories.  In a mysterious, spiritual way.
You’ll say something that’s a McCarthyism.  You want me to haunt you? 
I’ve even thought jokingly of threatening people if I didn’t get my way
on what I was demanding on my deathbed: “I swear I’ll haunt you.”

I like the idea of flying.  I’m beginning to really like the idea
of joining my mother and father and meeting God.

Pressure’s coming from all angles.  Got a tumor coming down from the top,
liver cancer from the side.  After a short time sitting down,
I get nauseous and dizzy. A few times I ran from the table to vomit.
I can probably still run faster than you. 

I’m built low, dark, and blocky.  That’s what the woman said to me in Ireland:
“You’re like all the McCarthys—they’re built low, dark, and blocky.” 
Kerry people are odd.  They look at you suspiciously. But I got along well
with them.  She took me to the stone with an old plaque that said,
“Here’s lies Sean O’Connell, the Seanachie [the Irish word for “storyteller”].
His stories will live forever.”   I read the plaque, I was looking at the stone,
and she said: “Your grandmother and the Seanachie were first cousins.”
I didn’t feel like a tourist there anymore.

They took me to a ruin that’s so beautiful, and so obscure, and so lovely,
and the man says, “This house was built as a present to your grandmother
and grandfather. And if you took it, we’d be grateful. 
We’re certainly never going to sell it to the Germans.”   

Turning a dollar was never one of my talents. 
Turning away money I’m pretty good at.

I reached a new station. I call it a station on the downtown train.
I’m not hungry, but I have hunger.  Everything is reduced to halves,
and I’m sometimes not even interested in the halves. 
It’s not gonna go any other way.  Meanwhile, I’m here. 
Just like my plan: that the last thing that will give out is my voice.

My life is full of blessings. 

You know what it is?  You get tired of this.  Tired of this routine.
This medicine I drink is rough—they never had anything like it in O’Grady’s.
Even just taking the pills becomes hard.  I don’t want to take no more pills.
All these constant throughout-the-night visits to the bathroom. I just get tired.
After a while, more distance is created.  You’re further away from life.
Further away from life’s concerns.  You drop the reins. 
You get to the point where you’re dead, and people say: “How serene.”

We’re here on this big rock traveling around a ball of fire, and you’re talking
about security.  You’re talking 401Ks.  We’re out in space, hurtling around
a ball of fire.  All my life, I really believed that, but when the time comes,
it’s startling.  I didn’t think I had cancer.  Never mind to such an extent.
But I’ve been okay since the second day in the hospital, and I’m okay today. 
These days count. I woke up the next day in the hospital in a good mood—
I can’t understand it.  There’s only one thing to do: you got to live till you die.

I got what I wanted: to talk my way out.

I found a funeral card that says, “Grieve Not.”  I like that.
It says what I want to say.

----John McCarthy in the fall of 2003

 below: John McCarthy on the roof, W. 16th St., NYC, 1970s; photo by Jesse Winch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sonnet in Memory of John McCarthy

You are smiling at us for eternity
but we don’t see what’s so funny.
You are up there on the roof, chest bare,
and you will not come down again, not ever.
We have a cup of tea on 16^th Street in your name.
Once when you were drunk, you almost broke
my thumb. Failure was your great success.
You hated authority and hypocrisy, loved dogs,
cats, Irish songs. You were a hundred percent excess.
Fearless, ballsy, brilliant. Around you, I felt brave. 
You made fun of me, I made fun of you.
No one ever died with such grace and humor
as you, my dear. You told us not to grieve.
I can hear you joke, “I thought he’d never leave.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John McCarthy & Terence Winch, mid-80s, DC; photo by Jesse Winch

The Latest on the Land of Homer and Plato

Our travel correspondent, an inveterate traveler to an antique land, files this report on developments in Greece:

<<<
Travelers who believe that flying a foreign country's national airline reduces the likelihood of encountering terrorism in the air crossed off Greece from their list of possible destinations at the end of 2009, when Olympic Airways announced that it was discontinuing intercontinental flights. Until fairly recently, though, you could get from New York or Newark to Athens and back nonstop via Delta and, briefly, United Continental. No longer. As if there weren't enough reasons not to go to Greece these days, both U.S. airlines have discontinued nonstop flights to and from Athens. This means that Greeks no longer have the spare cash that allowed some of them to visit family and friends in the States; that Greek Americans are sending their relatives in Greece all the financial help they can, making it impossible for them to visit Greece themselves; and that most U.S. tourists and businesspeople have neither the desire nor the reasons to go to Greece that they once did. If you wish to reach the Greek capital from New York now, you'll fly to a non Greek European city and switch to an associated non-Greek European airline if you aren't on one already. From Athens, you take either a non Greek European airline all the way or switch to Delta or United somewhere in Europe. The shortest stops both ways seem to be Frankfurt, Zurich, and Paris, one and a half to four hours; but some "layovers," the websites inform you with the straightest of faces, are 16 to 21 hours long. First class, business, and steerage.

>>>