Poetry

Robin Morgan’s “Monster”

I have been struggling to find all of Robin Morgan’s poem “Monster” since I read an excerpt of it on Feminist SF – The Blog.

It’s an angry poem and I adore it. I would love to quote you the entirety of the piece, all 6 pages of its glory, but I would also like to respect Morgan‘s creative ownership of the piece.

I admire its bravery, I admire the descent to violence but not the submission to violence. I need it because it reminds me that there are ways of writing that align with my ways of being and that most of the written word and the spoken word are not written and spoken in those ways. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong or despicable about who I am.

Here is an excerpt:

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

This is adult, end-of-the-day Poetry Friday.

“pouring your light into their mouths”

Hullo-ullo-ullo!

It’s been (and remains) somewhat messy in the county where I (and Joanne) reside. I’m itchy, itchy, itchy, both literally (water shortage) and figuratively (time shortage vs. things I want to write), but very grateful to have escaped the worst. (The baseball field seven blocks from my house was underwater before the Cumberland had even crested.)

Since I last posted here, some new poems of mine have been published:

“dozing April fool…” at 7×20

“She’s building…”, “Here, I’m able…”, and “That giant glass slipper…”, all at microcosms

“The Wailing Well” (text and audio) at Goblin Fruit

Also, two reviews at Galatea Resurrects, issue 14.

Reading has been even more piecemeal and snatched-moment than usual, so not much to say. At the moment, I’m mulling over today’s feature at Poetry Daily, Aliki Barnstone’s With God in the Morning. Some of the language is too prosaic for my taste (and the ending perhaps too abrupt — something about the “dear God” doesn’t work for me, even though I recognize the clever double meaning in its placement there) — but I’m intrigued by the connections the poem wants to trouble me with.

Oh! I must not neglect to mention, there have been poems written for me as well. Molly Gaudry’s Fingertips riffs on some lines from my Sonic Crochet Hook, and for my birthday, a fellow Taurus sent me a verse portrait of a bull. 🙂

And on that note, I’m going to go intimidate another 100 endnotes into submission, and then maybe I can treat myself to revising something or other into a submission.

Off My Desk

Christian Wiman‘s book, Hard Night, has been sitting on my desk for months, wedged open to “Reading Herodotus” and I have been able to set nothing on top of it—or nothing stably—for that whole time. Perhaps I can exorcise the need for the poem’s presence by sharing some of it with you folks.

It opens:

Sadness is to lie uneaten
among the buried dead, to die
without feeling a fire
kindled in your honor, that clean smell
of cypress rising and the chants, heat
increasing under you, into you, an old man
whose name the feasters weep and sing.

and closes:

Close your eyes
just this side of sleep and you can almost hear them,
all the long wonder of it, the lost gods
and the languages, the strange names and their fates,
lives unlike our own, as alien and unknowable
as the first hour on this earth for a womb-slick babe
around whom the whole tribe has formed a ring,
wailing as one for what the child must learn.

and dies the entire time in between. So powerful.

“adorned with laurel and lightning bolts”

If I could get all y’all to buy one poetry book in the near future (say, in celebration of spring, or National Poetry Month), at the moment it would be Alison Luterman‘s See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions, 2010). Today I quote to you from “The World Card,” which begins:

I always wanted the World card,
naked androgynous figure striding the globe,
adorned with laurel and lightning bolts…

and builds and builds to

…I wanted to cross the sky and come back
bearing dead stars in my hands, fossil fuel
for poems. I wanted to inhale God’s breath
till it singed my lungs; to be used up by love,
to hang from a tree by my heels.
“Be careful,” the old fortune-teller advised me shrewdly
at the shop where I paid her ten bucks
to turn the deck over in her ringed, swollen fingers.
“It’s not always a good thing, you know –”
but I wouldn’t let her finish. I didn’t want good,
good was too small. I wanted the world.

Speaking of Tarot cards, the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a new series to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot. I associate BPAL with poetry in part because many of the fragrance names and descriptions borrow from Poe, Swinburne, Keats, and others, and the CBLDF series is associated with Neil Gaiman. I should also note that, over the years, I’ve received some incredible responses to BPAL scents on me, and some fond memories (as well as a few “OMG scrub that off NOW!” moments — no risk, no reward) — a vial of “Embalming Fluid” came to the rescue in a too-small ScotsRail compartment after a too-long day sans showers, and there was an elevator ride where a stranger exclaimed “What IS that?” in a happily gobsmacked way in reaction to the Nanny Ashtoreth.

In other news, my sometime partner in crime Greta Cabrel has a new poem up at Thirteen Myna Birds, I have a booklet of hay(na)ku available via Open Hand Press (all proceeds donated to Haiti relief efforts), and last night I read Wendy Babiak’s The Uninvited Guest, thanks to a rec Joanne made on Twitter. (And speaking of Joanne and Twitter, I really like today’s tanka by Peter Newton on 7×20, the zine she edits, which incidentally is open to submissions…)

Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

The organizers of 2010: A Space Oddity (mentioned formerly) have sent me a tentative list of their events:

  • The Art of Book Covers: A/V Pesentation on how illustration and design come together to create a book cover. *Lou Anders, three time Hugo nominated Editorial Director and Chesley Award Winning Art Director of Pyr Books hosts a presentation on how science fiction book covers are created, from commissioning artists, to art direction, to final layout and design. The presentation will feature artwork from some of the most celebrated names in science fiction and fantasy illustration, including some never seen before pieces.
  • A Star Ripped Apart by a Black Hole? *While the evidence for high-mass and low-mass black holes is incontrovertible, whether Nature creates black holes of intermediate-mass (1000 – 10,000 times the mass of the Sun) is still quite controversial. We present work indicating that not only do intermediate-mass black holes exist in the centers of dense globular star clusters, but that in one instance the black hole has ripped apart a star that has strayed too close to it. The unusual chemical signature of the debris suggests the star that was ripped apart was a white dwarf, the stellar corpse of a star that no longer burns hydrogen in its core. (Yuanyan Su presenting the current research of astronomy professor Dr. Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama.)
  • Dark visions and bright: SF poetry reading: *The Science Fiction Poetry Association sponsors a reading of speculative poetry (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in between). Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny wrote novels to pay the bills, but they wrote poetry because they needed to. Come find out what depths and heights can be fit into just a few well-chosen words. (David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Peg Duthie and Joanne Merriam)
  • Mother Goose has a lot to answer for (Reading): *Who killed Humpty Dumpty? Who forced the old woman to swallow the fly? David Kopaska-Merkel reads from his recent book, “Nursery Rhyme Noir.” Shocking crimes lie behind the seeming innocence of nursery rhymes and children’s stories. Fortunately, Hasp Deadbolt, P.I., is on the case.
  • Why everybody should be reading Science Fiction: *My father was born before the Wright Brothers flew, and he lived to see the landing on the Moon. That was when change was coming at a snail’s pace. Now we live in a technological avalanche. But people naturally resist change. Someone mentions clones, or the capability to manipulate genetics and we’re automatically opposed. It’s as if these ideas, and others, fell out of the sky. But SF people have spent the last seventy years looking at the various directions we might take, and it helps them make smart choices. Another reason to read SF: At its best, it makes dazzling entertainment. – Jack McDivett
  • When Wallpapering the Den with Your Stories is Not an Option: A Q&A on Submission Etiquette: *Writing is one thing, but making it possible for millions of potential fans to read your work is quite another. David Kopaska-Merkel (speculative poet, fiction writer, and editor of Dreams & Nightmares magazine), Peg Duthie (author and editor) and Joanne Merriam (poet, fiction writer and former staffer of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia) answer your questions about submission etiquette and standard practices in the book and magazine industries.
  • It’s Time for the Bloodletting (Reading): *Joanne Merriam reads from her short post-apocalyptic story, “Sundowning,” which just appeared in Strange Horizons. Set in a future where vampires keep humans around for food, a fry cook struggles with her father’s Alzheimer’s. Merriam has had fiction in The Fiddlehead, On Spec, Southern Gothic and Stirring, and is a winner of the Strange Horizons Readers’ Award. You can find more of her work online at joannemerriam.com.
  • Micro Black Holes and the LHC Scare: Dr. Ben Harms.
  • Hanny’s Voorwep: The Rise of the Digital Amateur Astronomer: Dr. William Keel.
  • Ask an Astronomer and Physicist: *Do you have questions about space or physics? Well come and enjoy this Q&A on astronomy and physics with University of Alabama professors! Hosted by the Astronomy and Physics departments, Dr. Dean Townsley, Dr. Dawn Williams, and Dr. William Keel will be taking questions from the audience related to astronomy and physics.
  • Anthropology in Science Fiction: Exploring the Human Condition through Imagined Worlds: *We will compare portrayals in science fiction to anthropological perspectives on questions such as: What makes a human? Where does our species come from, and where are we headed? How important are the differences that separate us? Can we ever really understand each other? – Dr. Jason DeCaro.
  • Sci Fi and Gaming (TP) (45 min) – ABXY
  • The Science Fiction of Japanese Anime: *Have a look into the world of science fiction in Japanese anime with the people who brought you the anime convention KamiCon. See how technology in anime affects the path of modern technology, and how modern technology affects anime. Why does the most technologically advanced country in the world find anime so important? – Raymond Lenzer, KamiCon
  • War of the Worlds Broadcasting Scare: Adam Schwartz
  • Characters, Plot and Backstory: The Mechanics of Fiction: *All too often, the plots and backstories of science fiction and fantasy take precedence over the development of characters. Alex White gives you a series of tips and tricks designed to get you thinking about what drives a story.
  • Robotics programing and demonstration: Dr. Monica Anderson and ACM
  • How to get rejected: * Editors and their screeners are inundated with manuscripts from people they’ve never heard of. Hundreds of them pour in over the transom every day. So naturally they look for reasons to get rid of them, to send them back with the standard rejection letter. And to do it without having to read past the first page. Or often even the first paragraph. Here’s how we can make it easy for them to reject our submission. – Jack McDevitt

And, I will be selling copies of Edgewise. I got the covers printed yesterday, so I just need to bind them and my pre-orders will be mailed out. I’m still taking pre-orders if you’d like to get in on this hawt chapbook action.

(mirrored from joannemerriam.com)

stray sparks

Three things:

(1) A surprise package arrived in today’s mail, from my friend Marilyn. Slicing open the bubble-padded envelope and peeling away a thick layer of white tissue paper revealed yet more layers of another, gift-wrap grade tissue paper, tied with a red ribbon and sealed with a store sticker, accompanied by a crisp white envelope with my name in Marilyn’s familiar cursive. Undoing the ribbon and the seal revealed a copy of Mary Oliver’s Owls and Other Fantasies; opening the envelope revealed a handmade card, itself constructed out of both layers present (red and pink paper upon the cardstock) and absent (negative spaces created by wax or some other resist).

I’m looking forward to reading the book some other afternoon. Today I’m just taking time to savor both the surprise and its layers. (Mind, I neither expect nor require it of the presents I receive or give; it simply happens to be a type of pleasure I enjoy lingering with when inclination, opportunity, and means coincide.)

(2) Earlier this week, I was sorting through some snapshots from my trip to Israel last fall. I think I caught sight of this memorial inscription inside the Clore Garden of Science; I don’t recall if the item was a water fountain, sundial, or something else entirely. This is why I ought to caption my photos right away, not half a year later…

From photoblogging
From photoblogging

(3) I don’t know when (or even if) I’ll get to the book itself, but Susan Cheever quoted several intriguing passages from Mary Karr’s Lit when she reviewed it last November:

Humming through me like a third rail was poetry […] the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight. . . .

~ ~ ~

Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.

like the snout of a strange animal

I wonder if any of our t’ousands and t’ousands of readers live in Alabama? I’m going to be there on March 6th, reading from my work and participating in a panel discussion on submission etiquette, as part of 2010: A Space Oddity (more info here).

Since I’m going to be there, I thought I’d use the opportunity to motivate myself to bring out another chapbook. I’m calling it Edgewise, and selling it for US$5 (postage included for pre-orders). Details here.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to little movies of poems lately, inspired by the many Billy Collins ones which I think I’ve linked to before, and some stop motion movies I was watching. I’m thinking it would be interesting to do stop motion movies of some of my own poems, just for fun.

2009 Dwarf Stars Award Nominees

Dwarf Stars 2009

2009 Dwarf Stars Anthology

Got my contributor’s copy a few days ago and finally got around to scanning the cover for you all to see. Purty ain’t it? There’s some really excellent stuff in there, including my homegirl Peg Duthie’s “Evolution,” Charles Wright’s “The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight” and Jane Yolen’s “Goodbye Billy Goat Gruff.” A complete list of contents is here. The ones I could find online are:

Mirrored from joannemerriam.com.