NaPoWriMo – Poetic Asides Column Poem-a-Day Challenge

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Poetic Asides Poem-a-Day Challenge – where you follow writing prompts, leave your poems in the comments, and eventually poems are chosen for an e-anthology. The judges include Dorianne Laux, Mark Doty, Nick Flynn…and me, among others. Anyway, check it out:

Poetic Asides announces Poem-A-Day Challenge

Incidentally, I’ve already started – and I’m using the periodic table of elements as my list of prompts. Think I’m kidding?

Go Listen for Me

April, although NaPoWriMo, is really the month of work travel for me, not readings. There are so many wonderful readings coming up in my area in the next few weeks; could some of you go for me, please?

Kevin Young is reading at the ICA in Boston on 16 April. (I loved his book Black Maria.)

Also on 16 April is X. J. Kennedy at the Lexington High School!

On 2 April, Sabra Loomis and Jennifer Rose at the Suffolk University Poetry Center at 5:30pm (much, much too early to escape from work in time to arrive).

plants using their bright stamens as tuning forks

I’m getting ready for NaPoWriMo by coming up with lists of prompts and inspiring poems (both of which I’ll be posting here) and thinking about topics I may want to tackle. I definitely want to try to write something about being my grandfather’s pallbearer last month, and maybe something about the arsonist who burned down the world’s largest red cedar bucket, and I want to experiment some more with N+7. I’ll be posting about my progress both here and at my blog. I bought a new notebook, which fits in my purse, and will be trying to write on my lunch hours as well as at home.

Also, I had two poems published last weekend: “The Hitch in Yr Getalong” at My Poem Rocks and “Evolution” at Mise En Poem. If those sites look amazingly similar, that’s because they’re edited by the same person.

“Dropping clutter and rubies wherever I walk”

Today’s subject line is from Rose Lemburg’s “Burns at Both Ends,” a poem in the January/February issue of STAR*LINE.

As it happens, the Bronchitis of Doom that plagued me this past winter has pretty much put paid to my ability to get by on little sleep. I’m still grumpily coming to terms with how much less I’ve been able to pursue (never mind finish, never mind circulate) thanks to the combination of more chaos and fewer waking hours that has ensued; on the bright side, I don’t lack for engrossing projects, and I’m expecting the second half of this year to be more conducive to me giving them their due. To each harvest its time.

I’m not personally committing to NaPoWriMo, but I’ll be cheering on the VTL members who are, and I will at least try to show up here a couple times a week with recs or other ramblings. If nothing else, I’ll likely be inspired to stay up an extra hour here and there to get some writing or reading done, so that I’ll have something to share at the party. 🙂

Back to STAR*LINE: I am a volunteer for my church’s Room in the Inn program. I had two shifts this past winter where I served as the evening’s “co-host” – basically staying awake and “on call” in case the men needed assistance during the night.

During both shifts, I ended up with time to indulge in some poetry reading. A while back, I’d promised a friend that I would record some Sylvia Plath poems for her, so during my first shift, I had with me an edition of Ariel that included a facsimile of Plath’s typescript as well as a “restored” edition of the book. The publisher used different papers for the different sections (e.g., rougher stock for the fascimile section) — a decision I found pleasing.

The collection includes “Nick and the Candlestick,” a poem Edward Byrne reproduces in his entry on Nicholas Hughes’s death. The YouTube video embedded in his post is a fascinating listen — Seph Rodney introduces his gorgeous reading with how he didn’t really connect to poetry until he came across Plath’s work.

During my second RITI shift, I had with me the issue of STAR*LINE mentioned above. In addition to Lemburg’s poem, the standouts for me included Ann J. Schwader’s “Moonless” (a sonnet), and Robert Borski’s “Hansel & Gretel Revise Their Strategem,” “Jupiter’s Red Spot,” and “The Time Traveler’s Dog.” (Since Borski’s name kept showing up every time I dog-eared a page, I definitely plan to look up more of his work some other evening.)

Stolen

Karen Weyant‘s Stealing Dust (published by Finishing Line Press) makes you feel too hot, too sticky, too tired, too old, too dirty. It sings the songs of the assembly line so irresistably you will sing along whether you have sung them before or not:

Forget eyeliner. It stains shadows beneath your eyes.

Forget mascara. It runs. Even the waterproof kind.

from “Beauty Tips from the Girls on 3rd Shift”.

The poems make obvious and close as skin worlds outside my own experience. From the title poem:

They don’t care about what we

take home with us: dirt that crawls

up our jeans, seeps through our socks,

leaving tiny dots like deer ticks

 

embedded deep in our skin

and dust that melts through our shirts,

our white tank tops, our bras, coloring

the tips of our nipples, black.

The poems open your eyes, then blind you. From “3rd Shift Sunrise”:

                The sun looks different

after 8 hours of dust & dirt,

                & fluorescent white lights.

…

                edges blurred

as if melted from furnaces

                that never stop running.

You can find more of Karen’s work on her website.

Below our skin, rivers.

Since I wrote an entry last, five of my poems have appeared in Concelebratory Shoehorn Review (possibly not safe for work, if your workplace minds cuss words) and another in My Poem Rocks.

Today I’ve been reading David Orr in The New York Times on careerism in poetry, and Seth Abramson’s excellent response, which incidentally doesn’t mention the thing that jumped out at me, which is that great poets are implicitly assumed to be male (“it’s somebody who takes himself very seriously,” emphasis mine), and although probably David Orr didn’t mean it that way, but was just eschewing the questionable grammar of “somebody who takes themselves,” I think we do tend to assume a Great Poet or a Great Anything will be male, so his description was apt if, I suspect, unintended. Anyway, interesting reading, and Abramson’s points about classism are important, I think, although I’m no particular fan of MFA programs (which, at tens of thousands of dollars a year, are hardly democratizing poetry, for all the good they may do their individual students).

I was also very excited this weekend to find out that my friend Sue Goyette has won the CBC Literary Award for English Poetry, for “Outskirts.” The winning pieces will be read on the air on March 4th, and should be available at cbc.ca/podcasting or cbc.ca/wordsatlarge.

Neil Aitken’s The Lost Country of Sight

I have little experience writing reviews. Do not hold this against Neil Aitken‘s The Lost Country of Sight.

Although it seems strange to me, I think I am, as a reviewer, supposed to explain what the book’s about. If you’d just read the first poem, it would be fairly clear. The poetry is about home. It’s about not being home, coming home, searching for home, settling for home when home is not home, the implications of home and not-home on your identity.

Even the longing and the confusion are beautiful in Neil’s work.

From “I Dream My Father on the Shore”:

And when night comes, it comes without a tread, without a word.

From “After Neruda”:

When you press it to your lips,
you can still taste the unwashed salt of sorrow.

From “Gift”:

There is always cold at my heels, the tall ships
of thunder, small men with seeds. This is my gift.
This storm I bequeath to the acres of graves,
the bent necks of reeds, trees I remember.
More than color, I leave rain on doorsteps.

One of the things I admire most about Neil’s poetry are the details. Each poem has a similar silence, a quiet or a tone that I will now always associate with Neil’s writing, but the details in each are discrete, tangible, clear, differentiated so the book does not give the effect of being one long piece split up occasionally. From “My Father as Landscape”:

But I am not a forest. I am a road cutting through its midst.
I am what the mountain yields, the path through tall shadows
of pines and maples. I am the line that stitches the earth, my body
an unending arc of stone and gravel. I am the eye, the sight, the sign
at the edge of a ravine before the drop to nothing. I am the steel rail
on which you lean, the cross, and the wild flower burning against the dark.

Near the end, Neil takes on Jose Marti’s quotation “I have two countries, Cuba and the night”: “In me, there are as many countries as names.” Furthermore:

If there are three, there must be a fourth.
I will find it in your skin. Hear it resonate in your bones.
A ringing echo. Something of sound. It will be small.
Almost a hut. A thatched roof shack in the wilderness.
A hermitage for two. A boat in a river. Almost a home.

The book is now available for purchase on the Anhinga Press website, for USD15. Continue reading →

“no matter what other life you live…”

I am sitting in the living room of a beach house overlooking the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, which has been traveling past the picture windows at a formidable clip. We had planned to spend the afternoon on the water, courtesy of the owner and her kayaks, but there ended up being a bit of rain and a lot of wind, so here I am reading poetry and scribbling letters instead…

and while I would likely enjoy the poems on the page advertising Carolyn Miller’s forthcoming book regardless of the setting, they fit this place and afternoon very well indeed.