I am greatly amused by the “What the hell, man?” page of the Riverdale Sonnets site … and impressed by the actual sonnets. Especially the one that begins “Were space but all we needed, I would tear / it from the stars. …”
And, from the same author (lunarhalo): .-/.-./- = art. *glee*
Mary’s cri du coeur prompted some scattershreds of thoughts I might expand on later, but for now, here’s the raw gleaning:
First, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2008 Halloween Poetry Reading is in progress. Hop over there to hear my dulcet tones (among others. Ann K. Schwader has a lovely, expressive alto…). 🙂
Second, if you live in or near Atlanta (or have other reasons to spend time there), you might consider applying for one of the free one-day McEver poetry workshops there. You’ve got until November 10 to request an application. The experience and skill level of the participants can be across the board (i.e., be prepared for complete first-timers as well as experienced critiquers), but the workshops are very well-run and I’ve enjoyed the ones I’ve attended. (I found Thomas Lux very entertaining. He’s very opinionated.)
McEver himself sounds like my kind of guy, in terms of his insistence that commerce and art do belong together: I think this is a transcript of an interview with him and Lux. (A good deal of my income comes from corporate work, so I’m invested (you could say) in hearing about people for whom town and gown are not separate realms.) During my past visits, my local contacts expressed surprise that the workshops were being held at Tech; my own perspective is that Georgia Tech is on its way to becoming the Stanford of the southeast US (Stanford may be better known for its math and science programs, but its English department is top-tier as well).
There are some authors whose letters I happen to enjoy more than their formal creative work. William Maxwell is a prime example of this. I haven’t read enough of Ted Hughes’s work (poetic or epistolatory) to determine whether he too falls in this category for me, but this excerpt from Richard Eder’s review in last Friday’s New York Times grabbed me:
<blockquotEarlier, while Plath was still alive and [she and Hughes] were together, there is his unstinting reassurance, rejoicing in her successes and praising her work. Above all, after her death there is his searing defense of her shattering “Ariel” poems. To Donald Hall, an admirer who nevertheless found “Ariel” too sensational to be first-rate poems, he wrote:
“Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do,” Hughes wrote. “When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises.”
While looking up the online version of Eder’s piece, I came across today’s article on this year’s Nobel Prize winners in physics. Michael Turner’s “You have to look for symmetries even when you can’t see them” is begging to be turned into a poem.
Joanne’s post about political poems reminded me of the first Alan Dugan poem I encountered, in my junior year of high school. It was On an East Wind from the Wars and remains one of my favorite of favorites.
And when I think of Alan Dugan, I often think of Jack Gilbert, who is of the same generation, whose work I also first encountered in high school, and whose The Abnormal Is Not Courage is also a touchstone poem (I’ve copied or typed it out for friends on at least two occasions, and used it for a reading at a Unitarian Universalist service).
There is a Wikipedia entry devoted to the east wind. I am inordinately amused by this.
Howdy! I’m Peg. I also answer to Mechaieh, Pixel, Pixie, Ribbons, Marriott, “no sister of his” (*waves to any Sherlockians reading*), and a number of other monikers. My last name is pronounced “DUH-thee.”
I became acquainted with Mary and Joanne via their online journals around — oh, golly, at least five or more years ago? I started reading Mary’s journal back when it was called “Prosody and Perl” — I think I happened upon it via some sort of update-your-journal-daily-in-December challenge that another web-friend was participating in, and I remember going “Ooh! Someone else wrestling with every damned cadence and breath…” (Witnessing people care about getting the details right is one of life’s bonniest pleasures, as far as I’m concerned. Mind, it’s a fine line between devotion to craft vs. driving everyone else batshit with one’s overthinking (never mind perfection vs. paralysis), but that’s a topic for some other post some other week.) Joanne – I think there was a link to her journal from Jessie’s that I happened upon; Joanne was running a monthly collaborative project called “Ampersand” at the time, and I ended up writing poems on DNA and posts about Fra Giovanni thanks to her prompts.
There’s a meditation lurking somewhere behind those details about the joys of online friendships and creative pingpong, but that too is a post for some other time. I may also indulge in rambletations on holiday poems, “The Hound of Heaven,” Jill Essbaum’s tattoos, and other mayhem. Work and bronchitis are currently cramping both my style and schedule, though, so for now what you’ll get are quick recs and a bit of shameless self-promotion.
First, the recs:
(1) I’m the kind of perfectionist dork who often feels compelled to look up a source even for a silly fly-by comment, so I Googled Blake’s “Little lamb who made thee” earlier this morning. To my delight, one of the links that showed up was this tribute to Tygger. I haven’t paged through the entire comment-thread, but “tightwhitepants” offered a vignette that ended with this gloriousness: “For the next half an hour, the friends sat and argued about whether Eeyore’s name was iambic, trochaic, or even spondaic, until it was time for tea and everybody went home.”
(2) I’m enjoying Samuel Wharton’s poems at No Tell Motel this week. They’ve got a spooky-creepy-playful vibe that’s connecting with me. The last stanza of “Humiliation Pictures” is so good I wish I’d written it.
Shameless self-promotion:
(1) Version 3.0 of Things Japanese in Tennessee went live yesterday. This is the latest incarnation of a course I’ve helped produce for the Japan-America Society of Tennessee over the past couple of years, and it now includes a section on poetry. (This is a beta release — the official premiere will be next month in Raleigh.) I think it’s a nice bit of fun (it’s intended for ages ten and up, with features such a selection of kigo (seasonal words used in haiku) read aloud in Japanese), so I encourage you to go see (and hear) for yourself.
(2) I found out this morning that my poem “Playing Duets With Heisenberg’s Ghost” has been selected as a “Judge’s Pick” in this year’s Science Fiction Poetry Association contest, which means it’ll appear in the winners’ chapbook later this year. I confess I’d been feeling more down than usual lately over some recent rejections, so aside from the never-ever-will-get-tired-of-it thrill of someone else liking my work, it’s a welcome shot in the arm. I also probably owe Heisenberg’s ghost some sort of libation, since this is now the second poem about him I’ve managed to sell. 🙂