Poetry

Poetic Asides Challenge, day 2

An Asian American

Lighten up,
even friends would say
whenever she cringed
at a singsong chant
or failed to laugh
during Avenue Q,
each order a knife
that carved her into
less of herself around them
until all that remained
was a cheshire grimace.

– pld

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?

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.)

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.

Praise Day

Even the non-poetry blogs are talking about Elizabeth Alexander’s poem and its delivery at the inauguration.  I had wanted to make a comment about it, nearly identical to Jeannine’s regarding poems that fall flat and Evie’s note on Alexander’s reading style, but there is something to be said for not adding negativity to the universe.

So.  

I have come to praise Elizabeth Bartlett‘s poetry.  I have come to extol her cynicism, her music of the everyday, her flights of fantasy, the blood and the dirt beneath her nails which have gone into her poems. I have come too late.

 

Degrees

by Elizabeth Bartlett (published in A Lifetime of Dying: Poems 1942-1979)

 

We are the ones with Faberge’s eggs

concealed about our persons, or walking

humpty-dumpty up the ante-natal clinic path.

No doubt you wish we were not here at all,

gazing out over the heads of sleeping children

at the boxes which are our homes, and gardens

full of prams and strung with washing line.

 

We are the ones who don’t appear too much,

the ones which modern English poetry

could do without.  We don’t hold degrees,

except perhaps of feeling, the mercury

shooting up and down like crazy.

Oh lord, the thermometers we break,

the sweaty sheets in which we lie awake.

 

We have no O levels, or A levels either.

We didn’t fight and we didn’t win,

we only ran to get the washing in.

Look out, you just missed us

as you crossed the crowded campus.

We were only there to clean the floors

and hand your morning coffee out.