Tag Archives: Poetry

Poetry month books & doings

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It is, once again, April: National Poetry Month. My recent trip to the AWP bookfair has given me many poetry books to peruse at whatever pace I please, and because the weather here has been far too wet to do much in the garden, I’m using the free time to read. The outpouring of millions of peaceful protesters who oppose the current administration’s policies and who rallied on April 5 was somewhat heartening to me, but I remain skeptical and am aware that real change takes a long time. For the present, I’m bolstering my spirit through poetry.

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I met Diane Thiel decades ago, briefly, at the West Chester Poetry Conference. She is incredibly talented, intelligent, frighteningly well-educated, and her work impressed me a lot; somehow, though, I did not get around to reading the many books she’s published since then, so her Questions from Outer Space (2022) is a delight and a revelation. Travel, literary and historical references, child-raising, teaching–the poems here cover a large range of topics. I bought her book at the Red Hen Press tables in LA. Red Hen is a terrific source for contemporary poetry books, if you’re looking…

At Saturnalia’s booth (another good small press with a large catalog), I found three of Martha Silano’s books and rejoiced. So far I have finished reading only The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, which I love, but I can hardly wait to read her more recent books. She has a wry sense of weird, nerdy humor that’s inflected with science facts and grocery-store labels, pop culture and life in the burbs, and a healthy questioning of, well, everything.

My fellow Goddard alum and friend Lou Faber has a new book here, and it’s so wonderful to read the work of a long-time poetry colleague whom I haven’t seen in years but whose voice comes recognizably through this collection. The second half of the collection, in particular, deals with the emotionally-complex aspects of being an adoptee and this person’s efforts to untangle where (and who) he’s “from.” Contradictions abound over the years; then, DNA testing sort of, but not quite, sorts out some of the mysteries. But life–well, much of life contains mysteries and always will.

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Meanwhile, this April I will be busy giving and attending in-person and online poetry events–even a radio spot! I’ll be reading mid-day at a local community college, participating in a No River Twice poetry event; and at some point this month, an interview about The Poetry Press Project (and my latest book) will air on WDIY 88.9FM. And a few of my poems will be appearing in print this month, the first of which is here: “Luna, Paloma.” I’ve also signed up for virtual attendance at a couple of poetry reading; and on May 4, I will be among the features for a virtual reading sponsored by One Art journal. My physical stamina isn’t what I wish it were, but thanks to technology that enables me to participate from home, I can manage to do a bit of yard work and STILL get to a poetry event.

Prose/poetry

In the first weeks of this year, I participated in a virtual poetry workshop with Anita Skeen. It was so useful to me that I signed up for another workshop, this one on writing the prose poem, with mixed-media artist and poet Lorette Luzajic. She is the editor of an online prose-poetry lit journal, The Mackinaw.

In this workshop, I’m returning to a form I learned early in my writing practice. My friend and mentor David Dunn may have introduced me to prose poems, I cannot recall anymore; but I do know he was writing them in 1980 and that some of the poems in our collaborative chapbook The Swan King are either prose poems or on the verge of being prose poems. Prose poetry was then considered a “new” form and was (& in some quarters, remains) controversial among poets and critics. It sounds self-conflicting: if it is prose, how can it be poetry?

In the decades since I was very new to poetry, reading everything I could find of contemporary work and experimenting all over the place, the prose poem has been much written-about in literary forums and academia and is–mostly–on pretty sturdy footing as a “form” of poetry. I never completely stopped writing prose poems, and a few appear in most of my books. I’ve been writing so many sad lyrical-narrative poems since 2018, however, that I haven’t spent much time really playing with poetry, and play is a huge part of creative thinking. So Lorette Luzajic’s workshop, which gives us a chance to experiment and play, appealed to me.

The workshop has got me thinking about versions and expansions of the form, turned up some exciting new poets to read, and offered amusing prompts that have moved me into ekphrastic, surrealistic, dream-based, and pop-culture themed poems. I have found some surprises in my own work, which is always a reviving feeling.

Also, we are almost at the vernal equinox. My environment is brightening in small ways, which tends to help with enduring the tough stuff.

Mid-March

Tulip poplars begin to plump out their winter bud scales, where they will leaf out later in spring.

A marsh hawk zips overhead, winging above the treeline and vanishing over the northern hill.

Early ornamentals bloom: crocus, snowdrop, aconite, i. reticulata.

Red-winged blackbirds make the mornings noisy–they have so many different songs and calls that three or four of them sound like multitudes, almost drowning out our year-round singers, the song sparrows. Early migrant passerines have returned, but it’s still winter here. Some bugs have gotten active and are emerging from hibernation or incubation. No bees as yet. When I turn over rotting logs, I find amphibians’ eggs and lots of different varieties of soil centipedes.

And, of course, worms. March’s moon is sometimes called the Worm Moon, and tonight there’s a total lunar eclipse around midnight here in PA. Is that auspicious? It’s also when I will be reading at the Lambertville Free Public Library in Lambertville, NJ. I’m excited to participate in an on-site, in-person reading again…I’ve been hibernating a bit from poetry events, but it is time to get stirring.

At the end of the month, I’m packing up for a brief trip to Los Angeles, where I will be attending one day only of the annual AWP Conference (Saturday’s Book Fair!) and spending the rest of the visit with my son. The conference always offers a terrific infusion of writerly companionship, community, and inspiration. Whereas time with my son offers love, cool places to see and eat and hike, a host of things I didn’t know I wanted to learn, and many moments of hilarity and conversation. It’s hard that he’s so far away–hard for me; I don’t think he minds, he is busy and having fun, which is as it should be.

Also, yes, the whole situation here in the USA is something I never could have imagined as a younger person, when I somehow had an unquestioning faith the US Constitution could actually be workable as an enduring rule of law. That careless people who value money over community could indeed disrupt that 1787 document was always a possibility (the moneyed property owners and slaveholders had their way with the original, after all), but most of us didn’t see this coming–naive, I suppose. Busy with our own concerns. I get it, and maybe we deserve what’s coming, but [ugh]. A concerned European friend recently asked me how I was faring under the stress of these first three months, and I told him that since making art (poetry) has generally been an unconventional act/behavior/response even under the patronage system, my response is to keep making art. Granted, it isn’t much, nothing earth-shattering, not gonna change society that way; but it keeps us observant little non-conformers on our toes, creative, and flourishing in the face of weirdness and oppression.

Which is something we can do. Like early bloomers in the cold days of late winter.

winter witch hazel blooming in snow

Unexpected directions

What gets a poem started?

Sometimes, it is a prompt; I depend on those when I am feeling a bit “dry” creatively. Most of the time, though, the prompting comes from some unexpected quarter. The poem below was prompted by something a colleague said–that she’d consider belonging to any religion that permitted red wine and brie cheese. She was joking around, but the idea stayed in my mind. When I elaborated on it in a draft, the poem needed to be in first-person. And then it took off in an unexpected direction. Kind of a world-weary, sardonic direction, a commentary on our society perhaps. No: certainly. The poem changed tone from something rather amusing to something more reflective and serious. I had not seen that coming when I sat down to draft it!

I like that unexpected directions happen when reading, and writing, poems. One thing I have noticed when I see so-called poems “written” by an artificial intelligence program is that they deliver no such surprises. An algorithm’s surprise is called a bug; it occurs when something goes screwy in the code string. But AI isn’t human enough to understand surprise. Not yet, anyway.

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Luxuries

A five-year-old chianti reserva, recompense enough
for a day of malingering and, yes, loneliness—
as though that were reason to drink, as though drinking
requires reason when, for most of the last few
centuries, wine’s been safer to drink than water,
and I’ve no right to complain.

Aphorisms tell us we choose our own ways
(paths, journeys, lives); anthropologists say we are 
society’s children, which limits our choices.
Religions narrow the decisions further, although I’d
choose one that permits wine, Camembert, and almonds—
I admit a taste for luxury.

In my milieu, chianti and Camembert are luxuries and
I haven’t had my house bombed, my family sundered, the water
turned to poison in the reservoir, not yet, though sixty years
may not be an entire lifetime. And no quantity of wine erases
the wrenching violence done in the name of my society,
of keeping me secure

and those like me. As though we deserve to be kept, and not 
others, so we can purchase a more than palatable wine
and French cheese and almonds, to ensure the economy’s
robust, and money—that expression of magical thinking—
can continue to pour itself into the stock market’s statistics,
somehow to save us all.


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Photo by Josu00e9 Antonio Rivera Vallejo on Pexels.com

Febru-dreary

I try not to hate on February. The days do get longer; there’s often some early blooming or greening, a little more birdsong in the mornings, days that aren’t too miserable for walking. But. A lingering malaise of the spirit often natters about in the background of my days. This year, I am trying an infusion of art.

I’ve enrolled in an art class–visual art–drawing, sketching, experimenting with different media such as gouache, watercolors, pastels, colored pencils. I just want something to do with my eyes and hands that isn’t reading, writing, photography, social media/texting. I think of it as an exploration. The workshop I took with Anita Skeen and Cindy Morgan Hunter in October made me realize that using other forms of art might feel good to me, body and soul. This year, starting now (February), I’m taking an 8-week art class with Helene Parnell of Blue Church Art. We shall see how that goes. I am not doing this to create a good “product” but to enjoy the less-intellectual, more freeing aspects of the art as process…the way I did with the collages and book-making in the New Mexico workshop.

In that frame of mind, I accompanied my Best Beloved to Philadelphia to visit PAFA, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. It’s something I have been meaning to do for, literally, decades–even though we are often in the city, somehow I haven’t gone back to PAFA which I recall from a visit (in my teens!) and kept meaning to see again.

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Here’s irony! The historic 1805 building I recall so well is closed for renovation until next year, and many of the paintings are “traveling,” i.e., on loan to other museums, through a show called “Making American Artists.” Most recently, to Albuquerque NM, though the exhibit closed there in September. The Academy, however, has employed the large, windowed, modern gallery spaces across the alley from the old building as temporary museum space and curated some fascinating exhibits for viewing and learning from. We enjoyed the Philadelphia-themed historical and cultural arts, crafts, and objects that came from the Atwater-Kent Museum. The mix of mostly-20th c. American paintings, prints, and sculptures in the upstairs galleries showed us how little we know about more contemporary US artists (outside of the super-famous ones like Hopper, Hockney, de Kooning etc). The plaster casts of famous European sculptures which students used–and still use–for drawing practice are now located in the lower level.

That brought back memories of when I was a teenager in love with art. I will have to go back once the renovations are done, because I remember the building as I visited it in the early 1970s, a strangely decorative place where students could be found sketching one of Michelangelo’s carvings or painstakingly drafting the composition of a painting by Winslow Homer. How I longed to be one of those art students!

PAFA interior, pre-renovations

That desire has been much altered by time, but my love of “the visual and plastic arts” stays with me. I enjoy writing ekphrastic poems; perhaps my foray into making artwork will energize me these last weeks of February and keep me going into spring.

Promptings

I have mixed feelings about poetry prompts. There have been times when using prompts has really got me writing and feeling inventive about poetry. I’ve had instructors (and read books) whose prompts seemed terrific for me; but maybe I felt already ‘primed’ for writing, anyway, and it was not so much the prompt itself but the circumstances that led to fruitful drafts. At other times, prompts appear useless, or even–dare I say–insipid. My current belief is that, for me, circumstances and instructor matter more than the cleverness of the prompt. Any prompt can be delightful if only I find myself situated in the mood or feel an urgency to write.

The virtual workshop I’m taking with Anita Skeen opened with a discussion of poems (by Roethke, initially) and then moved to some list-making and prompts. This is not unusual for workshops, and lists are a fine way to begin thinking about poems. The prompts we were assigned employed both lists and a method for drafting a poem. So far, I’ve drafted four or five poems in a week: therefore, success (!) even though only one of the drafts seems to have legs.

I think what happens is that after many, many years of writing poetry (or making any kind of art) one begins to feel a rhythm that is almost circadian–as analogy–that informs a person about flow. I ask myself, “Am I ready to write today?” The answer may not be yes. But if it is yes, then I can just write. No expectations, and it’s okay to use a prompt, or re-write an older poem, or just free-write about whatever moment I happen to be in. Usually, in this frame of mind, I don’t get concerned about writing well. I just start on in.

If the am-I-ready answer isn’t a definite yes, then I may procrastinate or distract myself by cleaning the house or reading a book. I can overcome the “maybe” by turning to work by a poet whose work I find interesting or by experimenting with a prompt. Sometimes, it helps to give myself a deadline of some kind–this is why workshops are often useful!

But the answer may simply be, “No, not today.” Sometimes we have those non-creative days. It is alright to have them. Art shouldn’t be about pushing out ideas to get to a “product.” I’m suddenly laughing to myself, thinking of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in the movie The Princess Bride: “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.”

At least with writing, one gets a chance to revise.

Carol Kaine & Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride (20th Century Fox, 1987)

If you are a writer, what do you think about the use of prompts?

Breathe

2024 closed with “thundersnow” in my neck of the woods, a weather phenomenon that I find rather thrilling in its strangeness. And the year commenced with the conflagrations in California, not to mention everything else that goes on daily in the cosmos. Oh, the difficulties of life in interesting times.

Photo by Sabian Symbols on Pexels.com

It so happens that I had made plans, and purchased plane tickets, to visit my son in Los Angeles during the week that AWP is holding its annual conference there, in March–that is, assuming the situation in Los Angeles County doesn’t get even worse and assuming his apartment building survives the fires; it hasn’t been easy to keep myself from doom-scrolling and watching updated fire maps. I remind myself that there is not a thing I can do beyond sending money to charities and such, perhaps, and waiting for the winds to change, and that making myself stressed will actually do harm. But I am not one of those Pollyanna types (now termed a “toxic positivity” person, I have recently learned). I’m aware that the world can be hard, and that we may suffer. So, as my yoga and tai chi instructors would tell me:

Breathe.

There’s no point in trying to decide whether this start to the year is auspicious or inauspicious, though if I’m going to go with signs and auguries, I might choose to follow the Chinese year and move my year’s start to January 29, Year of the Wood Snake–and get all this awful stuff (including January 20th) packed into LAST year.

As I noted in my year-end post, a year’s end–or beginning–is arbitrary.

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As for writing-related resolutions, I make them all the time, not just at the beginning of the year. But in that one respect, the first dozen days of January are going surprisingly well. I’ve been spending more time on revising older–sometimes much older–work, and I have been drafting some new poems. I even submitted just a few things to lit journals and have been making minor progress in the monumental task of culling and organizing my writing files.

Best of all, I enrolled in an online poetry workshop with Anita Skeen through the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation, which starts this week. And I registered for an art class in February, so my plans to focus more on my creative work post-retirement are proceeding more or less apace. We balance fear and misery with art.

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Cloud sketch in acrylics

Year-end with raven

Last day of the year. Though when the year ends or begins is an arbitrary thing, calendars being a human invention so far as we know, this is my culture’s end date for the approximately 365-day cycle Earth makes around the sun–so I may as well stick with it. Here’s what the close of the year has brought me so far:

A sunny and mild morning post-frost, not uncommon at this time of year.

A Cooper’s hawk calling, hassling the songbirds, as they do. This one’s been hanging about our yard for a week now, sometimes perching right next to the leafless shrubs–it is amazing to watch how they can maneuver through the branches to grab at a finch or sparrow. A lithe and handsome raptor.

A solo Northern mockingbird, boldly eying me as I stood watching it (six feet away) while it gobbled up oriental bittersweet berries.

This surprised-looking tree, framed by horizontal branches–

Mutual disturbance among me and the mourning doves huddled on the ground amid the hedgerow’s vines and leaf-rot. Their sudden flurry startled me as much as I startled them.

Walking along with my Merlin Bird App turned to “sound identification,” I expected to hear the usual characters this time of year: finches, song sparrow, field sparrow, mourning doves, bluejays, crows, starlings, nuthatches, chickadees. Then I heard what sounded like…a raven? Indeed! The app noted “Common Raven,” with the little icon that indicates the bird is a vagrant or may be misidentified. I watched it fly north, over the house. Solo, (whereas early in my walk there was an entire “murder” of crows and they tend to hang about in groups this time of year). This bird was also very large, but too far off to see its beak or the color of its eyes. However, it sounded exactly like the third call recording here. I’m gonna call it a raven.

I found some collages the environment made on its own, much more lively and well-composed than any collage I might try to make.

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The inner environment today has been focused on yet more revision. I much prefer it to sending poems to journals. It’s playful and creative, if occasionally irritating when a poem refuses my attempted improvements. At present I’m wrestling with a sonnet. Not a bad way to end the year, I reckon.

Post-exertion malaise

This year, my holiday plans are less busy than usual. I don’t have to cook a large meal, wrap a lot of gifts, travel much (or far), or attend a bunch of parties or festivities. There is a quiet joy in this low-key schedule, though it means the season possesses a slightly different character. I thought that the lack of holiday stress would mean I had more time to write, revise, maybe even to submit work to literary journals. The rain and chilly humidity have enervated me more than I expected, though, and some days even an hour of serious concentration seems to wipe me out.

I believe this weird exhaustion for no apparent reason is a kind of post-exertion malaise.

Post-exertion malaise (PEM) is not uncommon among people with chronic conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr, long covid, fibromyalgia and the like. Its key features are that the fatigue seems far out of proportion to the exercise or other exertion that preceded it, and that it is delayed–the exhaustion may set in two hours or even two days after the experience. I have had PEM, for example, after spending a lovely and high-energy day of hiking or wandering for hours around a city or museum and suddenly, without warning, “crashing” into bone weariness two hours later, or a day later (I have fibromyalgia). I’ve learned to manage the physical aspects of PEM, however. It does not happen all the time, and often I can plan for it.

Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.

I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.

Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.

Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.

Because my PEM is intermittent, often I can send out a good deal of work in one sitting with no fallout, just as sometimes I can hike or walk for hours without pain or fatigue. I had almost no trouble when I was in Spain earlier this year. But this week in drizzly-snowy eastern Pennsylvania, I’m having to take too many rests after doing what seems like almost no real work. Frankly, it’s disheartening. So I’ve decided not to expect to get much done during the next two weeks and to appreciate the time I can spend reading a novel, decorating the tree, sitting by the fire, talking to loved ones by phone. No need to be disheartened.

Whatever works

My last post (here) generated some intriguing feedback and was cause for further reflection about revisions, at least on my part. Because I was writing a poem for a specific person–my son–I got useful information from his response, as well as responses from other readers; so I had the chance to hear back from my audience, however small, and to compare reactions. My son, the “you” in the poem, told me he liked the descriptions and that the piece did a good job evoking the atmosphere of the experience he’d had. He liked the closing lines, too. However, he said that while he had some moments of anxiety during his stint on the military ship, his overwhelming feelings cantered more toward frustration and an almost-constant irritation. He thought I had focused over-much on the anxiety aspect. “Though a person certainly could be feeling exactly that way in those conditions,” he added.

And that’s fascinating, because in earlier drafts I did not work toward evoking anxiety; I was trying to get the details right and to create a sense of annoyance, even anger, at the situation. (Apparently, that is closer to how he responded.) Here’s the “BUT”–but those revisions weren’t making the poem work any better. This is a challenge for many of us writers: when the impetus for writing the poem, and the initial intentions of the writer, don’t resolve into a good poem…and then some alterations–some “fictionalization”–make a better poem, but maybe not the poem the poet set out to write. Do we stay with our initial idea and keep whaling away to make it work as we initially imagined, or do we let the poem move into new territory somewhat removed from initial inspiration if the resultant revisions are more powerful, more believable?

I’m inclined to go with whatever works to make a stronger poem, most of the time. There are other options, though. Sometimes I end up with two or more poems stemming from the same initial idea. A bonus! One prompt I have occasionally used for myself is to re-write an earlier, less-satisfactory poem from a different viewpoint or to focus on a different aspect of the experience. This practice has been awfully helpful, and it keeps me from getting over-invested in the more obscure, personal components of a writing piece.

Photo by Leon Ardho on Pexels.com

Strengthening one’s work takes practice, and possibly a kind of discipline–not to suggest that I am a very disciplined poet, although I wish I were. I do take my practice seriously, though, and revision is a major aspect of my practice, always has been, even when I was a “baby poet” starting out. I never could quite agree with Ginsberg’s famous “first thought best thought,” since my first thoughts are seldom deep, reflective, or in any way excellent; and my first words set on paper are generally equally weak. For me, writing is thinking, in the way of E. M. Forster’s famous quote “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Thinking is often flawed, so analysis and critique and revision? They’re required.

Finally, whatever makes the poem better as a poem is worth doing. That’s my opinion: whatever works.