AWP: Some Alternatives

By now you know that everyone is talking about the AWP Conference. Non-stop talking. It’s all over the blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook. Lots of people are offering advice on how best to do the conference, e.g., what kind of clothing to bring, where to get sushi, which bars are the coolest.

Judging from the various comments I’ve seen, many regard the weekend as prime schmoozing time. Clearly, the hottest readings are the off-site ones (you know, the ones you didn’t pay for with your registration fee). And just as clearly, there will be some drinking and partying going on. One poet-blogger advised last year that others follow her example and carry a flask.

I went in 2007 when the conference was in NYC. That will probably suffice for a lifetime. It was okay, but really not my kind of thing. I’m not much of a party girl and I don’t drink. I know that there are plenty of other things to do, but this upcoming conference in Seattle is too far away, too expensive, and too big. I prefer smaller events.

So what will I be doing? I’m staying home! But poet Julie Brooks Barbour has invented an online Facebook version of AWP: "The Facebook Writing Conference." On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, February 27, 28, 29, there will be “panels.” These will be led by a handful of invited writers and others will be invited to chime in. The discussions will go on all day. Thursday’s topic is “Place.” Friday’s is “Teaching the Creative Writing Workshop.” Saturday’s is “The Practice of Submission.”

I’ve been invited to be a panelist for the Creative Writing Workshop discussion that will take place on Friday. Julie sent me five questions. I’ve sent back my responses which she will post in due course. I think there will also be some surprises along the way. I think there might also be some kind of mini-book fair. I hope at the very least to get a list of titles and order some from Amazon.

But I’m not a total party pooper. I do go out of the house from time to time. I’m going to the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in May and will be leading a group reading there. Later that month I’ll be hosting the West Caldwell Poetry Festival in New Jersey. In July I’ll be going to the Mayapple Writers’ Retreat in Woodstock, NY. In October I’ll be attending the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, NJ. Happily, not one of these events requires that I board a plane.

Seattle-Bound Confessions

Like so many writers, I am making my way to Seattle for the 2014 AWP Conference, where I'll be taking part in Thursday night reading for The Incredible Sestina Anthology and sitting in on a Friday noon panel "Verses Versus Verses," on poetry contests. I'd love to see you at either event, or on the book fair floor, or at one of these seafood restaurants, or over one of the cocktails described on Leslie Pietrzyk's blog. If your dance card is already filled and we don't see each other, just have a good time per the advice of Kelli Russell Agodon, hydrate and navigate per the wise words of Roxane Gay, and treat your hotel staff right.

It's been fun seeing everyone report what they're doing, on Facebook and elsewhere, but there hasn't been enough attention to those plans where we're simply excited to be in the audience. This year's official event schedule has some pleasing variances--discussion of writing for YA and children's audiences, the graphic novel or comic as literary work, and a spotlight on Pacific Northwest literature, including indigenous voices and Hawaiian writers. Check 'em out. Panels on the influence of Kurt Cobain and Bob Dylan? Yes. In venturing to off sites, be sure to support Elliott Bay Book Company and the Richard Hugo House; since the latter is closed on Sunday, my free day to explore, I'm going to try and make it by for the VIDA reading on Friday night.

I've only been to Seattle once before, when I was in my mid-twenties and working for a nonprofit that held its annual conference there. One of my jobs was to coordinate a set of awards that had been received by, among others for that year, Robert Pinsky. I'd studied The Sounds of Poetry. He was a former Poet Laureate. He'd been a voice on The Simpsons, for goodness's sake! What greater fame is there? I was so excited to meet him. About a half-hour before events were supposed to start, my hotel room phone rang, and I learned my father--on the other side of the country--was hospitalized with a collapsed lung, larger cause to be determined.

So. I arrived late to the proceedings; as the only poet on staff, I was the only one qualified to spot Mr. Pinsky, who had wandered the crowd, unrecognized and sans name tag or welcoming glass of wine; when I finally got to him, I had nothing better to attach his name tag than a loose paper clip from my purse; the envelope I gave him had the wrong check, made out to one of the other award recipients; I gave him a book to sign--his translation of The Inferno--forgetting I had gotten the copy from a poetry teacher past when he cleaned out his university office. That led to the awkward question "Why is [X]'s name inscribed in my book?"

This is not an AWP fairy tale. There was no networking, only profuse apologies. I revisited these a few years later, when I met him again in the context of a different award. (He had just been on The Colbert Report…the man is popular TV magnet.)

That next morning, right back to work at 8 AM. That night, I ventured to Pioneer Square to distract myself. He played bass.

My last morning in town, I went to Pike Place Market and spent $50 on a huge bouquet, the most I had ever spent for flowers: all of my remaining cash I'd saved for the trip. For my dad. I flew the six hours back to DC with them balanced on my lap.

Not going to Seattle this week? Not a big deal. AWP is a wonderful resource, but an annual professional conference is not the end-all. (The proof is that Tayari Jones is skipping it, and has been for a few years running.) I do recommend is soul-baring trips in your life, 4-5 days when you're pushed to some type of limit, times when the knife scrapes to the bone of ego and you ask--Wait, what? And when the world does not wait: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? That is AWP, for some. But a square is a rhomboid; a rhomboid is not a square. Whatever excursion defines you, tests you, and liberates you, is a lot more important than the abstract of AWP ever could be.

Iambic pentameter by Patricia Sykes

I watch myself how I use my voice how
much I give away rebellion weighs
against obedience prayer against fantasy
rote against the thrill of words that lately arrive

It was hearing a girl recite Ode to a Cabbage
that made me want to write verse myself
I hide my poems like hoarded love
the taste of secrecy is delicious (Nun-

the-Big-Irish gives the girl curry
when she catches her

Tiferet Writing Contest

Enter the 2014 Tiferet Writing Contest and submit to possibly win $400 for best poem, story or essay. $1,200 will be awarded in prizes.

This year's judges are Alfred Corn for Poetry, Jacqueline Sheehan for Fiction, and Charles Euchner for Nonfiction.

Tiferet editors will select ten finalists to be sent to the judges. One winner and three honorable mentions will be selected by the judges in each category. Results will be announced this coming fall.

All submissions are considered for publication in the journal and your $15 contest entry fee brings you digital copies of a full year's subscription to Tiferet (a $24.95 value).

They are accepting submissions until June 1, 2014

Submit your entry here

West Caldwell Poetry Festival

For the past ten years I have run an event called "Poetry Festival: A Celebration of Literary Journals." The event takes place at my local library and has always included twelve journals and editors. Each editor has invited two poets to read for the journal, so we have had a total of 24 poets reading. After last year's festival, I seriously considered not doing it again. A number of print journals had gone out of business, so it was getting harder and harder to find journals. Also, the turnout seemed to have diminished a bit the past few years. Then one day while debating with myself whether or not I'd do it again, it occurred to me that instead of dropping it perhaps I should revise it. I began to think of ways to revitalize the festival. Before long I came up with a plan that I'm excited about.

I decided to switch the focus from journals to new poetry books. I first compiled a list of poets with new books, poets within reasonable driving distance. The list was fairly long, so I had to make choices. I hate making hard choices, but I did it. Three guy poets and three women poets. All with different presses.

I then planned the structure of the day. Two reading sessions, each with three of the poets, so each one gets to read a decent amount of time. Then I began to think of other activities with which to fill the program. I came up with a bunch of possibilities. I narrowed the list and ended up with one publishers' panel and one creative process discussion. So now I had the event divided into four segments.

I also wanted to include journals as in the past but decided to pare down to eight from twelve so that there would also be table space for the publishers.

I arranged a meeting with my librarian to present this new format and get his endorsement. He was fine with it and agreed that change is a good thing.

Next came the implementation. I issued invitations to the six poets. Within that same day I'd received an enthusiastic yes from each of them. Off to a good start! Then I invited the eight editors. Within a day or two, all eight spots were filled. Then I issued invitations to four publishers and soon had all four lined up.

The Six Featured Poets: Teresa Carson, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Priscilla Orr, BJ Ward, Gary J. Whitehead, and Michael T. Young

The Publishers' Panel: Joan Cusack Handler with CavanKerry Press, Roxanne Hoffman with Poets Wear Prada, Anna Evans with Barefoot Muse Press, and Ellen Foos with Ragged Sky Press

The Creative Process Discussion: the six featured poets

The Journals: Adanna, Edison Literary Review, Exit 13, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Lips, Paterson Literary Review, Raintown Review, and The Stillwater Review

Books and journals will be available for sale and signing.

See the website for Schedule and details. Please mark your calendar and plan to join us!

Willa Cather: Poetry vs Prose

Willa Cather published poetry when she was young, although she is known for her later short stories and novels. Her poems seem to sink under the heavy weight of meter and rhyme, but still they reveal the world from which she drew her art:  

Prairie Spring

by Willa Cather

Evening and the flat land,

Rich and sombre and always silent;

The miles of fresh-plowed soil,

Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;

The growing wheat, the growing weeds,

The toiling horses, the tired men;

The long empty roads,

Sullen fires of sunset, fading,

The eternal, unresponsive sky.

Against all this, Youth,

Flaming like the wild roses,

Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,

Flashing like a star out of the twilight;

Youth with its insupportable sweetness,

Its fierce necessity,

Its sharp desire,

Singing and singing,

Out of the lips of silence,

Out of the earthy dusk.

Her material was better served by prose. The poetry seems dated, but not her prose.  This excerpt from My Ántonio: 

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

These few sentences convey much more. The poem seems static and this is alive and in motion. Willa Cather, in “The Art of Fiction,” wrote: 

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—  ....Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there  is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once—nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture. 

She admired poetry by Sappho, and she focused attention on the music in her poems. But the music she imposed does not seem to fit with the music of the prairie. Perhaps each landscape holds a sound that the writer must hold true on the page. For her, it could be achieved from shifting genres. It allowed her to simplify and to detach from the old forms in order to articulate her own vision.  

Cather also has some very well written essays. In 1925, in an essay about writing, Cather said:  

The struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates a strain that keeps everybody at the breaking point...Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe...and underneath, another-secret and passionate and intense-which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends.  Always in his mind each member [of the family] is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven around him....One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of life: every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. 

Her life experience on the prairie, before she was fifteen, is the material of her novels. She lived primarily in urban settings throughout her life. My Ántonio and Death Comes to the Archbishop focus on characters who are Catholic. Jewell and Stout correct the assumptions that readers have:  

Raised as a Baptist, Cather later became Episcopalian, but had two of her greatest successes with books so steeped in Catholicism that readers thought she was a Catholic. In fact, in a letter written from Pittsburgh in August 1896, she told a friend, "There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be."

She worked as a journalist and continued to write poetry all of her life in addition to doing the fine work for which she is celebrated.

Cather, Willa. "On the Art of Fiction." http://www.everywritersresource.com/writingsense/2010/04/essay-on-the-art-of-fiction-by-willa-cather/

Cather, Willa. "Prairie Spring." This poem is in the public domain.

Jewell, Andrew and April Stout.  "Ten Things You Probably Didn't Know about Willa Cather."  Publisher's Weekly.  April 19, 2013. Retrieved 20 February 2014.  Web.  http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/56879-10-things-you-probably-didn-t-know-about-willa-cather.html 

Jewell, Andrew. The Willa Cather Archive. U of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2004-2013. Web. 13 Dec. 2012. http://cather.unl.edu/index.wcse.html

Uncoupling by Jac Jenkins

Ice
clasps its thorny cloak with filigreed

brittle
lace against my breast

bone.
The pin sticks my skin when I inhale.

I
stay close to his mouth;

his
heat breathes an early thaw

as
Winter opens its teeth on my throat.



Spring
stitches my scabs to scars, my scars

to
silver. I am bare beneath bridal lace

and
veil. When I inhale, his hands

clasp
me like whalebone; I stay close

to
the

A Giveaway and Sundry News Items

Right now there is a week-long Goodreads Giveaway of one copy of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. Click on the link below and sign up. Even if you already have the book, you could use a second one as a gift. Please note that the Giveaway will end midnight on Friday, February 21. You must enter by then in order to be eligible.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Crafty Poet

by Diane Lockward

Giveaway ends February 21, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop received a very nice review from Erika Dreifus in "The Practicing Writer," a monthly newsletter which is the companion to Erika’s blog of the same name. In both her newsletter and her blog, Erika provides all kinds of useful information for writers. For example, she regularly includes lists of paying markets.

Erika begins the review with this disclosure: "I’ve known Diane Lockward for quite some time. Earlier in her career, she taught English at the New Jersey high school I attended (in fact, she was one of my sister’s English teachers)." The high school referred to is Millburn High School, same one Ann Hathaway attended. Sadly, I did not have the privilege of having both Dreifus sisters as my students, but I am happy to have Erika now as my reviewer. Read the rest of the review HERE. You can also sign up for the newsletter at the same site.

I was also happy to find this in Erika’s newsletter:

FEATURED RESOURCE: DIANE LOCKWARD’S POETRY NEWSLETTER.

Another nice piece of news is that I was recently invited to be the Featured Poet in the Poetry Spotlight at Cultural Weekly.  My three poems are "Invective Against the Bumblebee," "Organic Fruit," and "Linguini." All three are from my book, What Feeds Us. Cultural Weekly is an online newspaper with several columns, including Film, Art, Architecture, Music, and Dance. Each issue is also distributed via email. You can sign up at the site if you want to receive the weekly newsletter. (Bottom of the screen, right side)

I was also recently invited to become part of the "This Is Poetry" project that will result in eight volumes of poetry, each devoted to a different theme. The first volume will focus on women in the small presses. I'll be part of that first print volume. In the meantime, the woman behind the project is posting the poems as she selects them on Tumblr. My poems are Pyromania and The Best Words. Both poems are from my book, What Feeds Us.

Pandora (on Animals in Poetry)

Last night, as the snow fell and kept falling here, I read in the Washington Post that Pandora has died. She was a matriarch of our National Zoo's invertebrate exhibits, all 15 pounds of her, all 7.8-foot arm span. Her death was not unexpected--she'd been sluggish and, at five years old, was approaching old age for an octopus. But she'll be missed. Her rosy pink hue and outgoing manner charmed everyone. Including me, who went to watch her feed on a chilly Thursday in November 2012. That was an unusual detour from my usual stops to the aviary and the cheetah enclosure. It was exactly a week after Thanksgiving, my first week of being engaged. No ring. We hadn't told anyone yet. It was our secret.

I stood with my hands jammed into the pockets of my black shearling coat, not sure what to expect. The keeper speared a bit of scallop meat on a long wire and dangled it in the water, wiggling it to make it lively. Pandora approached. 

Once she was confident of her prey, she began to waft the loose folds of skin between each tentacle, billowing her body wider and wider.

As her skin stretched, it whitened, and the bait disappeared from sight. If it had been a crab or fish, it would have had no hope of escape.

It was utter. And then she returned to her leisure, sprawling out to eye us, showing off the 250+ tentacles on each arm. 

Some years back, I wrote a poem called "In the Deep," inspired by a trip to the National Aquarium--a dank, grim, undernourished and underground box of sad-looking sea creatures--down on 14th Street. I had recently read an article on giant octopi that talked about their intelligence, their skill as escape artists. At the aquarium, I eavesdropped on  some raucous kids, bored on a Saturday, looking for anything worthy of their attention. "In the Deep" appeared first in Hayden's Ferry Review, then in I Was the Jukebox. 

IN THE DEEP 

The boys are fifteen

and fuckwild:

Fuck the glass fish, 

they say, bodies pulsing 

with injected neon;

fuck the nautilus, nursing 

its bubble of salted air.

What they love is  

this crumple of muscle 

suctioned to the tank’s 

darkest corner—

Fuck her blue rings.

Fuck her three hearts.

The octopus cradles 

a baby doll, the doll’s head 

stuffed with krill. Fuck 

yeah, they say, watching 

as she pokes one eye 

out, then the other.

#

I'd write a different octopus poem today. That's not to disown "In the Deep," but simply to admit that the heart notices different things at different times. Did you know that a mothering female strings together 20,000 to 100,000 eggs? Once she has laid them, she doesn't eat in the seven months that lead to their hatching. She cleans them, she aerates them, she broods, and shortly after their birth, she dies. 

Pandora never mated in DC's captivity. She released her eggs in April 2013, unfertilized. According to the article, each would have been the size of a grain of rice.  

There is a long tradition of animals being the subject of poems. In addition, there is a specific cohort of female poets--poets of my generation--who invoke creatures as tangible actors or omens in their first and second books. I'd argue that we do this at an unusually higher proportion or frequency. I'm thinking of myself, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paula Bohince, Traci Brimhall, and Rebecca Hazelton among others. These works are otherwise interested in the psychic interior, works where I'd argue the driving urge is to share something about one's own relationship to the world. (Maybe that's overstating the point, because isn't poetry always about such an urge? Still.) So we point to bright particulars of these beasts as if to guard against the accusation of being self-involved; or, to prove our abilities as biologists and zoologists; or, simply for the pleasure of those particulars. We resist the confessional even as we flirt with it. 

I recognize this trend without judgment, because even within it there are strong poems and weak poems, variance, individual voices. But I notice it, and I'd love to sleuth out its origins. In the post-confessional morass, is it an issue of agency--do we more easily give ourselves permission to project character onto animals than we would fellow humans? Do humans seem, in fact, a little boring by comparison? Did Disney forever change out perception of an animal's capacity to think, feel, and love? Did Elizabeth Bishop wave her magic wand above our heads? Would we have been another generation's nature writers? No answers here on this quiet day, only questions. 

The octopus was a namesake of Earth's first woman, crafted from clay. Pandora was endowed by the gods with all the gifts--beauty, cunning, mastery of music and art, and as a curse, curiosity. Despite her husband's advice she took the top off the vessel, sent by Zeus, that released the world's plagues and worries. 

Watching Pandora that feed that day at the zoo, I pictured what it would look like if a woman tried to catch all those ills, to swallow them back inside herself. She'd have to balloon, stretching herself so thin her skin changed color, turning her body into a ladle to scoop through the sea and air. Not that it'd be her job. But she'd try anyway. 

Writing the Day

Writing the Day was the name I chose for a new daily practice I started for 2014. It wasn't a New Year Resolution, and it wasn't totally original.  I want to write a poem each day.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the for me. Stafford wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.”

It’s not that I don’t already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning and what he did when it didn’t meet his standards, he replied, “I lower my standards.”

I like that answer, but I know that phrase “lowering standards” has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.

I call the form ronka – a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

And that will be our short prompt for this short month.

These poems are meant to be one observation on the day. It might come upon waking. It might come during an afternoon walk, or when you are alone in the night.The poems should come come from paying close attention to the outside world from earth to sky or from inside – inside a building or inside you.

People know haiku as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that’s an English version, since Japanese doesn’t have syllables.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7.

For my invented ronka form, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like traditional tanka and haiku, my form has no rhyme. You want to show rather than tell. You want to use seasonal words - cherry blossoms, rather than “spring.”

It's hard for Western writers to stay out of their poems - lots of "I" - but ronka have fewer people walking about in the poem.

The poems are just 5 lines, but you can certainly write several on a single theme and chain them together renga style.

For examples, there are some on our main site and all my ronka poems so far are on the Writing the Day website. I look forward to you outdoing me at my own form.

Submission deadline: February 28, 2014

Planning a Girl Talk Reading

     
For the past six years I have organized and run an event called "Girl Talk: A Poetry Reading in Celebration of Women’s History Month." Each year since keeping this blog, I’ve posted something about the event after it took place. I’ve then received notes from other women poets saying that they’d love to attend such an event or organize one. I thought that this year I would post details before the event so that others might feel motivated to host such an event and have time to do the planning. So here’s how it goes.

1. Choose a date. Ideally, this should be in March since that’s Women’s History Month, but if March doesn’t work out, a different month is fine. Decide where you want to hold the reading. Mine is held in my local library, a place that has a great reading room and has become a congenial place for poetry. I always choose a Saturday, daytime, but you could choose any day of the week or could hold your event in the evening. Once I have a date in mind, I contact the librarian, and if the date is available, he puts Girl Talk on the calendar. A house reading would also be a lovely option if someone has a space large enough to accommodate the readers and guests.

2. Decide how many poets to include. I begin with two dozen, but somehow the list always grows as each year I get requests from women who want to read the next year. You can, of course, keep your group smaller, but I wouldn’t go much larger than 30. I have 32 on this year’s list, but typically a few readers cancel last minute. Be prepared for that. Make a list of who you want to invite to read. Aim for some diversity. Invite each poet to read one woman-related poem. I stick with poets who live within an easy driving distance. That reduces the chance of last-minute cancellations and seems to bring in more visitors. Send out your invitations. I do this by email. Be sure to give a deadline for response.

3. Once the list is compiled, I ask for a brief bio from each poet—3-5 sentences—and make a page at my website. This is not essential, but it’s a good way to publicize the event. I ask poets to link to the site from their own reading calendars and to use the link when they invite friends to attend. I prepare a list of readers to hand out at the event. If I didn’t have the website, I would include the bios there.

4. I ask for volunteers to bake cookies. I decline any offers for store-bought or bakery cookies. Homemade only! I usually get more volunteers than I need. The cookies are for the reception that follows the reading. The poets and all visitors are invited to join in.

5. I ask poets with books published within the past 5 years to send me title and price, one title only per poet. These books are placed on the book sale table at the reading. Poets may put out 6 books, but replenish if they get lucky and sell out. The library provides two volunteers to handle book sales.

6. Next comes the pr. I post notices of the event in a variety of online sources and local newspapers. I prepare and send a flier to all of the poets and ask them to post it and use it in their email invitations to friends and relatives. If everyone helps a bit with the pr, you can be sure of a good turnout.

This is just one half of the room. We also fill up the other side.

7. I have one short meeting with the librarian about two weeks before the event. We go over room setup, book sales, and any last-minute details.

That’s it for the planning. At the event you’ll want to arrive a bit early to greet people and get the volunteers set up with the books. Be sure that prices for the books are very visible. I ask my poets to use straight dollar amounts so no one has to mess with silver change. All the cookies get put in the kitchen until the reading is over.

I use alphabetical order for the reading. I begin with a welcome to the audience. Then I introduce each poet by name. She gets up and reads at the podium. The mic is set up there. About halfway through we take a 10-minute break. Caution: Don’t let the break go much over that or you will lose some people. Then we go through the remaining poets. Throughout the reading I remind everyone that books are available for sale and signing.

After the reading, the bakers get their cookies and put them on the table at the back of the reading room. Chairs are moved up to allow poets and visitors to circulate. There’s lots of good conversation during this time and lots of good cookies are eaten. There’s also a table set up at the front of the room where poets and visitors can put out fliers, postcards, notices of workshops, etc. (Nothing for sale there.)

That’s it! The event runs from 1:00 - 4:00. We leave well nourished with poetry, cookies, and girl talk.

Let me know if you decide to do a similar event. I hope you do.

Thunder of New Wings

Often, I'm attuned to poetry's forms, but this essay considers its earlier stages, even of formlessness. It is difficult to separate the elements of writing that writers use. Vision, voice, and technique are interlocked, and the whole seems to exceed the sum of its parts. Lao Tze wrote:

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

He says what cannot be spoken. It is the province of poetry to express the inexpressible. In exploring ways that "the spirit" can intersect with poetry, I wanted to bring together some thoughts about making new work. It is a creation story, somewhat abstracted, of the way that writers create objects made of language.     

In poetry, before the voice arrives, we attune to the world with our ears. Our ear gives us a sense wonder and awakens us. Our ear gives us the vowel sounds and cadences of the language we are born into, and we feel its rhythms in our body, listening comes before speech. The ear can pick up a tune. It is our ear that leads. A poem listens. Listen, a poem, titled "Beginning" by James Wright: 

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon's young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

"Be still./ Now."  Attentive to the moment, Wright invites the reader to do the same. In the magic of the night, between no sound and sound, James Wright gives the reader nocturnal stirrings and glimpses of the luminous. I trust this poem. The world is an alive being. It listens to the beginnings of things, to the places where darkness is separated from light, to creation. 

In Wright's poem, action and the figurative occur in the first words. This is also true of the next poem. The poet Joy Harjo uses creation stories of her Native culture alongside her narratives of people caught in the struggle between darkness and light.

At dawn the panther of the heavens peers over the edge of the world.
She hears the stars gossip with the sun, sees the moon washing her lean
darkness with water electrified by prayers. All over the world there are those
who can't sleep, those who never awaken.

My granddaughter sleeps on the breast of her mother with milk on
her mouth. A fly contemplates the sweetness of lactose.

Her father is wrapped in the blanket of nightmares. For safety he
approaches the red hills near Thoreau. They recognize him and sing for
him.

Her mother has business in the house of chaos. She is a prophet dis-
guised as a young mother who is looking for a job. She appears at the
door of my dreams and we put the house back together.

The narrator at the beginning of the poem is ambiguous, the poem story begins with myth: "the panther of heaven peers over the edge of the world/ She hears the stars gossip...." The sense of hearing is invoked. The mythic also has human characteristics. 

The poet brings together "those who can't sleep and those who never awaken." Two negations are conjunct, those who want to sleep can't sleep are juxtaposed with those who want to stay asleep. In the next stanza, the story's perspective emerges with the word "my." In figurative language, in metaphor, and in the actual, the awake world is indistinguishable from the world of dreaming. The poet has a two-fold consciousness. We walk in two worlds. In Joy Harjo's poetry, in her vision, action is not separate from creation and myth. 

Both of the previous poems focus "in the beginning." They invoke all beginnings. Perhaps all writers must separate darkness and light, and establish a world complete with conflicts and correspondences in their stories and songs. The creation stories, the sacred texts, the writings of mystics reveal light, illuminations, enlightenment, awakenings. These stories and texts and writings are mirrors, each capturing a glimpse of light, shadow, and the writer. 

There are no rules. Form rises from the material and comes intuitively. Formlessness is perpetual, it is the ocean of impulses, false starts, wrong directions, and abandoned ideas. I came to The Mirror of Simple Souls, the writing of a 12th century mystic, by way of Anne Carson. Her book Decreation explores the undoing of form in several ways (the word decreation, from Simone Weil, means the undoing of the creature inside us, or the self). I do not mean to intepret Porete's theology or even her experience, living in a different world and a different time. Her work passed into other's hands, and they made translations.

The Mirror of Simple Souls is a difficult but remarkable text, brilliant. "FarNear" was Porete's word for God. It's paradoxical and relates to proximity. In her book, an allegory of the seven steps on the "steep staircase" to God, Porete separated the concepts of self and soul, and she sought a state of "not-willing"--giving up desiring. 

This concept is not new in spiritual writing. But for the first time, I've seen writing through this lens, and it has resonance for me. There are some things that require a new language. The self, in art-making, can become an obstacle or a boundary that needs to be crossed. Maybe this is because preconceived ideas interfere with the process of bringing forth new work. One can't impose external structures on emerging work, but simply listen to it.  


In Porete's allegory,the characters are Love, the Soul, and Reason (and a few intervening: Pure Courtesy and Discretion)--all of whom she has given voice. Perhaps all writers carry on a negotiation between these elements and need to consider the undoing of form to reach the core of the work. Porete's metaphor was one of lovers: the soul and God. By "not willing," she could lose the self which was an obstacle to her quest for God. The river loses its name when it joins the sea, she said:

"This soul," says Love, "swims in the sea of joy, that is, in the sea of delights, streaming of divine influences. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy. She swims and drenches in joy, for she lives in joy without feeling any joy. So is joy in her, that she herself is joy, by the virtue of joy that has merged her in Him. And so is the will of the Loved and the will of this soul turned into one as fire and flame." 

This small passage from her long manuscript represents a moment of complete absorption, a flow experience. In her longing for the "thunder of new wings," she climbed the steep staircase she described, the seven "estates." She paid with her life for this pursuit, but her words, after centuries, remain. 

Another writing comes to mind: Rumi:

Why, when God's world is so big,
did you fall asleep in a prison
of all places?

This suggests that we need to dismantle the ideas we have about everything. I like the tone, the affection in consternation. My thoughts are still unformed, and perhaps this is appropriate. In formlessness, all is possibility. 

____________

Image:  Pottery by Gladys Koski Holmes, Minnesota, 1995.  

Harjo, Joy. "Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace." The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1996. Print and Web (Poetry Foundation): http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177196

Lao Tze. Retrieved 4 February 2014. Web. http://www.iging.com/laotse/LaotseE.htm#1

Porete, Marguerite. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Retrieved 4 February 2014. Web sources:
http://www2.kenyon.edu/projects/margin/porete8.htm and
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill/essentials.x.i.html

Wright, James. "Beginnings." The Poetry Foundation. 2014. Retrieved 4 February 2014. Web. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177231

Bogong Moth by Joe Dolce

A Bogong moth

darts out of
darkness
to seize fire -
it’s burned away its tarsi,
yet
continues to swoop,
kiss, careen, sizzle,
fluttering and
candle-banging
like fawn-crazed Nijinski.



I look up from my book

accepting the
immortal,
fatal dance
of life and light,
like Icarus’s
father
resigned to watch
his flying boy
hurl against
brilliance.



When you were a baby

night
crying,
often the