It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part V.

This final week I'm posting two new anthologies and three of my favorite poetry journals. All of these are worthy of our support and guaranteed to give you many hours of pleasure.


Helen Vitoria, editor
Thrush Poetry Journal: an anthology of the first two years

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Poems included in Thrush Poetry Journal: an Anthology of the first two years are the complete works from the Thrush Poetry Journal Online Editions. Poets include Maureen Alsop, Mary Biddinger, Karen Skolfield, Rachel McKibbens, Simon Perchik, William Greenway, Philip Dacey, and dozens of others.


Read "Dear Thanatos," by Traci Brimhall
Read sample poems by Ada Limon






MaryAnn Miller, editor
St. Peters B-List: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints (Ave Maria Press)

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This soul-stirring collection of more than one hundred poems—composed by a wide variety of contemporary award-winning poets—awakens readers to the beauty and humor in the broken, imperfect striving of the saints for holiness.

 Featuring poems by Dana Gioia, Mary Karr, Paul Mariani, and Kate Daniels, as well as many new and emerging poets, this anthology invites readers to view the saints as they've never imagined them, reaching for the sacred, doubting, bumbling, and then trying again. The collection features wide-ranging poems on ordinary topics, such as a mother trying to get her newborn to fall asleep, an older brother concerned about the marriage of his sister, a lonely man trying to meet a woman in a bar, and a burn victim's compassion for a small child.         
                                                                       —publisher's note

Read “Miracle Blanket” by Erika Meitner
Read “Limbo: Altered States” by Mary Karr





Poet Lore

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If Poet Lore has a character that’s remained constant across generations of editors, it’s not a shared aesthetic but an openness to discovery. And in that way, we think it’s true to say that Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke’s founding principles have guided the journal’s editorial stewardship all this time.  In the years we've worked together as an editorial team, many poets we know and admire have told us that their first published poems appeared in Poet Lore. What these poets have in common isn't a way of writing. What they have in common is the fact that an editor at Poet Lore read their early work with the respect it deserved.
                                              —editor's statement









 Southern Poetry Review

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SPR is the second oldest poetry journal in the region, with its origins in Florida and subsequent moves to North Carolina and now Georgia. Continuing the tradition of editorial openness and response to writers that began with Guy Owen in 1958, SPR publishes poems from all over the country as well as from abroad and maintains a worldwide readership. Past issues feature work from Chana Bloch, Billy Collins, Alice Friman, David Hernandez, Andrew Hudgins, Maxine Kumin, Heather McHugh, Sue William Silverman, R. T. Smith, Eric Trethewey, and Cecilia Woloch.

                                                 —editor's statement








 The Cincinnati Review

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Since its inception in 2003, The Cincinnati Review has published many promising new and emerging writers, as well as Pulitzer Prize winners and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellows. Poetry and prose from our pages have been selected to appear in the annual anthologies Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, New Stories from the South, New Stories from the Midwest, Best New American Voices, Best American Essays, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, Best Creative Nonfiction, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

                                                   —publisher's statement

The Noise by Lee Posna

a Sargasso of monologues that were all attracted to the
noise


– Clive James



As
the Great Pacific Garbage

Patch,
gyre of voyaged plastic

Irkutsks
and chemical sludge, most

fecund
upper section and sunniest

of
a deep pelagic cylinder

sea
myriad thousand cubic miles

big
with bright anchovies

is
one lens on a century



so
this rose window—

arabesque
brass tracery

to
which myriad

Two Worlds

In Cloud Birds, the poem "Two Worlds" was selected to be in a choral music composition by Finnish composer Olli Ortekangas. It was commissioned by Osmo Vänskä for the Minnesota Orchestra, and it will likely be performed in the 2015-16 season. This music, "Migrations," is to be scored for mezzo-soprano, symphony orchestra and male choir and the theme will be immigration.

I crossed through a mirror,
in one world people were leaving,
in the other, arriving.
On the other side, the ancestors’
face in mine
as if through a fire’s light
spark to tinder and coals to ash,
as if through the herring in the sea,
through memory’s country,
through clouds to the land,
over the border.
My name on their stones.
Words resurface.
Walk the same walk
under the same stars,
footsteps over footsteps.
Sit at the table sing a hymn
in the old tongue.
Forward and back
the road is the road
where gravity meets gravity.
Ten rivers into the Baltic,
ten rivers into the inland sea.
The longest distance,
the farthest point

One line  elicited a question from the composer: to which hymn was I referring?  I was able to send him this video clip, taken at the home of Mikko Himanka in Kokkola, Finland during my visit.   It happened to be the evening prayer that Mr Ortekangas remembers from his childhood.  There were some changes in the poem as it became integrated into the musical composition: punctuation! Also we worked out some line changes. This reflects the poem as it will be sung. Altogether, four poems will be in the composition.   Here is link to the composer's website: http://ollikortekangas.com/biography/

Weaving: Telling Not Just One Story

Weaving Text

Think of writing text as weaving. The result is fabric. The word text comes from a Latin verb texere,  to weave, braid, intertwine or compose. Words with the same root are texture and textile.  Writers are weaving together people, places, things and other stories.  My mother was a weaver, and I write. The texture of the writing reflects all of these things; these together with the personality comprises a writer's voice. The context has to do with time, place, community and purpose.  For Tillie Olsen and many women writers, the practice of incorporating other texts and stories acknowledges and honors the struggles of others. Olsen's mission was to lift the voices of those who are not in the history books. 

Hypertext and Intertext

The internet creates the opportunity for weaving. Hypertextuality can provide links to images, oral and written history, maps, other texts and stories; therefore, it increases content and provides more context.  Hypertext increases the intertextual links between stories.

Many beautiful works of literature are intertextual: The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys presents an imaginative development of the earlier life of the character Bertha, the madwoman in the attic, in Jane Eyre.  West Side Story reflects Romeo and Juliet. Films often reference or "remake" stories.   Intertextuality, often discussed in women studies, is defined as the interrelatedness between one text and other texts. Georgetown University has a good description:

A term most fully and originally explicated by Julia Kristeva in the school of poststructuralism, intertextuality has taken on a variety of meanings since her discussion of the term in the 1960s. On its most basic level, intertextuality is the concept of texts' borrowing of each others' words and concepts. This could mean as much as an entire ideological concept and as little as a word or phrase. As authors borrow pro-actively from previous texts, their work gains layers of meaning. Also, another feature of intertextuality reveals itself when a text is read in light of another text, in which case all of the assumptions and implications surrounding the other text shed light on and shape the way a text is interpreted.

These used to be called "literary allusions."  Ernest Hemingway alluded to John Donne. Maybe it borrows thunder. Maybe some characters are so vividly drawn that they continue to live in our imaginations, and we must revive them with new stories. In Textermination, Christine Rose (1992) created a droll novel using characters of other famous novels concerned about their diminishing readership who come together for a literature conference in San Francisco. This is creativity not piracy. It acknowledges the sources and extends the pleasure of the earlier works.  It's a remix.  The popularity of fan-fiction, where author's borrow famous literary characters and create new stories around them, attests to the ever widening web.  

Leslie Marmon Silko, in "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective," identifies her storytelling structure. In the Pueblo perspective, a storytelling is not complete until those in the audience include their own story -- it is an act of continuance.  Single words have stories. Stories are made of "historical, sacred, plain gossip." It may seem digressive but it is web-like and contained within the story of creation. It is connected to the land.  We are all connected, and the story is tantamount.  

 Warp and Weft: More Textile and Texture

My mother and grandmother had looms, and they made rag rugs. Each rug was a testament to the garments worn: winter wool pants, dark rayons, cotton fabrics were cut into strips and pulled into the warp.  The warp are the vertical threads, and the horizontal or filler is the weft or woof. The best fabrics were tight and strong. Skill and experience strengths the craft.   

My work is intertextual. The print book is a small part of a larger story about the people and places of the Iron Range.  In my poems, I wanted to bring out the stories of women on the Iron Range. History goes in books, but herstory is often not recorded, disregarded or forgotten. I wanted to contribute to the literature of this place.  

I use web forms to provide images, hyperlinks, back stories and to fill in biographical information related to people in Night Train Red Dust. This involved using a bookmarking site and a blog. Whenever I found an online source--a website, a Youtube video, an image--I linked it on the bookmarking site. This site also allowed me upload my own photographs or pdf documents that were not web-linked.  I used to the blog to write literary journalism. I wrote about the authors, poets, forms, and texts that I recently discovered or that had long been influences. I love this work, it leads me to new discoveries.  Initially the work appeared as poetry, and now it has continued into essay forms: literary journalism, biography, and literary criticism. When the work is performed, Kathy adds the medium of music and film.  Applying or adapting one piece of writing to a new genre or medium is called "remediation."  It takes on more nuances of meaning, and more intertextuality.  

These are examples: The title of one of my poems, "Sketch," (a poem about a shooting in Biwabik amid union strife) refers to the depression era poet Joseph Kalar used to write about mining and the lumbermills. On my blog, I've written an article how "sketches" were used by proletarian writers and about the life and poetry of Joseph Kalar. These are more than textual notes. In two poems, "Bonfire of Roses" and "Refuge," I am referring to Meridel LeSueur and borrowing some of her rhythms. Meridel LeSueur was a journalist, writer, and speaker. She visited the Iron Range before I was born, and I've felt her influence. "Conjuring a Bear" evokes the Kalevala, the epic collection of ancient stories from Finland, with its many charms or spells. The poem "Not Just Bread" is a 'found poem' from the writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. After her work as a union organizer, she later became one of the founders of the ACLU. I found a sentence from her autobiography that provided a snapshot of the Iron Range. Perhaps it meant even more to me than it did to her.  While she was here, her hosts arranged transportation for her in a bread truck. I recall the Italian bakery in Virginia; we had always shopped there as a family, the bakery is a meaningful landmark on the Iron Range.  I gave her quote a title, arranged line breaks, and added the first line. I want these stories and texts to speak; I wanted the manuscript to become polyvocal and communal. This form lends itself easily to the web environment.

Other writers combine journal entries, letters, drawings, reports, news items, and data. This suggests the possibility of a hypertextile with hypertexture. 

Media: New Threads

This gets bigger--as it does for all artists who are collaborators.  My work goes into collaborative performances with Kathy McTavish, a composer, web developer, and film artist. At first, finding a name for what we did--combining cello and poetry--was challenging. I felt similar to the traveling minstrel singing Kalevala verses, and then she began to work in experimental film, and we added this to our projects. The web continued to widen. When I was Duluth poet laureate 2010-2012, engaged in large community writing project called Migrations, participating writers also became part of our performance. These were 75 writers whom I'd selected to publish in our book, Migrations: Poetry and Prose for Life's Transitions. Celebrating the publication, we arranged seven public performances in seven different locales.  Writers performed their own work, but I had arranged the order to tell a story about change.  Each performance was unique and interesting. 

Transmedia: More Threads

The best definition so far is work that enters and travels across more than one media, and each media extends its meaning.  In collaboration, the new goal we have is to find ways to build participation and interactivity into the performances. Kathy and I are using our individual texts in the film projection. Juxtapositions create flashes of new meaning.  This new experiment will be part of The Hole in the Sky, a work that she composed for the Zeitgeist New Music Quartet in St Paul that will also be an installation. For more info and tickets go to http://www.zeitgeistnewmusic.org/performances.php  

For her last opening, she had created portals for "designated writers" to input text that appeared like graffiti on the film and she had added a live twitter feed (it received tweets from Global Climate Change twitter accounts) for visitors at the gallery to add text.  It was a film, but it was also a book, but it was in motion, a new kind of reading.  Of course!  Afterall, Virginia Woolf told us that reading is not just seeing.  To read is to weave oneself into another text; to weave that text into your own story. Now we contemplate this and other ways to invite others into the project, because the work of weaving the fabric of a community is ongoing and requires many hands.  Vision.  I'm thinking about starting another community writing project using texting....

Work Cited: 

Learn more about text games or writing your own hypertext stories at http://twinery.org/

Narrative Wiki.  Georgetown University. 2012. Web. Retrieved 24 April 2014. http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Intertextuality

Hypertextuality. Web.  http://www.tc.umn.edu/~rbeach/teachingmedia/module12/3e.htm

Silko, Leslie Marmon. "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Perspective."  Web. http://www.classfolios.org/learningresource/SilkoEssay.pdf

The beautiful rag rug image is from a weaver:  http://palttina.blogspot.com/2008/03/rag-rug.html

Prompt: The Erotics of Gossip

Gossip is that casual conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true. The etymology of the word is from Old English godsibb, from god and sibb, the term for the godparents of one's child who were generally very close friends. And plenty of gossip comes from "friends."

Nowadays, the media is full of gossip with entire companies like TMZ and Eonline built on talking about the lives of celebrities.  Newspapers were the earliest mass media for gossip and famous for their juicy headlines.

But gossip still comes over the backyard fence or is whispered in a classroom and high school hallway or in the workplace.



I was reading about George Green's book of poems, Lord Byron's Foot. Green is a professor at Lehman College (where Billy Collins spent many years teaching) and that is his first poetry collection.

The title is a bit of gossip itself coming from the fact that Byron had a deformed foot that caused him a lot of grief and was one of those celebrity secrets that probably generated plenty of gossip at social events.  The book is, to quote Byron, “a little quietly facetious upon every thing” written in blank verse.


The subject matter is not George Green but the world of celebrity that also interested poet Frank O’Hara. The people of art, movies, big cities like New York, celebrity and the ephemeral.

Green adds some formality to the poems, but the topics are loose and dishy.

Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Green works some of the same gossip beat.

Marilyn killed herself because she thought
that middle age began at thirty-five.
In Liz’s case it did, but she kept going,
though Dick went down in flames (Exorcist II).

In a critical study of O’Hara, Hazel Smith says that gossip in poetry is “straddling the realm of the intimate … encourag[ing] voyeurism” and involving the reader in an “erotics of gossip.”

The article points to the tradition of “community portrait” poems and sequences by Thomas Hardy (Wessex Poems), Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology), Edwin Arlington Robinson (various volumes), and Gwendolyn Brooks (A Street in Bronzeville, The Bean Eaters) and going back to party gossiper, Chaucer.

Your assignment this month is to do some poetic gossiping. It can be celebrity-style or the more everyday. You might want to start by looking at some of those gossipy sites mentioned at the top of this post for a headline starter.

Please feel free to dish!

Submission Deadline: May 25, 2014

Tillie Olsen: Listening to Silences

Tillie Olsen

Many of the stories -- about half-- in the book of poems Night Train Red Dust reflect the people and history of the Iron Range.  It's also a meditation on the layers of history and earth, and how those layers contain stories of resistance. Individuals are not isolated. We influence and draw strength from one another. In order to understand this period of time, it's useful to consider writers and artists of the same era.

"I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron, " says Tillie Olsen in a story.  

The era of the 1900s to 1930s was a progressive time when women finally won the right to vote. Efforts to address social problems were strong. Many women activists who helped achieve the vote for women also were part of the Temperance Movement, and this provided new opportunities for leadership. Settlement Houses offered services to immigrants and families. Along with industrialization, our nation was confronted with the hazards of machinery, factories, and unsafe working conditions.
The Triangle Factory fire in New York City seared the American public. Both factories and mines had dangerous equipment in dangerous environments. Workers worked long hours and were poorly paid, and they had no protection from the careless excesses of capitalism and corporate greed. Socialist and Communist organizations offered workers a vision of a better life.

Tillie Olsen (1912-2007) was a political and social activist and a writer during these times. According the American Modern Poetry website, she was born in Nebraska, but she lived in Faribault, Minnesota for a period of time where she wrote the beginning chapters of Yonnondio. She was in Minnesota after an intense year and a half where, as a member of the Young Communist League, she was leafletting workers of a meatpacking company and was arrested for disturbing the peace and "making unusual noises."  She was arrested and jailed. In jail, she was beaten up. She also was suffering from pleurisy and tuberculosis.  She arrived in Faribault to recover, at the age of 19, but those years were also financially stressful. The father of her children left her with the responsibility of raising them, despite her serious illness, and she was often unable to pay her rent. Here is an excerpt from Silences:

The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years—response to others, distractability, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, make you, become you. The cost of ‘discontinuity’ (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks, takes me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.

She was born into a first generation Jewish immigrant family, and she did not identify very much with the upper class or what she termed the  'culture class' of writers.  Her energies were focused on the demands of her four children, of making ends meet, and her work as an activist.  Her book Silences is well known, especially her essay "I Stand Here Ironing." She was sensitive to the ways that the demands of living and working prevented many people from writing or doing 'creative' work.

She helped to advance the voices and writing from people of the oppressed and lower classes. "We cannot speak of women writers in our century," she wrote, "without also speaking of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: [those] born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered." Tillie Olsen helped promote the writing of Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills.  Olsen was also noted for her strong support for public arts funding.  We must listen to these voices, she insisted. We must have these stories.

Constance Coin wrote about Tillie Olsen's literary and political contributions, and she noted the value that Olsen placed on the many voices that were often silenced. Of Yonnondio and other writing, Coin writes:

Even so, in this first publication we already see emerging in Olsen's writing a tendency, which will later become dominant, that competes with her desire for monological authorial and pedagogical control. In this "worker's correspondence" poem, she gives others a voice, straining toward a collective form. The poem is a vehicle for the stories of exploited Chicanas, as Tell Me a Riddle will be permeable to multiple oppressed voices. And in nascent form, "I Want You Women Up North" prefigures Silences' maverick intertextuality. Olsen "yields the floor" Filipe Ibarro's words as she will to dozens of other writers in the later text, and she allows Ibarro's words to conclude the poem, as she will give the "last word" in Silences to Rebecca Harding Davis.

In an obituary of Tillie Olsen in Slate Magazine, Jess Row said, "Look around you on your way to work, she might say to us, or the next time you eat at a restaurant or visit a nail salon, and listen: That deafening silence is the sound of literature not being written."

On the Modern American Poetry website I found this interview, excerpted here:

Q: What gives you hope?
OLSEN: History gives me hope.
Q: Even though this century's been so violent?
OLSEN: The century has also been full of resistance. Why is it that the resistance movements--often so heroic and so ingenious--get obliterated from consciousness?There's always been resistance, and there comes a time when changes are made. The fact that human beings do not put up forever with misery, humiliation, degradation, actual physical deprivation but act is a fact which every human being should know about. We are a species that makes changes.There was a period in my parents' lives--it was a period in our country's life--when the ideal and the real were dynamically contiguous. They really felt that the international movement was going to change the world and make it a more just, human place. They were young when they came here, but they'd lived so very, very much.The world is so different from the world of their youth and the world of my youth. Still, power is primarily held by people of wealth and position. By and large, class interest still rules in our country.

These words of hers attest to the value and power of written language.  If we record our history, we can help provide hope to ourselves and the future generations.

Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.

Gill, Vicraj. "In Her Own Words." Bloom . Blog: quotes from Tillie Olsen.  http://bloom-site.com/2013/02/13/in-her-own-words-tillie-olsen/

Modern American Poetry.  “Tillie Olsen (1912-2007).” Prepared and Compiled by Cary Nelson.  Web. Retrieved 24 April 2014  http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/olsen/olsen.htm

Olsen, Tillie. "I Stand Here Ironing." Full text. Web. http://producer.csi.edu/cdraney/2010/278/resources/olsen_ironing.pdf

Row, Jess. “Her Silence Spoke Volumes:The Importance of Tillie Olsen."  Slate Magazine. January 2007. Web.  Retrieved 24 April 2014. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2007/01/her_silence_spoke_volumes.html

Muriel Rukeyser: These Roads Will Take You Into Your Own Country

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is described by an essay on the website of the American Poetry Foundation in this way: "Impassioned, self-confident, eclectic, a poet of powerful expression, a poet of the political and the personal...."  In an earlier era, 1938, she travelled to the coal mining region and wrote about what she witnessed using her form: poetry.  This work inspired me to take on the same challenge of writing about mining in northern Minnesota. For this reason, I chose a line from one of her poems, "The Book of the Dead," as an inscription for Night Train Red Dust.  

Her title refers to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It expressed her metaphor that the miners in the coal industry were archetypal figures that descended into the underworld. The Academy of American Poets has an essay about this important work that reflected many voices in the community, historical documentation, and a socio-political perspective:

"The Book of the Dead" was published as a long sequence in Rukeyser's book U.S. 1 in 1938. It is a text that could be considered a hybrid work; it is polyvocal, part factual document, part investigative journalism, and part lyric. The series is a collage of source text that includes stock market quotes, Congressional reports and trial transcripts. The poems host a polyphony of voices: doctors, contractors, close family members of miners, and, most prominently, the victims themselves who were little more than exploited, and certainly nearly invisible, during the aftermath of the exposure. In doing so, the text provides a powerful exploration of who is empowered by speech, and whose speech acts have been mediated for various reasons. "The Book of the Dead," in making the dead visible, also exposes and implicates the classist, racist and capitalist structures that allowed such a tragedy to occur. 

Initially, Night Train Red Dust began with a focus on Highway #4, otherwise known as the Vermilion Trail.  In my research, I learned this road was the first road into northeastern Minnesota- initially a path for foot or horseback used by the Native Americans, and then later this road was travelled by surveyors and geologists with horse and wagon. Veterans from the Civil War arrived at Vermilion Lake during its Gold Rush via the Vermilion Trail. Reports from the 1800s were that the road was difficult to travel, often muddy and impassable. Equipment was more successfully transported during the cold winter when the surface was frozen. Large machinery and mining equipment were carried to Biwabik and other locations on this road.  Muriel Rukeyser is a poet whom I admire for her broad range of poetry.
This is excerpt of the poem:

These roads will take you into your own country. 

Seasons and maps coming where this road comes
into a landscape mirrored in these men.

Past all your influences, your home river,
constellations of cities, mottoes of childhood,
parents and easy cures, war, all evasion’s wishes.

What one word must never be said?
Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
cough in the theatres of the war.

What two things shall never be seen?
They : what we did. Enemy : what we mean.
This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.

What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.
The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.

The facts of war forced into actual grace.
Seasons and modern glory. Told in the histories,
how first ships came

seeing on the Atlantic thirteen clouds
lining the west horizon with their white
shining halations;

They conquered, throwing off impossible Europe—
could not be used to transform; created coast—
breathed-in America.

Besides writing "poetry of witness" like U.S. 1, Rukeyser also explored mythic stories (like that of Orpheus and Eurydyce). She connected her stories to myth:

By invoking the original Egyptian text Book of the Dead, Rukeyser assigns a mythic importance to the miners who were asked to descend into the underworld that would eventually foster their demise. However, as Michael Davidson points out in Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World, "their journey is not a search for lost cultural plentitude, but a fatal contract with progress....Rukeyser deflates the modernist mythological imperative typified by T.S. Eliot's invocation of cyclic vegetation myths. Buried in this waste land are the corpses of workers for whom a reading of the classics would have offered little sustenance." 

While "The Book of the Dead" is consistent with Rukeyser's ongoing dedication to a poetry of "witness," it is unique in that it draws on, and includes, an abundance of non-literary source material, thus widening the lens of the poet as documentarian and activist.

With such an inspirational writer as a guide,  I hoped to develop a collection of work that would reflect the challenges for men and women who lived in a mining community. Much of the region's population is employed in the mining industry.  During college one summer, I also worked at Minntac.  Mining supports the economy, yet it poses hazards to health and the environment. Growing up in a blue collar community with history of strong union activism and 'proletariat' roots, I have received an valuable education and I hold much respect for people who work hard. The Iron Range has made a critical contribution to the United States. The iron ore built the cities and highways and it supported the war efforts. It continues to provide us with resources and strength.



Alice Walker on Muriel Rukeyser from SLAP Agency on Vimeo.

Academy of American Poets. "Groundbreaking Book: US 1: Featuring "The Book of the Dead." n.a. copyright 2014.  Web. Retrieved 24 April 2014. 

https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/21713

Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive. Copyright Elisabeth Däumer 2012. EMU’s English Department.
http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/writing/the-book-of-the-dead/#the-book-of-the-dead

"Muriel Rukeyser Biography" Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/muriel-rukeyser

Rukeyser, Muriel. Out of Silence: Selected Poems.  Edited by Kate Daniels.  TriQuarterly Books. Northwestern University. 1992.  Print. 

Lake Superior Magazine: Cloud Birds Book Review

Book Review by Mike Link from Lake Superior Magazine Feb/Mar 2013

Cloud Birds
by Sheila Packa
Wildwood River
ISBN: 978-0984377725
$15 Softcover

Sheila, the descendant of Finnish immigrants, writes her poems within the setting of the Iron Range and Western Lake Superior.  

Her style is both visual and rhythmic, with words flowing to create a song-like quality, but with the strength to pull the reader to an abrupt halt.  She can lull the reader and also shock.

One of my favorite poems was “memory migration.” Another was “not forgotten,” in which Sheila remembers her father through the memory of him teaching her to ride a bike. “By his side, I learned balance/and took on speed” and eventually she rode on out of his life. This theme is later picked up in “road” and “street musician”: “your strings are roads/that connect to the highway/miles I haven’t gone”. – ML

---

The books reviewed here, unless indicated, should be available through local booksellers by using the ISBN number. More regional reviews can be seen on www.LakeSuperior.com.

http://www.lakesuperior.com/lifestyle/reviews/351reviews/

It's National Poetry Month; Therefore, Buy Books. Part IV.

We're already at Week 4 of National Poetry Month. I hope that your mailbox has been loading up with new poetry books. I also hope that for every book you buy two of your own will be sold.


Susan Elbe 
The Map of What Happened (The Backwaters Press)
won the 2014 Julie Suk Prize

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Susan Elbe's "Map" is an elegant work of starkly-hued reminiscence, a love letter to the city that raised her and an unflinching exploration of the littered personal landscape we all must travel. These deftly-crafted stanzas will conjure home for you—wherever that home is, whatever shape it has taken.
                                                                       —Patricia Smith


Read sample poem at Zocalo Public Square
Read sample poems at diode






Rachel Dacus
Gods of Water and Air (Aldrich Press)

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In Gods of Water and Air, the humor and irreverence of a 1960’s rebel mix with feminist, expressionist, and lyrical motifs as the author openly explores her feelings, relationships, and spiritual musings. Inheriting her late painter father’s artistic eye, Dacus paints with words. Her writing can be indirect and slant, but is always transparent, clear, and immediate, eschewing the often impenetrable poetic structures one frequently finds elsewhere.
                                                                     —Ann Wehrman


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Read sample poems from Prairie Schooner





Sally Rosen Kindred
Book of Asters (Mayapple)

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Sally Rosen Kindred has a gift for creating poems I wish I’d written. Here is a garden of witness, of forgetting, of memory and music and love s bright blare. Aster as metaphor, aster as ghost bouquets of common weeds and wildflowers haunt us in these poems, and teach us to lean toward their mysterious light, to blossom with their stories, and to grow bruised, but fed by their songs. 
                                                                        —Meg Kearney

Read "Confession" in Waccamaw

"My Son Asks" featured at Linebreak with audio

Jeffrey Harrison
Into Daylight (Tupelo Press)

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This book gets better each time I read it. Harrison is very skillful in a way that's almost passed out of existence: only a handful of writers can do what he does in handling the line and understanding how syntax and line work together employing the plain style with great virtuosity.
                                                                       — Tom Sleigh


Read selected poems from Into Daylight
"To a Snake" featured at The Writer’s Almanac

April Come She Will

The air is finally temperate in DC, so the windows are open warm enough to open the windows. The neighboring crews are working their mowers. I'm snacking on raw walnuts. "April Come She Will" is playing in my head. Not one of the best or best-loved Simon & Garfunkel songs (my favorite is "American Tune") but it has a gentle charm. In the 19th-Century traditional that inspired the song, the subject was a cuckoo--a male--and the nursery rhyme culminated in his August flight. The Simpsons used it in an episode called "Beware My Cheating Bart."

This is not my soup. This is Eduardo C. Corral's soup, who once used to post regularly at Lorcaloca, but who as of late has been a little busy being a rockstar poet and touring for Slow Lightning (if you get the chance to hear him read, do). This is menudo with tripe, but it's only a few degrees removed--switch in pork, add hominy--from the posole that I love, and ate most recently in Santa Fe. Although soup is generally presented as a peasant food, for me it evokes luxury. Luxury of time, to prep and layer ingredients and simmer for hours. Luxury of having a full fridge you can raid for tasty odds and ends. Luxury of not worrying about the inevitable salt bloat to follow. Soup is what I think of eating when I am truly at home. 

For much of later March and early April, I was not at home. (Hence the silence here. I missed you!) This is snapshot from a dawn flight out of Memphis. 

Thanks to the Georgia Poetry Circuit, one of the best opportunities I've ever had as a writer, I read in Bainbridge, Columbus, Macon, Valdosta, and Statesboro. Five towns, five days. The rampant Spanish moss was a reminder that I was in a place from another time. A state rife with conservatism--one GPC coordinator jokingly called his town the "pulsing red heart" of an already-red state--but also a lot of kindness and creativity. 

Also, some epic houses. 

…including the home of Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter). I gave an extemporaneous lecture to a crowded living room of students on the art of revision, manuscript strategies, and the writing life. I slept in her basement. 

Columbus was my favorite stop because of its utter surprises, which included a studio visit with the artists Bo Bartlett and Betsy Eby. All I knew about Columbus beforehand was its proximity to Fort Benning. I came away so impressed with the efforts to revitalize the downtown, including the decision to convert old mills to artist and loft spaces, and to open up a dam that transformed the Chattahoochee River's flow, for the 10 miles adjacent to the Riverwalk, into a whitewater passage open to the public. 

Several times over the years, folks have recommended One Flew South as a transformative airport restaurant experience. So--faced with a layover in Atlanta--I opted for a longer stretch instead of my usual 30-minute sprint between gates, and tracked OFS down in Terminal E. Folks were right! The conversation flowed as if we were all regulars, trading stories and cracking jokes. I don't know which was tastier: my lychee-sake cocktail, or the off-menu "Brown-eyed Girl" of bourbon with a float of malbec (yes, really), or the hamachi-pickled-pear hand roll, or the chicken soup with five spice. But I will never again dread the Atlanta airport. 

This may seem an odd pronouncement coming off such pleasurable travels, but I've been considering a more traditional job. Not because of financial hardship; although freelancing is not an easy life, I've had a fortunate stretch of opportunities and windfalls this year. But when I consider what comes after Count the Waves, I'm drawn to strange ideas--personal and scholarly--things that on first draft will probably seem like a mistake. I'd like to provide shelter for those ideas to grow. I worry about losing something in the trade, of course. But so much unhappiness is rooted in resistance to change. The jobs I'm considering are dear to my heart and my skill set. And, frankly, even the best soup at One Flew South will never compare to the one I have time to make in my own home. I'm only 33. There will be so many ways to live this life. 

Consanguinity: Gladys Koski Holmes

Consanguinity by Gladys Koski Holmes

Bedding Plants by Gladys Koski Holmes

Gladys Koski Holmes (1932-2005)  lived almost all of her life in the same small community of Angora, on the edge of the Iron Range. Her work was drawn from her own experience in a familiar Northern Minnesota rural environment, and from roots that extend back through grandparents who emigrated from Finland. Koski earned a master's degree in art from the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 1989.

Self Portrait by Gladys Koski Holmes

Iron Range Transition by Gladys Koski Holmes

 

Koski won the prestigious George Morrison Art Award in 2002 for significant artistic contributions to the arts of the Arrowhead Region. She exhibited her work in a number of exhibitions in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Finland.

In an exhibition catalog for the Viola Hart Endowment exhibit, Gladys wrote about herself, "Because I have always lived in this remote area where art is a foreign language spoken only by a few, I have found myself stretched across a chasm that bridges two disparate worlds: the Iron Range and the Urban-out-there. It has meant a continual search for elements from each and a struggle to synthesize them into some sort of cohesive whole. Through using recognizable imagery that provides a sense of place, while using symbolism and surrealism as transportation into yet another world--observations, ideas, and perhaps a bit of nailing down of culture and history are taking place. It is both the tangible and intangible--tangible objects collaged onto the frames, and the painted realm within.  

"I think these traits come from the very inborn, Finnish characteristics of protecting one's privacy while maintaining persistence in pursuing whatever needs pursuing, and of a spiritual quest for the unknown that draws upon trees, rocks and water. The use of materials stems from a heritage that reaches back for generations in which there is an inner drive to make something out of little or nothing, and make it good as possible, no matter the painstaking process. The strength of women, ancestral women, and the example set by old, rural Finnish women, reaches out through my work."

Of her painting Iron Range Transition, Gladys wrote: "The roll of tarpaper harks back to the thread of the Hoover-days during the Great Depression when people built little tarpaper shacks to live in along the edges of towns. Hoover-days were again threatening with the loss of mining jobs in a one-industry economy. The canning jars inside the bird cage symbolize how the mining industry had preserved a secure way of life but at the same time caged the mind and fostered an unhealthy dependence."

Consanguinity is in my private collection. Other photos are from an exhibition at Finlandia University in 2000. 

In Night Train Red Dust, the ekphrastic poem "Consanguinity" reflects both the image of her painting and my friendship with Gladys. Ekphrastic poems describe a piece of visual art -- and sometimes they correspond with the images or implied narrative.  My poem does this but it also has collected other images her Mandalas and other paintings.  







For info about Night Train Red Dust or links to order the book online, go to: http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/05/my-geology.html

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Untitled by Ema Saikō

Yabase Shichoku planted a thousand cherry trees on Mt Kinshō and asked friends for poems; I was one of them.





Making flowers your life, keeping your pleasure unchanged,


a thousand, ten thousand clusters you've managed to

Video Poem: Tremont Hotel

This is a video poem "Tremont Hotel" originally presented at the Radio Pluto Exhibit at Prøve Gallery. It is also published in the book Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range.
tremont hotel from Wildwood River on Vimeo.

On a historical note, the Tremont Hotel was one of the early lodgings available in Duluth. It was built in 1890.  In 1920, it became the Gardner Hotel.  In the 1980s, it was remodeled into a single room occupancy residence, and then it closed in 2008.  Now it has been sold to a developer to be rehabbed into apartments.  In the poem, the narrator's voice reflects stories of early Canal Park and its brothels.  Canal Park also had immigrant boarding houses where many Finnish men lived.

Video Poem: Was It I by Sheila Packa and Kathy McTavish

This is a video poem "Was It I" from the book Cloud Birds. It is the poem that initiated Night Train Red Dust! Spoken Word:

was it I (spoken word) from Wildwood River on Vimeo.

Written text only:
was it i / 2 from Wildwood River on Vimeo.

Lines in Poetry: Linkage Theory, Enjambment, and Associative Leaps

Paul Hurt from the UK focuses attention on the myriad ways to create a line of poetry:
         Applying Linkage Theory to poetry: 

The site is centred upon what I call 'Linkage Theory,' although I regard this theory as having a great number of practical applications. Innovations, I also believe, are far more likely to be made if a person thinks in terms of linkages and contrasts. In this site, I give some of the innovations I've made - but not all of them. 

I first began to formulate Linkage Theory as a result of intensive study of poetic forms. Some of my work on linkage and contrast in poetry and literary theory appears in this site, and is grouped on the left side of the Site Map. At this stage, I explored linkages between poetry and art and design, for example, by fragmentation of the poem, but later, I made a more intensive study of linkage and contrast in the visual arts, including work on the Set. Much of this work appears in the site too, and can be found on the right side of the Site Map. 

Chris Pulman, in 'The Education of a Graphic Designer,' writes 'If you ask why something works and you push back far enough, eventually everything seems to be based on contrast: the ability to distinguish one thing from another. Composition, sequencing, even legibility all rely on devices that affect the contrast between things.' (Quoted in the Web Style Guide). I later developed my ideas concerning contrast (and linkage) far beyond these origins. 

The next stage involved a great broadening of scope: the concrete linkages and contrasts of modern life, as well as technical extensions to linkage theory.

This is an interesting focus.  I've learned to "create tension between the lines," an adage from a writing teacher Wayne Moen.  The concept of linkage perhaps is related to the idea of "enjambment," the continuation of a sentence over a line break. The slight pause that a reader might make at the line break can introduce some ambiguity and perhaps make more meaning. Enjambment offers the poet an interesting rhythmic tool.  Hurt suggests that poetic lines should provide contrast in the way that they are sequenced as well as link both past and present.  Linkages are thus associations and evocative elements.  Hurt says:

I make the point that the artist should 'transform form.' I stress the exhilarating variety of forms available to the poet and the need for a wide variety of forms - free verse as well as strict forms of many different kinds, forms from the past which are still useful and completely new forms. I emphasize form here, but not at the expense of content.  

He offers a scientific sort of approach to literary arts, and he underlines the fact that form is as important as content, and it offers as many meanings.

Hurt, Paul.  Linkage Theory. 20 April 2014. Web. http://www.linkagenet.com/glossarylit.htm

Joseph Kalar: Sketch

Joseph Kalar: Sketch

In 1927-1935, Joseph Kalar, described as "a kind of north woods Rimbaud," began to write in poetry and short form prose called "proletarian sketches."  This depression era poet was from Biwabik, Minnesota--the Iron Range. In the introduction to the small volume of poems edited by Ted Genoways, an interesting biography and literary critique explains: "…the sketch allowed writers like Kalar to address proletarian issues without without either the aesthetic distance implied by poetry or the plot demands of a traditionally constructed piece of fiction. Genoways borrows a description from writer Douglas Wixson, "The plotless nature, the personal-narrative quality of the sketch, preserving accents and idioms, was a form suited to the needs of the nonprofessional writer."

In Papermill, there are several vivid sketches by Kalar.  Because I grew up near Biwabik, I was particularly intrigued by his writing. "Dust of Iron Ore" describes the mining location of Merritt (near Biwabik) and an area called "Chicken Town" where he lived as a boy with his family. His father worked in the underground iron mine.  

The miners, emerging like bats from shafts leading deep into the earth, were stained red and yellow with it, their clothes streaked and hardened with the dust, from which emanated a peculiar stink of dampness, sweat, and iron ore.

He continues the story describing the thousands of rats that swarmed the dump and the discovered of a man dead of suicide (by shotgun blast) on the dump. In "Mesaba Impressions" Kalar writes:

A man we all knew well and who was damned good to us kids got killed one day. The papers called it an unfortunate accident. It just happened that the shaft caved in. He sure was hurt some. I guess he only lived long enough to taste the iron ore in his mouth. Anyway his neck was all twisted to hell, his legs were broken, and his bloody guts hung over the top of his trousers.

Kalar captured the Iron Range's dialect and idiom. He used racial and ethnic slurs of the era and foul language that echoes the brutal work and life in a mining town.  The work was arduous and dangerous. The dust got into the lungs. Men suffered falls and crush wounds. They suffered from accidents with dynamite.  Before the unions forced a change, men were paid by the amount of ore that they took out of the mine.  They were not paid for the time they spent setting timbers in the deep shafts. Kalar used words like Bohunk (for Slovenian) and Wops (for Italians) and many other derogatory words to describe the many immigrants. He was not being derogatory, I believe because he saw these men as fellow-workers. In his poem, "Flagwaver:"

When I get patriotic, I go on a big drunk.
Let me tell you--
patriotism is a shot of now, a whiff of opium,
a mouthful of rotgut strong enough
to eat the brass pants off a monkey.
Let me tell you--
when the flag waves in redwhiteblue frenzy,
what fat men stand on platforms with them hooked
Napolean-wise in lapels of their coats
expounding landofffreemen,
telling me American is my sweetheart,
I get patriotic as hell,
I go on the big drunk.

The culture of the Iron Range continued to have these elements, the blue-collar, radical politics and drunken swagger. There were a lot of men like this. Biwabik, now a small town of about 1200 people used to have eleven mines.  At the beginning of the mining operations 1870-1910, the accident rates and deaths were alarming. The labor strikes and violence between union men and company guards are well documented.  The mining continued, when the rich iron ore was depleted, the underground mines were converted to open pit mines.  Iron ore mines became taconite plants. Still remaining is Kalar's derisive humor and spit of survival. Because of his poetry and sketches, we now have the images and insights of a proletariat poet.

For many years, Biwabik was held a giant Fourth of July celebration, the Calithumpian Parade. When I was growing up, it was the annual "big drunk." The crowds numbered in the thousands. Clown bands played their drums and horns. Men dressed up as women to entertain the crowd. It was outrageous, and political, and funny. An interesting detail about the British origin of the word Callithump: perhaps originated from "gallithump" to refer to a boisterous heckler or someone who disturbed the order at Parliamentary elections. This detail is from the "Weird Word" section of World Wide Words, and the definition references Biwabik, Minnesota.

In the context of Callithumpian, this poet was a boisterous disturber of the order, a proletarian writer. Unfortunately, he had difficulty making a living as a writer. During the depression, he travelled across the country, and then he came back to Minnesota to work in the lumbermill in International Falls. Slowly, his writing diminished. He married and had children. He made a run for office that was not successful. He climbed in rank at the lumbermill and his work demanded a lot of his energy. Kalar's work was nearly forgotten before the publication the University of Illinois Press brought out his work. One of my favorite poems is "Invocation to the Wind."  Here is an excerpt:

blow, blow into dusty corners,
reach cool fingers beyond cobwebs
festooning this dark room where
throats are choked with dust and
beauty shrivels like mushrooms
in dry cellar--blow, blow, blow
into factories with windows of dust
and a shuffling of feet tired
in silk stockings, and fingers
red at the tips--blow, blow into
jail, come like a draught of spring
water of faces hunkering against
steel bars--blow, blow into slums…

I pay homage to this poet. While I was growing up on the Iron Range, attending school in Biwabik, spending my teenage years trying to find a place that I fit--not at keg parties in gravel pits or on mine dumps--I wish I would have heard this voice. It offers a socio-political and artistic path for writers of the working class.

Work Cited

Kalar, Joseph. Papermill: Poems, 1927-35. Edited by Ted Genoways. University of Illinois Press. 2006. Print

Kalaidjian, Walter.  "About Joseph Kalar."  Modern American Poetry. From American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press. Retrieved 20 April 2014. Web.  http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/kalar/about.htm

Other notes: (http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-cal1.htm)