How Long Will You Revise a Poem?

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was an extremely methodical  and downright slow writer. I was surprised to read that she only published 101 poems in her lifetime.

She worked on her poem “The Moose” on and off for more than 25 years. I have poems from 25 years ago that I still look at and revise, but I can't say that I have been "working on them" for all that time. For "The Moose," she had it tacked up on her wall so that she could rearrange the lines.

We all have our distractions. For Bishop, writing letters was one. (Perhaps today, she would be online and in email.) She once wrote 40 letters in a single day and said, “I sometimes wish that I had nothing, or little more, to do but write letters to the people who are not here.” A collection of her letters, One Art: Letters, was published in 1994.

I don't classify coming back to a poem written years ago and making changes as the same kind of revision as when I sit down every day for a week trying to get a poem to a place where I feel comfortable reading it to an audience or sending it out to the world.

I also have notebooks of typed and printed poems that feel unfinished that I rarely look at and even more rarely work on any more.

What is your revision process?


Here is the opening of "The Moose."

The Moose
For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats’
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches...

read the rest of the poem

“Container” by Fiona Apple

I was screaming into the canyon
At the moment of my death.
The echo I created
Outlasted my last breath.

My voice it made an avalanche
And buried a man I never knew.
And when he died his widowed bride
Met your daddy and they made you.

I have only one thing to do and that's
To be the wave that I am and then
Sink back into the ocean.

Sink back into the o-
Sink back into the ocean.
Sink back

Best Practices for Fair Use in Poetry

A resource that might be especially useful for teachers of poetry, but also poets, critics, and publishers, is available from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute in collaboration with American University's Center for Social Media and its Washington College of Law. They have created the "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry."

Devised specifically by and for the poetry community, this best practices code serves as a guide to reasonable and appropriate uses of copyrighted materials in new and old media.

"This document," says project adviser Lewis Hyde, "brings wonderful clarity to the otherwise opaque world of poetry permissions. It is a useful tool that should serve poets, critics, and publishers alike."

It is available as a free free download (pdf) from the Center for Social Media.

From Pen Pal by Sugar Magnolia Wilson

1.
Hellooo. How are you?

I’ve only just started
witchcraft so this letter
includes some of my hairs.

My two guinea pigs had
million dollar babies –

two lots of babies.

Mum says they have the
eyeless ways of newborns.

Friday and I’m sitting
in the quad under the
acacia tree.

The bell has rung
and I’m waiting for
Mum or Dad to pick me up.

No one has come. It is
strange.

Did I tell you? I

Books That Call Us Back

Happy Valentine's Day, poetry lovers! This month three of our blogging team present the poets they consider touchstones―books and writers whose words touch deeper chords, serve as a hallmark of poetic achievement, continually surprise with original beauty. They inspire us with poems that cause us to breathe in, true to the origin of the word; in essence, to breathe more fully into our own perceptions and truths.

Karen George touches on several poets whose work most moves her, with special emphasis on Li-Young Lee's collections. Joel W. Nelson focuses his reader's light on the haiku of Kobayashi Issa in Spring of My Life. Barbara Sabol explores the work of Jane Hirshfield, highlighting in particular the book The Lives of the Heart.

___________

***KAREN GEORGE: My list of touchstone poetry books that I return to again and again would include all four of Li-Young Lee’s poetry collections (The City in Which I Love You, Rose, Book of My Nights, and Behind My Eyes), because of how his poems are layered with meaning, haunting in their tenderness and longing, deeply spiritual, yet grounded in the world of the senses. I’d also include New and Selected Poems, Volume I and II by Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin’s Migration: New and Selected Poems, because of how they teach me to pay attention, and immerse me in their reverence for the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world. Pablo Neruda’s One Hundred Love Sonnets would hold a place on my list of vital poetry books because of his sensuous imagery, and the intimacy, passion and mystery at the core of his poems. Jane Hirshfield’s After, Come, Thief, and Given Sugar, Given Salt earn a place on my list because of their contemplative nature, and how her spare yet multi-layered poems suggest as much by what she does not say as what she does. I’d include Naomi Shihab Nye’s Words Under the Words: Selected Poems for her direct, simple language, and her sense of urgency and compassion in writing about moral concerns and injustices. Lastly, Marie Howe’s The Good Thief and What the Living Do would hold a place on my list of touchstone books for the powerful, nuanced ways she handles complex emotional issues involving relationships and loss.

***JOEL W. NELSON: “Touchstone” isn't exactly the first word to roll off my tongue in the morning. What does it mean anyway? At one point, a touchstone was a literal stone used to measure the quality of gold and silver. Applied to our topic of discussion, a “touchstone” book of poetry can be understood as a book that one uses to judge the quality of other works, possibly even ones own. Kobayashi Issa's The Spring of My Life, translated by Sam Hamill, is such a book for me.

 Language is an essential compromise. Words can give life to a poem, but they can also kill a poem. The secret is in finding the right balance, and Issa is a master. His poems explore the whole range of emotion from light humor to deep suffering. When confronting suffering, the temptation is always to say too much instead of handling it with restraint, something Issa does beautifully. Even when his daughter dies of small pox, Issa manages to hold back:

 This world of dew
 is only a world of dew--
 and yet...oh and yet... 

This poem kicks off a series of poems by various haiku poets who also lost children. The haiku are brilliant mini-explosions of raw emotion. If there is one trait I admire most in a poet is his or her ability to transcend the page, to bring the reader into a world bigger than what they expected. If the poet can use the poem to manipulate not just the words on the page but the space outside the poem, is there anything more awesome than that?

 The old masters are old masters for good reason. I constantly fail to write the poems I want to write, whether it's because of a craft related failure or a lack of taste. For some reason, the poets of China and Japan reinvigorate me when I feel defeated and humble me when I become too proud. The Spring of My Life is a book that I constantly revisit. The feeling I get when reading these poems is a feeling I seek in other books of poetry and a feeling I aspire to share to my readers. Maybe one day, I will succeed, but until then, always the struggle.

***BARBARA SABOL: Joy, Sorrow and Every Moment In Between: Jane Hirshfield's The Lives of the Heart 

There is a good handful of poetry books I return to―for comfort (Kunitz, Merwin), for inspiration (Millay, Yeats), for wisdom (Hopkins, Rumi), for sonic brilliance in the nearly-edible vocabulary, the sheer rhythmic flow of a line (Dickinson, Heaney), for a well-wrought narrative (Bishop, Haas), for the exalted pleasure of discovering one's own perceptions exquisitely expressed (Glϋck, Doty). Any one of these poets could serve as exemplar "touchstone" poets. The one poet I keep closest, however, read again and again, the poet whose work embodies all of the above qualities, whose poems resonate into my day, is Jane Hirshfield. I own most of her books, including her collections of fine, illuminating essays. Of her books of poetry, The Lives of the Heart, published in 1997, has long represented a standard of poetry making to me, and stands out in high-relief on my bookshelf. Its pages are yellowed and the sumptuous cover holds a permanent curl at the bottom right-hand edge. What defines this collection, in particular, as my touchstone book of poems, is only secondarily its clear cohesion around the conceit of heart-as-symbol, its accessible diction, its beautifully rendered images, its philosophical and spiritual depth. Each time I re-read certain of the poems, I am struck anew by the quiet yet authoritative voice that layers meaning and image, image and meaning, such that I discover yet another strata of connotation, of connection to the poems' sensibility and sense enacted by its original and beautiful language. The poems ring true, the clapper chimes in fresh tones, even if I've read that same line five or fifty times.

 The collection is organized in four sections, each a full complement of one heart-theme: I) Heart Starting and Stopping in the Late Dark; II)Not-Yet; III) The Sweetness of Apples, of Figs; IV) Each Happiness Ringed by Lions. The four sections together present the full scope of emotional and spiritual responses to the world, to loneliness, loss, longing, joy, via a heart metaphor.

 A parallel theme of mortality and the inevitable tension that death/loss imposes on our waking lives, our joys, runs through the book. In the poem, "Not-Yet," the speaker turns her "blessings like photographs into the light," while "over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:/Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken." The speaker accepts the temporary nature of her blessings: "I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,/I ask him only to stay." The undertone of mortality completes the full circle of life, as enacted in these poems; eventually both "salt heart" and "abundant heart," in their ardent beating, says the god of Not-Yet, will someday cease.

 The book opens with the title poem as prelude to the collection; it presages the themes of each of the four sections in startlingly beautiful, textured images:

The Lives of the Heart 

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit.
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate―violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

One poem that catches my breath with each reading, and that I'd like to share here, is "Not Moving Even One Step," in which longing and emotional fulfillment are enacted by the figure of a solitary horse in light rain:

Not Moving Even One Step

The rain falling too lightly to shape
an audible house, an audible tree,
blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.

          He knows the field for exactly what it is:
          his limitless mare, his beloved.
          Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned
          in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.

Slow rain streams from fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,
while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees. 

The muzzles almost touch.
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

How strange and yet natural that the "she" horse appears in the second stanza. It is the old horse's open-heartedness to love's possibilities and mysteries that allows the female horse to inhabit the empty space that only he, in his blindness, can see. And how quietly and surely that last stanza completes the poem, with the impossible observation (unless it is the heart that perceives the muzzles almost touching) in the simple sentence in the penultimate line, followed by the philosophical musing of the closing line. Jane's poems seem to turn on insights such as "How silently the heart pivots on its hinge," which carry a contemplative quality through the collection, adding a multi-hued resonance.

A new book of poems by Jane Hirshfield, titled The Beauty, will be published this March by Knopf. If it's possible for another book to rival the full emotional and spiritual range found in The Lives of the Heart, it may be this newest. I relish the idea of another book of Jane's; another collection that promises to express the unarticulated and private self―poems that, as in "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight: ". . .look back from the trees,/and know me for who I am."

Cecil Taylor on Poetry and Magic

I've read a marvelous short story in Bombsite Magazine today. "Cecil Taylor" by César Aira (translated by Chris Andrews) explores with aching beauty the hostility and rejection that the musician and composer endured in his career. The writing of César Aira, an Argentinian writer known for 'miniature novels' --a sort of intimate immensity, is phenomenal. [The Musical Brain and Other Stories, by César Aira and translated by Chris Andrews is coming out in March from New Directions Press).  Here is an excerpt by Aira:

Immobility is art in the artist, while all the events treated in the artwork take place on the other side of the glass. Night comes to an end, so does day: there’s something awkward in the work in progress. The opposite twilights drop like tokens into slots of ice. The eyes of statues closing when they open and opening when they close. Peace in war. And yet there’s a movement that’s out of control, and all too real; it makes others anxious and provides the model for our own anxieties. Art figures it as Endless Revolving Growth, and it gives rise to libraries, theaters, museums and whole universes of fantasy. It may stop, but if it does, an enormous number of remnants are left. After a while, the remnants begin to revolve and breed. Multiplication multiplies itself ... But, as we know, there is only “the one life.”

In the contemplation of Cecil Taylor's life, the narrator considers this line between the artist and the art. I found this interview "being matter ignited" between Cecil Taylor and Chris Funkhouser (1994) published in a literary magazine, Hambone. Funkhouser interviews Taylor about his poetry.  This endless revolving growth is reflected in his interview. This is what Taylor said:

And what I mean by it is, after you do it enough, you make a commitment to the magic. Then the magic asserts itself in ways that you don't have to worry about, because it is incorruptible. That's the whole thing. Integrity must stand. If it stands, then you don't have to worry about other things. You do your work and then it comes. Because that is the truth. That is the beauty. That is the force. However, you just made me realize something. I am not conscious of form but yet you cannot not be conscious of it. Because you look at the page. And the page let's you know certain things. So, of course, one of the things that I'm thinking about is how the next part of this poem is going to be different in terms of its architecture. 

I mean, what are they doing, talking about form? I mean, you look at the rivers and the mountains. The forests that they haven't destroyed yet. Look at these rocks. I could have showed you a rock in that place across the street.
 … 

Can you imagine all the spirits that are coming out of that rock? And we are, after all, just animals and we are a part of nature. We are a part of, and we are probably the quickest in terms of duration of life. We are the transitory poems. The mountains will be here, and perhaps we will be part of a mountain. You know there are certain West African tribes that believe that life is just a part of death, and when the chemical composition changes--some of them believe that they may become a mountain stream, star, whatever. I think that we definitely go back to the earth. Which is interesting. It's called "mother earth." The Portugese say, "Portentosa", that's Africa. And actually, the oldest bi-ped was found in the Sahara, she was a woman species. But then again that's not really strange when you understand that salps, fish--it is the women who give birth, and without male--and the women, as they mature, they become male and that's how they unite. This is not acceptable by a Christian--but they don't know anything. 

  … 

I'm not interested in separations. What I mean by that is what I'm discovering and becoming aware of every day now is that the similarity, although the nature of the material is different, the process of building the structure are very similar. This is a recognition of something that was gradual. And I rather delight in it now, because I know, thus far, how to practice. Practice is very important to me, musically. In other words, practice is-- forget that--the preparation, the spiritual--the preparation is to enter the realm of the spirits. And it is not practice because it is voluntary. It is. Practice has to do with discipline. 

What happens is that you don't even think about it, and you work on it. Once you've been touched by extraordinary beauty, they tell you what you're supposed to do. And of course everyone who has been touched comes up with their own methodological concept how to translate that into their own language.

The phrase "methodological concept" that Cecil Taylor mentions is one that he has fought long and hard to maintain. While in school, he recalled that many teachers were not only disinterested in his concept, but actively blocked it. Because of the endless obstacles, Taylor turned toward other arts to maintain his connection with the "magic." Even at the end of his career, Taylor protected his vision from tampering by recording studios. His writing was not published at first, and he said that it was not his concern, that he simply loved to write and left the results of it to another time or place. Aira in his story:

And what counts in literature is detail, atmosphere, and the right balance between the two. The exact detail, which makes things visible, and an evocative, overall atmosphere, without which the details would be a disjointed inventory. Atmosphere allows the author to work with forces freed of function, and with movements in a space that is independent of location, a space that finally abolishes the difference between the writer and the written: the great manifold tunnel in broad daylight ... Atmosphere is the three-dimensional condition of regionalism, and the medium of music. Music doesn’t interrupt time. On the contrary.  

Aira's technique reveals the forces that make his story. It's a biography that includes a meditation on art and its making and an unforgettable atmosphere, And of Cecil Taylor's failure after failure in the New York clubs, he wrote, "His continual changes of address protected him; they were the little genie’s suspended dwelling, and there he slept on a bed of chrysanthemums, under the shade of a droplet-laden spider web."

Prompt: Shoveling Snow with the Buddha and Billy Collins

If you are in a part of the world covered with snow, you may identify in that way with this month's model poem: "Shoveling Snow With Buddha" by Billy Collins. Our prompt for February is writing about someone who is well known but in your poem "out of place."

I like that in Collins' poem the Buddha is out of place for several reasons. First, he is doing something and we are used to seeing him seated and meditative. We also usually find him in a nice temperate setting, not in the snow. Of course, he is also out of place because he is out of time, dropped into our present from his past.

Besides the idea that he is helping shovel snow, he is also quite interested in hot chocolate and playing cards after the shoveling - two rewards for his work, not unlike a child's rewards for helping clear the snow.

He is more Buddha-like in his mindfulness of the work.

He has thrown himself into shoveling snow
as if it were the purpose of existence,
as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway

Collins is no real life Buddhist, though he is mindful, but the poem touches on several ideas in Buddhism. Like most of Collins' poems, the light, perhaps funny, surface of the poem is a way to slide into more serious points. In this poem, I am reminded about how often we forget that the journey is the destination, and how often we want to be anywhere but in the now.

This prompt asks you to place a well-known person (living or dead, real or fictional) somewhere out of place. There is the suggestion of something absurd in this, although Emily Dickinson at Starbucks is not as odd as if you made her a Victoria's Secret runway model, so the choice is yours when it comes to that aspect of the prompt.

Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015

22 Hours in the Big(ger) City

Sometimes, you just gotta hop on a bus to New York. 

I packed my fur-trimmed hat and gloves; luckily, my more practical-minded husband convinced me to wear flats. My reading on the ride up was the January Poetry (Tarfia Faizullah's "100 Bells" is amazing, as is the "Las Chavas" portfolio, in which Spencer Reese and Richard Blanco workshopped with young Honduran women). 

I managed to limit myself to a bag, laptop, six books to sell, two books to read from, and my purse. So, only somewhat camel-like. A small camel. 

A small, extremely cold camel. Journeying straight to to Fifth Avenue. 

The first time I came to New York City by myself, Poets & Writers put me up in the Library Hotel during my weeklong stay for the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. So I've always thought of the blocks around the New York Public Library as my home "neighborhood." Now, it's where I go to see my publisher.

Seeing this never fails to make me stop and take a deep breath. The sixth-floor lobby has a collage of forthcoming book covers, and Cate Marvin's Oracle jumped out at me--good to see poetry proudly displayed alongside the "big" (read: money-making) titles.

I conspired with Claire, my publicist over coffee, trying to figure out key angles for Count the Waves. I said hello to Jill and met her new assistant, Angie. Bumped into Steve and Nomi, who tirelessly work the AWP booth every year, and snagged copies of Sandra Lim's The Wilderness and Eavan Boland's The Woman Without a Country. These annual visits aren't absolutely necessary, but they're vital to me: I want to know the faces and voices behind all the emails.

After I'd run out of excuses to stand around gawking at books, I walked a few blocks down to Grand Central Station and grabbed a seat at the counter of the Oyster Bar.

My friend Jeff introduced me to the Oyster Bar in 2009. Time flies! I ordered a Bloody Mary shot, which is what we ordered that day. And a dozen oysters on the half shell for good measure, with crackers pocketed for later...breakfast, to be exact.

Malpeques from Prince Edward Island, Pemaquids from Maine, and "Gigacups" from Washington state, a name that makes me smile (second only to the "Nauti Pilgrims" from Massachusetts). Four of each: two with lemon and vinegar, two with cocktail sauce and a dash of Cholula. A Blue Point Toasted Lager to wash it all down, while I leafed through the January issue of The Sun; "Readers Write" as the best part, per usual. I dog-eared a portfolio of Coney Island photos to leave out for my uncle.

Though my uncle has had the same Central Park West studio my entire life, navigating uptown to his place always makes me anxious. I made sure all five keys to the building worked, dropped my bags, and got right back on the subway. 

I've been to the Bowery Poetry Club twice before. The first time was ten years ago, when I while staying at the White House hostel. I sipped a carrot juice and tried to summon the courage to sign up for the open mic. More recently, I stopped in to see Reverend Jen host an anti-slam, and it was as I remembered: dark and raucous. 

When the Club opened in 2002, Bob Holman threatened to be the first one to ever go broke running a bar in New York. He came pretty close. So they've given it a total makeover, more fitting to a place that now hosts burlesque five nights a week to pay the bills. That's not a terrible thing--I like the blue, and the art deco details. Hell, if you've gotta make something over, might as well really make it over.

reg e. gaines was the co-feature, and good lordy did he bring it. He got right up with the Duo, who were riffing jazz-funk accompaniment for all the readers, and broke out "Please Don't Take My Air Jordans." I knew his name was familiar, but it wasn't until later that I realized this is the guy who was nominated for a Tony for the book to "Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk." I had to follow him. No pressure.

Oh, and also no pressure, Bob Holman was there. At my table! (Or rather, I was at his table.) I can't capture this man's energy, but this is someone who has worked with the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, BPC, "United States of Poetry," now the Endangered Language Alliance, and so on. You cannot meet him and not be struck by his capacious mind, and his generous heart. Also, he's a big ol' flirt.

It was a lot to take in, especially since I was using this reading to try out a new combination of poems. I think I did okay. If they invite me back, I'll know I did okay. I followed the best rule I know for readings: share one less poem than you want to. It's like Coco Chanel's gospel about removing one accessory before you leave the house.

I love my uncle's apartment. Even if I didn't know he'd been there forever, I would be able to tell with just one look at this cactus. There is always a box of Triscuits on the shelf and Pinnacle vodka in the freezer, chilling alongside two cut-crystal glasses. He has a great eye for calming what could otherwise feel like a crammed-tight space.

Hard to believe that all this happened in less than a day. I don't know that I could ever live here. New York wears me down. The cold is just a little harsher than DC, the streets a little dirtier, the people a little gruffer. But it's a deeply exciting city in its new-ness and its old-ness, in its layers. And I leave as I always do--achy, and grateful. 

Seven Snazzy Online Journals

While print journals struggle to stay afloat, online journals proliferate. That gives us poets lots of choices, but also means we need to make responsible choices. Online journals are not all created equal and, quite frankly, some of them are dreadful. There’s no sense in submitting your lovely poems to a journal you wouldn’t be proud to have them in.

Print journal editors always advise us to see and read the journal before submitting. The same advice holds true for online journals. Really, there’s no excuse for not carefully checking out an online journal before submitting to it. You can do it quickly and for free.

In 2013 I posted a list of the attributes I looked for in an online journal. What I said there still applies. I also posted a list of seven online journals that were then new and which I admired.

Now in 2015 I continue to prefer a real website to a blog, though blog sites have greater flexibility these days. If using a blog site, the editor should get a real domain name so that the url doesn’t include “blogspot” or “wordpress.” I also don’t want to see a lot of sidebar material that’s typical of a blog. That can and should be removed.

I really don't want to see a black background with a light font. That design is initially striking, but is difficult to read.

I like the Guidelines to be up to date. It’s frustrating to check out a journal, see that they are open now for submissions, put together a submission, then go to the Submittable page and discover that submissions are, in fact, closed.

I particularly dislike the occasional requirement that each poem be submitted individually. What a nuisance.

Likewise, I don’t care to have to remove my name and address. If the editors want to read blind, they can just cover up the id information. Mostly, though, I think that editors should be able to read objectively with or without names.

I really appreciate Share Buttons. I made a big point of that in my previous post. Still, two years later, I’m surprised to see that many online journals aren’t using Share Buttons. They’re free! And they can dramatically increase the journal’s reach and readership. With the click of a button, poets and readers can send a link to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and elsewhere. I can’t imagine any sensible reason why a journal wouldn’t add them to each page of the journal.

Lastly, I like journals that maintain a presence on Facebook and Twitter. This should be regarded as free advertising space. Social media allows the editor to promote the journal, the poets, and the poems.


I’ve recently perused some newish online journals—or new to me—and am going to share seven of the ones that I find appealing, both for their aesthetics and their poetry.


Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing
Fiction, poetry, non-fiction, art
beautifully designed Table of Contents page
Share buttons
2x

Construction Lit Magazine
Poetry, fiction, interviews, social/political commentary, essays on architecture
beautifully designed journal
submission is via email
Share buttons
4x

Cumberland River Review
artwork and poetry, fiction, essays
reads Sept thru April
No Share buttons
4x

The Ilanot Review
would like to see a better url (without “wordpress” in it)
but they do remove the usual blog sidebars
issues are themed
Share buttons
2x

Menacing Hedge
poetry, fiction, interviews, reviews
No Share buttons
4x

Radar Poetry
poetry paired with artwork
interviews
audios
blind submissions
No Share buttons
4x

Utter Magazine
poetry, fiction, non-fiction, interviews
No share buttons
1-2x

Love Poems for Valentine's Day

Need some poetic lines (or inspiration) for Valentine's Day?

Try some classic and contemporary love poems from Poets.org.

From "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace...

to

"How to Love" by January Gill O’Neil

After stepping into the world again,
there is that question of how to love,
how to bundle yourself against the frosted morning—
the crunch of icy grass underfoot, the scrape
of cold wipers along the windshield—
and convert time into distance...

"Breathing You In" by David Gregory

From up here it looked

as if the harbour’s lungs inhaled

the fog in through the headlands;

light as breathing, concrete coloured,

it set in for the day, giving us each a
bubble vision

containing what little we know,

and out beyond the garden’s edge;

all life arrested.



There was a fog of the familiar

such that I could not see

all of the changes underway

between you and me.



But

The Practice of Attention

My work as a writer is to pay attention .... to what is beside, inside, beyond .... inside an image, an object, or a place. I want to capture what wells up at different times as joy or as grief or as both.  "No ideas except in things," said William Carlos Williams.

Artistic practice helps sharpen the skills of observation. But it is through observation and practice that something else emerges. An artist must find someway to leave behind the self, and I think this is done by the act of deep attention. "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity," said Simone Weil.

"The worst thing you can think about when you're working is yourself," said artist Agnes Martin. She believed it was best to achieve an emptiness and to avoid "ideas."  She also said, "My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind."

Like a Butterfly by Jennifer Compton