Cultivating Space in 2017

Our apartment has gotten messy over this past year. 

The mess is for all the right reasons. The cat's perching corner is crowded with holiday cards from our friends and family. My husband has gotten music and more music. I've gotten books and more books. For the first time, I have teaching files--notes, lecture, handouts--of substance and value. Instead of slim little volumes of poetry, I keep ordering big fat anthologies of essays. The stovetop is coated in a sheen of olive-oil grease, because we cook more days than not. I've learned to cook salmon on this stove. I've made many soups from scratch (and a few from Soupergirl). One of my Tampa colleagues came through town and we had a three-course meal, seated at my grandmother's newly inherited dining table, drinking bourbon late into the night. My grandfather's eye chart, from his days as a naval doctor, is framed and hung on the wall. I've hosted poets for workshop here. My book club meets here. The cat has torn the couch's every edge to shreds, which seems to give her all measures of joy. We have a tray of delicate shells out, harvested from the beaches of Sanibel Island in November and then Kauai in December. 

We always have a vase of fresh flowers by the kitchen sink. We have an air plant named Sangria that lives, persistently and in flagrant defiance of our travels. My in-laws sent us a bowl, which joins the collection of other ceramics in shades of moss and mint and dusk. My husband got two new jackets. I got a hat. We both bought shoes. 

We get the Sunday New York Times and the New Yorker and New York and Oxford American and Gluten-Free and More and Washingtonian and Poetry and American Poetry Review and another handful of literary journals, and we hesitate to send any of it out the door unread. Most of the time, we really do read most of it....eventually. (If you want a reminder of what I'll be doing New Year's Day, here it is.)



In other words, this is a mess of luxury, and I am grateful for that. But gosh, it's a mess. So I've bought ten new hangers--sturdy wooden ones--as an incentive to tackle these closets, and I'm going to dig out my battered copy of Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure from under the bed. I actually used to visit the "Apartment Therapy" website daily, when I had a desk job. We even lived in a building, The Ontario, that has been featured in several (check out our onetime neighbor Scott's place). But eventually the emphasis on "cures" that seemed premised on a large budget and specifically, home ownership--the bold paint colors, the built-in shelves, the wall-anchored lighting--made visits more depressing than inspiring. The toughest thing about city life, for all if its rewards an day particular love of being in Southwest, is wondering if I'll have to give up ever having that room of one's own that all writers (and yes, perhaps particularly, women writers) crave. The last time I undertook this kind of measured, serious consideration of getting an apartment in order, we moved only three months later. So part of moving forward is valuing the process, and not fixating on the results as permanent or even long-lasting.

I celebrate clutter because I come from a family that loves knickknacks, collections, souvenirs. We still trade stocking shipped to overflowing each Christmas. We use items as a way of safeguarding memory and showing consideration for one another. My mother's pantry still has a stockpile of Sandra-friendly foods, free of my allergens, that she always keep on hand in duplicate in case they were ever discontinued. 

Yet I celebrate spaces that are bared, minimal, cleared. I crave them. Having every available space stuffed to the gills--even when a room is quirky, cleverly decorated, squared away neatly--makes me sad in some way I can't fully articulate. I'll try: I believe that unless your household showcases at least some empty spaces, you're not showing the universe that there is an room for new things to come into your life. An empty bowl or shelf is not a barren space so much as waiting opportunity. 

2016 was not a year of questions, not answers; what answers we did receive were, as a larger culture, pretty hard to absorb. I'm not prioritizing the decluttering of a home as a bulwark to avoid the much tougher challenges of supporting my communities, advocating for those who face oppression from even our very own government, and pushing for change. But I'm saying that we all need to tend our gardens, if we want the crops to thrive. Sometimes that means hunkering down in the soil (or in our case, the jute dust and cat hair) and getting to work. There's no way around it. 

But with that work, I create space. Into that space, I keep writing. See you in 2017.

Taak mein dushmaan bhi thay aur pusht per ahbaab bhi

Abhi to raakh howaye hai tere firaak mein hum

Acha howa gaya waqt wapis nahi aataa

Ab to awaaz bhi doo gay to nahi aayein gay

Samajh Nahi Aata Teri Zaat Ka Pehloo

Who jis ghomand se bichra gila to iss ka hai

Dast-e-Sehra mein bhatakti rooh meri

Aik teri baraabari k liye

Main tere milne ko mohjaza keh raha tha

Jism Ki Darraron Se Rooh Nazar Anaye Lagi

Mere ilfaaz ko itni shidaad se naa parhaa karo

Abhi too mousam bohat khuskh hai barish hoo to sochein gaye

Meri sinaakht mein shakal baqi hai

Piyaas kehti hai ab samandar nichoora jaye

Zara si khaak sada baal o paar mein rakhte hain

Bhar Ayein Na Ankhain Tou Ek Baat Kahun

Har shaam ye sawal mohabbat se kiya mila

Kal tukare pare thay raah mein

Be hissi ki duniya mein doo sawaal mere bhi

Chehre ajnabi hoo jayein too koi baat nahi

Hoo ijazaat to maang loon rab se

Interview with Anya Krugovoy Silver

In the Fall semester of 2016, I asked Jessica Wilson, the administrator for the Georgia Writers Association, if she could recommend a handful of new poetry books. Her kind and generous response included I watched you disappear, by Anya Krugovoy Silver, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award (GAYA) in 2015. I soon began reading Silver’s 2016 publication, From Nothing and found myself suspended between the worlds of late 19^th and early 20^th century art and, at times, unfamiliar fairy tales. I suspect that what will keep me picking this book up again and again is that I’ve found a bit of my own true north in the poet’s reluctance to romanticize childhood in favor of celebrating the weft and twill of adulthood.

Speaking briefly of her journey, Dr.  Krugovoy Silver relates, “I was born in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania to a Russian/Ukrainian father and Swiss/German mother.  My father was a Russian professor and I learned my love of language from the multilingual and multicultural environment in which I was raised.  I grew up in a home that valued learning, creativity, and questions over material success. Literature and church were the two sacred poles of my childhood.  I started scribbling stories early, but as an adult, I’ve published three books of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, I Watched You Disappear, and From Nothing. I have always wanted to be a teacher, and currently teach English literature at Mercer University.  I live in downtown Macon with my husband, who also teaches at Mercer, and my son.  I have been living with inflammatory breast cancer since 2004.”

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: At its core, this collection of poems is a quiet rebellion against the myth that innocence alone is able to shoulder and shrug off malevolence. These poems take the stance that naiveté (projected or clung to) has no place in womanhood with a capital “W.” Was this a deliberate message? 

Anya Krugovoy Silver: It wasn’t a conscious theme as I wrote individual poems, but I noticed the focus on sensuality, and a refusal to conflate innocence with goodness, appearing and reappearing as I put the manuscript together. That’s especially true in a poem like “St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Lent.”  I have long resisted the Platonic binary between body and soul, and in that particular poem, I reject the neo-Platonist Paul’s assumption that sensual desire is sinful or opposed to holiness: “Not to live in the passions of the flesh--/how grim and arid the light we’re promised.” I like to call this collection of poems my “red book” because there are so many red images throughout it.  The color, for me, signifies vitality and energy, blood and life.  Although there are many poems about mortality in the book, I also wanted to make room for the fullness and lusciousness of lived, bodily experience.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Your newest collection, From Nothing, also includes several ekphrastic pieces based on art by early 20^th century painters such as Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Chagall, Klimt, and Toulouse-Lautrec which reflect this “bodily experience.” The paintings and corresponding poems explore our sensual natures.  How did these works of art come to serve as a springboard into the conversation about sensuality and what is your personal connection to this time period?

Anya Krugovoy Silver:  Expressionist painting and art from the turn of the last century in general happen to be among my favorite art.  I particularly like German painters like Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Köllwitz, Werefkin.  Each of these painters, and the others you mentioned, sought to paint the human body in a non-romanticized way.  With the possible exception of Klimt, they painted ordinary people with ordinary bodies, and sometimes erotically (Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec, especially).  Modersohn-Becker painted German farmers without turning them into symbols of “the land” or “good, honest people.”  She simply painted them as she saw them, including what she perceived to be their individual spirits.  I love Kollwitz’s famous quote that “The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.” One of my goals in this book was to write about the body—the ill body, the sexual body—honestly, without making the body either grotesque or precious.  I wanted to always respect the body’s, even the dead body’s, integrity and dignity.  The Expressionists whom I admire the most do that, so they were models to me, in a way. They painted human beings neither heroically or fastidiously.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: These same long strokes and subtle countenances that favor insight rather than minutiae are inherent in your own work. For example, several impressions of your father appear in “The Christmas Hat,” “Wake,” “In the Sanatorium,” and “Partings.”  He is, at once, a beloved parent seeking refuge from his demons, a man who cannot articulate his own suffering, and one who only found peace in death.  Do you feel that this is more kinship or craft in regard to the Expressionist painters?  

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Wow—that’s very insightful. I had never thought of a biographical reason for my love of expressionist art, but I think you’re right.  My father and I loved each other very much, and he was very proud of my poetry.  At the same time, in hindsight I would say that he experienced PTSD from the murder of his father during the Stalinist purges and from other experiences in the Soviet Union and in exile during and after the Second World War  He would begin to tell me stories and then explode in rage at the memories of what he’d seen.  When I look at expressionist art, and its focus on the turbulence of the inner life, and about how much can’t be articulated or understood by others, I definitely see my father’s face.  There is a loneliness in the figures of that art that I think resides in many people.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Fairy tales are woven through From Nothing. One might think that they are close relatives, but in this case the speakers of these poems seem to admonish the mythological ‘happily ever after’ while conveying childhood memories that do not mollify young skepticism. In fact, the speaker in Snow White cautions against romanticizing death and recognizes her own early folly. What inspired you to use fairy tales to promote the conversation addressing innocence in this collection?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Fairy tales were the first form of literature that I encountered in my life.  My parents had a big blue book of the Grimms’ fairy tales that they read to me as a child.  I’ve continued to be obsessed with fairy tales, as so many writers are, because beneath a seemingly obvious and predictable narrative, they can be analyzed in countless ways.  I believe that reading and thinking about fairy tales can help humans find their values and vocations, to reach into their own minds, and I read many of them allegorically.  For example, I read the story of Cinderella as a tale about how one can survive grief; the romance is incidental to the real purpose of the story. It’s true that fairy tales posit a generally benign universe; things almost always end up happily for the protagonists.  I want readers to question those happy endings.  Specifically, serious trauma can’t simply be overcome by meeting a prince with a castle.  Pain stays in one’s memory, in some form or another, forever. 

I was consciously writing against the dominant cultural mood that one should “get over” grief and “move on” from pain.  I can’t stand that superficial notion of healing, and it’s often used to bully people who have gone through cancer or some other kind of violence.  As someone who has lived with cancer, I reject pink ribbon “survivor” culture.  My fairy tale poems, like “Nettle Shirts,” “Maid Maleen” and “Snow White” each argues that the concept of “getting past” cancer is absurd and puts a huge burden on a sick person.  I think that idea could be applied to anyone who has suffered abuse, assault, or violence.

And finally, I see in some popular culture, especially music and social media, a glorification of dying “young and beautiful.”  That’s always prettier in songs than in real life.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Is your answer to a more genuine healing process found in the poem, “Four Prayers for Forgiveness”? Because it is here that the origins of wounds are pursued while shifting perspectives still allow pain its rightful place.

Anya Krugovoy Silver: “Four Prayers for Forgiveness” grew out of my Sufi meditation classes. I’m trying to forgive a lot in the poem:  cancer, my body, myself, God.  For me, life with chronic illness is best lived when one is able to find peace and joy in the present.  I realize that’s a cliché, and easier said than done, but for me, happiness is an active practice and choice.  It’s definitely not the emotion that comes most easily in the face of suffering; happiness is difficult.  So the forgiveness that I describe in the poem is a forgiveness of my cancer cells, which are only doing what they’re biologically programmed to do, and a forgiveness of my body for endangering me.  I attempt to look beyond illness, and I refuse to let cancer define my life.  I choose to be fully alive. The last lines “I am absorbed like a drop of water/into a bottle of perfume without a bottom./I open my eyes and all is golden” express how I want to live completely immersed in life.  That’s also one reason that I included several love poems in the book.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Before we close, I’d like to discuss the book’s title poem, “from nothing” which is preceded by the lines, “I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” from Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.” 

FROM NOTHING

                                    Again and again, from nothingness I’m born.

                                    Each death I witness makes me more my own.

                                                I imagine each excess line of mine erased,

                                                each muscle shredded, each bone sheared.

                                                   One day, my spine’s long spar will snap,

                                    ribs tumbling loose; my face will droop and drop.

                                    Then I’ll be re-begot – the air will shimmer

                                    and my molecules will vault, emerging free.

                                    From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.

The poem itself is absolutely void of sentiment or affect, thus setting the tone for the rest of the collection, while the slant rhyme and final true rhyme imply a belief in a sense of order. How has your own belief in “the order of things” transformed since your cancer diagnosis, and is this poem most reflective of that sense?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: When one’s life feels out of control because of illness or trauma, it’s helpful, in a therapeutic sense, to wrest order from circumstance.  Some people do that through religion; others conceptualize their lives as journeys, with illness as part of the meaning and self-actualization of their time on earth.  In my case, poetry enables me to take a chaotic experience and fix it on the page, to give it line lengths, images, and sounds and to do what I want with it.  I reestablish a sense of control by giving experiences the meaning that I want them to have, no matter how inchoate that meaning is. 

In “From Nothing,” and in my poetry in general, I am more and more drawn to internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and sound effects such as assonance and consonance, to emphasize a sense of order.  For example, I used the slant rhyme of “snap and drop” and the alliteration of “droop and drop” consciously.  I like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s assertion that “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines/And keep him there.” Ultimately, if there is any underlying order in the world, I don’t think that human beings are privy to it.  I discern no order whatsoever in the deaths of my friends, or in the daily tragedies and disasters of the world.  All humans can do is create our own individual structures with which to deal with the unknown.  That’s why poetry and art will always be essential to the experience of being human.

Anya Silver has published three books of poetry with the Louisiana State University Press.  She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2016 (Scribner) and The Turning Aside:  The Kingdom Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Poiema Poetry).  Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s column American Life in Poetry, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and as an Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.  She is currently completing her fourth poetry manuscript.  She has taught for eighteen years at Mercer University.  She is also a metastatic breast cancer thriver.

 

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.  She received her MFA in Creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.

A Poet Named Paterson from Paterson

Jim Jarmusch’s new film is Paterson. which opened this week in the U.S. but received good reviews last May at the Cannes film festival.

Director Jarmusch came to New York in the 1970s and wanted to be a poet. He was diverted by music and filmmaking, but poetry has not left him. In his film Only Lovers Left Alive, one character is Christopher Marlowe, and in Dead Man one is William Blake.

"Well, when I became a teenager I started reading French symbolist poets — translated, of course. And I discovered Baudelaire — and, consequently, Rimbaud — and I started looking at American poets; Walt Whitman first. And then, when I escaped Akron, Ohio, where I was born, and eventually ended up in New York. I got to study in the New York school of poets and I got to study with Kenneth Koch, a great poet of the New York school and David Shapiro. Ron Padgett, who wrote the poems for our film and David Shapiro, who was my teacher, they both edited a book called the Anthology of New York Poets in 1970. I didn’t discover it until the mid-1970s, but it was kind of a bible for me. "

But in his newest film, we follow a guy called Paterson was born and still lives in Paterson, New Jersey. He drives the #23 bus which has his name on its side.

Among other things, Paterson, New Jersey is a poetry city. This "Silk City" was known for that elegant fabric during the latter half of the 19th century. It was and still is an immigrant city. It has a large Hispanic population and many immigrants from the Arab and Muslim world. (It has the second-largest Muslim population in the United States.)

The Great Falls

You may know that the Lou Costello half of the comedy team Abbott and Costello grew up there. You may know the Great Falls of the Passaic River, now a National Park.

Paterson is also the subject of William Carlos Williams' epic poem Paterson. The city shows up in the poetry of another native son, Allen Ginsberg.

In Allen's friend's novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac's protagonist Sal Paradise lives with his aunt in Paterson. (Kerouac's own hometown was another mill town with a waterfall, Lowell, Massachusetts. New Jersey's Junot Diaz uses Paterson. It is the setting of John Updike's novels In the Beauty of the Lilies and is renamed "New Prospect" in his novel The Terrorist.

I worked at Passaic County Community College in Paterson for five years and for me the city is a poetry place. Besides Williams and Ginsberg, it breathes poetry today through the work of poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan on the page and in everyday life.

Maria sings of her hometown in all of her twenty-one books of poetry. She also helps make Paterson  the beating heart of poetry for the state as the Founder and Executive Director of the nationally known Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. She is the editor of the Paterson Literary Review which comes from the Center and sponsors the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prizes.

Ginsberg, Gillan and Williams

The Paterson in the new film, played by Adam Driver, seems to take William Carlos Williams' poem and its aesthetic of finding beauty in the everyday to heart. He awakens and talks to his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), drives his NJ Transit bus, walks his dog and writes his poems. The work of contemporary poet Ron Padgett inspires and is the prose poetry of the character Paterson.

LOVE POEM by Ron Padgett

We have plenty of matches in our house. We keep them on hand always. Currently our favorite brand is Ohio Blue Tip, though we used to prefer Diamond brand. That was before we discovered Ohio Blue Tip matches. They are excellently packaged, sturdy little boxes with dark and light blue and white labels with words lettered in the shape of a megaphone, as if to say even louder to the world, ''Here is the most beautiful match in the world, its one and a half inch soft pine stem capped by a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious and stubbornly ready to burst into flame, lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love, for the first time, and it was never really the same after that. All this will we give you.'' That is what you gave me, I become the cigarette and you the match, or I the match and you the cigarette, blazing with kisses that smoulder toward heaven.

This poetry finds meaning and beauty from simplicity and routine. The film too is described as  subdued and undramatic. It may be an antidote to the superhero, violent, explosions of most films today. It may be just too simple and quiet for today's audience.

As we follow Paterson for a week, small changes in that routine seem large. Paterson's wife is also an artist but her creativity has no pattern. One day she is learning to play an instrument, or redecorating the house, designing clothing, or baking cupcakes. She builds. He strips things down to essentials.

Paterson seems quiet and gentle, but this veteran in one scene disarms an armed man. In a quiet world, small sounds seems louder.




Even in the film's trailer and clips, I see Paterson's old warehouses and factories that I know pretty well. This was a birthplace city of American industry set in a place chosen by founding father Alexander Hamilton to harness the power of the Great Falls. We see unpublished but prolific poet Paterson at the Falls too, as Ginsberg, Williams, Gillan and many other poets have done.

He is not much of a talker, but he is a listener, and that is important work for a poet.

Terrapin Books: The Year in Review

  

First, I want to let you know that Terrapin Books will open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts on Sunday, January 1, and will remain open thru Tuesday, January 31. Please carefully read and follow the Guidelines. Also be sure to read our new FAQs; hopefully, any questions you might have will be answered there. If not, then use the Contact form or email address and ask your question. I will quickly respond. I look forward to reading some great submissions.

The press celebrated its first birthday in October. We are very proud of the books we’ve published in our first year. They include the following titles, each linked to its page at the website:

One Anthology:
The Doll Collection, including 89 poems by 88 poets such as Alice Friman, Kelly Cherry, Richard Garcia, and Jeffrey Harrison.


Six Poetry Books:
Confessions of a Captured Angel, by Neil Carpathios

The Persistence of Longing, by Lynne Knight

Cutting Room, by Jessica de Koninck

Bluewords Greening, by Christine Stewart-Nunez

The Canopy, by Patricia Clark

Route 66 and Its Sorrows (forthcoming very soon), by Carolyn Miller


Two Craft Books:
The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, revised edition, edited by Diane Lockward
The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop, edited by Diane Lockward


For more information about any of the above titles, please visit the website page.


We are thrilled by the attention and appreciation that titles from Terrapin Books have received thus far. We hate to brag, but can’t help ourselves. Here’s what we’re bragging about:

3 Verse Daily features
1 Poetry Daily feature
1 Missouri Review online feature
3 reviews in the Washington Independent Review of Books
1 poet featured at the South Dakota Poetry Festival
1 poet featured at the College English Association National Conference in Hilton Head, NC (March)
6 Pushcart Prize nominations (and hoping for a win)

And as if all that weren't enough, Terrapin Books will make its first appearance at AWP in February with a table in the Book Fair, a reading on Thursday evening featuring three of our poets with new books along with a group of poets from The Doll Collection, and 3 book signings. But more about that next time.

Democracy: A Poem by Leonard Cohen

In these dark days Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman found comfort and hope in the work of Leonard Cohen. Together they recorded this new version of “Democracy.” Amanda composed the piano and Neil recorded the lyrics. Their friends David Mack and Olga Nunes created this stunning video to go with the song. 

Yes, Virginia

Each Christmas I like to revisit the following essay from the The Sun. My grandmother read it to me many years ago. I've always remembered it. If you don't already know this piece, I hope you'll enjoy it. I also hope you'll have a Merry Christmas if that's what you're celebrating. And I hope you'll have a wonderful New Year. Thank you for being a Blogalicious reader.

Eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York's The Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial on September 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history's most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps.


Here's Virginia's letter:

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."


Here's the reply:

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

A Poetic Fruit Bowl

I didn't realize until I was making some recent changes to the Poets Online archive of writing prompts and poems that we have gone to the fruit bowl three times since 1998. In those 18 years, we have posted over 200 prompts and and almost 2000 poems.

I try not to repeat prompts, but fruit has appeared in three prompts. So, if you're in the mood for some writing that came from fruit or in the mood to bite into some fruitful poems, try these:

Fruit 1

Fruit 2

Fruit 3

Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, Literature and the Nobel Prize

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg - Photo by Elsa Dorfman

Bob Dylan didn't attend the ceremony to pick up his Nobel Prize for Literature. He sent Patti Smith who sang his song "‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall." 

And he sent an acceptance letter. If it doesn't bother you that he compares himself to William Shakespeare, then you might like his response. Lots of people were excited by him winning the award, but others were disappointed. Is he a poet or singer? Are they poems or songs?

Here's an excerpt of his explanation.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?" 

...But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years. 

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?" 

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

Read the entire speech at nobelprize.org

One River Many Stories

Congratulations to Tom Isbell and the cast at UMD Theater.  "One River" has been chosen to travel to the KCACTF Region 5 Festival this January. This is a unique and moving performance that celebrates the history and people of the St. Louis River in Minnesota. And yes there are a few poems of mine in the script.

Also--if you missed your chance to see "One River" this fall, or would like to see it again--there will be having an encore performance at the Marshall Performing Arts Center at UMD in mid January before they leave for the festival. Hope to see you there!  

Kayla Peters playing the character of Sheila Packa in the play. 

Thanking Margaret Maher on Emily's Birthday

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog – 
To tell one’s name – the livelong June – 
To an admiring Bog!

Taking a few minutes to remember Emily Dickinson, born on this day in 1830 and Margaret Maher.

Emily wrote nearly 2,000 poems, but she only published about 10 of these in her lifetime.

Her maid, Margaret Maher, was the only person who knew about the full output of her writing. Emily would spend hours in the kitchen with Margaret, baking breads and cakes, and scribbling poems on chocolate wrappers and the backs of shopping lists. Maher was literate and she even dabbled in poetry herself now and then; the two women wrote poems back and forth to each other. Some scholars believe that Maher’s Irish syntax made it into some of Dickinson’s work. In any case, Dickinson trusted Maher with her poems — literally. She stored them in the trunk that Maher had brought over from Ireland.

Dickinson left strict instructions for Maher to burn her poems after she died, but when the time came, Margaret, thankfully, couldn’t bring herself to do it.

She brought the poems to Lavinia, Emily’s sister. Lavinia had already burned most of her sister’s letters, but she agreed with Maher that the poems should be published.

Maher also supplied the only daguerreotype that we have of Emily Dickinson.

The family didn’t like the picture, but Maher kept it, and gave it to the publisher to include with the first edition of Dickinson’s poems.



To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.



 You can read some of those poems at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poems/45673

Source: http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20161210/

Holiday Gift Books for Poets

Since I posted these recommendations two years ago, both The Crafty Poet and Wingbeats have been joined by companion volumes, so this seems like a good time to update my recommendations.

Poets love nothing more than books. A book is always the right gift for a poet, and if it’s a poetry book, then it’s the perfect gift. We poets devour books of poems, but we also love craft books and prompt books. Why? Because we’re always honing our skills and always looking for new ideas for poems. So I have two pairs of books and a singleton to suggest for you and your poet pals.

Now some of you might wonder why I’d be recommending craft books other than my own. Here’s why: Most poets need and want multiple books on craft. We can’t get enough of them. My own shelves are loaded with craft books. Each one has something to offer that the others don’t. That’s certainly true of the ones I’m about to recommend. Together, they should keep you and your friends growing and writing for a long time. I have them arranged here in what seems to me a logical order, from craftiest to promptiest.

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1. The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop. Edited by Diane Lockward, Terrapin Books, 2016.

This sequel to the original The Crafty Poet picks up where the first book left off, but it also can stand by itself. It is a poetry tutorial ideal for use in the classroom, in workshops, or at home. It includes craft tips, model poems, prompts, and Q&As. Contributors include more than 100 of our finest poets, among them 16 current and former state poets laureate. You will find work by such poets as Tony Hoagland, Laura Kasischke, Alberto Rios, and Ellen Bass.

Like the original, The Crafty Poet II is organized into ten sections, including such topics as "Revising Your Process," "Entryways into Poems," "Expanding the Material," and "Revision."

All ten sections include three craft tips, each provided by an experienced, accomplished poet. Each of the thirty craft tips is followed by a Model poem and a Prompt based on the poem. Each model poem is used as a mentor. Each prompt is followed by two Sample poems which suggest the possibilities for the prompts and should provide for good discussion about what works and what doesn't. Each section includes a Poet on the Poem Q&A about the craft elements in one of the featured poet's poems. Each section then concludes with a Bonus Prompt, each of which provides a stimulus on those days when you just can't get your engine started.

Comments:
The biggest reason to read her books? They're fun. Poetry is fun. And the poems in The Crafty Poet II will leave you Wowed. They will jazz you up, compel you to write your own poems. There are many poems and prompts to get you started writing, using the same tools our finest poets use.—BB

The Crafty Poet II, like its predecessor, is full of a wide range of inspiring prompts, tips, and examples. In a large market of books on the craft of poetry, both Crafty Poet books stand out in their clarity, dynamic suggestions, and fun. And I really mean fun. One can see the joy both the contributors and the editor, Diane Lockward, have in poetry and that makes this book a vital source to have on one’s shelf, whether you are a new poet or a seasoned one.—MTY

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 2. The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, Revised Edition by Diane Lockward, Terrapin Books, 2016.

This book includes craft tips, model poems, and prompts based on the craft elements in the model poems. In addition, each of the ten sections includes a Q&A with one poet about the craft elements in a single poem. Each section ends with a short bonus prompt that can be used over and over again. The material is organized by craft concepts such as Diction, Imagery / Figurative Language, and Line / Stanza / Syntax. Fifty-six poets, including 13 former and current state poets laureate, contributed the craft tips, model poems, and Q&As. An additional 45 accomplished poets contributed sample poems written to the prompts, two for each prompt. The book is craft-oriented and is ideal for classroom, workshop, or individual use.

This Revised Edition includes a full Table of Contents and an Index.

Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers Magazine
In this resource for poets, Lockward offers practical advice and insights about establishing sound, voice, and syntax in poetry while also providing writing prompts and other poems as inspiration.

Comments:
I received your The Crafty Poet in the mail today and found that I was only a few pages in when I was compelled to go get a pen. Not sure why, since I just held it in my hand while I read, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with sitting down to a feast without a fork.—JE

Writers and teachers of writing: If you’re looking for a book that illuminates the nuances of poetic craft, then you’ll find The Crafty Poet to be a terrific teaching tool. It’s also a powerful text for individuals seeking to break through creative blocks. You’ll encounter model poems with accompanying prompts, interviews with poets, discussions of process and inspiration, and more.—CD 

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1. Wingbeats II: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, Dos Gatos Press, 2014.

This eagerly awaited follow-up to the original Wingbeats is an exciting collection from teaching poets. It includes 58 poets and 59 exercises. Whether you want a quick exercise to jump-start the words or multi-layered approaches that will take you deeper into poetry, Wingbeats II is for you.

The exercises include clear step-by-step instruction and numerous example poems, including work by Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, Cleopatra Mathis, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Patricia Smith, William Carlos Williams, and others. You will find exercises for collaborative writing, for bending narrative into new poetic shapes, for experimenting with persona, for writing nonlinear poems.

For those interested in traditional elements, Wingbeats II includes exercises on the sonnet, as well as approaches to meter, line breaks, syllabics, and more. Like its predecessor, Wingbeats II will be a standard in creative writing classes, a standard go-to in every poet's library.

Comments:
Whether pursuing the poetic muse on one's own or with a writing crew, Wingbeats II will be an accessible, surprisingly fun bag of tricks, toolbox, serious simulator for those who want to play. I'd suggest purchasing Wingbeats II, today.—MW

This book belongs on every writer's shelf! A wide variety of voices and approaches, with sample poems in every essay, this teaching collection has something for everyone.—anon

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2. Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, Dos Gatos Press, 2011.

This is a collection of sixty-one prompts contributed by fifty-eight poets, including Naomi Shihab Nye, Ellen Bass, and Oliver de la Paz. The book is organized into seven sections under such concepts as Springboards to Imagination, Exploring the Senses, and Structure and Form. The exercises range from quick and simple to involved and multi-layered. Prompts include such intriguing titles as "Metaphor: Popcorn, Popcorn, Leaping Loud," "Aping the Masters: Poems in Imitation," and "My Mother's Clothes." The book's focus is on prompts, but most of them are preceded by some discussion regarding purpose and benefits; you will find some craft material included in those discussions. The contributing poets were asked to follow a suggested format, so you will find clear step-by-step instructions and sample poems that were written to the exercises. Ideal for the classroom, workshop, or individual writing space.

Comments:
Wingbeats is a fabulous toolbox of innovative and practical ideas that literally every teacher of poetry workshops and at every level, from elementary poets-in-the-schools through the graduate MFA, will find indispensable. Covering a vast range from image to sound to form, the exercises are all concrete and clearly presented—a marvelous way to mine the imaginations and experiences of today’s most dynamic poets. Invaluable!—CS

No teacher, no aspiring poet should be without the gentle guidance of this book.—GR

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3. The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, Two Sylvias Press, 2013.

The 365 prompts in this collection were all written by the two authors, both of them well-published poets. The book evolved out of several years of their regular writing dates during which they challenged each other with prompts. The book is arranged like a calendar with one prompt for every day of the year, though the user is free to skip around. Quite a few of the prompts begin with a reference to some historical event that occurred on that day. While the book is strictly brief prompts, many of them ask you to employ craft elements. This book is suitable for a beginning poet or one with a lot of experience but in search of some new ideas. It can be used in a classroom to supplement assignments, in workshop groups, or at home by the poet working alone.

Recommended by The Huffington Post Books:
. . . you could use The Daily Poet year after year and track how your writing evolves. Or you can just crack open the book, pick one out at have at it. They're all equally thought provoking.

Comments:
The variety of prompts also encouraged creative exploration of topics I might not have considered fertile ground for poetry (candy cigarettes, anyone?). For me, this is the book’s greatest gift to its user: its power to dig deep inside the rabbit holes of your poet’s brain and/or subconscious and pull out work that might never have been pulled out without it.—MS

Whether you write to prompts on your own or you use them when you meet with writing groups or with a friend at a coffee shop, there is something here for everyone.—DV


If you need to select just one of these books, I hope I've given you enough of a description that you can choose. But what I really hope is that you will choose all five.

By the way, Scott Wiggerman, co-editor of both Wingbeats books, has work in both of my Crafty Poet books; I have a lesson and prompt in Wingbeats II; Martha Silano, co-editor of The Daily Poet, has work in the original Crafty Poet; and both Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, co-editors of The Daily Poet, have work in The Crafty Poet II.