Your Life Is a Poem

In the new episode of ON BEING, "Your Life Is a Poem," poet Naomi Shihab Nye talks about growing up in Ferguson, Missouri and on the road between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Her father was a refugee Palestinian journalist, and through her poetry, she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence, that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity.

Your life is a poem. This is how the poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees the world, and she teaches how that way of being and writing is possible. She’s engaged the real world power of words through her upbringing between her father’s Palestinian homeland and Ferguson, Missouri. Her mother was American. Her father was a refugee journalist, and she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence, that language must be a way out of cycles of revenge and animosity. A poem she wrote called “Kindness,” that was written in a moment of trauma, is carried around in the pockets and memories of readers around the world.

Listen to the podcast

The Doll Collection: Book Launch

 

On Sunday, July 17, a group of poets gathered at the West Caldwell Public Library to celebrate the publication of The Doll Collection, the first book published by my new press, Terrapin Books. The poets included Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Kim Bridgford, Gillian Cummings, 
Jessica de Koninck, Jane Ebihara, Adele Kenny, Mary Makofske, Charlotte Mandel, 
Susanna Rich, Hayden Saunier, Elaine Terranova, Marjorie Tesser, J. C Todd. Each of these poets has work in the book which she read at the event. (There are a number of guy poets in the book, but none could make the reading.)

We were joined by lots of dolls! Gillian Cummings and Jeanne Marie Beaumont both brought their vintage doll collections for display. In addition, a number of the poets brought the dolls that starred in their poems. These dolls made the event extra special and fun.

Following the reading, we had a reception with homemade cookies made by me and iced tea. Lots of good conversation.

 Dolls on Display

 Hayden Saunier demonstrates her flip doll

Vintage Dolls from the collection of Gillian Cummings

 Adele Kenny's original Ginny Doll

 From the collection of Jeanne Marie Beaumont

 Dolls belonging to the poets

Rumi on death

Death is a dialogue between me and myself.

No one else is interested in the discussion

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, known more popularly simply as Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet" and the "best selling poet" in the United States.

I first encountered Rumi at a Dodge Poetry Festival through the translations by Coleman Barks. I was reading some poems randomly in The Essential Rumi today and noticed that I kept landing upon poems about death.

That sounds pretty depressing, but the poems are not grim. Here are two I found.



I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!

This is how strange your fear of death
and emptiness is, and how perverse
the attachment to what you want.

No end, no end to the journey
no end, no end never.
How can the heart in love
ever stop opening.
If you love me,
you won’t just die once.
In every moment
you will die into me
to be reborn.

Into this new love, die.
Your way begins
on the other side
become the sky
take an axe to the prison wall,
escape
walk out like someone
suddenly born into color.
Do it now!

• Rumi Poetry
• Rumi Poems at Khamush
• A Tribute to Rumi

The Poetry of Pizza

I knew that my book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, had inspired the creation of many poems, but never imagined that it would somehow inspire the creation of a new pizza! And yet Caleb Michael Price, pizza chef, poet, and student of Melissa Studdard in Texas, has created a new pizza, the Crafty Poet Pizza. Check it out on the chalkboard at the shop where Michael crafts his pizzas along with fellow chef, Zach. The Crafty Pizza includes avocado, basil, roasted tomatoes, and more! Wow! Too bad they don't deliver to New Jersey. Thanks, Melissa, for being the kind of teacher who inspires her students in multiple ways. And thanks, Michael, for this tasty tribute to The Crafty Poet.

Now speaking of The Crafty Poet, I announced here a few months ago that Terrapin Books, my new poetry press, had issued a revised edition of the book. The content remains exactly the same as does the pagination, but there is now a complete Table of Contents, i.e., one that includes the titles of all the poems and the names of all the poets. Most importantly, there is a full Index at the back of the book. This is very useful when you are looking for a poet or a poem—and especially useful in the classroom. Also I changed the paper from cream to white for enhanced print clarity. And I moved the page numbers to the left and right for easy thumbing through pages.

And yet in spite of these upgrades, people persist in buying the original version of the book. Nice, but I really wish that anyone who wants to buy the book would kindly purchase the revised edition. Why? Well, because of the upgrades, because this edition is put out by Terrapin, and because royalty payments come directly to the press and help support it. So, please, direct your students, your fellow poets, and colleagues to the revised edition. Thanks!

Click Cover for Amazon

Christine Gelineau: An Interview given to Caroline LeBlanc

Christine Gelineau is the author of the book-length poetic sequence Appetite for the Divine(Editor’s Choice for the Robert McGovern Publication Prize)and Remorseless Loyalty (winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize), both from Ashland Poetry Press, and co-editor with Jack B. Bedell of the anthology French Connections: a Gathering of Franco-American Poets. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University.  Gelineau lives with her husband on a farm in upstate New York.

Dear Christine, 

Congratulations, and thank you so much for agreeing to this email interview on the publication of  Crave, your third full length book of poetry.

 I reference it briefly below, but just so our readers know at the beginning, this is in fact the second time I interview you. The first was in 2010 when you put me in touch with Franco-American poets around the country, and I interviewed you (and many of them) for a presentation in Montreal, which was eventually published as an essay in the International Journal of Canadian Studies in 2011. That first interview was by phone, and we were distant neighbors in Central New York at the time—you along the southern border, me close to the northern border. It’s nice to have the chance to “visit” again. OK, let’s get started with my questions, and your answers.  

1. Generally speaking, the poems have to do with the relationship of public and private worlds. In the first section, “Hard Evidence,” the poems seem to be more grounded in the public implications, while poems in the second section, “Crave” they are more grounded in private life, though both aspects are in most of the poems in the book. Would you agree with this, and why or why not? How did you decide to organize your manuscript in this way?

I like this question very much, especially the insight that a melding of the public and the private are the province of the poems. Unless a book springs from a particular concept, I think one reaches a certain number of poems and starts looking to see if there are any ways in which the poems speak to one another productively that might suggest a collection. The first time I went looking for that in this group of poems, my initial focus was on a kind of plain-spokenness in poems like Hard Evidence, Grace, Physical, What Men Do, etc. and the words “Seeing Things” came to mind as a book title. I could see I was immediately attaching to that title and that notion of what organized the poems so before I got too infatuated I googled Seeing Things to determine if it was "available." No doubt many will know that I quickly discovered Seamus Heaney had beat me to that title a good number of years ago. So back to the drawing board. I wrote some more, fiddled some more, and gradually I began to notice there were poems with a kind of stubborn insistence on something like optimism, or at least a desire and hunger for more that continued to propel us in a sensation of moving forward and I began to attach the word “crave” to that impulse. Maybe in part because I already had a poem called “Hard Evidence,” it next occurred to me that there were a number of other poems that looked at the many instances in which the world presents us with hard evidence that would seem to contradict that impulse to crave. From there it was easy to make the decision to group the “hard evidence” first, and allow the poems that “crave” to have the last word. Perhaps your sense of the public and the private in the poems suggests that much of what knocks us down emanates from the wider sphere while much of what sustains us is embedded in the private. I would have to think about that some more but I was interested to hear what qualities you saw the poems as sharing.

2. I know from FRENCH CONNECTIONS: A gathering of Franco-American Poets, and the interview you granted me when I was researching Franco-American poets, that we share a Franco-American heritage. And that your husband is Jewish, and you live on a horse farm. Would you talk about how any or all these facts influence the poems you write, and those you chose to include in Crave?

I do not think of my poems as a variant of memoir, nor do I try to occlude their grounding in aspects of my actual life. Family heritage is a fact and factor and thus is likely to pop up now and then. Poems like “Morning Prayers” and “Fill” have settings that reflect some small sliver of Judaism in America , and the poems I wrote about the two weeks I was able to spend in France in May of 2013 are included in CRAVE. My mother’s parents both immigrated from Ireland and the poems from the trip to Ireland are in the first book REMORSELESS LOYALTY. I am interested in cultural connections such as those but would hope that any claims those poems might seem to make about speaking for a group are very small and tentative claims, as that’s the most I would feel comfortable with claiming. In her poem "Sources" in the book YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE, Adrienne Rich considers the cultural narrative of "special destiny," a concept appropriated by the Pilgrims from Jewish tradition, and then folded into the narrative of America. I like that poem's interrogation of how "special destiny" can at once be "a thought often peculiar to those / who possess privilege" but simultaneously "the faith / of those despised and endangered // that they are not merely the sum/ of damages done to them." A heritage cannot avoid being an inclusion and exclusion, a comfort that we have to be alert to when it develops the potential to be a cudgel. When your identity enfolds "American," "French Canadian," "Irish," and through your husband and children, "Jewish," then like Rich one occupies a position of privilege and dispossession simultaneously. Finding the language to speak about racial and cultural identity is surely one of the vital conversations of our times.

As to the horse farm, the opportunity to have lived a life among other-than-human animals of the size and power of horses seems to me the very best grounding I could ever have had for poetry. Riding is a physical language you speak with the whole of your body to another species. Rhythm is embodied, incorporated. The skilled rider, like the poet with the emerging poem, does not control the horse; rather she learns to control herself in order to allow the horse the opportunity to express itself. What could be better training for a poet?

3. The “Crave” section especially contains what I would call life course poems: from pregnancy with your children to your long term marriage to the birth of grandchildren. (At least I’m assuming you are writing about your life and not the anonymous life of “the speaker”). When were the various poems written and what was you rationale for including them in the same manuscript?

The poems in CRAVE have all been written since APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE, my previous book, was written. APPETITE came out in 2010. So these are the poems written since then that seemed to me (and happily apparently also to my editor / publisher) to work as a collection.

4. Would you tell us the story of poem, “Sockanosset,” and how you won the Pushcart Prize for that poem in 2013?

I have Patricia Smith to thank for Sockanosset. She was teaching a workshop at Binghamton University and suggested an exercise she had “borrowed” from someone else (whose name, I’m afraid, I cannot recall). The idea was to hand draw a map of your childhood neighborhood and see if any ideas for a poem leaked into the process. I had long wanted to write about this memory of us neighborhood kids pedaling our bikes around the neighborhood looking for clues that might lead to the boys who had recently escaped from the nearby reform school. I think what allowed the poem to move forward that time was the realization that the poem’s true point of view was that of the escaped boys. Maria Mazziotti Gillan published the poem in Paterson Literary Review and then later that year Lee Upton kindly put my name in as a nomination for the Pushcart Prize, which allowed me to submit three pieces I had had published that year for consideration for the prize. The Pushcart had two guest editors and I have to believe it was Maxine Kumin who pulled my poem out of the slush pile of nominations and that it was her notice of it that allowed the poem ultimately to be chosen for the edition. Thanks to Bill Henderson, of course, for his indefatigable work producing Pushcart all these years, including that one, but then thanks to the posse of women who inspired, supported, and championed the poem along the route to that selection.

5. I also appreciate how grounded in the rural life and the body many of the poems are. They are not anti-intellectual, but neither are they steeped in intellectualism. Would you comment on whether you think there is an academic/industry bias toward urban intellectualism and a mind-body split in much literature today?

Now this question I love. As you can see from my comment on the horses earlier, I would identify this inclusion/melding/prioritizing of mind and body to be a core value to my aesthetic. To my understanding of poetry, it is crucial to have the body, not only the mind, in the poem--in its content, in its rhythms, in a kinetic, physical sense of the poem as a made thing. A significant percentage of the poetry published in our culture that gets the most attention is certainly published by and produced by poets with an urban sensibility. Is there really any debate over the idea that New York City, and to a lesser extent a number of other urban centers, have the most impact on what content, modes, and names are considered most significant in contemporary American poetry? Just because you live in an urban area doesn't mean you have to champion only work with an urban perspective to it but don’t we all find perspectives closer to our own easier to enter? And haven’t those of us involved in poetry all encountered some degree of dismissal of “nature poems”? Inevitably we are all “rural,” all dependent upon the health and well-being of this one and only planet but the utter dependence of urban centers on the rural areas that support them can grow invisible to city dwellers.  The impact of that on poetry promotion is, of course, not the most important of its impacts but we poets do think about it.  I have a panel proposal in right now to AWP for the 2017 conference in Washington, DC on the topic of The Nature of the Natural in Poetry Today: Postpastoral, Antipastoral, and Beyond. I hope to have the opportunity to have more to say (and hear about) the topic then.

6. What is your favorite poem in the book, and why?

I don't usually think in those terms. I like “Anniversary in Paris” because lyricism is my first love and because "happy" poems are so challenging to write, but each of the poems has some moment or aspect I favor. I'd be more interested to know what is your favorite and why?

7. What’s next on your writing agenda?

I also love the essay form and I've been working on shaping up a book-length collection of my essays. Any potential poetry projects are too young and tender to be talked about until they've had a chance to more fully develop. But thanks for asking.

Thanks again, Christine.

Powerful Desires: A Review of Christine Gelineau’s CRAVE, by Caroline LeBlanc

                                                                      

[T]ime is a horse, a runaway

none of us can dismount and so

the need is to find a way to enjoy the wind

that snatches handfuls of your hair as you race,

the horse’s mane, your man, the rhythm

and energy of the haunches powering under you,

their easy determination

to go on running.

from CRAVE by Christine Gelineau. NYQ Books, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-63045-020-5        buy CRAVE on Amazon

The front cover of Crave pictures the neck and head of a white horse on a white background.  It looks away from us, toward the edge of the page. Toward what it craves?  Any of you who know horse energy, as well as those who don’t, will find satisfaction for your poetic cravings between the book’s covers. 

Crave is a meaty, earthy book of narrative and lyric poems rooted in Christine Gelineu’s rural life on a horse farm. Many poems also concern matters beyond the farm. The book is divided into two sections: “Hard Evidence” consists of fifteen poems that recount what destructive cravings can cost the human soul and society, and “Crave” consists of 31 poems about cravings that push life along, through good times and bad, but ever forward. The half-dozen poems that have to do with horses left me feeling like the book is about horses, for that kind of energy drives the poems in this book about the powerful rhythms that fuel life in our earthly bodies. Also, in line with poetic trends, there are several Ekphrastic and other form poems in a text of predominantly free verse poems.

The poems in the first section, “Hard Evidence,” recount public and private events, both local and international.  They touch on the personal cost of ignorance, betrayal, criminal behavior, and just plain difficult circumstances.  They are heavy reading, and could discourage one from reading on, but that would be a mistake, so please, keep turning the pages.  

“What Men Do” is one of Gelineau’s horse poems from this first section. It combines a personal story about an injured farm cat that had to be put down with an account of World War I Australian soldiers who brought their horses to war, but were not allowed to bring them home for fear of carrying new diseases back to their island country.  The personal event: “While he aims, hesitates, she/waits. He shoots,/then again to be sure.//Apologists call it “the final kindness.”/What men do when they live up/to what is owed.”  These sentiments will be familiar to anyone who has had to have a cat euthanized, particularly if one is acquainted with rural and farm life.  The Australian story is much less common, and I was glad of the preparation the cat story provided.

                That final night together,

               the hardened young soldiers

                gathered their horses for a race meet,

                to drink in one last time that joy

                in what their bodies could do.

                Race over, they swiped and curried

                the sweated necks, sleek flanks,

                disentangled forelocks,

                fed their darlings tobacco and fruits

                then each laid his pistol

                in the hollow above his horse’s eye

                and squeezed.

Some of us spend time pondering the cost of war—in money, lives taken and damaged.  How many of us ponder the cost of war to animals—horses, dogs, dolphins we recruit, or animals we simply encounter in the execution of war in theater. And to the animal soul of people attached to these creatures.

The poems in Part 2, “Crave” I would characterize as life cycle love poems:  love of the physical life, the land and the world, love in birth and death, animal love, family and maternal love, love of art, married love, romantic love, and sexual passion ( of corn, among other things). For me a number of poems, some mentioned below, also hint at tribute to great poets who have gone before.

“Orbit,” the first poem in the section is an ars poetica prose poem that puts me in the mind of Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman.”  It is a sassy, musical dance with “verbs hot enough to broil a sausage on, even cooled it is too saucy for the gander.”  It joyously tugs and grinds the reader out of the somberness of the first section of the book.

“Felt like a Thought” is about the wonders of the fall season in the Northeastern United States. The references to “the tumult of geese chevrons/clamorously rowing the skies overhead,” provide an almost iconic image of the region referenced by so many poets, including Mary Oliver. 

“Anniversary in Paris,” about the love of the long married, references the trend of young lover to place a padlock on le Pont de l’Archevêché.  “[T]hey kiss and toss the key to the Seine./Forty years into our marriage we know better than to think of love/as a lock.”

“Curing” tells the story of life in a family house from the time of its building, to the raising and sending off of children and generations of horses. “These days I stand in the past even when I am/most present, most in the present, my memories the element/through which I experience experience. Is this richness?//or rigidity?”  A phenomenon and question well known to those of a certain age.

The first two lines of “Grace,” a poem about a dying friend are: “If you’re lucky, at some point/ordinary life becomes itself: something to inhabit, rather than/something to pass through. “ A better description of an embodied life is hard to find.

Let’s close with some lines from two of my favorite poems: “Love Among the Long-married” and “To-Do List for the Final Decades,” both of which evoke the joys of enduring marital love.  First from “Love Among the Long-married:”

                For their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary,

                the long-married plant a tree.

                Yes, they are exactly

                that stubborn.

                ***

                The long-married tell one another:

                Our memories are not what they used to be

                but in memory

                we are who we used to be:

                 your touch

                your touch alone

                and we slip slick

                into our 26 year-old bodies

                young  electric  and sleek

                no one else

                no one else

                can offer that

Next, some wonderful suggestions from the “To Do List for the Final Decades:”

                Fall in love in a foreign language.

                Compose a navigation song to chart your losses,

                And the way back.

                Learn to skate on the skin, the inexpressibly thin

                membrane where water meets air:

                master the skill of carving a caress

                into that tensile surface, a calligraphy

                as tender as hope.

And to finish, these lines that put me in mind of Leonard Cohen lyrics:

                Accommodate your own prodigal idealism: kill

                the fatted calf for truth; strike

                the timbrel, sing in the purpled

                shadows of dusk now, sing.

                Wave farewell with the torn

                scarf of your heart.

                Welcome into yourself the evening’s holy silence.

I can’t think of a better way to end in that song, or this review.

Caroline LeBlanc, former Army Nurse and civilian nurse psychotherapist, has had her essays and award winning poetry published in the US and abroad.  In 2010, Oiseau Press published Smokey Ink and a Touch of Honeysuckle, her chapbook about life as an Army wife and mother, and the descendent of 17^thCentury Acadian/French Canadian settlers in North America. As past Writer in Residence at the National Military Family Museum, she wrote the script for the museum’s traveling exhibit, Sacrifice & Service; co-produced and co-created the script for Telling Albuquerque and 4 Voices stage performances; and facilitated Standing Down, a NM Humanities Council book discussion group for veterans and family members. With Mitra Bishop, Roshi, Mountain Gate Zen Center, New Mexico, she offers veterans and women military family members Day of Mindfulness Meditation & Writing Retreats.  She also serves as clinical staff for Mountain Gate Regaining Balance residential retreats for the same individuals.  Before leaving the Fort Drum, NY area, in 2012 she offered Writing For Your Lifeprograms to wounded warriors and military family members.  In 2011, Spalding University awarded her a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative writing.  Her art has won awards in New York and New Mexico.  She is a member of Albuquerque’s Rainbow Artists Collective, and a founding member of the Apronistas Collective of women artists who regularly mount community art shows highlighting women’s rights and ecological issues.   

Book Launch for The Doll Collection

If you're in New Jersey on Sunday, July 17, please join us 

for this reading and book launch for The Doll Collection, 

the first anthology from Terrapin Books. 

The reading begins at 2:00 and is free of charge. 

The following poets will read their poems from the book:

Jeanne Marie Beaumont  Kim Bridgford   Gillian Cummings    Jessica de Koninck  
 Jane Ebihara   Adele Kenny   Mary Makofske   Charlotte Mandel   Susanna Rich  
Hayden Saunier  Elaine Terranova   Marjorie Tesser   J. C Todd


In addition to the reading, there will be a display of vintage dolls provided by poets 

Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Gillian Cummings from their personal collections.



Reception follows the reading. 
Everyone is invited to stay for cookies, tea, and conversation.

                      

Roads Not Taken

Two Roads - CC via geograph.org.uk

One poem that you can safely assume that an American student has encountered is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It is in many anthologies used in schools and has become a phrase used by people who may not even know the source. It's so much of a classic, that it's almost a cliché.

An article by Katherine Robinson on www.poetryfoundation.org goes into greater detail than your high school English teacher may have in discussing the poem.

Did you know that Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend? That friends was fellow poet Edward Thomas who took walks with Frost. Apparently, Thomas was quite indecisive about the path to take and sometimes expressed regrets later about the one not taken.

Frost wrote the poem in 1915 and told Thomas that after reading the poem at a college, he was surprised that the audience had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.”

From the poem's opening decision about choosing a road, to the conclusion that the choice has made all the difference, there is an odd and somewhat surprising word journey.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Initially, the speaker wishes he travel both roads, but admits that the one he took looked "just as fair" as the other and people using both roads had "worn them really about the same.”  Despite the usual interpretation of the poem, it's important to note that the two roads are more similar than not - "And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black."

This month's prompt is to consider roads not taken. Of course, roads come in many forms - not all looking like a road.

So, is this a classic poem that is prompting us to write about choices and decisions and regret?

Frost wrote this poem when Europe was deep into WWI and a year before America would enter the war. Frost sent the poem to his friend Edward Thomas, who, like many readers to follow, did not see it as a joke (about him) but as a serious meditation on decision-making. He may have even connected the poem with the war and America's entry into it. Shortly after receiving this poem in a letter, Thomas enlisted in the army and was killed in France two months later.

At the end of the poem, the speaker says he will "be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence."  Is that a sigh of content or regret?

The answer depends on how you view the final lines:

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Has the difference been a good one or is there the regret of the opening? The speaker really would like to have taken both roads, but knows "how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back."

And if both roads were both very similar, how much of a difference would there have been in his life if he had chosen the other?

There are certainly "roads" you did not take, but that may have been a good or bad decision. It may not have been been your choice. Or you may have make the choice casually or quite unaware that it would carry any significant consequences.

Submission Deadline: August 7, 2016

One River Many Stories

One River Many Stories was a community wide story-telling event for the Duluth and St Louis River region.  It was initiated by Paul Lundgren, John Hatcher and many others in the Journalism program at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and it included students, area poets and writers, journalists, photographers, artists, scientists and activists.  The One River Many Stories presented a series of events: an art show at the Duluth Art Institute featuring the photography of Ivy Vainio and area citizens and an interactive map, workshops for adults and kids, readings and a celebration.      

On April 27, 2016 creative writers came together to present their stories and poems at UWS. This was recorded by KUMD radio for future broadcast.   It's available to stream or to download the mp3 at http://www.wpr.org/shows/wpr-presents-one-river-many-stories

For more information about One River Many Stories, see http://onerivermn.com/

Thank you to Karen Sunderman and the camera crew at WDSE, John Hatcher, Jennifer Moore, and Judy Budreau and the many others involved in the project.   

The Poetic Process of Molly Peacock

Creative work develops in such interesting ways, in a combination of both freedom and constraint. In a Brief Guide to Oulipu on poets.org, the reader can consider ways to create literature using structural constraints:

Although poetry and mathematics often seem to be incompatible areas of study, the philosophy of OULIPO seeks to connect them. Founded in 1960 by French mathematician Francois de Lionnais and writer Raymond Queneau, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or Workshop of Potential Literature, investigates the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints. Lionnais and Quenuau believed in the profound potential of a poem produced within a framework or formula and that, if done in a playful posture, the outcomes could be endless.

Molly Peacock has spoken about the evolution of her book: Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions.  I find it fascinating to consider her project from its inception to the finished form.  In an interview by Laura Bast (https://maisonneuve.org/post/2015/01/22/mollypeacock/), Ms Peacock says:

A dear friend of mine, Phillis Levin, had given an assignment to her students to write a poem with an ambiguous pronoun, where you may not know who or what is behind this pronoun, and your reader certainly doesn’t. So I thought, I’m going to try this. When I started it, I was thinking about the idea that things only mean if they come into language. As a child I thought, “I have thoughts in my head. But I can’t put them into words.” I think that is the essence of poetry. A poem is about the things you don’t have words for.

In a blog post, Molly Peacock wrote

As a writer in my seventh decade, I’ve been shocked at the twists and turns my own creative life has taken. Alphabetique began as a book of poems, then transmogrified into twenty-six brief imaginary biographical tales of those shapes we call letters.

In another interview in Duende Literary Magazine, she says:

My poems reveal themselves both in an inchoate idea and in a design, or a form.  I seem to create a kind of mental playing ground before the poem can develop.  I didn’t know how “The Poet” would evolve, except that I had set myself the assignment of writing a prose poem for each letter of the alphabet, and for using as much alliteration as I could without destroying the sense of the story. “P” was for poet, but I didn’t want to convey that autobiographically. Instead, I wanted to make a statement about all of poetry, but to take the grandness of that enterprise and make it fun, too.  I thought of the first poems that influenced me as a girl:  poems by Basho, Buson, Issa and Shiki.  Their haiku on the page had always looked to me like lily pads on a pond. The point of view of a young man in a far-off time seized me.  He wore a kimono.  (I always write poems early in the morning, often in my kimono-like bathrobe.) Could I actually write both the story and the poems of this young man?  By the pond, and with a desire to include that delicious word “petrichor,” the poem was launched.

Book reviewer Steven W. Beattie writes:

Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and the other Oulipo writers, united by what Daniel Levin Becker calls “strict technical constraints or elaborate architectural designs,” have had a largely unacknowledged effect on Canadian writing in the 21st century. Their influence is most apparent in the realm of poetry: the key Canadian Oulipo text is Christian Bök’s Eunoia, which won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök’s volume – a series of sections each employing only a single vowel – recalls Perec’s novel La Disparition, written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” 

The success of Bök’s experiment – Eunoia is one of the bestselling works of poetry this country has seen in the new millennium – has led to a proliferation of conceptual poetic works that employ Oulipo-like constraints, but this phenomenon has not really made inroads into prose. It is fitting, then, that Molly Peacock, a memoirist and author of the well-received 2010 non-fiction hybrid The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, is also a poet. Peacock’s latest work, the intriguing and beautifully produced Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions, while not as rigorously constrained as Bök, recalls the Oulipians in its premise and execution. 

As the title suggests, the book comprises 26 vignettes, each centred on a character named for a single letter in the alphabet.

While the Oulipo techniques might sound too artificial or esoteric, the work of Molly Peacock provides an example of its possibilities and pleasures.

To buy her books, visit her website: http://mollypeacock.org/

Conversations: When Is a Poem Finished?

Moore

People often cite the poet Paul Valéry as the source of the quote " A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned."  That is actually a paraphrase of Valéry by W. H. Auden from 1965. (See W. H. Auden: Collected Poems "Author's Forewords.") What Valéry originally wrote was less of a sound bite: "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations." But many poets can identify with the sentiments in either.

When do you let go of a poem and stop revising?

An article about Marianne Moore and her continual revision compares her to any contemporary poet who uses software like Word and "tacks changes" leaving digital footprints of where the poem has traveled.


Moore doesn't seem to have ever been satisfied that her poems were completed. Her poem “Poetry,” first appeared in 1919 and was about 30. In the published 1967 version it was down to 3 lines. She also changed titles - "A Graveyard” became “A Grave,” for example.

In the Internet age, we have lots changes made to things published online - from simple typos in a poem or a Facebook post, to Wikipedia entries (always being revised). Lots of revisionist history.

Google Docs tracks each edit to the page. But if you're well known and post a Tweet, then decide to delete it after you get some bad feedback, chances are the original has been captured in a screenshot by someone for posterity.

When is a poem finished for you?  Pre-digital, when I wrote all my poetry in longhand on paper, I saved all the drafts which included revisions and proofreading changes. When I typed the poem, I considered it finished. As a hunt-and-peck typist, retyping something was an effort and I avoided it. When an electric typewriter with a correction tool appeared, and then with the first word processors, it was so much easier that I increased my revisions.

For me, most of my poems are finished when they are published. I can only think of two times when I changed a poem after it appeared in a publication. Perhaps, if I ever make it to the point where I need to put together that "Selected Poems" collection, that will change.

That article views Moore with the ways she changed her work as "more of a digital-age artist than any of her contemporaries. Her poems were as malleable as something written online."

I actually know several very well known poets who still avoid the computer, email and word processing. Two of them have "typists" who interpret their handwriting and print copies which they edit with a pencil and give back for retyping. There may be some thoughtful advantages to that process, and some of you might do the same thing even though you are your own typist.

As another of our online "Conversations," let us know in a comment here about your revision process and particularly how you know when a poem is finished. Are you easy about letting go, or do you revise until as long as you can, like Marianne Moore?

Reading at the Jackson Inn in DE

If you're in Delaware this Saturday, please join us!

I'll be reading from my new book, 

The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement

Allusions to 'The Wasteland'

As an undergrad, I was quite enamored by the poetry of T.S. Eliot. It started with Prufrock and "The Wasteland" and led me to The Four Quartets.  I was in love with all the allusions to other poems, mythology etc. It impressed me. It was a puzzle.

I'm not as enamored by poetry that is a puzzle as I used to be, but I still admire Eliot's poetry.

There continue to be allusions to Eliot in pop culture, especially in music - Genesis, Manic Street Preachers, Arcade Fire and Bob Dylan are all artists that have used Eliot's poetry in their lyrics.

Bob Dylan references "The Waste Land" with the line “in the wasteland of your mind” from “When The Night Comes Falling from the Sky” and in his “Desolation Row” he has “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower” - probably over the edits Pound made to the poem.

Via Open Culture, I found a clip of Dylan riffing on "The Waste Land" on his Theme Time Radio Hour show that he did about ten years ago.




After listening to that, you might to hear the real thing read by Tom himself. He's not a great reader, but he does pronounce words and break lines as he intended them to be.





When I read "The Wasteland" in college I read it with a woman classmate that I was also enamored with, and one of things we shared was poetry. She was also into astrology and she really liked this section of the poem.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.