Poetry Festival in Paterson, NJ

I'm looking forward to this coming weekend which is the "Celebrating the Poetic Legacy of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg Literary Festival and Conference." The day-long event will be held at the Poetry Center of Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ.

I'm going to be on the panel, "The Narrative Tradition in Poetry," organized and moderated by Adele Kenny. I'll be joined by four other NJ poets, all of whom I adore and look forward to chatting with. Get up early and come join us! Then spend the day attending some of the other panels.

The schedule can be found HERE.

There will be many panels held throughout the event in three different time slots. Two fantastic poets headline the festival: Patricia Smith and Li-Young Lee. Each will give a morning workshop. Then they'll read together at 1:00 PM. Don't miss this reading!

I hope to see you on Saturday.

Talking About "Good Bones"

As any poet who has experience this will tell you, having a poem catch on--to go viral, to be replicated and shared even among those who don't usually consider themselves to be readers of poetry--is a strange feeling. For Maggie Smith, it's fair to say that the effect has been tectonic in scale. 

Her poem, "Good Bones" (originally published in the journal Waxwing), has been shared on Twitter by numerous celebrities; translated into multiple languages; interpreted in music and dance; used as a plot device on the television show Madam Secretary; and recited by Meryl Streep in front of a crowd at New York's Lincoln Center. Public Radio International named it "the official poem of 2016," estimating it to have been read by a million people. Her poem was made into a limited edition broadside (seen left; you can purchase it here). Her forthcoming book, previously titled Weep Up, has been retitled Good Bones (cover art below; you'll be able to purchase it from Tupelo Press this September). 


I read the poem the day it was published, via an editor's Facebook link. Poets shared it, as poets do. But within the day, all kinds of people were sharing, tagged with comments mourning the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. (Another poem that resonated was "At Pegasus," by Terrance Hayes.) Sharing surged after British politician Jo Cox was killed, and again after America's presidential elections. Last night, as news spread about the bombing at pop star's concert in Manchester, "Good Bones" began making the rounds. The bittersweet side of this poem's success is that it's not a harbinger of happy times. Smith's words are embraced by those looking for comfort in the wake of disorder or outright tragedy. 

This is the kind of poem you spontaneously bring in to share with students on a numb and gloomy day. Or perhaps this is the kind of poem a student brings in and says, "I want to write about this." In the classroom, there will be a real temptation for any discussion of "Good Bones" be entirely thematic in focus. This is a poem about salvage, someone might say. This is a poem about hope. But to praise a poem on entirely topical terms is to miss out on Smith's precise craft. 

With that in mind, here's what I'd like to talk about, when I read "Good Bones":

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

The first line--neatly endstopped--establishes a first-person speaker, identifies the speaker as a parent, and adds urgency by conveying its information in present tense. The poem presents a familiar truism ("Life is short"), but then personalizes the banality by framing it as a secret to be kept. The reader becomes complicit in the ruse. 

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. 

If you pair the first clause (in line 2) and the final one (all of line 5), this sentence mirrors the opener--with the subtle shift into future tense, creating a pledge on top of line 1's claim. What interests me is how the speaker's character is developed substantially in the middle clauses, identifying with an impulse toward pleasure. At first, the comma proposes that "delicious" and "ill-advised" are in contrast to one another; in the refrain, the voice admits that the ways are delicious precisely because they are ill-advised. The speaker's choices made outside of being a parent is yet another secret to be kept from the kids. 

                                                 The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.

Secret #3, kiddos: life is short, yes; we're not in the best of all possible worlds, either. 

The first enjambment teases us by briefly teetering toward optimism (the "at least" in "The world is at least...") before a reality of pessimism sets in (the completing "...fifty percent terrible"). The usage of a numerical figure moves us to thinking about studies, statistics, and the march of infographics signature to contemporary reporting. The second enjambment splits "estimate" from its modifier of "conservative," leaving that word dangling in the eye of the reader. One's mind might go to the modern dichotomy of American politics (liberal vs. conservative), though the motive could simply be conserving the median length of line. 

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. 

If you're going to assert a "terrible" state, you have to provide evidence, harnessed here through anaphora. The image of line 8 is straightforward: for every bird, symbolic of nature, man makes a gesture attacking nature. This is the ecological balance of of today's world. Note that this line is also endstopped, free of commas or other intermediate grammars, which anchors the poem's syntactic momentum. 

Lines 9-10 raise the stakes to human life. The previous sentence is the first to omit mention of the speaker's children. In this sentence, that awareness returns in the distillation of a "loved child" and, in symmetry, one subjected to violence--violence driven home by the hard consonance of "broken," "sunk," and "lake." In another poet's hands, this equation-making could become expository and prosaic; Smith smartly relies on the comma after "For every loved child," creating a midline caesura that fills with dread for the reader. 

                              Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. 

The diction relaxes a bit here ("half" instead of "fifty percent"), as the speaker reflects on the accumulated realizations of the first ten lines. We return to the refrain of "though I keep this from my children," but the power and authority located in the decision has been diluted. This is also the first occurrence of "you," though we don't pay too much attention to the word choice because of its colloquial stance.  

                                                                    I am trying
to sell them the world. 

Ignorance is not enough to protect them. Isolation is impossible. So what the speaker must do, instead, is attempt to promote engagement. The metaphor of "sell" takes the risk of moving us to the realm of commerce (raising questions of sincerity). Rather than dodging these connotations, Smith doubles down on the conceit of real estate. 

                                           Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: 

How strange and wonderful, in a fraught landscape, to encounter the humor of these lines. "Decent" is the perfect choice, implying good but also good-at-one's-job, which in this case is the task of closing the deal. There is a perverse, lively internal music between "realtor" and "real shithole," and the crassness of the latter term cuts through potential sentimentality. "Good bones" is an appealingly familiar term of real estate (there is an HGTV show called Good Bones) that summons thoughts of the body. 

Note that there are two deft conflations executed in this sentence. The first conflation--activated by the verb choice of "chirps"--is between the realtor and the bird of line 8. The impact of this is that we're encouraged to favor this character, regarding the realtor as ally rather than predator. The second conflation is between the "them" (the children of the previous sentence) and the "you" who is now taking the tour. 

                                   This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

This second conflation is significant because in these final lines, a facade drops. Though this is positioned as dialogue in-scene, these sentences break the fourth wall of the poem. We may argue that we're trying to sell the world to our children--that may be a useful external priority--but the truth is that we're trying to sell it to ourselves as well. The "you" becomes invitational and encompassing of the reader. 

Note, too, how the seemingly declarative repetition of "beautiful" is undercut by the modal verb choices. This is about what "could be," not what is. The penultimate line's enjambment leads into the affirmation-seeking "...right?" 

The irony of framing this as a text of comfort is that what appeals about "Good Bones" is its indeterminacy, the liminal space it occupies between hope and despair. That's what rewards multiple re-readings. That's what makes us trust the poem. 

Why am I sharing a text that you've probably read in at least a dozen other places? Because I'd like for you to see it with fresh eyes. Because I want Smith to be credited with more than "Right place, right time, right emotion." I'd like for you to see what I see--phrasing that sticks to your ribs not just because of its politics, but because of its construction. Form enacts content, I say to my students. This poem can be used to explore how to take on a big idea and ground it in bright, specific language and technical decisions on the page.  

Through all this attention, Smith seems to have maintained her generous spirit and a sense of humility. In an interview with Ohio State University (where she is an alumna of their MFA program), she said: “This poem feels less like mine than any other poem I’ve written. It belongs to others. I live in this nest in Ohio and my poem is flying to people and places I will never see. It has a bigger job to do.”

Thank you, Maggie Smith.

Tar River Poetry and Other Poetry-Only Journals

I'm pleased to have two poems in the new issue of Tar River Poetry. This is my first appearance in this print journal. I find myself in very good company with poems by such poets as Kelly Cherry, Susan Laughter Meyers, Karen Paul Holmes, and Faith Shearin, and Grant Clauser. I see some names new to me and look forward to getting acquainted with those poets. My own poems are "Signs That Life May Yet Work Out as You'd Like It To" and "Why I Couldn't Keep Him."

This is an exclusively poetry journal which pleases me. It's a slender volume with perfect binding and, as you can see, a lovely cover. I'm going to subscribe, and I suggest that you consider doing the same.

Some years ago I posted a list of other all-poetry print journals. I just dug that out and will re-post it here. Although I subscribe to several journals that include poetry and prose, I often find myself skipping over the prose pieces to get to the poems. So it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to subscribe to a few more poetry-only journals. Poetry with perhaps some reviews of poetry books, interviews with poets, and / or a poetics essay. A bit of art would be nice, too. I then set about gathering a list of such journals. Perhaps you might also be looking for a few ideas for new subscriptions, so I'll share the list with you. Those with two asterisks are ones I am already subscribed to.

**Beloit Poetry Journal
A saddle-stapled journal that has been around a long time. Four issues per year.

Cave Wall
Combines poetry and art. Two issues per year.

Field
Poetry and poetics, reviews by editors. Two issues per year.

Mudfish
Poetry and art. One issue per year. They make it difficult to subscribe as there is no online subscription option. Instead, you are asked to make a phone call to their NYC number.

Naugatuck River Review
Focus on narrative poetry. Two issues per year. One is a contest issue.

**Poet Lore
Poetry and Reviews, occasional essay. Two issues per year.

Rattle
Poetry and interviews. Each issue has a section of poems solicited from a particular group, e.g., nurses, attorneys. Two issues per year.

**Southern Poetry Review
Pure poetry. Two issues per year.

Spoon River Poetry Review
Poetry and one very long review essay. Two issues per year.

Sugar House Review
Poetry and reviews. All reviews are also archived online. Two issues per year. A very beautiful journal, perfect bound, glossy paper inside, pretty end pages.

**Tar River Poetry
Poetry, interviews, reviews. Two issues per year.

**32 Poems
Two issues per year.


Let me know what I've missed.

Float

Ann Carson's new book promises to be interesting. As always, she provides both amusement and food for thought as she explores form. There is no designated order for reading the parts, it is as she suggests "a free fall."

Float, her most ambitious publication since Nox (2010)... a boxed collection of twenty-two individually bound chapbooks in a sleek plastic case, it includes some traditional lyrics, some translations, some plays and scenes from plays—what readers might think of as lyric-dramas. It also features essays, lists, and loosely structured meditations. In fact we might say the pieces “float” in a loose network of relations, interchangeable in order and readable as individual projects, but connected by a strand of interrelated themes—the problem of representation, translation as an act of creation, and the idea of “network” itself. The book, if we can call it a book, contests not only conventional understandings of genre and readership, but, through its collective disjunction, the classificatory modes by which we comprehend our realities. Float urges us, at least implicitly, to reconsider the essential divisions we fashion between subject and object, self and other, bodies and the spaces they inhabit.

Read the full review at http://bostonreview.net/poetry/john-james-astralize-night

On the other side of the spectrum, Robert Hass book recently came out, A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry.  It's 400 pages.  He orders the manuscript starting with poems of one line, couplets, triolets, quatrains, and in ascending order and he considers the history of the particular stanza and its effect in a poem. The book represents an accumulation of years of notes, and he also makes lists of poems for the reader to investigate.  It is a thorough analysis.

As he notes in the brief introduction, this has been a work in progress for two decades. His modest goal is to explain how the “formal imagination actually operates in poetry,” the “way the poem embodies the energy of the gesture of its making.” Hass begins with analyses of a single line, then two, three, and four, which take up the book’s first 100 pages. Next, he moves on to form (blank verse, sonnet, etc.) and genre (ode, elegy, satire, prose poems, etc.), finishing up with stress and rhythm. Along the way, he draws on hundreds of examples of lines, stanzas, and complete poems from the history of poetry, which he carefully selects to illustrate his points. 

The full review is at https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-hass/a-little-book-on-form/

Lately, I've been contemplating the past year's work on my desk, poems, prose, and memoir.  Both of these book offer thoughts about structure.

On the History of the Sonnet

To supplement this month's sonnet writing prompt, here is poet Linda Gregerson discussing the history of the sonnet at Poets Forum in New York City in 2015.

Prompt: Petrarch, Laura and the Sonnets

On an April day in 1327, Italian poet Francesco Petrarch first saw “Laura,” She would become his muse for more than 300 sonnets.

It was Good Friday and he saw her at St. Clare Church in Avignon. There is some controversy about the identity of Laura, but it is generaly thought that she was a real woman. Many sources identify her as Laura de Noves, a married woman and mother. Whether she knew that she was his muse, and whether or not Petrarch ever contacted her is not known. Laura de Noves died during the Black Death plague of 1348.

The first 263 poems Petrarch wrote for her while she was alive and he called them Rime in Vita Laura. After she died, the poems he wrote were known as Rime in Morte Laura.

His love for Laura was unconsummated. Petrarch wrote about this love:

“In my younger days, I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair — my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”

Lord Byron wrote this sarcastic couplet about Petrarch's love-at-a-distance for Laura:

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?

Petrarch's poems popularized the Italian sonnet form and influenced the English sonnets that came in the Elizabethan era. Petrarch did not invent the sonnet. It had been a popular classical form long before him. "Sonnet" comes from the Italian sonetto, which means “a little sound or song."

Traditionally, the sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, which uses a particular rhyme scheme and has a structured thematic organization.

The sonnet form popularized by Petrarch and which now carries his name uses two stanzas. One is an octave (8 lines) with the rhyme scheme abbaabba and the second a sestet (6 lines) with either a cdecde or cdcdcd rhyme scheme.

Some of Petrarch's sonnets were translated by Chaucer and other poets, but their Middle English is still difficult for modern readers. But you can find a Petrarchan sonnet that was written in 1903 and is engraved on a plaque found on the lower level of the Statue of Liberty. That sonnet is 'The New Colossus' by Emma Lazarus.

'Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
'Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she
With silent lips. 'Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'

A variation of that form is known as the Shakespearean, or English sonnet, This sonnet form uses iambic pentameter and has three quatrains (4 lines) and a couplet follow this rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

Traditionally, the first stanza of a sonnet is the question and the break is seen as a "turn" with the second stanza being an answer or response. In the English sonnet the concluding couplet is a conclusion, amplification, or even refutation of the previous three stanzas,

And there are many variations on these two formal definitions.

John Milton’s sonnets blended the two variations and didn't follow all the rules. (See his "When I Consider How My Light is Spent")

The Spenserian sonnet, named for the sixteenth century English poet Edmund Spenser, uses the Shakespearean three quatrains and a couplet but uses “couplet links” between quatrains (rhyme scheme: abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee).

"Hades' Pitch" by Rita Dove imagines a pitch, a seduction, by that Greek god of the underworld and uses a single 14-line sonnet with rhyme.  "Anne Hathaway" by Carol Ann Duffy (from The World's Wife) takes the form of a sonnet written by the wife of Mr. Shakespearean sonnet himself.

Modern poets have taken the variations much further. For this month's prompt we will do the same, writing sonnets that follow these three "rules":
1) Fourteen lines in one or more stanzas
2) Some rhyme (whether using a traditional rhyme scheme, couplets or something of your own design)
3) The structure of question and response or problem and resolution and the "turn" of the sonnet

Billy Collins - not a formalist poet - wrote a "Sonnet" that pokes fun at poets' loose variations on the form.

How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

and pokes fun at Petrarch, and even allows Francesco to consummate his Laura-love (or perhaps explains why all that sonnet writing prevented it!)

But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blowout the lights, and come at last to bed.

Submission deadline for this prompt: June 4, 2017. Please follow our submission guidelines.

Do You Know Where Your Donut Poem Is?

We are still open for submissions for our forthcoming anthology of donut poems to be edited by Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham. Deadline is May 31, so you still have time to get yourself to a donut shop, sample the goods, then rush home and write your masterpiece. 

We will consider up to five published or unpublished poems about any kind of donut, e.g., jelly donut, sugar, powdered, glazed, Boston cream, donut holes, cruller, long john, fritter, pączki, oliebollen, ponchik, fánk. 

Send us your poems about making donuts, eating donuts, donuts and family rituals or traditions, your love or fear of donuts, your first donut, a memory associated with donuts, cops and donuts, a fight over donuts, a dream or a nightmare about donuts.

We are open to all kinds of forms: formal verse, free verse, prose poem. 

Be sure to check our Guidelines. Submit via Submittable.

No fee. Compensation is one complimentary copy of the book for US contributors. Poets outside of the US are welcome to submit, but we cannot cover exorbitant postage fees.

Interview with Poet Robert Walicki about his chapbook The Almost Sound of Snow Falling

The Almost Sound of Snow Falling

Author: Robert Walicki

Publisher: Night Ballet Press

Publication date: 2015









First Snow by Robert Walicki

Even when it came and afterwards, it hits me like a surprise wind.
The last clothes of the summer on a line:

Transparent flowers on my sister’s spring dress still wet and swinging,
or the long threadbare robe of my fathers’ that finally tore itself free,

hung there in the air is if weightless
held by something I couldn’t see.

A waiting, something slow like that.
Pausing and stopping, like music gone quiet

and starting again. Cool as a fridge door opening,
a breeze when a car is moving. Watching children run in a soccer game.

And cheering. Pizza so hot it burns the roof of my mouth, that walk over frozen mud
to get a bottle of water

to cool it and I am suddenly alone with what I’ve taken, what I can’t leave behind.
Not even that small boy covering his ears outside, the woolen hands

that hold the wind back to stare at something so large and black above his head,
while the pieces of something keep falling as if torn,

pages from a book that sat open by his parents’ bed:
In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth

was formless and void—
Words I never got close enough to read or understand,

only that whiteness.
That miracle of 2 am when the roads have no memory.

Sidewalks, unbroken by footsteps.
And no one awake at this hour to sweep it away.

from The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015)

*   *   *   *   *

Robert Walicki is the curator of VERSIFY, a monthly reading series in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in HEArt, Stone Highway Review, Grasslimb, and on the radio show Prosody. He won 1st runner up in the 2013 Finishing Line Open Chapbook Competition and was awarded finalist in the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. He currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015).

Author Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Robert-Walicki-1961568937400784/

*   *   *   *   *

Robert Walicki and I first met several years ago in a now-defunct Facebook poetry workshop group. I wrote a blurb for the cover of his chapbook The Almost Sound of Snow Falling. It was a delight interview him about the chapbook and poetry.

—Nancy Chen Long 

[This interview was originally published on my blog.]

*   *   *   *   *

Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook.

RW: The Almost Sound of Snow Falling follows my last collection, A Room Full of Trees, in a fairly chronological way, moving from the inevitable acceptance of loss as a state of existence, but then moving past that aftermath to explore identity and self. I think more so than anything, it's about growth, a trial by fire so to speak and the transformation that occurs as a result of these experiences.



Some of the poems in The Almost Sound of Snow Falling touch on issues of masculinity and gender identification. Could you speak a little to this aspect of the book?

RW:  I had been interested in challenging stereotypical roles of masculinity after working for years in the construction trades industries. Society in general, can be very judgmental to individuals that don't fit into the expected or preconceived gender roles.When one is ostracized for their personality and make up, or even what they look like, it can be a very painful experience. This applies to many people and in many different fields and walks of life. The makeup of identity was something important to me and something that I wanted to understand to a deeper degree. Combing through hurt feelings and taking a candid look at what it means to be a man, and that being sensitive and caring didn't make you less masculine, was something that appealed to me a great deal.



The poems in this collection read as explorations of memories. Here are two considerations of memory in poetry:

• In an April 2015 article “The substance of memory,” poet Chloe Garcia Roberts makes the comment that “[Homero] Aridjis highlights the inseparability of the self and its past in his poem, “Autoretrato a los seis años (Self-portrait at age six)”, by asserting that the past is the substance of the self.”
   
• In a March 2013 article “Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part IV: The Function of Memory,” Leslie Heywood writes:

[M]emory is unstable and idiosyncratic, and follows a structure and procedure much like narrative … [E]motion is the basis of long-term memory, and our reactions to the world around us are a complicated concatenation of the narratives we’ve written and continue to write in our brains in conjunction with reactions to new stimuli, which is often interpreted according to old patterns. Everything we 'know' is a narrative construction based on sometimes idiosyncratic interpretation.

What is the role of personal memory in your poems? When you’re writing your poetry, do you find memory to be something more solid, like Roberts examined the first quote—an inseparability between self-identity and the past? Or is it more permeable, as discussed by Heywood?

RW: I think for me, it's a combination. It really depends on the poem and the voice that leads me. I'm very much a believer of letting the poem determine what it's going to be, so in that sense, I feel memory is a very fluid thing. For example, there are poems like "First Snow" or "Ostaria" that attempt to capture the uncapturable or indescribable. Memory, when layered with emotion, often gets very complicated. There can be a lot to unpack and equally, so much of what I remember is colored by emotion and shaped by it. Truth, or what really happened, changes when I write, because what is more important to me, is whether a poem is "emotionally true" and not necessarily 100 percent factual. I'm fascinated most of all by concrete imagery as a doorway into memory and emotion. It's almost involuntary for me, like Proust. It's a very serendipitous thing. A shirt ripping on a nail reminding me of the loose buttons on a mother's coat in a photograph and suddenly, I'm writing the poem "In The Years Before Color," and everything a simple black and white photograph evokes from the past, and the future.



Why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?

RW: In general, I find it easier to focus on a chapbook length collection. I'm very attracted to shorter length formats in terms of a sharper, thematic focus, although I'm currently working on a full-length. I don't think I ever sit down consciously and say "I'm ready to write a chapbook." It happens organically and I think the best ideas come from that aesthetic. I never stopped writing after my first chapbook came out and in a very fertile period for me, I suddenly had a lot of poems that I felt were speaking to each other. My style was, and still is, evolving, especially from A Room Full of Trees, my first chapbook. I felt I was loosening up, was more frank in my language and was moving on from many of the things that I was obsessed about in the first book, namely my father's death and how that changed me as a person. However, one could make the argument that a few of the early poems in this collection could fit right in thematically with that first book.



What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?

RW: That's difficult,but for me, the most crucial poems in this book are the work poems, because they were the hardest to write and the most important. As I've said before, I feel this book is about growth and I think these poems illustrate that process in a profound way for me. Those experiences changed me and forged me into the person I am, worlds away from the person I was before these events happened.

It took years to write this one in particular (it's not quite a year old), mostly because it was extremely difficult for me to find the poetry or "music" in these hard experiences. I also needed some emotional distance from what happened and perspective so I could write with the clarity and the restraint necessary to do justice to the material. I finally came to the conclusion that a simple frank and matter of fact tone was the best approach in writing about this kind of work. This poem is called "Rain Leader."

Rain Leader
(on running storm pipe under a bridge near Akron, OH, 1997)

When the only heat is from the coffee
at 5am, and less than 4 degrees outside,
you'll learn to wear enough layers,
or better yet, keep moving.

Some biker dude will laugh, blow frost,
Marlboro smoke in your face.
First day, it's "Hey rookie" and "Don't look down"
It's lift this 8 inch, cast iron pipe.

First day, It's " Go down to my truck and get
my pipe stretcher" ,and then you'll realize
there's no such thing 4 stories down.
First day, men will want to break you,

Like they've been broken, their riverbed faces,
grizzled beards twisted like dry rotted wire.
Last night's whiskey, sweating from dirty skin.
You will nearly lose your finger, when the ice forms

on the pipe, straps loosening, metal slamming flesh.
If you can make it past this, there's a Miller Genuine Draft
There's a welder sitting next to you, buys the first round,
lays his steel hands on your shoulder

Like the father who couldn't bear it.
If you can make it past tomorrow,
you'll have to trust the pig iron,
this foot width of rust,
and walk this I-beam,50 feet of cross cut steel
falling into nothing. There's a strap that holds
your waist, a broken man who leads you.
he'll walk like a free man across 4 inches of steel.
He'll never look back.

originally appeared in The Kentucky Review



You curate a monthly reading series for poets. How do you feel about spoken-word or performance poetry versus poetry on the page?

RW: I have learned from personal experience that when preparing to do a reading, I choose work based on readability and my audience. Knowing one's audience as well as having a balanced set list of poems is a real key to a successful reading. There are beautiful poems that I've never read for example, because I feel that they are either too "quiet" or "contemplative" or better on the page than ones that either have more movement in them, or are more accessible to a wider audience.

Regarding performing, I've had a few poets who qualify as performance poets in my series and I am always in awe of the energy that's brought to a poem by a gifted performance poet. It's a different aesthetic than more traditional poetry,but I often think that traditional poets could learn from performance poets in terms of being better presenters of their work, and performance poets could learn from the traditional poets as well. However, everyone has a unique gift to share with the world, and my goal is to celebrate that, give them a platform.



What difficulties or challenges did you encounter in writing some of the poems? in publishing the collection?

RW: There's always a fear that certain poems can be misinterpreted or something may offend someone, but I made a decision while writing my first book: Do I want to be a truth teller, or I do I want to play it safe and write pretty, lyrical poems for the whole family? Being a "tell all" kind of poet can be very difficult and a sometimes painful road to go down. It's something I continue to struggle with, although I've made peace with who I am as a poet.



Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

RW: I recently gave my first reading from the chapbook in Cleveland for my press, Night Ballet, at the wonderful Max Backs Books. I love to do readings in general, but this was a special night and the crowd was warm, attentive and engaging. I'm looking forward to going back!



What are you working on now?

RW: I have several projects that I'm working on currently, a full length manuscript, as well as another chapbook which is going to be a big departure. All of the poems will have or be inspired by pop culture references, so that's going to be a fun project when it's finished.