Eat This Poem

Many poets love food and many foodies love poetry. So a cookbook that includes recipes and poems seems like a natural combination—a most delightful one in Nicole Gulotta’s new Eat This Poem: A Literary Feast of Recipes Inspired by Poetry.

Gulotta’s book evolved out of her blog of the same name. I discovered the blog some years ago and was delighted by the recipes, the poems, and the photos. I sent in some poems and soon “Blueberry” appeared with Nicole's recipe for blueberry buckwheat pancakes. Eventually, Nicole began blogging about her dream of doing a book. Eat This Poem is the realization of that dream.

I like the size of this book (6 x 9, 205 pages) and its French flaps which make it easy to mark your place. I like the artwork that appears throughout. I like the symmetry of the unusual organizational plan: five sections each broken down into five parts. Each part begins with a poem by such poets as me (!), Mary Oliver, Louise Gluck, Jane Kenyon, Billy Collins, and Philip Levine. Each poem is followed by a brief and excellent commentary, and then by three recipes.

The author likes fresh food, natural organic products, and out-of-the-ordinary recipes such as Mushroom and Brie Quesadillas, Shepherd’s Pie with Sweet Potatoes, Pear and Manchego Grilled Cheese, and Strawberry Birthday Cake.

Gulotta has studied poetry and traveled extensively sampling and studying different cuisines. Her love of poetry and good food is evident in this wonderful cookbook which is deliciously priced at only $18.95—currently on sale at Amazon at $10.47.

Listening to the New U.S. Poet Laureate: Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith has been named the next poet laureate of the United States and will begin her role this fall, succeeding Juan Felipe Herrera.

Smith is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program.

She has written three poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars , The Body’s Question and Duende, all from Graywolf Press. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light  (Knopf, 2015).

“As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture,” said Smith in the announcement from the Library of Congress. “I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future-readers across this marvelously diverse country.”

Tracy K. Smith reads her poem "Wade in the Water," which will be published in a book of poetry in 2018.

Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. In The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, she writes about that loss.

In the memoir, Ordinary Light, she also considers the loss of her mother and of her father, who died in 2008. That was also the year her daughter, Naomi, was born.

Life on Mars  in some ways is an elegy for her father who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope program.

... sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959...

Smith reads “Digging” by Seamus Heaney, the poem she feels “invited her to start writing poetry,” and from “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” a poem she wrote about her father.

...Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,
That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip —
When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding...
   
(excerpts from "My God, It's Full of Stars")

Tracy graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. She earned an MFA from Columbia University.

She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005.

Tracy K. Smith discusses her interest in science-fiction and the research for her book, Life on Mars

Smith lives in Princeton with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their three children. Her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling, were born in 2013.



Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize
New York Times Notable Book of 2011
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
New Yorker, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

Summer Journals Q-Z 2017

Here's the third and final installment of the list of print journals that read during the summer months. Again, please let me know if you spot any errors or omissions. Good luck!

No rejections allowed.

**Remember that the asterisks indicate that the journal accepts simultaneous submissions.

Journal accepts online submissions unless otherwise indicated.

**Quiddity—2x

**The Raleigh Review—2x—opens July 1

**Rattle—4x

Raven Chronicles—2x—April 1-July 1
snail mail

**Redactions—2x—by email–opens July 1

**Redivider—2x

**Rhino—1x—April 1-Oct 31

**River Styx—3x—May 1 thru Nov 30
snail mail

**Rosebud—3x
via email

**Sakura Review—2x

**Salt Hill—2x
August 1-April 1

**San Pedro River Review—2x
month of July
via email

**Saw Palm—1x—July 1-Oct. 1
must have a Florida connection

**Smartish Pace—2x
via email

**South Dakota Review—4x

**The Southeast Review—2x

**Southern Humanities Review—4x—Aug 1-Dec 1

**Southern Poetry Review—2x
snail mail or via their website

**Sugar House Review—2x—Jan 31-July 31

**Tahoma Literary Review—3x—now thru August

**32 Poems—2x

Threepenny Review—4x—reads thru June

**Turnrow—2x
snail mail

**Tusculum Review—1x

US 1 Worksheets—1x—April 15- June 30
snail mail

**Washington Square Review—2x—Aug 1-Oct 15

**West Wind Review—1x—July 1-Sept 1

**Women Arts Quarterly Journal—4x

**Yemassee—2x


Summer Journals A - F

Summer Journals G - P

An Abundance of Elephants

My 2017 One Little Word is ABUNDANCE.

As a way to celebrate this word, I've posted here and here about objects I have an abundance of.

Today it's ELEPHANTS! It occurred to me yesterday when I was writing about another strand in my writer's DNA. I think elephants, too, are in my DNA. They keep coming up in my work, that's for sure! There was Millie in DON'T FEED THE BOY...

art by Stephanie Graegin

....and Miss Fancy, the real-life elephant in my forthcoming historical picture book FRANK AND MISS FANCY, set in 1913, about a black boy's quest to meet the elephant during Jim Crow Birmingham, Alabama. Wait till you see John Holyfield's art for this book... gorgeous!

Miss Fancy!

Around the house I found an elephant parade:

BOOKS about elephants...

an old one!

one I just finished!

elephant blankets (and not 

the Roll Tide variety, either... WAR EAGLE!)

... and elephant art. (This piece was a gift

from a friend who picked it up in India!)

Want to see some rescued elephants living the sweet life? Check out the elecam at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee!

among the multitudes

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.
I could have different
ancestors, after all.
I could have fluttered
from another nest
or crawled bescaled
from another tree.

Nature's wardrobe
holds a fair
supply of costumes:
Spider, seagull, fieldmouse.
each fits perfectly right off
and is dutifully worn
into shreds.

I didn't get a choice either,
but I can't complain.
I could have been someone
much less separate.
someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,
bred for my fur
or Christmas dinner,
something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground
as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede
of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness
dazzled some.
What if I'd prompted only fear,
Loathing,
or pity?

If I'd been born
in the wrong tribe
with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind
to me thus far.

I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments

My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is, someone completely different.

 

~ Wislawa Szymborska

 from Poems, New and Collected

with thanks to Love is a Place

 

 

 

 

 

mercy

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,—
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,—
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice. 

 

 

 

 

~ William Shakespeare 

 from The Merchant of Venice

art by Van Gogh

 

Another Strand in My Writing DNA

This past weekend we saw a wonderful production of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF here in Birmingham, put on by Red Mountain Theatre Company.

I laughed. I cried. I hummed along. And I realized this is one of those DNA pieces for me -- right up there with LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE and THE BLACK STALLION. It's got so many of the elements I love, so many of the layers I want to include in my own stories and poems.

1. It's historical

2. It gives a glimpse of a culture different than my own

3. It's about family

4. And change

5. About quiet defiance

6. About overcoming hardship

7. Holding fast to what we believe in ("Tradition!")

8. About choosing love

9. And letting go

I'm not sure how old I was when I first saw FIDDLER. It feels like one of those that's always been with me. I looked it up, and the movie came out in 1971, after the musical's 1964 debut. So, yes, it really has been with me my whole life!

If you haven't seen it lately, give it a whirl. It stands the test of time for sure. And if you're in Birmingham, wow, go see it! Excellent production.

Prompt: A Song for the Body

I recently read Marilyn Hacker’s clever poem “Canzone.”  I didn't know much about that form other than it being a kind of song. Her poem is a song to a part of the body - the tongue.

The tongue is certainly an organ with many uses, and to a poet certainly one of interest since it form our words. She writes that it is “sinewy and singular, the tongue / accomplishes what, perhaps, no other organ / can.”

If you read "Canzone" online on our main site or in her Selected Poems 1965-1990, you can see how she examines the multi-uses of the tongue and also how she plays with the words (particularly "organ") as can be seen in this illustrative excerpt from the poem.

...we give
the private contemplations of each organ
to the others, and to others, organ-

ize sensations into thought. Sentient organ-
isms, we symbolize feeling, give
the spectrum (that’s a symbol) each sense organ
perceives, by analogy, to others. Disorgan-
ization of the senses is an acquired taste
we all acquire: as speaking beasts, it’s organ-
ic to our discourse. The first organ
of acknowledged communion is the tongue
(tripartite diplomat, which after tongu-
ing a less voluble expressive organ
to wordless efflorescences of pleasure
offers up words to reaffirm the pleasure.)

​​Marilyn Hacker likes forms. Another interesting poem of hers is the “Villanelle For D.G.B." The poem we are looking at this month for a prompt is labeled a canzone. In ​Edward Hirsch's useful reference The Essential Poet's Glossary (which is the shorter and more focused version of his big encyclopedic A Poet's Glossary ), he notes that this form gets its name from the Italian word for "song."  This lyric poem originates in medieval Italy and France with troubadours and wandering musicians. ​Petrarch established this form of lyric love poem with stanzas of five or six lines, ending with an envoi, and Dante Alighieri was an admirer of the canzone.

Dante created his own version which Hirsch calls "maddeningly difficult... using the same five end-words in each of the five 12-line stanzas, intricately varying the pattern.”​

I don't like to use forms as prompts that are so difficult that they stop poets from attempting to write. Since Hacker, Dante and others have taken liberties with the canzone, we will too. Certainly, you can try to adhere to the form if you like the challenge of a form.

The canzone generally has 5 to 7 stanzas probably meant to be set to music. A end rhyme scheme, as one would suspect of a song, is usually followed.

Your canzone can be as short as two stanzas, because it must conclude with an envoi. The envoi (or envoy) is a short stanza at the end of a poem used either to address an imagined or actual person or to comment on the preceding body of the poem. In general, envois have fewer lines than the main stanzas of the poem

True canzones (and many songs) have a strict number of syllables. For our purposes, you should keep the length of lines equal, even if not strict about syllables. Swinburne worked with the canzone meter in “Hendecasyllabics”

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent...

For our June prompt, write a song/canzone to a part of the body

Deadline for submissions is July 2, 2017


For more on the canzone form:
Daryl Hines - “Canzone” ​
John Hollander​ - “About the Canzone"

Summer Journals G-P 2017

Here's the second installment of the list of print journals that read during the summer months. If you find any errors or have others to add to the list, please let me know. Good luck with your submissions.

This mailbox is ready to receive good mail.

**Indicates that simultaneous submission is ok
Unless otherwise indicated, the journal accepts online submissions.

**Gigantic Sequins—2x—opens July 1

**Grist—1x—June 15-Sept 15

Hanging Loose—3x
snail mail

**Hartskill Review—3x

**Hayden’s Ferry—2x—opens for submissions August 1

**Hiram Poetry Review—1x
snail mail

Hudson Review—4x—April 1-June 30 (all year if a subscriber)
snail mail

**Lake Effect—1x
snail mail

Little Star Journal—1x
strong preference for snail mail
strong preference for no sim sub

Louisiana Literature—2x

**Lumina—1x—check in July

**MacGuffin—3x
via email attachment

Manhattan Review—2x
(prefers no sim but will take)

Measure—2x
metrical only

**Michigan Quarterly Review—4x

**Mid-American Review—2x

**Minnesota Review—2x—August 1–November 1

**Missouri Review—4x

**The Mom Egg—1x—June 1-Sept 1

**Naugatuck River Review—2x—July 1-Sept 1
for the winter issue

**Nimrod—2x—Jan 1-Nov 30
snail mail

**Parnassus: Poetry in Review—1x
snail mail

Pinyon—2x
via email

**Pleiades—2x—Aug 15-May 15

**Ploughshares—3x—June 3 to January 15

**Poet Lore—2x
snail mail

**Poetry—11x


Summer Journals A - F

Summer Journals Q - Z

The First Published Poet in America

Who was the first published poet in America? Anne Bradstreet.

Anne was a Puritan mother of eight children. She is considered to be one of our earliest feminists and the first true poet in the American colonies.

Her collection, The Tenth Muse (AKA The Tenth Muse, lately Sprung up in America), was published by a printer without her consent or knowledge.

The "Tenth Muse" can refer to the ancient Greek poet Sappho.

She wrote the poem below in response to a second edition of that unauthorized edition being printed.

The Author to Her Book
by Anne Bradstreet

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

The visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.

In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.

In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,

And take thy way where yet thou art not known;

If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;

And for thy mother, she alas is poor,

Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

from
The Works of Anne Bradstreet

Summer Journals A-F 2017

Get your mailbox ready to receive good news.

It's that time of year again. During the summer many of us have more time to write and submit, but quite a few journals close their doors to submissions for the summer months. Do not despair. There are still many journals that do read during the summer and some that read only during the summer. This is the first of a 3-part list of those journals, all print. Please note that this year I have done only minimal updates. Be sure to check website.

I've added links for your convenience. I've also indicated the number of issues per year, the submission period dates, which journals accept simultaneous submissions, and which ones accept online submissions. If you find an error, please let me know.

**Indicates that simultaneous submission is ok
Unless otherwise indicated, the journal accepts online submissions.
If no dates are given, the journal reads all year.


**American Poetry Review—6x-tabloid

**Asheville Poetry Review—3x—Jan. 15-July 15
snail mail

**Atlanta Review—2x—deadlines June 1 & Dec 1
reads all year, but slower in summer
snail mail

**Bat City Review—1x—June 1-Nov 1

**Beloit Poetry Journal—3x—June 1-Aug 31

**Black Warrior Review—2x—June 1-Sept 1

**Bone Bouquet—2x
women only

**Briar Cliff Review—1x—deadline Nov 1

**Burnside Review—2x
email sub ok
$3 reading fee /pays $50

**Caketrain—1x
email sub

**Chariton Review—2x
snail mail

**Cimarron Review—4x

**Columbia Journal—2x—March 1- Sept 15

**Columbia Poetry Review—1x—July 1-Nov 1

**Conduit—2x
snail mail

**Crab Orchard Review—2x—Aug 15-Nov 5 (special issue)
snail mail

**Cream City Review—2x—Aug 1-Nov 1

Cutthroat—1x—July 15-Oct 1

**Edison Literary Review—1x

Field—2x—August 1-May 31

**The Florida Review—2x—Aug 1-May 31 (subscribers all year)

**The Fourth River—1x—opens July 1


Summer Journals G - P

Summer Journals Q - Z

Tucked Away: Dual Lives in David R. Altman’s “Death in the Foyer”

by JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp

For me, summers are for regrouping and re-reading favorite books.  One such work by David R. Altman, “Death in the Foyer,” continues to sink the plumb line of my appreciation for his attention to instinct and motive each time I read it.  “Death in the Foyer,” published by Finishing Line Press in 2014, is Altman’s debut chapbook. His website can be found at http://www.davidraltman.com.

“Death in the Foyer” contains a series of vignettes that convey the message nature may contain mysteries, but people keep secrets.

 The first of these is the book’s titular poem about a man who suddenly, and without resistance, succumbs to an aneurism in his home’s foyer. Altman’s use of an omniscient voice places the reader in an awkward position of knowing more than the dying man’s devoted wife whose “warm fingers [protect] now what no longer needs protecting.” 

Suddenly, the reader knows perhaps more than they should. Without warning, we’re in on it as the speaker divulges how, “his final thoughts were of wives and children;/and secret friends who knew him well,/thoughts that he will share now only with himself.”

And we know her, don’t we? This woman of “soft pleas” who emerges from “a living room landscape of family photos and dusty Bibles.” She is the hearth keeper; albeit, possibly not the first one as “wives” is unmistakably plural. 

I love this poem because every time I read the last stanza, I have to ask myself if I am obligated to care more about this man than the clearly ambivalent speaker. Altman writes,

            He was to die upon a rug he used to vacuum

            and had admired from a distance.

            Now moving toward a new life,

            less worldly than the one which at that instant he was leaving,

            but a new life, just the same.

We have to ask ourselves, what type of man (or woman, for that matter) sinks so comfortably into an “unexpected” death? Could it be one with “secret friends” suddenly offered a clean slate?  This negative capability allows the question to linger as long as we wish, as the dying man only “[moves] toward a new life” when we are ready.

More dramatic but equally compelling is the poem, “2:17 a.m.” Here, Altman carefully attends to setting, mood, and plot. We exist in both space and time, and the speaker uses the poem’s title and first line to create a sense of tension that does not dissipate even when the danger has passed.

Awakening to the sounds of destruction,

            the family presses one another to the hardwood

Unable to move or see or understand

            in one final act of unity they pray silently, hands touching.

Bullets fill the room, shattering photos and jewelry and bed posts

            While small children, life faceless rag dolls, curl beside their mother

Each family member pinned down like a spider beneath a jar

            waiting for the inevitable.

                                                Suddenly, things stop.

The crackling glass still rings as tires screech beyond shattered blinds.

            Quiet sobs fill the void

                        where gunfire had been.

The father sighs, his family safe, his home destroyed,

            His secrets so rudely revealed.

He peeks outside, in the dim light,

                   thinking only of how badly his grass needs cutting

                            and whether his house will ever be sold.

Here, the poem’s story is mirrored in its visual rhetoric. The first stanza consists of alternating but uniformly indented, end-stopped lines connoting order even in the midst of disaster.  It almost does not matter that a solitary line interrupts the terror in the night because the second stanza, with its craggy indents, betrays a father’s secret life.

While I personally find “Death in the Foyer” and “2:17 a.m.” two of the most intriguing poems in Altman’s first collection, this chapbook’s scope is far reaching.  He explores the lethal neutrality of animal instinct in the poems “Wake Up Call” and “Her Woods” in the same proportion as the will to live and love in “The Groom’s Mother Has Cancer.”

“Death in the Foyer” can be found on the Finishing Line Press website at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/death-in-the-foyer-by-david-r-altman/.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer in the English department at Kennesaw State University. JoAnn received her MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Replublic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.