Guest Poet Blogger: Julene Tripp Weaver
April 28, 2009
My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and MyblogLog, originally uploaded by luc legay.
Twitter: A Place to Play with Language Shorts
Facebook Status Statement Rang in National Poetry Month
By Julene Tripp Weaver
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Happy National Poetry Month!!
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Twitter is a new language play land; you can find me there @trippweavepoet. Many use Twitter for wordsmith play. My twitter friend sends out a daily word prompt, @poetwist, and what a perfect place for Haiku!
Here are some of my Tweets from days gone by (I could not help but edit a teeny tiny bit):
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carrot turnip rutabaga parsnip beet/eat roots/cilantro & green onion rich underground mineral perfection for our ingestion.
dual cancellation=free time: Lenin oversees Fremont: exit shoes=earth=calm: Oscar Wilde=feminist-flip-flop verse: precocious time.
we cannot interrogate words on a page, not you, nor Freud, Plato or Socrates, but we talk endless interpretation breathing ourselves to life
slow temple: bone—a long stretch—blues bullet in the brain—stop such pain: blame: bullets sold out: temple pressure point nil: chill
snake a break, eat a tad, take a caffeine/theobromine jag, forget spelling, even if it is compelling, eyes lock forward on text need rest.
I finger knotted birch, the red copper hemming on a basket woven, cross hatched rough skin, an outside life we wish to conceive, breathe.
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Then there is Facebook, where National Month started with a word blast organized by Seattle poet Dana Guthrie Martin. She made up the name, FaBoSteMe, for Facebook Statement Me and posted an event page. She sent out a call to write a series of status statement updates on Facebook, each writer did a half hour improvisational writing sprint. There was words flying from 6:30 a.m. through midnight. Many new friends were made.
Yes, I signed up! Facebook with its additional character capability gives even more word play space.
My tactic for this Facebook challenge? I used quotes from poetry books that are stacked on my floor (a great storage place for books!). I usually check (with a pencil) lines that I resonate with. I spent about an hour prep time flipping through books jotting down lines. When it was my turn, I entered the line in quotes with the name of the poet, then wrote a improvisational response!
It was stressful due to computer worries, but fun! Below are a few samples from my FaBoSteMe posts:
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FaBoSteMe Posts
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“The first few steps are/hard anywhere.” Clarence Major, Waiting for Sweet Betty
Tell me about it, how the earth intrudes in it’s misery undergrowth.
“Subtraction is about take away,/but what is left is never enough…” Jayne Pupek, Forms of Intercession
This game where we lose ground,
mountains blown asunder by our own hand.
“…a new peace,/an egg-blue lease on calm…” Kevin Clark, In the Evening of No Warning
accurate as bronze on pipes
the water inside running silent
in our walls blood cool as a snake.
“…powdered milk of human kindness…” Reginald Shephard, Angel, Interrupted
raining talc on a babies rump the glide of your forgiveness
“Or what peace I thought I’d find there/in the steel-ribbed cage of a captured god.” Michelle Bitting, Good Friday Kiss
in the brazed cavern of some holy
bereft I said a prayer
Try this exercise yourself! Use your favorite books, find some favorite lines, respond in your own words on either Facebook Statement or Twitter.
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Thank you for reading my guest blog!
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Julene Tripp Weaver has a chapbook written from the work I do in the world, “Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues” (Finishing Line Press). Garrison Keillor featured a poem from it on The Writer’s Almanac: a poet’s dream come true!
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Guest Poet Blogger: Alex Grant: The Ringmaster
April 25, 2009
Carousel Dreams VI, originally uploaded by georgiannalane.
The Ringmaster
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The first ring is contained in a small box no bigger than your fingernail.
We keep it on a shelf with minor planets and constellations-the beasts,
people, sawdust-the random arrangement of atoms and circumstances
that make up the world. I once knew a woman who believed that every
moment of every life was moving inexorably toward the same vanishing
point-the myriads moving on a giant canvas toward an invisible pinhole
somewhere in the middle distance. The stars continue to burn. The seas
pay homage to the sky. The brittle shards of days under your fingernails.
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The Magician by Alex Grant
April 25, 2009
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The Magician
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Stars on his fingernails, sky in his hair, breath of the sea in his voice.
His father sailed west on an Ottoman clipper, journey of the Magus
from Constantinople. The magician knows the world, feels its blind
dominions held tight in the sleight of his hand. We stumble through
the world like drunk men in a fog, outstretched arms clutching at the
air. Now you see it, now you don’t — then he takes your breath away.
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BIO
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Alex Grant’s collection Chains & Mirrors(NCWN/Harperprints) won the 2006 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award(Best North Carolina poetry collection). His second collection,The White Book, was released in 2008 by Main St. Rag Publishing. His full-length ms., Fear of Moving Water, a recent finalist for the Philip Levine, Brittingham & Pollak, Tupelo Open and Lena-Miles WeverTodd prizes, will be released by Wind Publications in late 2009. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in a number of national journals, including The Missouri Review, Smartish Pace, Best New Poets 2007, Arts & Letters, The Connecticut Review, Nimrod and Seattle Review. He lives in Chapel Hill , NC , with his wife, Tristi, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess. The Magician was a recent Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review.
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Web page:
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Fruit Fix by Diane Lockward
April 21, 2009
Fruit Fix
…………I’m often asked why I write poems about fruit—the strawberry, blueberry, apricot, apple, and others. My obsession with fruit is part of a larger larger obsession with food in general. Of course, it goes back to my childhood. I was a fussy eater whose father insisted that every plate be cleaned. I became adept at surreptitiously getting rid of what I could not bear to swallow. I made unnecessary trips to the bathroom to flush away wads of liver. I coughed asparagus into napkins. I stuffed my pockets with filet of sole. I plastered cottage ham under the dining room table. I risked danger. Food could get me in trouble.
…………….In early adolescence I was a bit pudgy. The foods I loved—cake, cookies, candy, ice cream sundaes—were prohibited by my father who wanted me slender. My cravings only increased. I longed for something sweet and sticky. On the sly I consumed entire jars of Marshmallow Fluff. …………….I went to Sunday school, racking up eleven years of perfect attendance. That’s where I first met Eve and learned about the garden, the snake, and the apple. I must have filed all of that away for future use. Fruit, temptation, capitulation.
……………And then I saw the 1963 film, Tom Jones. I was mesmerized by that famous eating scene in which Tom and a buxom woman he meets at an inn sit at opposite ends of a long table and proceed to rip apart chicken legs and stuff their faces with juicy grapes, all the while gazing at each other with—yes!—seduction in their eyes. Food and sex. Of course! An extension of the apple.
…………… I have been punished for my transgressions. Several years ago I developed a cranky stomach. Right at the top of the list of foods I could no longer eat—most of my favorite fruits. I only want them more. I am tantalized by their colors and aromas, their suggestive shapes, their various textures, the seeds, the skin. They are dangerous. They will make me suffer. I only want them more.
……………..Writing about fruit is my way of getting what I want.
Organic Fruit by Diane Lockward
April 21, 2009
Illustration Avacados, originally uploaded by rainy city.
Organic Fruit
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I want to sing
a song worthy of
the avocado, renegade
fruit, strict individualist, pear
gone crazy. Praise to its skin
like an armadillo’s, the refusal
to adulate beauty. Schmoo-shaped
and always face forward, it is what it
is. Kudos to its courage, its inherent love
of democracy. Hosannas for its motley coat,
neither black, brown, nor green, but purple-hued,
like a bruise. Unlike the obstreperous coconut, the
avocado yields to the knife, surrenders its hide of leather,
blade sliding under the skin and stripping the fruit. Praise
to its nakedness posed before me, homely, yellow-green,
and slippery, bottom-heavy like a woman in a Renoir, her
flesh soft velvet. I cup the fruit in my palm, slice and hold,
slice and hold, down to the stone at the core, firm fist at the
center. Pale peridot crescents slip out, like slivers of moon.
Exquisite moment of ripeness! a dash of salt, the first bite
squishes between tongue and palate, eases down my
throat, oozes vitamins and oil. Could anything be more
delicious, more digestible? Plaudits to its versatility,
yummy in Cobb salad, saucy in guacamole, boldly
stuffed with crabmeat. My avocado dangles from
a tree, lifts its puckered face to the sun, pulls
all that light inside. Praise it for being small,
misshapen, and durable. Praise it for
the largeness of its heart.
Diane Lockward Bio
April 20, 2009
Diane Lockward is the author of What Feeds Us, (Wind Publications, 2006). The collection received the Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize. Diane is also the author of two previous collections, Eve’s Red Dress (Wind Publications, 2003) and a chapbook, Against Perfection (Poets Forum Press, 1998). Her poems have been published in several anthologies, including Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. Her poems have also appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, and Prairie Schooner.
Diane is the recipient of a 2003 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and has received awards from North American Review, Louisiana Literature, the Newburyport Art Association, and the St. Louis Poetry Center. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and read by Garrison Keillor on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.
Diane conducts writing workshops for young and old poets, inexperienced and experienced poets. She also conducts workshops for teachers on how to teach poetry. She was a featured poet at the 2005 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and a workshop presenter at the New Jersey State Council of Teachers of English Conference in both 2003 and 2006.
Diane has also been a featured poet at a number of festivals, such as the Warren County Poetry Festival, the Inkberry Festival, the Long Branch Poetry Festival, the Walt Whitman Poetry Festival, the 2006 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, and the 2007 Burlington Book Festival.
A former high school English teacher, Diane now works as a poet-in-the-schools for both the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
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Guest Poet Blogger: Linda Benninghoff
April 17, 2009
Deer
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They came to Lloyd Neck seeking
New grass and bushes,
A place to roam unseen.
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I see them running through
Our yard,
Sometimes just brown
Backs catching sunlight.
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Yesterday four deer ran through,
Two mothers,
Two fawns,
Their eyes gelling with sunlight,
Their tails lifted high,
Necks outstretched,
Seeking something other
Than what we could give them.
Absorbed, intent–
As if they knew
A surplus of deer
Brings guns.
And although they seem
At one with the winter grass,
Brown oaks, green hemlock,
They carry the weight of death
With their beauty
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Remembering the Catbird
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She came north every summer
Nested in the ilex,
Sat on the metal pole
That marks the oil burner tank
In our yard,
And wanted to do nothing but sing.
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My mother remembers waking to the
Plain bird’s song early in the spring mornings—
As if happiness could begin at sunrise,
Last till evening,
And days could be spent in praise.
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When I discovered the catbird’s rumpled body,
A hand’s span of grey feathers left
Every other part of her disappeared,
She seemed to have no words for me.
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I wonder still why she cannot
Return south this year with her mate
Bring up fledglings,
Sit in the sun and praise
As if praising were everything,
Dying and living nothing
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Linda Benninghoff has published “Remembering the Catbird” in a chapbook of the same name published by MiPoesias.com Benninghoff won a chapbook contest at Kritya in India, and graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University where she majored in English. She has an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Stony Brook. She has published most recently in MiPoesias, Agenda and Ocho.
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Guest Blogger: Grace Curtis Interviews Poet Kathy Fagan
April 15, 2009
An Interview with Poet, Kathy Fagan
by Grace Curtis
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Recently, I took a close look at the poetry of Kathy Fagan. She is the editor of The Journal, http://english.osu.edu/research/journals/thejournal/default.cfm, the literary magazine of The Ohio State University, where she is a full-time professor of English. Lip, Eastern Washington University Press, http://www.ewu.edu/ewupress/poetry/lip.htm,
is her fourth book of poetry. Fagan’s work in The Charm, her third book, is thoroughly refreshing. It’s funny, insightful, inventive and lush. It is all the things that make reading a poet’s work cover to cover, a wonderful experience. Following are some thoughtful answers to questions I posed to her about her new book, Lip, her writing process, the writing life and her sources of inspiration.
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You can find her new book, Lip, at: http://www.amazon.com/Lip-Kathy-Fagan/dp/1597660493/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240249260&sr=1-1
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GC Tell us about your new book, Lip.
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KF As the jacket copy says, Lip is an insolent kind of book—one reader called it “gnarly,” which I like—filled with primarily female speakers who alternately rage, praise, sing, and meditate. I’ve always worked inside and outside all kinds of poetic structures, and this book is no exception to that—there are prose poems, pantoums, sonnet-like poems, innovative forms, narratives, lyrics, experimental utterances—but I’ve discovered that another abiding interest of mine is voice and persona. I like to think of Lip as a little purgatory of voices, an opera of sorts. In fact, the manuscript began with the title Poems for a Small Stage, and many of the poems take passages from other texts for their titles, epigraph-titles, so to speak. I wanted my speakers to be engaged with other speakers and texts, as in a stage production.
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GC Can you talk a little about your “writing life.” How do you fit in all the things you do? Teaching, editing The Journal, home, family, and writing?
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KF It used to be that writing took a backseat to everything else. No more. I don’t have any magic formula for how that happened; it just did. Age maybe. A deepening commitment. I love teaching and doing The Journal; it’s my way of socializing, my way of being a writer among writers. Since I’m shy and no good at schmoozing, I communicate via the poem that needs workshopping or editing, and that seems to work to create community for me. These activities also help to create structure in my life, which I’ve discovered I very much require in order to be productive. Of course, the demands of job and home and family often overwhelm—that’s life. My work finds a place among those other elements because without it everything else becomes meaningless.
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GC Can you talk a little about teaching and also about editing The Journal, the literary magazine for The Ohio State University? Do those things compliment your writing? Is it difficult to stay on task with your writing even beyond the amount of time other things take? Does it help or hinder your own creativity?
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KF Maybe I just answered this question? Yes, it’s difficult to stay on task. This year especially, because the book appeared and I’m in the middle of some intense work on the next book, some of my ordinarily passable organizational skills with regard to the magazine have suffered. I try not to allow my teaching to slide. Everybody knows that life is cyclical; sometimes your focus is one place, sometimes some place else. It’s true that writers with academic careers can get either distracted or tunnel-visioned or both; my sense is that most folks are doing the best they can to eke out a living and do their art.
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GC I recently read your book, The Charm. It was wonderful. I liked the concept of the charms in poems scattered throughout. It is such a nice unifying approach. How did you come up with that concept for the book?
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KF Thanks, Grace. I like that book, too. The book was, in fact, “charmed,” I think, in the sense that the poems were composed fairly quickly—or quickly for me; I’m a slow writer—and it was published nearly the moment it was finished. Zoo Press, now famously defunct, gave me a very beautiful book for which I’ll always be grateful. My current publisher is hoping to reprint it some time, but there are still original copies floating around.
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Anyway, to your question: I’d written over a long period of time a book of magnificent loss, a book of elegies called MOVING & ST RAGE, and The Charm felt like an antidote to the losses in M&ST R. At least to me. I had so much fun writing the poems. I realize now that many of them are just as dark as the poems in the previous book, but it was liberating for me to play with various exercises—the ekphrastic, the translitic, the alphabet poems, the haiku, the Egyptian afterlife poems—and not be focused on subject matter, as I had been in MOVING & ST RAGE. As for the charm concept, I loved the many meanings of the word, from birds to spells to charm bracelets. But the heart of it is in this story: M&ST R is dedicated to a mentor and friend of mine who died in 1991. She had given me a charm to wear, a friendship coin half, and left for me her half when she died. I wear them together now. That was the true beginning of the obsession.
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GC Your poems feel so natural. One friend of mine described them as ‘organic,’ meaning they feel so easy yet so engaging and wonderfully put together. And, they seem to spring forth from the ordinary; home, family, the neighborhood, childhood. Can you discuss the source of your inspiration? Your poetic project?
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KF My first teacher was Philip Levine. He used to say we had more interesting things in our pockets than in our poems, and he was right. That’s stuck with me, the “no ideas but in things” notion that he was passing down to us. Like Phil, my background is fairly modest. I was the first in my family to go to college, for instance. Nobody knew any writers. But the family was Irish Catholic, first-generation, so we were surrounded by story tellers and dancers and singers. I was a miserable failure at all of that. Poetry was my default art form. Yet I find myself in middle age wanting poetry to dance and sing and tell stories and just be. I’ve never been comfortable in my own skin, but I want poems to be.
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GC I noticed frequent mentions of dreams and nightmares in your poems in The Charm. Can you talk about that a little, as a source of inspiration?
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KF Childhood was a great source of material for that book. And childhood is scary, no matter if yours was good or bad, right? I mean, we begin as tiny defenseless creatures. That’s got to be terrifying in and of itself. Then there’s nursery rhymes and Disney films. It’s awful. I found myself turning back to childhood memory, even the toughest stuff, with some tenderness while writing The Charm.
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GC One of the things I enjoy so much about your work is your humor. It is clear that you have a great sense of humor that pervades your work. I love the humor in “Charm to Avoid Dying a Second Death”, “Misfortune Cookies” and in so many others. It is so refreshing. Can you talk about the humor in your poetry?
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KF Again, this goes back to the horrible sadness of MOVING & ST RAGE, both a response to that sadness and the acknowledgment at some point in my aging process that as heartbreaking as all this mortal life is, it’s also freaking hilarious. I think it’s important to acknowledge that in art at some level.
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GC You have some wonder ekphrastic poems. Are you often inspired by art, music other literature?
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KF References to other literature goes with the territory of being a writer, but mostly I’m a sight slut. I love to look at stuff. Art is good, scenery is good, people are good. And I adore music, all kinds, in a completely ignorant way. I’m an idiot about music and enjoy myself immensely listening to it. The project I’m currently at work on is mostly about trees. I’m only happy when I’m walking and seeing trees these days, and almost all my writing is coming out of that.
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GC What advice do you have for new writers? Submit or not? How much? How often? Journaling and so forth.
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KF Until very recently I kept a daily journal. Now I carry a little notebook around with me just for quick sketches or impressions. I’ve used a small tape recorder. People do what they need to. But my best advice for new writers is to read. One has to train oneself to really hear poetry. As Eliot says, poetry communicates before it is understood. The problem with poetry, which is also its beauty, is that it is rhythm mediated through language. In other words, we’re forced to use our rational brains when really all we want to do is groove to the sounds the words are making. Music affects us bodily. Language affects us intellectually. Therein lies the tension of poetry. Some folks avoid that. For me, it’s one of the best ways of knowing I’m alive.
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As for poe-biz, I say avoid it for as long as possible. When you’re ready to send work out, find magazines and presses that publish work most like your own. Again, that requires reading and lots of it. Publishing poetry and writing poetry are two very different pursuits. Everybody enjoys a little public recognition, but learning how to build your self-esteem by the discipline of writing alone is, in the long run, going to do a writer a whole lot more good than looking for the little ego-strokes journal publications provide.
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Kathy Fagan’s newest collection is Lip (Eastern Washington UP, 2009). She is also the author of the National Poetry Series selection The RaftMOVING & ST RAGEThe Charm (Zoo, 2002). Fagan is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohioana Library, and the Ohio Arts Council. A former director of the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, she is currently Professor of English and Editor of The Journal. (Dutton, 1985), the Vassar Miller Prize winner (Univ of North Texas, 1999).
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Grace Curtis is an MFA student in poetry at Ashland University ,Ashland, Ohio . She is a poet and is interning with The Antioch Review.
Guest Poet Posting: Anne Sexton
April 13, 2009
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Guest Poet Blogger: Jane Satterfeld
April 12, 2009
Sylvia Plath, originally uploaded by sabrinalouise987.
There’s a blurry photo in the beat-up Bantam paperback “Letters Home” I bought in a secondhand bookstore in Iowa City that’s long captured my attention: Sylvia Plath poised on a stone pasture fence (or ruined wall?) in Yorkshire while visiting her poet-husband’s family. Writing home to her mother, Plath describes a visit to Top Withens, an elevated moorland spot a few miles up a jagged pathway from the Brontë Parsonage—Emily’s favored walking spot with Keeper, her mastiff—and the ruined homestead purported to be the original for Wuthering Heights.
Plath immortalized the visit with a sketch of “the deserted black stone house” and eventually, a poem, packed with vivid impressions of place that still stand: the heathered hills, the sheep with their “hard, marbly baas.”
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Someday, I thought, as I took the image in, I’ll make that pilgrimage, though I’d never have imagined the circumstances in which my visit took place, never imagined writing the memoir my notes that day would start: December skies and scattered snow. I stand on Charlotte Bronte’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick. Three months pregnant, thinking about the legendary body of work crafted by these childless sisters, I looked down from the Parsonage toward the teashops that lined the steep, cobblestoned streets. It seemed foolish to follow ghosts, to browse museum cases and memorabilia (annotated volumes of the sisters’ masterpieces, teatowels, postcards, porcelain busts) and museum cases where letters, documents, and assorted curiosities that been collected and offered up for the public gaze. A small, blurred high contrast print caught my eye—the one reputed photograph of Charlotte Brontë. Iwas taken aback: the image caught little of her spirit—the ferocity with which she carved her own destiny and transmuted longing and loss and self-knowledge into the implacable Lucy Snowe, or the indomitable Jane Eyre. And there, at the end of the displays, stacks of daily newspapers, plastered with the image of Diana, magna-mater of the modern woman gracing TV screens and tabloids—a Northamptonshire girl like scale. I’ve lost the photo I know I posed for that day, taken by my daughter’s father while I paused on the Parsonage steps, too exhausted to make the trip to Top Withens, turning back from the path that energized the “scribbling sisters” and the youthful Sylvia Plath. We look to photos for clues about a subject’s life; to their words for paths to and through our own lives. In that blurry photo I still find haunting, a young writer, stylishly dressed, looks out to clear and windless skies where “the sun, by a miracle, was out…” It’s moment snatched out of time—the subject still free of what the future holds. A young woman, committed to her art, newly married, an ocean away from her homeland, stands on her literary heroine’s ground. How far, she must have thought, I’ve come; how much farther to go.
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Jane Satterfield is the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Her poetry collections are Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir, 2003) and Shepherdess with an Automatic (WWPH, 2000). Among her awards are three Maryland State Arts Council Grants in Poetry, Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. For nonfiction, she’s received the Gold Medal in the Essay from the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society, the Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize, the John Guyon Award in Literary Nonfiction and the Heekin Foundation’s Cuchulain Prize in Rhetoric for the Essay. Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of A Year in Britain and Beyond will appear on Demeter Press in 2009.
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