Blogalicious

Poetry Festival: A Celebration of Literary Journals

2013-05-16T09:52:00.000-04:00

Mapping the Line: Poets on Teaching

2013-05-09T09:30:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for some ideas to fire up your own poetry or that of your students, Mapping the Line: Poets on Teaching provides terrific material for poets, teachers, and students. Editor Bruce Guernsey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University where he taught for twenty-five years. He is also an accomplished poet with six full-length collections, most recently From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010. His work has several times been featured on Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry column. The poem, Back Road, was featured just this past March.

Following his retirement, Guernsey became the editor of Spoon River Poetry Review. As editor he introduced a regular feature called "Poets on Teaching." That was one of my favorite parts of each issue of the journal.

During his tenure as editor, Guernsey would invite one well-established poet who was also a teacher, one per issue, to write an article about the craft of poetry and to include an assignment that teachers and poets might use. When he left the journal, Guernsey took the feature with him. He has now gathered those articles, as well as some he subsequently solicited, into Mapping the Line: Poets on Teaching. I am happy to be included in this outstanding book and happy to recommend it to you.

The book begins with a Foreword by Ted Kooser. That is followed by twenty essays, covering a wide range of topics. For example, there's "Who's Writing This?" by Cecilia Woloch, "Metaphor as Form" by David Baker, and "Three Exercises for Free Verse" by Wesley McNair. My own contribution is "The Extravagant Love Poem," a discussion of the blazon and anti-blazon with an exercise employing metaphors.

Other authors include Baron Wormser, Kevin Stein, Andrea Hollander, M.B. McLatchey, Robert Wrigley, Doug Sutton-Ramspeck, Guernsey, David Baker, Miho Nonaka, Todd Davis, Sheryl St. Germain, Charlotte Pence, Megan Grumbling, Laurie Lamon, Betsy Sholl, and Claudia Emerson.

Teachers will find this a very useful and informative collection. Poets will find it instructive and inspirational. Students will find that it contains a traveling workshop. This book will be a happy addition to your classroom or your desk at home.

The Poet on the Poem: Robert Wrigley

2013-05-02T13:39:00.003-04:00

I'm delighted to have Robert Wrigley as my guest poet for this occasional feature at Blogalicious.

Robert Wrigley is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Anatomy of Melancholy. His awards include the Kingsley Tufts Award, for Reign of Snakes; the Poets' Prize, for Lives of the Animals; and the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, for In the Bank of Beautiful Sins. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Idaho, in the woods, on Moscow Mountain, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. He is the Director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Today's poem comes from Anatomy of Melancholy.

Click Cover for Amazon

Earthquake Light

March 11, 2011

Earlier tonight an owl nailed the insomniac white hen.
She'd fluttered up onto a fence post to peer at the moonlight,
to meditate in her usual way on the sadness of the world

and perhaps the hundreds of vanished eggs of her long life here.
I was watching from the porch and thinking she ought not to be
where she was, and then she wasn't, but taken up, a white hankie

diminishing in the east, one the owl would not ever drop.
Now an hour after, the new night wind spins up a leghorn ghost
of her fallen feathers, under the moon and along the meadow grass.

Corpse candle, friar's lantern, Will-O'-the-wisp chicken soul
dragging its way toward me, that I might acknowledge her loss
and her generosity, and wonder again about her long-standing

inability to sleep on certain nights. There are sky lights
beyond our understanding and dogs whose work it is to scent
the cancer no instrument can see. On the nights she could not sleep,

the hen Cassandra Blue perched herself with a clear view to the west
and studied the sky, every two seconds canting her head a few degrees
one way or the other. What she saw or if she saw it I cannot say,

though it seemed that something, always, somewhere, was about to go
terribly wrong. Then again, it always is. Now there's a swirl
of wind in the meadow, spinning three or four final white feathers

west to east across it, and there's a coyote come foolishly out
into the open, hypnotized by feather flicker, or scent, then seeing
by moonlight the too-blue shimmer of my eyes, and running for its life.

DS: Almost every line of this poem contains some kind of musical device. Line 1, for example, has the internal rhyme of tonight and white. The -ight sound is strewn throughout the poem—moonlight, night, might—as are the long i words—Life, friar's, I, sky lights, eyes. There's also a good deal of assonance and alliteration in the poem. Tell us how you create this network of sounds.

RW: Well, there’s no formula; there’s no scheme or discernible pattern. It’s just what I’ve always referred to as writing—which is, for the most part, the only way I’m interested in writing—via sound linkages. My poems, generally at least, work toward sonic unity. As much as anything else, this is the way I learned to make poems, allowing the sounds of individual words and syllables not only to unify the poem but even to determine its progress. Richard Hugo, who was one of my teachers, always said, when the poem requires a decision between music and meaning, always pick music. This doesn’t mean that meaning—whatever that might be; poems mean, but how they mean is vastly more important than what—should not matter. It means, rather, that “picking music” allows the poem’s language to conceive itself into being. And it forces the poet to employ all of his/her resources in order to make the conceptions of the language cohere. In this regard, the sound of the poem, as Frost would have said, is the sense.

I might also say that I have a particular fondness for the musical power inherent in long vowel sounds. Consonants are mostly percussive, and I love percussion. But vowels are notes. Balancing vowels and consonants is the way we make our music on the page.

DL: Talk about your long lines. Did you write this poem in long lines or revise into them?

RW: I write line by line. Always do. And I have to have some sense of the line, however loose it might seem to someone else, in order to see how the poem might move on. As with the sounds of the words, I let lines—and, therefore, line breaks—help determine the poem’s progress toward a unified structure. As I remember writing this poem, I can’t recall ever trying to make that first line be anything but a longish (15 syllables in all) declarative sentence. And that declaration demands elaboration. The verb nailed, and the adjectives insomniac and white are where the poem’s complexity is begun. Nailed, in this context, is a kind of vernacularism for gotten or, in the case of the hen, killed, although it may also be said that Japan was itself nailed by the March 11, 2011, earthquake. White is pretty ordinary, adjectivally-speaking, but it comes into substantial play in the totality of the poem’s imagery. The natural symbolic values of white are exactly what they are. Insomniac is the ringer, if you will; it was for me in the writing. Chickens don’t have trouble sleeping, usually, but animals have mysterious . . . skills and sensitivities. Thus the cancer-sniffing dogs later on. Once I had the first line, I felt the rhythmical contract was established, so most of the subsequent lines have a similar length, both in terms of syllables and stresses. This is also a unifying strategy. Like Frost, I believe the poem is (perhaps even must be) a momentary stay against confusion.

DL: I've noticed that you have an affection for symmetrical verses, i.e., stanzas with the same number of lines and fairly even line lengths. But I've also noticed a lot of variety from poem to poem in your book, Anatomy of Melancholy. What made you choose 3-line stanzas for this poem?

RW: I like the challenge of regularizing, I suppose. Building stanzas that are not only symmetrical but whose construction comes to be a necessary component of how they get said what must be said: well, that’s just one of the many things that might be described as increasing the degree of difficulty in the work of writing. And I’ve always been of the opinion that increasing the degree of difficulty formally or structurally is part of the process of deepening the poem’s complexity. I like to think these particular stanzas may be read vertically—that is, reading only the last word in each line, in three-word increments—and that a sense of the poem’s deeper statement may emerge.

The difficulty of the art is what addicts us to its creation, after all. We become infatuated with the possibilities of that difficulty, the challenge of the problem of the poem’s writing. I do see, looking back at earlier drafts, that, as I closed in on a final draft, the poem was first in six quatrains. Meaning the opening quatrain ended with a period, with her long life here. This would also have been when I noticed the effect of organizing the poem into tercets instead, so that sadness of the world is both the end of a line and the end of the first stanza. That stanza break allows the opening stanza’s final phrase to ring a bit longer, and what else is the poem about but the sadness of a world in which there is often no running for your life—not from owl, earthquake, or fate.

DL: I see another kind of symmetry in this poem, one of content. Tell us about the parallel between the owl and the hen introduced in the first stanza and the coyote and the speaker in the last stanza, the link between Cassandra Blue and the too-blue shimmer of the speaker's eyes, and the shared sleeplessness.

RW: The owl is not malign; it’s just an owl. The coyote, like the owl a predator, is drawn by the scent of potential prey, but it sees the eyes of the speaker in the moonlight, and sensing danger runs off. The too-blue shimmer is a play on blueness, depression, which both the speaker and the hen are afflicted by, for some reason. That the owl’s named Cassandra suggests that her sleeplessness has something to do with a gift (or more likely a curse) for prophecy, even if she knows only that something bad is about to happen. The unspoken presence, of course, is the earthquake, which is also not malignant but merely catastrophic. If there is a greater curse than knowing what will happen, I can’t imagine what it might be. And yet, the catastrophe that befalls the hen is not something, despite her Cassandra-like gift, she can foresee. Unless it is, which is all I think I can say, without saying too much.

DL: Your poem has several metaphors for the dead hen: white hankie, leghorn ghost, Corpse candle, friar's light, will-o'-the-wisp. Do you have a method for getting your brain to unleash these metaphors? Were there any that had to be omitted?

RW: Only that most of them are synonyms for one another: corpse candle and friar’s light being more of less the same thing as will-o’-the-wisp. White hankie as a kind of remembrance, I guess, and leghorn ghost being, for better or worse, chickenish. But the speaker’s role in the poem to this point is thoroughly passive; he’s a witness to the hen’s pondering and to her being killed. When this onslaught of figures comes in, he’s still sitting on the porch, but he’s active in his imaginative re-seeing, a re-seeing that is an endeavor to understand not only what he has seen and continues to see, but, as it turns out, what he will come to know the larger significance of.

DL: I consider a title the poem's first invitation to the reader. Yours is simple but elegant and inviting. Nevertheless, I wonder about its connection to the poem. The dating of the poem suggests some connection to the earthquake that occurred on that date in Japan, but the poem is clearly not set in Japan. Is this another kind of metaphor?

RW: The title came first. This is, almost always, a terrible thing for me. I was probably looking up something else, in a book or on-line, when I came across the phrase earthquake light, and an explanation thereof. It’s a real thing. Mysterious, abundantly theorized upon, and even challenged as myth, it’s something you can look up. There have been many reports of peculiar, seemingly sourceless lights in the sky at or near to areas of seismic, especially extreme seismic, activity. That such a phenomenon is not explainable but has been witnessed is what captured me immediately. The mystery of it appeals to me for many reasons, not the least of which is that I have this sense that there is a similar mystery attendant to the best poems. It’s not just in what gets said but in how it gets said, and that sort of mystery is mythic, bardic, and endlessly sweet to me.

The poem was composed within a few months of the Tohoku earthquake. My wife has had dreams of things happening before they’ve happened. I’ve had one or two. WTF, one thinks. And yet there is something as alive in the earth’s (write it) soul as there is in a poem. A poem written in German by Paul Celan, translated into English by Michael Hamburger, a poem not exactly explicitly stated but still astonishingly, breath-takingly clear: it rings, it resonates, it wallops, in some impossible-to-explain way, what feels like one’s actual soul. That kind of mystery, I mean, in which an insomniac hen may well be aware of or even foresee a catastrophic happening on the other side of the planet. Or perhaps in the vast nervy continuum of chickendom, a Japanese bantam beheld an otherworldly light in the sky, just before the earth itself moved.

Much as I confess I love the word chickendom, I also have to say that I’m honestly and deeply attuned to animals. There’s nothing misanthropic in that. I simply have come to admire the way most animals, especially wild animals, are at ease within their own skins in ways most human beings never are. Of course, Cassandra Blue is both domesticated and anthropomorphized. It may be that her sadness is in that.

***************************
Readers, please enjoy listening to Robert Wrigley read his poem, "Earthquake Light."

Poetry Reading at Farley's Bookshop

2013-04-29T13:40:00.000-04:00

I'll be reading this Thursday, May 2, in the First Thursday Series at Farley's Bookshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I've never been to New Hope, but have been told that it's a charming little town filled with artists and nifty shops. If you are in the area, please join me! Here are the details:

Thursday, May 2, 2013

First Thursday Series

Farley's Bookshop

44 South Main St.

New Hope, PA 18938

8:00 PM

reading followed by Q&A

Poetry Utopia at the Barred Owl Retreat

2013-04-23T09:52:00.002-04:00

Recently I treated myself to a poetry workshop. That's something I haven't done for quite a few years, but I'd been feeling sort of frustrated by my lack of productivity. I suspected that the stimulation of getting away and being part of a group might be just what I needed. I was right. It's now more than a week later and I still feel charged up.

I took the "Two-Day Revision Intensive" with Baron Wormser, a poet I first met at the Frost Place. He has been a mentor to me and an inspiration and a pal. I consider him not only a terrific poet but also an amazing teacher and workshop leader. The workshop was held at the Barred Owl Retreat in Worcester, Massachusetts. The place is owned by Jessica Bane Robert and her husband who purchased it with the idea of turning it into a haven for writers. What a great job they've done in accomplishing that goal. There are several rooms available for participants who choose to stay at the inn. I stayed at a nearby Marriott Courtyard, but was given a tour of the inn's rooms and found them very comfortable and spotless. More rooms are being added. The kitchen downstairs is gorgeous and newly renovated as are the dining room and living room. Most spectacular is the greenhouse room where we gathered both days. What a perfect spot that is! The grounds, too, are beautiful with lots of shrubs, trees, and even a large pond in the back of the house.

Our group of six women poets convened at 8:30 on Saturday morning. A delightful breakfast was available in the dining room along with an endless supply of coffee and tea. We introduced ourselves by each reading one finished poem. Then Baron talked for a while. As he did so, I took down names of poets whose work I need to re-visit—Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet), Walter Sutton (American Free Verse—already ordered and in my hands), Denise Levertov on free verse.

Then we went around the circle taking turns with our poems for revision. The critiques were truly intensive. One thing I really admire about the way Baron does a workshop is that I didn't just sit there waiting for my turn. Instead, I learned something from the comments that were made about other people's poems. We got through one round of poems in the morning, broke for a fabulous lunch, then moved on to the second round. I brought two poems which a few months ago I'd thought were finished, but which had come back each time I'd submitted them. So it had occurred to me that perhaps they weren't finished. When I learned for sure that they weren't, I wasn't discouraged but invigorated and excited about new possibilities.

We worked until 5:30 but were sustained by the delicious goodies Jessica baked for us. We then all went out to dinner together. I returned to my room around 8:30. I would not have thought I could put in such a long day, but I didn't even feel knocked out. In fact, I got right to work on some revisions. I can't remember when I last went twelve hours without checking my email!

The next morning we met at the inn at 8:30. We each found a quiet corner, set up our laptops, and worked on revisions. Again, I surprised myself as I wouldn't have thought I could revise with the clock ticking down, but I did. Baron had suggested that I make my first poem twice as long, so I really pushed it. Not everything I came up with will be retained, but I arrived at some lines and images that gave me pleasure. We gathered again at 10:30 and went over the revisions. Only one of us was able to get revisions for both poems—and that wasn't me. Again, we gave and received good feedback. Nobody yet had a finished poem but everyone went home fired up for the next revision.

Baron had asked us each to bring one extra poem in case we had time, which we did. We spent Sunday afternoon on those poems. We then hugged and parted around 4:00. I stayed over that night rather than make the 4-hour drive home after a long two days. So I had some more time to revise. And that's what I've been doing all week. If you're looking for a place to attend or give a workshop, I heartily recommend the Barred Owl Retreat.

Barred Owl Retreat from the outside

Dining Room where breakfast was served

Our meeting space

Deck off the meeting room

Lunch in the kitchen with Heidi, Carli, Baron, Jessica

Pond in the backyard

Lilies and Urine: Perfect Together

2013-04-17T09:34:00.000-04:00

I wish I'd written this essay, but I didn't. Pablo Neruda did. It's worth a careful read.

Toward An Impure Poetry

by Pablo Neruda

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest. Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists. The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things—all lend a curious attactiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized. In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out.

Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding— willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy's abandonment—moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet's concern, essential and absolute.

Those who shun the "bad taste" of things will fall flat on the ice.

Looking for Inspiration?

2013-04-09T08:55:00.000-04:00

It's National Poetry Month. Whether we're 30-day-challenge poets or once-a-week poets, we all want to get at least some new work underway this month. If you find yourself cursed with a lazy muse, try some of these sites for inspiration:

Poetry Challenge, by Robert Lee Brewer

30 / 30 Poetry Challenge 2013

Joanie Strangeland's blog

30 Poems in 30 Days , from NaPoWriMo

The Music in It: Adele Kenny's Poetry Blog
an inspiration word or phrase and a related poem for each of April’s thirty days

You might want to bookmark these links so that you can return to them after April is no more.

Supporting Poets and Poetry

2013-04-02T14:44:00.001-04:00

Every poet in America knows that April is National Poetry Month. There are numerous poem-a-day challenges available online for those who want to and are able to take on the challenge of writing a poem each and every day in April. I've confessed here before that I'm just not an everyday kind of poet. I put myself at the kitchen table several mornings a week and I do something poetry-related every day. That something else might be revising, reading, listening, submitting, working on my Poetry Newsletter or blog, catching up on P&W and The Writer's Chronicle, or perusing poetry journals.

So I'm not going to take on the big challenge because I know I can't / won't do it. However, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to acknowledge Poetry Month. My plan is to attend some local readings, participate in a weekend revision workshop led by Baron Wormser at the Barred Owl Retreat in Massachusetts, and go the extra mile to support poets and poetry by purchasing as many poetry and poetry-related books as I can without ending up in debtors' prison.

I'm off to a good start. Here's what's already on my table:

Where the Dead Are, by Wanda Praisner
Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Wrigley
Kingdom Animalia, by Aracelsis Girmay
The Switching/Yard, by Jan Beatty
Survivors' Picnic, by Deborah Bruce
Charms Against Lightning, by James Arthur

On order and eagerly awaited:

Gloryland, by Anne Marie Macari
The World Keeps Turning to Light: A Renga by the State Poets Laureate of America, by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Any suggestions for additional titles?

Here's a list of 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month, provided by the Academy of American Poets.

Tea and Conversation with Anne Marie Macari

2013-03-26T14:05:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, March 24, I attended a poetry conversation and reading at the Bernardsville Public Library. This twice yearly program, Tea and Conversation, is hosted by its creator, Julie Maloney. The program includes both prose writers and poets. This time Julie hosted New Jersey poet Anne Marie Macari.

Julie began the event with an interview. She's a terrific interviewer who makes sure she's very familiar with her guest's work and has her questions mapped out but is flexible enough to alter them or add to them as seems appropriate. She first asked Anne Marie how she came to poetry. Anne Marie told us that one day her high school English teacher, who hadn't been doing poetry with her students, was absent. Another teacher, one who wrote her own poetry, covered the class and simply read Whitman aloud to the class. And that lit the fire. English teachers, please pay attention to that! No one came in and did a brilliant analysis of Whitman; someone came in and simply read him aloud.

Julie asked Anne Marie what gave her the courage to delve into dark places in her poetry. Anne Marie paid tribute to her predecessors: Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Lucille Clifton. She said, "We don't write in a vacuum. We're part of a legacy."

Julie asked Anne Marie what she hoped people would take away from her work: Guts, the courage to face things, to do what you're afraid to do, to love.

When asked about her future plans, Anne Marie said she doesn't make plans. "The artist moves into the unknown." And she has no fear of that unknown.

We then moved to the reading part of the afternoon. Anne Marie read from Gloryland and She Heads into the Wilderness. She also read some poems from her forthcoming Red Deer, due out from Persea Books in 2015. The reading was followed by a Q&A with the audience asking the questions.

Thanks to Julie for bringing so many programs to writers. She runs a group called Women Reading Aloud. That program includes workshops, poetry with yoga, writing retreats to Spring Lake in NJ, and even a week-long retreat on an island off Greece. Check out Julie's website for more information.

Julie Maloney and Anne Marie Macari

Anne Marie meeting and greeting people as they arrived

Julie interviews Anne Marie

Julie and the library provide cookies, coffee, and tea

Anne Marie Macari Reads

Girl Talk Redux

2013-03-19T12:39:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday was the 6th annual Girl Talk: A Celebration of Women's History Month. I began this event because I thought it would be fun. I've continued running it because it is fun. A lot of fun. People say, Oh, it must take so much time to put this together. I am not being modest when I say that it does not take much time to put it together. It's held at my local library, so I don't have to clean my house. I ask for volunteers to bake cookies and others to bring beverages. I always get more than enough. The library staff sets up the room for us and arranges for two volunteers to handle the book sale table.

My job includes inviting the women poets, this year twenty-nine. If you want to run a similar event—and I encourage you to do so—that's a good number if each poet reads one poem. Invite a few more than you really think is just right because invariably a few drop out. We lost three this year due to illness. Invite poets who live pretty close to the event site. There will be fewer dropouts if the weather is uncooperative. One year we had a hurricane. This year we had snow. Also, poets who live nearby tend to bring more guests for the audience.

I also do PR for the event. Not a big job as this can all be done online. The librarian who works with me on this event sends a press release to local newspapers. I also ask the readers to each reach out and invite guests.

Each year I include some new faces and voices. Some of these new readers are women who've asked to be included; some are women recommended to me. It would be lovely to have everyone back each year, but you need to rotate a bit to keep the event fresh and to keep the total to a reasonable number.

I divide the reading into two parts, with a 15-minute break in the middle. That gives everyone a chance to browse the books and buy some. For the first few Girl Talks I invited all the readers with books to include one title for sale. However, starting last year I limited the book titles to more recent ones so the sale would be more manageable for the volunteers. This seemed to stimulate more rather than fewer sales. Fewer choices make for easier decisions? To stimulate book sales, each year I contribute copies of a craft book or anthology for a lottery. For each book a person buys, she puts her name in the basket. At the end of the day, there's a drawing. This year I gave away five copies of Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry.

I welcome the audience and introduce each poet. I do not give bios as I want the event to move along. However, bios are posted at the Girl Talk webpage.

Following the reading, the bakers go into the kitchen and bring out the cookies for the Reception. Our approximately 80 guests are all invited to stay and enjoy the cookies and engage in some poetry conversation. More books are purchased and books are signed. Guess who goes home with the leftover cookies? Me.

Here are some photos to give a sense of the day.

Book Sale Table. Visitors browsing and buying! What a lovely sight to see.

Crowd gathering before the reading. We filled the room. How lovely for poets to have a full room.

Poet Deb Gerrish who so graciously brought a beautiful rose for each reader. And baked!

And then brought beverages for one of the poets who couldn't make it. All in the midst of snow.

Jean Meyers waiting to read. I met her years ago in a Dodge Poetry Workshop.

Sandra Duguid signing her just released first book!

Girl Talk: A Poetry Reading in Celebration of Women's History Month

2013-03-13T09:46:00.000-04:00

Sometimes It's Good to Be for the Birds

2013-03-06T10:02:00.000-05:00

That is, if you're talking about Thrush Poetry Journal. This is a newish online journal, the child of poet Helen Vitoria. Departing from the more usual 1-4 issues per year, this journal appears every other month. Because of the increased frequency of the journal's appearance, each issue includes a limited number of poets. The current March issue includes 15 poets, each with one to six poems. And that's it. No essays, no reviews, no art. Just pure poetry.

Naturally, I'm delighted to be one of those poets. My poem Dreaming to Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling” is included. The muse for the poem was Philip F. Deaver's poem, Flying, which appeared on The Writer's Almanac back in 2005. Because I liked the poem, I saved it. You never know when you might need a poem.

I subsequently used Deaver's poem as the stimulus for a prompt in my Poetry Newsletter. As I often do, I wrote my own poem first. After all, I choose poems that do something I'd like to do. I like it when poems talk to each other, when one poem sets another in motion. Deaver's poem and the prompt will be in my forthcoming book, The Crafty Poet.

Thrush is attractively designed and Vitoria is working social media to the journal's advantage—and to the benefit of her poets and readers. She has a personal page and a journal page on Facebook and regularly posts notices and links to the journal and individual poems. This undoubtedly increases her readership and broadens exposure for the poets. The day this current issue went live her site received close to 3000 visits. Vitoria is undoubtedly also increasing the popularity of her online journal by giving a quick response to submissions. My acceptance came with a lovely personal note about the poem. I realize that not all editors can do this, but I appreciate it when it happens.

I also have a poem, His Two Arms, at Zocalo Public Square. This poem, previously published in my book, What Feeds Us, was taken by Zocalo more than a year ago. I'd sort of forgotten about it, so finding it there came as a nice surprise. The poetry editor, Stephanie Brown, took four of my poems. This is the last of that group. Brown said she liked this poem because it's rare to find a love poem by a woman about a man. Is it?

Who Is That Masked Poet?

2013-02-28T12:18:00.000-05:00

Every time I check out a journal's guidelines and find a request to remove all identifying information from my submission, I feel mildly annoyed. It's not a huge big deal, but I find it sort of a pain to have to highlight and delete my name and address from each poem as I combine the poems into one file. This request is usually accompanied by a directive not to include a cover letter or credits.

Mostly what annoys me is the claim of objectivity and the desire to just take the best work while not being seduced by names or credits. Shouldn't an editor be able to rise above partiality and the allure of names? Shouldn't the editor be able to simply weigh and evaluate and respond to the work, even if the poet's name is there? I mean, really, isn't that what editors are supposed to do, that is, make objective judgments?

I just checked out the site of a new online journal. (Notice that I've removed its name so as to appear impartial!) This journal specifies that all names must be removed, etc., etc. However, the first issue of the journal consists entirely of pieces that were solicited by the editors. I guess that means they invited poets whose names and work they knew, right? Hm. Isn't there a contradiction going on here?

I know it's a rather standard procedure for new journals, print and online, to solicit work for the first issue. The goal is to set a high standard for subsequent issues. That makes sense to me and is unobjectionable. But to say thereafter that we don't care who you are sort of strikes me as hypocritical.

Perhaps I'm putting too fine a point on this, but I generally keep going when I'm asked to remove identifying information. It just seems silly to me. On the other hand, I think it's a good policy for a contest or a fellowship.

The other day I checked out a set of guidelines from a journal that had just put out a call for submissions. Unlike almost every other journal that uses online submissions, this one requires that the submitter submit each poem as a separate file. The editors say that's how they read the poems so that's the way they want to receive them. What a nuisance! I don't understand how or why receiving five poems in one file would preclude reading the poems individually, one at a time. I've even seen guidelines where the editor specified a font style and size. I've seen guidelines that specify which side of the page should contain the poet's name.

I read and heed guidelines, but when they're idiosyncratic, I usually begin to think that the journal is just not the right fit for my poems.

Just Another Poetry Scam

2013-02-20T12:46:00.000-05:00

I wonder if any of you have received the same phone call I received last week. A guy called asking for Diane Lockward, the writer. I said that was me. He then explained that he worked for some TV station and the producers were planning to do a feature on a writer. They were going to select a writer who wasn't yet hugely famous and they expected to catapult that writer into huge fame. I was one of three candidates for this program. He did a lot of name dropping—Judge Wapner, Judge Judy, Jim Masters, Doug Llewelyn. He asked a few questions, but very few, about my writing. He asked me to go to this TV website and to view one of their videos. It was very nice. That, he said, was the sort of video they would do for me—if I were selected. He was quite a fast talker. A dangler of carrots.

Finally, I got to ask, Okay, so where does this go from here? He said I'd first be interviewed by phone by a board of eight. He said the other two writers had already been interviewed and we needed to move fast on this. I asked when I'd be interviewed. He said within 48 hours, maybe that very day. By now I'd been on the phone for almost 30 minutes and had already begun to think this was a cartload of nonsense. I wasn't sure if the guy even realized that I'm a poet although he did say that they (who?) liked my work because it wasn't offensive. Is that supposed to be good? He was vague about how he'd obtained my name.

He kept talking and talking, repeating what he'd already said. Then finally he slipped in something about they would make a DVD for me and I'd get 12 copies and could reproduce and distribute them. Hm. Who's going to pay for that, I thought. He asked if my time was flexible. If the Ricki Lake show called, could I hop on a plane to California?

Then he said they'd be investing $40,000 in me and I'd contribute just $5000. Really?? I then asked, Okay, let me be clear—are you saying I would have to give you $5000 right now? Answer: Yes. I then said there was no way that was ever going to happen and ended the call.

Could that scam possibly work on anyone? I hope not. Don't these people know that poets don't make that kind of money? If you get that call, don't let the guy even waste your time.

The Crafty Poet: A Progress Report

2013-02-14T14:36:00.000-05:00

This morning it went sailing off to my publisher! At last. That is, the manuscript for my forthcoming craft book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. This is the accumulation of about two and a half years of work, most of it culled from this blog and my monthly Poetry Newsletter. The challenge in doing this book was the organization of a good deal of material into a sensible whole. I spent a long time just staring at piles of paper on my kitchen table, thinking and thinking. Then weeks of outlining, rearranging, breaking one section into two, joining two into one, filling in some holes. Then the big job of compiling all the separate pieces into one humungous file on the computer. Then because I don't trust myself to proofread accurately on the screen, I printed out the whole thing and proofread, fixed, reprinted, proofread, fixed, etc. Numerous times.

While stylistic differences from one newsletter to the next don't matter, in a book they do. So I spent a lot of time making things consistent. What's the difference between "into" and "in to," "onto" and "on to." Did I want "line breaks" or "linebreaks," "free write" or "freewrite"? And oh my, which numbers should appear as numerals and which as words? Should numbered lists be indented or at the left margin? Some were one way, some the other. I had to take notes about how many line spaces to leave between different kinds of headings. Then go back and be sure I'd done it the same way from one section to the next. Finally, I reached the point where it seemed about as right as it was ever going to be and I said, Time to let her go.

Side view. Look how plump she is!

That pile in the middle is all the previous print-outs. Obviously, I've gone broke on paper and ink cartridges. That pile does not include the finished manuscript.

This has been a long process—and still isn't over. I've spent months putting this book together. It's a different kind of challenge than putting together a book of poems. But it has been exciting and hugely gratifying. I have around 100 amazing poets in the book. I am so grateful to each one for his or her contribution. Names and contents to be released in a later post.

Now the manuscript is with my publisher and I will wait to get it back for some more proofreading after he whips it into shape. Yes, more proofreading! The book should come out this summer. In the meantime, it's back to poetry for me. And a celebratory dinner out tonight seems in order.

New Online Journals

2013-02-07T09:37:00.001-05:00

Online poetry journals are proliferating. Seems like I'm routinely receiving notification of yet another one. A few of these notices are about former print journals that have converted to online, but most are about brand new journals. Not all online journals are created equal. Because anybody can start one and often for free, there is a broad disparity in quality. Submitter beware. Always thoroughly check out the journal before you submit. If you wouldn't be proud to have your work appear in the journal, don't submit.

A few caveats:
1. Avoid journals that are really blogs masquerading as journals. These reveal a lack of commitment and generally have limited archive space. If a journal doesn't archive issues, steer clear.
2. Especially avoid a journal that posts all poems on the same page and requires the visitor to scroll down. Most readers won't bother.
3. Avoid journals with dreadful color combinations and weird fonts. You want your work to be nicely displayed.
4. Avoid journals with overly complicated navigation. Readers don't want to have to jump through hoops to find your poems.
5. Gravitate toward journals that make their presence known by using Share Buttons and having Facebook and Twitter accounts. It amazes me that some online journals still haven't added these features. They're free and can dramatically extend the journal's reach. When I find a poem I really like, I like to hit the Share Button at the bottom of the page. A link to the poem then posts on my Facebook page and is available to all my friends.

Here's a list of some fairly new online journals that are worth taking a look at:

Birdfeast Magazine—2x
poetry only
reads all year
Linked Table of Contents allows for easy movement from one poem to the next
No Share Buttons

Flycatcher—1x
poetry, essays, reviews
submissions will reopen April 1
Facebook Share on home and TofC, but not on the poem pages

Four Way Review—4x
reads all year
poetry and fiction
no Share buttons
good navigation buttons
great audio with each poem

Heron Tree—1 poem per week
online but plans to print a bound issue yearly
poetry only
poems are posted weekly, on Sunday evening
link to the weekly poem opens a pdf page which I find a bit unwieldy
no Share Buttons

the museum of americana—4x
reads June and December only
work focuses on things americana—"showcases and/or repurposes historical American culture"
poetry, fiction, interview, reviews, nonfiction, art & photography
Share Buttons throughout issue

Sleet Magazine—2x
regular posting period not posted but is currently reading subs
includes poetry, fiction, interviews, and what they call "irregulars," i.e., cross-genre pieces
will consider previously published work
no Share Buttons

Thrush—6x
poetry only
open all year—accepts on a rolling basis
very quick response time
one print edition per year
No Share Buttons

The Last Line

2013-01-31T09:33:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I saw Robert Caro being interviewed on TV. Caro is the biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson. To date, he has written four biographies of Johnson and is at work on the fifth and final one. It has taken him thirty years to get this far. Thirty years devoted to one project!

Caro, now 76, expects this last book to take ten years. The interviewer tactfully asked if he worried about being able to complete this final biography. Caro replied, yes, of course, but one carries on anyhow. The interviewer then pointed out what is apparently a characteristic of Caro's writing process: he already has the final sentence written. When asked, Caro declined to share the sentence, saying that would spoil the ending for him. I completely understood that unwillingness to talk about a work while it is in progress. I've heard many a writer say they'd killed a project by over-talking it.

And yet I thought how different the process was for a fiction writer or a poet. I've heard fiction writers talk about the thrill of discovery and the pleasure of invention. I've heard of fiction writers who write towards a particular ending, but do any of them map out the entire journey or have that last sentence before the writing has begun?

Now I suspect that some of our highly prolific fiction writers, e.g., James Patterson, Stephen King, might very well pre-plan a plot. But where's the fun? There's a well-known story about a writer who lost the manuscript for her novel. When a friend said, Well, you can just write it over again, the writer replied, No, I couldn't do that. I already know what happens. (I can't recall who this writer was, but I'm counting on one of you to supply the name.)

I don't know of any poets who even want to have the final line in mind before writing. The excitement of writing a poem is precisely the not-knowing where it's going. I want the sweet surprise of the ending, that closing I never envisioned but somehow arrived at. It typically takes me days, weeks, even months to get that last line. But until I get it, the poem's not done. If I knew what it was ahead of time, I don't think I'd be interested in writing the poem.

How about you?

Get Back in the Groove with Wingbeats

2013-01-24T10:01:00.000-05:00

In my monthly Poetry Newsletter I always include a book recommendation. Wait—what do you mean you don't get my Poetry Newsletter? Time to fix that. Go here to sign up: http://eepurl.com/bfoCw Or go to the sidebar to the right of this blog post and use the form there. The next issue will go out on February 1 and will include a Craft Tip from Susan Laughter Meyers, a poem by Caitlin Doyle, and a prompt based on the poem. Also included will be a book recommendation, a video, and some links.

Click Cover for Amazon

Anyhow, in January's issue I included a recommendation for Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, edited by Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen. I want to mention that book here, too. Since I've been up to my earlobes getting my forthcoming craft book, The Crafty Poet, ready to send off to my publisher, I've been finding it hard to find the time or the creative brain power to crank out some new poems of my own. Now, however, I'm zeroing in on the final stages of my work on the book and have again been making morning time for my own writing.

But guess what? My brain was sort of dead, stale, out of practice, tilted to the wrong side. So I picked up Wingbeats, a book I'd already read months ago. As is my usual practice, I'd marked the Table of Contents to indicate which prompts most interested me, the ones I thought I'd want to try. The first few just got me back in practice, exercising some lazy muscles. But the one I started last Thursday, that one lit a fire. So I'm back in the groove. And I still have 15 more circled prompts to try. Then I'll push myself to try the ones that didn't interest me as much. Who knows what surprises they might yield?

This is a perfect time of the year for a gift for yourself. Let that gift be a book of prompts. After the craziness of the end of the year—holidays, grades, and most likely neglect of your own poetry—it's time to get the engines revving again. I'm keen on prompts. I like the challenge, the sweet surprise of them. I like being pushed in new directions. If you feel the same way—or even if you don't—treat yourself to a copy of Wingbeats. I think you'll want to buy rather than borrow this book so you can mark it up and return to it repeatedly.

The book contains approximately sixty prompts by several dozen poets. The prompts are divided into seven sections with such headings as "Springboards to Imagination," "Exploring the Senses," and "Complicating the Poem." Each prompt includes specific instructions for preparation and procedure. Copious examples of poems by published poets and students are included.

The contributors include Ellen Bass, Barbara Hamby, Naomi Shihab Nye, Patricia Smith, and Lewis Turco. Many of the contributors are teachers as well as poets.

Priced under $20, this book is an irresistible bargain.

For Female Formalists

2013-01-17T10:08:00.000-05:00

The new issue of Mezzo Cammin has recently gone live. The journal appears twice a year and is limited to formal poetry by women. Each issue also features an artist. This issue's artist is Jean Shin whose installations are shown in photos, along with a bio and a discussion of her work.

The journal is the brainchild of poet Kim Bridgford who created the website and serves as the journal's editor. The journal evolved out of a seminar on women's poetry held at The Westchester Poetry Conference several years ago.

Another outgrowth of the conference is The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which was officially launched in March 2010 and will eventually be the largest database of women poets in the world. Dozens of women poets have entries, each written by another woman poet. Along the top of the Timeline page, date ranges are listed. Click on one to find a linked list of poets covered in that time range. This is an invaluable resource, and it's still growing.

In addition to poetry, each issue of the journal includes essays on any aspect of poetry in form, received or invented, by a woman.

The current issue includes 17 women poets, one of whom is me. I'm joined by the following:

Diann Blakely

Terese Coe

Edna Coyle-Greene

Erica Dawson (Featured Poet)

Nicole Caruso Garcia

Terry Godbey

Tracey Gratch

Athena Kildegaard

Diane Lockward

Mary McLean

Mary Meriam

Jennifer Reeser

Susan Spear

Myrna Stone

Doris Watts

Gail White

Marly Youmans

My poems are Apple Rondeau and In My Yard, the Bones of Trees. The first is obviously a rondeau, fun form which you should try if you haven't already. The second is written in tercets.

A bio and photo are included for each poet. The editor limits the number of poets included in each issue but includes 2-3 poems by each poet, more by the featured poet.

An Invented Form: The Gigan

2013-01-10T12:28:00.000-05:00

I love invented forms, the challenge of them, the risks they entail. So when I recently learned of the Gigan, I pounced on it. This form was invented by poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Kocher named the form in honor of her favorite monster from Godzilla.

Here are the rules:
1. The poem is 16 lines.
2. The lines are broken into couplet, tercet, couplet, couplet, couplet, tercet, couplet.
3. Line 1 is repeated as line 11.
4. Line 6 is repeated as line 12.
5. Ideally, the closing couplet should put a twist on the poem.

You can sample a number of Kocher's gigans online at From the Fishouse. The text of each poem is provided, along with an audio of the poet reading the poem.

You can also listen to Kocher talk about her gigan project. The talk is just a bit over 2 minutes.

Here's a sample gigan from Kocher:

the gigans: iii.

i would give up anjou pears for you, and their cousins
the bosque, which are more beautiful, wrapped ochre,

wrapped gold around their small deaths--wrapped securely
as though they know an old friend will call, say love, say
no. and this old friend, he would die for a crust of earth

peeled back to reveal some buried bliss, a dance of bees
singing out the ruined pleasure of their battle, their lavish

avenues of forsythia, their swank arias of roses, inked roses,
sung roses that want most to be the silk worm’s slink and cower.

pity them, their faithless world, their bruised
and darkening red. i would give up anjou pears for you.

i would peel away their splendorous backs to reveal the equation
we build our hunger upon, the dank musk of decay turned sweet,
the soil’s woe begotten centuries mulched into pollen, nectar.

think of the silk worm’s desire--its dreams of mulberry leaf,
its singular drive toward the green silhouette of rapture.

***************************************************
Here's one by Evie Shockley, from her book, the new black. This poem was previously featured on Poetry Daily.

celestial

—L.A., THE MID-1950s

her name was ella, elle, french for all woman,
 everywoman, she, the third person, feminine,

hippy, buxom, regal curls piled atop her head,  
soft shiny crown for her diamond voice, the soaring  
swooping bird, the orchestra in her throat, the stars

in her eyes, the star in front of her eyes each night,  
one week, at the mocambo, her name was norma,

she wasn't normal, blonde, her name was marilyn,  
the i in angelic, first person, created, an immaculate

concept, the image of pure beauty, sound, power,  
her name was ella, elle in french, all women,

in her, i's, the star in front of her eyes, each night,
 glamorous, first lady of song, iconic, backstage,  
the effort behind the effortlessness, the exercise,

the training, the makeup that made up the woman,  
her name was norma, marilyn, ella, est-elle, the star.

******************************************
Now go grab a pen and get going on your own gigan.

Southern Poetry Review

2013-01-02T12:16:00.000-05:00

Click to Subscribe

Let's kick off 2013 by getting back to poetry! So long, Santa. So long, Malls. So long, Online Stores (but bless you for making life easier).

You may recall that several months ago I posted a list of print journals that include poetry only or poetry and reviews of poetry books. One of those that I was interested in was Southern Poetry Review, the second oldest poetry journal in its region. I submitted some poems and was delighted to have one accepted.

That poem, "Morning Walk," now appears in the latest issue of the journal. Due to Hurricane Sandy, this issue took longer than it should have to reach me as lots of New Jersey mail was destroyed, including, apparently, my contributor's copies. After seeing references to the new issue and receiving a few notes from people who'd seen my poem, I realized that my copy was missing and I contacted the editor. He very kindly sent me two additional copies.

I am now not only a contributor but also a subscriber. I look forward to more of this outstanding journal. I like it because of its limitation to poetry. I also like it because the journal is just the right size. At 6 x 9, it's comfortable to hold. I like the artwork on the cover, a photo by Andrew Ilachinski. I like it because it's limited to a reasonable number of poets. This issue has 28 poets and takes up 58 pages. I'm guessing that other issues have more poets, but this issue has a handful of longish poems. Then a few pages of Contributors' Notes, each note giving the poet's location, most recent book title, and a few publication credits.

Southern Poetry Review publishes two issues per year. A subscription is only $14. That's $7 per issue! Now that's a serious bargain. Submissions are read all year, snail mail only.

Here's a list of the poets in the current issue:

William Archila

Jacqueline Berger

Chana Bloch

Jody Bolz

Robert Brickhouse

Fleda Brown

Don Colburn

John DesMarais

Jane Elkins

Michelle Gillett

Jeff Hardin

David Kirby

Richard Krohn

Ann Lauinger

Diane Lockward

Debra Marquart

Lynn McGee

Janet McNally

Susan Laughter Myers

Jeff Miles

Hayden Saunier

Susan Schmidt

Floyd Skloot

Alexandra Teague

Craig van Rooyen

Kathy Whitson

Mary-Sherman Willis

Steven Winn

Yes, Virginia

2012-12-21T15:10:00.000-05:00

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

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

Here's Virginia's letter:

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

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

Here's the reply:

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

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

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

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

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

Eating Poetry

2012-12-17T11:59:00.000-05:00

I love literary food blogs. So I am very pleased that food blogger and writer Nicole Gulotta recently featured my poem, Blueberry, at her site, Eat This Poem. The site is fairly new but already includes an impressive list of poets, such as Jane Hirshfield, Li-Young Lee, Louise Gluck, and Jane Kenyon. You will find a delicious variety of poets and poems at the site.

But wait! There's more. Nicole includes a thoughtful discussion of each featured poem, stunning photos, and an appropriate recipe with a mouth-watering photo of the prepared dish. My poem is accompanied by a recipe for Blueberry Buckwheat Pancakes, a recipe inspired by Nicole's memory of her grandmother.

Please pay a visit to the feature. Then also, if you're on Facebook (and who isn't?), go there and Like the Eat This Poem page. You can also subscribe to Nicole's email newsletter at the website.

Here are a few other literary food blogs to check out:

Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup.

Jonelle Galloway's The Rambling Epicure.
While at The Rambling Epicure, be sure to check out the ongoing feature, Food Poetry.

Not a blog but the online journal, Alimentum, is another good place to visit. Considers previously unpublished food poetry.

The Perfect Gift and Just in Time

2012-12-11T13:42:00.001-05:00

Shafiq Naz has again published the Alhambra Poetry Desk Calendar. I can't think of a more perfect holiday gift, for poets and non-poets alike.

The calendar includes a poem for each day of the year. You will find more than 300 poets, classic and contemporary. Many poems are accompanied by commentary from their poets. This is a great combination desk calendar and anthology.

The price is $29.95

The best place to purchase the Alhambra Poetry Calendar 2013 is at the Academy of American Poets online store.

My poem, "Linguini," is nestled among poems by the following poets:

DICK ALLEN * MONIZA ALVI * NIN ANDREWS * ANONYMOUS * TALVIKKI ANSEL * RAE ARMANTROUT * MATTHEW ARNOLD * ROBERT BAGG * DAVID BAKER * CHRISTIANNE BALK * MARY JO BANG * JANE BARKER * WILLIAM BARNES * ELLEN BASS * DAN BEACHY-QUICK * THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES * JACK B. BEDELL *AMY BEEDER * APHRA BEHN * CHARLES BERNSTEIN * AMBROSE BIERCE * LINDA BIERDS * DAVID BIESPIEL * SOPHIE CABOT BLACK * WILLIAM BLAKE * ADRIAN BLEVINS * ROBERT BLY * STEPHANIE BOLSTER * BRUCE BOND * TODD BOSS * WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES * ROBERT BRIDGES * GEOFFREY BROCK * CHARLOTTE BRONTË * EMILY BRONTË * RUPERT BROOKE * JOEL BROUWER * WILLIAM BROWNE * ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING * ROBERT BROWNING * WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT * COLETTE BRYCE * JOHN BUNYAN * ROBERT BURNS * KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER * THOMAS CAMPION * VAHNI CAPILDEO * CAROLINE CARVER * CHRISTINE CASSON * ANN CEFOLA * GEORGE CHAPMAN * THOMAS CHATTERTON * GEOFFREY CHAUCER * G. K. CHESTERTON * JOHN CLARE * ANDREA COHEN * SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE * MORTIMER COLLINS * CALLY CONAN-DAVIES * DAVID CONSTANTINE * WILLIAM JOHNSON CORY * ABRAHAM COWLEY * WILLIAM COWPER * GEORGE CRABBE * HART CRANE * STEPHEN CRANE * RICHARD CRASHAW * SAMUEL DANIEL * JOHN DAVIDSON * SIR JOHN DAVIES * JOHN DAVIES OF HEREFORD * W. H. DAVIES * JON DAVIS * DANIEL DEFOE * GREG DELANTY * SIR JOHN DENHAM * CARL DENNIS * TOI DERRICOTTE * EMILY DICKINSON * FRED DINGS * GREGORY DJANIKIAN * JOHN DONNE * ERNEST DOWSON * MICHAEL DRAYTON * JOHN DRYDEN * SASHA DUGDALE * DENISE DUHAMEL * IAN DUHIG * STEPHEN DUNN * STUART DYBEK * SIR EDWARD DYER * GEORGE ELIOT * ALISTAIR ELLIOT * RALPH WALDO EMERSON * EDWARD FIELD * ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA * ANNIE FINCH * JOHN FLETCHER * WILLIAM FOWLER * CAROL FROST * ROBERT FROST * JOHN FULLER * ALICE FULTON * JOHN GAY * DOREEN GILDROY * MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN * DANA GIOIA * BARNABE GOOGE * GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON * THOMAS GRAY * JESSICA GREENBAUM * LINDA GREGERSON * EAMON GRENNAN * KELLE GROOM * IVOR GURNEY * MARILYN HACKER * RACHEL HADAS * KIMIKO HAHN * SASKIA HAMILTON * SOPHIE HANNAH * THOMAS HARDY * JOY HARJO * JAMES HARMS * DAVID HARSENT * DOLORES HAYDEN * WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY * JOHN HENNESSY * HENRY VIII, KING OF ENGLAND * GEORGE HERBERT* MARY SIDNEY HERBERT * DAVID HERNANDEZ * ROBERT HERRICK * BOB HICOK * BRENDA HILLMAN * EDWARD HIRSCH * JANE HIRSHFIELD * H. L. HIX * TONY HOAGLAND * RICHARD HOFFMANN * THOMAS HOOD * PAUL HOOVER * GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS * JOHN HOPPENTHALER * A. E. HOUSMAN * HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY * ANDREW HUDGINS * GLYN HUGHES * T. E. HULME * MARIA HUMMEL LEIGH HUNT * MARK IRWIN * HELEN IVORY * AMANDA JERNIGAN * JAMES WELDON JOHNSON * LIONEL JOHNSON * SAMUEL JOHNSON * DEVIN JOHNSTON * LIBBY FALK JONES * BEN JONSON * JAMES JOYCE * MARILYN KALLET * LAURA KASISCHKE * JOHN KEATS * X. J. KENNEDY * WAQAS KHWAJA JOHN KINSELLA * SUSAN KINSOLVING * RUDYARD KIPLING * DEBORAH LANDAU * WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR * D. H. LAWRENCE * SYDNEY LEA * EDWARD LEAR * ELEANOR LERMAN * PHILLIS LEVIN * TIM LIARDET * SARAH LINDSAY * DIANE LOCKWARD * WILLIAM LOGAN * HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW * RICHARD LOVELACE * AMY LOWELL * JOHN LYLY * AMIT MAJMUDAR * RANDALL MANN * CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE * ANDREW MARVELL * JOHN MASEFIELD * DAVID MASON * EDGAR LEE MASTERS * CLEOPATRA MATHIS * JOHN MATTHIAS * GARDNER MCFALL * JOSHUA MEHIGAN * HERMAN MELVILLE * GEORGE MEREDITH * RICHARD MICHELSON * JOHN MILTON * ROBERT MINHINNICK * CAROL MOLDAW * LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU * ELIZABETH MOODY * THOMAS MOORE * WILLIAM MORRIS * PAUL MULDOON * THOMAS NASHE * WILLIAM NEW * RICHARD NEWMAN * AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL * BARBARA NICKEL * EDWARD NOBLES * MARY NOONAN * CHRISTOPHER NORTH * KATHERINE NORTHROP * D. NURKSE * NAOMI SHIHAB NYE * JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY * WILFRED OWEN * ERIC PANKEY * JAY PARINI * ELISE PARTRIDGE * LINDA PASTAN * COVENTRY PATMORE * MOLLY PEACOCK * WALTER PATER * GEORGE PEELE * PASCALE PETIT * ROBERT PINSKY * DONALD O. PLATT * EDGAR ALLAN POE * ALEXANDER POPE * D. A. POWELL * MATTHEW PRIOR * ADELAIDE ANNE PROCTER * SIMON RAE * SIR WALTER RALEIGH * JAMES RICHARDSON * ATSURO RILEY * ROBIN ROBERTSON * EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON * PETER ROBINSON * PADRAIG ROONEY * ISAAC ROSENBERG * J. ALLYN ROSSER * CHRISTINA ROSSETTI * DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI * MICHAEL RYAN * LAWRENCE SAIL * FIONA SAMPSON * CARL SANDBERG * REG SANER * GEORGE SANTAYANA * ROBERT SAXTON * GRACE SCHULMAN * SIR WALTER SCOTT * SIR CHARLES SEDLEY * WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE * RAVI SHANKAR * DON SHARE * PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY * ANDREW SHIELDS * VIVIAN SHIPLEY * ROBERT SOUTHEY * PENELOPE SHUTTLE * SIR PHILIP SIDNEY * JOHN SKELTON * ED SKOOG * TOM SLEIGH BRUCE SMITH * CHARLOTTE SMITH * LISA RUSS SPAAR * EDMUND SPENSER * ELIZABETH SPIRES * A. E. STALLINGS * ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON * DABNEY STUART * MATTHEW SWEENEY * JONATHAN SWIFT * ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE * J. M. SYNGE * ARTHUR SZE * GEORGE SZIRTES * MARILYN L. TAYLOR * SARA TEASDALE * ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON * WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY * EDWARD THOMAS * JAMES THOMSON * ADAM THORPE * RICHARD TILLINGHAST * DANIEL TOBIN * BRIAN TURNER * MARK TWAIN * WENDY VIDELOCK * KEITH WALDORP * SUE WALKER * EDMUND WALLER * ROSANNA WARREN * MICHAEL WATERS * WALT WHITMAN * OSCAR WILDE * JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER * ELEANOR WILNER * TERRI WITEK * CECILIA WOLOCH * WILLIAM WORDSWORTH * BARON WORMSER * ROBERT WRIGLEY * MARY WROTH * SIR THOMAS WYATT * ELINOR WYLIE * WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS * STEPHEN YENSER * GARY YOUNG * MATTHEW ZAPRUDER *

New this year is a calendar for young readers. Here, too, there's a poem for every day of the year. Poems are by more than 200 poets. What a wonderful way to instill a love of poetry in young readers! At year's end, the calendar can be saved as an anthology.

The price is $22.95.

The Poetry Calendar for Young Readers 2013 is also available at the Academy of American Poets online store.

These are serious poems, ones written for adult readers but holding appeal for young readers.

My poem, "Blueberry," finds itself hanging out with poems by the following poets:

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH * DICK ALLEN * WILLIAM ALLINGHAM * WALTER ANCARROW * NIN ANDREWS * ANONYMOUS * MATTHEW ARNOLD * DAVID BAKER * CHRISTIANNE BALK * MARY JO BANG * THOMAS BASTARD * DAN BEACHY-QUICK * JACK B. BEDELL * THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES * HENRY CHARLES BEECHING * HILAIRE BELLOC * MARGARET BETHAM-EDWARDS * WILLIAM BLAKE * STEPHANIE BOLSTER * ANNE BRADSTREET * GEOFFREY BROCK * EMILY BRONTË *RUPERT BROOKE * TOM BROWN * ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING * ROBERT BROWNING * JOHN BUNYAN * ROBERT BURNS * KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER * BLISS CARMAN * LEWIS CARROLL * CAROLINE CARVER * ANN CEFOLA * G. K. CHESTERTON * COLLEY CIBBER * JOHN CLARE * SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE * SARA COLERIDGE * CALLY CONAN-DAVIES * HELEN GRAY CONE * GEORGE COOPER * RICHARD CORBET * WILLIAM COWPER * STEPHEN CRANE * W. H. DAVIES * CHARLES DICKENS * EMILY DICKINSON * GREGORY DJANIKIAN * JOHN DONNE * LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS * ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE * SASHA DUGDALE * PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR * GEORGE ELIOT * RALPH WALDO EMERSON * EDWARD FIELD * JAMES THOMAS FIELDS * ANNIE FINCH * JAMES ELROY FLECKER * ROBERT FROST * JOHN FULLER * ALICE FULTON OLIVER GOLDSMITH * GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON * KENNETH GRAHAME * KIMIKO HAHN * THOMAS HARDY * JAMES HARMS * DAVID HARSENT * FELICIA DOROTHEA HEMANS * JOHN HENNESSY * GEORGE HERBERT * DAVID HERNANDEZ * ROBERT HERRICK * WILLIAM HICKSON * EDWARD HIRSCH * HEINRICH HOFFMANN * THOMAS HOOD * PAUL HOOVER * GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS * JOHN HOPPENTHALER * A. E. HOUSMAN * RICHARD HOVEY * HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY * ANDREW HUDGINS * T. E. HULME * LEIGH HUNT * HELEN IVORY * HELEN HUNT JACKSON * AMANDA JERNIGAN * LIBBY FALK JONES * BEN JONSON * JAMES JOYCE * JOHN KEATS * X. J. KENNEDY * JOYCE KILMER * CHARLES KINGSLEY * SUSAN KINSOLVING * RUDYARD KIPLING * CHARLES LAMB * MARY LAMB * WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR * D. H. LAWRENCE * EMMA LAZARUS * EDWARD LEAR * ELEANOR LERMAN * PHILLIS LEVIN * VACHEL LINDSAY * DIANE LOCKWARD * HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW * JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL * JOHN LYLY * AMIT MAJMUDAR * KATHERINE MANSFIELD * WALTER DE LA MARE * CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE * JOHN MASEFIELD * DAVID MASON * JOEL MCCREA * GARDNER MCFALL * JOSHUA MEHIGAN * HERMAN MELVILLE * RICHARD MICHELSON * EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY * JOHN MILTON * CAROL MOLDAW * EDITH NESBIT * WILLIAM NEW * SIR HENRY NEWBOLT * RICHARD NEWMAN * AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL * BARBARA NICKEL * EDWARD NOBLES * CHRISTOPHER NORTH * ALFRED NOYES * NAOMI SHIHAB NYE * JOHN O’KEEFE * OTTÓ ORBÁN * ELISE PARTRIDGE * LINDA PASTAN * COVENTRY PATMORE * MOLLY PEACOCK * JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY * HUGH PETERS * MARJORIE PICKTHALL * DONALD O. PLATT * EDGAR ALLAN POE * ALEXANDER POPE * SIMON RAE * SIR WALTER RALEIGH * SIR WALTER A. RALEIGH * WILLIAM BRIGHTY RANDS * JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY * PADRAIG ROONEY * CHRISTINA ROSSETTI * DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI * MICHAEL RYAN * LAWRENCE SAIL * CARL SANDBERG * JOHN GODFREY SAXE * SIR WALTER SCOTT * SIR CHARLES SEDLEY * ALAN SEEGER * WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE * PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY * ANDREW SHIELDS * SIR PHILIP SIDNEY * EDWARD ROLAND SILL * ROBERT SOUTHEY * EDMUND SPENSER * ELIZABETH SPIRES * A. E. STALLINGS * ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON * DABNEY STUART * MATTHEW SWEENEY * ARTHUR SZE * ERNÖ SZÉP * GEORGE SZIRTES * JANE TAYLOR * MARILYN L. TAYLOR * SARA TEASDALE * ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON * WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY * EDWARD THOMAS * ADAM THORPE * DANIEL TOBIN * MICHAEL WATERS * ISAAC WATTS * SÁNDOR WEÖRES * WALT WHITMAN * JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER *ELLA WHEELER WILCOX * JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER * ELEANOR WILNER * TERRI WITEK * WILLIAM WORDSWORTH * SIR THOMAS WYATT * ELINOR WYLIE * WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS * GARY YOUNG * MATTHEW ZAPRUDER * ZOLTÁN ZELK

True Crimes and Misdemeanors

2012-12-04T09:49:00.001-05:00

Click Cover for Amazon

I'm a big fan of true crime books. Not mystery books. I want the real thing. I'm sure most people would find this predilection out of character and I admit I've wondered about it myself. Is there something wrong with me, something ghoulish? I've even written a poem about it, Why I Read True Crime Books, a sestina, of all things, a form that I wrestled with for months.

So when I heard that Joe McGinniss had a new book in progress, my ears perked up. This new work is of double interest to me because it's being released in serial form. McGinniss says the old way of publishing books is on its way out. Of course, publication by serialization isn't new; it's an old method resurrected. Charles Dickens, for one, published his novels chapter by chapter in magazines and newspapers. This "new" way seems ideal for people who love their Kindles. And while some of us might feel frustrated and impatient waiting for the next installment, don't we already do that for TV series?

The series title is 15 Gothic Street which is the address of a courthouse in Boston. That's the setting where each episode, a criminal trial, takes place. My impression, then, is that each episode will be self-contained. Each episode gets its own title. The first is "Primitive," which sells for $.99. The second episode is "The Human Circus," which is now available and sells for $2.99. It looks like subsequent episodes will be released at 2-3 month intervals. At the completion of the series, McGinniss plans to release the entire book in traditional book form. I wonder if this will boost sales?

The work is published by Byliner Serials. The press offers this description of their work: "Byliner commissions, collects, and curates quick-read stories from the world's best writers." Visit the website for a list of the authors on board. Apparently, getting on board is by invitation only. I wonder if this will start a hot trend?

I also wonder if this could translate to poetry. How would you price a single poem? Just think, as I often do, if a poetry book contains 40 poems and sells for $15, the poems are going for less than $.40 a piece. And yet how many people shell out money for novels but won't do the same for poetry books? Surely, a poetry book is one of the best bargains around, especially considering that the poems so often bear repeated readings.

So let me end with a reminder that the perfect holiday gift is a poetry book. Let's all buy at least one poetry book for someone we care about. It would be a crime not to.