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The Cover Story Behind A WORLD IN WHICH: An Interview

2024-04-12T14:21:00.003-04:00

Poet J.L. Conrad's beautiful book—beautiful both inside and out—has just been published by my press, Terrapin Books. Jenny and I both fell in love with the art of Amy Salomone and were thrilled when she agreed to having one of her pieces on the cover of Jenny's book, A World in Which. Jenny recently did a Q&A with Amy about Amy's work and its use on Jenny's cover. Here is that Q&A:

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The image on the cover of A WORLD IN WHICH (Terrapin Books, March 2024) comes from artist Amy Salomone (Forms Most Beautiful), whose digital collages often depict the human form—both external and internal—as an integral part of the natural world. I am indebted to the poet Heather Swan for introducing me to Amy’s work. 

Today, I’ve invited Amy to respond to a few questions:
 

JLC: Your background is in the sciences, specifically cellular biology and evolutionary biology, or animal behavior. How does this play out in your work as an artist? What are your fascinations?
 

AS: So my background in the sciences is really where my pieces come from. Most of the pieces that I make are communicating some concept about our place within larger biological and cosmological stories. Rather than make a piece about our experience of love, I might make a piece about the evolutionary basis of love, the neurotransmitters and hormones that dictate our love response and reproductive tactics of other organisms. So, while my pieces are about us, they are not about us. I kind of like to think of them as a perspective shift. How can I get the audience to see their own experiences from a different vantage point? I feel like the more you know, the easier it is to navigate life. Albert Einstein said, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better,” and that really is the basis for why I make what I make.

My particular fascinations are pretty broad, but I would say I get the most excited about natural selection, nucleosynthesis (or atomic generation in stars and supernova), decomposition and symbiotic relationships, microorganisms, animal behavior…haha. So ya know, a lot. I could go on for days.
 

JLC: When I first shared your artwork with my editor, Diane Lockward, she responded, “I absolutely love Amy’s work! She’s the one. Thrilling pieces. But which one? Hard decision ahead.” Diane and I went back and forth, sharing favorites and even cover mockups. We both ended up preferring “My Heart Beats with Nature,” the image that appears on the cover of A WORLD IN WHICH and are so glad you agreed to allow it to appear in this context!

This piece deeply resonates with my own areas of inquiry—including with the body and its representation. Here, I love how you depict a heart severed but also a heart preserved within a landscape, a heart generating new life and growth. Can you tell us a bit about how this particular work originated and/or what was on your mind as it came together? Did anything surprise you?
 

AS: First off, you get me. Haha. Your interpretation of that work is pretty right on for what I was trying to communicate. For me, this piece is about how humans seem to always separate themselves from natural systems and are not aware of how intrinsically connected they are to them. So, we don’t like to call ourselves animals, we talk about “getting into nature,” we make terrariums, we talk about climate change as if we are somehow saving the Earth, or the polar bear, but not ourselves. We are of natural systems. We are super organisms, drenched with bacterial, archean and fungal life. Our human decisions are dictated by those microorganisms and the genetic code we share with countless species.  This piece is really about why I make all of the pieces that I make. To put a mirror up to a person and change how they look at themselves in the world around them. Science has this amazing capacity for profoundly altering our perspectives of how we see ourselves, and this piece is me communicating that.
 

JLC: You’ve indicated your interest in collaborating with authors. What do you appreciate about this process? How does your work change, or shift, when it’s put into conversation with a writer’s work?
 

AS: Well, first off, I LOVE books. I am a self-proclaimed bookaholic, so the idea that someone who wrote a book and poured their heart into that project wants to use my art is just so amazing. I also love commissions. I really love hearing peoples' stories and their intention for what they want to communicate through the written word and then trying to translate that into a piece. I think I am just a collaborator at heart and working with an author or anyone else who wants to commission or license a piece is like free inspiration. My work changes in that there can be an added depth there because I’m trying to translate the intent of the author, let’s say, into a piece. It's about them and their experiences. I have had some of my best work come out of the commission process, so I also love it when someone gives me feedback on a piece, and it ends up pushing the work so far forward. That has happened often. 
 

JLC: What else (if anything) would you like readers to know about your artwork, or about your creative process?
 

AS: I started making my artwork because I was stepping out of a science education role, and I needed to fill that void of talking about human discovery all day. When I start a piece, sometimes I know what I want to say, but more often I just open up my computer and begin. The piece takes me where it takes me, and the message of the piece almost always comes with its creation.  Digital collage is great because I can incorporate so much of myself. My pieces often include anatomical forms from vintage lithographs, combined with European or American paintings, combined with microscope slides, combined with photography. Because of my extensive background in the sciences, I have visually been in love with science illustration and science communication for over 20 years. It’s exciting that I get to share that love with a larger audience.  My heroes are scientists who aren’t just great scientists but, more importantly, great communicators, and the hope with my artwork is that I can continue the tradition of storytelling through art, but storytelling that tells a story much larger than the typical human experience. A story outside of ourselves.
 

JLC: Thank you so much for your time, Amy! I’m absolutely thrilled to have “My Heart Beats with Nature” on the cover of A WORLD IN WHICH, and I look forward to the book and your work making their way into the world together!
 

AS: Thank you again J.L. I am so excited to have my work on your amazing book!
 
A World in Which is available at 
 
Amazon
 
Terrapin Bookstore
 
Bookshop.org 
  
Praise for A WORLD IN WHICH:

More Thoughts about Manuscript Submissions

2024-03-19T11:26:00.006-04:00

I recently completed the 18th submission period at Terrapin Books. Here are some thoughts I jotted down as I read. I hope you'll find them useful for your own manuscript submissions, though each publisher and editor has their own guidelines and perhaps an idiosyncrasy or two.

1. There’s a bit of a trend now with plentiful use of ampersands. I don’t care for them as I find them a visual distraction, especially if there are a lot of them in the poem. Avoid them or be very sparing.

2. I find way too many hyphen errors. Be sure to check your hyphenated words. I use the online Merriam Webster dictionary.

https://www.merriam-webster.com

3. Poems in columns rarely serve any useful purpose. Go cautiously!

4. Avoid pretentious Notes at the end of your manuscript. They often provide unnecessary information. Can you, instead, use an informational note in the poems’s epigraph position?

5. Speaking of epigraphs, avoid name-dropping in that spot, e.g., “dedicated to famous poet/ person,” or “after some famous poet.”

6. If your poem really is after another poet / poem, be sure to indicate that in the epigraph position. Without the proper attribution, you risk being accused of plagiarism.

7. Avoid excessive use of epigraphs.

8. One space after a period, not two. I shouldn’t have to be saying this as two spaces died at least 30 years ago. You date yourself when you stubbornly cling to an outdated practice.

9. Don’t be that person who waits until the last minute to submit! You know that’s when your power is going to go off. And when you write me a begging note the next day, I’m going to have to say Sorry.

10. Don’t include blurbs with your submission. That looks presumptuous. Blurbs come after your manuscript has been accepted.

11. Get the name of the press right. Check your cover letter. I never hold it against someone when they misspell my name or get the press name wrong, but it’s not a good look. Makes you look careless.

12. Do not ever use the copyright symbol. It’s insulting, as if you fear the publisher might steal your work. And your work is automatically copyrighted. The symbol is unnecessary.

13. In your cover letter, if you list any titles of books you’ve had published, be sure to include the press along with the title.

14. Do not say that you have been “widely” published. Sounds braggy.

15. The time to research a press is Before you submit, not After. Before you submit, be sure the press is one you'd really like to have publish your book.

Thoughts on Poetry Manuscript Submission

2022-09-18T14:16:00.001-04:00

I just completed the 15th reading period for Terrapin Books. It's hard to believe but the press has now been around for seven years! During that time I've read a lot of poetry manuscripts. I've read lots of wonderful material. But I've also noticed some of the same errors being made again and again. So I've jotted some of them down and offer them here, hoping that they might be useful to you as you prepare your next manuscript submission for Terrapin or another press. Of course, these are my thoughts; another press may have very different thoughts.

1. The first thing your reader sees is your cover letter. Make it work for you. Keep it brief and focused on you as a poet. Don't bother to tell your age (you'd be surprised how many people share this irrelevant information). Also don't list the big name poets you've studied with. Do not be a name dropper!

2. Also do not include in your cover letter any words of praise from other poets or teachers. This will not affect the reader's impression of your work. Definitely do not include blurbs. Why would you already have blurbs, the potential publisher wonders. But feel free to include information about any close acceptances the manuscript has had.

3. If you are asked to provide a description of your manuscript's content in your cover letter, keep that brief and focused. If you find it impossible to describe your manuscript, it's possible that you haven't yet found its center. I see lots of descriptions that list a dozen themes covered in the manuscript: nature, climate change, love, death, religious conversion, pollution, birds, waterways, marriage, children, and so on. Look at that list. Can you find some common themes? Might they suggest a way to tighten up your cover letter—and your manuscript? I also often find that after a list of a number of dark themes, the poet adds a note to the effect that there's also some optimism or that the collection ends with hope. It's not your job to cheer me up. If it's there, fine, but don't force it. I like darkness and so do a lot of other readers.

4. The next thing your reader sees is your title. Don't title your collection with a word no one knows. Why confuse the reader and put a fence around your collection? You can get away with this for an individual poem but not for the collection title.

5. Also regarding titles, there's a trend towards long titles. Go easy here. Some of the ones I've seen just struck me as a kind of strutting, showing off—look at how clever I am! Also very long titles are difficult to format on a cover. This won't get you rejected, but why do it?

6. In your poems, be parsimonious with "how" clauses. I too often see lists of these. This has become an overused strategy. Likewise, avoid overusing "the way" to begin items in a series.

7. Be very sparing with poems about poems. I can take maybe one per manuscript. You won't get rejected if you have more, but if your manuscript is accepted, I will almost certainly ask you to revise some of those poems. I find this kind of poem particularly vexing when the poem is making its way along beautifully on a particular topic and then suddenly starts referring to itself as "this poem." That knocks me right out of the poem. My heart sinks with disappointment.

8. Avoid great blue herons in your poems. I add this here for a light touch, but seriously that bird is so overused in poetry! Surely there are other magnificent birds. And does it have to be a bird?

9. In your Acknowledgments do not include bibliographical information such as page numbers. Just journal titles and poem titles. And be sure to use alphabetical order. Get out a few books by the press you're submitting to and follow the format used for the Acknowledgments in those books. It's pretty standard.

10. Read the Guidelines and follow them. Also read any FAQs that the press provides. Terrapin provides FAQs which should answer most questions submitting poets might have. Yet each submission period brings some chapbook submissions (we don't do chapbooks) and a few New & Selecteds (we also don't do these). Don't waste your time and submission fee by submitting what the press doesn't publish.

11. Terrapin's Guidelines ask that 25%-50% (or more) of the poems in the manuscript have been previously published. Why then submit a manuscript with none of the poems previously published? A few years ago someone who wanted to submit but who hadn't published any of the poems chewed me out about this request. It wasn't his fault, he insisted, that none of his poems had been published; it was the fault of journal editors who wouldn't accept his poems. My argument ended there.

12. Don't wait until the last minute to submit your manuscript. Poets ask if there's any benefit to submitting early or late. Really, no. But lots of poets wait until the last two days of a submission period to submit. Might make the reader cranky. Not me, of course, but maybe some other reader.

13. Get your hands on at least one book by the press you plan to submit to. (If you can't afford to purchase a book or two, at least peruse the Look Inside feature at Amazon for a sample of what the press publishes and how they format a book.) It makes no sense to submit to a press you know nothing about, yet I more than occasionally receive submissions from poets who clearly know nothing about the press.

14. Only submit to a press if you would be happy to be published by that press. If your heart is set on winning a contest, then only submit to contests. A few years ago I accepted a manuscript. The poet stalled her response, then said she'd decided to withdraw as she really wanted to win a contest. She should never have submitted to the press in the first place.

15. Practice Patience and Persistence. Poetry is a slow art. I have a number times received two or even three submissions from the same poet. How is it possible to have that many solid manuscripts in circulation? Consider pulling out the very best poems from the manuscripts and making one new manuscript.

I hope that these tips will give you some guidance as you put together or revise your manuscript. Terrapin's next reading period is January 24 thru February 28. Check out our Guidelines and our FAQs.

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Ann Keniston Interviews Kory Wells

2022-06-29T11:22:00.000-04:00

The following is the sixteenth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Ann Keniston talks with Kory Wells about using a central metaphor as an organizing principle, the role of facts and stories in a collection, and the arc of a poetry collection.

Ann Keniston: Sugar is central to your collection, as the book title, Sugar Fix, makes clear. Yet sugar seems to mean different things—at times it’s aligned with desire and pleasure, and at others it’s something to be resisted, an “urge,” in one poem, that the speaker is “unlearning.” Can you talk a bit about how you understand sugar in the collection? How did it become central to the collection? Did its meaning change or become more complex as you worked on the manuscript?

Kory Wells: It’s hard to believe now, but I didn’t know that sugar was going to be such a central motif of the collection for quite some time. I knew I was writing about identity and connection and love, and that I was witnessing to the power of story and memory. I also knew I wanted to incorporate a wider sense of history and social context. But it wasn’t until I wrote “Due to Chronic Inflammation,” which interweaves the speaker’s addiction to sugar with America’s addiction to gun violence, that the bells went off in my head: I can’t tell my story without talking about sugar: red velvet cake, sugar sandwiches, Dairy Queen, marshmallow pies. My ancestors even lived at a place called Sugar Fork! Sugar represents many factual details of my family history. But more than that, for me sugar represents longing: my longing for romance, yes, but more than that, for kinship and connection—even across time and the troubling aspects of our country’s history and present.

Keniston: I noticed that you use the word “fact” several times in the course of the book, often in relation to something you want to amplify or contradict. And then the word “story” also recurs. Can you talk about how you see the relation between those two terms? Are stories a way to correct so-called facts or to amplify or complicate them? Given that many stories are associated with family, especially a grandmother figure, do these stories have the weight of truth, perhaps emotional truth? Or can they also be misleading or deceptive?

Wells: Thanks so much for this question! This tension between stories and facts dominates our entire socio-political climate, right? It’s common to hear someone say, “We need all the facts” and believe those facts tell THE story. But we don’t often hear, “We need all the stories.” And even if we did, how often are we truly open to hearing someone whose story we think we may not like or agree with?

I think that’s what Sugar Fix is attempting to champion, in its own small way—the idea that we need all the stories, and that the best, fullest stories dissolve the line between us and them.

A major thread of this book comes from my obsession with how my family’s oral history jibes—or fails to jibe—with facts I learned from genealogical research and DNA testing. In my experience, the stories my grandmother and other family members told definitely captured some of the truth, and that still matters deeply, even if it’s not the full story.

The facts are that my family traces back to the Catawba, and before that a Saponi tribe, but hearing the story that I was descended from Cherokee who narrowly escaped the Trail of Tears still shapes the empathy and connection I feel today.

The facts are that I’m descended from a woman who was arrested for dancing and masquerading as a man in Philadelphia in 1703. The facts are also that I am of African descent. I can’t say these facts—which are relatively new to me—are life-changing. But they expand my story, and that’s part of what I was writing toward in these poems. How I include new facts in my story, my own self-reckoning, particularly as a person who tries to be intentional about connection and allyship, is, to me, significant.

Keniston: I was really interested in your use of the word “cousin,” first in relation to the possibly-but-probably-not blood relative Gypsy Rose Lee and then as an addressee in several other poems. It seems like part of the book’s project is to destabilize conventional lineage-based ideas of family, as well as race and history. Can you talk a bit about how you extend the notion of family, maybe especially in relation to your use of form, including renewable forms like the villanelle, sonnet, and ghazal? To put it another way, what is the relation of the theme of family to that of political reimagining in the book?

Wells: Oh, thank you for noticing how I address cousins! Perhaps I’m intrigued by the idea of consanguinity because I’m an only child. Or because I grew up in a small town, where people are more connected than you realize, and you have to be careful you don’t bad-mouth your new friend’s second cousin. Or perhaps, amid our national divisiveness, I’m reaching, reaching for common threads.

At any rate, I think my use of form is, in one sense, a nod to the various rhythms that have shaped me as a Southerner with Appalachian roots: a rich storytelling tradition, the cadence of Southern and Appalachian speech, the rhythms of old time and classic country music, the spread of a Sunday soul food dinner, the particularly Southern customs of hospitality and manners. All of these things ignite my sense of kinship.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that, as someone who came to poetry by way of computer science, I have occasionally felt like an outsider to the literary community. I want to be clear: I do feel a deep belonging much of the time—I have so much gratitude for the kinship of fellow writers! But let’s face it—there are a lot of poets, and it can be easy to feel overlooked. By employing poetic form, I think I am, in a small way, acknowledging literary tradition and saying, “I want to belong.”

Keniston: Can you talk about the shape of the book? Your last section title is “As I Already Said, Sugar” and circles back to some of the themes of the first section. Yet things seem different by the end of the manuscript: several of the poems look forward to an uncertain future rather than back to childhood. Can you talk about how you imagined the arc of the book?

Wells: I enjoy reading poetry collections that have a definite arc, so I started thinking about that with my manuscript early on. Initially, for a few years while I was working on the manuscript, I used a James Dickey quatrain—the last lines of “Into the Stone” —divided into four sections as an organizational device. One of my early readers, a novelist friend, said it was “impenetrable,” so that’s when I backed up and started looking at excerpting my own words as section titles. But the Dickey excerpt was still in my mind: this idea of how the dead “have the chance in my body,” and how that interweaves with stories and what we carry, and the comfort of knowing and being known.

In revision, I also faced the fact that my grandmother, who is a definite character in my earlier chapbook, Heaven Was the Moon (March Street Press) and who I thought I was sort of done with, deserved a greater role in framing the collection. “Untold Story,” which is the first poem in section one, and “When the Watched Pot Boils,” the first poem in the final section, were both written relatively late in the process and reflect how I finally came to understand this collection as being all about story.

Sample poem from Sugar Fix

He drove a four-door Chevy, nothing sexy,
but I'd been thinking of his mouth for weeks

when he finally called me up
and asked if I'd like to get
some ice cream.

I was full from supper and my
thighs sure didn't need it, but
I've never struggled with

priorities. That Dairy Queen
had gone downhill even then—
bright red logo faded like a movie star
who's kissed away all her lipstick—
but it still had a drive-in, and he
knew how I was about nostalgia

and sugar. This is how a place
became our song. We parked
under the sun-bleached canopy
and I leaned over him
pretending to read the menu.
Then at his rolled-down window
we confessed our desires
more or less into thin air,
which now that I think about it
sounds a little like church
and believe you me

I'd been praying about him.
How I wanted him.
How if I couldn't have him,
I wanted to be free
of want. Do you get that way
sometimes? Where all
you can think about is
chocolate, chocolate, chocolate,
or in my case man, man,
that man. The bench seat
of his Chevy became a pew,
the space between us palpable
as the early summer humidity.

I kept telling myself
it's just an ice cream,
but even then I knew
love is a kind of ruin.
When those cones arrived
so thick and voluptuous,
I almost blushed to open my mouth
before him, expose my eager tongue.

Click Cover for Amazon

Kory Wells is the author of Sugar Fix, from Terrapin Books. Her writing has been featured on The Slowdown podcast and recently appears in The Strategic Poet, The Literary Bohemian, Poetry South, Peauxdunque Review, and elsewhere. A former software developer who now nurtures connection and community through the arts, storytelling, and advocacy, Kory mentors poets across the nation through the from-home program MTSU Write and has served as the poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.   
www.korywells.com

Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly. She is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Somatic (Terrapin, 2020), as well as several scholarly studies of contemporary American poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in over thirty journals, including Yale Review, Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and Literary Imagination. A professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches poetry workshops and literature classes, she lives in Reno, Nevada.
www.annkeniston.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Kory Wells Interviews Theresa Burns

2022-06-10T14:03:00.002-04:00

Click Cover for Amazon

The following is the fifteenth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet. In this interview, Kory Wells talks with Theresa Burns about her use of color, the role of gardening and humor in her book, running a reading series, and persistence in getting a manuscript published.

Kory Wells: One of the first things to strike me about Design is how color infuses this collection. The epigraphs introduce white and green through the words of Frost and Lorca, and soon the reader is drenched in color: the yellow of a magnolia goldfinch, a hosta "blue as a lung," turquoise storefronts, the gray-greens of dreams, a burgundy dress, and so on. You even have several poems with color in the title—“Green," "Embarrassed by Orange," and "The New Black"—the latter of which I want to talk more about later!

So I really want to know: Is color as important to Theresa Burns the person as a whole as it is to Theresa Burns the poet? For example, what colors are in your home? Do your rooms mostly share a palette, or do they differ wildly? Do you dress in bright colors?

Theresa Burns: I love your question about color! It is important to me, and I think it's become more so as I've gotten older. It's probably rooted both in my kids' enthusiasms when they were young and also what excites me in the landscape.

When my daughter was a toddler and we asked what her favorite color was, she genuinely couldn't decide. "I love all the colors," she'd say, helplessly. (Though I think she's now settled on yellow.) The older I get, the more I'm with her on this. Why do we need to choose? My son, when he was young, loved purple most, then orange. The poem "Embarrassed by Orange" is about him helping me get over my adult need to push color away, blunt it somehow; he gets me to share his unabashed joy in it.

Color has a huge psychological impact on me. If I'm feeling a little depressed or dulled, I run out to find some orange to bring into the house. Orange tulips, a bowl of tangerines. And everyone in my house knows that if they spot an American goldfinch at the feeder, I must be summoned immediately. So colors make their way into the book, too.

Kory: The patterns in your poems are not only emotional—you also deftly layer nature with the made world, with relationships, with identity, with memory. I don’t mean to imply that a lot of the poems in Design are set in a garden…they’re not…and yet I feel this sense of garden and design as creation, if you will, throughout this collection. Are you a gardener?

Theresa: I love gardening, but I'm not a knowledgeable gardener. For a couple of years, I wrote a column for a local online edition of The New York Times. The idea was a person like me—recently moved from the city, who knows nothing about gardening—writing a gardening column. Instead of expert advice, I would write about the trial and error. And I could be funny. Over time, I came to see how much I loved the garden in a way that was not really scientific or knowledge based, but relationship based, story based. Stories about failure and negotiation and learning from your neighbors. When the Times dropped the local edition after two years, I needed another place to channel this new passion I'd developed. That's when the garden started entering the poems.

There are several poems in the book that are titled “Design,” and the first one did begin with the idea of garden design in my head—like the rule of three. But the poem quickly evolved and became as much about faith and intention and luck as any aesthetic concern, themes closer to those in the Robert Frost poem, “Design.” When I realized all those ideas could live in one small poem, I knew it could form the heart of a manuscript.

While I don’t consider myself a “nature poet” exactly, I am drawn to the language and rhythms and emotional life I find in the garden, and in nature overall. Because you can make mistakes and change your mind, it has helped me to take more risks. It’s also excellent for those of us in recovery from perfectionism, especially writers! There is no room for perfectionism in a garden; we can start things out, but we are not in control. And it is never finished.

Kory: “Only when I got a little closer to the dirt,” as you say in your poem “Teaching Whitman in the 21st Century.” You are speaking of the passage of time in that poem, but you’re making me want to go dig in my own perennials now!

Another thing that I appreciate in your poems is your tendency toward humor. And that brings me to "The New Black," your poem in which the speaker (can I call her you?) is at a poetry reading, possibly feeling a bit out of place because you're in mom jeans and an orange sweater, "possibly one / with flowers" (I adore that detail!) and everyone else there seems to fit the stereotype of a poet. It’s a super-fun poem and yet it pokes the beast of poetic identity and the sometimes-gatekeeping of the literary community. As the founder of a community reading series (Watershed Literary Events), can you talk more about the intersection of your personal writing practice with the poetry community?

Theresa: I'm glad you asked this question because my knee jerk response might have been a glib one about the gatekeeping and cliquishness of some folks in the poetry community. But that, by and large, has not been my experience. That said, the poem "The New Black" is based on a conflation of two real life events, both of which took place in Brooklyn a few years back when my kids were small, and it took enormous reserves of time, money and guilt capital just to get myself into Brooklyn to be part of a reading.

In one case, the poet introducing me seemed to be apologizing to the audience that I lived in New Jersey, stressing that I used to live in Brooklyn, so maybe that mitigated it. In the second case, the poet introducing me to the host seemed to apologize to him for how I was dressed: "She looks conservative, but she's anything but!" I was wearing a blouse with flowers on it, and it was being read as political or social conservatism. And then I became acutely aware that everyone else there was dressed in black and grey, with heavy black boots, and I sort of wrote that poem on the train on the way back to my town that night, where the next day everything was blooming and lots of folks were dressed in bright colors and kind of drunk on Spring, and I felt perfectly at home.

When I first started Watershed Literary Events in 2019, it was part of a plan in my town to offer some off-site activities while their arts center was being renovated. The town leaders liked the idea of a spoken word series, and I figured well, we could keep this going for a couple years with just Jersey-related people. And what I soon realized was the depth and breadth of the talent out here. It seems every week I learn about another writer I admire who was born here, or moved here, or teaches here. Everyone knows Whitman and W.C. Williams lived in NJ. But Paul Auster grew up in my town, and so did Alicia Mountain, a young poet who I think is brilliant. I'd never heard of Jane Wong or Rachelle Parker before I worked on Watershed—now I'm their #1 fan. I could do this for decades!

Kory: Yes to all of this! As the founder of a local series myself, I understand—and celebrate—that sense of local richness. But I know I also struggle, sometimes, with getting to my own work when there are so many opportunities for community outreach. So, for a final question: How much do you feed community, and how much does it feed you?

Theresa: I'll just say it's probably worth noting that the poetry book I'd been writing and revising and submitting for about 20 years—Design—finally got done during the last couple of years, while being locked down during a pandemic and continuing to work on Watershed with our Program Manager, Anne Wessel. I don't think that's an accident, and it may be why those wise people who give advice to poets trying to get manuscripts published tell them to keep trying, and while they're trying, to practice their poetry citizenship, help poetry happen around them. It changes something, makes you feel part of the whole continuum of poets and poem making. It helps you find your place in it.

Sample poem from Design

The New Black

 Because I wore an orange
 sweater to the reading, possibly one

 with flowers, and had my black
 standard-issue MFA glasses

 holstered for the moment
 in a pocket of my mom jeans,

 my poet friend apologized 
to the emcee while introducing me,

 hand at her throat, assured him
 good naturedly that though

 I lived in Jersey now, I did in fact 
reside in Brooklyn once

 and, despite appearances, 
belonged among them, the ones

 in black leather, black jeans, 
Doc Martens, ombre hair, smoke

 lenses, each one a small storm
 gathering as he took the stage

 to read, features illumined 
from below, crepuscular,

 and I wanted to shout, Am I not 
one of you, brother, confrère—

though I’ve taken the train
 to this dive, not the subway.

 And the trees of the town I just left 
were exploding like seltzer

 bottles thrown down a stair. 
What’s more, I have a garden there,

 and the craziest orange azalea 
opened just last week,

 its color the latest cheesy
devotion I wear on my sleeve.

Click Cover for Amazon

Theresa Burns' debut collection of poems, Design, was released from Terrapin Books in 2022. She is also the author of the chapbook Two Train Town (2017). Her poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Verse Daily, The Cortland Review, The Night Heron Barks, Plume, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee and former book editor, she is the founder of the community-based reading series Watershed Literary Events and teaches writing in and around New York. An earlier version of Design was a finalist in both the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press and the Homebound Publications Poetry Prize for 2021.
www.theresaburns.org

Kory Wells is the author of Sugar Fix, a poetry collection from Terrapin Books. Her writing has been featured on The Slowdown podcast and recently appears in The Strategic Poet, The Literary Bohemian, Poetry South, Peauxdunque Review and elsewhere. A former software developer who now nurtures connection and community through the arts, storytelling, and advocacy, Kory mentors poets across the nation through the from-home program MTSU Write and has served as the poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
www.korywells.com

Making More of Revision

2022-06-01T12:18:00.004-04:00

During revision discussions, we poets hear a lot about compression, reducing clutter, and cutting out the non-essential. Who hasn’t sat in a poetry class or workshop and been told that less is more? So when someone tells us to add more, to expand, to keep going, we might be hesitant to pay attention.

But we should pay attention. The less-is-more principle is often good advice, but it’s not always good advice. As I once heard Mark Doty say, Sometimes more is more.

Too often we start revising and hacking away at the poem before it’s even fully written. We quit before we’ve given the poem life, before we’ve discovered its full potential, before we’ve found its real material.

Stephen Dunn addresses the topic of revision in a 2007 interview in Pedestal Magazine:

"A fairly new experience that I’ve been having is revision as expansion. Most of us know about revision as an act of paring down. Several years ago, in looking at my work, I saw that I was kind of a page or page and a half kind of poet, which meant that I was thinking of closure around the same time in every poem. I started to confound that habit. By mid-poem, I might add a detail that the poem couldn’t yet accommodate. That’s especially proven to be an interesting and useful way of revising poems that seem too slight or thin; to add something, put in an obstacle. The artificial as another way to arrive at the genuine—an old story, really."

Before you begin to strip down your poem or abandon it as no good or decide it’s good enough as it is, first consider how you might expand your poem. The following expansion strategies just might help you to discover your poem’s true potential and arrive at the genuine.

1. Choose a single poem by someone else, one that has strong diction. Take ten words from that poem and, in no particular order, plug them into your own draft. Make them make sense within the context of your poem, adjusting your context as needed. Or let the words introduce an element of the strange, a touch of the surreal.

2. Find the lifeless part of your poem. This is often the part where your mind begins to wander when you read the poem aloud. Open up space there and keep on writing in that space. Repeat elsewhere if needed. Remember that freewriting can occur not only while drafting but also while revising.

3. Find three places in the poem where you could insert a negative statement. Then go into the right margin of your draft and write those statements. Add them to the poem. By being contrary, you might add depth and richness to the poem.

4. Go into the right margin and write some kind of response to each line, perhaps its opposite, perhaps a question. The material that you add to the right margin just might be your best material, the real material. Bring what works into the poem. Make friends with the right margin; good things happen out there.

5. Put something into your poem that seemingly doesn’t belong, perhaps some kind of food, a tree, a piece of furniture, a policeman, or a dog. Elaborate.

6. Add a color and exploit it throughout the poem. This is often a surprisingly effective enlivening strategy, one that can alter the tone of the poem.

7. Go metaphor crazy. Add ten metaphors or similes to the poem. Keep the keepers.

8. Look up the vocabulary of an esoteric subject that has nothing to do with your poem. The subject might be mushroom foraging, astronomy, cryogenics, perfume-making, bee keeping, the Argentinian tango, or zombies. Make a list of at least ten words. Include a variety of parts of speech. Import the words into your poem. Develop as needed.

9. Pick any one concrete object in your poem and personify it throughout the poem. For example, if there’s a rock, give it feelings, let it observe and think, give it a voice. As the object comes alive, so may the poem.

10. Midway or two-thirds into your poem, insert a story, perhaps something from the newspaper, a book you’ve read, a fable, or a fairy tale. Don’t use the entire story, just enough of it to add some texture and weight to your poem. Your challenge is to find the connection between this new material and what was already in the poem.

Now go into your folder of old, abandoned poems, the ones you gave up on when you decided they just weren’t going anywhere. Then get out some of your recent poems that feel merely good enough, the ones that never gave you that jolt of excitement we get when a poem is percolating. Finally, return to some of the poems that you’ve submitted and submitted with no success, those poor rejects.

Mark all of these poems as once again in progress. Now apply some of the expansion strategies and see if you can breathe new life into the poems. Remember that this kind of revision is not a matter of merely making the poem longer; it’s a matter of making the poem better.

(This craft tip appears in my book The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop.)

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Paige Riehl Interviews Ann Keniston

2022-05-19T14:21:00.001-04:00

The following is the fourteenth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Paige Riehl talks with Ann Keniston about combining scholarship with creativity, the role of research in writing poems, the speaker's voice, syntax, and manuscript organization.

Paige Riehl: Thank you, Ann, for discussing your powerful poetry collection Somatic with me. Somatic is organized into four sections that explore the complexities of illness, in particular the diagnosis of hysteria, through the life and treatment of Anna O, the first hysteric diagnosed by Dr. Josef Breuer in the late 1800s. You expressed your interest in the relationship between the creative and scholarly, so would you tell us a bit about those intersections in Somatic as they relate to your process of researching hysteria and Anna’s case and writing the poems? Was it a more circuitous than linear process? From where does your interest in the subject matter stem?

Ann Keniston: The book evolved from several sources. One was the aftermath of my mother’s death; I actually published a chapbook of elegies about her (November Wasps, Finishing Line), some of which I revised—mostly pretty heavily—for Somatic. My interest in Anna O. and hysteria had several sources: I’ve always been interested in the relation of mind and body, and somehow I stumbled across a bunch of documents about Anna, from the first case study to a radically revisionary article by H.F. Ellenberger published in 1972 to a bunch of more recent feminist and other studies. Anna was kind of a blank screen for critics, it seems, who projected their own interests onto her. Before I ever thought of writing poems about this topic, I compiled a little anthology of those writings as a unit in an honors composition course I was teaching about memory. I just kept reading about Anna and hysteria and got more and more fascinated, and also a little repelled. I began writing poems about Anna, and also in her voice (or that of a more generic hysteric who was also, of course, partly me), and realized that the elegies were in fact relevant to the Anna poems, so I worked to bring those elements of the ms together.

Paige: The opening poem titled “Opaque” begins with the line “and then my mother wasn’t / there.” This poem explores the concept of absence, which is a theme in the book, and how it’s unexplainable, more defined by what it isn’t than is, although the poem ends with “unless someone chooses / a single moment / to preserve and undertake / the labor of transcribing it.” I read those lines as relating to both the poem’s content and to you as poet, the transcriptionist laboring to illustrate and preserve these tangled and complex historical moments, including what is absent from the records. What unique opportunities does the poetic form provide when exploring this history and subject matter? Do you think that the poetic form offers an opportunity achieve a “truth” that the medical records and case studies cannot?

Ann: I was definitely thinking about my own poetic project in that poem; in fact, this is one of the poems I revised heavily from the chapbook, so I was literally engaged in a laborious process. When I write poems, I often try to unfasten myself from linearity and narrative. Poems like “Opaque” allow me to explore contradictions and paradoxes that feel powerful to me. I often say that writing poems allows me to bring my analytic, thinking self to feelings that are powerful but inchoate, the kinds of often contradictory or self-defeating feelings that I sometimes think organize my life—and maybe everyone’s. In that context, I was especially interested that Breuer’s familiar published case history of Anna was in fact a radical revision of a shorter, unpublished one that was much less conclusive. Writing poems based on the case histories, from which I cite in often scattered ways, allowed me to further disrupt their logic, to focus on them as linguistic artifacts rather than arguments, and to expose the ways their arguments were in fact fictions constructed to support newly emerging theories. I was interested in the book in trying out different forms, both more and less coherent, again to try to get at what felt almost inexpressible, especially in terms of the complicated relation between bodily symptoms and their psychological causes.

Paige: I keep returning to the poem “Conversion.” I so admire the intensity of the short lines, the surprising metaphors, the way the poem turns and builds upon itself: “And then I made / an actual girl, hysterical, / from husks / and scattered pages / and her dust. / I licked her lips / and then her scar, / hurt bruise, / bereaved, her / hiding place. I mean / she was a house / I squatted in.” Will you talk a little about the speaker in this poem as well as your process of determining who else would be given voice in the collection? Do some poems have a speaker whose voice blurs or overlaps with your own as poet?

Ann: Absolutely. “Conversion” talks about a hysterical figure without appropriating her body or voice. It is a kind of ars poetica: I literally had the pages of different articles scattered around me as I wrote. I’m still not exactly sure why I became so preoccupied with Anna and hysteria, though I have had some firsthand experience with psychosomatic illness (now called conversion disorder). (I was also interested in the pun: I was converting documents depicting someone with conversion disorder into a not-quite living person who was also a version of me. My scholarly work on contemporary U.S. poetry has focused a lot on elegy and the ways poems create and invoke ghostly versions of the dead.) Using Anna as a foil and adopting the kind of “hysterical” voice that I and others have associated with the operatic aria—halting, aphasic, redundant, nonlinear, but also kind of histrionic—enabled me to express things I couldn’t otherwise. So, to answer your last question directly, I’d say all the poems in the volume, no matter who narrates them, speak in versions of my voice.

Paige: You are adept at using language and syntax to create tension in your poems that reflect and reveal the layers of historical tension—the tension between what is imagined vs. recorded, real vs. performance, between “treatment” and mistreatment. In “Concordance,” you write “each / almost-theory disproven by the newest batch / of symptoms till psychoanalysis became a curtain / filled with holes and also light.” Is effective poetic tension like that metaphor—"a curtain / filled with holes and also light?” Is building tension an intuitive process for you? Tell us about your process of creating and controlling tension and the function of disjunction in your poetry.

Ann: I often say I’m not an especially good drafter of poems, but I’m pretty good at revision. All the poems in the volume were heavily reworked, and at times reimagined from scratch multiple times, so I’d hesitate to say that these poems were “intuitive” in the sense of having written themselves. I think tensions are what I am most interested in—the tensions you mention, and how they are evident in tonal shifts and turns. In the poems I most love (and study most intently), the process of reading the poem involves surprises. I love it when poems swerve—when they move, especially over a line or stanza break, into unexpected territory. The idea of something simultaneously torn and revelatory is really powerful for me. I had a yoga teacher who used to play a piece called something like “Light on Fish Scales” during savasana, which reminds me of Bishop’s image of iridescent fish scales in “At the Fishhouses.” The notion breakage or splintering makes something more beautiful is really powerful for me, amd that suffering allows things to be revealed that can’t be otherwise. I’ve strayed quite a bit from your question, but I think that the topics I’m most drawn to write about are ones that involve, or let me create, tensions of different kinds.

Paige: Will you talk about the book’s structure a bit more? The book is divided into sections subtitled Elegies, Odes, and Arias. What are those forms for you and what is the effect of juxtaposing them?

Ann: I’ve long been interested in the elegy and ode as forms. As I mentioned before, I’ve written quite a bit about elegy in my scholarly work, and was very influenced by a weeklong seminar I took on the ode at the National Humanities Center led by Susan Stewart over a decade ago and actually wrote an article on the contemporary ode afterward. I am interested in the distinctive features of these forms, but also the ways they overlap, the ways elegies can end up as praise poems and odes can focus on unpraiseworthy entities or experiences. I kind of stumbled on the idea of the aria as a third (hysterical) mode: it seemed to me to express the kind of extremist and also performative speech a hysteric might use, and I was especially happy to see that Peter Brooks (in an article I cite from as the epigraph to Part Three) sees the operatic aria as a distinctively hysterical form. I return to the ode in the last section, entitled “Assemblage,” but differently: these poems attempt to locate a mode of praise that emerges from fragmentation and the reassembly of parts. Those poems focus direcly on actions of breakage and remaking, as the poem titles (“Profusion,” “Sutured,” “Reassembly,” “Accrual,” etc.) indicate.

Sample poem from Somatic:

Somatic

So I could let her in     
                           and spill

my secret animosity and

sweet, I found some other 
broken girls I hadn’t known
 existed till she 
               got lost to me, lacy

wraiths I pitied first, then came
 to love since all they had

were bodies and the body’s
 requirements come both first  
and last. Illness is another

form of speech, 
                   somatic, enmeshed
 in flesh and manifest as symptom 
and release,

                 a code
 I also speak, their voices
 my portion, penance, snippet.

violent or tender but

                          always loyal

since all I wanted 
was not to further harm

my fragile, lost, familiar one.

                Click Cover for Amazon

Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly. She is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Somatic (Terrapin 2020), as well as several scholarly studies of contemporary American poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in over thirty journals, including Yale Review, Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and Literary Imagination. A professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches poetry workshops and literature classes, she lives in Reno.
www.annkeniston.com

Suspension (Terrapin Books, 2018) and the poetry chapbook Blood Ties (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications such as Artful Dodge, Crab Orchard Review, Water-Stone Review, Portland Review, and Meridian. She was a finalist for the 2017 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry with Milkweed Edition, winner of the 2012-2013 Loft Mentor Series in Poetry, and was a 2016 & 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee. She served as the Poetry Editor for Midway Journal, as poetry mentor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and is an English faculty member at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, where she is Chair of the Two Rivers Reading Series and 2021-2022 Co-Coordinator for Minnesota State Write Like Us.
www.paigeriehl.com/

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Diane LeBlanc Interviews Robin Rosen Chang

2022-04-28T11:47:00.003-04:00

The following is the thirteenth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Diane LeBlanc talks with Robin Rosen Chang about the role of a prefatory poem, the use of myth in poetry, manuscript organization, and the function of form.

Diane LeBlanc: The first poem in The Curator’s Notes, “My Mother Was Water,” introduces some of the collection’s central motifs: water, a mother/daughter relationship, origin stories, exile, survival. It serves as a preface or frontispiece. I always wonder if poets choose a poem with great weight for that position in a book, or if a poem gathers force when situated alone before a series of sections. What can you tell us about that poem and about its place in the collection?

Robin Rosen Chang: “My Mother Was Water” was actually the working title of my collection. However, I felt that, as a title, it incorrectly implied that the collection was all about the mother figure. On the other hand, the poem works well as a prefatory poem because it introduces many of the book’s themes. Through this poem, the reader is presented with the importance of stories—origin stories, stories we inherit, stories we adapt, stories we ourselves curate—as well as the types of relationships that are prominent in The Curator’s Notes, namely those between mothers and daughters and between women and men. It also serves as a launching point for my own origin story, while foreshadowing some of the turbulence that ensues.

Diane: We just touched on origin stories. You begin the book with your origin story. Then, poems such as “Bleeding into the Garden,” “The Creation of Adam,” “Apple,” “The Snake,” and one of my favorites, “Motherless, Eve,” return to the Biblical creation myth to contemplate origins of human beings, paradise, sin, loss, grief, even stories themselves. What draws you to the Garden of Eden story in these poems?

Robin: I’m not sure what initially impelled me to write the Creation poems, but in retrospect, I’m sure I intuited there was something crucial about the figure of Eve. “Bleeding into the Garden” was the first one that I wrote, and in it and the other Creation poems, I begin to interrogate stories that have been handed down to us. For example, why should it be taken for granted that Eve was the first to be disobedient? Why would Eve and Adam be ashamed of being naked? It was exciting and liberating for me to be able to write poems that felt so different from my usual preoccupations, but also, interrogating those stories empowered me to think more critically about my own story. When I began to reflect on how the Eve poems related to the poems I had written about loss and about the speaker’s mother, I realized that Eve was literally motherless. That understanding prompted me to delve into what being motherless would really mean. Imagining Eve and Adam together also gave me a way to explore relationships between women and men.

Diane: Knowing that you had several poems in dialogue with the creation myth, how did you determine their placement in the book? I can never decide if I should group similar poems or weave them throughout a collection. The dispersed effect in The Curator’s Notes is powerful. The myth becomes increasingly integrated into the world of the book until the real and mythical, the ancient and the contemporary, are interchangeable in “After Eden.” What can you tell us about organizing the collection?

Robin: Organizing the collection was a challenge. The collection started as my thesis for my MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I had always wanted the Creation series to be part of the thesis, but I didn’t know how to integrate them into the collection. My advisor, Rodney Jones, suggested that they could be interspersed and in conversation with the other poems. That’s when I started understanding the relationship between Eve and the speaker. Still, deciding where to place different poems was difficult because The Curator’s Notes has other threads related to nature, art, language, and Spain. I first experimented with placing the narrative poems in chronological order and strategically placing the lyric poems among them. When Diane Lockward began working with me to bring the book to fruition, she suggested I let go of chronology since this book deals with curating stories and also with memory. That opened up lots of options.

Diane: Let’s talk about form. Your poems vary in terms of the number and pattern of stanzas, line lengths, and alignment. That variation creates appealing use of negative space. I’m particularly interested in what I call the skinny couplets of “Futility,” “Ashamed,” and “Holding On.” The lines are two to three words long with a lot of white space to their right. Do you have an influential poet’s work in mind or does a certain kind of content inspire those spare lines? I’m curious how a poem’s appearance on the page influences your form and language choices.

Robin: William Carlos Williams is of course well known for some of his very spare poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow” or “This Is Just to Say.” Rae Armantrout, a contemporary Language poet, is also masterful with short lines. While Williams, Armantrout, and others use short lines in different ways, parceling information into small chunks and offering only the most essential bits, surrounded by white space, intensifies the impact of what is there. It pops and takes on more meaning, while what is not said is almost ghostlike and still felt.

The poems you mentioned—“Futility,” “Ashamed,” and “Holding On”— are among the most difficult poems I wrote because they intimately and directly deal with loss. They address a loss that is not mitigated by distance, but one that is immediate and acutely painful. In these three poems, the speaker’s mother is dying, and the speaker’s feelings are complex and raw. Because of this, the only way I could write these poems was by uttering what I felt I had to say. Thus, the content led to the form of these poems, while the form also acted upon the content. In this sense, these poems are very organic. I have to add that concise poems like these are incredibly difficult to write. Each word must be earned, and their placement on the page and every line break becomes crucial.

Diane: The poems in your collection raise timeless questions. In the book’s title poem, you recognize the tension between extinction and survival in species and in family. Since other poems explore the relationship between knowledge and responsibility, I’m wondering about “the curator’s” responsibility to the dying and the living. At what point in writing the poems in this book did you realize you were living with these questions?

Robin: You’re correct that a lot of the poems in The Curator’s Notes deal with survival, whether it is of individuals, families or entire species. This only became evident to me during the process of revising some poems with an eye to making the collection more cohesive. “Great Green Macaw,” the final poem in the second section, is one I had always been fond of, but I could never find the proper closure for it. While revising that poem, the line “[t]ell me how you survive/this perishing world” came to me. That’s when it became clear to me that survival is the underlying subject of this book. But also, recognizing beauty and love, even when it appears in unusual places and unrecognizable forms, and curating one’s own story are essential for being able to live in this world.

Sample Poem from The Curator's Notes:

The Curator’s Notes

In amber, the thin, articulated vertebrae of a Coelurosaur,
feathered landlubber, festooned with thousands of wispy fluffs
resembling leaves—rachis with pinnules, chestnut-color on
top, colorless on the bottom—probable cousin of the “chicken
from hell.” Neither destined to endure—

Like the rodent, Bramble Cay Melomys, recently extinct. Or
the Darwin Fox, numbers dwindling as earth, once recovered,
gets increasingly inhospitable. Our generations will also
shrink. The Formicidae will prosper, a most dubious hero—

The ant. One glows in the amber resin. Its multi-chambered
spine—head, thorax, bloated abdomen. Six legs, each bends
in three places—eighteen joints that motored him through ferns
and conifers, under lumbering big-headed dinosaurs and
tiny-brained armored grass grazers, between the legs of
cockroaches. The species marched 100 million years to the
other side of the K-T mass extinction, dropping small white
eggs on its way, colonizing almost every landmass. Survivors.
At any moment, 10 quadrillion walk the planet—

And in her bed, my mother. Her bowed back, its protruding
spinous process, like a nautilus’ chambers, spirals inward
toward oblivion. The archivist, I note the world disappearing
before my still-good eyes, and wish I could change nature’s
course—uncurl her.

Click for Amazon

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Diode, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and other journals. They have also been included in Terrapin Books’ A Constellation of Kisses and The Strategic Poet. She is the recipient of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poets’ Choice Award, an honorable mention for Spoon River Poetry Review’s 2019 Editors’ Prize, and a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart nominee. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
www.robinrosenchang.com

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. Her books include The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Her poems and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Sweet, and other journals. Diane is a certified holistic life coach with emphasis in creative practice. She directs the writing program and teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.
www.dianeleblancwriter.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Robb Fillman Interviews Meghan Sterling

2022-04-21T10:00:00.001-04:00

The following is the twelfth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Robb Fillman talks with Meghan Sterling about poetry and place, poetry and parenting, the function of titling, and poetry and form.

Robert Fillman: Thank you, Meghan, for taking a moment to chat with me about your ambitious debut collection, These Few Seeds, which I loved! The book covers a lot of ground—Brooklyn, London, Greece, California, New England, Texas—was your intention to evoke place (and a range of places) when you set out to write this collection? Or did you have some other governing principle in mind?

Meghan Sterling: It is a whirlwind, isn’t it? A big part of my life has been traveling the world—it was actually in Peru that I decided to have my daughter. As my first collection, I wanted to give it the breadth of my life, all that came before that delivered me to my daughter, as it were, that made me the person who could be her mother, who could mother at all. Traveling also gives me a broader sense of grief about what we are losing to climate change. And she may not take after me, but if she does, I hope she can travel a world that still has sacred and pristine spaces.

Robb: So many of the poems in These Few Seeds are tender representations of motherhood. And yet, they are often textured by an awareness of the environmental crises that threaten to upend intimate moments with your child. Could you talk about the feelings you are working through as you bring these themes together?

Meghan: There is a sharpness in intense joy that sometimes carries the resemblance of intense grief with it. When I was pregnant with my daughter, the wilderness around Asheville, NC, where we were living at the time, was on fire, and Asheville was a bowl of smoke. Australia was on fire, California was on fire, and the Amazon was on fire. The world was on fire. It has been on fire in every way since that time. With my daughter's tender growing comes the grief and uncertainty that this world deserves her, or that the parts that do will survive long enough to become part of the landscape that shapes her. And I write into that fear and sorrow and love.

Robb: I appreciate that the phrase "these few seeds" (which is, of course, the title of the book) appears in the last line of the final poem. It keeps the reader in suspense, waiting for that revelatory moment! Would you walk us through how you arrived at the title of the book and how you see that metaphor operating for the collection as a whole?

Meghan: Oh, titling. I went through so many titles. It took me months. I went from long titles to one word titles—I tried everything. By the end, I knew I wanted something that was three words and contained assonance. I had been inspired by my friend and fellow poet Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook titled, Bright Glint Gone. I loved the clean brevity of it, and the sound of it. Diane Lockward (publisher of Terrapin Books) and I worked together to search through the manuscript for just the right three-word phrase—and she found it!

Robb: I admire a poet that embraces different forms. Free verse clearly dominates the book, but each of the five sections of These Few Seeds experiments with line and stanza length. In fact, it is rare to see two poems in the collection adopt an identical form. Can you explain how you arrive at the formal structures of your work?

Meghan: I love playing with forms. I started out as a formal poet who has branched into the world of free verse and modern sonnets. However, I love to play with the way a poem looks on the page. One criticism I got early on was that my poems were just blocks of text on the page, so I am sensitive to create space and variety.

I like to let the poem inform me as to the shape. Something very dense might become a series of couplets. Something that has a song-like quality or a certain way of repeating itself might become a series of tercets. If something feels breathless and urgent, it might remain in a block of text, without breaks. And, if something has a certain longing in it, it might become a sonnet. But I experiment until it settles into the form that gives it life.

Robb: I loved so many of these poems: "Morning Prayer," "The Absence of Birds," "Man Subdues Terrorist with Narwhal Tusk on London Bridge," "Adeline," "Apology After the Fire." I could go on! If you had to pick a single poem from the book that means the most to you (for whatever reason), which would it be—and why?

Meghan: I have a few. “Still Life with Snow,” “Jew(ish),” and “All That I Have is Yours” are some that jump to mind, but my very favorite is probably “Weaning.” It captures some of the raw feeling, the intense physical love between a mother and child, that I really didn’t know existed until I had my daughter. That deep, powerful, physical love has changed me utterly. That poem captures the anguish at each layer of losing a closeness with her. It was the first one—weaning her. There have been more since, and so many more to come. But when I read that one, I cry a little, every time. And that makes me feel like I got at the truth of something, which is, ultimately, why I write poems.

Sample poem from These Few Seeds:

Still Life with Snow

It fell away, that slant of light
that followed us across the North Sea,
across a stable yard, hoofmarks
sunk into the frozen mud. The way the barn
cut the night in two, the hay steaming,
the chickens soft in the roost. I had dreamt
us before we ever came to be, clutching the cold
like a talisman against the bruising of old dreams,
against the inevitable age that would grip us
in its fulsome mouth, a dog in the stable yard
mawing its one mean bone. And what sky was left
was hollowed moon and piecemeal as a memory
of what I thought I could be if only love would
find me, traveling the Arctic of my heart,
gnawing its white bone.

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Meghan Sterling’s work was nominated for four Pushcart Prizes in 2021 and has been published in Rattle, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, SWIMM, Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review. Her first full length collection These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021. Her chapbook, Self Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will be out in 2023.
www.meghansterling.com

Robert Fillman is the author of the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His poems have appeared in such journals as The Hollins Critic, Poetry East, Salamander, Sugar House Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. His criticism has been published by ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, CLAJ: The College Language Association Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and teaches at Kutztown University. His debut full-length collection, House Bird, was published by Terrapin Books in February 2022.
http://www.robertfillman.com

Terrapin Interview Series: Dion O'Reilly Interviews Yvonne Zipter

2022-04-14T11:30:00.001-04:00

The following is the eleventh in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Dion O'Reilly talks with Yvonne Zipter about discovery in poetry, dealing with difficult topics, poetry and religion, and finding solace in poetry.

Dion O’Reilly: Nature, or what we now call The Living World, is a prominent feature in your poetry. Do you consider yourself an eco-poet?

Yvonne Zipter: I’ve never actually thought about it, but I think that’s a fair label to apply to my work. If ecopoetry explores “the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception,” as Forrest Gander posits in The Ecopoetry Anthology (eds. Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street), then it makes perfect sense to apply that term to my work. Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, for instance, is organized roughly as a dialogue between the natural world and humans, the intent being to show how they—we—are interrelated. But I tend to agree with Naturalist Weekly that “labels can be challenging for readers and writers. They have a tendency to limit our ability to see the world. One of the things I really appreciate about poetry is that any given poem may produce different meanings to different people. . . . Any poetry that gets you to think about your role or place in the natural world is beneficial and . . . the labels we give them are only helpful if they contribute to the joy of the audience.” That said, I would be honored to be thought of as an ecopoet.

Dion: Do you strive to take turns in your poems, what we call voltas or peripeteia? In other words, do you seek a deeper layer, what Robert Frost called surprise and what many poets call discovery?

Yvonne: For me, part of the joy of writing poetry is discovering what the poem is about as I’m writing it. That surprise or discovery, to my way of thinking, is an important component of a compelling poem, not only for me as the poet but for the reader as well. The delight I feel when an out-of the-ordinary perspective emerges regarding some ordinary thing—I want the reader to feel that delight as well. A poem for which the significance of the subject remains opaque to me is never successful. I end up trying to force a revelation, and the resulting poem feels empty, too glib, uninspired—boring. What I aim for in my poems is being able to take the reader along with me in the process of seeing something in a new way that might ordinarily be taken for granted. Well, that’s not quite true—I write for myself, for the joy of learning something I knew but didn’t know I knew. It’s only afterward that I think about the reader.

Dion: How do you feel poetry should deal with what some call, perhaps unfairly, darkness—topics like death, pain, "the slings and arrow?"

Yvonne: Pain, death, and adversity are common to every living being and are thus topics that should be universally relatable. As a poet, writing about these difficult topics has not only given me solace but has also been a way for me to find beauty and/or poignancy about some of life’s least pleasant moments. The hope is that such poems can allow readers to think about their difficult moments in a new way and/or help them process their own pain or grief. At the very least, poems on topics such as these let people know they are not alone in what they’ve been through.

 However, much as with love poems, poems about pain and death are hard to write without falling into abstractions and clichés. I often have to let months or years pass before I can write a poem about something dire that has happened before I can focus on the kinds of details that will let me tell the reader “this was awful” without telling them that.

Dion: You have a few poems which could be interpreted as having a theme of religion versus spirituality—"Still Waters" and "Manners of the Flesh" come to mind. Is this a theme you grapple with?

Yvonne: Religion, in my poems, functions as a sort of shorthand—like myth, in a way—to convey a lot about a subject without having to elaborate in great detail because the themes, terms, et cetera are well-known. I think of myself as a spiritual person. When it comes to traditional religion, I consider myself to be an atheist, but I was raised going to church (three different denominations, actually—Lutheran, Methodist, and Unitarian) and my wife is Catholic, so despite my beliefs, I am nevertheless steeped in this culture. But because I use religious imagery so often in my poems, my wife sometimes teases me that I’m the worst atheist ever. “Manners of the Flesh” was actually written for a friend of mine who has struggled with his own relationship to religion, especially during the time his sister was dying, hence the ambivalence about heaven, prayer, and so on, whereas in “Still Waters” I use the terminology of religion to express my reverence for nature and the awe I often feel in its presence—in other words, as a way to put spirituality on the same plane as religion.

Dion: Danusha Lameris talks about poets having a solace and an irritant. The irritant feels broken or off-kilter and inspires them to speak. But poets also often experience a solace, a relief from that irritant. It appears that the Living World (nature) and your dogs are a solace for you. Would you say that is true? And what is your irritant?

Yvonne: You’ve hit the nail right on the head: nature, including pets, is definitely a place of refuge for me. When I’m looking at a Cooper’s hawk in flight or hugging the dog, I’m not thinking about the precarious nature of our democracy or inequities of race and class. As a kid, I immersed myself in nature, haunting the nearby creek for frogs and garter snakes, climbing trees, and chasing bumblebees and fireflies trying to catch them in a jar so I could watch them up for a while close. But as I got older, I drifted away from the natural world. There was always so much else to do—studying, reading, learning what it was to be a feminist, to be queer. But as things began to slow down a bit, with a steady job and long-term relationship, I found myself drawn to nature again.
 
As for an irritant, I have a few, from racial inequities to political skulduggery. But these irritants overwhelm me in a way that, for the most part, makes it hard for me to write poetry about them without sounding shrill and prosaic. But then, that gives me something to work toward.

Sample poem from Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound:

Osteosarcoma: A Love Poem

—for Easton, Zooey, and Nacho

Cancer loves the long bone,
the femur and the fibula,
the humerus and ulna,
the greyhound’s sleek physique,
a calumet, ribboned with fur
and eddies of dust churned to a smoke,
the sweet slenderness of that languorous
lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk
of Spiegelau stemware, its bowl
bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy,
a reed, a wand, the violin’s bow —
loves the generous line of your lanky limbs,
the distance between points A and D,
epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end
but then of course it does, emptying
its miles into the Cal-Sag Channel
that river of waste and sorrow.
I’ve begun a scrapbook:
here the limp that started it all, here
your scream when the shoulder bone broke,
here that walk to the water dish,
your leg trailing like a length
of black bunting. And here the words I whispered
when your ears lay like spent milkweed pods
on that beautiful silky head:
Run. Run, my boy-o,
in that madcap zigzag,
unzipping the air.

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Yvonne Zipter was born in Milwaukee, WI, and following sojourns on both coasts, has replanted herself firmly again in the Midwest. She lives in Chicago with her wife and a long succession of retired racing greyhounds. She is the author of the poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Awards finalist) and Like Some Bookie God; the nonfiction books Ransacking the Closet and Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend; the novel Infraction; and the nationally syndicated column "Inside Out,"which ran from 1983 to 1993. Her poems have been published widely in periodicals.
www.yvonne-zipter.com

Dion O’Reilly’s prize-winning book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Poetry Daily, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Journal of American Poetry, Rattle, and The Sun. She is a member of The Hive Poetry Collective, which produces podcasts and radio shows, and she leads online workshops with poets from all over the United States and Canada.
www.dionoreilly.wordpress.com

Terrapin Interview Series: Meghan Sterling Interviews Robb Fillman

2022-04-07T10:54:00.002-04:00

The following is the tenth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Meghan Sterling talks with Robb Fillman about masculinity and poetry, parenthood and poetry, ordering poems in a manuscript, and more.

Meghan Sterling: The poems in House Bird, which are lovely, have a thread of masculinity/an examination of men and manhood running through them, both painful and yearning. Can you talk about how you came to a place of writing about manhood? What do you feel is most urgent about doing so?

Robb Fillman: To be honest, I don’t believe it was a conscious act. In other words, I did not set out to write about masculinity per se. I think I started writing poems about the relationships I had with the people around me—my wife, my children, my father, my grandfather, my uncles, my childhood friends, and so on—and I started thinking about what it means to be a father, a husband, a son, a brother. And it wasn’t until well into writing that I noticed that I was actually trying to speak the words that had been, for whatever reason, difficult for me to express in conversation.

Sometimes, I think men and boys feel as though they can’t talk openly about their feelings, so we talk around the "thing" we wish to say, or we don’t talk at all. And I suppose, one of the reasons I started writing poetry was because I felt inarticulate. In that way, the poems could speak for me. And really, it was after I had children when I began to think: I don’t want my kids not knowing what their dad thought or felt. I want them, when they are older, to have a map, to know I was (and still am) a "work in progress." I never want them—my son or my daughter—to be afraid of their own feelings. Poetry opens up that space.

Meghan: How do you feel fatherhood has changed the way you see your father and grandfather? Your mother? How do you feel your poems reflect that?

As I was beginning to say, becoming a parent changed my entire outlook. Until I had children, I don't think I was nearly as reflective as I am now—in my poetry, or just in my daily existence. After having kids though—playing with them, caring for them, reading to them, witnessing their facial expressions, listening to what they say (and don't say)—I came to realize that even the slightest interaction, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, affects them. Every experience they have is a discovery.

So becoming a father got me circling back to my own childhood and the people who influenced me. I was very lucky to have nurturing and generous caregivers. But we are all human, so we are flawed and subject to human frailties. I try to be mindful of those complexities in my poetry. If anything, writing about the important people in my life has only made me appreciate them and their experiences more.

Meghan: These poems deal a lot with the intimate spaces of home—in regards to one’s original home and the one we create as adults. How do you approach writing poetry that is located in the familiar, physical spaces of the past and the present?

That's a great question! One of the dangers a writer faces when writing about the familiar is that you very often have to face those spaces (and those people) day in and day out. As a poet, fortunately I have the freedom to play with details in the world of a poem. What I try to honor most are the feelings associated with the experience. When I write about a childhood memory, or a loved one's presence in the home, or something that happened at the breakfast table two days ago, I don't want my thoughts or feelings to be separate from the text I am creating. I want the emotion that I am experiencing at that moment (or about that person) to leach from every corner of the text. To allow that to happen, I have to give myself permission to know that my feelings are momentary, and likely to change ten minutes later. If I didn't allow myself that "out," so to speak, the understanding that what I am writing at any given time is only a snapshot of a situation, and an incomplete one at that, I don't think I would be able to get up the nerve to write about things close to me at all.

Meghan: Which is the poem you feel closest to in this collection?

Robb: That is such a difficult question, though a great follow-up! As you know, every poem contains a part of the writer, so it’s almost like picking which part of yourself you like best. There are poems I am almost certain to read at readings: “House Bird,” “The Bones,” “Superstition,” “For Snowflake,” “The Blue Hour.” Like many of the poems in the collection, these are syllabics that unfold accretively and quietly and build in intensity, so they were all very much written in the same headspace. But if I had to pick just one from the bunch, I would say “Superstition.” To me, this poem represents a turning point in my career as a writer. “Superstition” was the first poem I wrote in which, upon its completion, I was 100% satisfied with the results. I wrote myself out of the idea suddenly and decisively. From the moment I placed the final punctuation mark, I knew that was the poem I was supposed to write that day—and it was at that moment that I started to gain confidence in my ability as a writer.

Meghan: House Bird looks closely at childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and the poems are woven thematically instead of ordered chronologically. How did you choose the poems for this collection and then choose the order—how did you make the choices you did to construct the narrative arc?

Robb: Another great question! I really admire poets who think in terms of an entire book manuscript. They seem to know intuitively what a collection needs, what's missing, the order of things. I haven't been able to do that. I write what I write-- which is a lot of individual poems. And it is only after some distance-- and looking back on what I have created-- that I can begin to see what I've done-- which themes I keep returning to, which voices tend to dominate, which subjects I can’t let go of.

House Bird had many iterations: it was four sections; it was five; it was organized chronologically; it was ordered according to the seasons. It took a lot of shuffling, and it wasn't until Diane Lockward (Terrapin Books publisher) made some excellent suggestions about re-ordering that I was able to see the collection's potential. Rather than create a straightforward narrative, we opted to abandon a linear "plot" or organizational formula and instead create a collage, or maybe several mini collages—a kind of mosaic of experience in which images, and words, and subtle through-lines reveal themselves gradually, building enough resonance to give the reader, by the end, a sense of a uniform whole.

I wanted House Bird to be an excavation of memory, to work the way the mind does, shadows coming and going, hazy outlines sending the reader backwards in time, the familiar drawing them back into the present.

Sample poem from House Bird:

The Bones

What I remember most
are the bones—and my dad's
fingers slimy with guts

as he pulled apart bits
of smoked whiting he bought
from the market downtown.

He sat in the kitchen
most of the afternoon,
working over headless

glistening flesh, picking
through the soft pink insides
without a knife or fork,

offering my brother
and me a horse-radished
peck now and then. We stood

by his side and waited,
listened to him humming
along with Merle Haggard

between long sips of beer.
He was always careful
with the giving, his hands

like a slow, warm current
feeding another. That
cold fish with its many

bones. Dad never let one
slip past. It was all smoke
and silver scales, the tang
of root wet in our mouths.

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Robert Fillman is the author of the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His poems have appeared in such journals as The Hollins Critic, Poetry East, Salamander, Sugar House Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. His criticism has been published by ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, CLAJ: The College Language Association Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and teaches at Kutztown University. His debut full-length collection, House Bird, was published by Terrapin Books in 2022.
www.robertfillman.com

Meghan Sterling’s work has been nominated for 4 Pushcart Prizes in 2021 and has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Colorado Review, Idaho Review, Radar Poetry, The West Review, West Trestle Review, River Heron Review, SWIMM, Pinch Journal, and others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review. Her first full length collection These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021. Her chapbook, Self Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will be out in 2023.
www.meghansterling.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Karen Paul Holmes Interviews Hayden Saunier

2022-03-31T11:55:00.000-04:00

The following is the ninth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Karen Paul Holmes talks with Hayden Saunier about place in poetry, sections in a collection, selecting a publisher, choosing cover art, and reading/performing poetry for an audience.

Karen Paul Holmes: I’ve dog-eared so many pages in this beautiful book, A Cartography of Home. Please tell us how this collection came about. I note a thread of homestead/weather/growing things that almost feels pioneer-like, but in a modern sense. And you do, after all, live on a farm. But there are other-located poems too: mini-market, hotel, church, for example. What can you tell us about the sectioning of the book into four parts? How much of the choosing and ordering of poems throughout the collection was purposeful and how much intuitive? Did you write any of the poems for this book specifically or did you assemble poems already written?

Hayden Saunier: I’ve been thinking about place for a long time. I’m a southerner who moved north into cities for theatre opportunities, but I grew up attached to a rural landscape and with an awareness of the innumerable lives that have inhabited a place long before me. Moving to the farm where my husband grew up reignited that deep connection to a particular landscape, but I also wanted to expand on the ideas of home and place to the those “other-locations” you mention (superstores, mini-markets, churches, press conferences, customer helplines) that have become our current and shared cultural landmarks. And when you walk the same fields and woods every day you are confronted by how time is stacked up in layers in a place, like tree rings and soil, so writing about place and home naturally becomes writing about time. That’s been given as an argument for art: It’s a means to stop time. Or a means to enter a single moment and that feels like stopping time.

I love sectioning a book because I think a reader needs a place to rest between poems. I know I do. The way a bench is situated on a walking path to allow a moment to consider the view or tie your shoes or just sit. In A Cartography of Home, the first section begins with concrete considerations of home and habitation, and then those ideas ripple outward in the second and third sections, returning to the concrete and actual by the end. The way a walk works when the mind loosens and makes wider associations between the fixed points of beginning and end.

Some of these poems were begun years ago—I am a constant reviser— and some came into being as part of the process. In general, I’m slow to put a manuscript together; it takes me a while to understand around what center of gravity the poems are orbiting. The title poem came together after many revisions and a recognition that people are places too—until they are no longer here—because here is a place. “Navigational Notes” was among the last poems I wrote for this book so it grew out of the endeavor. It grew directly from the Rene Char quote “how do we bring the ship near to its longing,” and how home is a longed-for place. I loved including that imagined landscape as part of the mapping of home. By the end of work on this collection, like all obsessions, everything I wrote was attached to time and place and home.

Karen: Thanks for that great answer! I’m a northerner who moved south, and your ideas of place and time resonate with me. I also sensed in the middle sections of Cartography the “ripple outward” you mention, and that really did work for me as a reader. And “Navigational Notes” definitely got dog-eared on my first read!

This book and How to Wear This Body were both published by Terrapin Books. (And by the way, both have such compelling covers!) You’ve had two other full-length books and a chapbook published with other publishers. Of your 2013 book, the wonderful Laure-Anne Bosselaar wrote, “Hayden Saunier is a poet of wit, irony, and a huge generosity of heart.” I happily find that to be so true of your work today, too. Why did you choose to publish a second book with Terrapin? Tell us about timing, especially considering the pandemic.

Hayden: Yes, Laure-Anne is a treasure. I’ve been fortunate with book prizes and excellent publishers and working on How to Wear This Body with Diane at Terrapin was a continuation of this great good luck. As for the timing of Cartography, it was a gift that my focus on this manuscript during the first months of lockdown coincided with Terrapin’s decision to launch the Redux series. I’ve learned to recognize luck when I see it! I didn’t trouble myself worrying about the timing of publication with the pandemic and the dearth of readings. I just didn’t. Poems find their way in the world all by themselves, I think.

And thank you for the compliments on the cover images. An extra pleasure working on these two books with Terrapin has been that when we couldn’t quite settle on a cover image for either, I created my own. I’m not a visual artist but I know how to look for inspiration, so full disclosure: the multimedia artist Cecilia Paredes inspired the coat image and Rosamund Purcell’s photographs inspired the nest. The experience of creating and photographing the coat and the nest informed both books as much as the books informed the images. That’s been another way the process of working on this book has been layered from beginning to end.

Karen: It’s very cool that you’ve got the skills to create images that exactly work for your books. You’re also an actress and therefore, of course, an excellent poetry reader. In your work, I can tell you take such care with word selection and sound. When I’ve edited one of my poems to a certain point, I often record myself (or read it to my husband) so I can listen to the sounds and line breaks and feel the poem in my mouth. Do you do something similar? How much does your acting background influence the way you write? What are some actor’s tips you can give to poets who are about to do a reading?

Hayden: I am always speaking a poem as I write—it’s natural to me. I love to read aloud and I love the sound and vibration of words in my mouth and head and chest. My favorite moments as an actor have been the times—which are very rare—when all aspects of a play come together with the sound and the meaning of someone’s brilliant words in your body—it’s transportive. Poetry is the essence of that, and it was through theatre that I came to poetry. It’s so much cheaper to produce—no lights, no costumes, no crew! And best of all, you don’t have to wait for someone to give you a job. But I miss the collaboration of theatre and the discoveries one makes when minds and imaginations knock against one another and work together to create a whole world. As for reading tips, I try to let the images and rhythms of the poems tell their stories. And no “poet voice.”

Karen: So true about poetry! And speaking of collaboration, I’d love to know more about the program you founded called No River Twice (www.norivertwice.org/). Your website calls it “an interactive poetry performance group in which the audience interacts with a group of accomplished poets to determine the direction of each performance from beginning to end, poem by poem, co-creating a reading that is never the same twice.” What else can you tell us?

Hayden: No River Twice is so much fun. We’re a group of poets who do readings from our books but what we read is determined by audience interaction—so we never know where we are going to start or end or what we are reading along the way. We follow the images or ideas in poems like stepping stones across a river and make a cento poem from the connecting lines—a collective poem of the reading. It’s surprising and wide-open and encourages us all to listen to poems in whatever way we like and be playful in whatever way we respond to it. It’s never even remotely the same twice. The idea is to connect without judgement to other voices and finding deep human community there. Another reason for poetry.

Sample poem from A Cartography of Home:

A Cartography of Home

My mother was a place. She was the where
from which I rose. Once on my feet, I touched

my forehead to her knee, then thigh, then hip,
waist, shoulder as I grew into my own wild country,

borderless, then bordered, bound 
by terrors, terra incognita and salt seas.

I took my compass rose from her, my cardinal points,
embodiments of wind and names of cloud,

but every symbol in the legend now 
belongs to me—rivers, topographic lines and shading,

back roads, city streets, highway lanes that end
abruptly at the broken edge of cliffs

where dragons snorting fire
 ride curls of figured waves in unknown seas.

Monsters mark the desert blanks on her charts too.
Before she died, I folded myself back

to pocket-size, my children tucked inside
 like inset maps and I lay my head down on her lap.

My mother stroked my hair
 the way her mother had stroked hers,

and hers before hers, on and on, and we
remained like that—not long—but long enough

to make an atlas of us, perfect bound,
while she was still a place and so was I.

Click Cover for Amazon

Hayden Saunier is the author of five poetry collections, most recently A Cartography of Home (Terrapin Books, 2021). Other collections include How to Wear This Body (Terrapin Books, 2017) Tips for Domestic Travel (Black Lawrence Press, 2009) a St. Lawrence Award Finalist, Say Luck (Big Pencil Press, 2013), winner of the 2013 Gell Poetry Prize, and Field Trip to the Underworld (Seven Kitchens Press, 2012) winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award. Her work has been published in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and Verse Daily and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize. She is the founder and director of No River Twice, an interactive, audience-driven poetry performance group.
www.haydensaunier.com

Karen Paul Holmes has two poetry collections, No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin Books, 2018) and Untying the Knot (Aldrich, 2014). Her poems have been featured on The Writer's Almanac, The Slowdown, and Verse Daily. Her publications include Diode, Valparaiso Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, Pedestal, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She’s the current “Poet Laura” for Tweetspeak Poetry. Holmes founded and hosts the Side Door Poets in Atlanta and a monthly reading with open mic in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She has an MA in musicology from the University of Michigan, was VP-Communications for a global financial company, and has led workshops in business communications, creative writing, and poetry.
www.karenpaulholmes.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Hayden Saunier Interviews Patricia Clark

2022-03-24T18:46:00.000-04:00

The following is the eighth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Hayden Saunier talks with Patrica Clark about manuscript development, the function of a title poem, the selection of cover art, and more.

Hayden Saunier: I’m fascinated by how poetry manuscripts develop. In Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars was there a central idea or proposition or moment that these poems gathered themselves around? A series of explorations that you return to again and again?

Patricia Clark: These poems that became a manuscript that came to be named Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars are not poems of a project, or an agenda. I can’t work that way—with an aim at a project defined ahead of time. I want to write out of my obsessions and, over time, see what results. What are the threads that unite these poems? Feasts, pleasures, and the falling away, the inevitable loss of such pleasures. The longing for connection with others, with ourselves, and with the world. The elegiac thread of loss, lost moments and chances, and also lost loves and selves, missed connections. The awfulness of flux. We want stability—but stasis is a horror—and we get only fragments, of course. Robert Frost’s description of a poem, each one as “a momentary stay against confusion.” Brief, yes, but such great moments and fragments!

Another way of looking at the poems gathered in the book is to note the epigraph at the book’s front by Elizabeth Bishop: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” Each poem included here is a bit (a micro bit) of knowledge, knowledge of living in our world. And I love her adjectives. Be ready for some cold, even frigid, North Atlantic water: “dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free.” Brilliant. Finally, maybe each poem included here is a self-portrait but not called that, as the title poem is. Moments of living, moments of memory.

Hayden: The title poem appears toward the end of the collection and seems to explore the gap between expectation and reality—but I especially love how it also snapshots your family in a moment before “anyone was sundered,” a richness and wealth that we rarely recognize when we possess it. Could you comment on this?

Patricia: Yes, you put your finger on it: the difference or gap between expectation and reality. I don't mean the poem and the experience's end results to be such a letdown—it wasn't really. The buildup was so good, the vision I had was so spectacular, that of course no reality could ever live up to that. Still, I have the great memory of being there with my father, who took the time to bend to my wishes, and so I have/had it all—just not a glimpse of the coins. Well, until later. I did see them in a pile at the fair in Seattle. Memory has preserved it all, fabulously, and the sweet moment with my father. My goal in choosing a title was to have it be memorable, yes, and also to fit the book. I think it does.

Hayden: Tell me a little about the cover of this book. I’m drawn to its primary colors and abstraction but also to the texture and sense of scribble, the reworking and balancing of the shapes, all of which sounds like a writing process. So perhaps I am projecting my own process here. What drew you to this image?

Patricia: I have met this painter, the painter of "Darn"—Mary McDonnell—she's a Michigan painter from Saginaw, Theodore Roethke country. I love her work. Lots of bold abstractions and lots of marks on the canvas as you describe. She works on canvases on the floor, as I've heard her describe it, and she walks round and round the work trying to figure out the orientation, which edge is up. Yes, to me, the painting seems to reveal a process, quite similar to working one's way through a poem, the confusions, the attention to craft and to letting the "meaning" develop on its own almost. The painting is a record of an exploration—in paint, but very similar to a writer’s exploration in words. I was captivated by the boldness of the images and colors and maybe those primary colors speak, especially, to childhood and youth. Maybe the poems inside the book are, after all, primary experiences of dipping one's hand in cold water, as Bishop describes. And one feels something, an icy jolt. Wow, that's knowledge, huh? I like it. I hope my poems take the reader into such a primary experience—with seeing an owl, or walking in a garden.

Hayden: “Feasting, Then” opens the first section with a call to attention to the small marvels and gifts surrounding us in the natural world. “And the Trees Did Nothing” is a poem that confronts our romantic notions about that natural world as the human one literally collides with it—there’s an icy jolt of “knowledge.” These are two examples, but all through the book, your attention and your language focus our eyes and ears on vivid, resonant details of both worlds. How did you develop this keenness of observation?

Patricia: Thanks for the compliment on "keenness of observation." I'll say right off, it has taken me years. And I'm still not really satisfied. How does one describe what one sees: whether a sky or a tree? Impossible. The real sight still escapes one, I think. What I am up to, I believe, is trying to tell the truth about something I see in the physical world. When I get stuck in the poem, I return to that, over and over. What was there? What else was there? Was that everything? And don't make it too beautiful? what was on the ground? Some trash? some dog poop? Let the "divine details" (Nabokov's words) speak. And they will and the poet can step out of the way. And back to another poet, William Carlos Williams—"No ideas but in things." I have no "idea" what a poem is up to—I want to let the details speak and tell the story, tell the moment. If I can do that well, I've done my job, I believe. And it's not easy, even then. If I get the “small” picture right, the big picture of the poem (its meaning, its thoughts and movement) should take care of itself.

Hayden: Often, a poem doesn’t find a first publisher before being included in a book, a poem that we, as writers, adore and are baffled by the fact that the poem never found a home in a journal. Do you have a favorite poem from this book that was ignored or homeless that we can give its full due now?

Patricia: I honestly don't remember the poems and their publication history. I could look it up but won't. I’ll pick out a poem that appeared first in Galway Review in Ireland, a place I love. “After the Darkest Year” only made the journey out one time and it was accepted by the magazine right off, and published very quickly. I pick it out for a few more moments of attention because I wish readers would take the time (if they don’t already) to read poems out loud. This poem is one that I think gets on a particular linguistic, sonic roll. And it’s basically all one sentence. I was trying to just describe and describe and not worry at all about where the poem was heading. Just give the horse its head and let it run! So that’s what I did. Is the darkest year just winter, or something more? Oh, let the reader open to whatever thoughts come to him/her. All of those are in there and are correct. Happy reading!

Sample poem from Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars:

After the Darkest Year

Out of verdant and lush,
oak leaf, Virginia creeper vine,
blackberry wild as today’s wind,
sumac, invasive honeysuckle,
each different leaf a knuckle, earlobe, or palm
of the hand,

in thirty days no less, from dormant
to swaying, leaves shivering and trembling,
one side grayer, one side slick,
shiny on top,

and what gets through of sunlight
dappled and shade-crazed,
sunburst down to a single blade
standing tall on ravine-floor,
leaf-pile, leaf mold, crackle
of still dried stalk and spent
blossom trundled from the yard,

an ancient process, green
to done, down, trampled on, spent,
left here to vegetate, pack deep
under snow, decompose,
and then all starts again,

warbler time just after dormancy breaks,
bud swell and pencil point unfurling
of green, each blossom and ear leaf
sparking in its time—trillium, may-
apple, redbud, lilac, more—
and the welcome scents
[cont’d; no stanza]
lively on the air, fresh and new
as any flower, note of honey,
jasmine, vanilla, lemon, bark,

till all is filled, unfurled, spread wide
and out—umbrella canopy, wand of
Solomon’s seal with berries white,
dangling, ripe—and whose mouth
will surround, pull them off to eat?

So sudden you could blink, miss it, lose
sight of dame’s rocket imagining it
phlox when it’s not, lavender, white,
and pink covering a slope, a hill,
an elevated bank by the creek
or by the busy road usually all dun
and trash, dirt, dust, but now
a gorgeous swell, in bloom, so brief.

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Patricia Clark is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars (Terrapin, 2020) and the author of three chapbooks. New work appears in Plume, Tar River Poetry, Paterson Literary Review, Westchester Review, I-70 Review, Atticus Review, Midwest Quarterly and elsewhere. She is professor emerita of Writing at Grand Valley State University.
www.patriciafclark.com

Hayden Saunier’s most recent book, A Cartography of Home, was published in 2021 by Terrapin Books. Her work has been published in numerous journals, featured on Poetry Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and Verse Daily, and awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize. She is the founder and director of No River Twice, an interactive, audience-driven poetry performance group. www.haydensaunier.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Ann Fisher-Wirth Interviews Christine Stewart-Nuñez

2022-03-17T13:25:00.000-04:00

The following is the seventh in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Ann Fisher-Wirth talks with Christine Stewart-Nuñez about book organization, marriage to another creative person, motherhood and poetry, and being a state Poet Laureate.

Ann Fisher-Wirth: In one poem toward the end of The Poet & the Architect, “Map and Meaning,” you write of the difficulty of learning to make “one’s own map” rather than relying on the maps created by others, and you say that the map you eventually created “marked the spirals of stops along my path.” The book itself is structured into four “Rings,” and each section page that announces a new ring has a little drawing of a spiral. So I’d like to invite you to tell us about spirals. What do they signify to you, both in organizing this book and—perhaps—in organizing the “map” of your life?

Christine Stewart-Nuñez: I’m so glad you asked about the spiral! It’s long been a symbol I’ve used. I kept some of my writing from grade school, and spirals abound in the margins of that saved work. Even now, I use the symbol to show “insight” when I’m annotating the margins of a text. In The Poet & The Architect, besides existing as an image in some of the poems, it also serves as an organizational strategy. The spiral helped me conceptualize how poems could return to earlier themes, picking up images introduced in those poems and broadening or expanding them. I decided to start each ring with the most intimate poems and move outward from there. For example, the first poems are short and set both spatially and temporally before the meeting of the poet and the architect. Next the poems move outward from the intimacy of new coupledom to establishing a family and experiencing life together. “Credo,” which employs syllabic lines based on fractal integers, gathers fractal images from life, nature, and architecture, and ends the book with an invocation of time and space in a much broader context. I think ultimately the spiral captures my sense of time—moving forward yet reaching back to a central core. For example, “Credo” ends by connecting the birth of my son Xavier, the death of my sister Theresa, and divine light.

Ann: The Poet & the Architect is a book about a poet who is a wife and a husband who is an architect. Both are creators, and both are engaged in the fundamental work of building a home. What do these two callings share? What have you learned from each other’s work?

Christine: I didn’t really understand myself as an artist—as a maker of things—until I met Brian. Through our conversations, and through my observations of the way he works, I realized that the processes of writing and designing are so similar; I reference that several times in the book, but most specifically in “The Process of an Architect’s Thinking.” By identifying as a literary artist, I give myself permission to experiment more, to play more.
 
From Brian, I’ve learned a lot about how to engage buildings and places as products of design (or lack thereof). Until recently, I’ve seen myself only as a consumer of buildings—I vastly underappreciated what kinds of work went into creating them. When I asked Brian what he’s learned from my work, he said: “I have found that architecture and poetry have more in common in conveyance than any other form of writing. Architectural drawing, according to Nelson Goodman, is at once sketch, score, and script. It depicts the project, it constructs the project, and it programs the project. Poetic writing at once gives one an image, presents how to say it, and delineates meaning in a way that is analogous to architectural communication.”
 
Also, I didn’t anticipate learning how energizing it feels to apply the lessons of “process” to building a life together as a couple and as a family.

Ann: Motherhood is a central focus in your book. There are poems about LEGOS and gingerbread houses, a little boy’s fascination with wildfires and typhoons, and also poems about your older son’s seizures and other health problems, poems that add to the developing body of disability literature. In your writing, what are some ways you have found to approach this latter, intensely personal material?

Christine: My approach to motherhood poems comes from a similar emotional space as my other poems: I sense a tension that I want to think more about. Whether it’s a confounding event, an interesting juxtaposition, a pairing of words, or an emotional knot—I want to explore it through sounds, imagery, and (often) metaphor. Even before my oldest son was diagnosed with a rare epilepsy syndrome that caused him to lose his ability to use and understand language for several years, I wrote about him learning to talk. As a poet and mother, I wanted to think more about how my child would learn—and use language in particular. So when these skills began to regress, I needed to explore it with the tools I possessed; most of those poems are in Bluewords Greening. Now, though, I’m interested in exploring how my relationship to parenting has shifted and changed as a result of this experience. In The Poet & The Architect, the poems inspired by Holden are largely speculative; I wonder what his future holds.
 
That said, I reflect a lot on the ways I represent personal material after the poems get drafted. Within the constraints of the genre, there’s not space for explanation. Because of this, personal experience can transform into something that reads far more abstract, or it gets reduced to one of its many facets. Both can be problematic. I also think a lot about shame, and the reasons that embodied realities like seizures and the behaviors associated with them are stigmatized. When I speculate about what happens to Holden’s memories when impacted by seizure activity, for example, I push against the stigma of epilepsy—naming it, exploring it, discussing what it can do. Of course, my understanding is limited; I can observe and read about seizures, but I’ve never had one.

Ann: You were recently Poet Laureate of South Dakota, and it seems that some of your poems reflect that public engagement—for instance, “Research,” “Marker of Medary,” “Mall Manifesto,” “A Good Building.” Though still personal, they turn outward to consider towns, buildings, history. Please tell us about the relationship between your laureateship and your poetry; did being a poet laureate lead your work in particular directions?

Christine: I often write about place—especially places new to me, places where I’m there, in part, to learn and observe. But it took a decade of living in South Dakota before a South Dakota poem tumbled out. Most of the poems in The Poet & The Architect were drafted before I was appointed poet laureate—influenced by seeing the landscape and architecture through Brian’s eyes. But the laureateship did give me me a stronger sense of citizenship, of wanting to make that place a weightier thread of the book.

Sample poem from The Poet & The Architect:

Blueprints and Ghosts

My husband and I were midnight whispering
in the moment the soul opens after the body’s
sated, that moment when everything’s laid bare
and imagination, past, and present collide—
everything compossible—when he tells me
he helped design a project that still haunts him.

The clients? New Yorkers. Creepy, slick, budget
unlimited. The elder, founder of the lingerie
store housed in every American mall, introduced
the younger client to the team, and he requested
a cabin, a picnic place for models featuring baskets,
bearskin rugs, and a fireplace for cold desert nights.

A glass wall overlooked a vista in New Mexico;
the road-facing wall was windowless save a few
narrow slits. Silk against skin. They shook hands.

How close can one get to evil before it tarnishes?
My husband’s heart skittered across history: architects
who designed concentration camps and gallows.

He wondered how much they knew and when
and how they felt about knowing. He wondered
if design could help men to do bad better. At 55,
he can draw that cabin from memory—the same one
he drew at age 32, the year his daughter was born,
the year a surgeon scraped out a tumor from his knee—
and he can still feel that post-meeting handshake.
That cabin made the news this week: Predator. Sex
trafficking. Hundreds of girls. Now nightmares cross
my husband’s midnights: his hand erases walls, line
after line, page after page until, as he rubs the last angle
away, the cabin returns. Over and over, he begins again.

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Christine Stewart-Nuñez, South Dakota’s poet laureate from 2019-2021, is the author and editor of several books, including The Poet & The Architect (2021), Untrussed (2016) and Bluewords Greening (2016), winner of the 2018 Whirling Prize (literature of disability theme). Her poetry has been the basis for international, cross-artistic collaborations with colleagues in music, dance, visual art, and architecture. She recently joined the faculty of arts at the University of Manitoba, where she teaches in the women’s and gender studies program.
christinestewartnunez.com

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds (Terrapin Books, 2019). Her fifth, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay (Wings Press, 2018). With Laura-Gray Street, she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, she has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, The Mesa Refuge, and Camac/France; next October, she’ll be in residence at Storyknife, in Homer, Alaska. Her work has received two MAC poetry fellowships, the MS Institute of Arts and Letters poetry prize, and the Rita Dove poetry prize. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the interdisciplinary environmental studies program. For many years, she taught yoga in Oxford, MS.
www.annfisherwirth.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Lisa Bellamy Interviews Jeff Ewing

2022-03-09T11:39:00.001-05:00

The following is the sixth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Lisa Bellamy talks with Jeff Ewing about what's it's like to write in multiple genres, his use of point of view, and his unique writing process.

Lisa Bellamy: Jeff, Wind Apples is such a memorable poetry collection! I was delighted to have the opportunity to read it. Your biography notes it is your first, and that you’ve written and published in other genres. What led you to poetry, specifically?

Jeff Ewing: Hi Lisa, and thanks for that. I’m really glad you enjoyed it. It is my first poetry book, but it’s been quite a while in the making. I’m not sure whether I came to poetry first, or if—as seems likely—I started with stories, but it was very early. I do like variety, and have been unable, or unwilling, to settle on a single genre. I jump back and forth between poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, with the occasional short play thrown in to round things out. What draws me to poetry is that it lets me play with language more freely, and to tie images and ideas together with a sort of finer thread. I was exposed early on to poetry that seemed far different from the customary grade school assignments. My father was a big Robert Frost fan, and he used to recite his poems as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Not the usual ones; he tended toward the epics. He could sail effortlessly through “The Death of the Hired Man,” but I remember “Mending Wall” and “Birches” making an early impression too. He really loved them, and the effect they had on him was eye-opening. They became a part of him, almost as if he’d helped write them. I think poetry can give you that feeling of participation, that your own thoughts have been captured and refined by someone else.

Lisa: Given that you write in several genres, could you talk about your process? What guides you to knowing whether you’ll work with material in poetry, rather than in one of your other genres?

Jeff: Most times an idea presents itself early on as what it’s going to be—a poem or story or a play. Essays are pretty easy to isolate, since they necessitate sticking to the facts. With other ideas—it may be a phrase or an image or a situation—I look to see what aspect of it calls for treatment. Conflicts or journeys, for instance, usually (though not always) are best suited to fiction. Phrases and very distinct images probably suggest a poem; playing with the language, following one line to the next by practiced guesswork. Many of my poems seem to cascade in that way, by sound as much as sense. Not to say they’re necessarily abstract, just that sound in a poem is very central for me. It’s what separates poems most clearly from the other forms. It’s hard to sustain that kind of music in a story or a play, though they can certainly feature that. And there have been times I’ve changed course in the middle of writing—realizing that a poem should have been a story, or the other way around, or a story would be better reduced to dialogue alone. A few times I’ve explored the same idea in several genres, written a poem over again as a story, or whittled a story down to a poem. It’s fun to play with those things. That, by the way, is a central part of why I write in the first place. The fun and thrill of watching something come out of nothing.

Lisa: Wind apples is such an evocative phrase. I know the meaning—windfalls—but the phrase invites the reader to a wider meaning, a metaphor. And of course, it is the title poem. Is there more you could say about that?

Jeff: The poem really originated from the notion of the mnemonic quality of a smell drifting on the wind. “Wind apples” in that sense, imaginative apples (rotting, tellingly) acting as a trigger. Like the taste of a madeleine, famously. The image of the windfall apples (“the last scrimped fruit”) are a concrete bridge to that idea, to memories stumbled across after their prime. Apples evoke a great deal for me, I’m not sure exactly why. But they can stand in for any common, tangible thing that opens the floodgates. The image seemed apt to the collection, where memory is often both a comfort and a burden, or a taunt.

Lisa: In some poems, the narrator views characters from a different perspective, as in “As the Crow Flies,” or from a third-person perspective, as in “On the Death, by Trampling, of a Man in Modoc County.” What does this change-up do artistically for you, as a writer?

Jeff: It’s very freeing to get away from the constant “I.” Seeing the scene from an abstracted point of view—in “As the Crow Flies”—or a third person, really does allow me to put myself at that vantage. To get a wider, more objective view of the action. The default “I” point of view of a lot of poems—mine included—does convey a certain intimacy, but it’s also constricting. Claustrophobic. I get itchy and anxious after a while. It’s clearly the point of view a writer has the most authority over and experience with, but there’s a danger of coming to see it as genuinely authoritative. As a reader, it makes me suspicious and a little resentful. Like most people I get tired of myself, and it’s a relief sometimes to break out of that.

Lisa: The varied stanza constructions in your collection fascinate me! Each poem has its own “stanza strategy,” so to speak. How do you build your poems? What choices do you make? What is the process?

Jeff:. I wish I could say I have a process. I write when I can—I’ve always had jobs with no connection to poetry or imaginative writing. It’s made my output less than it might have been, but it’s also allowed me to retain a level of excitement at the prospect of sitting down. I think it’s common to feel a little lost at the beginning of each new project, but it’s not unpleasant for me. Each poem is a fresh start. I become something of an amnesiac; suddenly I’ve never done this before and have to dive in blindly. A framework of some kind can help. Occasionally I’ll set out to use an established form, a villanelle or a sestina maybe, but often I’ll devise my own purely arbitrary structure. A given number of lines per stanza, for example; or a visual layout, two lines flush left, one line indented; a single stanza without punctuation carrying a head of steam all the way through. Anything, really, that eliminates a range of options and forces me to focus on manipulating what’s left. It really opens doors for me. That said, a form might change completely during revision, when the plan I’d started out with forces unnatural line breaks or kills the pace. But as a starting point, I find it very helpful. Poems can too easily become uncontrolled and indulgent, and a little bit of a fence—"something there is that doesn’t love a wall” notwithstanding—can corral it before it runs off into the brush.

Sample poem from Wind Apples:

Wind Apples

The orchard, ghosted
in fog, rises in ranks
toward Orion.

The last scrimped
fruit thuds to ground
like footsteps

working downhill,
shuffling through dry
leaves. I meet

myself coming back
when I can’t sleep
and the trees—

heads bowed, branches
clawed with age—
rattle my nights

with remembered harvests.
When the smell of
cider on caught

breath and the spill of
light ripening on
moon-washed skin

drags me uphill again.
One leg stiff with
cold and wear,

my blood thick as
winter sap, I find
our old spot

and eat myself sick
on wind apples,
lug after lug,

carried in unforgiving
gusts down from
the gray crest.

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Jeff Ewing is the author of Wind Apples (Terrapin Books, 2021), and The Middle Ground: Stories (Into the Void Press, 2019). His poems, fiction, and essays have appeared in publications in the U.S. and abroad, and his plays have been staged in New York, Los Angeles, and Buffalo, New York. He has lived in Chicago, Santa Cruz, and Bergen, Norway, working variously as a technical writer, editor, newsroom PA, copier repairman, forklift driver, longshoreman, and salad boy. He now lives in Sacramento, California, where he grew up.  
www.jeffewing.com/

Lisa Bellamy studies poetry with Philip Schultz at The Writers Studio, where she also teaches. She is the author of The Northway (Terrapin Books, 2018) and a chapbook, Nectar (Encircle Publications chapbook prize, 2011). She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Pushcart Special Mention, and a Fugue Poetry Prize. She is working on new collections of poetry and beast fables. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and the Adirondack Park with her husband.
www.lisabellamypoet.com

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Robin Rosen-Chang Interviews Diane LeBlanc

2022-03-02T14:04:00.000-05:00

The following is the fifth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Robin Rosen Chang talks with Diane LeBlanc about book design, grief in poetry, prose poems, and more.

Robin Rosen Chang: I loved The Feast Delayed, Diane. Congratulations on this gorgeous book. While reading it, I noticed what I consider a tension between the act of living and the act of grieving. On one hand, poems such as “The End of Grief” or “Last Day of September” offer the idea of hope and moving beyond grief, whereas in “Orientation,” the speaker, who is married to an astronomer, reflects about living “in a state of constant orientation.” Is acceptance of where one is oriented at a particular moment, even if it’s somewhere painful, a central concern in The Feast Delayed? Of course, this also relates to the notion of “the feast delayed.”

Diane LeBlanc: I’d love to turn that question back to you because your collection, The Curator’s Notes, particularly the title poem, reflects on the dynamic tension between living with wonder and grieving. Reflection ideally examines the past, analyzes experience, and imagines how we respond to new experiences based on the past. The tension in “Orientation” is between hyper-awareness of where I am and the confusion caused by lack of orientation, or living in rooms painted the same shade of white that blur into one another. So in a way, yes, acceptance of where one is oriented is a central concern. I wrote many of these poems between 2015 and 2020, when the U.S. political landscape shifted, science deniers influenced public policy, and I no longer understood who I was in the changing narrative of America.

Throughout the book, I explore responsibility and my place in a web of being, hoping to measure how my choices move or disrupt other strands of the web. Perhaps the feast is delayed, but the poems find agency in doing things to salvage and to disrupt.

Robin: One of my favorite poems in your collection is “Possum.” In this poem, the speaker chides herself for not checking if there were live babies in the pouch of a dead possum she found in the grass. The speaker then asks herself, “What if I rolled the possum with my foot, opened her like a purse, and rummaged through the dead to find only more dead? What plea do I answer when it’s too late to salvage the living?” This is such a powerful question. It’s about more than grief. It’s as if the speaker carries the burden not only to accept loss but also to heal the living. Could you talk about this?

Diane: I appreciate your insightful reading of this poem. Your observation may inform how readers perceive other poems in The Feast Delayed. Obviously, I wrote this poem after encountering a dead possum. No one responded to calls to remove the body, so it became an artifact of loss that I confronted almost daily when my dog and I walked around the pond. My grief for this small creature was informed by larger ecological loss. An earlier poem in the book, “Stars to Fire,” begins, “This is the year we lost stars to fire.” In “Possum” and other poems I explore the question of whether or not I have done enough, or anything, to salvage the living. I live with that same question as I witness the devastation caused by climate change. It’s another way of asking, “In what ways am I responsible for this loss?” I remember being profoundly moved by Marie Howe’s book, What the Living Do. Although I continually articulate, “I am living,” as the speaker does in the last poem of that collection, grief and responsibility to the living are inseparable.

Robin: You have an incredible facility with metaphors. A few standouts for me include: “Language is the velvet grenade/whose pin I keep replacing” (“Six Variations on an Accident”); “…you confessed your thoughts were razors floating in a tub” (from “Reconciliation”); and “Metaphor from a distance is my comfort” (“December Hospice”). How do you craft such inventive metaphors, and how does metaphor function throughout the book?

Diane: Thank you, and I love this question. As an undergraduate in the 1980s, I studied X.J. Kennedy’s An Introduction to Poetry in my poetry genre and writing courses. Several chapters auger into metonymy, synecdoche, and all of metaphor’s nuances. I still have and use my copy, which has deteriorated to loose pages bundled with a rubber band. Contrary to claims that poetry complicates or muddies ideas, I believe that effective figurative language brings us closer to things and ideas. I’m an embodied writer, so when I’m composing I often make gestures with my hands to understand the physicality of process, shape, and movement. That’s when metaphors develop. At other times, I write very quickly and let the language fly in all directions. Those drafts may not survive as poems, but I sometimes find ideas for metaphors that will clarify other poems. Metaphors are central to the collection for a reason I touched on above. I wrote these poems during a period of ecological, political, and personal uncertainty. Expressing the unknown through the known, which is the outcome of metaphor, was one way of grounding poems of uncertainty, loss, and hope.

Robin: Almost one-third of the collection consists of prose poems. What inspired you to write so many of the collection’s important poems in this form? Do you feel it is better suited for the material you were working with?

Diane: I write both poetry and lyric essays. Are you familiar with Annie Dillard’s essay “To Fashion a Text?” She writes that when she gave up poetry to write prose she felt as if she had “switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.” Her description upset me at first because it situates poetry as a deficit genre. Then I started writing essays and understood Dillard’s contrast. But I didn’t leave poetry behind. Prose poems exist in the sweet spot where poetry and prose live together. For me, a good prose poem offers the full orchestra experience with some stunning single reed solos.

When I’m drafting, I don’t decide in advance if I’m writing poetry or prose. I let the language determine what will happen. When a poem with line breaks depends on narrative, but it’s too compressed or lyric-driven to be prose, I’ll eliminate the line breaks to see how it reads. Each of my published collections has an increasing number of prose poems until, as you observe, they comprise almost a third of the poems in The Feast Delayed. Some of the poems went back and forth several times as I experimented with how to tell a particular story. In the end, the blurring of poetry and prose emerged as the necessary form to write about orientation, loss, and transformation.

Robin: I visited your website and saw samples of your stunning book arts. How did you get into book arts, and how does it relate to your writing? Perhaps you might also like to comment on the artwork on the cover of The Feast Delayed.

Diane: I’m a book nerd. I love paper, font, white space, stitching, everything about books. By the time I started an MFA in creative writing, I had been writing and publishing for over 20 years and wanted new ways to use form and image in poems. I had a rare opportunity to take a course co-taught by poet and collage artist Deborah Keenan and poet and book artist Georgia Greeley. They introduced me to the basics of shape, balance, color theory, and book arts, and I’ve learned more through the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The tactile experience of making books influences how I think about words and white space on a page. I sometimes use book form or collage to shape a poem. Several of the poems in The Feast Delayed are responses to collages I made. I wouldn’t have written the book’s final poem, “Gretel’s Campaign,” without this process. And that poem enabled me to see the book’s larger themes of personal and ecological survival.

My love of paper eventually led me to artist Molly Keenan’s paper mosaics and collages whose images of sun, moon, trees, birds and foxes and deer, and seasonal change speak to me. When I discovered “Dreaming Minnesota: December Fox,” now the cover art for The Feast Delayed, I felt immediately that the fox in mid-step against the gray-blue sky conveyed the book’s tone. And of course, foxes appear in these poems.

Sample poem from The Feast Delayed:

Click Cover for Amazon

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. Books include The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Sweet, and other journals. Diane is a certified holistic life coach with emphasis in creative practice. She directs the writing program and teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. www.dianeleblancwriter.com.

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length poetry collection, The Curator's Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Diode, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and other journals. They have also been included in Terrapin Books’ A Constellation of Kisses and The Strategic Poet. She is the recipient of the Oregon Poetry Association's Fall 2018 Poets' Choice Award, an honorable mention for Spoon River Poetry Review's 2019 Editors' Prize, and a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart nominee. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
www.robinrosenchang.com

Terrapin Book Interview Series: Heather Swan Interviews David Axelrod

2022-02-23T12:07:00.001-05:00

The following is the fourth in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings. Heather Swan and David Axelrod both have a tender heart for and a deep knowledge of the natural world.

Heather Swan: David, your book, Years Beyond the River, is filled with such a wide array of specific language describing the plants and animals in the landscapes you inhabit. Did you cultivate this intimate knowing and capacity for naming these things as an adult or did you grow up knowing them? And what is the importance of that naming to you?

David Axelrod: That’s a great question to begin with and the answer is yes and no, or more precisely it wasn’t and isn’t an either/or matter for me. My maternal grandfather was enchanted by living things and plant lore, and I was prone to grotesque cases of “poison ivory” as he used to say (he also enjoyed punning). It was he who taught me about the cooling effects of the crushed stalks of jewelweed, that is, spotted touch-me-not, which grew in abundance in the creek bottoms and along farm lanes. I recall him washing my legs with the crushed plant after I’d inadvertently walked through poison ivy in shorts, and for once I didn’t suffer the consequences of my blindness to things. I’d found an ally! He taught me to identify animal tracks, common birds, trees by leaf and bark, the stars, and stories of rare things I must never miss an opportunity to see should they ever return, such as the Ohio Buckeye or Halley’s Comet, which he saw as a child. We even planted a small forest together of birches and pine. I realized that only by knowing a name would I even be able to begin to perceive what is named. The animating anxiety there is being otherwise blind to what we can’t name. I’m reminded too of something Zbigniew Herbert wrote in his poem “Never About You”: “Don’t be surprised that we can’t describe the world / we just speak to things tenderly by name.” That tenderness is what I hope to convey when I name things in poems. It’s the tenderness my odd grandfather felt for life and wished to share with me.

Heather: There is a dominant awareness of deep time, of river valleys changing shape due to dams, of glaciers disappearing, of missing forests, and human life seems to be dwarfed by these long-term landscape changes. However, there is also an indictment of the human, our capacity for folly and destruction—forest fires, mining, internment camps. In "As the Mountain Dreams It," you write, "There it is. The world/ as the mountain dreams it, / going on after as it went on before us––" but in the end ask, "Does whatever the mountain dreams end / without us / if it wakes in a world we set afire?" What are you hoping the reader will glean from these observations and questions?

David: The deep time you refer to is something I feel we are immersed in, despite the many distractions that plague us. Perhaps what we’re referring to here is scalar time, that is, magnitude minus a directional vector. As for the poem, “As the Mountain Dreams It,” the first reference you quote is a gesture toward an awareness of deep time we’ve been speaking of, but also the brevity of human existence, both in personal terms and as a species. This is simply factual. There’s another question asked there at the end that precedes the final question. “If people live inside some spectral order, / does it matter how / or how long we abide here?” That’s the ontological gauntlet being thrown down by the poem. Are human beings really the subject of life on earth? We have an ecologically ruinous global economy based on that very claim. Is the meaning or value we attribute to objects entirely dependent upon our subjectivity? An alarming carelessness attaches itself to such delusions. That carelessness borders on nihilism. The final question the poem asks, depending on the reader, might cause a moment of self-doubt about what kind of reality we actually dwell in.

Heather: The poems have a keen awareness of language and memory. In "Memory Hoard" the narrator witnesses "ice retreating in blue leads/ before our eyes, a magnitude of memory/ we have no story for." And in "Hiraeth," which I learned was a Welsh word for a "longing for home" (and sometimes even a home that was erased or never existed), the narrator wants the language to describe things like "a word for fog gathering overnight/ in inland valleys?" and asks, "What word did father use whenever he pointed to that portion of a field set aside/ for reasons no one knows?" Are your poems a way of preserving memory or creating it? Do you think humans are forgetful and what implications does that have?

David: Yes, of course, human beings are forgetful, and the implications are as dire today as 10,000 years ago or in whatever future there may be for life on this planet. Both poems share some DNA, which in a way, I suppose, is life’s memory of itself. And both poems found their inspiration during a backpacking trip in the North Cascades, though they are in no way delimited by that experience. I mean, “Hiraeth” is entirely invented and responds to the latter definition you cite in your question. Each poem—through lived or imagined experience—wants to get at something strange about how language and memory construct meaning at the porous borders between self and other. How can we learn from what we have forgotten seems to be the question that “Hiraeth” asks. “Memory Hoard” perhaps asks us to consider how to deepen memory.

Heather: The book is filled with elegy for people and landscapes, and yet it also sings of so much beauty and renewal, of moments when "seeds parachuted past us all the way down Slick Rock Canyon." Do the poems or the writing of them give you hope and/or the possibility of healing?

David: We have to be realistic about what we face. There is, after all, much trouble ahead. It offends our sensibility too when our virtuous individual actions to mitigate damage are meaningless given the scale, say, of climate change. The persistent failure of our collective actions, too, renders us hopeless. Obama’s election didn’t after all signal the advent of a post-racial era in the US or anywhere else; it simply brought to the surface our tormented and corrupt origins as a nation, while providing hostile actors the opportunity to manipulate us into turning against each other. And here we are. And yet, I feel the power still in Auden’s reflection at the disastrous beginning of this era of ever-escalating harm to life. “May I, composed like them / Of Eros and of dust, /Beleaguered by the same / Negation and despair, / Show an affirming flame.”

Heather: Your work has been compared to that of Roethke's and Hugo's. In some ways it seems to be speaking to Mary Oliver (especially aspects of "Summer Evenings in the Grande Ronde Valley"), Elizabeth Bishop, and Gary Snyder. Can you say a bit about your evolution as a poet and perhaps who influenced you as a writer?

David: One summer in the mid-70s a high school teacher enrolled me in a poetry writing program in Michigan, and I hitchhiked there the summer I turned eighteen. There I met mostly students destined for elite schools and literary adjacent careers. But my teachers that summer were three very generous and kind poets, Conrad Hilberry, Colette Inez, and Henry Taylor who one day pointed at a copy of Shall We Gather at the River in the bookstore and told me to buy it. I did as he said. That was the moment my so-called life as a poet began. James Wright’s poems, their language, their characters, and attitudes were all familiar from my childhood in Ohio and burst inside of me like thunder. I trembled as I read them beside a campfire one night while hitchhiking home.

The formal reserve and grace of Bishop’s lines made a strong appeal to me. Jeffers, Everson, and Rexroth were all far more important to me, however, than Snyder. Discovering Cid Corman’s journal, Origin, also had a big impact. It was there I first encountered Lorine Niedecker’s work, whose skill at creating nuance with silence introduced a new kind of music to my ear. My work is as influenced by novelists, filmmakers, music, visual arts, philosophy, and science as by other contemporary America poets. Truly, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Milosz, Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Tranströmer, to say nothing of T’ang Dynasty poets, have all played and continue to play outsized roles in my imaginative life.

Sample poem from Years Beyond the River:

HIRAETH

i

I can't tell you what word meant
to kneel in forests.

Or why people are empty-handed,
who once hauled buckets.
Where did we draw water and for whom?

I used to follow my sister
to a lake I can't find on any plat
and I forget the irregular verb
to walk uphill carrying fresh water.

Sometimes we spilled a little under
a canopy of limbs. But I don’t recall,

were there two inflections
for water spilled under barren limbs
and spilled inside a sphere of green mist?

Lives unfold the same now as then
except for our having become
transparent. Who knows

the word for fog gathering overnight
in inland valleys? Does anyone remember

ii
the name of the clan who lived
alongside a river that sank underground?
Their festival boomed according to
an interval we couldn't forecast,
so, it was always a wonder—

dancers in heavy costumes at the riverside,
drums filled with thunder,

a ritual reenactment of their route
from another river gone dry for them
elsewhere long ago.

iii

What did we call cool and wet
if it arrived at just the right time?

What did a future do?

What time of year did we share food
in twilight, at ease with strangers
in a ring of piled stones?
The name of which remains blank.

Were those galant syllables joy
our mother sang of
when there was enough to spare?

What word did father use
whenever he pointed
to that portion of a field set aside
for reasons no one knows?

Click for Amazon

David Axelrod’s ninth collection of poems, Years Beyond the River, appeared in 2021 from Terrapin Books. His second collection of nonfiction, The Eclipse I Call Father: Essays on Absence was published by Oregon State University Press in the spring of 2019. Axelrod directs the low residency MFA and Wilderness, Ecology, and Community programs at Eastern Oregon University. He makes his home in Missoula, Montana.

Heather Swan is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), the chapbook The Edge of Damage (Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award, and the creative nonfiction book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Please visit the Terrapin Bookstore for these and other Terrapin Books.

Terrapin Book Interview Series: Geraldine Connolly Interviews Dion O'Reilly

2022-02-15T10:48:00.006-05:00

The following is the third in a series of brief interviews in which one Terrapin poet interviews another Terrapin poet, one whose book was affected by the Pandemic. The purpose of these interviews is to draw some attention to these books which missed out on book launches and in-person readings.

Geraldine Connolly: What central themes haunted you in the writing of this book?

Dion O'Reilly: The mind grappling with a world full of both exquisite beauty and also unimaginable evil pervades Ghost Dogs. I seek to balance these stark elements almost in the way a painter balances light and dark in chiaroscuro. I believe such juxtaposition of supposed opposites ignites the lyric moment, an experience of deep connection with the Living World. So I guess I would say connection haunts the book—how to connect, which, I think, might be at the heart of lyric poetry.

A motif that emerged is the way animals function as inspiration and solace. I knew I wanted my book to be called Ghost Dogs because the entire arc of the collection reflects a haunting—the past whispering in my ear. I grew up on a ranch, isolated and often in peril: mastiffs, horses, pigs, fish, and raptors were a solace, a source of wisdom. This animal motif emerged naturally because, on the ranch, I spent more time with animal-animals than human-animals. As I say in my poem “Rivervale,” Herons lifted their great bodies from the streambed,/ shining fish caught in their beaks,and the agony/ twisting in the air made sense.

Gerry: The California landscape is very vivid in your work. How does the landscape of your childhood inform the poems?

Dion: Well, as I say, I grew up (and still live part of the year) in a beautiful place—the Soquel Valley, on an eighteen acre ranch with two streams running through it. So I write what I know. Portraying connection with The Living World is a theme I borrow from eco-poetry, and just another way to engage the lyric moment of connection. A landscape is a self-portrait; a self portrait contains a world.

For some reason, as a child, I was able to pay attention to The Living World, and it lifted my thoughts to a different plane. That kind of focus was redemptive, and I’m grateful. It’s the same process when I write, paying attention helps me transform. For example, early in the book as a child, I watch the heron’s prey—the fish struggling—but as an adult I identify with raptors. I admire their hunger and their agency:

          The sun, a muzzle flash,
          turning the meadow bright, burning
          off the haze. I soar in, see it magnified,
          everything itself only more so.

Gerry: Can you tell us about your writing process?

Dion: The most important tool for me is reading regularly. Reading all sorts of poets. I start my day, preferably before sunrise, with reading poetry.

Other than that, I would say that really looking at my life is key to my process: Ghost Dogs contains stories I carried for decades. The difficulty was in seeing the narratives differently. For example, writing about my sister led me to express a new compassion for her. I struggle not to be the heroine of the tale, not to write revenge poems, not to reinforce tired grudges or viewpoints. If the poem does not create a connective moment of insight, it doesn’t satisfy me, doesn’t provide the poetry fix I seek. I guess that’s what we call discovery, which is often the hardest part of the process. But that moment of discovery might be what makes a poem a poem. It’s a thrill

But sometimes I wonder what discovery really is cognitively. It might be a moment where, suddenly, I see my thoughts at work, almost like meditation, a meta moment where I catch myself identified with my thoughts, rise above, and connect with a different Self—a moment where I say, This isn’t the same old story. It’s a song. It’s a sonnet. It’s a chant. It’s a moment where I did wrong. It’s not what I thought it was. It’s not the voice in my head anymore. We all have voices in our head, from childhood, from middle school, from MFA workshops. I would hope my process sees these thoughts, these running inner dialogues, and transforms them. My poet mind is like a kind adult shaking my suffering, self-involved, or just blithely unaware self and saying Hey, things aren't what you think they are!!!

Nowadays, I work less from my old narratives and more from prompts, word lists, rhyme, and form. I think that's a common evolution for poets. Still, word lists and prompts often excavate memories related to those in Ghost Dogs, but they force me to express them differently.

That being said, I write about whatever obsesses me. Whatever voices are in my head! I love to give myself that freedom and permission. It’s a kind of self acceptance. I think of the painter Chagall who never stopped painting flying goats and Russian villages. All the paintings are different yet the same. I don’t care if I write about the same thing for the rest of my life. The magic of poetry is that it’s a portal to infinite perspectives.

Gerry: Did you find it difficult to organize the book or did the poems fall easily into place?

Dion: Yes! I found it very difficult! Danusha Lameris, Ellen Bass, and Diane Lockward helped me organize Ghost Dogs. Ordering the book was its own discovery. I realized the poems traced my experience in a cohesive way I hadn’t seen before. The arc goes something like the following: reveling in the beauty of the Living World, the bad stuff that happened, the struggle that ensued, the redemption of adulthood.

Gerry: Do you think of yourself as a poet of the body? It seems that your work is so truthful about the body, both its suffering and its pleasures. Overcoming the suffering seems like a central concern, also you dare to write about the aging body in such a frank and accepting way. I wonder how you came to this stance. Do you think of it as stoic?

It’s true my body has experienced extremes: the constant beatings as a child, enduring third-degree burns over most of my body, but life is beloved and joyous too with its many physical pleasures. I’ve had a lot of fun in my life and taken my body on many adventures! I just want to talk about it all. I don’t want to leave anything out. True sadness, for me, is to ignore part of my own experience.

I'm not afraid to talk anatomically about a woman's body, to break taboos or broach certain topics. I don’t understand why talking frankly about the aging female body, both its pleasures and its decay, is not a subject for polite company.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in such an isolated place, grew up in a barn as they say, I have always found it difficult to adhere to social conventions, so I’m just more open about my body. Dorianne Laux said of my writing, You're willing to say anything, and that can’t be taught. I agree, that at best, it’s difficult to teach a willingness to break silence. But whenever I read someone like Sharon Olds, Diane Seuss, Rachel McKibbon, Francesca Bell, Alexis Rhone Fancher, or Denise Duhamel, I see any subject is worthy of poetry. Singing the body electric has a long history in American poetry. It’s time for women to sing it too. Funny how people never stop being shocked yet intrigued by these violations of taboo. I guess that means we still need to talk about it.

I don’t know if I’m stoic. Maybe resilient is a better word. I think stoics suffer in silence, and I like to belt it out!

Sample poem from Dion’s Ghost Dogs:

Ghost Dogs

Two hundred pounds apiece,
with strong bodies, great black heads,
and sad, sagging faces, they were my companions
through the long years of childhood.
Mastiffs. Herds of them—
studs, a handful of bitches, scores of puppies.
Bored, in dusty clumps, they guarded the driveway,
pulling themselves up
onto oversized padded feet
to trail my horse through the hills,
then—with surprising speed—racing
up deer trails in futile pursuit
of coyotes or bobcats.

My friends risked stitches in their thighs
by knocking on the door,
and when the proud cars of boyfriends pulled up—
a gleaming ’68 Camaro, a convertible Bel Aire—
the pack ambushed them,
ferocious muzzles breathing steam,
drooling on the windows.

Now, all these years after leaving home,
I miss the dogs,
how formidable they were,
negotiating between me
and the world. I have
no silent creature at my side
to touch on her wrinkled brow,
no coiled animal to summon,
in love and ready to die.

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Dion O’Reilly has lived most of her life on a small farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Her writing appears in such journals as The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Rattle, and Bellingham Review. Her work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Terrapin Books anthology A Constellation of Kisses. Her work has been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize. An earlier version of Ghost Dogs was a finalist for the Catamaran Poetry Book Prize. She received her MFA from Pacific University. Ghost Dogs is her debut full-length collection.
website

Geraldine Connolly is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Food for the Winter (Purdue), Province of Fire (Iris Press), Hand of the Wind (Iris Press) and her latest book, Aileron, published by Terrapin Books in 2018. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Cortland Review, and Shenandoah. It has been anthologized in Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High School Students, Sweeping Beauty: Poems About Housework, and The Doll Collection. She has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also received the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Maryland Arts Council fellowship, and the Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize.
website

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Christine Stewart-Nunez Interviews Emily Franklin

2022-02-08T10:47:00.000-05:00

Here's the second interview in this series. I hope you'll love it as much as I do! This series is all about poets supporting poets.

Christine Stewart-Nuñez: I know you are a prolific storyteller and an author of many novels. As I read Tell Me How You Got Here, I kept looking for an overarching narrative, but the collection refused me in the most satisfying way. I enjoyed swinging from poem to poem by collecting imagery and emotional impressions. Can you tell us more about what the genre of poetry opens for you that novels may not?

Emily Franklin: I started life as a poet, publishing in high school. In college I worked with great poets (Tom Lux, Kimiko Hahn) and thought for sure I would keep writing poetry while I worked numerous other jobs (cook, construction, teacher) but wound up being pulled into fiction writing. It made sense since I wrote mostly narrative poems. After years in the fiction world, I found lines of poetry coming back to me. For me, writing poetry is about sharing the biggest truth in the smallest form. I felt relief in trimming words and focusing on line breaks, really paring back in order to tell what needed to be told.

Christine: As a child, I maintained collections: knicknacks, earrings, dolls, stickers. Having moved a lot as an adult, I've let go of this tendency--with books a hearty exception. Tell Me How You Got Here appeals to my love of things because so many objects shimmer with meaning. Can you tell us more about your relationship to artifacts?

Emily: I’ve always been fascinated by what people (or crows!) collect. What people keep is also who they are or markers of what happened to them. Having moved a ton growing up, what we keep has special significance to me. I wrote Tell Me How You Got Here considering the amassing we do—and the sloughing off of items either when children grow out of things, or when a house floods (which happened to us), or what remains for people to sort through after someone dies. I like the record keeping of objects, and the freedom that comes from letting some of those objects or what they represent go.

Christine: I'm fascinated with the methods poets use to arrange the poems in their books. How did the order for Tell Me How You Got Here come about?

Emily: First of all, I had help. It’s tough for me to see the best order. That said, I knew "Japan, Autumn" would start the collection and that "Tell Me How You Got Here" would be the final poem. I thought about what I was asking of the reader, what topics I wanted to introduce right off the bat to let them know what the collection is about—memories (not just what we remember but how and who), the acts of gathering and letting go (both of objects and people), and ultimately what we are left with (in this case, a parrot who is loved, who leaves and returns). I think about how I came to be where I am and that’s what I’m asking the reader to examine—how you got here and—the last lines of wishing we knew how long anything or anyone can stay.

Christine: Your work in this collection is unabashedly sensual, and I adore the attention you give to food. Tell us more about your love affair with cooking.

Emily: I do love food. I also really like to know what and how other people eat. The how can tell you a lot. So I’ve always written about food and eating. In one of my life detours, I became a cook on boats and—years later—wrote a cookbook/memoir about cooking with and for my four children.

Christine: I admire how the titular poem, "Tell Me How You Got Here," concludes the book, and how the cover image is of an African Grey Parrot--the subject of that poem. And yet, I found that I wanted to substitute the "you" for the word "grief," since loss threads the book. Will you tell us more about the role grief plays in your writing process?

Emily: I write a lot about grief, even when I don’t think I’m writing about grief. That’s how grief works, I guess. The way I live is to find and hold daily joys while always knowing part of being alive is figuring out how to live with and carry sorrow.

Click Cover for Amazon

Sample Poem from Emily's Book:

In Praise

No one praises the nostril.
Overshadowed by tufted nastiness of age,
crusted muck of childhood. Where is the joy
of newborn neck, smell of milky morning,
inevitable scent of your mother’s/father’s/grandfather’s/son’s
lotion/cologne/maple syrup/pomade?
Could you spend a few moments thinking
of those once tiny nostrils—now larger,
that we learned not to stick things in,
haunted by what has gone but that we still want—
that mother and her lotion,
the high school boy who drowned—
bourbon soaked, in the reeds
what was that smell he had?
The betrayal of age is the smell.

Let us praise nostrils for what they are—
time travel, gateways to every meal, place.
This is how you bring back the dead.
I’ll cast no judgment if I find you hunched over
a bottle of vanilla extract or your son’s sweatshirt or
your grandfather’s gardening gloves.
There will be mourning for empty biscuit tins,
trowels still woozy with dirt, each salt-and snow-stained boot
the size of your palm, for even the dishrag’s rank and pong,
box of undone slithering bowties, swaddling blankets
that could not possibly hold the nostril’s gaze.
Afford the olfactory a moment,
give thanks for those gateways, consider
the space carried each day in the center of us.

Emily Franklin's work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Blackbird, and Sixth Finch among other places as well as Long-Listed for the London Sunday Times Short Story Award, featured on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Her debut poetry collection, Tell Me How You Got Here, was published in 2021 by Terrapin Books. Her novel Becoming Isabella, a novel of Isabella Stewart Gardner, is forthcoming from Godine Books.
http://emilyfranklin.com

Christine Stewart-Nuñez, South Dakota’s poet laureate from 2019-2021, is the author and editor of several books, including The Poet & The Architect (Terrapin Books, 2021), South Dakota in Poems: An Anthology (2020), Untrussed (2016) and Bluewords Greening (Terrapin Books, 2016), winner of the 2018 Whirling Prize. Her poetry has been the basis for international, cross-artistic collaborations with colleagues in music, dance, visual art, and architecture. She recently joined the faculty of arts at the University of Manitoba, where she teaches in the women’s and gender studies program. christinestewartnunez.com

Please visit the Terrapin Bookstore for these and other Terrapin Books.

Terrapin Books Now Open for Submissions of Full-length Poetry Manuscripts

2022-02-02T11:52:00.001-05:00

We will be open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts from January 24 thru February 28.

We plan to select 2-4 manuscripts each submission period.
All submissions must go through Submittable.
Please read our FAQs page before submitting.
Any questions, please use the email address or the Contact Form on the Contact page.

Guidelines:
A manuscript of approximately 40-55 poems. This will produce a book of approximately 90-110 pages. (Please note that your book will always be more pages than your manuscript. Page count for the book includes poems, front and back matter, blank pages, and section dividers).

Include contact information on title page (we do not read anonymous submissions)

One inch margins all around

Include Table of Contents

Include page numbers

Include Acknowledgments Page

Please include a list of poems and journal titles rather than just a list of journal titles. Format as a list, not as a paragraph.

Please note that we allow a maximum of 6 poems from a previously published chapbook. Regardless of the number of chapbooks, it’s no more than 6 chapbook poems. Poems previously published in a chapbook should be indicated as such on the Acknowledgments page. Include title of poem and title of chapbook.

In cover letter area include a brief bio and a 4-6 sentence description of your manuscript—in your own words, not a blurb

We recommend that 25-50% of the poems have been previously published. More than that is fine.

Simultaneous submission is acceptable but please immediately withdraw your manuscript if it's accepted elsewhere.

Please note that there is a minimal $12 reading fee to help cover our costs.

If you are resubmitting a manuscript, please explain in your cover letter how you revised it.

We strongly suggest that you peruse at least one book from Terrapin Books before submitting. We suggest that you peruse the work of any press before you submit.

Please note that at this time we are unable to accept manuscripts from outside of the US.
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Terrapin Books is committed to publishing outstanding books of poetry by outstanding poets. We intend to fully support our poets. We will edit your manuscript and work with you on revisions. We expect our poets to actively engage in promoting their books. We require our poets to maintain a dedicated website and to be a member of Facebook.

Our books are 6 x 9, paperback, perfect bound, color cover, with printed spine (poet's name, title, press).

We are committed to publishing accepted titles within six to ten months of acceptance. We do not maintain a long list of books-in-waiting.

We offer a standard contract, a generous number of author copies, a substantial discount on additional copies purchased by the author, and an annual royalty payment.

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Trish Hopkinson interviews me (Diane Lockward) about my new craft book, The Strategic Poet; the selection/publication process at Terrapin Books; and Terrapin’s current call for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts. Get a behind-the-scenes look into Terrapin Books.

Terrapin Books Interview Series: Yvonne Zipter Interviews Heather Swan

2022-01-27T10:13:00.000-05:00

I've been feeling bad for poets whose books were released during the Pandemic, poets whose book launches were cancelled or never scheduled, poets who haven't been able to do in-person readings. I asked myself, Aside from buying lots of books, what could I do, especially for my own Terrapin poets? So I devised an idea for an interview series. I invited all of my Terrapin poets to select one poet whose book had come out during the Pandemic. They were invited to choose a poet whose book they'd read or wanted to read and then to come up with five questions for that poet to respond to. The response was wonderful! Thirteen poets offered to do a Q&A. Some of these were poets with a Pandemic book themselves but some were poets without a Pandemic book. Lots of generosity among my poets! Yvonne Zipter was the first Terrapin poet to volunteer; she chose to interview Heather Swan about her Terrapin book A Kinship with Ash.

Yvonne was also the first poet to complete her interview. Here is that Q&A.

Yvonne: With both of your parents artists—your father a painter, your mother a potter—were there ways that being surrounded by art influenced your work as a writer, in particular your poetry?

Heather: Growing up in studios with people who turned ideas into images made of paint and clay certainly affected me. I understood metaphor and the importance of art so intrinsically, it never occurred to me that others did not understand the world in that way. My life was filled with art and music and stories. My mother's craft required so much (literal) centering and concentration as well as trust in the process, like writing poems does. Everyone around me made things in order to make sense of our world or to comment on it. I learned to make pottery and sculpt and paint, but I also wrote everything down. I recorded images and thoughts in journals as a child. My writing now is filled with visual imagery and, I hope, layers of meaning that one could discover in a painting.

Yvonne: Your love of nature is evident throughout A Kinship with Ash. Have you always loved nature? From where does this appreciation spring?

Heather: I feel like I have always been a part of the natural world. I spent so much of my time outside as a little girl. The studios where my mother and father worked were luckily near spaces I could explore with my dog. I moved from the prairies and woodlands of the Midwest to Colorado where I lived in the mountains. Later we moved again to a town on the east coast by the ocean. Because I moved so often, my human friendships didn't last long, but my dog was a constant companion with whom I explored these landscapes and this allowed a deep connection to the birds, the insects, and the land. All the beings we encountered in those spaces led interesting and important lives and spoke in languages I didn't understand, but recognized as valuable and mysterious.

Yvonne: A number of the poems in this collection grapple with the effects of pesticides and climate change. They are all both heartbreaking and beautiful. What does writing such poems afford you?

Heather: The experience of loving this beautiful, fragile, miraculous planet at this historical moment also means being in touch with enormous grief as so many species are going extinct, as forest after forest is being killed, as fish are struggling to survive in toxic waters, as frogs and insects are disappearing. When I write, it is part elegy, part plea. When I write, I want to remember that while so much is being lost there is also so much to be grateful for. I hope that my poems are an invitation to readers to pay attention to the outrageous beauty and vast number of different intelligences out there as well as to question our impact on the world.

Yvonne: Your sweet motherhood poems also showcase your love of nature. My sense is that this entwining is part of what fuels your anxiety about the state of our world. Can you elaborate on this?

Heather: Funny, this question made me tear up. Yes, of course. I am a parent and a teacher. My children have grown up on trails, in trees, in canoes spotting birds, insects, and frogs. A part of their community. They ache knowing so much of what they love is at risk. I invite my students to connect with each other and the planet, so they will be invested in the work of care. I think all the time about the next generations. Will polar bears still exist? Will the oldest trees survive? Will the coral reef thrive? I want so much to be a responsible ancestor, not just to my children, but to all humans and non-humans. I would like my work to offer an invitation to intimacy with the earth and also hope that we can change things for the better.

Yvonne: The cover of your book is beautiful and evocative, with various ways to interpret its relationship to the book. Can you discuss the genesis of this piece of art becoming your cover and how it illuminates the poems within?

Heather: Emily Arthur and I met when we served together on a panel on Earth Day that basically asked what art is saying about the planet right now. Emily's work immediately seized my attention. Her prints depict ghost landscapes, places of cultural and natural erasure, while also serving to honor and revive the missing stories of her Cherokee ancestors. For a variety of reasons, these images exploring loss and survival after great violence resonated with me, on both a personal and global level. When I completed my manuscript, I knew that I wanted to ask Emily if I could use her work on the cover. I am so honored she said yes. The colors of the print on the cover hint at heat and ash as birds migrate across the image with the help of the stars. But how has their home changed? Is there still a home? Emily Arthur's sense of home is complicated by the removal of her people and the species eradicated by this process. Her work, I think, holds both sorrow and strength. I hope my poems, too, can allow someone to feel the loss, but also to remember the beauty and the hope there still is for renewal and recovery.

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Sample poem from Heather's book:

Rabbit

After a long numbness, I wake
and suddenly am noticing everything,
all of it piercing me with its beautiful,
radical trust: the carpenter bee tonguing
the needle of echinacea believing
in their sweetness, the exuberance
of an orange daylily unfolding itself
at the edge of the street, and the way
the moss knows the stone, and the stone
accepts its trespass, and the way the dog
on his leash turns to see if I’m holding on,
certain I know where to go. And the way
the baby rabbit—whose trembling ears
are the most delicate cups—trusts me,
because I pried the same dog’s jaw
off his hips, and then allows me to feed him
clover when his back legs no longer work,
forcing me to think about forgiveness
and those I need to forgive, and to hope
I am forgiven, and that just maybe
I can forgive myself. This unstoppable,
excruciating tenderness everywhere inviting
us, always inviting. And then later, the firefly
illuminating the lantern of its body,
like us, each time we laugh.

Heather Swan is a poet, nonfiction writer, and teacher. Her chapbook The Edge of Damage won the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Award. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, Cold Mountain Review, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Midwestern Gothic. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt Magazine, Catapult, Edge Effects, ISLE, and Minding Nature. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She has been the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award, the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship, and the August Derleth Award for Poetry. She teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she is a beekeeper.

Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (Terrapin Books, 2020), The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist), and Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Her published poems are currently being sold individually in two vending machines in Chicago to raise money for the nonprofit arts organization Arts Alive Chicago. She is also the author of the Russian historical novel, Infraction (Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2021) and the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. She is retired from the University of Chicago Press, where she was a manuscript editor.

Please visit the Terrapin Bookstore for these and other Terrapin Books.

Sample Bonus Prompts from The Strategic Poet

2022-01-08T14:15:00.003-05:00

FYI--Terrapin Books will open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts on January 24 and will remain open thru February 28. Please note that we publish only poets living in the US. Check our Guidelines and our FAQs. Then send us something wonderful.

Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers

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Now that the holidays have come and gone, it's time to return to your poetry. If Santa didn't bring you a copy of my latest craft book, The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft, perhaps you should gift yourself with a copy. To entice you and to give you something to work on until you have the book, I'm offering you below two of the 39 Bonus Prompts from the book.

 114 fabulous poets contributed to this book, poets such as Ellen Bass, Jan Beatty, Diane Seuss, Dean Young, and George Bilgere. The book includes Craft Talks, Model Poems, Commentaries, and Prompts. It is suitable for use by poets working independently, by poets in writing groups, and by teachers in the classroom.

Here are the strategies covered in the sections of the book:  

I. Descriptive Details 
II. Diction
 III. Imagery 
IV. Sound Devices 
V. Repetition 
VI. Figurative Language: Simile 
VII. Figurative Language: Metaphor 
VIII. Figurative Language: Personification
 IX. Figurative Language: Hyperbole 
X. Figurative Language: Apostrophe 
XI. Syntax XII. Sonnet 
XIII. Odd Forms

Each of these 13 sections ends with 3 Bonus Prompts. These focus on the specific strategy of the section. They have the twin benefits of being short and recyclable. I solicited these prompts from outstanding poets who are also outstanding teachers. Here are two of these prompts. Give them a try!

1. Section VIII focuses on Personification. The Bonus Prompt poet for that section is Kerrin McCadden, a high school English teacher in Vermont and Associate Director of The Frost Place in New Hampshire.

Your Word Bank Comes Alive
Build a ten-word word bank according to this formula: a place name (a park, a neighborhood, a city, town, or country), an insect, a weather term/event, a tool, a geographical feature, a period or event in history, a term that has to do with furniture, and three words you like the sound of. Now, write a poem in the voice of an object you care deeply about. Let the object tell its story, or talk about you, make complaints, pontificate, or muse—but you must include all the words from your word bank. In a final draft, you might kick these words out of your poem, but their job is to push your imagination into sparking through the act of weighing what you love against words you might struggle to use.

2.  Section XII focuses on the Sonnet. Poet Jeffrey Bean provides three delightful prompts for this form. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Central Michigan University.  

Animal in an Invented Sonnet 
Write a sonnet about an animal. Don’t choose a traditional sonnet form—instead, devise your own fourteen-line rhyme scheme. Feel free to use meter or abandon it. Either way, use concrete imagery to bring the animal to life. What colors, smells, textures does it evoke? Try to engage all five senses and use sound and syntax to embody this animal’s movements, the noises it makes, how it feels to touch it or look at it or stand in its presence.

The Tradition of Santa Clause: A Letter

2021-12-22T12:00:00.001-05:00

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.

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 on 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.

The Strategic Poet Update/ news, poems, prompt, and video

2021-12-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

My new craft book, The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft, is now available as both a print book and an ebook. I hope that you will consider the book for your holiday gift giving. And don't forget to give yourself the gift of craft talks, model poems, prompts, commentaries from the poets, and bonus prompts. You should not experience any supply chain issues when ordering this book as it's fully available.

I am very grateful to contributor Karen Paul Holmes who made a wonderful video for the book. She recorded herself reading a model poem by Sean Shearer, "Rewinding an Overdose on a Projector," and then her own Sample Poem, "Slow-Motion, Reverse-Replay, Myocardial Infarction," which she wrote using the prompt that follows Sean's poem. Both poems, Sean's commentary on his use of similes, the prompt, and the video appear below.

From the Exciting News Department: My book has just received the lovely honor of being named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers magazine!

Sample Prompt from The Strategic Poet:

Rewinding an Overdose on a Projector

Blacker. Black. The foam drools back
up his chin, over his lips and behind his teeth.
The boy on the floor floats onto the bed.
Gravity returns. His hands twitch.
The heart wakes like a handcar pumping faster and faster
on its greased tracks. Eyes flick open.
Blood threads through a needle, draws into a tube.
The syringe handle lifts his thumb.
The hole in his vein where he left us seals.
The boy injects a liquid into the cotton
that drowns inside a spoon. He unties the leather belt
around his arm, pushes the sleeve to his wrist.
The wet cotton lifts, fluffs into a dry white ball.
The flame beneath the spoon shrinks to a spark,
is sucked inside the chamber where it grows cold,
then colder. The heroin bubbles to powder.
The water pours into a plastic bottle. The powder rains
into a vial where it sleeps like an only child.
All the contents on the bed spill into a bag.
The boy stands, feeds his belt through the loops.
This is where I snip the film and burn it.
What remains are the few hundred frames
reeling: the boy unlocking a bedroom door,
a black jacket rising from the floor, each sleeve
taking an arm like a mother and father.

—Sean Shearer

~~~~~

Craft Analysis:

The narrative action in this poem is reversed. Something horrible has happened—a heroin overdose. As we all do after horrible events, the speaker wishes to turn back the clock. Therefore, he begins at the end of the story, reversing and undoing each action that led up to the overdose and its catastrophic conclusion.

Notice the declarative sentences with their article/subject/action verb construction, e.g., The foam drools, The heart wakes, The boy injects. Notice too the flat, lifeless tone that results from this syntax, ironically at odds with the use of the personal first-person speaker.

The imagery makes the scene one we can see. Much of the imagery results from the strong verbs: Eyes flick open, Blood threads, The syringe handle lifts his thumb. The poet forces us to see the scene. And because we see it, we feel it.

In lines 5, 18, and 25 the poet employs three powerful similes, each of which illustrates that sometimes a simile works better than a metaphor. In the closing simile, the speaker describes the boy’s black jacket, each sleeve / taking an arm like a mother and a father. This closing simile makes our hearts ache for the boy and his parents.

The poet might have given more prominence to the actions by using stanzas, but he opted to use a single stanza which contributes to the poem’s fast pace and the absence of the relief that stanza breaks might bring.

~~~~~

Prompt based on Sean's poem:

For your own reverse action poem, first choose an event that had a negative outcome. This could be something you experienced, observed, or heard about from someone else. It could also be something you heard or read about in the news. Perhaps a dog getting killed by a car, a heart attack, a house fire.

Then make a list of actions leading up to the end. Put these actions in chronological order. This is just a list, not a draft.

Now beginning at the end of your list, draft your poem, ending with what’s at the beginning of your list.

Use a first-person speaker.

Use declarative sentences. Use active and energetic verbs.

As you revise, work in some imagery and similes. Put your strongest simile at the end of the poem.

How does the single stanza work for your poem? Feel free to try a different format.

~~~~~

Sean's Commentary: The Function of Similes in his poem

Although this poem is sparse in similes, the emotional weight of each one tends to be heavier the more the reader moves through the poem. The first one that appears is the heart being compared to the vehicle of the handcar as it wakes. Not much of an emotional weight, but it begins the poem’s rhetorical structure of the body being this rickety vehicle for the subject. The next two similes are the opposite as they compare inanimate objects to a living thing. These similes are hermetically tied to family, i.e., only child, mother, and father.

“Rewinding an Overdose on a Projector” is about the practicalities of shooting up heroin, an ugly subject matter. When you have the amalgam of a family setting beneath the poem, it creates a much stranger and stronger emotional weight for the reader. That last simile in the poem will always haunt me when I read it. The speaker is clutching these bodies that signify a balance or protection in life—a mother and a father—whereas we already know from the very beginning of the poem that the speaker can no longer be protected.

~~~~~

Karen's Sample Poem written using the above prompt:

Slow-Motion Reverse-Replay, Myocardial Infarction

Shards of crystal rise
from the terracotta floor, swirl
as if charmed by a wizard’s circling wand.
They form the stem, then bowl
of last night’s wineglass, which floats
to the counter
just as his heart starts again,
the slow wingbeat of a great heron,
its reliable lub dub, lub dub.
Purple bruises on his cheek fade,
rosiness returns, feet pulse with cozy blood.
His knees unbuckle. He rises.
Settles into his chair’s knowing shape.

[Pause.
That’s the stop-action I want
burnt on my retina.]

He’s like a buoyant boy on a birthday,
lips pursed for the Bulldog kickoff,
a gruff WOOF WOOF WOOF!
He’s glued to TV’s pre-game pomp—
Georgia-Alabama—texting buddies
Tide ain’t gonna roll today!
The ambulance never needs to scream.
The house isn’t skin-prickling quiet.
My key doesn’t shake in the lock.
On the two-hour trip, my gut isn’t sick,
my brain doesn’t fast-talk—
his phone must be dead, his phone must be lost.
Instead, I waltz with the hairpin curves,
Cat Stevens singing “Morning Has Broken.”
My heart stays with October’s trees—
the red flags only their leaves.

                        —Karen Paul Holmes

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The Strategic Poet Just Published

2021-10-13T06:00:00.007-04:00

I'm thrilled to tell you that The Strategic Poet: Honing the Craft is now available.

Available at: 
Amazon 
B&N
Bookshop

114 fabulous poets have work in this book, poets as George Bilgere, Jan Beatty, Traci Brimhall, Annie Finch, Camille Dungy, Danusha Lameris, Ada Limon, Matthew Olzmann, Diane Seuss, and Dean Young (see back cover below for the complete list).  

The book is organized into 13 sections, each devoted to a specific poetic strategy:

I. Descriptive Details 
II. Diction 
III. Imagery
 IV. Sound Devices 
V. Repetition 
VI. Figurative Language: Simile 
VII. Figurative Language: Metaphor 
VIII. Figurative Language: Personification
 IX. Figurative Language: Hyperbole 
X. Figurative Language: Apostrophe 
XI. Syntax 
XII. Sonnet 
XIII. Odd Forms

In addition to the section strategies listed above, many other techniques are covered along the way.

Each section begins with a Craft Talk devoted to the section strategy, then is followed by 3 model poems. Each model poem is accompanied by analysis of its craft elements. Each model poem's analysis is followed by a prompt which asks the reader/writer/poet to do what the model poem does.

One model poem in each section is followed by a Commentary from the poet who wrote the poem. I solicited these commentaries and invited the poets to comment on a specific element of their poem.

Each model poem's prompt is followed by 2 sample poems to illustrate what might be done with the prompts and to illustrate that outstanding poems can result from prompts. These 78 poems were submitted by an additional 72 poets.

Each section ends with an additional 3 prompts. These 39 prompts were solicited from a variety of fabulous poets who also teach.

This book can be used by poets working independently, by poets in writing groups, and by poets in workshops. It should also make an ideal text for the poetry classroom.

Thanks for your support throughout the writing/editing of this book. You are an important part of it even if your work isn't in it. And thanks to all of you who pre-ordered the book and made it the #1 New Release at Amazon in the Poetry Writing Reference category!

Available at: 
Amazon 

B&N

Bookshop

Available at: 
Amazon 

B&N

Bookshop