// just returned from the BMCM+AC poetry reading wordfest event… two hours until the next reading at jubilee…
Category: poetry
// drunk on sufi poetry from the reading/performance by Thomas Rain Crowe & Coleman Barks… the hangover should be delicious…
// so when the asheville police showed up at the bobo gallery, i told j- d- ‘now this is what i call a poetry reading’ …
Do you read poetry?
“In 2002, 12% of adults read poetry. 2008 it’s 8.3%.” 1
NOTES:
1) The Chronicle of Higher Education, accessed April 23, 2009, https://www.chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/article/?id=1312&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en (page no longer available)
// weird. fell asleep reading an ezra pound bio and woke up thinking i’m late for class.
// i didn’t know ezra pound had wisconsin connections… chippewa falls connections at that.
// poetry vrs. the american poetry review. this month the the american poetry review wins (due to the publication of wendell berry poems).
Two things poets should consider
With the market plunging, here’s two encouraging items to consider as a poet:
1) “The state’s jobless rate began the year at 4.9 percent and has steadily increased since then. It stood at 6.6 percent in July.” Link The unemployment rate in N.C. is presently 7 percent.
DO NOT try to make a living writing poetry. Keep your day job (and your night job, too).
2) In the Asheville area, almost $400,000 was donated to political campaigns.
NONE of that money was spent on your livelihood as a poet, buying your poetry books, or purchasing coffee and other goodies at your public poetry readings.
Poetry, the highest form of art
Poets Teaching Poets, part 2
The advanced poetry class in which I am enrolled, began last night. Two of the four predictions I made regarding the class are right (the other two will be determined later):
1. 25 percent of the students are male
2. 16 percent of the students are under the age of 40
The first night of class was an amiable experience and it seems as if several of my classmates know each other from other writing classes. I’m bracing myself for an onslaught of confessional lyric poems about grandchildren or childhood or something along that line. A good gardening poem would be preferable, in my humble opinion.
One of the poetry books I am reviewing collects poems about the decline of the working class in America. It is a fantastic subject and book. Can’t wait to see what the editor thinks of my review. It’s that type of material I want to tackle in poetry; some subject that changes peoples life or at least causes a physical reaction. The editor of Main Street Rag once said that the poems he likes the most are ones that make him react physically; meaning he laughs or cusses or throws the book across the room. A few years ago, I witnessed someone shed a few tears after I read one of my poems. That’s the stuff I want to write (and hopefully publish); the stuff that creates a place for the reader to inhabit. The teacher told the class last night that the word “stanza” is Italian for “room.” If that is the only thing I learn from this class, it will be enough; the composition of inhabitable poems. Maybe that’s why I like today’s featured poem at Writer’s Almanac; I can get into its space.
“Literature in the 21st Century” by Ronald Wallace
Sometimes I wish I drank coffee
or smoked Marlboros, or maybe cigars—
yes, a hand-rolled Havana cigar
//read more
Writing book reviews
The nice thing about writing reviews of poetry books is the ongoing education I am receiving by reading contemporary poetry.
Often I am mistaken as a student on the bus. Last week an older woman asked me if I was a student at UNCA. I told her no and that I was reading a book to write a review of it. Later that week, a man on the bus asked me if I was in college. Again, I told him no and that I was reading a book (a different book of poems (I read two books last week)) to wrote a review about it. He then began to tell me about a book he read that absolutely amazed him. It was a narrative nonfiction book about Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. The conversation was amiable.
I came away thinking that must I look like a student. I suppose there are worse things to look like.
Why do I do it?
Write Anything (formerly Write Stuff) asks a good question: Why do you do it?
I’ve been asking myself that question a lot recently: Why do I have the desire to compose poems and write prose? A few weeks ago I applied for a writing class–which begins next week–and thought I must be insane. Why should I spend money on an advanced poetry writing class when most readers in America don’t even read poetry. I mean, really, why do I torture myself? Why can’t I have a hobby like a normal American? Something like model trains or comic book collecting or kayaking. But no… I’ve got to do the hard things and hone my craft in the dark art of poetry. I might was well learn to speak Latin or something equally useful. I couldn’t even bring myself to attend the poetry event at Malaprop’s today.
This week at Malaprop’s
Time: Friday, September 5, 2008 7:00 p.m.
Location: Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe
Title of Event: Jonathon Flaum-A Fable of Leadership
Local author and CEO of WriteMind Communications,Inc., Flaum will read from his new book, How the Red Wolf Found Its Howl: The Internal Journey to Leadership
Time: Sunday, September 7, 2008 3:00 p.m.
Location: Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe
Title of Event: Poetrio- 3 Readings by 3 Poets
Join us every first Sunday for Poetrio, poetry readings by three poets. This month’s featured poets are Scott Owens, author of The Fractured World, Beverly Jackson, author of Every Burning Thing, and Pat Riviere-Seel, author of No Turning Back Now (New Women’s Voices Series, No. 30)
Poetry Class: What’s your all time favorite poems
The teacher of the poetry class I am enrolled in asked the class what are our all time favorite poems. I was surprised my my selections.
As I child I remember listening to my grandfather reciting an excerpt from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” (Part I, Chapter 3). So, I chose that as an all time favorite.
In school, I memorized several poems that have become my favorites as well. They include:
- Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”
- Rudyard Kipling’s “If”
- Edward Rowland Sill’s “Opportunity”
- Thomas Hood’s “I Remember, I Remember”
Other poems I’ve found along the way include:
- Carl Sandburg’s “Grass”
- Sergeant Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”
- W.B. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle Of Innisfree”
- Robert Pinksy’s “Samurai Song”
The list I sent to the class instructor is not final nor reflective of poets who have influenced me. I tend to enjoy a complete work rather than an individual poem. If I was asked what three books of poetry have influenced my own work, it would be more representative of the direction my poetic work is moving. Still, it is interesting to learn which individual poems became the foundation of my journey into poetry.
What magazines do you receive?
Deborah of 32 poems magazine wants to know:
I’m getting Cimarron Review, Bloomsbury Review, Ninth Letter, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker and some others. The New Yorker hardly needs my support, but there you go. I am morally opposed to The Atlantic, because they do not publish enough poetry. The amount of poetry they publish withered to nearly nothing the last time I checked. That’s about the time I decided to subscribe only to magazines that offered a large poetry presence. You could easily tell me how few poems The New Yorker publishes. Well, The New Yorker is The New Yorker. The prose is also good.
Some other magazines that invite my interest include Southwest Review, Barn Owl Review, and Pebble Lake Review to name a few. I’m only including magazines one can subscribe to, so that leaves out many excellent online magazines.
What magazines do you like?
American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poets & Writers and Small Press Review.
Magazines I used to subscriber to, but had to cancel due to lack of funds: Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Main Street Rag, New York Review of Books, Paste, Salamander and Slipstream.
Unwritten Poetry Rules
Next week, I start another 30-day Poetry Marathon… I’ll write one poem per day.
Deborah Ager. Link.
The secret lives and desires of poets and writers
From The New Yorker:
Part of the reason there were no real biographies is that little was known about Gibran’s life, and the reason for that is that he didn’t want it known.
Link.
And from Slate:
…one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture…. the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed–as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.
Link.
From 1000 Black Lines:
- Jessica Smith, Burn it. Poetry burns well. And it is a fitting end for poetry, esp. anything from that angsty juvenile period…
- 1000 Black Lines, Thanks for the advice. I’ll burn it along with all the friendship bracelets, florescent T-shirts…. Who needs to worry about the high cost of heating fuel when burning poetry is such an affordable alternative?
Link.
How to write a marketing poem
Step One:
Read anything and everything Seth Godin writes.
Read anything and everything Seth Godin writes.
From Seth Godin:
used bookstores hate Amazon
And so do independent bookstores
Link.
Who vs. how many.
Link.
More marketing links than you can read…
Link.
Step Two:
Write a 31-syllable waka.
Write a 31-syllable waka.
Step Three:
Publish the waka on your own blog, because no prestigious literary journal would waste the time to print it.
Publish the waka on your own blog, because no prestigious literary journal would waste the time to print it.
Used bookstore owners
hate Amazon. But why? The
staff and owners of
used bookstores know the hands and
faces of bibliophiles.
Lost in translation
From The Times:
The Prince of Wales has watercolours, it’s true, but it’s hard to imagine him getting to grips with the waka, with its 31 syllables, strictly arranged into five lines in the 5-7-5-7-7 structure. Akihito and Empress Michiko knock out four waka apiece for New Year’s Eve as well, reflecting on the year just gone by, and this year’s offerings were helpfully put out in English by the Imperial Household Agency last week. Translating poetry is notoriously difficult and the waka usually come out sounding as poetic as the instruction manual for a vacuum cleaner. Link.
Maybe if I translate my grocery list into Japanese it will sound poetic.
Warren Wilson College reading — review
Brief review of last night’s Warren Wilson College MFA faculty reading.
Marianne Boruch
Charles D’Ambrosio read a lengthy, intriguing piece that I assume is the opening to a novel. When he finished, I wanted to shout, “What happens next?”
Van Jordan
Michael Martone
Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture summary and thoughts
As promised, some highlights from yesterday’s Maurice Manning
The lecture centered on “Some Thoughts on Sympathy.” Maurice began by defining sympathy. First, it is not the “I feel your pain” emotion that is manipulative, fake and inaccessible — a show of feeling rather than creation of feeling (i.e. the desire that you feel me feeling your pain). Sympathy defined as honest feeling, common understanding — as in “two beasts bound together” like oxen — of suffering.
Maurice cited the Romantic period as the historical place where sympathy in literature is born — where the outward reaching heart surveys the humanity of the world and returns to the mind where it is changed, sympathetic, and reaches outward again. “Isn’t that what we seek in poetry, to be changed?” Maurice asked. From there he presented the two-step machinery of Romanticism — heart and mind cycle — using the physics examples of sympathetic motion in plucked strings and pendulum motion.
This is the part of the lecture where I was deeply engaged. He went deep into physics and linguistics to make the point that sympathy occurs naturally — it is part of our nature. It is the transfer of energy from one property to another, one person to another, from the page to the spirit. This is the kind of lecture that challenges me, resonates with me, makes me want to go deep. I’m starved for it.
Maurice used Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” as examples of sympathy in poetry. After an in depth analysis of the linguistic patterns of “To a Mouse,” he concluded his lecture by stating that the poets he referenced found the self in these poems. “We’re always yoked to something…” he said. “The mysterious force of the poem stays with us even after we have closed the book.”
The applause was loud and seemed not to affect him as he paper clipped his lecture notes. As the applause subsided he quietly stated, “I guess it’s lunch now.”
Maurice Manning’s poetry lecture…
…was ARGH-sum!
I arrived at Warren Wilson College’s Fellowship Hall a few minutes early and waited for the earlier session to conclude. First one out the door was none other than Steve Orlen
I’ll provide highlights from Maurice Manning’s
Did any of ya’ll out there make it to Maurice’s lecture?
Coffeehouse Junkie 