Month: March 2009

Go Listen for Me

April, although NaPoWriMo, is really the month of work travel for me, not readings. There are so many wonderful readings coming up in my area in the next few weeks; could some of you go for me, please?

Kevin Young is reading at the ICA in Boston on 16 April. (I loved his book Black Maria.)

Also on 16 April is X. J. Kennedy at the Lexington High School!

On 2 April, Sabra Loomis and Jennifer Rose at the Suffolk University Poetry Center at 5:30pm (much, much too early to escape from work in time to arrive).

plants using their bright stamens as tuning forks

I’m getting ready for NaPoWriMo by coming up with lists of prompts and inspiring poems (both of which I’ll be posting here) and thinking about topics I may want to tackle. I definitely want to try to write something about being my grandfather’s pallbearer last month, and maybe something about the arsonist who burned down the world’s largest red cedar bucket, and I want to experiment some more with N+7. I’ll be posting about my progress both here and at my blog. I bought a new notebook, which fits in my purse, and will be trying to write on my lunch hours as well as at home.

Also, I had two poems published last weekend: “The Hitch in Yr Getalong” at My Poem Rocks and “Evolution” at Mise En Poem. If those sites look amazingly similar, that’s because they’re edited by the same person.

“Dropping clutter and rubies wherever I walk”

Today’s subject line is from Rose Lemburg’s “Burns at Both Ends,” a poem in the January/February issue of STAR*LINE.

As it happens, the Bronchitis of Doom that plagued me this past winter has pretty much put paid to my ability to get by on little sleep. I’m still grumpily coming to terms with how much less I’ve been able to pursue (never mind finish, never mind circulate) thanks to the combination of more chaos and fewer waking hours that has ensued; on the bright side, I don’t lack for engrossing projects, and I’m expecting the second half of this year to be more conducive to me giving them their due. To each harvest its time.

I’m not personally committing to NaPoWriMo, but I’ll be cheering on the VTL members who are, and I will at least try to show up here a couple times a week with recs or other ramblings. If nothing else, I’ll likely be inspired to stay up an extra hour here and there to get some writing or reading done, so that I’ll have something to share at the party. 🙂

Back to STAR*LINE: I am a volunteer for my church’s Room in the Inn program. I had two shifts this past winter where I served as the evening’s “co-host” – basically staying awake and “on call” in case the men needed assistance during the night.

During both shifts, I ended up with time to indulge in some poetry reading. A while back, I’d promised a friend that I would record some Sylvia Plath poems for her, so during my first shift, I had with me an edition of Ariel that included a facsimile of Plath’s typescript as well as a “restored” edition of the book. The publisher used different papers for the different sections (e.g., rougher stock for the fascimile section) — a decision I found pleasing.

The collection includes “Nick and the Candlestick,” a poem Edward Byrne reproduces in his entry on Nicholas Hughes’s death. The YouTube video embedded in his post is a fascinating listen — Seph Rodney introduces his gorgeous reading with how he didn’t really connect to poetry until he came across Plath’s work.

During my second RITI shift, I had with me the issue of STAR*LINE mentioned above. In addition to Lemburg’s poem, the standouts for me included Ann J. Schwader’s “Moonless” (a sonnet), and Robert Borski’s “Hansel & Gretel Revise Their Strategem,” “Jupiter’s Red Spot,” and “The Time Traveler’s Dog.” (Since Borski’s name kept showing up every time I dog-eared a page, I definitely plan to look up more of his work some other evening.)

Stolen

Karen Weyant‘s Stealing Dust (published by Finishing Line Press) makes you feel too hot, too sticky, too tired, too old, too dirty. It sings the songs of the assembly line so irresistably you will sing along whether you have sung them before or not:

Forget eyeliner. It stains shadows beneath your eyes.

Forget mascara. It runs. Even the waterproof kind.

from “Beauty Tips from the Girls on 3rd Shift”.

The poems make obvious and close as skin worlds outside my own experience. From the title poem:

They don’t care about what we

take home with us: dirt that crawls

up our jeans, seeps through our socks,

leaving tiny dots like deer ticks

 

embedded deep in our skin

and dust that melts through our shirts,

our white tank tops, our bras, coloring

the tips of our nipples, black.

The poems open your eyes, then blind you. From “3rd Shift Sunrise”:

                The sun looks different

after 8 hours of dust & dirt,

                & fluorescent white lights.

…

                edges blurred

as if melted from furnaces

                that never stop running.

You can find more of Karen’s work on her website.

Below our skin, rivers.

Since I wrote an entry last, five of my poems have appeared in Concelebratory Shoehorn Review (possibly not safe for work, if your workplace minds cuss words) and another in My Poem Rocks.

Today I’ve been reading David Orr in The New York Times on careerism in poetry, and Seth Abramson’s excellent response, which incidentally doesn’t mention the thing that jumped out at me, which is that great poets are implicitly assumed to be male (“it’s somebody who takes himself very seriously,” emphasis mine), and although probably David Orr didn’t mean it that way, but was just eschewing the questionable grammar of “somebody who takes themselves,” I think we do tend to assume a Great Poet or a Great Anything will be male, so his description was apt if, I suspect, unintended. Anyway, interesting reading, and Abramson’s points about classism are important, I think, although I’m no particular fan of MFA programs (which, at tens of thousands of dollars a year, are hardly democratizing poetry, for all the good they may do their individual students).

I was also very excited this weekend to find out that my friend Sue Goyette has won the CBC Literary Award for English Poetry, for “Outskirts.” The winning pieces will be read on the air on March 4th, and should be available at cbc.ca/podcasting or cbc.ca/wordsatlarge.