Sunshine & Rain

Two out-of-the-ordinary things happened to me today. One, I cut my finger. Badly. Not stitches bad, but bloody compress, take an extra Advil bad. Two, my partner discoverd newborn rabbits holed up in the garden underneath our tomato plants, and I got to hold one in my hands while it tickled me with its tiny feet. One moment was painful. The other was joyous. It was a nice balance to the day. I think that the best poems have this balance. I never get excited about a poem that is just happy, or just sad. Life, as they say, is complicated. I'm reading some Jack Gilbert poems right now. Here's one that coincidingly fills my heart and destroys it.

Feeling History (from The Dance Most of All, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

Got up before the light this morning

and went through the sweet damp chill

down to the mindlessly persisting sea.

Stood neck-deep in its strength thinking

it was the same water young Aristotle

knew before he stopped laughing.

The cold waves came in on me,

came in as the sun went from red

to white. All the sea turned blue

as I walked back past the isolate

shuttered villa.

Let's Talk About Lost Treasure!

I don't want to talk about poetry today...okay, that's a lie. I'll be more specific. I don't want to talk about a poem today. What I'd like to talk about are things that inspire poetry. For me, I mostly get inspired when I'm outside walking. It doesn't matter if it's a nature hike or a stroll through town. Something about walking, thinking, and observing my surroundings at the same time gets me writing lines in my head. But other things inspire me, too, and sometimes inspiration comes from the strangest places.

Yesterday, I bought an old library book from a used bookstore. The book is called Sinkings, Salvages, and Shipwrecks (American Heritage Press, 1970) by Robert F. Burgess. The cover is fabulous, like looking through a submarine porthole and seeing a couple of your mates floating over gold coins in their diving suits. The back cover has a photograph of a partially sunken ship. Chapter One is titled "The Archeology of Shipwrecks" and begins "It was a gay, festive crowd that gathered on the quay before the royal palace in Stockholm on an August Sunday in 1628" (9).

These things may not affect you, but I'm hooked. I've been thrown into another world. I can smell the salty sea air, the cool breeze prickling my arms and tossing my hair around, sticking it to my face. I feel exuberant and excited. I'm craving an adventure, a voyage. Seriously, a book cover and an opening sentence did this to me. The characters are coming alive; I'm envisioning the sailors, the guy who commissioned the venture, the lady he brings with him. They probably die a horrible death at sea. That's sad, but then one day a team of diver's discovers the wreckage. It's all so magical and morbid and eerie and cool. Who wouldn't want to write a series of poems about this?

It's something I'm considering at the moment. Maybe I'll write them, or maybe something more important will come along, and I'll write about that. Who cares? As long as you're inspired, you have a universe of poetry waiting to be written. The next time you get excited about something, write about it. See where it takes you. For now, I'll be taking a journey into the deepest, darkest depths of Poseidon's lair, expecting my pen to follow.

Thank you! An Appreciation of Community

This post is a thank you to my friend, Adrienne. She's a poet. After I finished my MFA, I decided not to go into academia. Being a poet and not teaching at a university means I'm on my own. I work hard to keep current on poetry news and new poets, and develop and nurture a poet community. I'm lucky to have poet friends. I turn to friends, like Adrienne, not only for recommendations on new poets and new poetry sites, but for community. She and my other poet friend, Verity, are always there to share poems and ideas with. You should see our Facebook conversations (no, you really shouldn't). We love poetry. We love to talk about poetry. We love to have someone to talk about poetry with. If you're feeling alone in the poetry world, reach out! Post a note with your favorite poem. Ask your friends if they'd like to talk about poetry with you. And please, use the powers of the Internet for good. Check out some of the sites I'm continuously linking to. Today, with a big kudos to Adrienne, I'm linking to a site I just discovered. It's way cool.

http://asitoughttobe.com/

To Prose or Not to Prose

I have been working on a series of prose poems these last few months. It has come to the point where I scoff lines breaks; I feel a certain superiority to those fools sweating over where to pause and start again. Like any silly human, I am prone to poor judgement and biases. While I have loved every minute of my prose-obsession, I have stupidly ignored the fact that it takes a great amount of craft and mastery to pull off a successful line break. So I'm here to briefly discuss the merits of both forms.

1. Prose - It's just plain liberating. When you forget about line breaks, you are free to revel in language. The words stand for themselves. The music comes solely from the choice and order of words. Pauses come from punctuation. Many poets and poetry critics in the past have considered prose beneath them, but I'm here to say shut up and listen!

2. Line Breaks - The traditional form of poetry, poems with lines breaks can create a rhythm that is much more difficult to accomplish in prose. Line breaks can create a fast beat, a slow beat, an awkward beat, any kind of tempo you desire. Sometimes, line breaks can ruin an otherwise good poem. In contrast, a mediocre poem can be elevated with amazing line breaks. I am reading Mary Oliver's Evidence, and although I adore Oliver's body of work, I am not moved by most of the poems in the book until I read them aloud. Yup, I'm going there AGAIN. Sorry, but before you write me off forever, read this poem while strictly observing the lines breaks. Pause for a second or two at the end of each line.

More Honey Locust

 by Mary Oliver (from Evidence, Beacon Press, 2009)

Any day now 
the branches 
of the honey locust
will be filled
with white fountains;
in my hands
I will see
the holy seeds
and a sweetness
will rise up
from those petal-bundles
so heavy
I must close my eyes
to take it in,
to bear
such generosity.
I hope that you too
know the honey locust,
the fragrance
of those fountains;
and I hope that you too will pause
to admire the slender trunk,
the leaves, the holy seeds,
the ground they grow from
year after year
with striving and patience;
and I hope that you too
will say a word of thanks
for such creation
out of the wholesome earth,
which would be, and dearly is it needed,
a prayer for all of us.

This poem is so heavy. The short line breaks build and build until I feel like I'm suffocating in the language (not in a bad way). The perfumed air is thick. The words combined with the line breaks make you pause, just as Oliver says "I hope that you too will pause." We do pause because she makes us pause. There are other elements at work here, like the long sentences and exuberant use of commas, but the line breaks seal the deal. It's methodical. It's rhythmic, almost trance-like. It's a deliberate and successful prayer.

So the choice is up to you. Good poems come in all forms. As a famous poet once said to me as I watched her scribble her name on my copy of her book, "Write, Lesley, you have to write." So I say to you, "Write, INSERT YOUR NAME HERE, you have to write."

P is for Podcast

Last week, my partner (Kevyn), my five-month old son (Niko), and I weathered a ten-hour road-trip to Ann Arbor...and back. Cars are not my friends. Motion is not my friend. Ten hours of Kevyn's mixed music CDs - not my friends. On long trips, we often break up the music with comedy CDs. But once you've heard the same joke, oh, twenty-seven times, it gets pretty boring. This time, we were armed with podcasts. Kevyn's an ecologist, so we had several science podcasts ready and waiting. Being a thoughtful guy, he also downloaded a bunch of poetry podcasts, too, mostly from Poetry Magazine.

I'm always wagging my finger at people saying "Poetry is meant to be read out loud" in my firmest old-lady scolding voice (sorry old ladies, but you know you like to scold sometimes). And the victims of my finger-wagging are probably thinking "yeah, yeah, yeah, but how do I know how the poet wants it to be read?" Well, I've got an answer for you kids, sort of. Poetry podcasts! We listened to Carolyn Forche and Kim Addonizio, well known contemporary poets. We also heard one of my new favorite poets, Jill Alexander Essbaum. And, you can listen to old and new poets online anytime! They may not be called "podcasts" technically, but poetryfoundation.org and poets.org are two websites just hanging out waiting for your fingertips to press "play."

More than hearing poems read by the poets who wrote them (which is totally awesome), poetry podcasts also have people talking about poetry. One podcast included three or four men talking about an eight-line William Carlos Williams poem for twenty-eight minutes. It was divine. Another podcast included a brief telephone interview with a critic of Williams. All of a sudden, for good or bad, I am engrossed with Williams. A third podcast involved the editors of Poetry Magazine conversing over the telephone with a woman in a retirement community. She and her fellow residents have a poetry club (so cool), and they were pretty peeved with Poetry Mag! Obtuse, she said. Meaningless words. And the editors actually had a dialogue with her! They asked her what her poetry group did and didn't like about the current issue. They gently answered her critiques with their own thoughts. Kevyn said "I really like these guys; they're not pretentious." Poetry podcasts are sweet. They're down-to-earth and often novice-friendly.

As a poet and poetry editor, I'm obsessed with this new way of bringing poetry to the people. At damselfly press, we're just beginning to jump the audio wagon. As I listened to my poets' recordings for our July issue, I got chills. It's mesmerizing and enlightening when you hear a poet read her work. When you read a poem, you put emphasis where you think it ought to be, but when you hear the poet read it herself, its magnificent.