so many great writing related things going on
I have been flooding my Facebook, Twitter and (even) Google+ pages with cool poetry and writing related links lately, so I thought I might collect them here.
Read these poems by Hugh Behm-Steinberg and Marie-Elizabeth Mali.
Check out this advice from Yusef Komunyakaa.
Pre-order this AMAZING book by Dinty Moore, which makes me happy and will make you happy.
Check out this review of Megan Gannon’s chapbook of poems The Witch’s Index (edited by yours truly, which can be ordered at Sweet Publications).
And don’t forget to like the following on Facebook: Sweet: A Literary Confection, Castaway Fan Page, and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy.
Oh, and watch my video of me reading a poem with photos of central Illinois.
some great poems, including video poems
I came across several really interesting links to wonderful poems–including some set to cool videos–today, so I figured I’d share them all here. And encourage everyone to make videos to go along with your poems!
First, an astonishing poem about a lynching, that gives rise to new insights about the human condition–and does it beautifully. Ansel Elkins, “Reverse: A Lynching”
Next an amazing video poem by Motionpoems. Todd Boss, “The God of Our Farm Had Blades”
And another video poem by Motionpoems, this one funnier but still with that awesome kick at the end. Erin Belieu, “When at a Certain Party in NYC”
Oliver de la Paz, Furious Lullaby
I just got back from the AWP conference in Chicago. It was the biggest ever, with 10,000 writers converging on a couple of hotels and (of course) several bars in downtown Chicago. I’m still processing my various responses to it, but I wanted to say something about just one of the books I picked up there, Furious Lullaby by Oliver de la Paz. I actually own this book already–or think I do–but hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet (sorry, Oliver!). I happened to be at the right place and the right time to get the author to sign it for the graduate student who was dog-sitting for us during the conference, also a poet. It’s the perfect gift, and Oliver kindly even mentioned my dogs in his inscription. This being a gift, I had to keep it safe, and so it ended up in my carry-on luggage. I opened it up on the plane and began to read.
Normally I try to wait until I’m finished with a book before writing about it, but I’m not confident I’ll be able to recapture the joy I felt as I was first reading this once I’ve been home for a while. How utterly lucky I felt, to come from a place filled with the love of writing and writers, where I had the great fortune to spend time with friends who make me feel whole in this world, and then to find that feeling extended and amplified by the insight of another poet on the page. Some quotes that made me swoon from this book:
“…the instinct to love/is the exact memory of flight for mourning doves.” (from “Aubade with Doves, a Television, and Fire“)
“I was trying to remember a word/standing for light and rhyming//with innocent sex.” (from “The Devil’s Book”)
“My imaginings sometimes take me/away from you.” (from “Aubade with a Book and the Rattle from a String of Pearls“)
“Not memory,/though horses live in both worlds and forgive us…then the clop of hoof on grass as if to say here is heaven./Thus the horses forgive, though they look above.” (from “Aubade with Constellations, Some Horses, and Snow”)
“There are ruins we witness/within the moment of the world’s first awakening/and the birds love you within that moment. They want/to eat the air and the stars they’ve hungered for, little razors.” (from “Aubade with Bread for the Sparrows”)
So for me, this is what AWP is about. All kinds of other things, too. But really, this.
Writers, keep writing. And I wish you all joy in your reading.
on not being able to explain why we love a poem
Check out this post by the Indiana Review.
I’d expand this observation into advice for writers: sometimes it’s ok not to know exactly where your poem is going, to let language and image take you to some place surprising. We write to discover, not merely to record.
USF’s Blank Pages Creative Writing Symposium was a great success!
In case you missed it, we had all kinds of literary events on February 9 and 10 at USF. Talented writers read, talked about issues in writing, debated, and generally showed off their smarts. Here’s a video of the final reader of the symposium, Tim Seibles, reading the wonderful poem “First Kiss.”
upcoming Tampa area literary events
Blank Pages, the USF creative writing symposium, February 9 & 10, 2012, with readings by Ira Sukrungruang, Katherine Riegel, Lola Haskins, Tim Seibles and more. Panels throughout both days, too!
Life Out Loud, a Tampa area reading series featuring true stories. Submission date February 10; reading is March 10.
Beginning poets and intermediate poets: a meditation
First of all, I’m updating this blog because a beautiful poet, Angela Brommel, remembered that I sometimes post here and shared this with others. In honor of people actually reading my musings, here’s one I’ve been thinking of lately.
I’m lucky enough to teach both the beginning level poetry workshop here at USF and the intermediate level. One issue I notice coming up in the intermediate workshop is the question of what’s at stake in a poem. I end up asking the student poets why this poem matters? Why was it urgent for the student to write? As an old colleague of mine used to write on composition papers, “So what?”
But that issue comes up much less frequently in the beginning level. And I’m thinking it’s just part of the process. Beginning poets come in to class thinking of poetry as an outpouring of emotion. We spend much of our time then showing them that a poem is a crafted thing. They are introduced to techniques and to the very idea that choosing one word over another might have a different effect on the reader.
Intermediate poets come in to class thinking of the poem as a crafted thing–that’s what they learned in their beginning classes, after all. And then we need to remind them that poetry is also an outpouring of emotion. You should be writing the poems in your intermediate class for the same reasons you wrote them in the beginning class: because you had something to work out on the page, to ponder, to turn in your hands and examine, to try to understand.
This isn’t an either/or issue. This is a matter of knowing that poetry is many things. It is a body that we stitch together, a body that requires a heart to make it move.
on “what’s at stake” in a poem
“The poem’s power and authority reside within the notion that particular (and feel-able) risks have been taken by the speaker—something hard to say, something nearly impossible to say, is ventured. (This is what makes me sad, this is what I adore, this is what I hate, this is what I fear.) Once the hard thing is said (or suggested), then there’s danger on the page. It takes a special sort of nerve to spell (just enough) the connection between the imagery (symbols) of the outer world and what the poet wants us to take from that imagery about how that imagery enhances, reflects, refracts and intensifies the poet’s inner landscape.
How overtly drawn does this correspondence have to be? I think the answer is: just overt enough so that readers can feel the risk taken. Whether or not a reader actually feels the danger on the page depends entirely upon whether the poet has provided us with sufficient correspondence between description and metaphor on one hand, and what’s human, on the other. There must be that ineluctable tension between what we understand abstractly and what we feel concretely. Without that kind of correspondence (and corresponding tension) there’s no felt urgency. Without those risks, the description and metaphor, no matter how well turned, turn merely symbolic. Without sufficient evidence of that correspondence, a symbol is just a symbol, stripped, then, of its power, like an electric circuit whose wiring reaches a dead end: the light won’t go on. Sound and fury are fine, so long as they signify something. Within this correspondence—this levering—the real work of the poem gets done.”
–Jeffrey Levine, from http://jeffreyelevine.com/2011/11/16/how-resonant-diction-and-correspondence-propel-a-poem-part-1-in-what-we-look-for-at-tupelo-press/
Reading this Saturday, November 19, 7-11:30 at Cafe Hey in Tampa
Cafe Hey
1540 N. Franklin Avenue
Tampa, FL
More Info:
Come one, come all and join us for the very first Ubernothing art show and poetry reading, featuring the work of the very same artists who adorn the pages of our magazine! This event is FREE OF CHARGE with FREE COFFEE, TEA AND TREATS for the guests!! So join us in celebrating the artists and works that make Ubernothing Tampa Bay’s Premier Art Review and Literary Magazine.
VISUAL ART
Bradley Paul Valentine
CyberCraft Robots
Brad Kokay
Jon Ditty
Kym O’Donnell
Leah Renee Pecoraro
READING
Robert Annis
Wayne S. Williams
Wayne Mason
Meg Godbout
Louis Kern
Victor Florence
Jeffrey J. Skatzka
Featuring an appearance by the Bluebird Books Bus! http://www.thebluebirdbus.com/
Readings in the Tampa area Oct-Nov 2011
Peter Trachtenberg, reading
FRIDAY OCTOBER 7, 6:00 p.m. USF GRAPHICSTUDIO
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little, Brown 2008), a book that combines reportage, memoir, and moral philosophy to explore suffering and its narratives, which won the 2009 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for works that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. In 1997, his debut book, Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh (Crown) was published. Of this book, the Montreal Gazette wrote, “Seven Tattoos is like a Lou Reed record: off-key and on the mark at the same time….A reminder that the memoir, when it’s revealing and reflective, can go where the best literature has always sought to go—straight to the human heart.”
Trachtenberg’s fiction, essays, and reportage have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Bomb, A Public Space, Bidoun, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New York Times Travel Magazine. He has performed his monologues at Dixon Place, PS 122, and The Kitchen and broadcast commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Nelson Algren Prize for Short Fiction, an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2010-2011 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008-2009 he was a visiting professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
(click for directions to the GraphicStudio)
October 13, 7-10pm
thread will be having its 3rd Annual Reading is Sexy Showcase– a more formal (with free food) event than last month’s fundraiser. But more importantly, this event differs from last month’s in that we want to revive the celebration of last year’s published writers with the goal in mind that those who were published in the Spring will read at this specific event.
Also, Oct. 13th marks the open submissions date for thread this year! We will be accepting submissions in literary criticism (max 15 pages), fiction (max 15 pages), poetry (max 5 pages each, 4 poems total), creative non-fiction (max 15 pages), and a short screenplay (max 15 pages or 1 Act). *Note: the submission guideline has changed from last year. Please submit all submissions to thread.submishmash.com/submit
Come on out all you threadies and be inspired to submit!
Readers include:
Robert Alderman (published before; short story)
Ryan Bollenbach (published before; short story)
Amanda Molinaro (published before; short story)
Jenni Nance (graduate student; short story)
Neil Pepi (published before; screenplay)
Alan Shaw (graduate student; non-fiction)
Brogan Sullivan (published before; short story)
Mon, November 7, 7pm – 9pm
Ella’s Folk Art Cafe, 5119 N. Nebraska Ave
This year’s writers harvest will feature poets Erika Meitner and Michael Hettich and fiction writer Karen Brown. The event raises money and canned goods for Feeding America.