If you’re into poetry, and you haven’t been paying attention to Poets’ Quarterly, then you should be. It is one of my favorite journals in terms of content, especially the interviews and craft essays. Check out the newest issue, and my review of Neil Shepard’s latest book, Hominid Up.
My personal favorite in the new issue is the essay on Baudelaire and the madness of love.
I would be remised if I didn’t share my thoughts on the recently announced indefinite hiatus of The Gaslight Anthem. I can’t think of a band that I’ve blogged more about over the years than those guys.
Writing on Facebook, the group said, “We wanted to let everyone know that we’ll all be taking a break from The Gaslight Anthem after this next European tour in August. We’re all going to do other projects and stay active in some way or another, both in and out of music, but we’d like to step away from the band until we decide what we’d like to do next.”
It’s unclear when or if the band will get back together for more shows or another album, but I’m glad I had the chance to see them play numerous times in Philly and NJ. I still remember when I bought their first album, Sink or Swim, back in 2007. I was living in a ramshackle apartment, just out of college, and working a full-time job as a reporter. Some of my roommates were still in college, and I was in that weird in-between phase of being an adult and still clinging to those college days of late night drives coming back from Philly after punk shows, my clothes stinking of sweat and cigarette smoke, my car stereo blasting three-minute tracks.
Yet, by that point, I was tired of spinning the same familiar punk albums from my record collection. I hungered for something to jolt me in the same way that I was floored when I heard The Clash or Black Flag for the first time. Since The Gaslight Anthem was getting such immense attention in the punk community, I wanted to hear what all of the fuss was about.
I must have listened to Sink or Swim half a dozen times when I first got it. There wasn’t anything groundbreaking in the music; big hooks, power chords, and rapid snare beats have always been the formula for punk music. But Brian Fallon’s lyrics resonated with me the most. Those tracks about “dime-store punks” and waiting for a lover by the light of the moon stuck me as a writer. The band’s soulfulness was evident even on those driving, three-minute punk songs, and that soulfulness would only grow throughout their career. I also liked Brian’s ability, even on the first album, to mash-up rock n roll lyrics in his songs, everyone from Joe Strummer to Bob Dylan to Springsteen. It was clear, almost immediately, that the band would not be confined to three chords and sweaty basement shows. They were going places and their influences were too broad.
Over the years, the shows got bigger and I saw the guys perform less and less, but with each album, no matter the changes in sound, I found tracks to love. The last album, Get Hurt, a document of Brian Fallon’s divorce, came out as I split with my fiancé. For me, it was the right album for the right time, just as Sink or Swim was at the time.
When I first saw Gaslight, at a record release party for the Loved Ones in Philly, I told them after their opening set they were going to be big. They shrugged it off, but the soul, the poetry, the punk rock energy, and the best kind of rock n roll influences were all there from the beginning.
Thanks for all of the music and memories, guys! Please come back soon!
Here’s a video from their final show at the Reading Festival in the UK this past weekend.
I just want to give a quick shout-out to the fine folks at Electric/Diamond City for the wonderful write-up on the August edition of the Writer’s Showcase at the Old Brick Theater in Scranton. I’m thrilled we got to sit down with them for an interview and photo shoot. This reading series continues to grow, and I couldn’t be more proud. Check out the article here.
The reading will take place this Saturday from 7-9 p.m. Admission is $4. The Old Brick Theater is located at 126 W. Market Street in Scranton. I couldn’t be more excited about this edition’s line-up! Check out their bios:
Carrie Reilly is a genderqueer poet from Philadelphia and host of Wild Mischief: A Reading Series & Literary Gathering. Carrie earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and has had poems published in Apiary Magazine and My Favorite Bullet, as well as the collective chapbook, “Bodies of Fire,” with poets Julia C. Alter and Julia Perch.
Raymond P. Hammond served over twenty-five years as a law enforcement officer at the National Park Service. He is editor-in-chief of The New York Quarterly Foundation and the author of Poetic Amusement, a book of literary criticism. He is also an adjunct professor at Keystone College and is the faculty advisor for Keystone College Press.
William Black’s short fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, The Sun Magazine, Harvard Review, and more than twenty other journals and magazines, and a collection of stories, Inheritances, came out in the spring of 2015. He lives in Scranton and teaches creative writing and world literature at the Johns Hopkins University.
Sarah Zane Lewis is a poet and science geek from Scranton, PA. She is the recipient of the Delta Epsilon Sigma National Writing Prize in Poetry, the J. Harold Brislin Medal for Distinction in Creative Writing, the Sister M. Charitas Loftus Medal for Excellence in Poetry, and a National Science Foundation Research Experience in biochemistry. The author of two chapbooks and several limited edition graphic poems, her work has also appeared in Pulp, and the recent SwanDive Press anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. Sarah Zane founded Seattle’s Word of Mouth poetry series, and featured at the Seattle Poetry Festival, the Seattle Poetry Slam, the National Poetry Slam, the Bumbershoot Music Festival and was the 2001 Bumberslam Champion. Sarah Zane served as Scoring Director for the National Poetry Slam, has coached a youth slam team at Brave New Voices, and mentored young writers through the Emerging Voice program. She holds a B.S. in Biotechnology and a lifetime membership to Trapeze School New York.
Kaylie Jones is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (2009). Her novels include A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which was released as a Merchant Ivory Film in 1998; Celeste Ascending (2001); and Speak Now (2004). She is the author of numerous book reviews and articles, which have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Paris Review, the Washington Post, Confrontation Magazine, and others. She is the editor of the anthology Long Island Noir (2012). Her latest novel, The Anger Meridian, was published in July 2015. Kaylie has been teaching for more than 25 years, including at Southampton College’s MFA Program in Writing, and in the low residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Wilkes University. She co-chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 yearly to an unpublished first novel. Her latest endeavor is her imprint with Akashic Books, Kaylie Jones Books, a writer’s collective in which the authors play a fundamental part in their own publishing process.
My favorite scene in the N.W.A. biopic, Straight Outta Compton, is when the group is on stage in Detroit and Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr) looks out on the crowd, turns to Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and then belts out “Fuck Tha Police.” This incident occurred after the Detroit P.D. demanded that the group not play the song in their city. The group’s decision to defy the police led to a riot and the arrest of the artists and raised a lot of questions about censorship.
There are so many good things that I could say about the film, specifically the way it captures the explosion of “gangsta” rap, the implosion of N.W.A., the rise of Death Row Records, but mostly, I favor the film because of how much it resonates with headlines today, specifically the Black Lives Matter movement. Looming throughout the film is tension between police and black communities, ultimately leading to the Rodney King riots. In one early scene, as the artists step outside of a recording studio, they’re shoved to the ground by LAPD because they’re assumed to be gang-bangers.
There are many criticisms that can be made against “gangsta” rap, namely its treatment of women, but as Ice Cube notes several times throughout the film, the music served as a reflection of their reality, including the tensions with police. In that regard, it can also be said that N.W.A.’s bold decision to play “Fuck Tha Police” in Detroit was an act of civil disobedience.
That particular reminded me of young Black Lives Matters activists who recently shut down rallies by Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush, and have since protested at other campaign scenes. When they shut down a Sanders rally in Seattle, several of my progressive friends questioned their motives, since Sanders is generally open-minded and supportive of civil rights causes. I noted that it doesn’t matter who the candidate is, they should keep employing such acts of civil disobedience. For one, it forces the cnadidates and their supporters to really listen. After shutting down the Sanders rally, for instance, he broadened his platform to include matters of policing in minority communities. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton recently met with BLM activists. These acts of civil disobedience create a national dialogue and force people to pay attention. Any change comes from the grassroots.
There really couldn’t be a more appropriate time for a biopic on N.W.A. produced by Ice Cub and Dr. Dre. Already, it’s continued the conversation that the group started in the late 80s and the BLM activists rekindled, post-Trayvon and post-Ferguson.
Recently, I got in a conversation with a friend about Donald Hall’s life and long career. This occurred after I blurbed her forthcoming book and drew some resemblance to her collection and Hall’s poetry, at least in her treatment of everyday subject matter and rural scenes. My friend then noted that Donald Hall, now 86, has stopped writing poetry and is only writing prose. In fact, his latest book is a prose collection, Essays After 80.
I had already known that Hall stopped writing poetry. Prior to the release of his latest book, he gave a lengthy interview in Poets & Writers in which he confessedthat he has stopped writing poetry and joked that it’s because he no loner has enough testosterone. Hall, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, did admit, however, that he keeps revising old poems. I still wonder to what end.
In an interview with NPR, Hall was more specific regarding his inability to write new poems. He confessed, “Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line — to me sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less. I still use it in prose, but the unit is the paragraph.”
My writing process is similar, in that, for me, poetry often begins with sound and rhythm. I may have an image, but the structure of the poem is dependent on sound, especially the breaking of the line and the progression of the image or extended metaphor. I write and rewrite to stretch the language of a line and to play words off of each other for rhythmic effects.
In the same interview, however, Hall admits that he didn’t see the essays coming, but they did come. We can hope that new poems will come, too, but his statements regarding his inability to write new poems raises questions about what composes a poem and what is needed. Is it possible to still compose once the senses start to dull? Poetry is so dependent upon the senses and the structure is so reliant on sound that it seems inevitable the process will become more difficult with old age.
Lately, I have been working on my third books of poems, tentatively titled Waiting for the Dead to Speak. Right now, it’s nearly 90 pages and split into three sections. I spent several summer mornings and evenings putting the book together and ordering the poems. I recalled a conversation that I had with poet Patricia Smith when I was teaching at Keystone College and some of us had dinner with her prior to the reading. She encouraged an undergraduate student who was putting together her senior project poetry chapbook to let the arc of the book build. She recommended not front loading the book with all of the strongest poems, but save those for last.
I agree with Smith’s advice somewhat. I don’t like books that are front heavy and fall flat at the end. That said, I look at a manuscript like a punk rock set. Pummel the audience with a few two-three minute songs one after the other. Give them a taste of your strongest material. Engage them immediately, prior to slowing down, and after the halfway mark, step heavy on the gas again. I think a poetry collection should start quite strong. Hit the reader immediately, with the first poem, and let the first few poems set the tone and style for the book, and then it may be okay to slow down some. But by the end of the book, like Smith said, the reader should be left with something memorable.
The same advice could be said about a featured reading. Think carefully about what you’re going to read, and this is just as important as thinking about the order of poems in a collection. Engage the audience immediately. Hook their attention, and then it may be okay to slow down in the middle of the set, or perhaps even read something new. By the conclusion of the set, end with something strong.
These are just some thoughts. Does anyone else have any advice about ordering a manuscript of preparing a reading set?
Last night, the editors/founds of [PANK] shared some sad news. The magazine will close at the end of the year. Here is the official statement shared on social media:
Dear friends and family,
Please accept this brief note as PANK’s formal notification of resignation, effective as of the end of this calendar year, 2015. We’ll publish one last print issue and two final online issues of PANK Magazine; look for those in the months ahead. We are immeasurably proud of our publications and have boundless gratitude for all the staff, contributors, and each and every reader who has labored alongside us over the last decade. It’s been an immensely gratifying ride. PANK loves you.
Yours sincerely
M. Bartley Seigel, Roxane Gay, & Co.
Over the last several years, [PANK] has been one of the edgier and influential literary journals in the country, whose following grew from year to year. It should also be noted that when the magazine started, Roxane Gay did her best to feature several female voices, which is important to note, since the literary world is still very much dominated by men, even in 2015.
I’ve had the pleasure of writing book reviews for [PANK] over the last five years or so, and I’ll always be grateful for that opportunity, and for the reviews that they did of my first two poetry collections. RIP, [PANK]. Oh, and before any assumptions are made regarding funding cuts or someone dying, here is what Seigel said in response to the comments on Facebook:
This outpouring of support is humbling. Thank you. But three points: 1. No one died, no one yanked our funding, there’s no scandal, we just decided we were ready to move on to other things. 2. Who knows, maybe PANK will be back one day, new, better. 3. Translate some of this energy into going out and supporting the wonderful litmags that are still at it and will still be at it when PANK closes its doors. -M. Bartley Seigel
Let’s hope that the magazine does return even new and improved. In the meantime, go read it!
If you do a Google search about the writing process, you will find numerous articles that preach the importance of routine, habit, and discipline. Those are certainly important characteristics, and in any writing course that I teach, I begin by addressing the writing process. Specifically, I tell students that everyone’s process is different, but you have to find a routine that works for you. You have to show up and do the work, not expect inspiration to merely find you. It never works that way. Sometimes, I share this link/article with them about the routines of famous writers, everyone from Ray Bradybury to Susan Sontag.
I’ve had the same writing routine since college. More specifically, I write in the morning, often starting with journaling or a recording of dreams, and then moving to a draft of a previous poem or new poem. I either sit at my writing desk, in the bedroom, or at the dining table. I’ve had an affinity for writing at dining tables since college, when I had no other place to write because I shared a cramped apartment with three of my friends. In college, I developed the routine of writing in the morning, before my late morning/early afternoon classes. I hustled to finish drafts of poems or short stories before my afternoon and evening workshops. Beyond location, I have other specific aspects of my routine. I journal and write all drafts of poems by hand. There is something to be said about breath, rhythm, and writing by hand. Revisions are later done in Word, printed out, and then written over in pen, before revised in Word again. This is what works for me.
Lately, however, I’ve needed to clear my mind and sweep away some dead energy. I felt confined to a space. While routines and specific habits are important, so the writer gets in the habit of sitting down in a chair and showing up for the muse, there is also something to be said about breaking out of habit. For four days, I ventured to Cape May and used the time not only to see the town again, but also to write. In that span of time, I wrote seven new poems. n addition, I plowed through some books that have been stacked on my shelves for weeks, even months.There is something to be said about a simple change of scenery, and it doesn’t have to be a mini vacation. It can simply mean visiting a new cafe or walking through different parts of your neighborhood.
If you are stuck, try breaking the routine, at least for a day or two. Take the journal and laptop and go to a new cafe or park. Take a long walk through unexplored territory. It will help, trust me.
It’s starting to feel like 2008 again. Only, instead of Shepard Ferry’s Hope and Change posters, we have numerous articles, including this one from the Huffington Post, about Bernie Sanders’s rise in the polls and the possibility that he could defeat Hillary Clinton in the primary. He’s closing the gap in New Hampshire and Iowa. Other articles have reported on the massive size of his campaign rallies.
One thing can be said. Sanders has energized his base. The size of his rallies and the money he’s raising offer proof of that. I, too, am excited about Sanders. He’s the only self-identified socialist in the Senate, and when he speaks about economic equality for all, I believe what he says.
That said, I have one big concern. The left in this country tends to get very excited every four years during presidential election cycles. They fell in love with Obama in 2008, and then after the election, the left went silent, other than the Occupy Movement and some other movements here and there, which formed as a response to the left’s disillusionment with the president and the widening economic inequality. Then, in 2012, activists knocked on doors again and helped re-elect Obama. After the election, however, they went away.
Here’s the thing: if Sanders is somehow elected to the White House, he most likely will accomplish less than Obama did in his first term. To his credit, Obama passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Obamacare, and bailed out Detroit, all within his first two years in office, before his party lost the House and nearly lost the Senate in the 2010 mid-term elections. When he was elected in 2008, his party had a super-majority in the House and a majority in the Senate. If Sanders is elected, he will face a divided government. It is highly unlikely the Democrats will win back the House, though retaking the majority in the Senate seems likely. However, the Dem’s Senate majority is likely to be 1-3 seats, and the Senate landscape in the 2018 mid-term elections will favor Republicans, due, in part because Democrats will have more seats to defend. Whatever big proposals Sanders puts forth would most likely die in the House or get filibustered in the Senate.
After Obama was elected in 2008, I hoped there would be a sustainable movement, one that would push him even more to the left. Instead, there was the rise of the Tea Party Movement. Then, after the 2012 election, I held out hope again, and even the Obama campaign tried to make OFA (Organizing for America) into a long-term movement. However, that never happened.
The left needs to learn what the right has known for years. Electoral politics, especially at the national level, are only part of the puzzle. Movements are what create and sustain change. While I am happy that Bernie Sanders has reignited the national debate about income inequality, I have a major concern that the left is once again ready to funnel all of its energy into supporting a candidate, hoping he will create lasting change. If Sanders is to have any real, lasting impact beyond this election cycle, then he needs to encourage his supporters to keep the momentum going well beyond election season. He must encourage movement building.
We’ve seen the left rise up during Occupy and Black Lives Matter, but the tents in Zuccotti Park were swept away by Bloomberg and the NYPD a few months into the movement, and the fate of the Black Lives Matter movement is uncertain, though thus far, it has had more of an impact and has sustained itself far longer than Occupy. There is potential for something bigger. If Sanders can somehow channel the energy of his campaign crowds into something sustainable, then he will achieved something more important than a campaign victory and a seat in the White House. He will have ignited a movement that has been bubbling under the surface in this country for years.
A few years ago, I started a reading series in Scranton, Pennsylvania with my friend and fellow writer, Jason Lucarelli. We wanted to showcase the work of local, regional, and national writers. Our series ran for about two and a half years at a few different venues. In that time, we had over 100 readers, including some from as far away as Boston and Chicago. Due to venue closures in the last year and the fact my co-host moved out of the area, the reading series went on hiatus. However, I’m happy to announce that it’s back! We’re making our return this Saturday, June 27 at 7 p.m., at a new location, the Old Brick Theatre in Scranton. There is also a new co-host, the wonderfully talented poet, Dawn Leas!
For our return, we have five featured readers. Check out their bios below:
Mischelle Anthony is Associate Professor of English at Wilkes University, specializing in poetry and eighteenth-century literature. Her scholarly edition of an 1807 memoir, Lucinda; Or, The Mountain Mourner is available from Syracuse University Press. She is founder and coordinator of Luzerne County’s Poetry in Transit program that places local writing and visual art on public buses. Foothills Press published Mischelle’s own poetry collection, [Line]. She has also published work in Calyx, Nimrod, Found Poetry Review, and Slush Pile, and is currently at work on a second collection, about living in and away from Oklahoma, titled Barbed Wire.
Barbara J. Taylor was born and raised in Scranton and teaches English in the Pocono Mountain School District. She has an MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University. She still resides in the “Electric City,” two blocks away from where she grew up. Her first novel, Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night, was named a “Top Summer Read for 2014” by Publishers Weekly. She is currently working on the sequel, All Waiting is Long, due to be released in June/July, 2016.
Bill Landauer is the author of the novel We Are All Crew (Kaylie Jones Books). He has been a journalist for the past two decades, most recently with The Morning Call in Allentown. He lives in Bethlehem, PA.
Macaulay Glynn earned a Bachelor’s of Communications Arts and Humanities from Keystone College, where she served as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, The Plume, and is a three-time recipient of the Edward M. Cameron IV American Academy of Poets prize. She is an associate editor for New York Quarterly, and hopes to attend graduate school.
Christian W. Thiede earned a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 2009 and is the primary host of Poetry Thursdays, the Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel’s weekly open mic in Harrisburg. He has performed in venues all across the country, including Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Harrisburg, Montpelier, Minneapolis, Madison, Boulder, Hilo, and Anchorage. His work can be found in the Pitkin Review, Aquila Review, Cerebral Catalyst, Zygote in My Coffee, Bent Pin Quarterly, Fledgling Rag, and numerous other publications and anthologies. He has authored books in both poetry—Gazing Behind My Eyes, Random Poems Now With Homes, Confluenza, and Little Buffalo Rumblings—and fiction—Death and Deception Shake Hands and Holden Resurrected.
We will have one more showcase this summer, at the end of August. Details about that will be posted here when the reading is closer.
school.graduateschool for English and Creative Writing. Her first chapbook of poetry, Good Girl, can be found in the trunk of her car.
Brian Fanelli 