I’m thrilled to announce that The Los Angeles Times published one of my poems in its Sunday edition today! The editors decided to do an opinion page of poetry and received over 1,500 submissions, many of which included multiple poems. I feel honored to have been picked. The poem can be read here.
In addition, the Texas-based journal Red River Review published my poem, “Gov. Perry’s Response,” in its latest issue. You can check that out here.
It’s been a tough year for American poetry. In a recent issue of Harper’s Magazine, Mark Edmundson published an essay titled “Poetry Slam, or the Decline of American Verse” bemoaning the current state of poetry and longing for a modern William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, or Robert Lowell, a poet willing to address serious issues. Specifically, Edmundson called out W.S. Merwin, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney and other contemporary heavy weights for failing to use their talent and skill to seriously address social and political issues. That is the author’s claim, not mine.
This essay followed an online blog post by The Washington Post titled “Is Poetry Dead?,” which ran shortly after Richard Blanco, one of my favorite contemporary American poets, read at President Obama’s second inauguration in January. The blog post’s author, Alexandra Petri, asked if poetry can still “change anything,” but has that ever been the point? I have always viewed poetry as an art form that makes us see the ordinary differently, that makes the common thing new, to paraphrase Williams. Furthermore, it is an art form that pushes the boundaries of language and indeed challenges language. Perhaps most importantly, poetry is a community-builder. I have seen that time and time again over the last decade or so that I’ve been doing readings and attending readings.
This point is why I bring attention to a an article in the HuffingtonPost entitled “Top 200 Advocates for Poetry (2013).” What impresses me about the list is the range of names- including some well-knowns, such as current Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway and several former Poet Laureates, such as W.S. Merwin and Billy Collins. But the author, Seth Abramson, includes several people that work for small presses, such as Fence and Black Ocean Press, and folks that run various reading series. His list points out that poetry is indeed still alive and well and has several big names left, which I’ve mentioned above, but more importantly, poetry is about community, about small presses and reading series. There are plenty of people keeping the art form alive and plenty of people writing it, since over 20,000 books of American poetry are published each decade, according to Abramson’s article. It is nice to finally see a publication as well-known as the HuffPost point out that poetry is indeed alive and well and there are several people, especially at the small press level, working to foster community through poetry.
If you have a poem that pleads for marriage equality, or promotes immigration reform, or calls for an end to the war in Afghanistan, then you should check out a contest The Los Angeles Times is running. From now until Aug. 16, the newspaper’s opinion page editors are seeking poetry that speaks to a specific issue. On Aug. 25, the editors are going to print all poetry on the opinion page. They will pick a few additional poems to publish online. A lot of academic and mainstream poetry publications shy away from work with an overtly political bend, so this contest is unique. The submission guidelines can be read here.
I sent a few poems off this morning, and I hope other writers that read this blog will submit their work. I can’t wait to see what the editors decide to publish.
Scranton has lost another all-ages art venue, this time New Visions Studio and Gallery, which will close this month. Tonight is the venue’s final First Friday art exhibit, and the gallery is having a few more events until mid-month. New Visions joins a long list of all-ages venue in northeastern, Pennsylvania that have closed in the last several years, including Test Pattern, Café Del Soul, Homebase, Café Metropolis, and others. This place was especially important to me because during the last two years I hosted a reading series there with my friend and fellow writer Jason Lucarelli. New Visions provided a place for dozens of local and national writers to share their work. We hosted poets, novelists, and memoirists, and all of them only had positive things to say about the venue and Scranton’s literary scene.
With yet another local art venue closing its doors, its important to support the venues that remain, especially the Vintage Theater, AFA Gallery, and other all-ages venues that host a wide array of events. I doubt I would have ever become a poet if I didn’t have venues like New Visions when I was in high school and then in college. Such places allowed me to cut my teeth at open mics and find a community of writers. For now, we bid goodbye to another venue, but the New Visions reading series will continue. We are currently working on billing writers for a November reading and finding a new venue. Stay tuned, and many thanks to Adam and Mel, the owners of New Visions, for running a wonderful gallery!
My summer has mostly been spent reading and working on new material, but there are a few events coming up I want to share. This Friday, July 26, I will be the featured reader at the Dietrich Theater, located at 60 E. Tioga Street in Tunkhannock. This is a wonderful venue and a great reading series, so I’m thrilled to be a part of it. There will be an open mic from 7-8 p.m., and then I will take the stage at 8:15. I am going to read some poems from my forthcoming book, All That Remains, and a few even newer poems, as well as some oldies. Please come out if you can!
I also wanted to share information about a new reading series at the Hoyt Library in Kingston. The reading will take place this Thursday, starting at 6:30. The featured readers include my friends Lauren Stahl and Scott Thomas. There will be an open mic as well, and I hope this will turn into a long-running series.
Meanwhile, I am in the process of booking some readings in the fall surrounding the release of my new book. I already have some readings scheduled in Doylestown and Reading. I will post more info about upcoming readings as they draw closer.
Over the last year or so, Poets & Writers has been profiling different indie bookstores around the country, while running a few feature stories about the return of the bookstore. One of the bookstores they profiled was Parnassus Books, run by best-selling novelist Anne Patchett. After I read the article and the nice write-up in The New York Times a few years ago, I thought, well, it’s great that Patchett’s Tennessee-based bookstore is doing so well, but is the success simply because Patchett is famous?
There is a recent poll, however, that should be good news for bookstores. Rasmussen recently found that 75 percent of American adults would rather read a print book as opposed to an e-book. It has yet to be determined whether or not this will translate into success for bookstores and perhaps the growth of small, indie bookstores in communities, but it does prove that despite the e-reader fad of the last several years, people like reading print. The poll also found that 66 percent would rather read a newspaper in print as opposed to online. What is unclear, however, is whether or not this would be true for younger people. The poll was mostly conducted through LAN lines, and most younger people only have cell phones. It would be interesting to conduct another poll, say on people ages 18-30. Would the results be different?
At the very least, the poll provides some good news for bookstores. People still like print!
Acclaimed writer Joyce Carol Oates recently took to twitter to dispense some sound writing office. All of her tweets can be read here. My favorite tweet is “The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE.” This advice should be included in the syllabus of every undergraduate creative writing class and MFA class. I also like her advice to “Be your own editor/ critic. Sympathetic but merciless” and to “Read, observe, listen intensely!–as if your life depended upon it.” The last piece of advice is especially important as a way to cure writer’s block. I find myself most inspired and ready to write after reading and observing, which require space, time, silence, and patience. To add to Oates’ tweet and to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, poetry is words on the page surrounded by silence. So, if you’re been in a writing funk lately, dig into a book, or go somewhere and observe a scene. It will help, I promise.
The new issue of Poets’ Quarterly just launched late last week. I’m thrilled to have an essay published on the influence of Ezra Pound on William Carlos Williams’ and T.S. Eliot’s poetry. My essay can be read here. The magazine also published my review of Martha Collins’ latest collection of poems, White Pages, one of the most provocative, interesting books I have ever read in regards to race and class. You can read that review here. In addition, they published my review of Jim’ Davis latest collection of poems, Assumption. Davis is the editor of North Chicago Review.
Check out the complete issue. There is a wonderful interview with National Book Award finalist Stanly Plumly, an essay on what not to do when submitting your work to literary journals, and over a dozen other reviews.
I have been spending a good portion of this summer doing a lot of reading for my first Ph.D. field exam, which is focusing on William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot. What I have always liked about these poets is their differing views on approaching poetry and form. Williams felt that American poetry should sound distinctly American, and he aimed to capture the American vernacular in verse, and to his ire, Eliot was more of a traditionalist who often referenced Shakespeare, Dante, Greek mythology and other classicist literature, while using more traditional forms in his work, especially in his later work. Williams famously said that The Wasteland set American poetry “back 50 years” for its references to classic literature and its reliance in certain sections on traditional meter. Yet, as experimental as Williams was, certainly more so than Eliot, he did not believe that verse could ever be truly free. In the book William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, by Joel Conarroe, the author makes a great point that for Williams free verse did not exist because poetry requires some sort of measure. This is a little different, however, from Eliot’s belief that behind free verse there lurks a ghost of meter. Williams believed that the measure had to reflect the times and not necessarily rely on tradition. Thus he believed in trying to capture American speech in verse as he heard in such speech a musicality, a sense of measure.
Eliot and Williams’ views on free verse and form are important, especially to anyone teaching a creative writing class. These are two of the most influential and experimental poets of the 20th Century, yet they did believe in establishing some form and structure, though they approached that task rather differently. Whenever I have taught intro to creative writing and even upper level creative writing class, I have encountered students time and time again that believe in no rules. So what separates their poetry from chopped prose? A good exercise regarding form is to take a free verse poem by Williams, or even Walt Whitman, and find some structure in it. Look at the line lengths. Count the syllables. Look at the stanzas. I have done this before, and it helps students to understand that even free verse needs some sort of measure and some backbone of structure.
If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, then stop by New Visions Studio and Gallery in Scranton to attend the next installment of the New Visions Writers Showcase. We have quite a line-up, and I’m eager to hear these wordsmiths share their work. As always, the event will begin at 7 p.m. on Saturday. It is free and open to the public. Here is the list of this month’s featured readers:
Stacy Ferguson is a senior at Keystone College, working on her Bachelor’s degree. She has had two poems and two short stories published in the school’s literary magazine, The Plume. She lives in Northern Pennsylvania with her husband, two sets of twin children, two dogs, and one cat.
Victoria Seamans is currently completing her Bachelor’s degree in communications at Keystone College. She has written several short stories, poetry, and for her graduation project, she authored five stories for children that she is seeking to have published. Her college publishing credits include two articles published in the school newspaper, The Key, and a poem that was published in the school’s literary magazine, The Plume. She also served on the editorial staff of The Plume in the spring of 2013.
Amye Archer has an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Twins Magazine, Provincetown Arts, The Ampersand Review, H_ngm_n, Boston Literary Magazine, and Hippocampus. Her first chapbook No One Ever Looks Up was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Her latest chapbook A Shotgun Life was published by Big Table Publishing in 2011. Her first novel, Fat Girl, Skinny, is represented by the Einstein Thompson Agency. Her first play, Surviving, was produced locally as part of the Jason Miller Playwright’s Project. She is the winner of the first Scranton Storyslam and she hosts the reading series Prose in Pubs.
Jen Gittings-Dalton’s poems have appeared in No Barriers, Zephyr, Front Street Journal, and she has published articles on arts and cultural affairs in various electronic and print media. Her chapbook Bird in the Overhang was published by FootHills Publishing in 2007. Jen is active in the Berks Bards, a non-profit group dedicated to “promoting the living art of poetry” in the Greater Reading region. She lives with her husband along the Antietam Creek in Exeter, PA.
Elizabeth Stanley has loved poetry since she was six. She holds a Bachelor’s in English from Gettysburg College, and an MA from Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, VT. She also attended one summer at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She taught junior high English and ESL with students from Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Since 1998, Stanley has hosted the Bruce Stanley Memorial Poetry Series, Poetry@Six, at Reading Area Community College, featuring local, regional and national poets, sponsored by the Foundation for RACC. She serves as president of Berks Bards, a grassroots poetry group that promotes the lively art of poetry in Reading and Berks County through hosting First Thursday Poetry events at the First Floor Cafe’ in the GoggleWorks. Stanley hosts poetry events for Bard Fest every April, and for the Berks Literary Festival and Kinetic Poetry in October. Several of her poems were published in Fledgling Rag, Iris G. Press. She lives on a curved street with a Turkish Van named Bear.
Along with writing poetry, Mischelle Anthony is Associate Professor of English at Wilkes University specializing in poetry and eighteenth-century literature. She has a poetry collection,[Line], available from Foothills Press. She is also founder and coordinator of Luzerne County’s Poetry In Transit program that places local writing and visual art on public buses. To keep her feet on the ground, she volunteers year-round at her local Domestic Violence Service Center hotline. Mischelle is currently working on a second book of poetry, Tramp, and would like to create a garden on the roof of her garage.
Curtis Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in over seventy-five literary reviews and have been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. He is the author of five story collections, three novels, and an essay collection. His most recent book is the story collection Beasts & Men, just out from Press 53. His next book will be a novel from Aqueous Books in 2015.
