Over the last two years, I’ve been working on a new full-length collection of poems. When I had some time off from teaching over Christmas, I had a chance to put the finishing touches on the collection and make more revisions. The manuscript, tentatively titled What Remains, is now sitting with the editors of a few presses and book contests. I’m optimistic but also realize more revisions may be made before it reaches print. When I started the book a few years ago, I wanted to write a collection of poems that explored relationships and gender communication. Some of that is still there, and the book certainly explores relationships and what’s left after they unravel, but it also includes several blue-collar narratives and character-driven poems. Some of what I witnessed during the peak of Occupy Wall Street and visiting different cities is captured. There are poems that are a reaction to this strange time we live in and the ongoing political narrative about growing income inequality, but the political is always personal, and I tried not to preach. There’s also a few poems in the collection that are music-oriented, much like Front Man. Overall, though, I think this collection offers more depth, stronger extended metaphors, and greater reflection than my chapbook.
It feels good to conclude a project that has occupied my time for about two years or so. I look forward to hearing back from editors soon and seeing what happens. Then it will be time to start yet another manuscript.
Lately, I’ve had a lot of students tell me that they want to go on and get an M.F.A. after they finish their undergraduate degree. In fact, nationally, creative writing programs are booming right now, and I think it’s too soon to tell if that’s for the best or not. The long-running fiction/poetry journal Ploughshares just published an interesting article regarding the M.F.A. degree. I think this article gives one of the better overviews of an M.F.A. degree that I’ve read in a while because it raises both positive and negative points about the degree. First, it points out that you should never go into deep debt for any sort of art degree. I whole-heartedly agree with that point. With an M.F.A. degree, you’re not going to get rich. In fact, the only real job you can get with it is teaching undergraduates, and full-time jobs in academia are becoming scarce thanks to all of the national and state-level cuts to education (assume these cuts will only worsen if the GOP maintains control of the House after the 2012 election and somehow wins the Senate and White House, too, a real possibility). That said, if you do want an M.F.A. degree, or really any graduate degree, there are ways to lessen the debt. A lot of graduate programs offer fellowships, scholarships, and graduate assistantships. I was able to obtain my M.F.A. from Wilkes University because of a graduate assistantship, so I wasn’t loaded with a terrible debt when I finished. Some other graduate programs also offer teaching assistantships. Check into these as a way to pay the tuition bill.
The article also points out that there are ways to complete the degree without having to move across the country. A lot of M.F.A. programs are now low-residency, meaning most of the work is done online. This can be especially convenient if one has a family and career already.
Certainly, there are ways to complete an M.F.A. degree that make it affordable and convenient to one’s geography and lifestyle. But as the article also points out, if one is already part of a writing community and reading consistently, an M.F.A. is probably not be needed, especially if one has no interest in teaching. Personally, I don’t regret for a second getting an M.F.A. It certainly expanded my knowledge of contemporary poetry, made me a better writer, and introducted me to a wonderful community. I also teach, so I needed the degree.
I want to congratulate some of my friends that also went through Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program and are about to release debut books. Taylor Polites, who was part of my class in grad school, is about to release his debut novel, The Rebel’s Wife, a story about a young widow trying to survive during the Reconstruction period on Alabama. The novel has already garnered positive reviews from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly, which called the book, “A richly detailed portrait of Reconstruction-era Alabama.”
Another friend and fellow poet, Sandee Umbach, is about to release her debut book of poems, The Pattern Maker’s daughter, through Bottom Dog Press. I’m also happy to announce that Sandee will read at the next New Visions Writers Showcase, slated to run Saturday, March 31 at 7, New Visions Studio and Gallery in Scranton.
Taylor and Sandee’s books are available through Amazon. Kudos to both of these folks and everyone else from the Wilkes program that is having recent literary success!
About a month ago or so, I wrote on here about the collection of essays and interviews about Springsteen I read called Racing in the Street. The collection mostly explores his early days in Asbury Park, his huge success, and his evolution as a songwriter not afraid to shy away from social and political commentary. Today, Springsteen announced dates for the first leg of his U.S. tour, and I’m going to try my best to see him at one of the Philly, NJ, or NY shows because you never know how long he’ll be doing this for.
When I wrote the blog post about the book Racing in the Street, I predicted Springsteen’s new album, which has been named Wrecking Ball and is slated to drop March 6, would certainly feature some commentary on social and economic injustice, similar to his albums the Ghost of Tom Joad, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Born in the U.S.A. This is the age of Occupy Wall Street, and even Newt Gingrich is talking about economic inequality and how much Mitt Romney pays in taxes. Springsteen is one of the few big voices we have left to talk about such issues. Dylan pivoted away from that years ago. Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager, made a few comments about the album to Rolling Stone. You can read them here. Two quotes intrigue me about the album. Landau said Springsteen feels this is his “angriest album yet,” and he says the music will include “unexpected textures – loops, electronic percussion… influences and rhythms from hip-hop to Irish folk rhythms.”
You can click the YouTube video below to hear one of the new tracks from the album, “We Take Care of Our Own.” You can certainly hear some of Springsteen’s commentary on the state of America in the new track. You can check out his tour dates on his website by clicking here.
I just want to make a quick plug that I am taking part in “Local Author Night” this Wednesday from 5-7 pm at the Valley Community Library, located at 739 River Street in Peckville. The event is free and open to the public. I’m not sure who else will be reading, but I do know my friend and fellow poet Dawn Leas will also be there.
Newsweek has drawn the ire of conservatives yet again for a headline on its cover that reads, “Why Are Obama’s Critics So Dumb?” Inside of the current issue is an article by Andrew Sullivan that looks at Obama’s first term in office and pushes back against his critics on the left and right. Sullivan makes Obama out to be a rather centrist president with legislative victories that should please both the left and right. You can check out the article here.
Regarding critics of the right, who Sullivan says have sometimes made Obama out to be some left-wing, radical socialist, Sullivan points out that Obama has not yet ended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and he has cut taxes several times, including the payroll tax. Furthermore, Sullivan points out that the stimulus package passed during Obama’s first few months in office included tax breaks for 95 percent of taxpayers.
Sullivan also addresses the claim by Mitt Romney and others that Obama’s policies have deepened the recession. According to the article, when Obama took office, the U.S. was losing 750,000 jobs a month, and since 2010, the U.S. has added about 2.4 million jobs, and unemployment has dropped about 2 percent.
Regarding the critics on the left, Sullivan says Obama did have legislative victories they should be happy about, including healthcare legislation that, when it fully takes effect, will require everyone to have healthcare coverage, and those that can’t afford it will be given government subsidies. Sullivan does point out, though, that the healthcare bill did not include a public option, which many progressives wanted, but he said in an era where anything in the Senate needs 60 votes to pass, this may be the closest to universal healthcare we get. Obama’s other main accomplishment Sullivan addresses is a full withdrawal from Iraq, which was one of Obama’s key campaign promises when he announced he was running for president in early 2007.
Sullivan does admit that he is an Obama supporter, but I think the article does give a fair assessment of the president’s first term and addresses criticism of the president from the left and the right. The piece concludes with the idea that Obama thinks in the long term, that he runs a long game, and that he envisions himself accomplishing more if re-elected. But what Sullivan doesn’t point out is that Obama is going to have a harder re-election in 2012 than he did in 2008. His base is starting to wake up and get fired up, but the economy is still in a slump, and that will mar him heading into re-election. Anyways, the piece is a good read that cuts through the stereotypes and criticism that surround the president and presents him not as a left-wing radical or a leader too timid and weak to stand up to opposition, but rather as a centrist and pragmatist.
I want to thank everyone who came out to the New Visions Writers Showcase this past Saturday. The turnout was simply incredible. Big thanks to Dawn Leas, Frank Sabina, Rich Howells, Tricia Kinney, Lisbeth Herr-Gelatt, Jen Bokal, and Bridget McIntyre for strong readings. The next Writers Showcase will be in March, one of the last two weekends. We’re trying to nail down the date this week. We have the readers booked, and I promise they won’t disappoint.
If you can’t get enough of the poetry scene around NEPA, you should come out to the Third Friday reading at Art Seen Gallery this Friday in Wilkes-Barre. It is located at 21 Public Square. The reading starts at 8 p.m., and this month’s featured reader is my friend and fellow poet, Reena Ranells, who will have her new book available for sale. An open mic will follow her reading.
Finally, I want to mention that my chapbook, Front Man, is now available to purchase for Kindle. If you’re an Amazon prime member, you can also borrow the book for free. Click here to check that out. Also, if you’ve read the book, feel free to review it on Amazon. I would greatly appreciate that.
Last year, Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor, Tom Corbett, drew ire and protest when he proposed and succeeded in passing deep cuts to education, especially to the state university system. Now, Gov. Corbett is proposing more cuts to education, this time about $20 million to the State System of Higher Education. A history professor at East Stroudsburg University had an editorial published yesterday in the The Morning Call newspaper, which covers the Lehigh Valley, about what impact these budget cuts have at state universities. Read it here.
The writer and professor, Shannon Frystack, points out that cuts to education lead to higher class sizes, cuts to courses that are planned to run, and dissatisfaction among students. She writes, “The most recent cuts have forced my university, as well as others in the state system, to increase class sizes and cut courses that did not meet, what I believe to be, unreasonable minimum numbers of students.” She goes on to say, “Many students have expressed to me that they are feeling ‘lost in the shuffle’ and that they were told that if they came to ESU, they would have smaller classes and more interaction with their professors. I’m doing the best that I can, but there is only so much I can do when I am forced to work with 150-200 students per semester.”
She also points out that the budget cuts have forced ESU and other universities to leave vacant open faculty positions.
Maybe Corbett, like a lot of other Republicans, wants to fully privatize education, doing away with the state system that makes higher education obtainable for a lot more students. I myself am a product of the state university system because I went to West Chester University for my undergrad education and had a wonderful experience and great professors. If you are concerned with this issue, let the governor know how you feel. You can contact him online by clicking here.
As promised, here is some more info about the New Visions Writers Showcase. It will take place this Saturday at 7 pm at New Visions Studio and Gallery, located at 201 Vine Street in Scranton. Jason Lucarelli and I will host it, and we have a wonderful line-up of readers this month. You can read an article about the event here.
Here is some info about the readers.
Lisbeth Herr Gelatt is an undergraduate student at Keystone College who has taken community poetry workshops in Scranton and creative writing classes at Keystone. I’ve had her in class a few times, and she’s a great reader.
Rich Howells is an award-winning journalist, longtime blogger, and short fiction writer. In addition to his daily work for Scranton newspaper Go Lackawanna, his articles are also regularly published in The Times Leader, The Abington Journal, and The Weekender. Online, he maintains two main blogs and several smaller websites, and he is currently working on expanding into comic book writing. A good sampling of his portfolio can be found at www.RichHowells.net.
Trica Kinney is a senior at Keystone College. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Word Fountain,WritingRaw.com, and Indigo Rising Magazine.
Dawn Leas is the author of the chapbook I Know When to Keep Quiet, published by Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared online, in print and in buses including goldwakepress.org, Willows Wept Review, Literary Mama, Interstice, and Poetry in Transit. Currently, Dawn Leas teaches middle-school English at Wyoming Seminary. Visit her at www.dawnleas.com.
Frank Sabina has taught English at Keystone College. (We are actually still waiting for his full blurb to come in!)
Jennifer Bokal lives in Upstate New York with her husband, John, and their three daughters. Originally, a romance writer, Jennifer switched her focus to young adult novels while pursuing a degree in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. When not writing, Jennifer can be found practicing yoga, having lunch with friends or shopping for shoes. King’s Crossing is her first novel for young adults.
Bridget McIntyre is a GLBT writer who holds her MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University. Currently, she teaches in the English department at Marywood University and is working on her first novel, Stonewall Girl.
We also have one other writer on the list, Beth Burke. Jason has the blurb for her. This Writers Showcase is unique in the sense we have a broader range of genres compared to the last showcase, which was poetry heavy. I’m confident all of the writers will do a wonderful job, so come on out and enjoy the work of local and regional writers! The event is free, though donations to the gallery are encouraged.
A few posts ago, I mentioned that one of my resolutions for 2012 is to share more on here about books I’m reading. So, to adhere to my resolution, I want to mention a book that I got for Christmas from my girlfriend– Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader. Lately, I’ve been reading more non-fiction than usual. I just finished a long bio on Hemingway called Hemingway’s Boat. I recommend it. Now I’m reading this collection of essays, interviews, and articles on Springsteen. It begins with his career in the early 1970s, shortly before Born to Run was released, and it concludes with his post-9/11 album The Rising.
What impresses me most about this book is how it details the evolution of Springsteen from a New Jersey rocker who played the clubs of Asbury Park and struggled early on to a rock star with an evolving political/social conscious and a willingness to speak out for the working-class, especially on the albums Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born in the U.S.A., and The Ghost of Tom Joad.
The book contains the first major article about Springsteen, published in 1973 in the magazine Crawdaddy!, a little after Springsteen released his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, and had yet to hit the mainstream. What surprises me about the Crawdaddy! article and some of the early articles about Springsteen from the New York Times is how much he was compared to Bob Dylan. I’m a big fan of Dylan and Springsteen, and I don’t like one more than the other, but I don’t see a lot of similarities. Springsteen’s early albums were not folk albums, and they weren’t at all political or social, like Dylan’s first albums. That would come later for Springsteen. Furthermore, Dylan always worked in the abstract, with wild characters, word play, and layers of metaphors. Springsteen’s songs are more concrete, often centered around character-driven narratives.
I especially like the section on Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. album and how Ronald Reagan tried to co-opt the title song for political purposes, despite the fact the title song and a lot of other tracks on the album are about people struggling for jobs in Reagan’s trickle-down America. But my favorite section includes the essays on The Ghost of Tom Joad album, which may be Springsteen’s most political/social album to date. Released in the mid-1990s, the album is a barebones folk album, filled with stories of immigrants struggling to survive and references to Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.
One of my favorite essays is entitled “The Ghost of History: Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie, and the Hurt Song.” Here, the writer, Bryan K. Garman, compares Springsteen’s Joad album to the work of folk pioneer Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan’s earliest albums that focused on the Civil Rights Movement and racial injustice. Here a distinction is made between Springsteen’s songs and Dylan’s early work that I think is poignant. Garman writes, “While Dylan constructs his working-class characters as passive ‘pawns’ who are wholly manipulated by historical and social forces beyond their control, Springsteen’s characters make their own history, but they do so under very difficult circumstances. Springsteen’s working-class narrators proudly and faithfully proclaim, ‘Mister, I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/And I believe in a Promised Land!”
I like that quote because I think it sums up Springsteen’s work rather well. Over the years, he’s always written about the working-class, and even on some of his darkest albums lyrically, including Darkness on the Edge of Town, which includes the track “Promised Land” referenced above, there are rays of hope. In an interview with Springsteen published in 1985 by the Los Angeles Times, when he was really at the height of his success, Springsteen says, “I’m a romantic. To me, the idea of a romantic is someone who sees the reality, lives in the reality every day, but knows about the possiblities too.” That quote also sums up his work and characters well.
If you’re a fan of Springsteen, rock ‘n roll history, or politics, check out The Springsteen Reader. You won’t be disappointed. Springsteen and the E Street Band are also set to have a busy 2012, including a tour and a new album promised to be one of their best yet. I’m excited to hear where Springsteen goes lyrically for the new album, considering he is still mourning the loss of his childhood friend and long-time sax player in the band Clarence Clemons. The country is also so fractured politically, and the promised land Springsteen sang about for so many years seems unobtainable for a lot of Americans now. His songs are more relevant now than ever.
As far as poetry goes, I’m currently reading Elizabeth Alexander’s collection Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Alexander teaches at Yale and gained more notoriety when she delivered a poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” during Obama’s inauguration three years ago. I like Alexander’s work. Her poems draw on everything from first kisses to race in America. Check her out.
