Beyond National Poetry Monh

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I want to share an article I wrote regarding National Poetry Month and Oprah’s attempt to mainstream poetry through her magazine O. The article, “Beyond National Poetry Month,” was posted yesterday on The Write Life, the blog of the Wilkes University Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Basically, I wrote the article to continue the discussions about how to get poetry into communities and schools beyond one month out of the year. You can read the article here. Please, feel free to comment on it here or on the Wilkes blog.

Poetry and Politics: The Struggle to Be Heard

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I came across a CNN interview with one of my favorite poets, Terrance Hayes,  a National Book Award winner for his latest collection, Lighthead.

Though some of the questions asked may have been a little soft, I do find the interview interesting and unique in the sense that Hayes draws some connections between poetry and politics, meaning that poets, like politicians, deal with the issue of being heard, of shaping a message, even if the message is not necessarily about the war in Iraq or Hurricane Katrina.  Both groups focus on manipulating language to be heard, to reach an audience.

Hayes was also asked if there are any contemporary politicians whose speeches were poetic, and the answer he gave was Abe Lincoln. He was pressed further and asked if any of Obama’s speeches could be considered poetic. Hayes answered by saying there was a greater shapliness to the language and speeches Obama gave leading up to the presidency, and less so now. But now that Obama is gearing up for re-election, do you think he will recapture some of that magic, some of the “shapliness to the language” and control his message better? He’ll have to if he wants to reside in the White House for another four years, especially as he deals with the situation in Libya, the economic recovery, and further looming budget battles with the GOP. He’s going to have to craft language that leads to action, that makes voters trust him to run the country for four more years.

Anyways, Hayes makes a lot of other great points in this short interview, and reads a poem from Lighthead regarding the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Check out the full interview below.

another call for submissions

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As I had mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been tapped as a first-round editor/judge for a poetry contest run by East Meets West, American Writers Review, a journal of fiction and poetry.

We just finished developing our guidelines for submissions. There is a $15 fee to enter the poetry contest, which is standard for poetry contests. The top three winners will be awarded cash prizes, and each finalist will be published in the journal.  Writers can submit up to three poems in any form or style.

You can read the submission guidelines here.  Be sure to follow the guidelines completely so you aren’t disqualified.

If you chose to submit to the contest, good luck!

The Kinda Faith That Doesn’t Fade Away

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This was a jam-packed weekend, and the highlight was seeing The Menzingers and the Bouncing Souls at a tiny bar/club in Jermyn, PA called Eleanor Rigby’s on Friday night. First, I want to say how happy I am that The Menzingers are getting as big as they are. They hail from Scranton, PA and have been a staple of this music scene for a while. They’re also some of my old friends, dating back to the days when all the punk rock kids around here used to hang out at Cafe Del Soul on Mulberry Street, which is now a parking lot. The Menzingers ripped through song after song from their debut album,  A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology, its follow-up EP, Hold On, Dodge, and the newer album, Chamberlain Waits.  Tom May and Greg Barnett’s vocals sounded as raspy and powerful as ever, backed by the crunch of power chords and the impressive drum skills of Joe Gadino. Though the guys have moved to Philly and have spent the last few months playing shows with Against Me!, the Bouncing Souls, and other bigger punk bands, they said several times how happy they were to be home, and how their music formed out of the local music community.

Especially impressive about their set was the reaction by the crowd. The circle pit widened as soon as The Menzingers’ hammered the first chord, and it didn’t let up at all. Tattooed youth bounced against each other, threw their fists in the air, and sang along to every song.

After The Menzingers exited the stage, the Bouncing Souls came on, blasting through some of their most popular songs early, including “Hopeless Romantics,” “Say Anything,” and their cover of “Lean on Sheena.” The set covered most of the band’s career and even featured a few songs they barely play anymore, including “Fight to Live,” “I Like Your Mom,” and “Argyle.” One of the highlights for me was seeing the band perform their acoustic version of the Misfits’ “Hybrid Moments,” which will be released soon on an EP they recently did for SideOneDummy records. Like usual, the band’s banter was kept to a fair minimum throughout the set, and front man Greg Attonito leapt into the crowd a few times for some of the crowd favorites, including the band’s most popular anthem, “True Believers.” The band also fooled the crowd by playing the opening bars to “Ole!,” which is always chanted before they come on stage. But then they suddenly stopped and yelled “April Fools!”

This marked the 8th, 9th, or maybe even the 10th time I’ve seen the Souls live, and their positive energy and catchy choruses never wear off on me. I hope they come back, and I hope this little music club in NEPA keeps booking these bands.

Some Plugs

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There’s a few announcements I want to make today. One, I placed five new poems in the Oregon-based journal Indigo Rising Magazine. You can read them online here. They will also be in the print edition. What’s really cool about this is the fact that one of my former students at Keystone, Tricia Kinney, also placed poems in the same magazine and our work will be in the same print issue. You can read her poems here.  I think I’m more exicted by the fact that this is Tricia’s first national publishing credit! Furthermore, I’ve worked with her on some of these poems during a community poetry workshop I taught at the Vintage Theater, so it’s nice to see that the revisions paid off.

Second, I am doing a reading this Saturday with Dawn Leas for National Poetry Month. The reading will be held from 2-4 p.m. at the Osterhout Free Library, 71 S. Franklin St., Wilkes-Barre. We’ll also have our books available for sale, and we’re also going to read a few poems by other poets. I have Langston Hughes and Terrance Hayes on my list so far. May add one more.

Dawn_and_Brian_poetry_reading[1]

Calls for submissions

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I wanted to take a moment and post some information regarding some journals looking for submissions.

First, a local journal, Word Fountain, edited by my friend Rachael Goetzke, is currently seeking submissions for its spring/summer, music-themed issue.  If you are interested in submitting, here is the contact info:

This is a music-themed issue, any genre, 1,000 words or less. Can be emailed to: wordfountain@osterhout.lib.pa.us or sent to:

Word Fountain Staff
c/o Osterhout Free Library
71 S. Franklin Street
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18701

Word Fountain is also run out of Wilkes-Barre’s Osterhout Free Library, and it has a print edition and an online edition.

In addition, I have been asked to serve as a first-round editor for a new journal starting entitled East Meets West, American Writers Review.  Right now, we are working on the guidelines for submissions, but we are hoping to take submissions from mid-April-mid-June.

When I have more info about the guidelines/submissions, I will post them here.

Now, I need to get back to writing an article for another blog regarding National Poetry Month.

Happy writing/reading!

Towards the Splendid City

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I am currently re-reading Lofty Dogmas, a collection of essays on poetry edited by Maxine Kumin, Annie Finch, and Deborah Brown. For anyone interested in poetry, this is a great book to have on your shelf. It has some of the most important essays/letters written by some of the most influential poets, including John Keats, Percy Shelley,  William Wordsworth, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, and some more contemporary poets such as Robert Hass, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Bernstein, and on and on.

A lot of these essays I’ve already read a few times, but there is one I came across this time that I wasn’t familiar with and enjoyed thoroughly. The essay/lecture comes from Pablo Neruda, and it’s titled “Towards the Splendid City.” It is the speech/lecture he gave after winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1971.

He raises some great points in it about the craft of writing poetry and the poet’s relation to society. First, he brings up the point that writers need a balance of solitude and interaction with community/society to produce good work. “I believe that poetry is an action, ephemeral or solemn, in which there enters as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature.”

There are a lot of ideas just in that one sentence, including Neruda’s belief that poetry is an action that requires time, space, and solitude, but  it is also an art form that requires connection to community and nature.

Neruda also stresses in the lecture/essay the importance of reaching out to the community. I think this is an especially important point. Those skilled in poetry should consider creating workshops, reading series, and other events to share poetry with others and to give people a chance to share their work with others. These experiences are rich and fulfilling for those involved, and often leave the community feeling inspired and more likely to keep writing.

Neruda makes some other good points in the lecture/essay and stresses that a poet should not be a “little god.” He goes on to say, “He is not picked out of mystical destiny in preference to those who follow other crafts of professions.” He adds that the best poets are those who “prepare our daily bread.”

Neruda ends the lecture/essay by commenting on his own work, saying, “I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed, and rainy. But always I had put my trust in man. I never lost hope.”

If you are interested in reading the full essay/lecture, you can do so by clicking here.

first tattoos

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A few of the poems in Front Man reference first tattoos and the meanings and reasons behind getting tattoos. One of the poems specifically references the ficticious front man getting a Clash tattoo, the cover of London Calling, on his forearm. That poem and some of the others have sometimes prompted people at readings to ask me if I have tattoos.

I actually have four of them-two on my upper left arm, one on the upper right arm, and a pretty big one on my right leg. Most of the tattoos were inked on me during my punk rock days, but all of them having meaning. Though I don’t have a specific Clash tattoo, I do have a few punk rock band tattoos, including two Hot Water Music-inspired ones and one of the inconic Lawrence Arms logo-the hourglass with the bat wings/time flies symbol.

So that then poses the question by people, Will you regret those music tattoos when you are older? Maybe my answer will change when I’m 55, but for right now, I don’t foresee any regrets.

 Truth be told, some of my best memories are of punk rock shows, like the time I saw the Lawrence Arms for the first time at the cramped basement hall at the First Unitarian Church in Philly, when they opened for Against Me! a number of years ago. Those bands  and shows remind me of being young and raising my voice with best friends to sing along with some of our favorite songs. And still, to this day, as soon as I hear Brendan Kelly or Chuck Ragan’s raspy voices roar over the crunch of power chords, I feel good.

Bright Star

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Last night, I re-watched the film Bright Star, which focuses on the life of John Keats, especially his love affair with Fanny Brawne and his untimely death at a young age. This is one of the few biopics about a poet I really like. First and foremost, the acting is superb, especially Ben Whishaw as Keats and Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne. The passion of their love affair is captured best in the film not only through the acting, but also through the use of some of the letters Keats wrote to Brawne while he was away in various parts of Europe writing and trying to earn some income. Some of his letters had as much beauty and poetic images as some of his best poems. Here’s one of the lines used in the film: “I almost wish we were butterflies and I lived but three summer days. Three summer days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could contain.”

For those not familiar with Keats or some of his poetic theories, seeing the film is a nice introduction to some of his key thoughts and his life. For instance, Keats’ theory of negative capability is addressed in the film, the idea that not everything can be resolved and that truths found in the imagination access holy authority and that there is a “holiness to the heart’s affections,” too, a phrase directly quoted in the film.

Some of his other theories are addressed briefly in the film, including his belief that one should immerse himself in poetry through the senses, that feeling is what matters most, and that if poetry “does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”

If you haven’t seen Bright Star and if you aren’t familiar with Keats’ work, it’s a good introduction to his life and some of his theories, theories that played a key role in the English Romantic poetic movement. His theories and work are also paramount because the Modernist poets in the 20th Century acted against them through their own work and essays.

New reading series

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This weekend, the Mulberry Poets and Writers Association hosted a reading at the Vintage Theater in downtown Scranton. While emcing the event, I met a local poet, Charles O’Donnell, who told me about a new reading series starting in Wilkes-Barre.  It will be held the third Friday of every month at 6 p.m. at the Art Seen Gallery, 21 Public Square.

Writers are encouraged to share original work, as well as a poem or two by another writer. I like the fact these guys want expose the public to other poets. When I do readings, I often read a poem or two by another writer, just to share poets I love with other folks.

So, if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, why not come to the reading?