Some plugs

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As an Orlando Magic and NBA fan, I’ve had a rough couple of days as my poor team becomes more and more irrelevant because their rivals are adding superstars as the playoffs near and the Magic are stuck with what they have. So, to get my mind off of that and to share some positive poetry news, I wanted to make some shameless plugs today. : )

First, I wanted to announce that new poems of mine, “Dive,” “Gypsy,” and “Old Friend,” were published by the online literary journal WritingRaw.com, which publishes book reviews, poetry, and fiction.  You can access the poems by clicking the link to the website and scrolling down on the page, or you can read each poem in the PDF format.

Poem 1

Poem 2

Poem 3

In addition, I’m also going to take part in the OutLoudLit reading series again this Saturday in Mechanicsburg, PA. I had a fantastic time reading at the event in December, and I look forward to the variety of writing that will be featured this time around. The reading will take place at 6 p.m. at the Gallerie, 13 E. Main Street, right in the downtown. The theme for Saturday’s event is “love gone wrong,” so I look forward to showcasing some new poems that fit into that theme from the draft of my second manuscript. I’ll also read a poem or two from Front Man that also fit that theme.

Here is a full list of the readers and their genres:

Maria Snyder (fiction)
Chet Williamson (fiction)
Brian Fanelli (poetry)
Amye Archer (memoir)
William D. Prystauk (screenplay)
Curtis Smith (fiction/essay)
Rick Fellinger (fiction)
Susan Marvel Ferrer (play)

Busy Week for Poetry

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Last week featured two solid poetry events in the Scranton area that I’ll recap quick. I hope this is the start of more poetry-oriented events coming to this area.

First, Carolyn Forché came to the University Scranton on Wednesday evening to deliver a lecture about Poetry of Witness. She also read some poems from her second book, The County Between Us, which was published in 1981 with the help of Margaret Atwood.  The book deals with her time spent in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War, so the poems fit in with the lecture she gave on Poetry of Witness. I don’t want to recap the whole lecture, but I do want to point out some points I found interesting. First, I agree with her statement that when poets sit down and immediately say they’re going to write a political poem or poem with a message, it never turns out that well. Poetry of Witness personalizes the political and focuses on what the poet experienced. So, for instance, The Country Between Us contains poems describing some of the atrocities Forché witnessed in El Salvador. They are personalized, first-hand accounts.

She was also optimistic about the opportunities for social change, due to social media. She pointed to Egypt as an example, how those protests were organized using Twitter and Facebook. She also pointed out social media allows young people from all over the world to have a dialogue.

The second big poetry event that occurred this week was a  Friday evening performance of Langston Hughes’ 12 moods for jazz entitled Go Ask Your Mama. This event, held at Lackawanna College’s Mellow Theater, featured a live reading of the 12 poems, mixed with jazz music and film from the civil rights movement. Great performance overall.

Finally, I want to mention that my poetry students from a workshop/class at the Vintage Theater will be reading their work this Wednesday,  at 7 pm at the Vintage Theater (119 Penn Avenue). Admission is free, so stop by. Once this first workshop/class concludes, I will be teaching another one at the Vintage Theater, which will also be five weeks. This will most likely begin in May. The price will again be $75, capped at about 5 students. We hope to do a few more, though I’m not sure what my situation will be come this fall.

Poetry Book Review Campaign

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The wonderful poetry/activism organization, Split This Rock, is launching a new campaign to get more book reviews of poetry in newspapers throughout the country. The organization first targeted the Washington Post, after the newspaper’s best of 2010 book list didn’t include much poetry. Basically, the organization is launching a letter writing campaign to urge book review editors to give more consideration to poetry chapbooks and full-length collections. I think this is a fantastic campaign and a way to spread the word about poetry books. Here is the information that was sent to me through Split This Rock’s email list.

In response to a special year-end “Best Books of 2010” issue that included an appallingly small number of poetry books, Split This Rock decided it was time to let the editors of The Washington Post’s Book World know that we expect them to publish more reviews of poetry books. Following is an excerpt from the letter we sent on January 14th:
 
To the Editors: We take issue with the gross lack of poetry books included in the Book World’s “Best Books of 2010” list (Dec. 12, 2010). The section (misleadingly) titled “Fiction & Poetry” included 46 fiction titles and only 2 poetry titles. The insinuation that only 2 poetry books in 2010 were worth recommending-and that poetry is some kind of inferior sub-genre of fiction-is appalling, inaccurate, and completely inappropriate for a major literary publication like the Book World. . . . These statistics reflect the dearth of poetry book reviews in the Book World throughout the year, in striking contrast to the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary poetry. . . .We believe that the Book World should be publishing at least one poetry book review each week.
 
This letter was co-signed by several well-known local poets, university professors, leaders of literary organizations, and editors of local presses and literary magazines, including Grace Cavalieri, Kyle Dargan, Carolyn Forché, and E. Ethelbert Miller.
 
We received the following encouraging reply from Book World Editor Rachel Shea:
 
Thank you for your letter. We did have a debate about whether to call the section “Fiction” or “Fiction & Poetry.” We decided on the latter to signal that poetry books were included. In an ideal world, there would have been more, but our coverage of poetry has been limited since Book World stopped being published as a separate section in 2009. We will continue to do as much as we can, with occasional reviews (for instance, Michael Dirda will be reviewing a biography of Andrew Marvell this Thursday) and roundups of collections. In the meantime, may I forward your letter to the letters page? I think it is fodder for discussion among our readership.
 
We have followed up to urge the Book World to commit to publishing at least one full-length poetry review per week, and to devote its limited poetry space to contemporary poets. Please add your voice to the campaign by writing a letter today!

It really doesn’t take long to write a letter to the editor or even send an email to the book review editors of local papers. So why not take part in this campaign?

Valentines Day

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Happy Valentines Day! One of the first poets I ever read closely was Edna St. Vincent Millay, and I think she’s appropriate to bring up on this day, since so many of her poems dealt with love, sex, and lust. I was always amazed by her because she dealt with the emotional weight of love or sex and put it in such a tight, restricting form, mostly the sonnet. Here is one of my favorite love poems by her, also a poem that captures the sorrow of loss quite well.

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

In response to not getting paid much…

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I came across a sort of funny article in the Washington Post today regarding Busboys & Poets, the famous restaurant/bookstore/poetry venue in Washington, DC. According to the article, poet and Washington native, Thomas Sayers Ellis, stole a cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes from the venue in response to what he calls a “low pay scale” for writers that perform at the venue. 

Ellis, also an assistant professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, went on to tell the Post, “You would think that an establishment that makes as much money as Busboys would have set in place a reading series with a respectful pay scale for writers. The restaurant gives poets a venue, but it also profits from their talent. The literary community doesn’t know if Busboys is the good guys or the bad guys.”

The article also mentions that the owner pays a monthly salary for three poets-in-residence (one at each of the restaurant’s locations) as well as $50 each to a host and featured poet at three weekly readings.

A lot of poets starting out are used to not making much money at readings, and the little money they do make usually comes from book sales at readings. But the two Busboys & Poets locations are popular spots and staples of the poetry community in DC. Can’t they afford to pay more than $50 to some of the bigger names they bring in? At least what Ellis did has started a debate about the pay scale for poets at the popular venue.

Langston Hughes Project Coming to Scranton

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Langston Hughes, the most influential Harlem Renaissance poet, is going to be showcased in the Scranton area, at Lackawanna College’s Mellow Theater. The press release I received about this project is posted below. It sounds like a wonderful way to spend a Friday evening and experience Hughes’ poetry mixed with jazz.

On Friday, February 18, 2011 at 8:00pm, Community Concerts at Lackawanna College will present The Langston Hughes Project, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz, featuring the Ron McCurdy Quartet at the Mellow Theater at Lackawanna College. The Langston Hughes Project is a multimedia concert performance of Langston Hughes’s kaleidoscopic jazz poem suite. Ask Your Mama is Hughes’s homage in verse and music to the struggle for artistic and social freedom at home and abroad at the beginning of the 1960s. It is a twelve-part epic poem which Hughes scored with musical cues drawn from blues and Dixieland, gospel songs, boogie woogie, bebop and progressive jazz, Latin “cha cha” and Afro-Cuban mambo music, German lieder, Jewish liturgy, West Indian calypso, and African drumming — a creative masterwork left unperformed at his death. Tickets are $30 and $20 and can be obtained by calling (570) 955-1455, in person through the college’s box office and online through www.etix.com. 

Student tickets are available for only $15. This performance is sponsored in part by Prudential Financial. Jazz was a cosmopolitan metaphor for Langston Hughes, a force for cultural convergence beyond the reach of words, or the limits of any one language. It called up visual analogues for him as well, most pointedly the surrealistic techniques of painterly collage and of the film editing developed in this country in the 1930s and 40s, which condensed time and space, conveyed to the viewer a great array of information in short compass, and which offered the possibility of suggesting expanded states of consciousness, chaotic remembrances of past events or dreams — through montage. “To me,” Hughes wrote, “jazz is a montage of a dream deferred. A great big dream — yet to come — and always yet to become ultimately and finally true.”
Substantial group discounts are also available by calling (570) 955-1455.  For more information, please visit www.lackawanna.edu/CommunityConcerts .

back to the early stages

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Not long after Front Man was published and I did a slew of readings to promote the chapbook, I started wondering what next? What should I work on now? The poems from the chapbook, overall, have a distinct voice and focus on a particular music scene and the ideals that go with it. But I knew around the time I finished the book and it was accepted by Big Table Publishing up in Boston that I said all I wanted to say about that subject and it was time to move on.

Near the end of writing Front Man, I started drafting some new poems, with far different personas and even some different forms than the poems of my first book. I started to heavily explore the issue of relationships, of first meetings between friends, crushes, lovers, and what’s left after relationships unravel. I think some of this came from what I was reading at the time- a lot of Kim Addonizzio’s poems (which often deal with love, sex, lust, and loss), and Sam Hazo’s marriage dialogue poems, which explore how each gender communicates in a relationship. I also read Major Jackson’s new collection, Holding Company, and that collection has had the biggest influence on my newest work. In his third collection, Jackson leaves  behind the hip-hip references and longer narrative poems. For Holding Company, he created a series of tight, 10-line, sonnetesque poems, many of them dealing with a broken marriage and new beginnings/new relationships. I was especially impressed with the collection because of the leap forward he made as a writer, how he broke from his  familiar and probably comfortable personas and forms.

I have a good portion of poems written (probably 15-20 solid drafts,  just a few shy of a second chapbook manuscript). So far, it’s been exciting to take on new subject matter, new forms, and new personas. Finishing Line Press wanted to publish Front Man after it was accepted by Big Table Publishing, and recently, they told me they are very interested to see a second manuscript and will give it close consideration. But right now, I’m enjoying the drafting and revision process, figuring out how these poems will fit together and speak to each other. I’m in the process of sending poems out to journals, just like I did for Front Man, before it all came together. It’s refreshing to be back at the early stages of a new manuscript. Here is a new poem from the new collection I’m working on.





Old Lovers

He answered her motel call for company,

pulled her close, wrapped her in his long arms,

the same arms she used to imagine

caressing when she watched him swing bats

at their high school ball field.

For two hours, she made up for months

she ached to be touched,

nights she pulled a pillow close,

pretended she could feel his facial stubble prick her cheeks.

The old lovers finished, sparked cigarettes,

sat on the deck. They knew that come daybreak

they’d gather their clothes,

bathe and leave because she had her New York job,

and he his hometown carpenter work.

He liked to remember her moans,

his name loud in her mouth,

and she the strength of his hands

tracing her curves in the dark.

They always left before sunlight revealed

growing streaks of gray in their hair,

fine lines near their eyes,

bodies sore and tired, in need of rest

before meeting again.

99-year-old sells 1.5 million poetry books

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This morning I came across a story from Reuters that I wanted to share.  A 99-year-old woman in Japan, Toyo Shibata, published her first collection of poetry recently, and it’s sold about 1.5 million copies and has landed on bestseller lists in Japan! Even more surprising is the fact that she didn’t even start writing until she turned 92, when she could no longer practice her decade-long hobby of classical Japanese dance, according to the article. So her son suggested she try poetry.

It’s hard to say why the self-published book of 42 poems has sold over a million copies. Is it simply because of her interesting story? Is it because the Japanese people want to focus on something positive in light of their sagging economy, as the article suggests? While every other poet struggles to sell a mere few hundred copies of a first book and we crisscross different venues to read and get the work out there, this woman sold an outstanding number of books with very little initial promotion. I’d be telling a lie if I said I wasn’t a little jealous. : ) But kudos to her! I hope I’m that productive if I live to her age.

Reading Recap

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Over the last few months, I’ve done several readings to promote Front Man, and I’ve crisscrossed various venues in the tri-state area to get the work out there. I’ve enjoyed all of the readings so far, but I think my favorite reading  occurred Friday evening, at Anthology New and Used Books. As I had mentioned in a previous post, there have been readings at that venue since it opened a few years ago. Dozens of people squeezed into the venue Friday, and I appreciate the fact that so many of my students, fellow writers, and friends showed up. I like that venue so much for its intimacy and the fact it’s the only used bookstore we have around here.

Furthermore, the crowd there is always respectful. When a featured reader is up there, people aren’t texting or talking to their boyfriends or girlfriends. They’re paying attention and often stay around for a little while after the reading to socialize and make connections. I’ve been to readings where people don’t pay attention or leave in droves after the main reader, but that usually never happens at the Anthology events.

Friday’s reading also meant a lot because my friend and former co-owner/co-manager of the venue, Andrea Talarcio, has stepped down.  I wish her luck in whatever she does now. We were lucky to have her in the community to host these readings. I’m glad Anthology is staying open and the various writing workshops, book clubs, and readings will continue, as long as people shop at the store and help keep it open. We’re lucky to have it in our community.

Bringing it all back home

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Over the last few months, I’ve done a lot of readings for my poetry chapbook Front Man. The mini reading tour started up in the Boston area with a reading at Borders that featured other poets from the Big Table Publishing community. I’ve also read all over Pennsylvania and parts of NY. This Friday, I’m doing a reading in my hometown of Scranton, PA at Anthology New and Used Books.  Out of all the readings I’ve done, I’m most excited about this one. Since it opened a few years ago, this bookstore has been a real bright spot for the local art community. The venue has housed poetry readings, writing workshops, and book clubs. It’s been a place for local activist and philosophical clubs to meet on a weekly basis.

I’m also happy to come back home and do this reading because a lot of the poems in Front Man were first read at Anthology, at the poetry open mic nights the fourth Friday of every month. These readings gave me the chance to test some of the poems in public and learn what lines worked and didn’t work. Anthology played a crucial role in putting the book together. Furthermore, most of the poetry collections I read while writing the book I ordered through Anthology. Because of the store, I was able to obtain a lot of collections by new voices in contemporary poetry. You don’t find many of these collections at the local Borders or Barnes & Noble stores.

So, if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, come out to the reading on Friday. It begins at 7 p.m. I’ll sign some books and read some poems. A limited open mic will follow. Anthology is located at 515 Center Street, above Outrageous Jewelry.