Tag: Poetry

Poetry News

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Just wanted to mention that The Portland Review published two of my poems online this week, and they will appear in print later this year. The first, “The Summer of Our Fall,” can be read here. It’s a poem left over from the Front Man manuscript, but it was taken out during the final edits. The second poem, “Missed Cues,” which is part of my new manuscript, can be read here.  I also have three poems forthcoming in Yes, Poetry. They will appear online in October. I also have a poem forthcoming in the fall issue of Evening Street Review.

I also want to announce that the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre is hosting free poetry workshops throughout the fall months. I’m hosting one in November, and several of my friends are also involved. The workshops start next week and run from 6:30-8. The dates and some blurbs are listed below.

September 6–“Writing Tools and Habits.”
Rachael Goetzke, teen poetry coordinator, will host a session on environment, writing tools, and making poetry a part of your daily life.

September 20–Dawn Leas “Channeling Memories.”

October 4–Amye Archer “Language Poems”

October 18–“Performance Poetry”  Not sure who’s teaching this section.

November 1–Alexis Czencz Belluzi Not sure what her focus will be.

November 15–Jenny Hill “Heavy Metaphor.”
We’ll explore the use of metaphor in prose and poetry and use the library resources to write our own extended metaphors.

November 29–Brian Fanelli will focus on writing about home/place in poetry. We will look at how certain poets depict home/place in their work, and do some writing prompts that tie into home/place.

All sessions held in the Gates Lab.

Final workshop/oration/open mic December 13 (Reading Room)

Completed Summer Reading

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In a mere week and a half, the fall semester begins, and I’ll return to my normal teaching schedule. This summer consisted of preparing a second MS of poems, camping, traveling, and teaching two poetry classes.  I also hit up a few different towns/cities for poetry readings, and I still have two left before summer concludes– one in South Sterling, PA this Saturday and one in Lewisburg, PA next Saturday.

Summer also provided the chance to get a lot of reading done, and I thought I’d post what I read over the summer. Also, feel free to comment and share what you read this summer.

Drama:

I was on a Greek mythology kick and re-read the Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles. I still like it just as much as I did when I was in college.

I also re-read Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Is there a greater rebel in ancient Greek literature than Prometheus?

 Fiction:

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.  After hearing hype about Franzen for years and reading him in the New Yorker, I finally gave in and read The Corrections, the novel that won him the National Book Award. Yes, he is worth reading, and yes, he is probably one of the most important American writers alive today, due to the way he addresses a slew of contemporary social/political issues.

Mickelsson’s Ghosts by John Gardner. This is Gardner’s last novel, released shortly before he died in a  motorcycle accident in the early 1980s. This is a great, fat American novel, and I love the way he wove supernatural elements into this novel, and the way he poked fun at the politics of academia.

Collected Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. So glad he’s still alive and publishing sometimes.

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike. I love the way in which Updike captured periods of American history through the “Rabbit” novels, in this case the Carter/early Reagan years.

The Centaur by John Updike. This novel won Updike the National Book Award in 1961. It’s a moving story about father and son, and it also retells the myth of Chiron.

Terrorist by John Updike. I guess I was on an Updike kick this summer. This is a powerful novel, one whose main character is an Islamic fundamentalist. This is one of the most interesting post-9/11 novels I’ve read, one that points out the hypocrisy of certain U.S. actions regarding the Middle East and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism.

Poetry

Poets in their Youth by Eileen Simpson. This is a fantastic memoir written by a woman who was married to John Berryman for a while. It offers a glimpse into the lives of some of the mid-20th Century’s most important American poets, including Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randal Jarrell, and Delmore Schwartz.

Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems by Robert Hayden. I think readers sometimes forget he wrote more than “Those Winter Sundays.”

T.S. Eliot: Selected Prose and Essays.  I tend to revisit Eliot’s essays every now and then as a refresher.

The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin. It took me a while, but I’m finally getting into Merwin’s work.

Collected Poems by Joseph Brodsky. He is one of the 20th Century’s most non-political Russian poets. Compare him to Mayakovsky and notice the difference. Brodsky wrote such beautiful love poems.

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner. This is a great collection of poems written by an Iraq war veteran. I’m amazed at the scope of voices in this collection. Turner succeeded in capturing the complexity of the second Iraq war.

World Tree by David Wojahn.  Anything Wojahn releases is worth checking out. Here, he continues writing about music, pop culture,and politics, while displaying a  wide range of forms. My review of the book will be published by PANK sometime soon.

Sailing Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins. There’s a reason Billy Collins is a bestseller. I can’t think of a contemporary American poet who’s wittier.

Reading Now:

Tar by C.K. Williams. I’ve read his collected poems, but never a collection as a whole.

The Eye of a Poet. This is a collection of essays on poetry, featuring Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, and others.

How to be Alone: Collected Essays by Jonathan Franzen. I guess I’m on a Franzen kick now. I also plan to read his latest novel, Freedom, soon.

So what did you read over the summer?  What are you reading now?

good news all around

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I want to pass along some positive news about my poetry. First, another review of my chapbook, Front Man, was just published by the journal Blood Lotus. You can read the review by clicking here and flipping to page 56 of the journal.  You can also read the review by visiting the blog of the reviewer, Kacy Muir. Click here to do so (this option is probably the easiest).

I also recieved word yesterday that three of my poems, “What They Forgot by Morning,” “Late Night Stop,” and “Remembering Names,” were accepted for publication by the NYC-based journal Yes, Poetry. They will be released in the October issue, the same time frame another new poem, “How She Hides Her Age,” will be published by the California-based journal the San Pedro River Review.

Finally, I want to announce that my friend and fellow writer, Amye Archer, just released a chapbook, A Shotgun Life, with Big Table Publishing, the same folks who released my book. Buy a copy and help support another local writer! You can get a copy by clicking here, or by seeing her read at Prose in Pubs on Jack’s Draft House in Scranton on  Sunday, Sept. 25 at 7 pm.

Yes, Poetry Matters

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Over the last few years, and especially this year, there have been HUGE cuts to the arts in state and federal budgets, as this country tries to pay for two wars (even if they’ve been “scaled down”), and tax cuts for the wealthy.  Since these cuts started, I haven’t come across a lot of articles that make a solid defense for the importance of the arts, especially for poetry. However, a friend posted on Google + yesterday an article published at the Huffington Post by poet/book reviewer Roger Housden, who makes the case for poetry. Read the article here. In the article, Housden points out that we may never be the same again after reading poetry, that poetry “calls to us” and can ignite a fire within us. I agree with this theory. When I had my first poetry workshops as an undergrad at West Chester University, I was never really the same again. I felt that fire he mentions in the article, and I started writing poetry, thinking about it, and organizing readings. I hope other students have this same opportunity and schools don’t do away with such classes because of budget retraints.

Poetry is also important, he writes, because it “uses the common currency of our daily speech. It uses words that are known to all of us, but in a sequence and order that surprises us out of our normal speech rhythms and linear thought processes.”

Above all, poetry nourishes the imagination through surprising language and imagery, a point made well in the William Carlos Williams poem “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” also quoted in the article.

It is difficult
To get the news from poems
Yet men die miserably every day
For lack
Of what is found there.

Upward, Onward

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My summer vacation technically started a few weeks ago, once I turned in my spring semester grades, but since then, it hasn’t felt like I’ve really had a day off. I’m one of those people who constantly needs to be doing something. Since the spring semester concluded, I have drafted/revised four totally new poems, some of which have found their way into my new manuscript. I’m also teaching a  poetry workshop at the Vintage Theater in downtown Scranton, and I have a wonderful group of students that offer insightful, intelligent comments on poetry we cover.  I’ve also done a few poetry readings, especially at the end of May, and I have more coming up in June. I view these readings as the last push/leg of all of the readings I’ve done over the last 6 months or so for Front Man. When fall begins, I’ll be able to ease up on the readings and do last revisions to my new manuscript.

I’m also spending this summer placing the poems in order for a new chapbook. Some of the poems have already gotten published, including in Indigo Rising Magazine, Word Fountain, Young American Poets, WritingRaw, and soon the Pennsylvania Literary Journal.  I hope to get the new chapbook accepted by a publisher (maybe Big Table Publishing again) at least two years after Front Man came out. That is enough time after the first book came out, but also not too long so people don’t forget about me. Whenever that next chap comes out, I wonder what people will think about it. Gone are the music/punk rock/indie rock references, for the most part, though there is a poem that does reference Bob Dylan. But these are more coming-of-age poems, poems about love, poems about loss, poems about father/son relationships, and all from a male point of view.  Some of the poems are also in tighter forms, unrhymed quartrains especially, while some are longer narrative poems.

 I am indeed getting there, but there is a need to also trim the fat, to cut out a lot of poems that will make the book sound too repetitive.  In an ideal world, I’ll have a solid polished manuscript by the end of the summer, with the poems ordered, but I know how fast the summer turns to fall, and how soon I have to prep my work for the poetry course I’m teaching at Keystone starting in mid-July.

With or without music?

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The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog recently posted an entry regarding the writing process, exploring whether or not it’s helpful to listen to music while one writes. For the author of the blog post, music is too distracting while writing and causes her to hum along and crank the speakers instead of writing. I have the same issues, which may be surprising considering my first chapbook of poems, Front Man, consists of narrative poems about a front man of a punk rock band. But I can promise you not a single one of those poems were drafted or revised while I had music cranking through I-pod headphones or pumping through my turntable’s speakers. Like the blog post’s author, I get too distracted.

My writing process is pretty strict in the sense that I do most of my writing in the early morning hours. I try to get in a good half hour of journaling, drafting, and revising before leaving my apartment to teach. The rest of my writing is done in the evening, after dinner, and again, without music or distractions.

I still collect records and catch live bands when I can (though it’s less and less as I get older), but for me, music is separate from writing. Most of what I listen to now is on vinyl, so I have to carve out a chunk of time to listen to those records, just as I carve out time during the day to write.

Everyone’s writing process is different. I’ve had students in creative writing classes that need to plug their ears with I-Pod headphones while we write in class. For me, I need silence after I spin the records and I’m ready to write.

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?

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 .