National Poetry Month

Along with rain showers (and early flowers) April brings us National Poetry Month. One way to honor the month is to participate in napowrimo, or National Poetry Writing Month, where the goal is to write a poem a day. I have tried this in past years--it is a challenge but also a wonderful exercise. After all, the more you write, the more you find you have to say, and the better you learn to say it. The site readwritepoem discusses napowrimo further and gives an exercise for today here.

Another way to celebrate poetry this month is to read it! Sites where you can get your poetry fix include:
Poetry Daily
American Life in Poetry
The Writer's Almanac

Opportunities for Poets

I am passing along some information related to unique ways of sharing your poetry with the world. First, this from a Kentucky press release:

The Kentucky State Parks are celebrating their 85th anniversary this year and are encouraging guests to help celebrate by getting outdoors and visit the parks. For those of you who like to write about your outdoor experiences, the parks system has a poetry contest for you.

The Kentucky State Parks 85th Anniversary Poetry Contest has three age categories – 11 and under, 12-18 and 19 and over. Any style may be used but poets are asked to use a theme that is some way related to the natural, cultural or historical aspects of state parks.

The deadline for submitting an entry is Nov. 2, 2009, with the winners to be announced by the end of the year. The top prize in each age category is a $50 Kentucky State Park gift card. There will also be prizes for 2nd and 3rd place in each age category. All winners and honorable mentions ages 18 and under will receive a free admission coupon to a state park fort, museum or historic site of their choice.

Winning poems will be posted on the state park web site.

Poems have to be in writing (two copies please) and mailed to the Kentucky Department of Parks, c/o Poetry Contest, 500 Mero Street – 10th floor, Frankfort, Ky. 40601.

There is a limit on length and all works must include a title and be the original work of the entrant. A complete list of rules as well as the official entry form, which must accompany all entries, is available at www.parks.ky.gov.

Second, check out The Guardian's monthly poetry workshop, where "Every month, a different poet sets an exercise, chooses the most interesting responses from readers and offers an appraisal of them."

Ekphrastic Poetry

As part of the LexArts Showcase Weekend, on Saturday, February 7, from 1:00-3:00 p.m., I will be leading a workshop called “Ekphrastic Poetry: Responding to Art through Poetry” at the Carnegie Center. Here’s the blurb from the brochure:

Ekphrasis is writing inspired by art -- usually paintings, photographs, or statues. In this workshop, we’ll explore ways to launch our own poems in reaction to works of art. Through hands-on writing, looking at examples of ekphrastic poems, and discussion, we’ll broaden the separate experiences of poetry and visual art by marrying the two.

Here’s an ekphrastic poem to whet your appetite.

In the morning of the LexArts Showcase Weekend, Lynn Pruett will be leading “Fiction/Collage: Words in Pictures, Pictures into Words” (10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.). Both workshops are free.

The Carnegie Center’s Winter Session starts this week and is filled with many other offerings. To find one (or more) for you, check out the winter schedule.

Reflecting on the Work of 2008

I'm going about this backwards, having looked forward to the year ahead in my post yesterday. Call it memory, call it flashback, call it the writer's business to mix up time.

At the end of 2007, I received an artist enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women to begin writing my second collection of poems. I recently finished my final report reflecting on the activities and artistic growth of the past year. Admittedly, I was a little nervous to review the year, to examine carefully the work I accomplished...and that which I did not. The approach I took was to let the poems develop organically through the year, without thematic direction (although I had outlined expected themes in the original proposal) because you just can't force a poem to be something it's not. Although some of the themes and images did not develop, many did, and, to my delight, new themes and images surfaced. During the year, I did not always feel like I was making progress, though a couple poems immediately felt like "breakthrough" poems. With the recent introspective period, I discovered the year had resulted in many significant changes and growth in my work. Perhaps most noticeably, I see a lightness, even humor, in the new poems, which is not present in the poems of my first manuscript.

Grateful beyond measure for the many benefits the grant provided, I look forward to completing the project and to continued growth as a writer.

O Pioneer!

By way of Lori-Lyn, I learned about the word of the year project featured on Christine Kane's blog. Essentially, rather than make traditional resolutions (which are traditionally not so successful), you choose a word to carry through the year as a touchstone, a word that guides you through the year. This is a concept that appeals to me, perhaps partially because my daily work is done with words. What better instrument to nudge me into and through the changes (bidden or unbidden) in my life?

After perusing the list of suggested words, a number of them seemed like possibilities--gratitude, creativity, confidence, patience--but only one immediately rang like a bell. Pioneer. I let the word roll around within me for the last few days; more and more it seemed like my word for 2009. It is suggestive of the places I want to go this year...and of the spirit I want to embrace. It even seems like the runner-up words belong under the umbrella of 'pioneer.'

To more fully connect to the word, I looked up its definitions in the dictionary, as I often do when I'm trying to get the language of a poem exactly right (I've learned much about even the simplest and most common words by reviewing their meanings). I was reminded that as a verb, pioneer means:

1a. To open up (an area) or prepare (a way): rockets that pioneered outer space. b. To settle (a region). 2. To initiate or participate in the development of: surgeons who pioneered organ transplants.

It feels like 2009 is going to be a trailblazing year.

Marilyn Taylor - - Wisconsin's Next Poet Laureate

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle has appointed Marilyn Taylor as Poet Laureate of the state. You can read about the appointment here.

Marilyn was my mentor in the English/creative writing department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee many moons ago. I cannot adequately express how much she contributed to my development as a poet. I have always felt privileged to have had the opportunity to study with her, and I am absolutely thrilled about this news.

“Marilyn Taylor is committed to bringing poetry to all corners of Wisconsin,” stated Governor Doyle. “She has impressive credentials and an obvious love for her work and her state. I am confident that she will be an excellent Poet Laureate.”

You can read some of her poems here.

More Patricia Smith, Persona Poems, and a Prompt

One thing Patricia Smith does masterfully is the persona poem (sometimes called dramatic monologue). Poets.org defines the dramatic monologue as a poem in which "the poet speaks through an assumed voice--a character, a fictional identity, or a persona."

In Blood Dazzler, Smith takes on a range of personae from Hurricane Katrina to President Bush to a dog left behind. What surprised me was that the persona poems written in the voice of inanimate things could work. There seems to me a great deal of risk in speaking in the voice of the Superdome.

The Greek word persona means "mask," and some poets suggest wearing the mask of someone else--writing from a different point of view--is freeing because you are not writing your story, your vulnerabilities. However, I think to write a successful persona poem, the poet might have to make herself more vulnerable than, or at least as vulnerable as, when writing about her personal experiences. She must be able to locate in herself aspects of that other person (or thing), no matter how different or frightening or uncomfortable. Just as writing about the self reveals the other, writing about the other reveals the self. (A side thought--does this come more naturally for writers who write fiction more frequently than I?)

I found this interview with Patricia Smith (interviewed by Cherryl Floyd-Miller for Torch) where she talks about crafting persona poems. About the persona poem, Smith says:

I think the persona poem moves us out of our space, moves us out of our comfort zone where we’re almost forced to take a really hard look at another life. Whether it be something you’re just doing for the fun of it, like, you know, wow, what’s it like to be Little Richard for a day, or you’re sitting next to some woman who is clutching like twenty bags or something on the subway, you know that her whole life is in those bags, and you realize just how close everyone’s life is to your own. They may look really distant. You may say, “Oh my God, I’d never be a bag lady.” But starting to look at that persona and really examining it honestly, you realize how close we all are, and you may really be one paycheck away from that. So, it kind of forces us outside of ourselves – which we should all in a perfect world do naturally anyway. We should strive to relate to whoever it is that we meet, or we don’t meet, anyway. I mean, that’s what the human race is supposedly all about, but we don’t do that. Working in persona – if you do it enough – kind of makes that a second nature, even if it’s somebody you will never write about. You tend to take a closer look at their lives because you’re used to doing that in your creative work.

And she says:

Persona helps develop the poet’s eye. Then when you come back to yourself with that knowledge, you can write about yourself in a way that is more insightful and probing than before.

So if you're looking for something to try, write a persona poem. As Smith suggests in the interview, start from your natural curiosity. Begin from a question you want answered.

Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler

I am reading Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. These poems tell the story of New Orleans before, during, and after Katrina.

Personally, I've found it difficult to write "political" poems (or poems that address social concerns...which raises the question what constitutes a political poem for can't every poem be considered a political poem in some sense [i.e., the personal is political]...but that's for another post perhaps). For me it is all too easy to fall into rant or lecture mode, to lose the essence of the poem.

Smith's poems are what political poems should be because first they are poems. They are musical. They are crafted (I mean this in a positive way; I mean she has considered structure carefully so the form suits the poem). They are filled with hard evidence (singular images, convincing voices). And through these means, the poems take on the weighty topic of Katrina. She has made poems that balance beauty and substance.

Here you can listen to Smith read three poems (the third, "What Betsy Has to Say," is from Blood Dazzler).

Poetry of Place

William Stafford, in Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation, said:

All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences--which is to say, all the arts--are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life.

It is this immediacy that distinguishes art. And paradoxically the more local the self that art has, the more all people can share it; for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground.

Artists, knowing this mutual enrichment that extends everywhere, can act, and praise, and criticize, as insiders:--the means of their art is the life of their people. And that life grows and improves by being shared. Hence, it is good to welcome any region you live in or come to or think of, for that is where life happens to be--right where you are.

This passage caught my attention because long have I been intrigued by poetry and poets of place. I have envied poets whose writing is steeped in a particular place (some associations in my mind include Philip Levine/Detroit, Susan Firer/Milwaukee, Frank O'Hara/New York, Ted Kooser/the Plains, Kathleen Norris/South Dakota). It seems like many poets have a city or region that influences their work.

No single place has infused my writing, nor do I feel like I "belong" to any particular place, perhaps because I have lived in a fair number of places. What constitutes home anyway? If I had to name one place that consistently feels most like home, southern Wisconsin (Madison/Milwaukee) would be it, though I suspect it has more to do with the fact that it's my birthplace and home to family and less to do with a connection to the place/land directly. Still it is the closest connection to a place I have (and yet it doesn't permeate my writing). All the other places I've lived, I've felt like a visitor. If I lived in Kentucky 20 more years, I would probably still feel like an outsider, perhaps contributing to why I feel inauthentic grounding my writing in a place.

What I take from Stafford is that if we are present to the place we are now (whether as a native or as a visitor), we can inhabit that place; we can serve witness to it as only individuals can.

Poetry Sites

Here are some poetry-related sites that have come to my attention recently:

Poetryvlog posts a weekly video of a poet reading his or her own poetry.

Ars Poetica shares daily poems about poetry. This blog has an interesting origin; it began when Dan Waber invited five of his favorite poets to send him an ars poetica they'd written along with the names and email addresses of five other poets. The invitations grew from there.

Mark Doty's blog is a sort of online notebook for the poet. (As a side note, I think Doty has to be one of the hippest poets out there. What other poet of his reputation [if you haven't heard, his book Fire to Fire is a finalist for the National Book Award] has a public MySpace page and blog? And I may be one of the least hip poets without a reputation for using the word "hip.")

No Praise, No Blame

After reading Sherry's recent posts about William Stafford, I decided it was time to read his collections about writing poetry. The library only had Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation so that's the one I'm reading. Turns out it is what I need to be reading right now. Stafford championed process over product. What Stafford espoused is summarized nicely in this statement of his:

A writer must write the bad poems in order to approach the good ones--finicky ways will dry up the sources.

Essentially the idea is to lower one's standards. Although I've heard (and tried to practice) this advice fairly regularly in my writing career, it still seems foreign to me (shall I say, un-American?). We are trained to set goals, make progress, achieve, have something outward to show for our labor (i.e., publications, awards for the writer). Certainly goals serve a purpose, but it is good to remember a writer is someone who writes, not someone who publishes, not even someone who writes well necessarily. By lowering or removing expectations (and as a result, nixxing those pesky, shaming, blaming voices when expectations aren't met), the writer writes for the sake of writing, for the sake of language and interaction with the language. Anything that might result from the writing process, say a finished product or publication, is just gravy.

On the flip side of "no blame" during the creative process is "no praise," no criticism or judgment of any sort. I've practiced this in the earliest stages of writing. This freedom from judgment is a critical component of Writing Practice, which in other circles is called free-writing or pre-writing. Whether in a group or alone, I have learned to turn off some of the censors/editors during the first stages of writing. However as drafts progress, as I become more committed to a piece, the internal editor becomes louder, more insistent, either drawing smiley faces or circling flaws in red ink. Okay, the editorial process cannot be shrugged entirely; sometimes I need to hear from the internal editor that I'm on the right track or that such and such construction is awkward. But I think the later stages of writing--at least sometimes--could benefit from a no praise/no blame philosophy and the open dialog with language it encourages. As simple as applying the philosophy, right (insert smiley face followed by #@##&!)?

miller's pond, 2008, Vol. 11, Issue 1

I'm pleased to report my poem "Photograph, Summer 1981" appears in the recent issue of miller's pond. The issue includes poems by featured poet Jeff Worley as well as poems by Leatha Kendrick, one of which is one of my all-time favorites, "Talking to Liza."

Spice of Life

While making dinner the other night, I was searching online for information on spices, which brought me to the Enspicelopedia. From allspice to white pepper, this online resource provides a description, uses, origin, and folklore for various spices and herbs. I especially like the folklore section (must be the writer in me). Did you know that Romans believed cinnamon's fragrance sacred and burned it at funerals? Or that the name parsley comes from the Greek word petros, meaning stone, because the plant was often found growing among rocks?

I think my delight in finding the site stems from my love of reference books...dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias. From early on, I've loved scanning reference books (and in recent years, online sites), looking for something but not knowing what. Maybe it's the brevity of the entries or the fact you can open the book to any page (hmm...sort of like poetry). Maybe it's simply my admitted love of lists.

Often when I need to jump-start a poem--whether looking for a hook to start a new poem or fresh insight to feed the revision process--I'll head to the dictionary or encyclopedia. Getting to the root of a word or event or thing clarifies the word/event/thing. Such research frequently cracks open the poem. Although I've been doing this for a while, I'm still surprised that by studying the elementary aspects of something, I can find a way to grow the poem into something quite complex and multi-layered. But life is filled with those pleasant incongruities.

20 Days for Peace and Justice

Friend, fellow writer, and Peaceways Newsletter editor Gail Koehler sent notice that the Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice's 20 Days for Peace and Justice have arrived. Check out the calendar of events, which has something for everyone. Writers in the area might be interested in Writing Peace and Justice: A Reading by the Affrilachian Poets at the Carnegie Center on October 10 at 6:30 p.m.

Real change happens at the local level.

The New York Quarterly - Issue 64

Issue 64 of The New York Quarterly is now available, and I'm pleased to report that my poem "Running at Daybreak" is included.

The issue, aside from being chock full of poems, features craft interviews with Marge Piercy and and David Lehman as well as essays on the present state of American poetry.

Joseph Campbell and Myth

This weekend I watched the remainder of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. It took me quite a while to get through this two-disc program, partly because it's hard to find six hours to devote to anything, partly because when I did make time, I found myself frequently pausing and replaying sections so I could write notes. I remember wondering how Campbell could clearly articulate so many thoughts and ideas wordlessly residing inside me. Even the ideas contradictory to my own helped me to understand my own reasoning. He also raised many new concepts, which I want to think and read about further.

Some random paraphrased snippets from the program:

• The influence of a vital person vitalizes.
  
• One should seek the experience of being alive, not seek the meaning of life.
• Consider intention (aesthetic) versus nature (expressive)...the beauty of a spider's web comes out of the spider's nature.
  
• Myths and dreams come from realizations, find expression in symbolic form.
  
• Myths need to change as the world changes. The world is changing too fast for new mythology.
• Art reveals through the object the radiance, speaks to the order in one's own life.
  
• There could be no relationship with that which is absolute other (lots in the program about dualities...male/female, man/god, good/evil, man/nature, love/pain).
  
• Images/symbols of myth are reflections and potentialities of all of us.
• Myth, like poetry, attempts to say what cannot be said with words.
  
• Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated...it opens, doesn't shut you off...it is the precise choosing of words that has implications past the words.
• Your (image of) god is your ultimate barrier to the transcendent experience.
  
• This moment now is the heavenly moment.
  
• One must have a sacred place.
• Myths are basically the same all over the world, in separate cultures and separate time periods...two possibilities for this are diffusion (mythology travels with traditions that travel through cultures) and the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world.
  

As I reread these and my other notes, I realize the effect has been diminished, the meaning blurred. It's like eating just the cherry off the top of a sundae. So if you're curious after this post, read Campbell's work or watch the PBS program, listen to these ideas directly from the source, devour the whole dessert. I ate and am more ravenous for it.

Purpose

A thought that inevitably surfaces when you are a poet is why...that is, why write poetry? With so many people who write poetry and so few who read it, I sometimes wonder why should I add to the surplus of this medium?

Sherry Chandler wrote a post related to this recently and what struck me most was this:

If, like the monks who pray at Gethsemane to restore balance to the world, I choose to spend my life as an obscure poet, nourishing my own human spirit and with luck a few readers’, then who is to say that is not a worthy thing to do, whether or not I leave an individual mark on the world at large.

Of course! Why I never thought of it this way before, I don't know, given my Catholic upbringing and its orders of secluded nuns. Absolutely, the world needs the sisters (and the secular) who live and work within our communities, but as much of a critic as I can be, I also (need to) believe that the world also needs those secluded nuns sending forth their silent prayers.

On a related note, this weekend my Netflix adventure was disc one of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, the long-ago PBS series where Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell, the now-late legendary thinker and teacher. I'm still digesting their discussion and hope to write more about it, but for now I'll focus on the part related to this post. Campbell suggests the artist's function is the mythologization of her environment. This turns everything upside-down for me, in a very good way. For far too long, I've looked at myth as something of the past, something unchangeable. But here's a directive that I, as an artist, am responsible for creating new myths. And, as Campbell points out, the world is in desperate need of new myths that meet the needs of our contemporary society.

Campbell also likens the poet to the shaman of primitive societies, for both share a unique connection to the universe and act as intermediary between the visible world and its invisible plane.

Now, let me be clear, I'm not suggesting I have shaman-esque capabilities or the sanctity of secluded nuns, but Campbell's message and Sherry's post came at one of those times when I was feeling frustrated with the limitations of a poet, the only real role I've felt "called" to do. I guess I'm saying I take my messages of affirmation any way I can get them.

Sunday Funnies

A good friend, who knows me too well, sent me this link to an article in The Onion. Enjoy.

More on the Sonnet

In An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, Marilyn Hacker notes about the Italian sonnet "that all these versions of the sonnet almost predicate a poem whose "argument" divides into two parts, a premise set out in the octave (first eight lines), with the sestet contradicting it, modifying it, or giving a concrete proof."

The volta, or turn, seems to be the essential element that makes a sonnet a sonnet. Meter might vary, a couple lines might be added or subtracted, rhyming might be slant or varied or even non-existent, but most poet-critics suggest the turn is a requirement.

Hacker also says (specifically about sequences of sonnets):

Its Italian form is very like a mixture of the two most flexible and utilitarian "blocks" of verse narrative: the quatrain and terza rima.

And she summarizes the sonnet as (in regards to its origins and contemporary applications):

a poem in "popular" language that could be read or written by anyone (not only clerics and scholars) and that incited its writers to fresh examination of their evolving languages' interactions with the human world.

The Sonnet

I have two sonnets in need of revision, of re-envisioning; thus, one thing I'm contemplating lately is the form of the sonnet. What constitutes a sonnet, or "little song?" How can I develop my sonnets into fully realized poems while maintaining their sonnet qualities?

Tony Barnstone writes in A Manifesto on the Contemporary Sonnet: A Personal Aesthetics (featured in The Cortland Review, December 2006):

Poets set sail like Columbus, unsure whether they would sail forever, sail off the waterfalling edge of a flat world, or encounter India or other new worlds. There is something comforting about knowing the destination of your journey. Sonnet-mariners know they will arrive at a port after a voyage of fourteen lines. With free verse, one travels into the fog, and must map the world again with every poem. With free verse one has to ask each time, "What makes this a poem?" Why should I break my line here and not there? What sort of stanza shape and length should I have? What voice shall I speak in, with what attitude, with what rhetoric, with what image structure? We have to come up with organic ways of making it poetry, because the mechanic form has been dispensed with.

Working in form (sonnets or otherwise) gives me a compass and the comfort that there is a destination ahead. I'm envious of the free-verse poets who can write beautifully and clearly without maps. Recently even my poems that end up in free verse tend to start in form. Without some breathable shape, my writing borders on prosaic thoughts broken into lines. Furthermore, form helps write the poem. Rhyme, in particular, leads me to what the poem is trying to say. I might arrive at the same place in free verse, but form tends to get me there in a more direct, unexpected, and interesting way. (Bardstone's essay addresses rhyme and rhyme devices in detail...worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

Barnstone proposes a number of ways of approaching the sonnet, one of the most interesting being to "transform sonnets in English into sonnets in English":

I found that approaching the sonnet as a translation game was a very generative creative mode. The translator wears the skin of the author. It is a kind of spirit possession. In my own work, I have learned much about traditional form by wearing the skin of the Chinese sonneteer Feng Zhi, of Petrarch, and of Borges. In addition to learning their techniques in the process of translating their poems into sonnets in English, I have developed a technique of transformation that I have attempted to apply intralingually as well as interlingually. I might, for example, work from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, using some of his rhymes and filling in my own lines, or write poems in direct conversation with the imagery of a source poem.

I think I may be too far along with my two sonnets in question to start from the translation/transformation approach, but I think it is an interesting approach to play with to generate new poems.

What I need to do is study my sonnets--map out the routes they took, look at the destinations they arrived at--then see if I can improve upon the routes and destinations.