Reading February 9 In Gloucester

Come listen to me read--I'll try and dig out some Valentine's-esque poems--and then check out the Open Mic afterward!

To Navigate

Image of the Day:  The increasingly cloudy sky--a spreading of grey wings--and busy chickadees.


Happy New Year!  I hope 2014 is generous and kind to you and yours.  (And, also, to me and mine!)
I spent New Year's Eve at home, relaxing by a fire, and enjoying being home.  Just the right amount of bubbly.  Did I mention how happy I am to be home?!?

For Christmas, I got a gift card to Amazon and spent it that very evening.  I purchased some music, some replacement music since I tend to be rough on the cds in my car, and also, and I know you'll find this shocking, some poetry books.  I bought:  Incarnadine by Mary Szybist, Quelled Communiques by Chloë Joan López--but that's sold out so I was disappointed, but will retry, and
Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido.  I cannot wait to get those and dig in. 

I have a poem here, at Cider Press Review, which has just started taking simultaneous submissions, so I urge you to submit.  It's a very pretty journal, too, and easy to navigate. 

And I have an interview with the fabulous Diane Lockward, here, at IthacaLit, another very beautiful journal.  I asked Diane about her book, The Crafty Poet, which has been and continues to be incredibly helpful to me and I'm sure you as well.  So pick it up. 

New years' morning

by Carl Adamshick

 

A low, quiet music is playing-- 

distorted trumpet, torn bass line, 

white windows. My palms 

are two speakers the size 

of pool-hall coasters.

I lay them on the dark table 

for you to repair.

 

 

 

Copyright © 2010 by Carl Adamshick. From Curses and Wishes (Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

 

 

 

 

My Christmas Card to You

Caritas

(St Andrews Cathedral)
 

These stones speak a level language
murmured word by word,
a speech pocked and porous with loss,
and the slow hungers of weathering.

And there, in the broken choir, children
are all raised voice, loving the play of outline
and absence where the dissembled god
has shared his shape and homed us.

At the end of the nave, the east front stands
both altered and unchanged,
its arch like a glottal stop.

And what comes across, half-said
into all that space, is that it's enough
to love the air we move through.

Rachael Boast

Pilgrim's Flower
Picador

That Obvious Loss

Image of the Day:  Fog obscuring the Rocky Mountains--the whole world in a white-out.


I'm going to apologize right up front for the following blog post as it will not be exactly full of good holiday cheer but my father-in-law died a few days ago so I'm thinking about people's reactions to death--how we cry or don't cry, become angry or tense--not tense exactly but that obvious loss of control and the effort we make to regain control of our life spinning  out before us with our own death one thread whipping outward and then curling in toward us and that feeling of being spun by something unseen and mostly unfelt, except times like this.  Our whole being concentrating on reaching out to steady ourselves, to grab hold of that thread but...
--But I think this is when a death is closer to you, crushes you harder than others around you and you're shattered trying to hold some semblance of self together because other people are able to but there's this hole this fragile sharp hole that's continually and quietly fragmenting splintering and it's hard to catch your breath really but breath is all you can think about because right now you ARE breathing and someone else isn't and how is that possible when just minutes ago they were? And how will it be for you? That one last breath, filling your body for one last time, feeling your self your insides known and not known that emptying out beginning, and how long will it take to end?

A History of Mourning

It's odd that evening is so speckled with grief.
Birds start singing when the branch reddens.
But we write our poems when the sun goes down.

Our ancestors knew how to cry at death; but they
Had enough to do finding big stones to cover
The dead, and begetting new souls to replace them.

We slept on the limestone plains, and woke
Night after night, tracing the route the dead take
Through holes in limestone and on into the stars.

Some hands outlined with blown powder
On the walls of the cave have missing fingers.
We drew maps of the night sky in the dust.

How slowly it all went! One day a woman wept
When she saw a bone reddened with ochre.
A thousand years later, we put a bead in a grave.

Some graves stand among woods. We still don't
Understand why a pine coffin is so beautiful.
We are still brooding over why the sun rises.

Robert Bly

Delicious, Argumentative

Image of the Day:  How the white throated nuthatches and grey tufted tit-mice fly into the feeder on my window, all sharp speed and grace. 

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Mine was delicious, argumentative, happy, painful and quick.

I have a poem here at Lyre Lyre.  I do not have a glass eyeball but I did have something, well, to me something similar that made me feel self-conscious and less than, if you know what I  mean.  It is weird how our bodies reveal stuff about ourselves, and yet sometimes it's our flaws that are the most revealing things of beauty.  (Of course here I am thinking of your flaws, not my flaws.)

From an interview with Valzhyna Mort:
                I always write in response to what I read. If I'm not reading anything, I won't be able to write anything. I've said that certain poets wound you, and so you keep on going after them, and because they have hurt you, only they have the power of healing you, and in that conversation, I think, you're able to find yourself, to restore yourself again.


From The Imagination, Drunk with Prohibitions by Joy Katz

Womanhood is more embarrassing than manhood.
If the woman is old, breakfast is hopeless.
If breakfast is brioche, it becomes less frightening.
Insouciant is more French than nuance,
disappointment more French than matinee,
London more suave than Paris.

My Review of Donna Vorreyer's A House of Many Windows

In the recent issue of American Poetry Review, an article titled “Baby Poetics” ignited a fascinating discussion on Wom-po, the on-line list-serve for all things women and poetry.  Much of the conversation was an attempt at figuring out what the author, Joy Katz, was actually up to with her essay:  decrying poems that actually attempt to write about babies in them or pointing out the fear that women poets have in writing about such topics?  A complicated essay about a complicated subject.

Donna Vorreyer’s fascinating first collection of poetry, A House of Many Windows, addresses this important subject matter.  What is a woman in relationship to motherhood?  When does a mother become a mother?  How are we as women allowed to write about, or allowed to feel as mothers or as women who can’t or don’t become mothers?  And why exactly are these questions so deeply important?

One of my favorite of Vorreyer’s poems, “Billy Gets the Analogy All Wrong” speaks exactly to the necessity of asking these questions.  Billy Collins:  Poet Laureate, filler of poetry bookshelves in book stores across the country. Billy Collins, an actual name people can associate with poetry.  And here is what Billy Collins has written about women without children:  “a woman without children, a gate through which no one had entered the world.”  In her poem, Vorreyer closely examines that analogy and picks it apart, the idea that a woman is just some door to a hip bar or event, where “children / [are] waving twenties and straining / to catch their names on the list.”  But Vorreyer doesn’t just show us what we aren’t—more importantly, she shows us what we are:  “not the shuttered womb, / but the unlatched heart, wide open.” 

            The first section of Vorreyer’s book describes the attempts and failures of a woman trying to get pregnant and to stay pregnant, likening her body to a city, “waiting for the scaffolding to rise.”  Many of the titles are heartbreaking, alerting the reader to what occurs with an unflinching accuracy:  “Upon the Second Attempt, Whole Foods,” “After the Third Failure, Silence,”  “After the Sixth Failure, IKEA.”  Notice this movement of language from what are at first “attempts” to what becomes to be perceived as “failures.”  

            Throughout the book, the relationship between the woman and her husband are also detailed, and how this relationship is effected by the effort at pregnancy, which causes silence and strain between them, such as in the poem, “When I Don’t Love You Anymore is a Wasp.”  Here the speaker is struggling with quick momentary spurts of feelings that could be released through angry language, compared to a wasp, but is held back:  “She wants me to spit her with wild / velocity, stinger first, straight into your patient face.”  That word “patient” adds such an honesty to the speaker’s complexity of emotions in this poem. 

            Another, thoroughly heartbreaking poem, is “Still Tending Each Garden.”  Here, the speaker addresses her “tiny truth, my traveler.”  Having a miscarriage is such an emotionally challenging situation, where one is grieving for something unseen but yet known in a most intimate way. This poem is partly a list of things the speaker compares to her unborn child:

                       

                        My grace note, my disembodied echo,

                        your hum rumbles through my limbs,

                        a melody unfinished, without a refrain.

 

                        Some days, I hear you, calling from

                        an unseen place in umbilical code,

                        my confidante, my secret semaphore.

 

Such tender grief. 

            The last section concerns itself with the adoption and subsequent trials and errors of becoming a mother. And in the prose poem, “How You Become A Mother,” it is clear that each way of becoming a mother is fraught with its own challenges and emotional difficulties:

 

You sit in the social worker’s office, and she asks you what sort of

child you would like to adopt.  The only answer you can think of

is human.  You have to write about your whole life, the

therapist’s foot tapping in time with her pen as she grills you

about  your parents, your childhood, your definition of family.

You have to circle yes or no on checklists:  would you adopt a

child without a limb?  With a heart condition?  You are a monster

whenever you circle no.

 

This first book of poems is a wonderful, truthful look at what issues are at stake for women and mothers.  It is an attempt to define what those words mean in the most honest way.  We need more books like this, written by women in the attempt to define ourselves since, as Vorreyer says in her poem, “Anatomy of A Day,” the miracle of our ourselves is “what our bodies hold.”

 

In The Quiet

Image of the Day:  Three large white swans flying low in the wild sky this morning.


On my commute today, I saw a deer in someone's back yard and slowed and the deer saw me and started running for the road and so I moved on but noticed a car behind me so I stopped so the car would stop but it just slowed and then the deer came flying across the road and I yelped but I think the one car didn't hit the deer. 

From Mary Ruefle's essay, "On Erasure":  "art--it is a private journey; we can be inspired and we can be influenced, but the predominant note of any journey must be found in the quiet unfolding of our own time on earth."

Poetry books I have purchased recently:  Canticle of the Night Path by Jennifer Atkinson
Hot Flash Sonnets by Moira Egan

I am also reading Donna Vorreyer's A House of Many Windows and getting ready to write a review of this fabulous book. 

A couple of acceptances recently. 


From Toad, by Diane Seuss


Do you ever 

 

wonder, in your heart of hearts, 

if God loves you, if the angels love you, 

scowling, holding their fiery swords, 

radiating green light? If your father 

 

loved you, if he had room to love you, 

given his poverty and suffering, or if 

a coldness had set in

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taken Aback

Image of the Day: The leaves are falling so slowly today, languidly, in this crystal cold air. 

The reading of The Mom Egg Review had a great turn-out.  Lots of people and lots of readers.  It was such a gorgeous day as well--with sunshine and warmth.  My friend Diane and I ate lunch at the little café at the Arts Armory and enjoyed a reading of "Titus Andronicus" from a local theater group called  the Dead Actors or something like that.  When we first walked in we were a bit taken aback from the reading, but then it was really fun to listen to.  Titus is one of those Shakespeare plays I've heard about but never read. 

This is the week that my mom died seven years ago.  Hard to believe it's been seven years...and it's strange how one year it'll hit me much harder than other years.  Well, maybe not that strange. 

Anyway, one of my Lascaux poems got published recently and I thought I'd share it here, since it has my mother in it.  Sort of.

A Field Guide to Sorrows:  The Lascaux Woman

What else with my endless time but the gnarled naming.  I dislike this job sometimes so many sorrows in my mouth.  Little blue darlings.  I burst their skin under my canine teeth. He is so eager with his gifts of habitat of range.  Description:  Crunch of Eyes Turning Away.  Description:  just one more Slip on the Slick Ice of Remembering.  Description:  combination of the Sorrow of Sedum and the Sweet Smell of Damp Grass.  Description:  His Eyes become Small Sharp Flies.

Footprints from someone else and I was not well-furred for it.  The path was silent.  What did I think I would find, my dead mother asks me always from the caves of Lascaux she running with the  moon-soaked reindeer.  I sew my sorrows with needles carved from brittle bones of stars. 

Reading for The Mom Egg Review

                             Please join us for

                            Mass Mayhem!

                          Mom Egg Review

            Reading at Červená Barva Press Studio

                 Saturday, November 2 at 1:30 PM
             The Center For The Arts At The Armory
                           Basement Room B8
                          191 Highland Avenue
                             Somerville, MA

                             Featured readers:
                                Carol   Berg
                               Louise Berliner
                               DebbieBlicher
                                 Fay Chiang
                               Lori Desrosiers
                              Kathy   Handley
                               Jennifer Jean
                           Danielle Jones-Pruett
                            Dorian Kotsiopoulos
                                Aparna Mani
                                Tara    Masih
                              Colleen Michaels
                               Jaqui   Morton
                             January G. O'Neill
                               Eve     Packer
                                Kyle    Potvin
                               Denise Provost
                               Laura   Rodley
                            Rosie   Rosensweig
                                Nancy Vona
                            mc Marjorie Tesser

To Take In

Image of the Day:  Geese straggling together like tails of kites fluttering in the October sky.

I finally have an afternoon where I can just veg--no deadlines or meetings or nothing.  Just time to sit and read and think.  Possibly poeming, but we'll see about that.  The poems come, taper off, and leave.  I've been rejected a gazillion times it seems lately, but I've still got a few more out there and a few poems that I haven't even gotten in any kind of submission order, which is actually a good thing. 

The fall weather has been gorgeous and the birds are changing--as noted above, the geese are practicing their flying formations and the juncos have come back (and I have an old poem here about that) and the woodpeckers are changing their thudding sounds.  Time to hang the suet and to take in the hummingbird feeder. 

My schedule has changed too in that I'm working longer hours now at my tutoring gig. And things have gotten much more busy there as well--so little down time to write.  The only writing time it seems I can squeeze in is sitting in stopped traffic or endless traffic lights and dig out my notebook and scratch around for some images.  I tell myself it's practice nonetheless.  But I do need some new poetry books.  I have been reading some journals--The Journal and Crab Orchard Review, but my subscriptions seem to have run out and I haven't had the time or money to renew.  Hopefully, that'll change soon. 



Battering Robin Syndrome
       

He has split his beak on my view.
He has left his selfprint, almost art.
My window is torturing him.
My hubcaps incense him.

The robin wants my spring yard
to himself. Each reflection's
a rival and must be fought full force.
Each reflection is harder than his skull.

He slides down, hobbles, tries again.
What business do I have holding mirrors
to nature? It revolts. It suicides.
My love of flat, clear and shining surfaces,

flatter, clearer, shinier than lakes,
than anything in nature, is unnatural.
And if nature held mirrors to me,
showed me someone I thought would steal

my truelove, or showed me how I'm doing,
what would I do, would I learn,
or beat my head against her skull,
or try to smash myself against the news?



Copyright © 2013 Tina Kelley All rights reserved
from Precise
Word Poetry

 

Ambling Alone

Image of the Day:  Fat raccoon furtively checking behind it as it ambles alone along the road in the dark. 

Dreams:  I'm dying and wandering around outside and the light is so bright but I'm waiting for my vision to fail.  I tell him not to put me in the coffin until my eyes close.  Feelings inside the me in the dream of something totally un-understandable approaching.  Something darker and larger than I can image.  I wake up.

I know what my mind is doing there in that dream, trying to process certain experiences, but I wish it wouldn't do it quite so vividly, if you know what I mean.  On my way to work, I noticed wires across the road and a box on the railing which said it was Traffic Data Collecting.  How the brain is one big data collecting box with coiling wires/tentacles, searching out information all over the place. 

Poetry News:  Rejections.  Writing a poem a day using Diane Lockward's The Crafty Poet.  I'm getting together some questions for an interview with Diane that I'm very excited about.  Waiting on submissions.

Consciousness

A massive shadow of hubris
crashes through a universe of thorns

having no feathers but smooth skin
and wingflaps of nearly transparent

lugubrious membrane
there's lightning by firing of eyes

thunder by flapping of wings
cowboys leaving a trail of moonshine

fire at the heart of it
while the legend disappears

rumors persist of a big dead bird
nailed to a barn with a mighty span unfurled

and several men posed under it for scale

Jane Miller

Thunderbird
Copper Canyon Press