Listing

Image of the Day:  Golden-rod just beginning their yellow spidery blooming.

What I'm reading:  Darling Hands, Darling Tongue by Sally Rosen Kindred. 

What I've done today:  Mopped floors.  Jumped rope.  Cleaned toilets.  Hung laundry on line.

What I did yesterday:  Baked whole wheat bread and granola bars.  Ran but really walked the path. 

What I will do tomorrow:  Aquarium. 

What I'm getting in email:  We're sorry we can't use your poems, please try again.

What I'm writing:  Revising rejected poems. 

Etiquette For Poets

Image of the Day:  Markedly cooler morning air and the crickets shocked mute.

Holy cow:  we're in the middle of August.  I've been busy freaking out about my son who has been having a very good time in Boston at a day camp.  Typical.  Also, there have been three or four happily lost pigs routing in the muck on the path that I run on during the weekends.  I think there is some kind of connection there. 

What I am (and am going to be) reading:  The Crafty Poet, by Diane Lockward, is zooming through the mail.  You can read all about it right here and then buy it cause you are gonna want all those fabulous prompts and discussions about writing poetry. 

I'm also reading In The Dojo, by Dave Lowry, about the etiquette in the martial arts programs.  In particular, the chapter about being a student in martial arts is so relevant for poets, at least in my opinion.

For example, Lowry writes that sometimes when practicing with someone who is more senior than you, it's tempting to think too much.  Instead, the student should try and "simply learn" (178).  Just work on your craft.  I'm working right now on yet another iteration of my manuscript, trying to polish it up, and one of my poetry friends, the fabulous Ruth Foley, has generously agreed to switch manuscripts so we can get feedback on each other's work.  So I was able to put my head down and get that manuscript together to send to her.  I knew it needed work, but actually doing it can be daunting. 

Another thing Lowry says is that all students of martial arts "run into periods when they don't seem to be able to improve"  (179).  All of us poets have felt that, either from a discouraging rejection, not being able to write a poem when other poets are blogging about how they've written so many poems, or whatever.  I think we need to remember that there are those fallow periods and that we keep practicing and will eventually find a way to write a good poem again. 

So anyway, these things have been helpful for me to read and to remind myself to practice and keep polishing  my writing skills.  Maybe someone should write an etiquette book for poets--and naming it so would help place ourselves in healthier perspectives.  (And then we wouldn't have to worry about lists and such.)


557
One step outside the gate
and I too am a traveller
in the autumn evening




Yosa Buson
translated from the Japanese by W. S. Merwin and Takako Lento

Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson
Copper Canyon Press

"Bursting and Crush"

Image of the Day:  the snap of blueberry skin under my teeth this cool July morning.

I bought a pint of fresh blueberries from a local farm stand and have practically eaten the whole thing myself.  Small blue darlings.  I saw two of the fox kits near the shed the other day--but I can't tell if they're all back or what since I haven't seen anything of them since then.  Big green grasshoppers have been exploring the windows of my house and the sides of my garage and a green dragonfly buzzes the backyard.

I'm so pleased and happy that the wonderful editor Kathleen Kirk over at Escape Into Life has nominated one of my poems, "The Wife's Mid-Life Crisis While Dusting the Bathroom Cabinet," for the 2013 Best of the Net Awards!   You can read that poem here as well as the other fabulous poets that Kathleen nominated as well--I am in terrific company!  Thank you Kathleen for all you do! 

Also, in other poetry news, this year I decided to enter some poems into poetry contests.  Normally, I shy away from those things for various reasons, including, mostly, monetary.  But this year, I chose three contests with journals that I really admire.  (The entrance fee included subscriptions, so I can get on board with that, I reasoned to myself.)  One contest I haven't heard back from yet, and one contest was an absolute no, but one journal accepted a poem!  So although I didn't win the contest, they did say that I came very close at the end and that Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who I just love love love, admired my poem!!!  Well, that was pretty nifty in my book and worth the expense. 

I'm hoping to make it to the farmer's market this Friday--I really need some vine-ripened tomatoes.  We have a few plants, but the chipmunks are biting into them and then just dropping them on the ground to rot.  Annoying!  But until then, I'm enjoying this.  I hope you do, too.

Cherry Tomatoes by Moonlight

Skintight virgins in a rush
their red on red sashay
through vines, so plush
their seeds and flesh
all bite-size blush
your very own stash
ripening in the raw, oh lush
that you are for a good flourish
of bursting and crush.
 

Kate Sontag

Court Green
Issue 10 - Winter 2013

And The Chapbook Giveaway Winner Is....

Kathleen!!! 

Hey Kathleen, if you could send me your address at bergcaro at gmail dot com I will send you a copy.

Thanks everyone for playing!

Chapbook Giveaway!

I just got five of my chapbooks today in the mail and decided to give one away.  Please comment below if you'd like a chance to enter or email me at bergcaro at gmail dot com.  I'll choose a winner on July 17 (or thereabouts) and mail it off.

If you need something to read for the summer...

That is one gorgeous cover, isn't it?  So my chapbook is now available from Red Bird Chapbooks, and I couldn't be happier with it and with working with them.  Thank you so much to the editors, Dana and Sarah!

Made-up Words

Yesterday we had a tornado warning so my son and I got to spend some quality time on the stairs to our basement.  That was fun.  Thank heavens for small hand-held electronics so we could pass the time watching exactly where it was and how much longer we actually had to be on the stairs, cause really, that wasn't the funnest (my favorite made up word) place to be.  One of our cats knocked off the screen door to the porch hurtling toward a chipmunk and as I was eating my breakfast this morning, a big ole spider was exploring my hand.  I'm pretty sure I had felt him jump up on my ankle, take a bite, and move up my pants.  Now I feel all buggy.

Jeannine is writing some very interesting stuff on her blog.  She says, "I hate to say this, but very few of the young men (literally, maybe only one or two) I’ve worked with have struggled with any of the above, regardless of the quality of their writing. Therefore, those guys have several books and a tenure-track teaching job now. Just think of that, ladies, and let it motivate you to not stand in the way of your own writing. Send it out, be proud, take the time to work on it and make it the best it can be but then for God’s sake send it out and when it gets published then promote it without feeling ashamed."  I have really been feeling the promotion shame lately.  That feeling of why on earth would anybody be interested in reading these poems and why should I point anyone in their direction?  Not to mention how, if I thought anyone WAS reading my poems, that they would think I'm a horrible person.  As if they would think, how can she write those things, what does her family think of her???  In other words, shame.  And the poems I am writing now?...I'm all like, these are so unimportant.  I should be writing about the big political stuff.  But that's not what I write or how I write.  And I have to just let that kind of wasteful thinking go. 

And on a different note, Susan Rich has a beautiful note on the gift of poetry editors.  We should definitely praise them and thank them, because, as she so correctly states:  1. Poetry Editors are almost always poets themselves. They take time away from their own work to promote other writers and allow new work entry into the world.2. No one gets rich or becomes famous as a poetry editor. They do work for free or little money.  We poets are so lucky to have such generous editors.  My editors over at Red Bird Chapbook were working hard this weekend to correct the proofs of my, and I'm sure other poets', chapbook. 

And so I would like to point you in the direction of three poems I have in the latest Rufous City Review and to thank those editors for taking a lot of time and energy and creating a beautiful journal full of art.  And I'm gonna try really hard not to go bang my head against some invisible stupid wall of shame.  Wish me luck.

Epicene

Always covering myself
in clothes or cloaks of words
which only dogs hear: in truth
                    I was nude and didn't know
which parts to cover or if
I could finally uncover it all.
And what a relief to move
my hands, formally, from
my breasts, testes and labia,
to show myself, for what I am—
a worm or perhaps just a cell
which may birth and split from itself
                    and I wish you could see
all my secret hairs
revealed like words
or the meanings of words
which always seem concrete
in dreams but never when I awake
                    and quickly cover.
 

Ryan Van Winkle

American Poetry Review
July / August 2013

Whammed Again

The fox kits and Mama Fox have moved elsewhere. 

I had the twenty-four hour stomach-flu yesterday.  I hate that feeling where the body is sick but the mind isn't so you're just laying there in bed, itching to do anything else.  I'd not move for awhile, feel better and roll over to get outta bed and get whammed again.  Today, it is such a joy not to feel the rumblings in my stomach and to actually eat something.

I'm reading Poetry As Survival by Gregory Orr, well, more accurately, I've picked it back up again.  There are so many things he writes that I agree with / feel strongly about, such as:

The jeopardy of poetry-making is deeply connected to the jeopardy of life itself (48)

...language itself is a form of sight (31) 

The essential point is that for a poem to move us it must bring us near our own threshold.  We must feel genuinely threatened or destabilized by the poem's vision of disordering, even as we are simultaneously reassured and convinced by its orderings (55 my italics)

But I'm not sure I agree with this statement:  "...poets have a higher threshold for psychic disorder than the average population, just as professional dancers have higher pain thresholds"  (57-58).

I think poets watch their mind and listen to it closely and try and tap into their emotions as honestly as they can.  Or at least some poets.  But this seems to me to be so close to saying poets are crazy and are comfortable with it. That just seems like such a cliché to me.  But at the same time, I know when my mom died, and we had to go back to the house and talk about when to hold the funeral, I totally mentally just checked out.  My sister even said to me, "You weren't there."  But I also was able to translate this into a poem--this mental check-out that I had. 

But I don't know now, maybe this is just confirming what he's saying. 

***Reviewing/Rethinking this at four in the morning:  maybe he's actually saying that poets can handle more challenging mental stuff and NOT go crazy.  I like that idea much better. 

What do you think?  Do  you agree with his statement?

The Major Subjects

Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.

Consider the sea cucumber:
when attacked it divides, sacrificing half
so that half
won't get eaten. Can the part left undevoured
figure out what to do?

The natural world is always instructive,
mysterious as well, but often
hard to praise. Love
is also difficult—the way it slides into
so many other subjects,

like murder, deceit,
and the moon. As my mother used to say
about anything
we couldn't find: If it had been
a snake it would have bitten you.

Fellow poets, we must
learn again to copy from nature,
see for ourselves
how steadfastly even its beauty
refuses to care or console.

Lawrence Raab

The Common
Issue 5

I take it down, put it back up again

I'm feeling ambivalent about this blog. 

That is all.

At Least A Curiosity

It is a regular menagerie around our house right now.  We  have three (nope, just saw another one--so four!!!) grey fox kits playing out around our shed.  They are so cute to watch--I positively squeal when I see them.  Hopefully, Mama Fox is somewhere nearby, although we haven't seen her and I'm getting worried.  Also, three baby red squirrels were tearing up my birdfeeders, doing all sorts of gymnastics to get to the seed.  They are a noisy group but very cute as well.  I've had to honk at little finches trying to get whatever on the road that's apparently fit to eat, or at least a curiosity and yesterday on my run I scared Mama Duck and her ten or so ducklings right next to the path. 

I have two more Wife with her Mid-life crisis poems up at Noctua Review you can read here.  I also got my proof copy of my chapbook Her Vena Amoris with the most exquisite cover--I'm very thrilled with the book. 

But I've  been getting my fair share of rejections as well.  Bleck.  And I've got about 14 poems for this month but these past two days have not produced anything.  I could blame it on a thousand things, but it's possible I'm just done for right now.  We'll see. 

Reminiscences Of My Father

Happy Father's Day!  So what made your dad your dad?  My dad used to be a hunter and a general out-doors man.  We grew up hearing about all kinds of hunting adventures he had.  He was tri-state area champion in target shooting and there were always guns around our house, although usually locked up.  I went skeet-shooting a few times with him and enjoyed shooting guns.  My dad was also an excellent fisherman and my favorite memories are being out on the boat with him and my mom and sisters fighting the stripped bass.  Those are fun fish because when they hit the bait they go deep and you really have to work at getting them on the boat.  Anyway, L. L. Bean would ask him to take certain clients out on his boat to show them where the best fishing was on the Kennebec.  Many of our summer vacations as young kids involved going to the Battenkill River in Vermont watching my dad catch trout with his Orvis fly rods.  We would always have to visit that store, or at least drive by.  I also learned to bird-watch from him and now that he can't get out as much, we chat about what interesting birds are around.  Here's a poem of mine about all of this sort of thing:

Fishing

 

I don’t know what to cast toward today

to catch whatever’s swimming

inside my tide-turning mind.

The diving terns and skimming seagulls

have no need for rod and reel.

 

The Battenkill River holding my

childhood in its swirls and eddies:

Little girl listening to lectures on

nymphs and pupa chasing spotted

salamanders and her father’s attention

in shallow ponds. 

 

Listen:  the mayflies are hatching even now

their curved backs like elegant commas

and my father hunched over in his blue

leather chair all alone in what was once his

fairy tale house of forty five years.

 

 

If I strain, could I hear the practiced

back and forth swish of my father’s fishing rod flying

in our backyard? Only the small incandescent insects

dance in this late afternoon light.