Wasn't There

Image of the Day:  The yellow leaves outside my work window lit up from the gorgeous and generous sun today. 

I have a poem here in Rogue Agent.  A Poetry Story:  that poem, "Girls Who Struggle," was previously accepted at another journal but when the issue came out in which it was supposed to appear, it wasn't there.  So I emailed and the editor said he'd "look into it" but nothing ever came of it.  So I withdrew it and sent it off to various other journals.  Rogue Agent took it and so I subsequently withdrew it from other places.  But then came an acceptance from another journal, who hadn't apparently gotten my withdrawal or had overlooked it or something.  I emailed them back and told them about the mistake and figured, well, they're gonna hate me and I can't submit there ever again.  But then yesterday, I got a very nice and understanding email from that journal, asking me to resubmit when they open. Phew! Very nice. So technically that poem has been accepted three (!) times!  I guess that makes up for some other rejections.   

Also, I had mentioned that one of my poems had been published with the wrong title.  Well, actually, they had told me in the acceptance letter that they had taken one poem with the title "Abandoned Girl at the Source of" but had published that title with the wrong poem associated with it.  So I just assumed that they had wanted to publish that poem ("Abandoned Girl Wants to Peel You Open").  Turns out, no.  They had somehow published the right title with the wrong poem and have now fixed it--thanks!--AND they are nominating it for a Pushcart Prize.  So that is mighty cool. 
So here is the right poem with the right title at the fabulous Amethyst Arsenic journal. 

And I'm being featured at The Sundress blog The Wardrobe's Best Dressed.  You can check out some poems from my chapbook The Ornithologist Poems here. 

The Marrow

There's a gleam to the trees and meadow
that verges on something heartsick;

convent quiet,
and rich as a jeweller's window.

Facing the lake-water is your bull.
He's concentrated and arcane,

his Dutch yellows make him look mild;
you think he sings to himself.

Like you, he seems to have had
a grasp of what it was to love.

What it is.
And he's lost it.

Michelle O'Sullivan

Out of the Fall

Image of the Day:  Sleek dark heads of three mink poking out of the fall river.

I got to see that yesterday while walking my dog.  At first I was like, "Seals!" cause that's how seals always pop up in the ocean in Maine, but then my brain registered the river and I realized these were mink. 

Also, I got to see a huge fat raccoon out on my run on Tuesday.  It was so big I wasn't quite sure if it was a small bear or something.  But it turned around to look at me and I could see its tail as well.  I wanted to take a picture but it lost itself in the river weeds. 

I have two poems here in the recent issue of Pith.  I love the found poem that Meg Cowen made with lines from all the poets' poems.  I really love it when editors do that kind of thing.

Hamlet

It's quiet here. A stoic rectitude
Props up the weather-pummeled citizens,
Craggy yet almost cheerful. Uniform
Gray granite cottages, precipitous
And sturdy, make the most of things. The wind
Does all the talking hereabouts, and who
Would think to think about the universe?
Their certainties define them, not their doubts.
 

Joseph Harrison

Trailer for Ides and Small Portraits

Silver Birch Press created a trailer for Ides.  Check it out here...

New Chapbook: Small Portraits

I am so pleased that my chapbook, "Small Portraits" is to be part of Ides:  A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks.  You can read the press release here at the Silver Birch Blog.  There are fifteen chapbooks collected in this selection, so you definitely want to buy it and check out all the poetry.  You can purchase a copy here at amazon.

 

 

Permanently Change

Image of the Day:  Bluejays and tufted titmice squawking at something (I'm assuming a hawk) on my way to the café here on campus; on the way back, total silence, the birds gone.

So I have a poem here at Amethyst Arsenic you can read.  Funny story:  The title for this poem is actually the title to a different poem.  I emailed the editors if they could change it, totally panicked at the mistake--and they said they would, but I know life gets busy and they haven't yet.  And now I kind of like this title better than the original title.  I may permanently change it.
Update:  So they changed the poem to the correct poem and have nominated it for a Pushcart Prize!!  That sure makes things better!



From Anne Truitt, in her memoir Prospect:  "We can understand what it is to be human only to the degree that we are willing to endure all that it is to be human" (64). 

"Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself" --I had misread that as empathy is finding echoes of yourself in another person when I first read this.  (Mohsin Hamid in Poets and Writers Sept/Oct 2015 in "The Time Is Now" column.)


Autogeography
       

Finally, the body is littered with landscapes,
the brain all map and diligent chart.

The three-story row houses line up like memories
over the barbershops and the gas station
along a street grooved with trolley tracks.

A town at the center of a stubbled cornfield
blinks under an unnecessary stoplight,
waits in bone for the winds to come at dark.

There are two lakes breathing in the chest,
one north and large, the other south and smaller,
freezing over each year, but still breathing,

the avenues rough with fleets of gypsy cabs,
the bus idling in front of the YMCA,
the national road with its angry pickup trucks.

There is so much soil in the creases of the skin,
feet black with asphalt, toughened by brown glass.

Finally, the wanderer will settle into one place,
laying the back's weight on the pavement.

The world will take root—
the world will be buried in that place.

A Mess, Spilled

Image of the Day:  some bird in the deep woods, calling, calling.


Dreams:  We had forgotten to have someone come into our house while we're away and take care of our pet monkey.  So I leave early--a campground?--and go home and the fridge is a mess, spilled pasta all over the place.  I can't find the monkey and am super trepidatious.... (We do not own a pet monkey, fyi.)


From an interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths in the recent American Poetry Review:
"Creatively, I had to let go of trying to control myself on the page.  And to give up any attempts to control other people's experience of me" (18).


From Women of Will:  Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays by Tina Packer:
"[Shakespeare] was an artist, and as with all artists, the conflicts they hold beg for attention, so they can be examined, perceived, made whole, made use of"(43). 


I had deja vu when I read this poem and I don't know why...

In the Home for Elderly Vehicular Manslaughterers by the Sea
       

The guilt, like the sand, is in everything,
being so near, as they are, to the ocean,
being so close, as they were, to the end
of their lives, before they took the lives
they took. Someone should have taken
the keys away. In many cases, they tried—
but the old, mottled, gnarled knuckles
clenched, closing reflexively around
that silver promise, its heft, its glinting
mountainous teeth. And they held on to it.
Now the guilt, like the sand, is on their hands
and on their lips. It's the grit in the food
they can't eat. Lucky the demented ones,
with no idea, no memory, blithely chewing.

Paul Hostovsky

Quest

Image of the Day:  Teeny tiny toad leaping across the road.


Hej Hej!  That's Swedish for hello! Hello!  My family and I took a trip to Sweden a couple of weeks ago and it was so gorgeous.  We stayed on the Island of Vaxholm and took ferry rides out to different islands and to Stockholm.  (I discovered that Sweden has an archipelago several years ago when my boss visited there.)  The shoreline and coast of Vaxholm was so similar to the coast line of Maine it was like I was visiting home.  I definitely could live there.  The Swedish people know their boats--we took a rented boat ride around the island by Beorn who built his own steam boat from mahogany wood and Siberian larch.  It had the feel of a train.  We ate lots of silky salmon and herring, pickled and fresh.  The fresh was so good--I'm on a quest to find local herring and make my own sauces for it.  I also purchased a rolling pin to make knickebrod--the crispy rye bread that went with everything. 


The flight home was fine but eight hours--lots of movie watching.  I got a strange sort of domestic surge when I got home--cleaning out pantry cupboards and canning blueberry conserve, peach jam and chutney.  The chutney didn't work out though and I had to ultimately toss it--after making three attempts to adjust the recipe and get it taste of something other than mustard seed and vinegar.  Maybe next year I'll try chutney again. I did manage to make some yummy gravlax:  cured salmon in my own fridge.  Here's an open face sandwich on my regular homemade bread.  It was yummy!

My son and I tried to memorize this Swedish poem before we went over.  You can listen to it here.  I translated it when I was doing my translation seminar.  Here is my translation: 

Philomela

The little pink buds

contract in my head

marvelous

I see out, it is hushed

dark whispering sounds come

my tongue buried under stone

my head finds no rest

even when the tongue was sliced from its cords

the voice was left inside

how could my head find rest

lilac-blue was the weft woven round me

hear, how sound
varies        it is a voice that lifts you

my tongue is buried, my ear shouts
my robe has gone, my head sings

Hoopla

Image of the Day:  The electric hum of the hummingbird's flight toward the feeder.


It is a beautiful day:  no humidity finally, a slight breeze to keep the mosquitoes off--not to mention the evil horseflies--and the sun.


I have a poem here in Radar Poetry you can read and listen to.  I have been submitting more this year, it seems to me, than other years.  But my poetry output seems slower or more erratic.  It seems like how I write poetry is dependent on so many things that I'm not sure I can control:  time, mainly, and the right sort of combinations of ideas, prompts, etc.  My manuscript was a finalist in two contests and also a semifinalist, so there's that hopefulness that keeps me submitting that thing. 


I'm reading The Sunlit Night.  I've read Dear Committee Members which was fun but definitely not a second read type of book.  I also read for the very first time To Kill a Mockingbird, with all the attending hoopla about Harper Lee's second book coming out. 


I also have received some amazing poetry books from Facebook friends:  Donna Vorreyer's beautiful Encantado, Margaret Bashaar's Stationed Near the Gateway, and Ruth Foley's Creature Feature. 
I've also been able to up my subscriptions to magazines this year, and check out new journals like Atlas Review and Crazyhorse. 

Song
       

                    To put the moon back in a song. To put back the sun
                    And the stars. To loosen a little the air from the ether.
                  To let the grass keep in thin shadows secret its secret love.
                                      To keep the roots dark. Nothing
                  Hasn't had enough of fear. Wants fear a little more wild.
      To the deaf ear and the wheat ear that cannot not hear the covering pall
Cover up the moon. Find some song like a coin lost in the grass. Give it a home.

Dan Beachy-Quick

Turned Tender

Image of the Day:  The whole world turned tender and greening.


I have a poem here at the gorgeous DMQ Review. That artwork!
Happy to share poetry space with Sarah J. Sloat and her two gorgeous poems. 




I am still slowly clambering out of this past winter's wreckage. 






Revision
Laura Van Prooyen
        
Understand, this is a story. You are gone
and I am home. The viburnum is in bloom.


A convertible speeds past with the top down.
Wait. Back up. The neighbor invites me


for a ride on his bike. I think yes. I say no.
Our daughters hear me and laugh. In this story,


we have no daughters. You are a stranger
and I am the girl. This is the beginning.


You refill, again and again, my drink. We walk
for hours past row houses. We don't know


where we are. This is the part where I should be scared.
I'm not. This is the part where you tell me


I'm beautiful, and I believe you. Where you press
my thigh to your hip. I wipe the rain


from your lenses like a mother, then
you resist me. You didn't count on the rain.


Or the girl who falls, so quickly, for the stranger
every time. Understand, the plot


doesn't matter. Only the peak. In this story, you
are gone a long time. I get a kitten.


It grows. I don't know viburnum from a child's
pale palm. I refill, again and again, my drink.


This is the beginning. I take off your glasses and lift
my skirt. I don't know you, but tell you: resist.

Descriptions of the Endless

Image of the Day:  How you can somehow internally feel the snow melting slowly, hear the birds singing new spring songs, and bask as the sun burnishes snow banks.


What I'm reading:  Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions by Maggie Nelson.  Nelson, who wrote Bluets which was so incredible.  This book is just as incredible:  Her study on the painter Joan Mitchell, who said, "I want to paint the feeling of a space," and also, "painting never ends, it is the only thing in the world which is both continuous and still" (20 and 22 respectively). 


What I'm writing:  in my journal, descriptions of the endless snow and its endless changing. 


How I'm feeling:  sore throat, stuffy head, snot-filled nose. 


What I'm waiting for:  next week, on Spring Break!!!


What I'm gonna do on said Spring Break:  create my own writing residency....


What bird I recently saw:  Bufflehead merganser.


What poem to read:




Poetry
       
Child of a lighthouse keeper and a firewatch,
conceived in a wordless encounter
at a rest stop—


1 part flywheel, 8 parts resraint—

luminous with near-disaster,
says, Don't try to mirror this

 world of nothing-is-as-it-seems.
Set down no word. Says, by means

 of a searching pause

 I mistake for an intimate nod,

 Step inside the caution tape.




Naomi Mulvihill

To Land In

Image of the Day:  Small snowflakes sifting down, each one looking hesitant to land in such a snowscape.


Sometimes I am really surprised when a journal accepts one poem out of all the other ones I send in a submission packet that I think will fit, based on my reading and research. 
For example, I have a poem in the recent issue of Harpur Palate.  This was the first time I had ever sent to them.  They accepted my poem "Her Pregnancy Dreams."  And I thought to myself, what resonated about that poem for the editors? Why choose that one? I mean, I like that poem, but you never know. I just got my contributor's copy yesterday in the mail, and after reading through it, I can understand.
Somehow a theme must have started to coalesce from all the submissions they received, and from the first poems that they wanted to accept.  Themes of motherhood, dreams, and water images.  I'm sure from an editor's point of view, that must seem so cool, as if that particular issue was meant to be.  And of course I'm always happy/relieved/surprised that my way of thinking about things--or in this case--dreaming about things, is in fact not so weird.  That other people think about them too. So in this particular case, for this particular poem, I am enormously lucky.  Some journals announce a theme and that's always fun to submit to, but some journals let it happen serendipitously. It's a lot of fun to be involved when that happens. 
And so I need to remember to try and tell myself to just submit the poems I have.  Cause who knows?


The Other Side of the Argument
But she prefers the morning glory,
How slowly its bloom unfurls,
How its curl of vine
Catches the flaw in masonry
First, then the crosshatch
Of kite string we hung
From the porch
As a makeshift trellis,
How it needs only a foothold
To fill half the day with blue.


Eric Pankey

Wanna Buy A Book? Of course you do....

Hey All!
My new chapbook The Ornithologist Poems is now available from dancing girl press!
As always, Kristy Bowen does such a fabulous job!!!  I'm very excited--can you tell by my use of exclamation marks?

Part 1

Some of my favorite lines and beyond:

 

“The world had been sad since Tuesday.”   A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings:  A Tale for Children  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

“and I eat men like air”  Sylvia Plath

 

“I could hear everyone’s heart” What we Talk about When We Talk about Love Raymond Carver

 

“They flee from me that one time did me seek”  Sir Thomas Wyatt  Also the line "How like you this?

 

“What is’t, Ophelia, he hath said to you?” Polonius

 “So please you, something touching the Lord Hamlet.” Ophelia

 

“The grave’s a fine and private place”  Andrew Marvell  and then what Diane Ackerman does with the lines in her poem “A Fine, A Private Place”

 

i found them there

rubbing against the leaves

so that the nubs of their

wings were flush under their skin     “report from the angel of eden”   Lucille Clifton

 

“Finally the boat veered around a rock that stood at the gateway to the ocean; the shadow of a cliff fell across it; its wake disappeared from the deserted surface, and the painter Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling vanished forever on the jade-blue sea that Wang-Fo had just created.”  “How Wang-Fo was Saved”  Marguerite Yourcenar

 

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke loose on the wind  “Poetry” Neruda

 

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house   “Sestina” Elizabeth Bishop

 (pretty bold of her, don’t you think, to title this just Sestina?)




"And this... is your opinion of me!"   Darcy from Pride and Prejudice  Jane Austen

An Obvious Thing

Happy 2015!

Yesterday I was busy organizing my computer folders and realized I'm horrible at keeping track of some things (like how many poems I've actually published in a year).  I'm trying to keep track of my published poems for grants and stuff.  So after reviewing my system, I decided to open a folder of poetry stuff just for 2015.  Keeping my poems, my submissions, my acceptances and rejections all in one place.  We'll see if that helps.  You'd think that kind of organization would be an obvious thing, but....

I also was facebooking and came across this wonderful commencement speech a MacArthur Genius Fellow had given.  Teresita Fernández has this wonderful list of things artists should remember so I'm sharing them here because I think they're spot on:

1. Art requires time — there’s a reason it’s called a studio practice.
2. Learn to write well and get into the habit of systematically applying for every grant you can find. If you don’t get it, keep applying. I lived from grant money for four years when I first graduated.
3. Nobody reads artist’s statements. Learn to tell an interesting story about your work that people can relate to on a personal level.
4. Not every project will survive. Purge regularly, destroying is intimately connected to creating. This will save you time.
5. Edit privately. As much as I believe in stumbling, I also think nobody else needs to watch you do it.
6. When people say your work is good do two things. First, don’t believe them. Second, ask them, “Why”? If they can convince you of why they think your work is good, accept the compliment. If they can’t convince you (and most people can’t) dismiss it as superficial and recognize that most bad consensus is made by people simply repeating that they “like” something.
7. Don’t ever feel like you have to give anything up in order to be an artist. I had babies and made art and traveled and still have a million things I’d like to do.
8. You don’t need a lot of friends or curators or patrons or a huge following, just a few that really believe in you.
9. Remind yourself to be gracious to everyone, whether they can help you or not. It will draw people to you over and over again and help build trust in professional relationships.
10. And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you’re going through family troubles, when you’re heartbroken, when you’re frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career.

I personally think #3 and 4 are especially important.  Well, #5 too but I think that goes for a lot of things--although I'm not as private as I think I am.  Or would like to be.  (Update:  Here is a link to the complete speech:  http://www.penultimosdias.com/2013/05/15/on-amnesia-broken-pottery-and-the-inside-of-a-form/) 

Anyway, I hope your writing and my writing are better than ever this year.  

Orange, Enormous 
        

to be a lunatic, fellowing the moon
shining, binding in quartz cracks

broken? no bracken,
leaves grown flown and blacking

I'll mumble I'll bramble
up slide down rise flattering scree

cluttering tattering full to fall
all the way to tamarack stands

crayons of larch trees please me
as they dip they tip they drip rain

sips, a psalm on my tongue
my roots laced to ground, found

the soil slinks to sap — I've tapped
I'm home come wholed

held healed in a halo of moon sight
lit I leap, lip, leaf into singing

 by Becca Rose Hall