Poetry world

Although Henry David Thoreau wrote little poetry, I find his essays and journal to be inspirational. He advised in his journal that we should �Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.�

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, � the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, � advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, � dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man�s ingratitude;
   Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams and like them in this cold month I am protecting my buds from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

         

With all the Oscar buzz this week, a nominated animated short film this year has a poetry connection. Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata's Academy Award Nomination for Best Animated Short with "Negative Space" is based on a poem of the same name by Ron Koertge.

Ron's prose poem (flash fiction?) begins:



Ron Koertge's poem was published in his collection, Sex World  (2014, Red Hen Press).

Having gone through high school in the late 1960s, several of the younger English teachers brought popular song lyrics into our poetry lessons to entice us beyond Keats, Frost and the rest of the anthology club.

One of my teachers was a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, as was I. I still recall a lesson reading  "Richard Cory" by E.A. Robinson and then listening to their song version.  My first thought in seeing the original poem was that Simon had basically plagiarized the poem. But Mr. Reece, my teacher, talked about how Paul had changed the point of view to one of Cory's workers, and how that changed the poem for a reader.

In the following weeks, I wrote several terrible songs with my guitar based on poems that I liked. (Never ask me to sing my Frostian "Miles to Go" song.)

The other poem/song combination in that class session was Simon's "I Am a Rock" along with Donne's poem "No Man Is an Island." Here the differences were more obvious. It was more that the Donne poem, and really just one image, acted as a writing prompt for Paul Simon.

Our teachers probably hoped that beyond sparking our interest in poetry, we might make the leap to read more of Robinson or Donne beyond what was in the anthology. I did, though most of my classmates did not.

I liked Robinson's poems, many of which were like short stories.

Songs based on poems are fairly common. There are a good number of direct interpretations as when Natalie Merchant uses poems, such as Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death." 

This month we are going to try writing a poem from an existing song. But we are not looking to imitate the song or even use lines from the song. A better model, though in the reverse direction, might be Paul Simon's "I Am a Rock" which takes inspiration, but does not merely imitate John Donne's poem.

I AM A ROCK

A winter�s day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow

I am a rock
I am an island

I�ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It�s laughter and it�s loving I disdain

Don�t talk of love
Well, I�ve heard the words before
It�s sleeping in my memory
And I won�t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock
I am an island

And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries

- Paul Simon





NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne


For this prompt, select any song as your inspiration. Indicate at the top or bottom of your poem what song/composer/artist you used. You might select some lines to repurpose. You might use themes from the song in your own poem. The original should serve as a contrasting view or extension to your poem, rather than being just another version of it.

Submission deadline: February 7, 2018 

Years ago, I was in a haiku workshop where the teacher gave us a find-a-word puzzle as a writing prompt and asked us to look it over and write down the first three words we saw. We were then to use each of those words in a different line of a haiku.

Many writing prompts seem "artificial." You are asked to "write about an article of clothing you once owned that you wish you still had." How odd. But in another workshop where that was a prompt, my friend, Jim, wrote a beautiful poem about his father's coat that hung on a hook by the back door for most of his childhood. And when Jim read that first version of his poem, I was prompted to write a poem about the Navy pea coat my father wore in WWII and that I wore after he died. Why did I give it away?

Below is that original find-a-word puzzle that I found in with some poetry papers during my annual end-of-year cleanout. If you need a bonus prompt to write something here at year's end, try this: Look over the puzzle below and write down the first 5 words you find and then use each as part of a line of a poem about the year that is ending.

Of course, you could also find just 3 words and write a haiku, or get into puzzling and find 14 for a sonnet or any variation.

I think the value of writing prompts is that they can push you into places you would not have otherwise gone in your writing. It seems counterintuitive that given as "assignment" you have more freedom. In the same way, forms are freeing. As a young poet, I despised formal poetry in my own writing. It seemed like I was being forced to select a word or line break etc. when I didn't want it. But my imagination was forced to not only conform to the form or prompt, but find creative ways to do it.

If you like the poem that comes from this little prompt, post it as a comment here and put the words you found and used in CAPITAL letters.

Our December prompt on pilgrims and pilgrimages talked about my own short journey to the garden of Stanley Kunitz and I want to his final poem from his Collected Poems.

I was at the reading captured here on video at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival held at Waterloo Village in New Jersey. There was an electricity that ran through the audience as he read, and a standing ovation when he finished.

�Touch Me� is a love poem that takes place in that garden. In his old age, as a storm approaches and he stakes his plants for protection, he ponders the seasons in a life. To his question�What makes the engine go?� he answers  �Desire, desire, desire.�

It is the last poem he published.

...The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
                        and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

After being on almost all major social networking sites from last thirteen years I realized it's been too long for such a thing. I first learned the idea of social networking sites in 2005 and it began with Orkut in it's golden days. Lots of groups and communities which shared tons of information, old time games and scarps to each other. Lots of friends found and lost as well.

Then came

Canterbury Pilgrims by William Blake, 1808

A pilgrim (from the Latin peregrinus) is a traveler. Literally, it is one who has come from afar and commonly it is someone who is on a journey to a holy place. Though we generally think of this as a physical journey, often on foot, to some place of special significance, it can also be other kinds of "journeys."

A pilgrimage is that journey. At one time, these were alway long trips made to some sacred place. But distances can be covered more quickly today, and the journey can be a metaphorical one and the destination can be into someone's own beliefs.

There are many places that pilgrims have made their way to for many years: the Holy Land, Lumbini, Kumbh Mela, The Temple Mount and Mecca. There are also places less well known tat individual make pilgrimages to for their own reasons: to the place where they were born or where they grew up, or where there father or mother lived, a poet's home or...

I know that people also make pilgrimages to a place but really it is to a thing - the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., a manuscript, a gravesite.

One of the best known books about a pilgrim is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It is an old text (1678) and a difficult read for most modern readers.

The book is presented as a dream sequence told by an omniscient narrator. The allegory's protagonist is Christian, an everyman. His pilgrimage takes him from his hometown, the "City of Destruction" ("this world"), to the "Celestial City" ("that which is to come" - Heaven) atop Mount Zion.


To end 2017, we will write pilgrimage poems this month, and by pilgrimage we mean a journey to a special place or thing, spiritual, if not religious.

Our model poem is "Pilgrimage" by Natasha Trethewey, which is about a journey to Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Her poem incorporates the themes of time, history, and memory as are presented in the first half of her book Native Guard.

Here, the Mississippi carved
            its mud-dark path, a graveyard
for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
            Here, the river changed its course,
turning away from the city
            as one turns, forgetting, from the past�

A kind of pilgrimage that I have made over the years is to the birthplaces, homes and graves of writers. I can't quite explain what I expect to find in these places, but I really enjoy being in the actual places where writers I admire did their work.

My first pilgrimage was to the gravesite of Stephen Crane. I was born in the same city as Crane. I liked his stories and I liked his simple poems a lot when I was a very young poet. His life was short and tragic. He is buried not far from where I grew up. I went there. I made a gravestone rubbing. I took a photo of myself at his grave.

I didn't feel his presence there. No ghosts. No mystical experiences. But in some way, it did change how I thought about him and writing. I've never written a poem about that pilgrimage. I haven't determined, even after all these years, exactly what I want to say about it.

When I spent a week in a poetry workshop in Provincetown on Cape Cod, a few of us in the group wanted to make a pilgrimage to the house - really, the garden - of poet Stanley Kunitz.

We had heard about the garden. We knew it entered into some of his poems. We asked some locals who either protected his privacy, had never heard of him, or gave us rather cryptic directions. But we found it.

His home was modest. A grey shingled cottage on a small hill in the east end. The garden was terraced, built on what was originally a dune that he fertilized with compost and seaweed to have actual soil. As a gardener myself, I felt this connection to him and his poems.

We didn't see Stanley and didn't knock or intrude, but it was great to see it.

I eventually met Stanley a few times at poetry readings at the Dodge Poetry Festivals and in Paterson, New Jersey.  Later, I would find the book, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, and also read articles about other Kunitz pilgrims, and I would reread his poems looking for garden references.

If you decide to journey the more traditional religious path in your poem, you can look to some older poems - perhaps, George Herbert's "The Pilgrimage," or a more modern poet traveling to an ancient place, such as in "Different Ways to Pray" by Naomi Shihab Nye.  Here is an excerpt from her poem:

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery. 

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children�s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

Religious or not, journey by foot, car or in the imagination - for December, write about a pilgrimage.

Deadline for submissions: December 6, 2018


        

Who reads poetry? Poets read poetry. Students read, not always by choice, poetry they are assigned. Who are the other readers of poetry?

Certainly, people get things from poetry that they don't get from reading novels, non-fiction and news.

�It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.�

That's what William Carlos Williams wrote in  "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (read an excerpt) a long love poem to his wife that he wrote late in his life.

In the collection Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from 'Poetry' Magazine, people are asked why they read poetry. The answers are taken from the magazine's column "The View From Here.�

Musician Neko Case calls poetry �a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress.�

An anthropologist, Helen Fisher, turns to poetry while researching the effects of love on the brain, �As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or pot shards to understand human thought, I studied poetry. . . . I wasn�t disappointed: everywhere poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain�s eruptions.�

Ask that question to a Google search and you will find many other people have asked and answered the question.

Dan Chelotti gives many answers, begiinning with: "Read poetry because of the times you have stopped to look at rain fall through the light of a street lamp and wished you knew the words that made it what it was. Read poetry because you are lonely and full of wild abandon. Read poetry so when you are no longer lonely and are wrapping your arms and legs around your beloved your beloved will tell you I have never known arms and legs to have such wild abandon. Read poetry so a part of you stays in what you see, so what you see stays with you..."

Matthew Zapruder covers the question in a bit broader way in his book Why Poetry which attempts to answer not only why we should read it but also why we write it.



     

I usually don't write product reviews because I have a strange set or parameters that never meets most people's needs. However, this time I am writing one for Audio Technica M50X studio monitor headphones, which I have been using from last one month. I don't qualify as an audiophile, but I do have average understanding of music and sound. I don't create music myself, but I appreciate ones

One of the perennial and difficult to answer questions that writers get in a Q&A is "How can I get published?"

When I was in a week-long poetry workshop about 20 years ago with Tom Lux, I asked him that often-asked question. He said he always had a dozen poems "out there" at magazines and journals, and he had envelopes ready to go to other magazines so that when a poem was rejected, it went right back out again. Persistence.

It's good advice and a discipline that does not come naturally to many writers.

These days, not as many poems get mailed on paper to publishers. Online submission portals and email is often the way we submit our work.

Poet and publisher Diane Lockward has regularly posted listings of print journals that are reading submissions. She did two Summer Journals A - F  and Summer Journals G - P post this year.

If you have used Submittable, a service used by a good number of organizations, it allows you to submit and track your submissions. They also offer an email newsletter that lists publishing opportunities.

I wish I knew the secret of getting a book published. I know more and more poets who are self-publishing and doing their own promotion, tours etc., but most of us want the recognition of a publisher accepting our work. Validation, perhaps.

I would also recommend using lists like one from Poets and Writers magazine to find individual publications for poems and also manuscript contests and grants.  There are always some that are free, but most have a fee which is how many presses pay for publication.

The Poetry Society also offers resources of places that use poetry.

Start with the free ones, but the secret might be to always have a few poems out there as submissions.

The National Book Foundation have announced its winners of National Book Awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people�s literature. Each winner will be awarded $10,000, and each finalist will take home $1,000.


For Poetry, the winnner is Frank Bidart for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

FINALISTS
Leslie Harrison, The Book of Endings (University of Akron Press)

Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (Graywolf Press)

Shane McCrae, In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press)

Danez Smith, Don�t Call Us Dead: Poems (Graywolf Press) finalists:

         


Books on the judges' long list are:

Chen Chen, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, Ltd.)
Marie Howe, Magdalene: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company)
Laura Kasischke, Where Now: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
Sherod Santos, Square Inch Hours (W. W. Norton & Company)
Mai Der Vang, Afterland (Graywolf Press)

The judges for poetry were Nick Flynn, Jane Mead, Gregory Pardlo, Richard Siken, Monica Youn (Chair).