43º ~ the sky still mixed gray and white in the wake of last evening’s storms, one small splotch of blue directly in front of me (Update: the blue in front of me expanded to fill the whole window while typing this post, I face the west, woo hoo, good omens)

Oh, Dear Reader, today’s draft was a battle hard won. 

I did say my mantra last night and I was happy thinking about the drafting time today.  It was a long week at work, with lots of grading going on in the afternoons and evenings.  I’ve been fighting off a sense of exhaustion along the way, and all that is normal for this time of year.  Also normal is that my ability to concentrate is beginning to fray a bit.  So, last night and this morning while I would remind myself that I was going to draft a poem, I couldn’t sustain the concentration to think on what I might have to say.

I know this may seem forced to some of you, this prescribed writing time.  All I know is that more times than not, it works for me.

This picture of my desk tells the story of the day.

I began with coffee, as always.  The paper is green because I’m recycling a bunch of fliers from school.  I started by printing out all of my fairy tale poems, which are stacked to the left.  I did this in part because I was curious how many I have: 9, but also in part because a poet-editor friend has asked to see some for possible publication and I have promised to do submissions this weekend.  Here, I may have gotten completely off course by thinking about what’s going on tomorrow instead of today.  However, I did remind myself that I have two poems that are more general and don’t have the “Fairy Tale for Girls Who…” type of title, but they are clearly part of the same project.  Hold that thought.

Next, I listed all the titles in my journal and thought for a bit about doing another tale.  Nothing sparked.  I thought about the week and why my brain was so jumbled, too much happening in this wild world.  A line or two formed: “It’s happening again/ the world unraveling… .”  I admit I drafted a full poem then, but I wasn’t happy with it. 

Unsatisfied, I decided to read some poems.  You see the latest issue of Barn Owl Review there at the bottom of the pile in the picture and Traci Brimhall’s book Rookery.  I’m looking forward to both of these reads; however, I started with the journal, and the poems were amazing but I couldn’t sink into them, still fretting about a draft. Maybe I needed to stick with poems I knew by heart from poets I’d lived with a long time.  So, I called up “The Colonel” by Forche and “Sonnet XVII” by Neruda and did a word bank.  I turned to my random number generator and formed pairs.  I couldn’t believe it…NOTHING!  This exercise has rarely failed me and I began to wonder if my tank was simply EMPTY.  I turned to Brimhall’s book and read the first poem.  Wow!  I couldn’t wait to read this book, but I knew I needed to read it when not trying to write.

Still struggling, I pulled out two inspiration cards and out of desperation simply listed all the images I saw.  One of the cards featured a painting of a bull kicking wildly and with its head thrown back.  There were a lot of allusions to other countries and to the southern US, but nothing struck me.  And then, I wrote, “And so, why not, another tale.”  But this time, I didn’t force the form of the “once there was a girl.”  Instead, I let myself write about one of my doubts; there are no witches and no prince-charmings in my tales.  As I said before, this has been worrying me.  And now, there is going to be a movie based on Little Red Riding Hood and making the wolf a werewolf…I think.  I’ve seen the commercial a dozen times this week and I’m still not sure how the tale is being twisted there.

With the images of that beautiful blonde woman in her dramatic red and all the danger hinted at in the commercials, I started the poem that I’m calling “The Contents of Our Fairy Tales.”  It begins:  “No witches.  No wolves. / The blood of the cow slaughtered / and dressed is enough for fright.” 

Enough.  The draft and I are a bit scarred today.  Only revision will save us, and that’s for tomorrow.

64º ~ far too warm for this early in the day at this time of year ~ storms on the horizon ~ solid gray skies ~ a breeze that smells of rain

I am thrilled to write today about my friend and fellow Arkansas MFA grad Brian Spears’ first book A Witness in Exile.  It seems I’ve developed a bit of a pattern to reading a book of poetry.  I start with the cover and front matter, then move to the back matter and back cover, and then to the first poem.  Yes, I read from front to back, in order, the first time I read the book.  If poets and their editors spend so much time on the order of a book these days, then I’m going to find out why. 

What an honor then, to find my name among the acknowledgments among some major league poetry sluggers.  Wow.  Thanks for that, Brian.

A Witness in Exile is a book about the celebration of place and the struggle of one son with his family.  Much will be made of Brian’s biography, having been raised a Jehovah’s Witness, who was excommunicated from the church and thus from his biological family as well.  While the book isn’t divided into sections, I definitely found the arc.  We begin steeped in the South, mostly in southern Louisiana & NOLA where Brian was raised, and then on to Florida, where Brian currently lives.  Towards the end of the place poems we get a handful from the West, which matches another part of Brian’s biography, having been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford after finishing at Arkansas.  These place poems compose the first half of the book.  The second half deal with family, with Brian’s relationship to his daughter, from whom he was separated by divorce, and with Brian’s relationship to his father and the church. 

The first poem in the book is a prose poem titled “Pastoral” and begins in the heat and humidity of southern Louisiana with the speaker as a boy fishing in Gar Creek.  The poem ends with a sentence that sets the theme for the entire book: “The walk home is never long enough.”  Here we are introduced to the fact that the speaker is uneasy with his home, his origins.  In another poem toward the beginning of the book, “One Day the Ruins of the Galleria Mall Will Shelter Armadillos,” Brian expands on that theme.  He writes, “and this is what it means to be / American and lonely” and later “[We] have / no river gods to transform us into / laurel trees so we can escape the lusts / of … never mind.”  The speaker expresses, here, that we have come too far from our original myths for them to offer any hope or solace. 

Of all the place poems, “What Change Must Come” encapsulates this 21st century relationship to the land, America, and home.

Here is a bit from the poem:

The places I love most

to submerge it whole.

While I am most drawn to Brian’s poems of place (and this is no surprise as that’s my own focus), he handles the most closely autobiographical poems with the same deft craft and brutal honesty.  In “Lament,” the speaker states, “It is not poetic, your leaving / of church and family; / it is pathetic the way you slip away.”  Some of the most haunting lines in the book arrive in these poems when the speaker must reconcile his being cast out by not only the church but also his father.  It is hard to do this justice with an excerpt, but I’ll leave you with this one and encourage you to read the book for the full impact.

from “Tell it slant”

(PS: I love the ghosts of Dickinson and Bishop in this poem.)

A Witness in Exile
Brian Spears
Louisiana Literature Press, 2011

57º ~ cloudy skies and some wind trying to get things started, everything gray and drap, mid-February

If you followed along with my AWP reports, you’ll know that I was lucky enough to have a brief breakfast and book swap with Martha Silano.  I can’t remember how I first found Martha’s blog, Blue Positive, but it’s one of my favorites.  Martha let us all follow along on the blog during the production of The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, so it was a double delight to hold the finished product in my hand.  (The link to Saturnalia will show that the book is in production; however, it is available for sale NOW.)

By chance Martha’s book wound up on the top of my backpack at the airport, so I read the first 4/5 of the book ten days ago.  Last night, I reread the poems I’d dog-eared from that read and then polished off the last section of the five.  Wow, what a great way to end a long and slightly stressful day.

Two words sum up this book for me: domestic and divine.  To elaborate, these are poems about the domestic life of a busy mom-wife-woman-friend and include the daily details of meals, cars, jobs, and brand-named products, all the trappings of our 21st century lives.  However, these domestic details are constantly brought to bear on the divine or vice versa, and what I mean by the divine is much larger than just religion.  I mean the cosmos, spirituality, religion, and aliens; we mustn’t forget the aliens. 

The first section of the five into which the book is divided is titled “What I Will Tell the Aliens,” and each section is titled based on a poem within.  This first section features a speaker attempting to name “My Place in the Universe” (the first poem in the book).  The section sets up the idea of this one speaker as one of the 6 billion plus people inhabiting this earth and the knowledge that there is so much more going on beyond our singular lives.  The whole book reminds us that our little blue planet is just one dot in the larger universe.

Here’s a bit from “What I Will Tell the Aliens”

This brief excerpt showcases Martha’s strengths as a poet.  Her speakers are real, honest-to-goodness, struggling human beings, and they talk to the reader as if sharing a drink with a good friend.  The poems are filled with humor, sarcasm, wit, and they always push the reader to answer the question: Who are we?  What are we doing with our lives?

Here’s just a sliver from “After Reading There Might be an Infinite Number of Dimensions”

Just looking back at all the poems I have marked in the book, I could go on and on with this brief bits, but I’d be short changing both you, Dear Reader, and Martha.  This is a book with poems that are begging to be read and reread. 

I also vote this book BEST COVER of all the books spread out on my desk waiting to be read right now.  Seriously, the cover alone is worth the price of the book, but the poems will prove your time well spent.

My all-time favorite lines from the whole book come from “No Refunds, No Exchanges.”  Here:  “And yet I’m no girdle / on this galaxy’s expanding waistline.”  I’m still smiling from this poem, this poem of optimism in the face of a life that might crush us at any moment.

Support a Poet/Poetry
Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today!
The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception
Martha Silano
Saturnalia Books, 2001

71º ~ Yep, we made it to the 70s!

Dear Readers, one special book tried to get away!  Many apologies to the wonderful Lynne Knight for leaving this off my list from earlier today.  Lynne works for Anhinga and designed Blood Almanac.  She has a brand new book of poems out, and I got my very own signed copy at AWP!

Carol Lynne Knight from Apalachee Press

44º ~ a bit of spring weather this week with sunny skies and highs in the 60s all week ~ sympathies to my northern companions where the snowbanks remain ~ and oh, a flock of cedar waxwings have arrived to dine on the privet berries

Today, I’ve got a list of books I brought back from AWP and a few that have arrived in the mail recently.  Looking forward to returning to my reviews, possibly later this week, but Monday for sure.  (All the covers link back to the press website.  Consider buying directly from the source to put more money in the pockets of those who work so hard for poetry.)

In the mail: books by two fellow U of Arkansas grads.  Woo Hoo!

Matthew Henriksen from Black Ocean

Brian Spears from Louisiana Literature Press

From the AWP bag:

Alison Stine from U Wisconsin Press

Dan Albergotti from BOA

Martha Silano from Saturnalia

Traci Brimhall from Southern Illinois U Press

Jake Adam York from U Southern Illinois U Press

Joy Katz from Tupelo

Aimee Nezhukumatathil from Tupelo

William Trowbridge from Red Hen

Patrick Hicks from Salmon

I love Rodney Jones! Thanks to Sean Chapman for first introducing us.

36º ~ Praise be we’re on our way to the upper 50s ~ brilliant sun and a warm wind working through the snow still on the ground (maybe two inches left in places) ~ MUD

No, it’s not the Oscars, but I was thrilled to discover that Tawnysha Greene gave me my first blog award last night.  Tawnysha’s one of those amazing people who publishes in three genres!  If you aren’t reading her blog yet, skip this post and go there now.

The Memetastic Award started with Jillismo and has passed from blog to blog, and one of my duties as a recipient is to send the award on to five other bloggers.  Only 5!  I could have listed 10!  In no particular order, those five are:

1.  Kristin Berkey-Abbott.  A great poet who blogs about poetry, literature, and the wider world in general.

2.  Josh Robbins.  Wonderful poet and editor who posts whole poems and links to books, along with recaps of his writing life.

3.  Karen Weyant.  Lovely poet from above the snowline who gives voice to her blue collar roots and blogs about a life among her books & teaching.

4.  Luke Johnson.  A great poet just emerging on the scene with a blog full of links and new discoveries.

5. Martha Silano.  Lovely poet and new AWP friend who has a new book out and blogs about all things poetry and writing related.

The other requirement is that I list five facts, four of which are lies.  Guess which one is true!  (Mom, you aren’t allowed to tell!)

1.  When I was eight, I fell into a grain bin at a friend’s farm and had to be rescued by the local volunteer fire department.  I was sad that it never made the news.
2.  I once wanted to join the circus to do a combination trapeze and snake handling act.  I had my music and costume all picked out.
3.  I have a birthmark on my shoulder that is shaped like a quill pen.
4.  I got so many parking tickets at the University of Arkansas that I’m afraid to go back and visit even when I park on city streets.
5.  The year after I graduated from the College of St. Benedict, my family doctor became my patron and paid me to do her errands but also to read and write, even including a book allowance in my salary.

Let me know if you have any guesses for which of the above statements is the true one and I will reveal the right one tomorrow.  Stay tuned…

–link back to the blogger who awarded you.
–display the graphic from award creator.
–post 5 facts, four of which must be lies.
–pass the award on to 5 other bloggers who must follow these rules.
–link the post back, so Jillsmo can follow its trajectory.

Again, the start of this is shaky, but the sound seems good.