78º ~ all storms have moved eastward and taken the heat/humidity with them, aside from the wind gusts, a perfect afternoon

Once the sun returned, I headed out to the deck to catch up on some reading. What Marie Howe says in her interview with Christian Teresi in the current issue of The Writer’s Chronicle struck a resonant chord with me.

Early in the interview, Teresi asks about the pressure to publish and notes that Howe’s three books have ten-year gaps between each publication. Here is Howe’s response:
“In all those years that I was writing poetry by myself at home, what mattered to me was not a book but a poem. Each poem. One poem. It was a world. You know what happens when you read a true poem. It sees you, you see it. There’s a profound sense of mutual recognition in that moment, and it cures, for a moment, the profound loneliness we feel on this earth. We feel kindred to someone… .”

I love how Howe uses the word “kindred” here. This is exactly how I feel about the poetry I return to over and over again to read and the poetry I hope to write.

Later, she adds this, “This new notion about book projects is really beyond me. I don’t understand it at all. I like a lot of books that are written that way. I don’t feel in any way critical of them, don’t misunderstand me, but I don’t understand it. What I understand is one poem. To write one poem seems to me worth living for. So that you have ‘To Autumn,’ or you have ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes,’ or you have ‘Whose woods these are I think I know, / His house is in the village though.” You have something sturdy, and you can clamour all over it and climb inside and rattle it and shake it and howl and it stands there, this human voice, this human-made thing. And you can inhabit it.”

Here, I love the idea of the poem as a body or a building.

Howe goes on to state that she believes the process of writing and publishing is different for all poets. I wish there were more of this kind of recognition and less worrying about schools and cliques.

That’s just a bit about the opening of a quite in-depth interview, but it’s the bit that stuck. What’s funny is that later in the issue, there is an interview of H.L. Hix conducted by John Poch. The very first question echoes what I found so right on in Howe’s interview. However, Hix has the exact opposite answer. He states: “For me the book is a more fundamental unit than the individual poem” and goes on to talk about how his first exposure to contemporary poetry was not by reading journals or anthologies, rather it was through reading individual collections.

I’m still with Howe on this one, but I’m glad the Hix interview was there to provide another voice in the conversation.

57º ~ more sun than clouds, a storm system building in the West, two days out

It’s the middle of week 15 of a 16-week semester (not counting finals), and I’m feeling about as wrung out as I’ve ever felt. AWP happening so late in the spring sort of pushed me over the edge. I slept 10 hours last night…a good soaking sleep, aside from a dream about being chased through the woods and eventually through a cabin by a killer bobcat which paused to kill a goat and a wild turkey during the chase…and still feel like I could sleep all day today. Alas, teacher duties call to me.

For today, some good news:
Stacey Lynn Brown and Oliver de la Paz chose one of my poems for inclusion in their persona poem anthology: A Face to Meet the Faces. It turns out that my poem will rest alongside poems by many friends, both old and new. Yay! My hat is off to both Stacey and Oliver for undertaking such a project; I have all the faith in the world in these two editors.

Also, if you haven’t already, please drop by Linebreak and read/listen to Joshua Robbins’ amazing poem “Heaven as Nothing but Distance” which I had the great honor to record.

Many thanks to Kelli for posting this on her blog first. Out of Print Clothing sells t-shirts imprinted with the covers of old book covers. To make the deal even sweeter, OofPC says, “For each shirt we sell, one book is donated to a community in need through our partner Books For Africa.” As soon as I’ve paid off my credit card for AWP, I’ll be buying several of these t-shirts!

You all know how I feel about advocating for literacy. Here’s just a reminder that if you haven’t already switched, you should be buying your online books from Better World Books. Not only do they support literacy programs in America and abroad, but also they have a carbon offset shipping option that is eco-friendly! Oh, and they buy used college textbooks, too. Seriously, why aren’t you shopping there?

Finally, I’m a little late to the game with this one so you probably saw it yesterday. Terrance Hayes’ poem “The Golden Shovel” was on Poetry Daily yesterday. You must read it. Now!

55º ~ the clouds have returned after days and days of sun, I long for rain but am not hopeful

It seems that a weekend spent grading and clearing the decks of schoolwork has afforded me a chance to do a mini-review today. Yay!

I know that during my AWP posts I mentioned several books that I “couldn’t wait to read on the plane home.” It turns out, I was more tired that I could have imagined and I only managed to read one book on the plane, Brent Goodman’s the brother swimming beneath me. It is a testament to the strength of the individual poems and to the book as a whole that I was able to read and engage with this book through my fog of exhaustion and a very loud passenger one row back and two seats over who was a nervous flier and kept talking about plane crashes and how God didn’t mean for people to go “flitting about” in the sky.

Goodman’s book coalesces around the death of the speaker’s brother from leukemia; however, one of the reasons I love this book is that it does not focus solely on this death. The book broadens into a larger dialogue between being alive in this world in all our diverse natures and accepting our mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. It has a three-part structure: the first, those larger dialogue poems; the second, the brother-focused poems; and the third, a series of prose poems that blend the two.

While the long poem “Maier” grounds the book and contains many fine lines, such as “They drew the seeds of your new blood / by hammering hollow nails through skin / to reach the dark marrow inside my bones,” it is not the poem that made me write “WOW” in the margin. The poem that took the top of my head off is a political poem, something I’ve never been able to tackle in my own work. Goodman’s “‘Armless Iraqi Boy Bears No Grudges for U.S. Bombing'” nearly undid me on that plane ride home from AWP. Here is the opening:

We know it is difficult to look at
when parts of him are still missing.
It will take some time for his charred skin
to completely slough off. It will take longer
for his arm stumps to forget how to carry
and for the two ragged holes to close.
His condition is improving. We have replaced
his eyes with rubble, he ears with crosshairs,
his mouth a khaki radio. We know
it is difficult to look at. …

Another poem that wows me every time is “Evaporation,” which I first read on Linebreak. It sent chills down my spine that first time I read it, and it continues to do so on re-reading. The link here will take you to the poem, and it’s a little long to reprint here.

One of the things I admire most about Goodman’s book is the range he displays in form and content, yet the entire thing holds together so well. Let me leave you, Dear Reader, with the last poem in the book, one of the prose poems. Please image a margin that is both left and right justified.

“[past lives]”

Redhead suicide, scarlet fever, holocaust, third rail, stillborn.
Best not to blame past lives for migraines, luck, regret, or
deja vu. Haifa. Sapporo. Luxembourg. Eden. Each life learns
to outlive the last. Eat rich meals, fuck, haunt museums,
Eurorail every hostel from Amsterdam to Zabreb. Chalk a
line around your silhouette near the fountain. Pray your
children may survive you. Dear mystery: are you the outline,
shadow, earth or sun?

I was lucky enough to bump into Brent Goodman at the book fair at AWP and to swap books with him. I know I’ll be waiting, eager for his new poems and next book.

Support a Poet/Poetry: Buy or Borrow this Book Today!
the brother swimming beneath me
Brent Goodman
Black Lawrence Press, 2009

Conditions the same.

Here’s the final list from Kelli. Be sure to visit all the blogs and sign up for a chance to win free poetry books for National Poetry Writing Month!
Also, here’s a link to my post where you can leave a comment to win a book.

67 deg ~ clear skies and great sun, but still shadows here due to all the neighborhood trees in full leaf

Drafting Friday report:  Woo Hoo, Dear Reader, I managed to draft a poem today amid all of the chaos of post-AWP grading and end-of-the-semester fever.  My desk is a mess of papers, books, and AWP ephemera, but I pushed and piled it to the side.  I had a clean space, good light, good coffee, Yo-Yo Ma, and room to breathe.  All necessary for my process.

I started the day by reading Joseph P. Wood’s wonderful poem “Urgency.”  This poem appears as a Boundless Book from Cannibal Books, a small press run by fellow Arkansas pals Matt and Katy Henriksen.  Matt and Katy are a fierce poetry duo and create beautiful books.  Be sure to click on the link to Wood’s poem to see what a boundless book is.  Awesome production.  “Urgency” is a long poem of amazing phrases stitched together with repeated elements.  The whole thing feels like it should be read in one breath or out of breath.  All during AWP I’d been thinking about how all of my lyrics are short and compact and how I want to write a long poem.  Wood reminded me of that, and as some phrases of my own began to appear, I just tried to let go and not control anything, just let the words accrue on the page.  They did, but alas, Dear Reader, so far, they have not coalesced into anything formative.

After playing around with lines for a bit, I switched to my “In Progress” folder and went back to five lines I’d drafted back in March during one of my non-productive weeks.  It turned out that those lines sparked a whole new direction for me today.  The draft is titled “Bloodlines” and my favorite section right now is:  “Wild and singing the dangerous syntax / of bee-stung tongues, we hunt / the wisteria vine that climbs the dead / branches of a withering tree.”  I’m sure to hate these lines tomorrow, so I wanted to praise them today.  I’m including this photo of my friend Anne’s wisteria b/c she was on top of things and I was not.  I failed to take pics of our wisteria in its glory.  Now it is sending pale purple petals down to scatter our back lawn.  Beautiful decay.

On a Blogger note, I’m using some beta version of the composing posts function, and for some reason, I can no longer use my shortcut keys to produce the degree sign I need for my opening temperature record.  I tried copying and pasting from Word and that threw the whole thing off.  Does anyone know what’s up with this?

 55 deg ~ April sun rises over my left shoulder, some leaves lit fresh green, others still in dawn’s shadow

While I was recovering from AWP on Monday, I received an email from Roger Humes, editor of The Other Voices International Project, an online anthology of poetry from all over the world, letting me know that the poems he had accepted last month were now published.  I hadn’t known about this wonderful anthology until Roger contacted me through Facebook, so the online world helped me connect and expand my poetry world once again.  Roger titled my selection “The Bones Dismissed” and added this beautiful image as the cover.  Both the title and the image are perfect.  Please check out this site and read the Mission Statement if you get the chance.  Many, many thanks to Roger for seeking me out and then supporting my work.

Me, Joey Cole, Robert Bruno,  Suzi Garcia, John Willis, Antoinette Brim, and Ralph Burns

Last night, I felt like I was back in Denver at AWP.  I attended a joint poetry reading presented by Pulaski Tech (my school) and the University of Arkansas Little Rock.  Former PTC students, now current UALR students, Suzi Garcia and Robert Bruno read from their work and were joined by current PTC student John Willis.  They were all awesome!  The only thing missing was the nametag-gazing.  Faculty memebers, Joey Cole, Antoinette brim, Ralph Burns, and myself were the proud mamas and papas.  Sadly, our second reader from PTC was unable to attend due to a family tragedy.  Sending healing thoughts JW’s way this morning.

Without having time to link to each title, here’s a list of books I brought back from AWP (in no particular order).

They Speak of Fruit     Gary L. McDowell
the brother swimming beneath me    Brent Goodman
The Wondefull Yeare    Nate Pritts
sum of every lost ship   Allison Titus
Self-Portrait with Crayon    Allison Benis White
At Once   Jenny Browne
The Second Reason    Jenny Browne
lug your carelss body out of the careful dusk    joshua marie wilkinson
History of Hurricanes    Teresa Cader
Ink for an Odd Cartography    Michele Battiste
Orange Crush     Simone Muench
The Alchemist’s Kitchen     Susan Rich
Blue Collar Fathers    Jason Lee Brown
girl on a bridge       Suzanne Frischkorn
From the Fishouse    Ed. Camille T. Dungy, Matt O’Donnell, and Jeffrey Thomson
on the cusp of a dangerous year     Lee Ann Roripaugh
Biogeography   Sandra Meek
Tongue   Rachel Contreni Flynn
Requiem for the Orchard    Oliver de la Paz
0 deg, 0 deg    Amit Majmudar   (with apologies…Blogger won’t let me use the degree sign properly these days)

Whew!  Hurry up summer so I can read, read, read!  Watch for my “What I’m Reading” posts to return sometime in May.

I’m still trying to process the AWP experience and have pages of notes to go through.  Yesterday at about 4:30 p.m., I hit the wall and collapsed, but rallied in time for the reading.  Much sleep is in the forecast for the weekend…sleep and grading.