31º and brilliant sunshine making a glare on the screen~~loathe to draw the curtain

2010 is staring off in a sluggish gear. We hosted a small party to ring in the New Year (this picture is of our blue moon taken about 11:30 p.m.), and yesterday was spent mostly on the couch, as I don’t normally see midnight and lost some few hours of sleep…but it was all worth it. Good friends are a comfort and a delight. And today, I’m going to dinner with two out-of-towners, Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble of SIU Carbondale fame. Yay!

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Today, the new issue of Southern Women’s Review is available in PDF form, and you can read my poem “This Is What It Comes Down To” on page 83. I haven’t had a chance to read the rest of the issue, but it looks lovely. I was so happy when Alicia Clavell, the editor, emailed me to accept this poem. It’s a quiet one, and I wasn’t sure how it would fare in the world. Thanks to everyone at SWR for giving this poem a home.

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Today, I read Julianna Baggott’s response to the question of gender & writing and winning awards/making the lists, published in The Washington Post. I was particularly struck by her admission that she had been guilty of this unexamined sexism in the beginning of her education. Baggott writes, “But I was told to worship Chekhov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Carver, Marquez, O’Brien. . . . ” I was reminded once again how grateful I am to the professors I had at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University whose sole focus was on diversity. We read the traditional canon, but we also explored those marginalized voices that had been excluded. This was the late 80’s/early 90’s. I even did an independent study with one professor on Contemporary American Women Poets, where I created my own list of 8 or 10 books that fit the category and read one a week, writing a short paper on each. That was fabulous!

Baggott goes on to write about a stunning study:
Playwright Julia Jordan pointed me toward a recent study about perceptions of male and female playwrights that showed that plays with female protagonists were the most devalued in blind readings. “The exact same play that had a female protagonist was rated far higher when the readers thought it had a male author,” Jordan said. “In fact, one of the questions on the blind survey was about the characters ‘likability,’and the exact same female character, same lines, same pagination, when written by a man was exceeding likable, when written by a woman was deemed extremely unlikable.”

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Due to all the festivities of the last few days, I fell behind in my blog reading, and I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of unread posts in my Google Reader this morning. Many, many folks posted their resolutions, which I find fascinating, as I’ve never been good at “resoluting.” Of the many I read, I was particularly struck by Diane Lockward’s post at Blogalicious. Her first resolution is “1. Write on a more regular basis. Aim for three morning sessions per week. Show up at the kitchen table. Do chores later. Or not at all.” This is a great one for me, since over the break, I’ve allowed the chores to interrupt my writing time far too often! Poets should all have piles of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes!!

38º and overcast, dreary, light rain/mist

Here are two poems that I absolutely love this morning.

Katy Didden’s poem “Nest” made the best-of on Verse Daily. (I might have posted this back when it originally appeared, but it is definitely worth a re-read.)

This week’s poem at Linebreak continues their great run. Check out Michelle Bitting’s “Little Red Car” and click to listen to Arkansas alum Brian Spears read it.

I met Mary Biddinger’s 3 poems before 2010 challenge yesterday. First, I forced an ugly duckling set of lines into the world…the usual result when I try to write on a deadline, but all that ugliness disgusted me, so I turned to my inspiration cards and voila…a new draft emerged. This is the card I used yesterday. The draft is called “Assets & Heirs.”

39º and bright, shining sun

Due to the huge stack of books waiting to be read, and the drafting I want to do today, here are two mini-mini-reviews, rather than my longer take on books of poetry.

I can’t remember where I first read about Shaindel Beers’ A Brief History of Time, but I do remember her being referred to as a Midwest poet or a rural poet or something along those lines that peaked my interest. Beers’ book is not a book that romanticizes the rural, working-class world, but one that forces us to look at the ultra-real details of a life begun in rural poverty, a life that progresses into the educated, urban, middle-class and all the mixed feelings that progression evokes. Race, class, & gender are at work in nearly every poem.

My four favorite poems from the collection are:
“Elegy for a Past Life”
“Rebuttal Evidence” that begins this way
Because I’ve been loving in my own way all along,
just today, on the drive home from work on that stretch of 12
that still slices through the cornfields…
“Overview of the Carbon Cycle”
“What Will We Do With You? This Bone Has Almost No Flesh Protecting It–” (my favorite) begins
But I am like any porcelain doll, waiting to be destroyed
by a hammer. Brothers do these things
to incite the cries of their sisters. They think
This is power. Someday they will learn that power
is smiling gleefully up at the anvil.

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I read about Beckian Fritz Goldberg in an interview with another poet, exactly whom I’ve now forgotten. It turned out that I had an anthology with several of Goldberg’s poems in it, which I read and which inspired me to check out Lie Awake Lake. In this book there are poems that beautifully weave the landscape with the body of the speaker. The poems illuminate loss and grief and, from time to time, joy and celebration.

I once had a student who did not like the use of questions in contemporary poetry, but one of my favorite poems of Goldberg’s does just that (and I must confess I like to question in my poems as well). Here’s the start of “Question As Part of the Body”
The essential question —
what do we ache for, what do we need, how do we get it?

or rephrased: How do we not die?

How do we not see question as
part of the body?

Pain as. Light as.

Other favorites include:
“Back”
“Fourth Month”
“Blossom at the End of the Body”

And I’ll leave you with “Reliquary”

The lid sighed backward
it was a perfect fit
with the scent of laburnum and saints
as if the box, open,
addressed the physical world
the box being a snapdragon
in the hands
of the blossom thief: the boy in
the hands of a future
looking inside
what if he saw tonight
the firecracker thrown in the corner store
busting open a box of chili powder
smoke and red dust
and suddenly we’re all breathing in
desire and repulsion
because the open takes
something from us, but
Mr. Eros, you
ain’t got a finger to stand on
not like a female saint
whose thumb is a shrine,
upright and petrified and guarded
by glass, permanently
testing the inner
atmosphere.

Support poetry! Buy or Borrow a copy of these books today!
Shaindel Beers
A Brief History of Time
Salt Publishing, 2009

Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Lie Awake Lake
Oberlin College Press, 2005

52º and unending rain

54º and steady rain, backyard puddle/pond in existence

I’ve been trying to keep to Mary Biddinger’s challenge of 3 new poems before the new year.

Today, I drafted my second of the three. It is a Kwansaba, with many thanks to Saeed Jones for his post about this form. This is a new form for me. According to Jones’ post, the Kwansaba was created alongside the creation of Kwanzaa and is a poem of praise. The form requires a seven line poem, each line of seven words, with no word longer than seven letters. Jones blogged about using this form with a workshop for school children. After working with Writers in the Schools at the U of A for four years, I still think about what assignments would work well for K-12 students, and this one seems like a sure thing. I may even use it in my college-level creative writing class this spring. (Jones’ post contains one of his own Kwansabas, and I hope you’ll take the time to check it out.)

In any case, I sat down with the intention of drafting today, in order to meet Mary’s challenge, but I needed a focal point, something to get me started. I’d printed off the above post to take up to school with me in January, and it was sitting there on my desk, so I decided what the heck? Casting around for something to praise, what did I settle on but THE PRAIRIE…big surprise there! I thought I could just zip through seven lines and be done. Check another draft off the challenge list. Not so. As Jones hints at in his post, the form requires you to slow down and weigh each word, each letter almost and justify its existence in the poem. It also requires you to zero in on some SPECIFIC part of the thing/person/etc that you are praising (I typed prizing there first…cool). This is one of the reasons I think this will work well in class. Another benefit for me is that the poem is so short that when I was finished with the draft I wanted to write more, more, more just like it. (Of course, knowing that there’s a long road of revision ahead!)

I used this inspiration card (see this post and this one) for my draft.

Now, to the more troubling reflection that sank in afterward. I was reminded of my post from October about Ren Powell’s experience using an Arabic form while writing poetry in English and some of the negative reactions she got. For awhile I felt a bit shaky about writing a Kwansaba, as if I needed to ask permission to use a truly African-American form. But to whom would I address my request? If I don’t celebrate Kwanzaa, am I entitled to use this form? If I’m not African-American am I? Still, it’s a praise poem, and nearly all of us can find something to praise. Also, if we’re ever to break down the idea of the canon, shouldn’t we each experiment with forms from different cultures?

I think I’m experiencing a bit of that privileged, white guilt that some of my students feel when we study race, class, and gender issues in composition.