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Confession: I don’t really keep records on Poetic Asides, but I’m pretty sure Kristina Marie Darling has the record for most poet interviews in PA history.

If this is your first time hearing her name, Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over 20 books, which include Vow, Petrarchan, and Scorched Altar, all available from BlazeVOX Books.  Her writing has been recognized with fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation.  She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Visit her online at http://kristinamariedarling.com.

It’s been fun watching her writing evolve over the years, and in Darling’s collection Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014, it’s now possible to get a sampling of her writing from 12 different sources.

Here are a few of the pieces you will find:

• Seven poems in Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies.
• Three poems in Word for Word.
• Two poems in SoftBlow.

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Forget Revision, Learn How to Re-create Your Poems!

Do you find first drafts the easy part and revision kind of intimidating? If so, you’re not alone, and it’s common for writers to think the revision process is boring–but it doesn’t have to be!

In the 48-minute tutorial Re-Creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will learn how to go about re-creating their poems with the use of 7 revision filters that can help poets more effectively play with their poems after the first draft. Plus, it helps poets see how they make revision–gasp–fun!

Click to continue.

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What are you currently up to?

I’m getting ready to leave for a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and couldn’t be more excited. I’ll spend my time there working on a new collection of erasure poems, which examines the egregious amount of gender violence in Shakespeare’s tragedies. The fragmented, elliptical poems ask reader to consider whether the literature we’ve inherited has normalized gender violence, since plays like Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello are so present within the public imagination.

Part critique, part excavation, the poems are intended to redirect the focus of scholarly and readerly attention. It is when we become conscious of underlying beliefs and assumptions in culture, and their roots, that change emerges as a real possibility.

Scorched Altar is a collection of selected poems and stories published by BlazeVOX [books]. How did this collection come about?

That’s a great question. I initially contacted Geoffrey Gatza, the fabulous editor in charge of the press, to inquire about the possibility of a Selected Poems.

It turns out that Geoffrey had the same idea himself, and I simply e-mailed first. Since I had worked with BlazeVOX on numerous previous collections, I knew that my Selected Poems was in very good hands.

Was the process of selecting pieces from previous collections different than putting together a new collection?

When I compiled the poems from my previous collections for Scorched Altar, it was a much different process than working on a brand new collection. For me, writing a new poem or poetry book is an intuitive process, and I don’t reflect much on what I’m doing, at least in the drafting stage. If I allow myself to become too self-aware, that allows me to become self-critical, and then no writing gets done at all.

What I really enjoyed about the process of compiling Scorched Altar was that it prompted me to reflect on my body of work as a whole, to see patterns emerge from my writing over the past seven years, and to see progress and growth. The act of examining my poetry over the course of several years also helped me see what ideas, obsessions, and literary forms I returned to most frequently. And as a result, I came away from the process with many ideas for new projects, experiments, and poems that were completely different from anything I’d ever written before.

In many ways, the act of examining my body of work showed me what is possible within it.

Many of your pieces, especially in collections like Correspondence and Fortress, have a very visual element to how they’re arranged on the page. Do you ever perform these in readings? If so, do you have to explain how they’re set?

I think every poetry reading has some element of performance. Whether the poet shouts their poems, or sings them, or invites audience participation, I’m positive that all writers have a constructed persona, which is an extension of the work itself. With that in mind, I love performing my footnote poems at readings.

I typically read them in a completely flat, monotone voice, almost like the bad math professor that just about everyone had in college. I love seeing the audience lulled into a sense of comfort by the unexciting presentation of the work, only to be surprised by the wildly imaginative content.

You’re an active literary critic. Does this inform your writing? Help? Hinder?

I’m glad you asked about my reviewing and involvement with literary criticism. I love reviewing books, because it exposes me to poetry that is completely outside my comfort zone. This is great because it helps me question and interrogate what I normally do in my own writing. It pushes me to try new things and experiment more within my own practice. And it helps me see more clearly where my poems fit within the larger literary community.

The best thing about reviewing, though, is that it helps build relationships within publishing and writing. I’ve met friends, collaborators, and even mentors when working on reviews. And there’s nothing better than free books!

You’ve published 17 collections now. How do you keep the writing flame lit?

By reading and reviewing other poets. As long as you’re constantly being exposed to new ideas, literary forms, and aesthetics, you’ll always have something to write about.

I also run a small press, Noctuary Press, which has been great for my own creative practice. The press primarily publishes women’s writing that takes places across and beyond genre categories. Although I pride myself on my ability to question genre distinctions, reading submissions for the press has shown me the tremendous variety inherent in contemporary cross-genre writing by women. My work as editor has helped me see what’s possible within the hybrid forms I typically inhabit, and it’s a great deal more than I had initially envisioned.

One poet who no one knows but should–who is it?

Erin Bertram. She has several magnificent chapbooks out, including one from Kristy Bowen’s fabulous Dancing Girl Press. I’m just waiting for someone to realize that her first full-length book needs to be published (so I can buy it and read it!).

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

I’m very excited to check out Donna Stonecipher’s Model City and Dawn Lonsinger’s Whelm. I also just picked up Olena Kalytiak Davis’s newest collection, which I’ve been eagerly awaiting for quite some time.

And if you haven’t checked out Carl Adamshick’s Saint Friend, just published by McSweeney’s Books, then you sure are missing out. It’s a terrific collection, even better than his first book, Curses & Wishes.

And usually I ask for one piece of advice for poets, but we’ve done a few interviews together now. So instead, and this is probably still one piece of advice for poets, I’m going to ask you about your amazing organization and follow-up abilities, because you do a better job than most. Could you share how you stay organized and on task for writing, submitting, following up, etc.?

I’m probably going to out myself as a total nerd with this answer, but here goes:  Excel Spreadsheets. I keep track of everything (applications I’ve submitted, review copies sent, deadlines for applications) in a couple of gigantic spreadsheets.

If I could offer one piece of advice to poets, I’d say keep records of where you send your work, whether it’s review copies, applications, or poems. If you don’t remember where you sent something, then there’s no way you’ll ever be able to follow up with the decision maker.

And believe me, persistence pays off, especially in small press publishing.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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Check out these other poetic posts:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 299.
• WD Poetic Form Challenge: Paradelle.
• The Poetry World A-Z.

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Please welcome Megan Volpert to the Poetic Asides blog! I met Megan earlier this year in Austin as we were both National Feature Poets for the Austin International Poetry Festival and from the Atlanta area. Anyway, I watched her read twice in Texas and enjoyed both readings.

Volpert is the author of five books on communication and popular culture. She is also the editor of This assignment is so gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching. For the better part of a decade, Volpert has been doing three things: teaching high school English in Atlanta, living with ulcerative colitis, and driving a motorcycle.

Predictably, her website is www.meganvolpert.com.

Volpert’s Only Ride is a wonderful collection of prose poems that can be read in order, out of order, but especially out loud.

Here is a poem I really enjoyed from Only Ride:

We all fight, by Megan Volpert

I think it would be cool to own a switchblade. But that means carrying it around & then that means using it, which seems like no fun. I’m not a violent person. Go ahead & throw me under the bus though, because I can lift it with my tongue. No kid ever bullied me in school. For years, I didn’t understand it was because of my smart mouth. I didn’t even know I had one until my father put soap in it. All people are strong & most don’t know what their strengths are. The life is perfectly salvageable. It’s just the person is not yet interested in getting saved.

*****

What are you currently up to?

Well, I finally watched all of Breaking Bad this summer. But work wise, there are a few things brewing. Most immediately, in May 2015, Gina Myers of Lame House Press is kindly publishing a chapbook of about a dozen weird little language experiments I built based on something Michel Foucault once said. So we are having a blast contemplating design elements for that.

But I’m also knee deep in research for a book of essays I’m writing about punk rhetorics of independence during the American Bicentennial year, which is like holding a seance for Hunter S. Thompson. That will be breaking some new nonfiction ground for Sibling Rivalry Press, though I don’t think there’s anyone left who doubts that SRP is blowing up all kinds of new avenues. Bryan Borland-Pennington is deeply visionary, and moreover, remarkably nice for somebody so successful.

A little further out, I’ve recently begun to collaborate with the amazing and tender performance artist Craig Gingrich-Philbrook. We are investigating the nature of failure, of shows we imagined but then tossed away before they could become realities. That will be CGP’s first book, to which a million people have been looking forward for a very long time, and I’m just proud he wants to make the leap on that with me.

Only Ride is your fifth collection of poems. Do you have a process for assembling poems for a collection of poetry?

Yes, I’ve basically stopped thinking about each piece in isolation. They each have to stand alone, of course, but more and more often I am beginning with the big idea then drilling down to determine its component parts. I know what sort of machines I’m after, so I really proceed more from what the total function of the book will be and then write bits and pieces as I stumble across applications of the project’s main functions in my daily life.

Only Ride, in particular, is based on a series of constraints. It’s all prose poems between 95 and 110 words, with titles that are complete sentences. My previous collection was the Warhol thing, which was so sprawling and research heavy that I really wanted to work on something more compact and minimal next. I typed most of them on my phone, on the train during my morning commute. I’d let a batch sit in my notepad for a month or so, then revise the whole pile over a couple hours on a weekend. I knew my subjects, so when I reached my target of 66 pieces, I laid them all out on the floor and organized first based on chronological order of the events in the poems then for the right emotional arch within each subject or time period.

Other stuff can present itself for more obvious arrangement, for example, the 1976 book will report historical events in a straightforward chronological order, one month per chapter. I do prefer organic methods like that. My first two collections still feel well organized, but I agonized over those little piecemeal frankensteins, which in hindsight seems unnecessary.

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Publish your poetry!

Reserve your copy of the latest (and greatest) copy of Poet’s Market today!

This poetic resource includes hundreds of poetry publishing opportunities, including listings for book and chapbook publishers, literary journals, magazines, contests and awards, grants, conferences, and more! Plus, there are articles on the business of poetry, promotion of poetry, craft of poetry, poet interviews, and contemporary poems.

Click to continue.

*****

One of my favorite moments from this year’s Austin International Poetry Festival was watching you have the audience select random poems from Only Ride to read—kind of like a poetry jukebox. Was that the intention for this collection?

Intention is a strong word, but sure. In the design discussions, I was adamant about no table of contents and no page numbers. Life doesn’t have those, and I like it if the physical product of my books can surprise readers in useful ways like that. It contributes something beyond just the quality of the writing. Fonts choices are also of critical import to me, selecting the weight of the paper, and so on. I’m lucky SRP trusts me to participate in those choices.

But as much as I thought about how each poem would be performed aloud and live, it honestly never once occurred to me that I would have no system for putting together a set list. I think it looks silly to put sticky notes on so many pages, especially with these poems that are all just a minute long. I’d have like 20 tabs hanging out, and still the problem of whether to go through the book in order or not. I considered numbering the pages in my own reading copy for reference, but it really felt like cheating.

So I gave up control to the audience, and the first few times they loved it so profoundly that I just kept doing it. It allows me to be much more in the moment, enjoying the connections we make together. And it sure is nice not to have to sit down ahead of time for a half hour and fool myself into believing I know what those future moments of the reading should hold.

Each spread in Only Ride has a title on one page and a prose poem on the other. What appeals to you about the prose poem?

Ten years ago, I’d have said nothing appeals to me about the prose poem. In grad school, I was notoriously militant about the value of line breaks and could pontificate about the evil vagaries of the prose poem for an hour stretch without breaking a sweat.

But at some point, I gave up on the label of poetry. Truly, I know a lot of people categorize Only Ride as a collection of prose poems, but you could just as easily call them flash or micro-essays. I work in a hybrid kind of area and don’t see a lot of merit in genre classifications beyond their value as marketing tools. The Warhol book was hardly clear cut as poetry either. I don’t feel I’ve lost my capacity for line breaks, but I’m genuinely disinterested in them right now. I expect this trend to continue for awhile on into the future as I expand into making texts that are more easily identifiable as nonfiction, like the 1976 book and the collaboration with CGP.

I realize that doesn’t answer your question, but it does answer for some of the assumptions sliding around under the question.

You teach high school English. Do you find teaching helps or hinders your writing? Or the other way around?

Oh, teaching helps. No question about that. Because I am essentially a manic person, I am terrible at vacationing. After two or three weeks away from my students, I’m quite refreshed and ready to go back. I did just a sick amount of research and writing for the 1976 book during my eight weeks of summer break. It was so gross. I was inside all day, alone, staring at my computer. My back hurt, my vision got weird, and I went into that freaky liminal writing space for just too long too often. I couldn’t be a full time writer, and not because it doesn’t pay well enough. I get great inspiration from my students, plus I need the hamster wheel of the school to keep myself from being so focused on writing that I simply go nuts.

Do you have a writing routine?

It varies from project to project because it emerges out of the needs of each project, but I can at least say that I am more productive in the morning or afternoon and that I type almost everything now. I’ve always enjoyed writing in transit, on airplanes or trains especially, but have no explanation to offer as to why that might be. See also: above discussion of unhealthy manic behaviors.

One poet no one knows but should—who is it?

Brock Guthrie, no relation to Woody. We went to grad school together at LSU. His debut collection, Contemplative Man, is out now from Sibling Rivalry Press. When we would workshop together, I thought most of his comments were kind of dopey but all of his poems made me totally jealous. Envy is actually not an emotion I feel very often toward other writers, but wow, I just wanted to steal everything Brock ever wrote. Brock is still not good at promoting himself, or finding a publisher. I’ve been helping him out on those ugly business fronts, but as a writer, he nails it every time and I’m not going to attempt to encapsulate it for you. Just buy the book. Brock is the type of guy who will go unnoticed for 40 more years, then up and win a Pulitzer on the merit of the work alone. Get in on it while he’s still nobody famous, and later on you can join me in the I-told-you-so fest.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

I used to be a one book at a time kid of girl, but now I usually have two of three things going. I read tons of monthly pop culture magazines, from Rolling Stone to Esquire. I’ve been checking out a lot of Erma Bombeck, which is a 1976 thing. I just finished Bob Colacello’s excellent old book about the Reagans’ path to the presidency. And I’m steeped in Lester Bangs just for the sound of him. I’ve always kept mainly to nonfiction and don’t read much new poetry, though I did love Bruce Covey’s new book. When I want poetry, I listen to new music. As I type this, I am listening to Tom Petty’s new album, Hypnotic Eye, on loop. When I want fiction, I watch television dramas like Rescue Me or Six Feet Under. Whatever the medium, I pretty much prefer a pile of snark with a dash of morbidity. Surprise.

If you could only share one piece of advice with fellow poets, what would it be?

Fuhgeddaboudit. Stop asking fellow poets for advice and do whatever you damn well know in your heart feels best.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is an editor with the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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Find more poetic posts below:

• Todd Davis: Poet Interview.
• List of 50 Poetic Forms for Poets.
• Reviewing Poetry Books: Why Does It Matter?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Please welcome Todd Davis to the Poetic Asides blog. He’s authored and edited 13 books, including the poetry collection In the Kingdom of the Ditch.

Davis teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. His other three full-length poetry collections are The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe. His poetry has been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column American Life in Poetry.

Learn more at todddavispoet.com.

The entire collection is a great read, but here’s one poem that I especially enjoyed from In the Kingdom of the Ditch:

Missing Boy, by Todd Davis

I do not
want my son
to enter
the den
of sorrow.

At sixteen
he already
knows
too much
of the world.

Like a pine
snake,
he slides
toward his
burrow,
leaves behind
the skin
of his former
self.

It sloughs
and curls,
scales
of what
he’s learned
but now believes
he does not
need.

*****

What are you currently up to?

The last month or so I’ve been working on revising my fifth full-length poetry collection. At the moment it’s called Winterkill. The poems have been written over the past three years, finding homes in journals and magazines along the way, and in May I began to put the poems together to see how they talk to one another.

After two revisions of the manuscript—rearranging the placement of individual poems, tinkering with lines in individual poems, and even dropping or adding certain poems to the collection—I’ve sent it to four of my poetry friends who are reading it and offering commentary.

Once they’ve finished, I’ll do some more revision based upon their observations and critiques and hopefully send it to my publisher, Michigan State University Press, in the spring. After that, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that my editor likes what she sees and the press will move the book into production.

In the Kingdom of the Ditch is your fourth full-length collection of poems (with a limited edition chapbook thrown in for good measure). Do you have a process for assembling poems for a collection of poetry?

I’m very much a daily writer and thinker. My mind tends to gravitate toward certain subjects based upon my experiences—in the woods, on the rivers, with the books I’m reading.

For example, yesterday I was deep in on a small stream in the 41,000 acres of game lands above the village where I live. My son and I were taking a long hike and fishing for native brook trout. I came across an amazing caterpillar on the walk—it was lime green with what looked like small spines or quills covering its body. At the end of these spines where bright, vivid colors—red and yellow and blue. I hadn’t seen this caterpillar before, and when I returned home, with the help of the photos I took, I was able to spend time looking through my field guides, discovering that this was the caterpillar that would later turn into a cecropia moth (Hyalophora cecropia), the largest native moth in North America.

Several years ago at the top of the mountain above our village, I was hiking on an extremely foggy morning. Mornings like this many flying creatures settle to earth because nature’s “ground traffic control” has cancelled their flights. I’ve come across a kettle of kestrel and other beautiful raptors on mornings like this. That particular morning, however, it wasn’t raptors that I found but a cecropia moth clinging to a long blade of grass in a meadow. I spent more than 30 minutes photographing it, studying it, trying to express how enamored I was by its beauty. (Yes, I tend to talk to the natural world!)

I tell you this story because, like William Stafford whose example means a great deal to me, I go daily into the world simply to be with the miraculous range of human and nonhuman creatures, to observe what is unfolding, to attend to what is too often ignored. Out of this act of paying attention, I write my poems, trying to spend a few hours at my desk each day.

After a few years I begin to see the patterns of what the act of paying attention has afforded me. Once I feel the body of a book beginning to take shape, I place poems on the floor of my office and start to see what happens when a poem makes neighbors with another poem. It’s a bit like chemical reactions. Just as individual images or sounds in a poem, when juxtaposed with other images or sounds in the same poem, cause a reaction between them, so do individual poems in a collection. It’s fun to see how a poem will be transformed when it finds a particular place in a collection.

*****

Publish your poetry!

Reserve your copy of the latest (and greatest) copy of Poet’s Market today! This poetic resource includes hundreds of poetry publishing opportunities, including listings for book and chapbook publishers, literary journals, magazines, contests and awards, grants, conferences, and more! Plus, there are articles on the business of poetry, promotion of poetry, craft of poetry, poet interviews, and contemporary poems. Reserve your 2015 Poet’s Market today!

Click to continue.

*****

Many of the individual poems in the collection were previously published in a variety of literary publications. How do you handle submitting your poems?

I try to keep the act of writing and all such a process entails separate from the idea of publication. I write my poems for myself—a form of meditation or prayer, a way of thinking—and I also write them with my closest friends and family in mind. After that, I’m thrilled if a poem makes its way into the world to be published and read by strangers. But I don’t want the idea of publication to control or change the way a poem is created.

Having said that, I use the other half of my brain to be fairly orderly and efficient in sending the work out. I try to send to magazines and journals whose work I’ve read. A good way to find magazines or journals that might be amenable to your work is to read the acknowledgments page in books of poetry you’ve connected with. After you have a list of places to send, get the poems in the mail and get back to writing.

This same half of my brain also deals with the rejection. I remind myself when I receive the endless rejections that come every writer’s way that the statistical probability of getting a poem accepted is incredibly low. Thus, when I get a rejection, I read the poems again and if I think they are still working, I get them quickly back into the mail to another journal. A poem can’t be published unless it’s in the hands of editors for it to be considered.

You teach creative writing, in addition to American literature and environmental studies. Could you share one or two common areas in which most students need improvement?

I truly enjoy teaching. I’ve been very fortunate to work with some amazing students. In fact, just this past two years, four of my former students have published first books of poems with very fine presses.

What I’ve noticed in my 27 years of teaching—I taught junior high and high school English before receiving my Ph.D. 19 years ago—is a decline in reading. No mystery there, given the radical technological shifts. But if someone wishes to be a writer, there’s no substitute for reading the best from the past and the best from the present.

I’ve also noticed a shift away from delayed gratification. In a consumeristic culture, we’re used to desiring something and then purchasing it. No delay to our gratification at all. However, writing demands patience. Writing rewards self-discipline, delayed gratification, the ability to toil for days, for months, even years, to finally make that poem or story “work.”

I suppose this is similar to training for an athletic event. If someone was hoping to run a 10k race, for example, they would need to put in time running on a daily basis. Many days the runs will not be great, but they’re still necessary. You never know the day you will show up and things will click and your body feels unbelievably good and suddenly you are running effortlessly, turning in your best time.

Like an athlete, I think you have to show up to your desk, knowing that many days will be a slog, nothing seeming to work. But one of those days you’ll show up and the fantastical will happen at the desk. It’s kept me coming back to my desk for many years now.

I like to share poetic forms on the Poetic Asides blog. Do you have a favorite form?

I don’t think I can pick one favorite form, but I can name two that I enjoy reading. (I don’t claim to be a good practitioner of either!) The ghazal as practiced or recreated by such contemporary poets as Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell and Jim Harrison, and the sonnet, especially as Gerard Manley Hopkins practiced it.

It was hard picking a favorite poem from In the Kingdom of the Ditch, and I was impressed by the variation of structure. Could you describe your writing process?

I think I’ve described quite a bit of this above, but I might add that reading other people’s poetry is instrumental to my writing process, as is looking at visual art. I see art as a way of not only expressing something interior in oneself, but also as a way of having a conversation with other artists (living or dead) and their art work. Many poems I’ve written have begun because of a line or image in a poem, some music I’m hearing in a line, that reminds me of, or calls forth, a narrative or a phrase or an image from my own experience.

You mention structure in your question. I’m a free verse poet, but I love all kinds of sound play. Sound is one structuring device in my poems that shapes what the poem will become. I also enjoy experimenting with different forms that grow organically out of the content and sound play. Thus, my work does take on different shapes on the page, addressing the issue of white space and order/disorder.

One poet no one knows but should—who is it?

I’m going to cheat again. I can’t name just one. Sadly, there are so many poets we don’t know about because it’s difficult to find a bookstore where you can go browse 100 books of poetry that were published in a given year.

So here’s a list of poets whose work I truly respect and that many people may not have heard of: David Shumate, Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, Chris Dombrowski, K.A. Hays, Austin Smith, Nathaniel Perry, Rose McLarney, Jack Ridl, Mary Rose O’Reilley, Dan Gerber, Amy Fleury, and Harry Humes. And that list only scratches the surface of writers I wish I could tell everyone about.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

Here’s a list of the books that I’ve either read or am currently reading this summer: In Poetry, The Whole Field Still Moving Inside It, by Molly Bahsaw; The Glad Hand of God Still Points Backward, by Rachel Mennies; Revising the Storm, by Geffrey Davis; It’s Day Being Gone, by Rose McLarney; Hum, by Jamaal May; in fiction, Brown Dog and The Road Home, by Jim Harrison; Blasphemy, by Sherman Alexie; Swamplandiaia!, by Karen Russell; Eight Mile High, by Jim Daniels; Light Action in the Caribbean, by Barry Lopez; The Plover, by Brian Doyle; in nonfiction, Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder; A North Country Life by Sydney Lea; A Fly Fisherman’s Blue Ridge, by Christopher Camuto; Life Everlasting: The Animal Way of Death, by Bernd Heinrich.

And, of course, I’m always taking off the shelf books of poems to read a poem or two in the morning by writers I return to again and again. They’re my sustenance.

If you could only share one piece of advice with fellow poets, what would it be?

I see many people get caught up in trends, writing work they think will be considered hip, publishable. I have no trouble with experimentation, with the creation of new schools of poetry, poems that push our understanding of what poetry might be. But, again, I’m referring to our hyper-consumeristic culture and the ways that mindset bleeds into the world of poetry in negative ways.

We all become dust and our books will become dust, too. (Or digital files to be lost in the grand cosmos of the digital multiverse!) I don’t say this to depress my fellow poets. I say it to remind myself (and others) that no one can predict who will be read 50 years from now, 100 years from now. So the question then becomes: what art truly moves me, and what art do I wish to spend my time creating, sending into the world, hoping it reaches some other person and impacts them in a way that changes them, moves them?

I’ve had many poems change the way I live. I suppose that’s the kind of poem I’m interested in writing. Whether that poem ultimately becomes dust and is forgotten doesn’t matter. It’s life in the here-and-now that matters. I suppose such comments are born out of my conviction that poetry is an integral part of the pattern of human community. So what kind of poem do you wish to send to that human community?

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is an editor with the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

******

Explore previous poetic posts here:

• Laurie Kolp: Poet Interview.
• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 275.
• List of 50 Poetic Forms for Poets.

 

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I would ask readers to welcome Laurie Kolp, but most of you already know her as a long-time part of the Poetic Asides community. She’s placed in a few of the WD Poetic Form Challenges, and some of you may know her debut poetry collection Upon the Blue Couch was published earlier this year by Winter Goose Publishing.

Laurie is an award-winning poet with numerous publications, some of which include Poets & Artists, iARTistas, and MiPOesias (GOSS183 Publishing Group), Writer’s Digest, Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet, Deep Water Literary Journal, cho, Miller’s Pond, The Fib Review; forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain, Concho River Review and Blue Fifth Review. She serves as vice-president of Texas Gulf Coast Writers, and lives in Southeast Texas with her husband, three kids and two dogs. To learn more, please visit her website http://lauriekolp.com.

Here is one of my favorite poems from Upon the Blue Couch:

When I Was a Worm, by Laurie Kolp

I dug a hole to China
in search of
William Shakespeare,

my self-worth
a shot of Tequila
in a never-ending well,

and I found myself
in the bottom of the pit,
swinging my legs
from the last
blade of grass,

rotting with each
passing breath.

*****

What are you currently up to?

This has been a different kind of summer for my three kids and me. We’re used to hanging out with my mom… going to movies and out to lunch, or just visiting. You know she passed away in March after a very brief but intense illness. I’ve scaled back on some of my online poem sharing so that I can help them adjust (and vice versa). Plus, my dad finally said it was okay to start going through 30 years and four bedrooms full of Mom’s stuff, so my sister and I have slowly but surely been doing that.

At the beginning of the summer, I chaperoned my middle child’s Future Problem Solving (FPS) group to internationals in Iowa. We met people from many different countries at Iowa State University… my son’s group of four middle-schoolers who placed 2nd in state, an individual who placed 1^st, an alternate, and a high school senior. The teacher and I were the only “official” adults. Everyone enjoyed it immensely.

Then I turned around and it was time to travel to North Carolina, after which I attended the Texas Poetry Society’s summer conference. Now I’m preparing for three birthdays this month and back to school. Whew.

I believe I was at your first reading, but you’ve been busy recently—even getting out to Hickory, North Carolina. Do you have any reading advice for other poets who are new to it? Or do you have something you try to focus on when you’re reading?

Yes, the first time I ever read one of my poems to an audience was the beginning of October, 2011 when I drove 75 miles to hear you read in Webster, TX. I had no plans of reading anything… I just wanted to meet you in person. After all, Poetic Asides was where I first felt comfortable sharing my poems on the Internet and you’ve always been such an inspiration. An open mic followed your reading, and you encouraged me to sign up. Thank you so much for that, Robert!

Fortunately, I just happened to have a few poems in my bag. I read I Am the Sea, which had recently won third place for your sonnet form challenge. I felt all trembly and nervous inside, but when the audience liked it, I stepped back in line to read a second poem.

Poetry Hickory was amazing. Let me tell you how it happened. I’ve met some dear friends on Poetic Asides, 12 of whom I participated with for years in a daily sharing/critique online poetry group; Nancy Posey is one of them. When Upon the Blue Couch was released, Nancy contacted me with a wild idea… wouldn’t it be neat if I came to read at Poetry Hickory and stayed with her? Much to my surprise, Scott Owens then invited me and the dream became a reality. Jane Shlensky drove down for the event, too. What a magical evening I’ll never, ever forget.

My advice to poets new to reading their work consists of a few small things that I think make a big difference. Plan ahead and practice reading the poems out loud. Pique the audience’s interest. Think about what you want to share about each poem before you read it… something as simple as, “This poem was inspired by the three men with plumber’s butts I saw sitting side by side on the beach while looking down from Pleasure Pier.”

When I’m reading, I find a few people in the audience who seem half-way interested, perhaps a few smiling real big like Nancy and Jane. Then I make eye contact with those people. There are always a few expressionless listeners who, if I don’t look away, will start my mind wondering if I’m really that horrible. So I try to delve into my words and focus on the positive.

*****

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*****

Your collection Upon the Blue Couch has been a fun read—at times silly, romantic, serious, and beautiful. How did you go about collecting and organizing these poems?

Thank you, Robert! The poems in this collection were amassed through many years of writing about my past. At one point, I even wrote my memoir in the third person, and then did nothing with it except to share it with a few close friends. I still felt compelled to write about some of the things I’d been through, either personally or second-hand, and my poems always seemed to come from that desire. I wanted to offer my experience, strength and hope to others. Since the theme is a comfortable blue couch that has been the common thread of a woman’s journey through adulthood, I decided to arrange the poems chronologically.

What’s been the biggest surprise for you in the process of getting your collection published?

Well, the first hurrah came with the acceptance from my publisher, Winter Goose Publishing; but walking through the creative process, which I call a tug-of-war… the endless hours of writing more poems and then throwing them out, editing and revising, arranging and rearranging, self-discovery and self-doubt… and watching all my hard work come to fruition after more than a year of waiting has been amazing.

In retrospect, the delay in publication was a gift because in the meantime, my mother died, and I was able to add a section in the back which really completed the book.

Receiving my copy in the mail and holding it in my hand, caressing the cover and reading the poems as if I’d never seen them before… that was the greatest feeling in the world.

As you know, I like to share poetic forms on the Poetic Asides blog. Do you have a favorite form?

I love the poetry form challenges, Robert. I just wish I had time to participate in each one. They’re a wonderful opportunity to stretch out of my comfort zone and write my way into the poem’s certain parameters and specifications. I feel like following the formula is the closest I’ll ever get to wanting to work a math problem. It’s a challenge I welcome!

Of course, I really like the forms where I placed: tritina (1^st ), nonet ( 2^nd ), sonnet (3^rd), kyrielle ( 4^th place), triversen (top 10); but I like others, such as the fib, haibun, sestina (I know, I know), palindrome, and ghazal. Found poetry/erasure is one of my very favorites, though.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in The Found Poetry Review’s Pulitzer Remix April of 2013, where I wrote 30 found poems from John Updike’s Rabbit At Rest. Whew. What a month that was, as I also participated in your PAD. I was so happy when you announced your found poems challenge for your own poetry book, Solving the World’s Problems.

By the way, I really appreciate your putting together the list of poetic forms all in one place… what a wonderful resource!

What do you enjoy more—writing or revising poems?

That’s a toughie. I really like the urgency that accompanies the writing of a draft. I need to get this out, I need to write these words, I need to make this point… whatever the need may be at the time. But the revising is where I gain the most pleasure. I love watching my poems grow from various stages like a child maturing into an adult. The process of stepping away from the poem for a few weeks and then going back, feeling less emotionally attached to it and willing to let some of it go… isn’t that a lot like parenting?

Just as we as humans change throughout life, my poems are always forking off into different directions. I never know how they will end up. My muse can be very bodacious, you know.

One poet no one knows but should—who is it?

Gretchen Johnson, an English Instructor at my hometown college, Lamar University. I recently finished her poetry collection, A Trip Through Downer, Minnesota. I love her work.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

Right now I’m reading The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London. My sister, who teaches high school English, dropped off some classics for us to read over the summer. It’s been a joy. I also reread To Kill A Mockingbird. As far as poetry goes, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery, edited by Tom Lombardo, has most recently captivated my heart (I have a soft spot for all things recovery).

If you could only share one piece of advice with fellow poets, what would it be?

Wear a suit of armor and persevere. Never, ever give up.

******

Robert Lee Brewer is an editor with the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

******

Find more poetic goodies:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 274.
• List of 50 Poetic Forms for Poets.
• Reviewing Poetry Books: Why Does It Matter?

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Please welcome Jason Tandon to the Poetic Asides blog!

Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry including, Quality of Life (Black Lawrence, 2013) and Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt (Black Lawrence, 2009), winner of the 2006 St. Lawrence Book Award.

His poetry and reviews have appeared in AGNI Online, Boston Review, Esquire, Harvard Review Online, Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Review, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.

You can learn more about his work at: http://jasontandon.com/

*****

Publish your poetry!

The 2014 Poet’s Market is hands down the best all-around poetry resource for poets looking to get their poetry published and find an audience for their poems. The book includes hundreds of listings for poetry journals, magazines, publishers, contests, and more. Plus, the book contains dozens of articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–not to mention original poems, poet interviews, poetic forms, poetry organizations, and more.

And as of June 30, 2014, the book has been discounted more than 70% to $7.99!

Click to continue.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I’m working on a new collection of poetry, which will be my fourth, and I’ve begun to send these poems out to journals to test their mettle. I’ve also been trying, when work and life permit, to promote my last book, Quality of Life.

In your most recent collection, Quality of Life (Black Lawrence Press), I was struck by how your subjects often start somewhere familiar and then kind of spin off into interesting directions. How do most of your poems begin?

Often my poems begin with a line, a phrase, or an image, ideally something with a little grit and texture. I look through my notebooks and desktop folders where I keep all my fragments. These products of what seemed like frustrating mornings at the desk have yielded bits and pieces of almost all of my poems. There are times, too, when my poems begin in the midst of reading someone else’s poems, and the poem becomes in conversation with that work.

I also noticed most of the poems are in the first person narrative voice. I know poets who feel narrative poems should be 100% truth, poets who think the truth doesn’t matter at all, and others, of course, who are somewhere in the middle. What are your thoughts on telling the truth in narrative poems?

At a recent reading, a woman asked me afterwards, “Did you really work for NASA?” referring to a line in the book’s title poem. In Quality of Life, I was consciously trying to practice what I call the “poetics of verisimilitude,” a poem that gives the impression that it was written in real-time, faithfully recording the events as they happened. In actuality the poem was written over several years of observed images or felt experiences, which provide the spine of the poem; then my imagination and my following of figurative and rhetorical possibilities provide the flesh. If a reader assumes that the “I” in my poems is me or at least a real person, then they can move on to the real business of the poem: does the experience or the emotions presented resonate with them? Move them in some way? Have I written the poem successfully enough to make it worth re-reading?

If I were to write a poem in which I notated an experience from beginning to end, attempting to re-create its “truth,” I wouldn’t be writing something that has a re-readable quality for me and for my readers. This quality comes from my authentic discovery, from my being surprised at what actually gets written. In some sense I am after poems that make me feel as if I hadn’t written them.

When my poems have narrative qualities, I hope they possess equal if not superior lyrical ones. I want a reader to experience the pleasures of sound, image, and the occasional figure of speech. I’m not trying to leave a reader with a satisfactory resolution, aphoristic or epigrammatic wisdom, ironic or otherwise. My intention is not to frustrate a reader, but to present a kind of truth: that despite my best intentions to arrange, order, and recreate my subjective experiences of the world, disorder and disbelief often dominate. In this way I’m one step behind Frost: he writes momentary stays against confusion; oftentimes in Quality of Life, these poems are attempts at momentary stays against confusion.

You write reviews of poetry collections—some are even shared on your website. What do you appreciate the most about a collection of poetry?

I was recently re-reading Mark Strand’s interview in the Paris Review in which he talks about the “beyondness,” a quality that he works toward in his poems, and that he looks for in the poetry of others. He goes on to say, “I like to be mystified. Because it’s really that place which is unreachable, or mysterious, at which the poem becomes ours, finally, becomes the possession of the reader. I mean, in the act of figuring it out, of pursuing meaning, the reader is absorbing the poem, even though there’s an absence in the poem. But he just has to live with that. And eventually, it becomes essential that it exists in the poem, so that something beyond his understanding, or beyond his experience, or something that doesn’t quite match up with his experience, becomes more and more his.”

These are the qualities I most admire about Strand, Charles Simic, and Robert Bly—three of my favorite American poets. But I like a lot of different styles and approaches. I also crave the concreteness and societal engagement of Gwendolyn Brooks and Seamus Heaney, and the humor of Ron Padgett.

Which do you enjoy more: the writing, revising, or sharing of a poem?

I enjoy revising the most, because I get to attend to the poetry of the poem. The words on the page have some control and I can either submit to their possibilities or explore the alternatives.

I enjoy the sharing, or performing a poem in front of an audience, the least. I find the reconciliation between sharing what I created in solitude, which is what gives me the most pleasure, and then reading it aloud for the public, difficult. I would rather have people read my poems to themselves, or listen to a recording than see me read them aloud. I would characterize myself, at least in this book and in my current project, as a poet of quietude.

One poet most people don’t know but should—who is it?

I don’t know about “should” (and I don’t know what most people know!), but a recent collection I enjoyed very much is Jill Osier’s should our undoing come down upon us white. I imagine she will be well known, if she isn’t already, very soon.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

Right now on my writing desk are the following books: Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology; Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets; Bob Hicok’s Insomnia Diary, Novalis’s Hymns to the Night, Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems, and Dan O’Brien’s War Reporter.

If you could pass along only one piece of advice for fellow poets, what would it be?

I would only pass on advice to beginning poets! I would advise them to read and study the poets who write the poems they wish they had; then read the poets those poets admire; and finally read the poets whose poetics differ completely from the two previous groups. Repeat.

*****

Great advice!

Also, just want to note that this interview was conducted back in March, 2014. So if any of it is even the least bit dated, well, there’s a reason for that.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is the author of Solving the World’s Problems and an editor with the Writer’s Digest Writing Community. He loves reading poetry by and interviews with contemporary poets. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic fun here:

• Judith Skillman: Poet Interview.
• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 268.
• Golden Shovel: Poetic Form.

 

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Please welcome Judith Skillman to the Poetic Asides blog!

Judith Skillman is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Her latest book is Broken Lines—The Art & Craft of Poetry, Lummox Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, Midwest Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Pirene’s Fountain, and many other journals and anthologies.

Ms. Skillman is the recipient of grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Washington State Arts Commission, the Centrum Foundation, and the King County Arts Commission.

Learn more at judithskillman.com.

Here’s one of my favorite poems from Prisoner of the Swifts:

Cosmology, by Judith Skillman

The sky pulls you in.
You stand on tiptoe like a child.
Arranged like birthstone earrings
on a card, they’ve tarnished.
Sirius the dog, Medusa writhing
in her headdress of snakes, Orion
chasing the flock of doves
that later changed to sisters.

These strange stories kept you from sleep.
The bedside glass remains a collection of sand.
The same electron
masquerades as others, speeding in
and out of time
like Mother’s needle,
passing through the cloth
she held on her lap.

*****

Publish your poetry!

The 2014 Poet’s Market is hands down the best all-around poetry resource for poets looking to get their poetry published and find an audience for their poems. The book includes hundreds of listings for poetry journals, magazines, publishers, contests, and more. Plus, the book contains dozens of articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–not to mention original poems, poet interviews, poetic forms, poetry organizations, and more.

And as of June 23, 2014, the book has been discounted more than 70% to $7.99!

Click to continue.

*****

What are you currently up to?

Currently I’m working on a manuscript with the working title “Rules and Secrets.” I’m trying to keep this collection thematic, along the lines of the inner and outer worlds we live in—and how the “self” walks a tightrope keeping those in place—while also breaking some rules of language.

Part of the process of putting a manuscript together involves ferreting out content addressed by various pieces. The exciting part is to amplify that subject matter by writing new material. The secrets are easier to identify than the rules.

I’m also shaping a chapbook, or maybe it will become part of this mss, under the working title “Kafka’s Wound.”

Your newest collection, The Phoenix: New & Selected Poems 2007 to 2013 (Dream Horse Press), is actually your second “new & selected” collection. So two questions: First, how do you decide to put together a “new & selected” collection? Second, how (if at all) is that process different than assembling other collections?

Well it would seem as if I could be an expert on this, but I don’t feel like one. I’ve been lucky enough to find publishers who will bring a number of collections into print. So once I have say six or seven of those, it seems only reasonable to pull what I feel are the best poems from each one. Perhaps it’s more of a curse than a blessing, but I like to tinker with manuscripts in progress almost as much as revising a single poem.

To address the “how to”: the process of revision when working with poems from a few volumes and deciding which new poems to include in an “umbrella collection” is different mainly in volume from rearranging a manuscript. But either of these activities can be almost recreational, compared to figuring out where a certain poem went wrong!

In your poetry craft title, Broken Lines: The Art & Craft of Poetry, you talk line breaks, poetry manuscript ideas, marketing strategies, and much more. Since it’s in the title, what’s your best tip for handling line breaks?

My favorite tip comes from David Wagoner, who said not to end a line with adverbs, articles, and adjectives. Clearly these “little words” belong with the next line. I absolutely agree! And just to throw in one more favorite, listen for masculine and feminine endings. There is more on that in the book.

What was the most difficult part about putting that book together?

This book would not exist without RD Armstrong, publisher of Lummox Press. When I give readings or presentations from Broken Lines I thank him first and foremost. I had an idea of what I wanted to write about but it was somewhat sketchy.

This was the most difficult part—deciding how to integrate various materials from teaching, essays I’d written, and how to express certain ideas such as poetry writing can become insular. RD Armstrong provided a sounding board. He was patient with the work and revisions, which took over a year, and got advice from other writers to assist me.

Which do you enjoy more: the writing, revising, or sharing of a poem?

Definitely the writing. With a caveat—the pleasure varies depending upon how generous the muse feels at any given time. As in, “c’mon baby make it hurt so good…”

One poet most people don’t know but should—who is it?

There are so many excellent poets!! I’d like to take the fifth. But Joannie Stangeland has a new book out from Ravenna Press, tilted “In Both Hands.” I have admired her work for years. She tackles tough subjects with aplomb.

On your site, you mention offering manuscript services for other poets. In your experience, is there a common problem poets have with handling their manuscripts?

I would say the most common problem I’ve run into is separating material into “chunks” rather than viewing a manuscript and would-be book as a work of music, in which the theme (or, metaphorically, the refrain) comes in and out and passes through. This adds dimensionality and makes a manuscript far more exciting to the reader.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

Well, I always seem to come back to Hemingway’s stories. I am reading Kafka, trying to find lesser known stories and books. I loved “The Hunger Artist.” I need to find another alpine book as reading about climbers who write about their adventuring has become a passion. I’ve practically memorized parts of Lionel Terray’s “Conquistadors of the Useless.”

And the poets: there are so many. I tend to read the same ones over and over again until the pages get dog-eared. I love Vallejo, Lorca, and Edith Södergran. I just got Gigi Marks and am looking forward to reading “Close By.” I am still reading “Diadem” by Marosa Di Giorgio.

If you could pass along only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Another tough question! I’d say listen to the voice inside—snippets of old songs, phrases that sound like titles of poems, memories of tough times, anger and/or any strong emotion. Listen especially for those parts of your “self” that society does not sanction or encourage.

And I have to throw in my favorite piece of advice from William Stafford: “Can’t write? Lower your standards.”

(Interview completed in March, 2014.)

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is the author of Solving the World’s Problems and an editor with the Writer’s Digest Writing Community. His most recent publication went live yesterday (click here to read). Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 267.
• WD Poetic Form Challenge: Bref Double Winner.
• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Next Steps.

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2014 April PAD Challenge

 countdown: 2. That means tomorrow is one, and then, all bets are off. Come on, clock, tick faster!

As many of you know, I’ve been featuring interviews with the poets who wrote poems in my Top 25 list for the 2013 April PAD Challenge. Unfortunately, there were two interviews that I never received, but I still want to share the Top 25 poems.

So here they are:

In Case of Death, by Ashley Marie Egan

The message was clear,
Yet quite controversial,
Written in red ink,
In bold sharp letters,
“In case of death:
Feed me to sharks.”

Hold That Football, by Diana Terrill Clark

I’m trusting you here, Lucy.
And you’ve let me down before.
But I really think you’ll do it:
Hold the football on the floor.

I’m almost sure you’re honest
and truthful when you say
you’ll hold that football steady
and you won’t pull it away.

And now I’m getting ready
to run and kick that ball.
I’ll kick it to the moon, I will!
I’ll kick it through the wall!

I’ll kick that football higher
than its ever been kicked before!
And now I’m running at it,
…

…

…

And you’ve let me down once more.

And I lay here in the gravel
and I look up and hear you say
that I never should have trusted you
and then you walk away.

“Augh!” is all I mutter as
I lie there in my pain.
And then I think of trusting.
And then it starts to rain.

And all that I can ponder
in the grass, soaked to the bone,
is that it’s better to be trusting
than to have a heart of stone.

*****

Publish your poetry!

Click here to learn how

.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic fun here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 260

.

2014 April PAD Challenge: Guest Judges

.

WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

.

 

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2014 April PAD Challenge

countdown: 3. I’m starting to feel like that X-wing fighter guy from Star Wars: A New Hope: “Almost there…alllllmmmoooossst theeeerrrreeee…almost there…” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s totally fine: Just know that we’re almost there–ready to poem away!

Tracy Davidson lives in Warwickshire, England, and enjoys writing poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies, including: Mslexia, Modern Haiku, Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds, The Right-Eyed Deer and Notes from the Gean. Apart from writing, Tracy enjoys reading crime novels, entering competitions, photography and travel.

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

The Morning After, by Tracy Davidson

she wakes to find
a strange bed, a strange man
and a set of handcuffs

she remembers
the double vodkas, the line of coke
and a questionable kebab

her husband standing at the window

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Where are you located?

In a quiet village near Stratford-on-Avon, England.

Who are your favorite poets?

Apart from everyone on the Poetic Asides blog (and your good self) you mean?! I don’t really have favourites to be honest. Poets whose collections I’ve enjoyed reading recently include Simon Armitage, Sophie Hannah and Billy Collins.

And I still have a soft spot for a childhood favourite–Pam Ayres, who may not be familiar to those of you in the US. Her poems are not what you would call great literature, but they’re good fun. I saw her give a live performance once and she was brilliant.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I’m a little old-fashioned I guess, and I still like to read good rhyming poems. Even though the majority of what I write is free verse. I like straightforward language, not flowery or pretentious stuff. And I’m fond of short Japanese forms, such as haiku and tanka, which can say an awful lot in just a few words.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

To post something every day. A goal which failed in the very first week! Life kind of got in the way. Including losing my beloved dog, Jasper, which left me moping about instead of writing.

What’s next for you?

The November PAD Chapbook Challenge! I’ve been joining in for the past 3 Novembers, but have yet to submit a chapbook entry. Hopefully this time I will get one done.

*****

Publish your poetry!

Click here to learn how

.

Robert Lee Brewer

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic fun here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 260

.

2014 April PAD Challenge: Guest Judges

.

WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

.

 

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2014 April PAD Challenge

countdown: 4. Yes, I’m excited–so excited–and I just can’t hide it. As a quick FYI, we now have 29 confirmed guest judges. I hope to have the list finalized by Monday. View who’s already on board here.

Deborah Purdy lives in Pennsylvania where she writes poetry and creates fiber art. Originally from Virginia, she earned BA and MA degrees from Hollins University. She also has an MSLS from Clarion University. She has been a research scientist and a reference librarian. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River & South Review, Apeiron Review, The Milo Review, and The Found Poetry Review.

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

Holding, by Deborah Purdy

hold that ghost
like a bird
in your hand,
let your fingers
form the fleeting
wall between
now and then
beginnings and
endings,
hold lightly
like a tentative
thought but
closer than a
transient breath
then breathe
again
and let it
go

*****

Where are you located?

Pennsylvania.

Who are your favorite poets?

Mary Oliver, Joyce Sutphen, Linda Pastan, and Naomi Shihab Nye, among others.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

The imaginative use of language and being able to relate to what I am reading.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

I wanted to develop the habit of writing every day, and hopefully, in the process, generate a few finished poems.

What’s next for you?

In addition to continuing to write and to submit for publication, I’d like to put together a collection of poems.

*****

Get your poetry published!

Click here to learn how

.

*****

Robert Lee Brewer

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and the author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic fun here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

.

WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

.

Sara Tracey: Poet Interview

.

 

Add a Comment

2014 April PAD Challenge countdown: 5. We’re getting so very close to the beginning of this year’s challenge. I hope your pencils are sharpened, your paper is uncrumpled, and your mind is open to the world around you–or something like that (I have 5 kids; so I know it’s not always that idyllic).

Sally Valentine

Sally Valentine is a native of Rochester, NY. After teaching math for 25 years in the Rochester City School District, she is now off on a tangent of writing. Her love for kids, books, and Rochester led her to write a series of novels for intermediate grade kids which are each set in a different Rochester landmark. Her latest work is There Are No Buffalo in Buffalo, a collection of poetry for kids. Each poem is about a different place in New York State. This collection just won first prize in the Middle-Grade/Young Adult Books category of the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. When not writing, she can be found reading, solving puzzles of all kinds, or walking around beautiful western New York. She lives in Walworth, NY with her husband, Gary. Her grandchildren, Evan and Molly, are her newest source of inspiration.

Sally also included an aside to me, which I want to share with the group, “William Preston

and I live in the same small town and belong to the same writer’s group. He is just as kind and encouraging in person as he is online.” What a great small town that must be!

Here’s Sally’s Top 25 poem:

Broke, by Sally Valentine

He wanted to break her
like his daddy broke horses.
Free reign at first, then tighter, tighter.

She wanted to break him,
of speeding cars, careless spending,
thoughts of other women.

Their break-up was inevitable.

*****

Who are your favorite poets?

My favorite poets are e.e. cummings and Billy Collins.

As a reader, what do you like in poems?

I like poems with simple words that make me see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

What was your goal for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

My number one goal for the 2013 PAD Challenge was to finish with 30 poems. Secondly, I hoped that I’d be able to use some of them to start a new collection for kids about the 20th century. I was very pleased to have six that fit that category.

What’s next for you?

What’s next for me is adding more poems to that collection. I want to have one poem for each year.

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Workshop your poetry!

Beginning in May, poets will have the opportunity to put their poems through a workshop environment with an online mentor.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

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2014 April PAD Challenge: Guest Judges

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2014 April PAD Challenge

countdown: 6. I hope you’re getting excited, because I am!

Linda Simoni-Wastila

Linda Simoni-Wastila writes from Baltimore, where she also professes, mothers, and gives a damn. You can find her poems and prose at Smokelong Quarterly, Monkeybicycle, Scissors and Spackle, MiCrow, The Sun, Blue Five Notebook, The Poet’s Market 2013, Hoot, Connotation Press, Baker’s Dozen, Camroc Press Review, Right Hand Pointing, Every Day Poetry, Every Day Fiction, Tattoo Highway, and Nanoism, among others. Senior Fiction Editor at JMWW, she slogs one word at a time towards her MA in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins and her current novel-in-progress. In between sentences, when she can’t sleep, she blogs at http://linda-leftbrainwrite.blogspot

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Here is Linda’s Top 25 poem:

Hotdogs on the Grill, by Linda Simoni-Wastila

When I saw you
by the hundred year oak
talking to her
your hands lively
the air filled
with smoke
a thread
kindled thin
beneath my ribs.

I turned the hotdogs
on the grill,
charred.

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Where are you located?

Geographically, I write from the greater Baltimore area, but my heart belongs to New England and, sometimes, when I miss the warmth, North Carolina. These are the places I came of age, the places that formed who I am today. The essence of place figures in much of my work, and the settings, culture, and people of New England and the South provide rich context. That said, Maryland is growing on me, especially Baltimore—the city’s grittiness and grime, and even its graces, provide great fodder for my poems and stories.

Writing-wise, I write many genres. Poetry is only one facet of my writing life. Most of my writing time focuses on novels—there is something about creating characters and putting them into motion in unique worlds that captivates me. I also write short fictions, many of which are sketches or ideas for novels. April is the month prose gets put aside and I focus on the poem. April is a special time for my writing life.

Who are your favorite poets?

Sharon Olds has an amazing capacity to render the ugly into something beautiful. She writes a lot of pain—physical and emotional—and those are the domains I tend to write about. Her sense of word choice, her ability to find the telling detail, astounds me. I learn so much from reading her work. William Carlos Williams is a huge influence on my work—the sparse form, the repetition, and, again, the telling detail. There are amazing poets who participate in the April PAD and the November Challenge who I enjoy and learn from. And yourself, of course—your poems capture nuances of family life that I appreciate.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like lean poems, ones that use few words well. I also like poems with endings that make me pause, make me wonder, make me read back to the beginning and go ‘ah.’ Most of all, a poem must be elegant and have an armature, be it meter or rhythm or structure, invisible at the surface but noticed when read. This is not to say I prefer poems with ‘hard’ structures, such as sonnets, rondeaus, or villanelles–because I don’t. But great poems feel complete, feel contained, have an innate musicality to them. Hard to describe, but when the container is missing, I know it.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

This past April was a tough time for me. I had a lot going on, not good stuff, and many mornings I could not focus on much beyond getting out of bed and going through the motions of the day. My goal in April was to write a poem a day—nothing more, nothing less. That was my only goal. Writing the daily poem pretty much kept me sane, kept me tethered.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on my third novel and hope to have a first draft finished in the next six months or so. Another project is a chapbook of short prose and poems, Love, Life, and Other Devastations. For this, I’m reading through the 150-plus poems I have written over the past five April PAD Challenges for suitable material. It’s fun to see my growth as a poet, and to revisit—and revise—poems that feel like old friends.

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Workshop your poetry…

…from the comfort of home.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

(Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• Jane Shlensky: Poet Interview

.

2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

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Add a Comment

2014 April PAD Challenge

countdown: 7. Speaking of the April PAD Challenge, there’s some great news on the way. I’m still getting everything finalized, but we’re going to make the challenge fun times infinity. Speaking of fun, click here to check out an analysis of my “cold water” poem by the Retail MFAer. Fun stuff!

George Smith

George Smith was born in the small southeastern New York town of Queens, and quickly whisked below the Mason-Dixon. He’s the son of a Southern Methodist Naval and airline aviator father from Montgomery and an Irish Catholic mother from Philadelphia… So, naturally, he was raised Presbyterian in Miami… He eventually moved to NW Georgia with his brother and sister when he was a teenager, and has lived there since. George is a husband and the father of four boys. His wife and youngest son live in a ca.1838 farmhouse in formerly rural south Fulton County, Georgia, a short drive southwest of Atlanta. He considers himself a poet and country/bluegrass/blues songwriter/lyricist with a day-job in health care design and construction.

George has been writing since his mid-teens, starting with poety, and moving into songwriting along the way. He’s cowritten with musical artists from Nashville to Norfolk to Nacogdoches and recently been priviledged to have two songs placed on the CW TV show, Hart of Dixie… Hear some demo recordings on ReverbNation at:
www.reverbnation.com/gcsmith

or on SoundClick at: www.soundclick.com/georgesmith.

Here is his Top 25 poem:

Oakland Dawn, by George Smith

Blue on blue;
Obelisk in silhouette,
Cardinals dart and pirouette.
Angels trapped in shadowed stone,
Guard and plead in tone on tone.

No stars.
No moon.
The sun hints it is coming soon.
The faintest glow above the wall,
Below the trees.
Birdsongs call,

There is no breeze.
Blue fades into blue,
Blue fades into blue.
Blue fades…

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Where are you located?

I live in Fairburn, Georgia, just southwest of Atlanta, with my wife and youngest son (and three dogs/two cats), in a small farmhouse that’s been in my wife’s family since it was built in the 1830′s…

Who are your favorite poets?

In no particular order: Poets: Richard Brautigan, Robert Frost, Robert W. Service, Ogden Nash, and Dr. Seuss. And songwriters with a poetic voice, Guy Clark, Verlon Thompson, Paul Simon, and Robert Hunter.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like a feeling of “naturalness” – a flow and structure that doesn’t seem forced or pretentious (unless that’s the theme), that paints a picture or tells a story (or both), where every word counts and reinforces the next word
Perhaps this comes from songwriting…

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

Beyond writing something for each day by the end of each day…I’ve used each April’s challenge as a potential first spark for songwriting – sometimes to better effect than others – but also as a way to explore other forms and formats of poetic expression – often using a form posted on the Poetic Asides blog.

Additionally, I forward to friends and other poets (and songwriters) I know, including the blog’s e-dress and web-link, to reinforce April being National Poetry Month.

What’s next for you?

I want to keep writing and honing what I do…every day… just like it’s April…

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Workshop your poetry!

Learn more

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 259

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WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

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2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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Add a Comment

2014 April PAD Challenge countdown: 8. I’m always surprised by just how close we all are–often without knowing it. For instance, I drive up and down I-75 at least once a month, often stopping at the Richmond, Kentucky, exit 87. Little did I know, one of our Top 25 poets actually lives there.

Deri Ross Pryor

Deri Ross Pryor is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. She has been creating stories since she first learned the power of words, long before she knew how to read or write. Born in New York and raised in Florida, she now calls Kentucky home. She is a recent graduate from Eastern Kentucky University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing and is now working on her MA in English at the same university. Deri has won several college-level writing contests and has been published in Eastern’s Aurora Journal, Pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, Kudzu Literary Journal, and Still: The Journal. To pay the bills, she works as a copywriter and journal editor for a non-profit trade association. Deri lives in Richmond with her two beagles and inadvertent cat. Learn more at: www.deri-ross.com

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Here’s her Top 25 poem:

The Farmer’s Wife, by Deri Pryor

He sits in somber twilight,
the flickering television glow
his best company now.

He fingers a tiny gold circle
in calloused and cracked hands,
ached with work and waiting.

Under the elm trees, flowers grow over the gentle mound.

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Where are you located?

Richmond, Kentucky.

Who are your favorite poets?

I love so many it is hard to nail down. When I discover a new poet I have not read before I immediately declare I have found my favorite – until the next discovery. Poetry has not always been such a passion for me as it is now, so I arrived “late to the party” so to speak, so I am still learning and discovering new favorite poets and poems all the time.

I was recently introduced to the amazing poetry of Ruth Stone, who I am in awe of. I love the musical and poignant style of Nikky Finney, 2011’s National Book Award winner for Head Off and Split (and who I’ve had the honor of studying with). There are so many amazing poets from Kentucky that I’m in love with: George Ella Lyon, Frank X Walker, James Still…the list goes on.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like poems that are straightforward but with strong subtext — but not so mysterious that a clear theme or message is impossible to decipher. I like poems that are not afraid to stare the darkest part of humanity in the face, poems that can be slightly disturbing in a way that makes the reader step outside their own comfort zone and think.

One of the most startling poems I’ve read is “Child Beater” by Ai. It was an instant favorite. Another one is “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke. Some find those types of poems are hard to swallow, but I feel they are important.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

First of all, to write every single day. I’ve done the challenge in the past and fell into the habit of letting a few days go by and try to catch up. Since I work and go to college full time, it is hard to find time, but I think not writing every day defeats the point of the challenge (to me personally) of making time to write every day, to be serious enough about the craft that I’m willing to forgo that favorite TV show or a that extra hour of sleep.

Secondly, I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone. I tend to pull back a little, dance around things that are painful to me or that I worry will be too disturbing to others, but, again, I think that also is not in keeping with my personal challenge of writing as my true self.  I once remarked to a friend that my poetry, actually my writing in general, leans towards the dark and sad. She replied with the old adage “you write what you know.” I had to think about that for a while.

While I am not necessarily a dark and sad person (well, mostly), I have suffered through difficult situations, and have seen others experience pain and loss such as what I refer to in “The Farmer’s Wife.” Many of the poems I wrote in the challenge were unlike anything I had written before. It was quite liberating, actually.

What’s next for you?

I am in the process of revising a number of my poems that deal with the cycle of dysfunctional relationships in the hopes of having a chapbook published in the next year or so. I am working on my MA in English and then plan to go on to do an MFA in creative writing.

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Get your poetry published!

Learn more

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

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Sara Tracey: Poet Interview

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Add a Comment

2014 April PAD Challenge countdown: 9. I don’t know about you, but I love learning about other poets, especially the poets who hang out at the Poetic Asides blog.

Alana Sherman

Alana Sherman, poet and teacher, lives in Woodbourne, NY, with her husband and dogs in an 1834 farmhouse, under constant renovation (sort of like her poems). She belongs to a group of poets who meet once a month to share their work. The Alchemy Poetry Workshop has been in existence since the 1940s and is the oldest extant poetry workshop in Sullivan County (maybe even in NY State!). Alana writes essays, poems and children’s books. In addition to her writing, she is a community developer, working to preserve The Old Stone House of Hasbrouck.

Here’s her Top 25 poem:

Dying Sea Bird, by Alana Sherman

Legs splayed behind
feathers bedraggled
its beak in the sand

the only thing
keeping his head erect
Like others I stop

to assess the obvious

Two men discuss
if anything can be done
The tide is going out

the sea at its edges
lavender and aqua
A woman circles

shaking her head

down the beach a couple
getting married
a small girl running

her arms askew
as other birds scatter into the air
the rest of us are concerned

but powerless when I come back

the bird’s head
is at an angle
only death can achieve

all that remains
is for the tide to do
what all of us are wishing for

and take the sandy lump away

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Where are you located?

I live in upstate New York on an old farm, it’s pretty rural.

Who are your favorite poets?

My favorite poets are Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass, and Stanley Plumly. These days I am re-reading Richard Wilbur and Gertrude Schnackenberg for their incredible skills at rhyming. I can’t forget Robert Frost. If I could achieve his simplicity and ability to just move people with meaning as he does in one of my poems I’d be happy as a poet. I probably could list at least five more poets.

As a reader, what do you like in poetry?

When I read I look for the clear expression of ideas through beautiful language, beautiful images. I want a poem to make me say YES,  to enhance my experience of the world and life and to connect me to the writer and what he or she was thinking and feeling. ( A part of me always wants to feel a little envious of the poem and to wish that I’d written it.) That’s a tall order but really good poetry has always done that for me.

What did you hope to get out of the April PAD Challenge?

I keep a journal and I’m always writing down ideas. As a result I tend to have a lot of the stuff of poems. I use the April PAD to help me crystallize my  work. It’s a chance to make real poems out of all that rough material. My goal is to come out of the challenge with some poems worthy of being called poems.

What’s next for you?

To take the poems I have and revise them into a collection that hangs together. That’s why I look forward every year to the November Chapbook challenge. It forces me to re-think and revise.

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Get your poetry published!

Learn more

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

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Sara Tracey: Poet Interview

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Add a Comment

As many of you know, the 2014 April PAD Challenge is just around the corner. Over the past few months, I’ve been sharing poet interviews with some of the Top 25 poets from the 2013 April PAD Challenge, but I wanted to save a few to do a kind of April PAD Challenge countdown–that’s starting today!

There is a Wednesday Poetry Prompt day mixed in, but there are 10 poet interviews (including this one) between here and the 2014 April PAD Challenge. Let the excitement build–and the entertaining interviews and poems fill the spaces between.

Bartholomew Barker

Bartholomew Barker is one of the organizers of Living Poetry, a collection of poets and poetry readers in the Triangle-area of North Carolina. He was born and raised in Ohio, studied in Chicago, worked in Connecticut for nearly 20 years before moving to Hillsborough, North Carolina where he makes money as a computer programmer to fund his poetry habit. Learn more at www.bartbarker.net

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Here’s his Top 25 poem:

I am an early bird and I am late, by Bartholomew Barker

I am not driving an ambulance nor a fire engine. If I am late no
one will die, no buildings collapse, no skies fall. Yet I weave
through lanes as a snake. I curse my fellow men as obstacles. I
panic as though drowning with no time to breathe.

Only the far reaches of the parking lot have space. Elevators
mock my arrival from the highest floor. With apologies readied, I
burst into the conference room.

Empty.

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Where are you located?

I am located solidly in middle age.

Who are some of your favorite poets?

My favorite poets are Jack Kerouac for his haiku, William Blake for his scope and Robert Burns for his sound.

As a reader, what do you prefer in your poems?

As a reader, I prefer short poems that “pop” at the end.

What was your goal for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

My only goal for 2013 challenge was survival. I was extremely busy with my day job and things were just not going well. Most of the poems came out rather dark.

What’s next for you?

I just published my first poety book, Wednesday Night Regular, a collection of poems written about dancers in a strip club so I’m working on promoting that and I’m looking for my next theme.

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Get your poetry published!

Learn how with the 2014 Poet’s Market, which is filled with articles on the craft and business of poetry, listings for poetry publishing opportunities, contests, conferences, organizations, and more!

Click to continue

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

from Press 53. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Find more poetic posts here:

• WD Poetic Form Challenge: Triversen

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 259

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2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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Add a Comment

Jane Shlensky likely doesn’t need an introduction on the Poetic Asides blog, but I’m going to give her one anyway, because she deserves it. Not only is Jane a fine poet (read her Top 10 sijo here

), but she’s also one of the “encouragers” on this blog.

Jane Shlensky

Jane is also part of a faction of poets I like to refer to as the “Hickory Poets” (of North Carolina), along with the likes of Nancy Posey, Scott Owens, Helen Losse, Jessie Carty, and others. I’ve seen her read in person, and it made me appreciate her poetry even more.

Without further ado, here’s her Top 25 poem from the 2013 April PAD Challenge:

Storm-taught, by Jane Shlensky

A streak of yellow sky laid under
blue-black clouds, distant thunder,
and high wind bodes a reckoning.

Whatever tender plant or flower
newly born but for an hour
faces a beating April sting.

Old women learn to read such skies
like three-day bruises, alibis
for mischief loosed across the earth.

They think to harbor things they love
from hail and downpours from above,
knowing the scars from one outburst

can wreck a garden’s trust in good.
Old women know it’s understood
that heaven will have its way below.

Whatever power we think we own
is blasted by skies hard as stone.
We’re humbled by what we can’t know.

Bullying clouds with angry fists
prove some old women optimists
searching for spectrums arced in blue.

Old women know that broken plants
survive the direst circumstance.
Storms break, and sun shines through.

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Where are you located?

I live in a village a few miles north of Durham, NC

Who are your favorite poets?

My tastes in poetry are eclectic, a sort of revolving favoritism based on whoever has my attention at the moment. (You might be interested to know I’ve been Solving the World’s Problems

lately with some young guy from Georgia). Sometimes I’ll see something that recalls a line from Wordsworth or Whitman, Rilke or Keats, Tu Fu or Hopkins or Frost or Kooser.

I read widely and so appreciate widely. Teaching poetry and literature for so many years helped me read with an ear for form but a heart for truth. Reading fellow writers on my favorite blogs and in magazines has added to my list of poets to watch.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like beautiful language that is at once precise, clear, meaningful, and jagged—words that in their utter simplicity are dazzling and touching, that ring true to human experience. I want a phrase or line to snag me like a good fish hook, make me read again, make me wish I’d written that.

Sometimes, I feel compelled to say, “Damn, that’s a good poem” because it is. Naturally, what I love in poetry is not necessarily what I do every time, but poems that get my attention and reel me in are good models to consider as I write.

What were your goals for 2013 Poetry Challenge?

On blogs like Poetic Asides, I’ve paid heed to what my fellows find worthwhile in my poetry. Southerner to the bone, I cannot avoid story. I’ve been encouraged by comments about my narrative work, a particular character, event, or slice of life that engaged me.

During the April challenge, I decided to see if it would be possible to write mostly narrative poems, to explore a character’s plight using the prompts. While I was not always able to do that well, I did manage 27 days to do so, some days writing more than one poem for a prompt. I have a growing village of narrative poems, like Robinson’s Tilbury Town or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

What is next for you?

My mother believed that whatever a person learned was to be used for the benefit of others. With writing as well as with playing piano, she would chide me if I wanted to learn a thing just for myself. I guess I could say I’ve been raised to find a use for things, including the poems I write every day.

Words are written to be read, so I’m tinkering with a collection, still sending out a few poems to magazines now and then, entering challenges and contests sometimes. Maybe all these little narrative lives will coalesce into a volume.

Nancy Posey and I are flirting with a joint project we’ve discussed for a while.

What’s next? Like West Side Story’s song, “Something’s Coming,” “…I don’t know what it is but it is gonna be great.”  Or, at least, I hope so.

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To read a little more about Jane, check out this Poetic Creative Bloomings interview

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Write better poetry!

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

*****

Here are some more poetic posts:

• WD Poetic Form Challenge: Sijo Winner

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 258

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2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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Please join me in welcoming poet Sara Tracey to Poetic Asides.

Sara Tracey

Sara is the author of Some Kind of Shelter (Misty Publications, 2013) and Flood Year (dancing girl press, 2009). Her work has recently appeared in Vinyl Poetry, The Collagist, Harpur Palate, Passages North, and elsewhere. She has studied at the University of Akron, the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts (NEOMFA) and at the University of Illinois at Chicago Program for Writers. Originally from Ohio, she has lived in Chicago since 2008.

Here’s a poem from Some Kind of Shelter

:

Donny Takes a Night Class, by Sara Tracey

There’s no time to shower
between work and school; he shows up
in boots, Wendy’s sack
in one hand, clipboard in the other.
He sharpens his pencil with a pocket knife,
folds like a love note
into a desk that wobbles, eats his burger
in three bites, wishes for beer.
He thinks the teacher’s younger
than his favorite bartender,
not nearly as smart.

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What are you currently up to?

Today, I’m putting the finishing touches on a new online workshop I’ll be teaching in March for The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative

; it’s on found poetry, centos, erasures…experimental stuff that is very far from my usual writing habits. I’ve been having a ton of fun reading up on these forms and exploring a different kind of creativity. I’m also writing a narrative sequence that takes place in the 1940s and 1950s in Cleveland, Ohio, and tells the story of young mother whose husband is in prison.

As someone who grew up in Ohio, I could immediately identify with much of Some Kind of Shelter because of Ohio references and the working class themes. How much attention did you consciously give to locations in this collection?

I also grew up in Ohio (though I’ve lived in Chicago for almost six years) and I’ve always identified myself as a Midwestern or a Rust Belt writer. It was important to me from the beginning to capture a sense of place in these poems, and I very organically started using place names as titles (“Barberton,” “Medina Street,” “Garden Apartment, Tremont, Ohio”).

Location became even more important, though, when I received a Wick Summer Fellowship which allowed me to travel to Bisbee, Arizona for a workshop. I’d never been to the desert before, and the disorientation I felt being in this unfamiliar landscape made me ache for home even while I was having the time of my life. That sensation became an important part of the narrative arc of Some Kind of Shelter that was only intensified when I moved to Chicago.

Also, I love how these poems follow specific characters around. That, in combination with the first-person narratives, have me wondering where you stand on drawing a line between truth and fiction in narrative poetry. Are you more in favor of being 100% accurate or telling it slant?

I’m totally against accuracy. Or, rather, I’m against being controlled by it. That’s not to say there aren’t any true stories in my book—there are several—but I’m not terribly concerned with whether or not they’re recognizable as true.

People ask me all the time who Stella (a primary persona in Some Kind of Shelter) is. According to the narrative, she’s the cousin of the unnamed speaker of many poems (it’s safe to assume that speaker is a version of me). But in real life, I don’t have a cousin named Stella (this is especially confusing to people who know me and know my family, who try to place Stella in a real family tree), and if we’re being honest, many of the things that happen to Stella have happened to me.

I like to tell these people that Stella is my evil twin. But she’s not evil, she’s just broken. And for a long time, I romanticized the broken parts of me. Writing Stella gave me permission to lie, to make stuff up, and as a beginning poet, I really needed that.

These days, I tend to think of something Toni Morrison said: “facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.”

So, yes, I’m interested in the truth, but I don’t necessarily believe that truth and fiction are mutually exclusive.

Some Kind of Shelter is your first book of poetry. What was the biggest surprise in the process?

Before the book was accepted for publication, what surprised me most was how many possible books these poems could have been. I went through several titles, several sequences, several iterations of my first manuscript, many of which have surprisingly little to do with Some Kind of Shelter despite them being made up of the same poems. Each time I reordered the manuscript or changed the title, it felt like I’d made something brand new.

I noticed on your blog a post about student loan debt

. I don’t usually cover student loan debt on this blog, but I realize some readers are grad students—or considering that path. Could you give a snapshot of your experiences/thoughts on the whole process?

Oh, student loans! The bane of my existence!

I’ve been in grad school full time since 2005, and in that time, I’ve buried myself in over $100,000 in student loans (and I’m talking government loans, not those creepy private ones with super high interest). It’s embarrassing to say that in public, which is part of why I wrote about it on my blog (I know it’s counterintuitive, but I find the best way to dispel embarrassment is to make it public).

The thing is, when I started taking the loans out, I believed I was making a smart decision. I thought I had a sound financial plan. I’m almost done with grad school, and now that I’m faced with paying back these beasts, I realize I was misinformed. I’ll likely never pay them back. There’s a good chance I’ll never buy a house. I can’t imagine even being able to save for retirement, though I’m sure that’s just the fear talking.

I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me—I made my own bed, so to speak—but I do want people, especially those who are thinking about taking out loans to finance a PhD, to know what it feels like to have this financial albatross around your neck.

The system is broken—tuition costs too much and what grad programs call “full funding” just isn’t. That needs to change. In the meantime, folks who want to go to grad school ought to figure out a way to do it without borrowing against their future. At least that’s what I wish I would’ve done.

Which do you enjoy more: the writing, revising, or sharing of a poem?

I don’t think I can choose just one of these—they’re so very different, and I love them all. I think every poem is a tiny romance.

Writing a new poem is exciting; it’s like a first date: you don’t know how it’s going to go or where you’re going to end up. It might last 45 minutes and leave you with an awkward handshake outside a coffee shop in broad daylight, or it might go on until 3 a.m., kissing at the curb while a cabbie waits with the meter running.

Revision is like asking the poem to go steady. I know what I want from the poem, I know where I’d like us to go. But the poem has a say, too. Revision can be easy, a cause for celebration. But more often, it’s a negotiation. Sometimes it’s disappointing. The poem can’t be what you ask it to be and you have to let it go.

And sharing a poem? It’s like introducing your new sweetheart to your parents, or going “Facebook Official.” Everyone has an opinion, but most people will only say nice things to your face. It feels good to tell people you’re in love, and it feels good to offer up a poem I’m proud of so that others can read it. Hearing from people who’ve enjoyed my poems fills me with gratitude. I made this tiny thing and now it means something to someone else. That’s a miracle.

The thing is, you need all three. Can you imagine only ever going on first dates? Or asking someone to go steady and then never introducing him or her to your friends? Or going on a first date and changing your relationship status on Facebook while this relative stranger heads to the restroom? None of those scenarios is satisfying.

As a writer, I want to be in a relationship with my poems. I want the sparks in the beginning and the comfortable familiarity in the end. I want to walk into a party holding my poems’ hands and introduce them to everyone I know.

One poet most people don’t know but should—who is it?

Jennifer Moore. Her poems are whip smart and desperately beautiful. Here’s a poem of hers that I love

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Who (or what) are you currently reading?

I’m reading Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins.

If you could pass along only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

You’re a human first, writer second. Be part of the world. Yes, write and read as much as you can, but also: go to a roller derby bout, hang out with your sister’s kid or your spinster great aunt, have dinner with a friend and don’t once talk about literature, get a weird job working with weird people, walk a picket line, have a snowball fight. Then go home and write about it.

Life will bring you poems.

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After life brings you poems, share them with the world!

How? Why with the 2014 Poet’s Market! It’s the best resource for finding publishing opportunities and filled with advice on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry. Plus, poet interviews, new poems, and more!

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

(Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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• Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 256

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Taylor Graham: Poet Interview

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2014 April PAD: Guidelines

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The next poet in the Top 25 series from the 2013 April PAD Challenge has made herself known so well that I feel she doesn’t need an introduction. But here’s the thing: Taylor Graham is not a person who talks much about herself; rather, she just writes incredible poems. In addition to making the Top 25 list, she is the current co-champion of the 2013 November PAD Chapbook Challenge

(with Joseph Mills).

Taylor Graham and her dogs.

For almost 40 years, Taylor has trained her German Shepherds for search-and-rescue, in Alaska, Virginia, and California, and she’s responded as a volunteer to hundreds of searches for missing people. Her poems appear widely online and in print, and she’s included in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library) and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University). Her book, The Downstairs Dance Floor

, was awarded the Robert Philips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her collection Walking with Elihu: poems on Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith is available on Amazon, as is What the Wind Says (Lummox Press). Learn more about Taylor at her website, www.somersetsunset.net.

Here’s the poem I chose for the Top 25:

Lexicographer’s Daughter, by Taylor Graham

Angle brackets. Binomials of exotic
species. Boldface colons: how he spends
his days, and then files it all away.

She sneaks past the capitalizing labels
of his books; riffles pages; spreads
young (also called curious) angel wings.

She’s outgrown every pair of shoes.

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Where are you located?

I live outside Placerville, California, in the Sierra foothills with my husband, two German Shepherds we train for search-and-rescue, and six sheep.

Who are your favorite poets?

In high school, I fell in love with Gerard Manley Hopkins, e.e. cummings, and Dylan Thomas, and they’re still my favorites, along with A.E. Stallings, Mary Oliver, James Wright, and Billy Collins.

As a reader, what do you like most in poems?

I like to be shown something new, or see it in a different light – leaps of thought and language to transform the world. If a poet writes in form and handles the form very well, that’s an added pleasure. I like a poem to perform some sort of magic for me.

What were your goals for the 2013 April PAD Challenge?

To get out of my rational “this and therefore that” frame of mind, to let in some playfulness, serendipity, adventure; to see things from a different point of view; to end up somewhere I didn’t expect.

What’s next for you?

I’ve been writing a lot of dog poems over the past year and a half, bringing up old adventures I’ve had, mostly from search-and-rescue. I have a book-length collection due out from Lummox Press toward the end of 2013 or early 2014, titled What the Wind Says

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Beyond that, I can’t seem to stop writing about dogs and what I learn from them; some of the poems are taking mythic turns. So I’ll just see where this leads.

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Get your poetry published!

Learn how with the 2014 Poet’s Market.

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems

. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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Find more poetic posts here:

• 2014 April PAD Challenge: Guidelines

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 256

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Pamela Klein: Poet Interview

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Anyone who’s been reading my 8-part series on getting a poetry collection published will probably recognize Tom Lombardo’s name, since I mention him by name a few times. He’s my editor at Press 53. But some readers may remember that I’ve interviewed him on this blog in the past

–years ago–for his poetry anthology, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books).

Tom Lombardo

In addition to his editing work, Tom is a poet, essayist, and freelance medical writer who lives in Midtown Atlanta. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Subtropics, New York Quarterly, Atlanta Review, and more. Tom’s nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he runs the Poetry of Recovery blog at www.poetryofrecovery.blogspot.com. He earned a B.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University, an M.S. from Ohio University, and an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte.

Tom Lombardo just released his debut collection of poetry, What Bends Us Blue (WordTech Editions), and I’m excited to have the opportunity to share the stage with him later this week at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center (click here to learn more

).

Here is one of my favorite poems from the collection:

Daffodils, by Tom Lombardo

For weeks after Lana’s funeral,
my mother cooked for me,
handled death’s paperwork,
opened a door–
Look outside at your garden.
Looking outward for the first time since burial
prayers, I saw daffodils blooming,
the ones that Lana and I planted
in a sunken rectangular spot last Fall,
set against the bright, new green of Spring,
Easter white and careless yellow.

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What are you currently up to?

Four projects: First and most important, I am planning readings for my collection What Bends Us Blue. I have locked into 7 readings between now and November 2014, in Atlanta, Charleston, SC, Charlotte, NC, Cary, NC, and Nashville, TN, and several more I hope to confirm soon.  For your followers who want to come to the readings, they may track the details at www.facebook.com/whatbendsusblue

. Planning readings takes a bit of effort and persistence.

Second, I’m constantly reading submissions or seeking new poets for Press 53. Third, I am writing a novel, about half-way through it. Finally, the fun of my life, I’m getting my 3 tennis teams ready for the Fall team tennis season here in Atlanta, which has the largest amateur tennis leagues on Earth. I manage my men’s team, my daughter’s team, and my son’s team. It’s a lot of work, but we’re having a blast.

What Bends Us Blue is your debut collection of poetry. How did you hook up with your publisher WordTech Editions?

Open submission period. But I must tell you that this collection had already been submitted nearly 100 times to ALL contests and open submissions, two or three times to each contest, each open submission, over 7 years. The collection received some minor notice, an honorable mention here and there. I had literally given up submitting it.

April Ossmann, whom I’d been working with as my editor, suggested WordTech just before it’s submission period opened, and I always do what April tells me to do, even though I thought, as I put the stamps on the envelope, here’s a waste of $3 postage. Lo and Behold, a few weeks later, What Bends Us Blue had a publisher. I worship at April’s feet.

What Bends Us Blue is available at Amazon.com at http://tinyurl.com/whatbendsusblue

and www.BarnesandNoble.com.

This collection truly does bend the reader blue with some really charged material at the beginning. Do you distinguish between truth and fiction in your poetry?

Poetry must never be The Truth. Poetry must reveal a truth.

Poetry must never be literal. If it were, it would be nonfiction. Though I do love nonfiction and read a lot of it, when I read poetry, I want to read something that may start with the literal truth but when run through the poet’s diction, syntax, language comes out as poetry that reveals a truth. When describing a truth, poetry must rise above prose through the use of figurations.

For example, my poem “When” from What Bends Us Blue, which is based on the literal truth of my experience at a hospital upon the death of my first wife, ends with these words as the orderly stores her lifeless body in the hospital’s morgue: “you hear / metal slam shut in a room / with a drawer large enough / to hide your life.”  Well, that’s what happened, BUT it goes beyond the literal to achieve metaphor. It pushes the reader to a larger truth about life and death and hospitals. Metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, irony—the four figurations described by Harold Bloom in his essay The Art of Reading Poetry—those figurations take the truth and tell it slant, as my favorite poet would say. Poems may begin with a kernel of truth, but they’d better move away from the literal to succeed.

There are several poems in What Bends Us Blue that deal with the friction in relationships between spouses or people who co-habit. What Bends Us Blue contains poems to “my wife.” The Wife in the poems is not really the wife who died in 1985 or the wife I’m married to now. It’s sort of a poetic amalgamation of experiences I’ve had in two wonderful marriages. Some of these love poems are rooted in deep anger and frustration that I experience in the daily course of marriage, for example, when my wife says, every day, “Have you seen my keys?” This drives me crazy. I want to defenestrate her. In early drafts of a poem, eventually entitled “Keys to the Solar System,” I vented hateful, spiteful, violent anger upon the page. OK. 100 drafts later, the poem drifted far from Earth to become a light-hearted, imaginative, imagistic view of a loving relationship. Cathy Smith Bowers, another mentor of mine, called this group “love poems,” though they are not what you’d expect. These love poems start with a kernel of truth and move onto something that I hope reveals a truth about life and relationships.

Even among some truly heart-wrenching poetry, you know how to slip in humor here and there. Did you intentionally focus on varying the mood in this collection?

Absolutely. Who wants to read poetry that makes them cry on each page? Balance of emotion in a collection must be a concern of the poet. Up, down, middle. It’s like all of life. You can’t be down all the time. Sometimes you must be up. And I spent time and effort on the balance of moods in the collection, at the direction of my editor April Ossmann, whose fingerprints are all over this collection. I think humor in poetry is important, but it must be done well, in sophisticated ways, in the diction and syntax and language. Take Emily’s lines: It was not death for I stood up/and all the dead lie down. That’s hilarious. Yes, hers is a poem of despair over mortality, but the entire poem is funny in a goulish way—those cold feet that keep the Chancel cool. Hah! I can feel her laughing as she sings it—a church hymn in common meter—while binding it up into a fascicle. Gosh, I want to meet a poet that can be so wryly humorous in her despair.

When I experienced the deep shock of losing my first wife suddenly in a car wreck, there were times during the first weeks of shattering, shoulder shaking sobs that I laughed. I think I offended some friends by my laughter, which they may have deemed inappropriate given the circumstances. I had just buried my wife, but I laughed at the wake. It was a nice relief, steam whistling from a boiling kettle. Anyone who experiences a loss or another event that shatters their lives will have these experiences. Humor cannot be suppressed forever. It bubbles up. Humans need to laugh, even when they are in extremis. There’s something about us. I hope scientists never figure it out. But poets should.

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Full disclosure: You edited my debut collection of poetry, Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53) and I found you to be an insane resource of poetic knowledge—and a great sounding board. How important do you think studying the poetry of other poets is?

I am insane because I’ve read Harold Bloom’s essay The Art of Reading Poetry seven times, and I have pages of hand written annotations, almost longer than the essay itself. It drove me crazy because I took four readings just to achieve minimal comprehension of that essay, because I am not as brilliant as he is. But that one little essay has value beyond its few pages. Everyone should read it. I don’t necessarily agree with his canon, but he’s right on target with his view of what poetry should be. And his examples are wonderful. This little essay (it’s actually not so little when you consider it’s attached to a 900-page anthology) is a good example of how I study the work of other poets.

As poetry series editor for Press 53, I have responsibility to read widely to find new poets to publish. I do read a lot of poetry, and I think it’s important for poets to do so, of course. You can learn by reading if you read closely enough. Usually, I’m reading, as you say, to study poetry. I look at diction, syntax, language, structure as well as story because I want to understand the techniques that poets are using. There’s a good bit of poetry that I don’t like at all, but I still read it, just to find out what’s not working, so I can understand why I don’t like it. I want to know what I don’t like as much as what I like.

I read from a granular level outward, even at the first reading. I start with diction, then syntax, then language and figurations, then lines, then stanzas, then the whole picture. Start with the atoms, then elements, then compounds, then structure, moving outward to the entire organism.

I read with a pen or pencil in my hand, marking up the poem, noting diction/syntax events that attract me, I track the sounds by notations, I underline figurations or rhythms I can pick up, I put little plus signs at enjambments that tickle me. Poetry I read ends up all marked up. It’s a life-long habit I developed as a young, green eye-shade copy editor. I’ve been an editor for a long-time as a journalist and a granular view of text worked its way into my DNA. This is my way of studying poetry. While reading The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson one decade, I began to underline and categorize the bees, bumble and otherwise, and butterflies and other insects, and I made lists and counted them. I won’t say much here about my data because one day I may write about my findings, but I graphed the ebbs and flows, yes, on graph paper—and discovered some interesting connections to the cycles of the natural world. Along the way, I discovered an article by an entomologist in the Journal of Entomology about Emily’s bees that was truly an eye-opener. I mention this because this is a way I study poetry. Something grabs me—and I dig into it and I learn a few things along the way.

Another way I study poets—I try to “feel” the poetry. I just described above how granular I can be, but in an alternate way, I must step back to figure out what the poem feels like. I study it from outside in—which is the opposite of how I do my close reading, which is from the diction outward. When I look at how a poem feels, I view how it looks on the page first, as if I were looking at a painting. What does the structure of this poem feel like? What is the look of this poem saying to me. Are the lines all flush left, organized? Why? Or are they spread out, and why? What is the poet saying to me about this poem? Then, I go inward to stanzas, lines, figurations, syntax, diction. This is more qualitative, more emotional. This does not require a pen or pencil. Requires only feelings.

I like to read poetry journals—both paper and on-line—to keep up with what’s going on outside of my office. Poetry Magazine, New Letters, Denver Quarterly, and online Narrative are a few I read regularly, but I’ll pick up and scan just about anything that has poems. I’ll buy a collection if I see something that catches my eye or if a friend recommends it. A recent example…Kiki Dimoula, a Greek poet, unknown to me. I saw an article about her in the NY Times, with a sample poem, and I bought her Collected. Loved it. From there, I hopped to another Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. I’ll probably spend a year looking for the next Greek, and the next. I work hard to read outside the U.S. I believe that poets outside the U.S. have more to say right now, and I think they would be good models for poets here. Arc Publications has a great series of poets from Europe, especially Eastern Europe. There was an article about an Afghan poet in the Times the other day. I’m trying to find something in print.

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Find journals and magazines for your poetry!

The 2014 Poet’s Market

collects the latest and greatest information for poets trying to hunt down places to submit their work. Packed with hundreds of listings for book publishers, magazines, journals, contests, grants, and more, this reference also includes articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry. It’s the essential annual resource for poets. (And for a limited time, folks can get a copy of the book with a free issue of Writer’s Digest magazine at the WD Shop.)

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As an editor, do you have any specific pet peeves?

Worst peeve: Poetry devoid of figurations. Immediate rejection. You would not believe the number of submissions I read that do not have figurations. Prose with line breaks.

Next worst peeve: Prose poetry that does not adhere to the very clearly established form of prose poetry. Some people must think that flash fiction is prose poetry. No. Sorry. Study the form before you write it.

Finish this statement: Poetry should _____________.

Poetry should affect how you view the world—and your place in it.

What (or who) are you currently reading?

Embarrassing, but right now I’m reading all of the Delmore Schwartz books that my neighbor had in her library, because I came across him at a gathering of poetry readers one day, and I’d never read any of his work. In fiction, I’m just finishing up Cities of the Plain, the final book of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, and I’m in the middle of the Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I’d highly recommend to all poets and writers. Some of Fitzgerald’s sentences make me grab a pen to underline them. (“The lamp light shopped in the yellow stands of her hair.” Wow, what a nice use of a verb!) In nonfiction, I’ve just started Love and Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price, for no other reason than it was lying on the living room floor one day, getting kicked around the room as the kids passed through, and I’d just returned from a week in Bermuda, which has a history closely connected to the Jamestown colony.

Here’s something I’m constantly browsing, like bees on pollen. Before I read submissions, I invariably pick up my marked up Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ever-present on my desk, and open randomly and read at least one poem and say a little prayer, “God, don’t let me be like the editors who rejected Emily Dickinson.”

If you could only pass on one piece of advice for other poets, what would it be?

To new or young poets: Learn how to use figurations (first learn what they are and how great poets have used them by reading Harold Bloom’s essay The Art of Reading Poetry or some other appropriate source). If you already know what figurations are, then I can give you no advice other than USE THEM.

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Robert Lee Brewer

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and one of Tom Lombardo’s happily edited poets. His debut full-length poetry collection, Solving the World’s Problems

, was recently published by Press 53. Voted Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere in 2010, Brewer edits Poet’s Market and curates the Insta-poetry series for Virginia Quarterly Review. He’s married to the poet Tammy Foster Brewer, who helps him keep track of their five little poets (four boys and one princess). Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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• Moving Past the Poetry Collection

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Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 235

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Kristina Marie Darling & Carol Guess: Poets Interview

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This interview is a little different, because I have two interview subjects: Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess, who collaborated on the collection X Marks the Dress: A Registry. How exciting!

Kristina Marie Darling has been interviewed on this blog before. She’s the author of 13 books, including Melancholia and Petrarchan. Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Poetics at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo.

Carol Guess has also authored 13 books of poetry and prose, including Switch and Doll Studies: Forensics. Forthcoming books include collaborations with Kristina Marie Darling, Kelly Magee, and Daniela Olszewska. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Learn more at www.carolguess.blogspot.com

Sometimes things go wrong at weddings. Someone steps on the veil or loses the ring. In a “trash the dress” shoot on the bank of a river, one bride lost her footing, dead weight in her dress. I can’t save you; I can only be careful. For example, my mistress won’t help with the cake. For example, we won’t get married in Texas, where I’m wanted for something I’ll never confess. Don’t worry your pretty neck over dresses: tea-colored silk, Rosaline lace. We’ll lash our rings to a red satin pillow. Keep the flower girl leashed. Use erasable ink.