I’m enjoying a summer of poetry. Just the two words “enjoying” and “poetry” in the same sentence is new for me. Although I like hearing poetry, it’s not until recently that I discovered the joy of immersing myself in a book of poems on my own.
Summer is when I do most of my writing. I usually don’t sign up to teach summer classes, instead I grade AP tests or review textbooks to collect a paycheck. That way I can create long periods of time during the day when I do nothing but write.
I read a lot during the summer as well, but have trouble keeping my own voice if I read books close to what I’m currently working on. I never write poetry, so reading it keeps my voice true. It also makes me pay more attention to the line level details of my prose.
Currently, I’m reading Kathleen Flenniken’s Famous. She was in Spokane during Get Lit! and participated in a great poetry panel with Matthew Dickman, Lowell Jaeger, and Laura Tohe. I bought Famous because of “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” which Flenniken read during the panel. The book won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was an American Library Association Notable Book. Read more »
I love Nora Roberts. She’s the queen of the mass produced romance novel and if you don’t know who she is then take a stroll past your nearest grocery store’s book aisle to school yourself. She’s written over 30 books in her 30 year career (my mom would argue that she no longer writes her own books, instead a team of just graduated English majors are the geniuses behind Roberts). Admittedly her plots are predictable, her characters are flat and overall each story is pretty formulaic but that doesn’t bother me. I still love Nora. I know I’ve set myself up for ridicule but I do have a point.
See when I first moved to Washington, I found a fellow classmate who also loved Nora. Fans of anything know there’s nothing better than geeking out with a fellow fan who can talk about the particulars of your fandom with equal or greater knowledge, in this case, sexy male protagonists and romantic story lines, as if they actually exist. Well, I loaned said friend and fan of Nora Roberts a book she hadn’t read yet and when months had passed with no word from her about how she’d enjoyed it, I finally asked her how she liked it. But she hadn’t finished it yet. In fact, she hadn’t gotten past the first page. She told me the flowery writing that hadn’t bothered her before was painful to read now after months of intensely studying language as we had in school. How dramatic, I thought, and elitist too! Oh well, I wouldn’t let my education ruin my ability to read anything other than “Literature”…
Kicking sand. That’s what I was doing a year ago in April when I thought of the first line of a poem I would write for my friend Patrick Elliott who was deployed at the time: “Angry at the persistence of Winter/ I jabbed my toes into the rock hard sand/ of the volleyball court, my mind with you/ and your heavy boots sinking into the sands/ shifting around Iraq.” Patrick had been gone for almost 8 months and still had four to go. The day I was kicking sand reminded me how far from danger I was because my friend was fighting for me and my freedom. But he wasn’t the only one.
The first person I knew to fight in our war against terror was Doug Traversa, the father of two friends I went to high school with in North Carolina. Mr. Traversa was the last person I could see fighting, being more inclined to correcting my butchery of the English language (he taught English before joining the Air Force), fostering dogs and playing a mean game of the Settlers of Catan. I couldn’t imagine him carrying a gun but he did it, along with lots of other war-like activities that he cataloged in his award-winning blog AWAC (Afganistan Without A Clue). Talking to his three children and hearing how calm they were about their father being in a war zone was amazing to me. But it shouldn’t have been -they were military brats and they understood sacrifice.
Mr. Traversa came home from Afghanistan safely and I didn’t think about the war again, until almost two years later when Patrick was deployed to Iraq. A lot had changed – I’d started writing more frequently and I’ d started reconsidering if the business world was where I wanted to be, which was a very delayed reaction because I’d already graduated with my degree. And while I knew Mr. Traversa, I didn’t relate to him like I did with Patrick. I also knew that Mr. Traversa had a wife and family and a general wisdom that made him cautious. While I didn’t consider Patrick to be careless, I knew that he had a tendency toward heroism. So I worried. And I wrote poems for Patrick. Read more »
Marilyn Hacker Has a Speculative Poem in this Issue
If you had six weeks to teach twentieth century literature, which works would you include? I’m thinking of sticking with stories, essays, and poems in order to maximize the ground we can cover.
I want to focus on the ways in which editors of literary journals helped in the formation and invigoration of literary movements. The class is called Critical Perspectives on Twentieth Century Literature, and, while I don’t want to examine literary criticism, I do want to explore ways in which other sorts of critics have affected literary movements and literary camaraderie.
I’m interested in exploring the following editors and literary journals and their impact on literary landscapes of the 20th century:
Harriet Monroe, founded Poetry in 1912, where she promoted the work of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, H.D., W.C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, and others.
John Crowe Ransom, founded a group of poets called Fugitives, which included Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. Together they started the literary journal The Fugitive in 1922. Ransom also created the literary theory, New Criticism.
Charles S. Johnson, was the editor of Opportunity: Journal Of Negro Life, which started in 1923and was a publication during the Harlem Renaissance that featured the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen.
Andre Breton, a surrealist, founded the review La Révolution surréaliste in 1924, which he and his friends formatted like a scientific review of Breton’s time called La Nature. Breton wrote a Surrealist Manifesto and had a pivotal role in the surrealism movement. Read more »
the poetry foundation’s poetry off the shelf podcast has a couple thanksgiving day poems for you, “gift” by u.s. poet laureate w. s. merwin (excellently read by alfred molina) and “holidays” by dara weir.
I was headed into hour eleven of a fourteen hour day last week when I decided that what my developmental writing class needed was a little poetry. After all, I fed them Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” the week before, and they ate it up like Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. In other words, they loved it. I read the story aloud, and when I got to the last sentence– “They unlocked the door, and even more slowly, let Margot out.” –I heard a student in the back of the room whisper, This is gonna be awesome. So there I was a week later in my closet of an office reeling from that little bit of encouragement and searching for a poem that would provoke them to similar states of excitement. That’s when I remembered the final section of Adrienne Rich’s poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World” in the book by the same title. In a rush, I looked it up online and read it for the umpteenth time, and then the craziest thing happened. I started weeping, like really crying my eyes out like a dumb ol’ baby. I was tired, yes, and stressed out, yes that too, but it was something else, too. That poem was the most beautiful thing I’d experienced in weeks. I was looking for direction, and there it was telling me who I was and how I felt. And by the time I got to the last sentence– “I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else / left to read / there where you have landed, stripped as you are.” –I had the eeriest feeling that Adrienne Rich had been residing in my brain all these years. Yes, this is why I read and write poetry, because there is nothing else left that will bring me back to life after all the countless external forces have sucked me dry. Thank you, Ms. Rich. I’ll be sharing this poem with my students in a couple weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Shakespeare apps, spin the bottle for themed poetry, rhyme finders, Frostisms (Whitmanisms??) poetry readings “enhanced” by reading along on a glowing screen?
I don’t know, friends. Internet on the phone with fancy apps and whatnot makes me believe I would stray farther away from poetry than I already have. Basically, I’m unconvinced by Bob Tedeschi’s argument. To me, it’s just more portable internet.
The apps don’t seem that impressive, or maybe they feel more for people who spring breeze through poetry than people who grave dig for poetry.
This is one of the excuses I give people when they ask why I don’t submit my work. (Usually I’m the victim of some kind of finger wag/downward glance/breathy sigh as accompaniment.) I feel as if my poems never land at a place where I can say, Well, how ‘bout that?
And I think most of my colleagues go through this with me:
write something
work it into something decent
believe the writing is pretty damn decent
come back to it some time later (a week/month/year+) and call it crap
This summer, I’ve given myself a project: study the lyric essay. Over the last year of grad school I’d heard it mentioned in passing, but never really thought about it—too busy trying to figure out what a regular essay involved, really. But now that I have some time, I’m interested to discover what the lyric essay is.
Over here in nonfictionland, we like to say that poetry and creative nonfiction are lovers. For me, and maybe only me, it’s true because my poems and my essays are so very personal, all about the “I.” I also like to think that I really care about my sentences. One reason I love writing poetry in form (I’m hearting cinquains lately) is because you have to, have to, find that one perfect word. The word that maybe has a couple of meanings, the word that makes your prose march. I have always tried to pay just as close attention to the words and lines in my essays. I even like to think of my poems as cute little essays.
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I’m enjoying a summer of poetry. Just the two words “enjoying” and “poetry” in the same sentence is new for me. Although I like hearing poetry, it’s not until recently that I discovered the joy of immersing myself in a book of poems on my own.
