Now and again, I find myself in a rut. I recognize it in my prose, where I write long sentences with semi-colons and similar syntactical patterns on either side. I recognize it in my poetry, where I realize that the pacing of one poem basically overlaps with the one I wrote the previous week, and I could substitute lines and barely recognize the change.

When ruts hit, I turn to improv.

Jodi with her kids. Photo by Jote Khalsa.

Jodi with her kids, having a yes moment. Photo by Jote Khalsa.

I’ve been performing improv since I was a teenager, but it became an essential part of my daily life while I was in the thick of graduate school. I’d plod away at my dissertation in the daytime, then perform on stages around Austin, Texas in the evenings. It took me longer than I’d care to admit to realize that the principles I so passionately espoused about the power of improv were also pretty ideal tools to revitalize my academic writing.

The number one rule of improv is to say “Yes.” The truth is, it’s usually vastly easier to say no. Toddlers find their strength in “No!” Teenagers find a different strength in “No.” “No” seems powerful, but eventually “No” leads to stagnation, to stasis. It’s safe, and nothing will change. But…nothing will change. Say “yes”—on stage, in your life, in your writing—and you’ll find yourself being surprised, taking risks, and having adventures.

Safe is fine. Risky is fun. And scary. And powerful. And surprising.

When we say yes to taking risks, we let our guard down. We let in ideas, thoughts, words, and stories that challenge us, that could be scary, that go beyond what we believe we “should” do or think or say.

Doing risky creative work involves talking to strangers, climbing on ledges, and challenging the authoritative voices of teachers and doctors and judges. Read more…

vw84cover_largeQ: Voiceworks published your poem ‘Darlings’ in issue #84 PULP. How did you find the process?

I was so thrilled to see ‘Darling’ find its first home in ‘PULP’. That issue was published a little while before my 25th birthday, so I was almost but not quite too old to be sending poems to Voiceworks! As for the process, Voiceworks is very hands on, and I so admire the time and energy the editors put into their writers’ work, especially young and emerging writers. On the other hand, I’m inclined to feel that work should be accepted or not accept as is; that there’s something sort of tricky about accepting a piece of writing conditionally, with suggested edits, especially where such edits are extensive or significant. I suppose this depends on the writer and their experiences, and whether they’re looking for feedback, or to workshop what they’ve written. And honestly, who doesn’t love a reader—someone who will read your work closely and offer a detailed response of some sort? That Voiceworks also offers feedback to both successful and unsuccessful contributors is something else I really appreciate. Read more…

April may be the cruelest month, but then along comes poetry and makes it better. National Poetry Month was originally founded by the American Academy of Poets in 1996 and has taken on a life of its own since then.

Storywalk 2013. Photo courtesy of Poem City.

Storywalk 2013. Photo courtesy of Poem City.

Montpelier, Vermont is a small town (smallest capital in the United States!), but has a huge community of creative types-particularly poets, writers and artists.

Every April downtown Montpelier is inundated with poetry by local poets for the entire month: children’s, well-knowns and unknowns. More than 200 poets are featured in a full text public display in the windows of local businesses.

PoemCity2013 is the main exhibit for the event and has been happening during the month of April for the past three years in celebration of National Poetry Month. They have support from the Kellogg-Hubbard Library , Vermont College of Fine Arts, MontpelierAlive! and several other local organizations.

One of the exhibits features Storywalk, an installation of the children’s book, “Mary Had a Little Lamp,” at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. You can see pages from the book posted all around the outside of the library building, so you can read the story as you take a stroll. There are readings, workshops and poetry related events the entire month of April to keep you busy and inspired. A popular event is the Bear Pond Poetry reading. It’s been going on for fifteen years. I hadn’t realized it’s been around for so long! It doesn’t seem so at all! All events are open to the public and free of charge. Former Vermont Poet Laureate, Ellen Bryant Voight, kicked off the beginning of the event with a reading at the Vermont State House.

Among the featured poets is the current Vermont Poet Laureate, Sydnea Lea’s “Quicksilver Spring,” “Ritual,” and “My Wife’s Back,” displayed at the Vermont Arts Council. Peggy Sapphire’s “A Woman” and April Ossman’s “His Mother’s Hair” are displayed as well. If you are wondering, yes, I do have a poem hanging in the window at the gelato place in town- right on the main drag.

I’m curious to know how other cities-and you-celebrate National Poetry Month. Have you read or written anything so far you thought was the best thing ever? Do you find you have more inspiration during the month of April?


Kris Underwood.

Kris Underwood.

Kris Underwood is the Social Media Editor at Hunger Mountain, the Vermont College of Fine Arts journal of the arts. Her poetry has appeared in Literary Mama, Poetry Midwest and The Barefoot Review. Other writing has been featured at the Hunger Mountain blog, the VCFA blog: 36 College St. and the Ploughshares blog. Visit her blog at http://krisunderwood.blogspot.com/

springtbh_905

 

STACEY: Hi Lucy, thanks for agreeing to answer some q’s. You run an online lit journal called Shabby Doll House, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

SHABBY DOLL HOUSE: Hi Stacey.

Shabby Doll House (est. 2012) is an online publication that I started in order to showcase work that I felt excited about, but that didn’t seem to have a home. We publish various forms of literature alongside original visual artworks made specifically to accompany the writing. We have published short stories, poetry, tweet compilations, gchats, watercolour paintings, .gifs, photographs, collages… It is kind of a mix of everything, but I think it has developed a particular style and sense of aesthetic.

 

I edit the website with Sarah Jean Alexander, and we aim to curate a cohesive collection of work every quarter. The general theme or aim, I think, is to distract or prevent people from feeling lonely.

 

S: Seems like a good thing for a online publication to want to achieve. What is the submission process like and roughly how many pieces would you get for every issue? Are there particular things you look for when selecting? Read more…

I’m going to celebrate National Poetry Month by having an argument with a 94-year-old-man.

In his 2001 poem “Challenges to Young Poets,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born 1919) says “To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen; to be a poet at forty is to be a poet.” (He’s probably referencing the 19th century artist Eugene Delacroix, who said something similar.)

Jessy Randall.

Jessy Randall.

I disagree. I think to be a poet at sixteen is to be a poet, and to be a poet at forty is to be a poet. But I do agree that most teenage poets do not stay poets, and I lament that.

When I was in high school I knew many great poets. I was in class with them. I saw them every day. I read their poems every week. I knew they were much better than I was. I KNEW it, objectively. (In college I would argue against the idea of objective quality as hard as I argued for it in high school, but that’s another story.)

Everyone wrote poetry then. Some people hid it more than others, but I was an editor of the high school literary magazine and I’m telling you, EVERYONE wrote poetry. Even the people you would least suspect.

But then, somewhere along the line, they all stopped (except me). I wish they hadn’t. They were so good! I would like to read what they would have written, if they’d kept on writing.

I don’t usually try to defend poetry or say that it helps the world. I’m usually not certain that poetry does anything except make me (and some other people) occasionally happy or sad or some other emotion. This week, however, I read a poem that made me think poetry might serve a larger function.

After the bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, everyone around me (physically and virtually) was upset and didn’t know what to say or do. We mostly threw up our hands. Maybe we reached out to each other a little bit, but mostly we threw up our hands, as we do after school shootings (see this article in The Onion).

Poet Scott Poole, however, wrote a poem. I know Scott a little bit. We read together last year in Spokane, Washington. I’m a huge fan. He is hilarious. Not this time, though. Here’s the poem he shared on Facebook: Read more…

Sherry O’Keefe presents us with 4 vignettes which teach us how to launder our own imagery. This post reminds us constantly to look around ourselves, even the smallest of happenings are ones which can be spun into a poem or a story. Everything has a story. Everybody is their own storyteller.

 

Sugar On a Rope:

He told me potatoes were complicated. I know this is true because I wrote it on a scrap of paper and saved it in my back pocket. Some conversations later, I retrieved the scrap of paper from the lint trap in my dryer. Apparently I had laundered the words when I washed my jeans. The scrap of paper looked a bit like a former leaf, except I could see these words in faded ink: potatoes are complicated and some poems are born in badness. The trouble is I cannot remember the conversation that produced these quotes. I don’t remember anymore where these words came from.

I don’t always know what to keep and what to let go. I’m not the sort to let anything go. There are scraps of paper all over my house. For example, these are the words next to my kitchen sink: We don’t even need to talk about houses on the hill. As writers we deal with the hanging on and the not knowing when to let go. Read more…

I have been writing things since I was very little but I have only been keeping them in designated places (as opposed to collections of scraps) for a few years. Over the past five years I have been using mostly the same kinds of notebook to keep my ideas and writing and objects in. Usually my drafts don’t begin as such in the notebook, but the process of collection images or assembling my thoughts, working out my ideas and arguments happens there. The notebooks are the armature for the poem or piece of prose that will come later.

My thought is to show some of the process. I write poems and longer prose things. I read them, too. I find myself sometimes overwhelmed by the completeness of the world. Meaning, first, everything seems already to have been done, and second, that everyone else working now seems already to have finished their work while mine feels perpetually just-begun.

I think this is in part because what I privately (and not very usefully to my writing sometimes) think of as capital-L-Literature is what is finished, vetted, authorized, paid-for. And most of what I make is not these things. So for my post here for Poetry Month, what I offer is a selection, both transcribed and photographed, of pages and fragments from my notebooks. These are where my writing comes from. Which isn’t to say what gets written here becomes the writing. I write things down, glue things in these notebooks. Later, sometimes, I come back to them like I would to notes for a paper or an exam.

 

(I was reading a friend's manuscript to offer a critique. Those notes are on the top left side: “Sarah's poems: caves/depth/rot-softness-not necessarily a positive attribute/ears, disjointed body/insides of things/dankness/mineral/telephone/[illegible]/animal”. Below that, a to-do list and “now we are/ old enough/we know/we can die”. On the right-hand side of the page, some drawings and to-do lists.)

(I was reading a friend’s manuscript to offer a critique. Those notes are on the top left side: “Sarah’s poems: caves/depth/rot-softness-not necessarily a positive attribute/ears, disjointed body/insides of things/dankness/mineral/telephone/[illegible]/animal”. Below that, a to-do list and “now we are/ old enough/we know/we can die”. On the right-hand side of the page, some drawings and to-do lists.)

 

(From a very recent notebook. The far left page: part of the novel I am working on [“Approaching Naples in a...]. The page that is vertical looks like reading notes of some kind. On the right-hand page, working out plot or connections between elements in the novel. Middle of the page: “socialization for subservience | 1619” [I am not sure any more what that date means there] and then below that “getting to know dates the way/some writers know characters/ the century”.)

(From a very recent notebook. The far left page: part of the novel I am working on [“Approaching Naples in a...]. The page that is vertical looks like reading notes of some kind. On the right-hand page, working out plot or connections between elements in the novel. Middle of the page: “socialization for subservience | 1619” [I am not sure any more what that date means there] and then below that “getting to know dates the way/some writers know characters/ the century”.)

 

(From a notebook from February 2010, some to-do lists. In the middle of the page, “START WHERE/YOU ARE//USE WHAT/YOU HAVE” and a fragment of a poem, “we wanted both honeybees/and cheap, instant/connection to home//we wanted to migrate/with no pain”. Bottom left, “Who appointed you arbitrator of what I (can) know?”.) Background = my current notebook.

(From a notebook from February 2010, some to-do lists. In the middle of the page, “START WHERE/YOU ARE//USE WHAT/YOU HAVE” and a fragment of a poem, “we wanted both honeybees/and cheap, instant/connection to home//we wanted to migrate/with no pain”. Bottom left, “Who appointed you arbitrator of what I (can) know?”.) Background = my current notebook.

 

(A page from the notebook I used up until we left England to live in Belgium, where I collected pieces of plants I saw daily. I wanted to remember the English landscape I lived in very precisely. At top left, with arrow: “First snowdrop, 2012, Jan. 9”.)

(A page from the notebook I used up until we left England to live in Belgium, where I collected pieces of plants I saw daily. I wanted to remember the English landscape I lived in very precisely. At top left, with arrow: “First snowdrop, 2012, Jan. 9”.)

 

(The notebook I am using now. I sometimes find the squares hard to write on, somehow constricting. This is me working out where things might go in the novel I am working on. From top down: “APRIL—STILL//[Public Record] 3480// [Film Stills/inside tsunami] 823// [FIRST THINGS FIRST] 536//[LiST of SURViVoRS] 1819// [SNOW] 1492 // [AFTER QUAKE/ON ROAD] // [Blandinsky?] 3097 // [MODES OF COUNTING] 2231 // [SHe sees HIM] 189 // [DEATH CERTIFICATES] 1191 // [B'sky?] // [Book of Beginnings] 3778 // [RAIN] 842// [Dictionary]”.)

(The notebook I am using now. I sometimes find the squares hard to write on, somehow constricting. This is me working out where things might go in the novel I am working on. From top down: “APRIL—STILL//[Public Record] 3480// [Film Stills/inside tsunami] 823// [FIRST THINGS FIRST] 536//[LiST of SURViVoRS] 1819// [SNOW] 1492 // [AFTER QUAKE/ON ROAD] // [Blandinsky?] 3097 // [MODES OF COUNTING] 2231 // [SHe sees HIM] 189 // [DEATH CERTIFICATES] 1191 // [B'sky?] // [Book of Beginnings] 3778 // [RAIN] 842// [Dictionary]”.)


Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung

Éireann Lorsung is an American writer (two books of poems, MUSIC FOR LANDING PLANES BY, Milkweed Editions 2007 and HER BOOK, Milkweed 2013; prose published in DIAGRAM, The Collagist, and Bluestem; poems in many journals). After doing her BAs and MFA in the city of her birth, she went to France to work—then to England to study some more. She now lives in Belgium, where she runs a small press and edits a magazine. She likes talking to people about writing, art, and ideas. She also likes spicy food, Singlish, cushions that look like biscuits, and the word ‘turpentine’.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAFor a short three years of my life, my friends were poets. Maybe not all of them, but the ones who weren’t poets were essayists or novelists, and poetry wasn’t a bad word among us. We all read poetry, went to readings, talked about this new writer or that piece, wrote poems or stories or both. We also bitched about our bosses, celebrated each other’s birthdays, went jogging when the weather lifted above freezing and we felt we’d maybe run out of things to write. We drank, ate, fucked, sometimes danced, went to the movies, gossiped, despaired, told dirty jokes, congratulated one another on our small successes, envied each other the same, talked about our families, caught and missed buses—in other words, we lived our lives like everyone else. Then we all finished grad school and, with MFAs in hand, moved toward the compass point that promised the most luck or the least terror.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAFor me that meant moving back to Seattle where I had a paycheck waiting and friends I’d left behind. Though the job I was coming back to had nothing to do with writing, at least I had a job in a time when economic uncertainty was becoming the norm. And unlike when I up and moved to Minneapolis for school, at least I was returning to a city that wasn’t an unknown. It was comforting to come back to a place I knew, to people I knew.

Actually, no—it wasn’t. Because from the first day back I realized they didn’t know me.

It wasn’t completely their fault. Even before grad school, I didn’t tell many people about my writing—I wasn’t hiding it exactly, it just didn’t seem to come up. My co-workers were more focused on whether or not that sponsor had signed on to bankroll the new website we’d already started producing or if I was going to that team morale event at the go-kart track. My friends wanted to know whether our skyscraper apartment building really was being demolished because of unsafe construction (it was), how my new old-job was going especially with that commute over the bridge getting worse, if I’d tried that recently opened restaurant that sourced all their food from no more than 360 miles away, and if I was going to so-and-so’s baby shower next weekend or you-know-who’s housewarming party. The couple of times I suggested going to a reading, everyone feigned a bit of enthusiasm; nobody showed.

McGuireAptsDemolitionWhen the layoff rumors came true and I no longer had a corporate job neatly summed up on a business card with a recognizable company logo, I decided to try writing full time—at least until my savings ran out or my husband decided that being the sole breadwinner was overrated. But when people I met asked what I did for work, I was reluctant—no, I was loathe to say, “I’m a poet.” Based on the few times I’d tried answering that way, I knew that whatever fanciful ideas were conjured in their heads about what being a “poet” was, it wasn’t remotely close to the reality of it. So I’d say I was a “writer” and then rush off before they could ask what I wrote. I could have gently corrected their misunderstandings about peasant blouses, love and sunsets, end-rhymes centered down the page, the tears of orphans mixed into our ink wells, but I guess I was tired of doing that. Or maybe I was out of practice after the three years I’d spent not having to explain. Or maybe I felt that even if I tried, even when I tried, it didn’t change anything. It didn’t stop them from telling me how they, too, wrote poetry when they were feeling sad or from abruptly proclaiming, “ ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, took the one less traveled…’ ” then looking to me for some kind of consent. It didn’t prevent them from asking incredulously if people read poetry anymore or blurting out in amazement, “Wow. Really? I didn’t know that still existed!”

The truth was, neither did I. Read more…

StarMarriage

 

Last year I had the words ‘you that sang to me once sing to me now’ tattooed on my right inside forearm. This was not a mid-life crisis act but was overwhelmingly to do with poetry.
The quotation is the first line of a poem by W. S. Merwin ‘Song of the Nomad Flute’ is a poem which appears in The Shadowsof Sirius,[i] a collection which was published in Merwin’s 80th year. I’ve read and re-read this collection, finding new lines and images that sing to me on each reading. When I embarked on my year of learning poetry by heart, ‘Song of the Nomad Flute’ was the first unrhymed poem I learnt. I followed it with another from the same collection – ‘Good Night’, which has some intricate repetition in it and appears to be a farewell to a beloved dog (although I wouldn’t mind having it read at my funeral!).

But my admiration of the individual poems in this book did not impel to me have that line forever inked into my skin. It was the more the collection as a whole and the age at which Merwin published it. Over the last few years, this collection, more than any other, has come to exemplify for me the kind of unapologetic poetry a poet should write and keep writing.

I think there are times in every writing career when a writer reaches a pause. It isn’t exactly writer’s block. Nor is it entirely a period of evaluation. Perhaps you’ve balanced a day job and family life with the private job of writing for a number of years. Perhaps you’ve given writing precedence in your life and you look around you to find that your friends have other lives, plan holidays and do more than window shop. You wonder why you’re writing when you could do so many different things.

When I paused, it was more like fatigue  –   but fatigue with the anxiety that surrounds writing. I was tired of trying to make time  every day to write. I was tired of wondering whether what I was writing was good enough. I wondered whether or not I was pushing my own boundaries. I knew I wasn’t submitting work regularly. I’d let elements of my writing life slip while I attempted to finish other writing projects that clamoured for my attention. At the end, I was simply exhausted by my own mouse-on-a-wheel anxieties.

It didn’t help that my part-time day job was online-teaching, an isolating occupation. Nor did the state of the publishing and related industries help. It was difficult to maintain faith in my profession when I heard almost weekly of independent bookshops closing down, publishers retrenching editors and abandoning imprints and genres. Who would be left publishing poetry when the dust had settled?

the Shadow of SiriusThen I re-opened Merwin’s collection and read his limpid, spare yet mysterious and intimate poems. I was struck by their fearlessness. Some of the lyric poems in The Shadow of Sirius talk in the ‘unadorned voice of a close companion who speaks softly and urgently, as it were, into one’s very ear.’ [ii] It seemed to me that Merwin, as an older poet, was relaxing into his craft. I was very aware that his apparent simplicity – is the result of a lifetime’s rigorous editing and rewriting. I couldn’t speculate how – or indeed whether – Merwin has arrived at a place where all experiences can be accepted, but I could work on my own fear. The first step for me was being reminded that poetry keeps singing to you if you remain open. In my case it was already inked into my skin. I’m not suggesting you do that! But I have compiled a small do-it-yourself list for anyone who also feels that they are paused in their writing career.

 

  1. Don’t panic. You might simply need a holiday. Everyone else takes a holiday, so why can’t a writer? Declare a holiday for your writing self. Make sure that you note the start and end of your writing holiday on a calendar or in a diary. (You may, of course, write during this period, but don’t feel guilty if you don’t.)
  2. Make some simple goals – decide, for example, to write one poem a month, or submit five poems to competitions. Write these down and tick them off when you complete them.
  3. Attend poetry readings – hearing other people read their work, reading your own work  and just hanging out with other poets can be enriching and make you remember you are part of a poetic continuum.
  4. Set yourself some writing tasks – call these ‘Doing the Scales’ or any other name that implies practice writing. Schedule these into your day or your week.
  5. Finally, write something quite different. Write a picture book. Write a script. Embark on an interlinked narrative about smart young things living in five different space stations, bookended with sharp haiku that all have to have the word star in them.

 

May that which sang to you once, sing to you now.

 


[i] Merwin, W. S., The Shadow of Sirius, Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

[ii] http://thecresset.org/2012/Trinity/Weinert_T2012.html 


IMG_7054

 

 

Catherine Bateson is an Australian poet and writer for children and young adults. Her last poetry collection , Marriage for Beginners, was published by John Leonard Press. She partially overcame her writing anxieties by joining the Tuesday Poem Blog group and posting a poem on her own blog each Tuesday. In June this year she heads to Paris for three months, courtesy of an Australia Council Grant.

 

Milkweed Editions, May 2012.

Milkweed Editions, May 2012.

When I seek advice from poets about how they do it — and don’t we all? — there seems to be a nearly-sacred belief about how you have to clear your schedule so you can write.

I have found the opposite to be true: often, we don’t need nearly as much empty space in our lives as we think we do. In fact, the more time I have, the more time I have to ruminate, the more tasks expand to fill the time I have, and the less I feel compelled to do.

Over the years, I’ve found that I need to be in the world to fill my artistic well, and to push against the world to do my best creative work. Two of the best things that have happened to my poetry have been a full-time job and a child, and yes, I do mean both at the same time.

Here’s what’s different, and often better, about writing these days:

1.     No dilly-dallying. I now have less time to write than I used to have to sit in a coffee shop with a girlfriend and complain about how I had no time to write. (I think I stole that line from an old issue of Utne Reader.) But when I sit down to write now, I write. No Facebook, no e-mail, no fridge, no letting a stack of student papers magically grow until it takes an entire day to grade them. It’s a race between me and my daughter, Anna, waking from her nap — and the bits of writing I do get done keep building over time. Read more…