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Sunday, May 25, 2014

Small Presses: Eye on Japan

Among the Japan-related small presses covered by Japan Times writer Kris Kosaka (an extraordinary playwright herself) in this article in the paper's culture section today is Isobar Press. Isobar further specializes in poetry, and counts among its recent publications Royall Tyler's A Great Valley Under the Stars, Andrew Fitzsimon's A Fire in the Head, and my own The Insomniac's Weather Report.

royall cover11cRGBinsomniac cover33(small)fire cover(outline)300dpi


For those of you in Tokyo, please join Isobar Press founder Paul Rossiter and many Isobar poets at a reading on Friday, June 6th, a celebration to launch a number of new Isobar books. I'll be there and would love to see you. Here are the details:

The launch of the second four Isobar Press books will be from 6–9 p.m. on Friday 6th of June in room 403/404 on the fourth floor of International House of Japan in Roppongi.

http://www.i-house.or.jp/eng/index.html

Royall Tyler will read from A Great Valley Under the Stars; Andrew Fitzsimons and Nobuaki Tochigi will give a bilingual reading of A Fire in the Head; Jessica Goodfellow will read from The Insomniac's Weather Report; and Paul Rossiter will introduce and read from Whispers, Sympathies, and Apparitions: Selected Poems of David Silverstein.


Also, don't forget the following limited-time offer: the first 20 people who order a signed copy of The Insomniac's Weather Report directly from me will pay nothing for postage, worldwide!  There are still some copies left for this limited-time offer, so contact me right away!

Finally, other presses discussed in Kosaka's article include Stone Bridge Press, Chin Music Press, Bento Books, and Kurodahan Press.

Pattern

Something and Nothing                            Katie Ford
In the month my brother began to love a married woman,
the month the lantana took all the heat of late summer
into its orange sanctuary blooms, bearing it, storing it
as if for some suddenly-cold October night, he let her be.

In a twilight in which we are told the stars are portioned
into patterns like goblets and horses and archers he slid
her photograph into a copper frame welded
at the edges with a darker wire melted against it

and in. And it became
something of untiring capacity, growing
like the miles of hollowed land stunned and crafted
so far before us the metallic light of morning
that we could never imagine
unmade the land,
then towered the rain down, centuries worth,

to make a lake of what was gone, desire in which he let
her be and waters where the tired
but living carp swim back and forth. 

**********

We thrive, in part, when we have purpose, when we still have more to do. The deliberate incomplete has long been a central part of creation myths themselves. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women sought imperfection, giving their textiles and ceramics an intended flaw called a “spirit line” so that there is a forward thrust, a reason to continue making work. Nearly a quarter of twentieth century Navajo rugs have these contrasting-color threads that run out from the inner pattern to just beyond the border that contains it; Navajo baskets and often pottery have an equivalent line called a “heart line” or a “spirit break.” The undone pattern is meant to give the weaver’s spirit a way out, to prevent it from getting trapped and reaching what we sense is an unnatural end.    Sarah Lewis in The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

**********

The Pieces That Fall To Earth                           Kay Ryan

One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

**********

“I know that I have an instinct towards math and cleverness in structure that I work against, and so I try to make something … I make this whole structure which takes up a cork wall of index cards, and then I feel that is the architecture of the book, and what you do with architecture is that you cover it completely . . . And why I am driven to make something this complicated I don’t know. It’s just a pleasure for me always in all kinds of reading and fiction to know that there is some kind of clock ticking in the background. It could be rhetorical device, the way that language goes in the book. That there’s a pattern to it, because it’s nice to feel when you close the book that there’s a pattern to life.” Andrew Sean Greer in an interviewwith Michael Silverblatt on KCRW’s Bookworm 

**********

Time                                                    Robert Creeley

Moment to
moment the
body seems

to me to
be there: a
catch of

air, pattern
of space— Let’s
walk today

all the way
to the beach,
let’s think

of where we’ll be
in two year’s
time, of where

we were. Let
the days go.
Each moment is

of such paradoxical
definition—a
waterfall that would

flow backward
if it could. It
can? My time,

one thinks,
is drawing to
some close. This

feeling comes
and goes. No
measure ever serves

enough, enough—
so “finish it”
gets done, alone.

**********

Desire is, among other things, a function of repetition, or so the very patterns of your life have led you to believe. John Keene

**********


Thursday, May 22, 2014

Channel Shane McCrae

If you are a fan of Shane McCrae (as I am, see here and here), you may have wished you could channel him, or his sensibilities, while writing your own work. Now you can. Black Lawrence Press, publisher of McCrae's latest book Non-fiction (don't be fooled--it's poetry), is offering a consultation with McCrae over five of your own poems if you purchase a bundle of Black Lawrence titles, including Non-fiction. The bundle total is $10 off the price of the books purchased separately, and includes the online consultation. Sign up by May 31 to receive a written critique from McCrae on your poems. I've already signed up!

In the past, I've used the personalized creative writing sessions of Black Lawrence Press's parent company, Dzanc Books, currently called Creative Writing Mentorships, in which a writer selects a mentor from an impressive list, currently including Molly Gaudry and Alissa Nutting. The writer then purchases time with her mentor, at $20 for one hour, $30 for two hours, or $50 for 4 hours. My experience with poet Michele Battiste significantly strengthened the manuscript I had been writing at the time--it soon found a publisher. And I'm happy to hear Battiste has a new book just out with Black Lawrence now, titled Uprising.

These are economical ways to get some one-on-one help with your poems. Plus the writers all volunteer their time so that proceeds can go to the Writer-in-Residence programs that Dzanc offers free to students in elementary and secondary schools across the country.

And I just discovered that Dzanc now has Online Writing Workshops. I don't have first-hand experience, but will likely try one in the future, given my good experiences with other Dzanc programs. Would love to hear from anyone who has had experiences with Dzanc programs. Thanks.


Saturday, May 17, 2014

Weather

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”
Pema Chödrön

******************

No Narrative                    A. E. Watkins
A paradise forecloses once an aperture—no narrative but trees
are saying birds between them. Sun through green leaves like green

stained glass—a bright room, the birds spoken in through
a window—translating between two

weathers: the birds as captives or portents.
The forest and feathered currents

coursing its chambers; what to think
of open doors, the emptied sanctuary Your trilling

lingers the rafters now branching several scenes.
No narrative but birds on wires humming between

poles—lining the street—front doors and absence cut in each
tree to let wires through: an entrance by which

a blood-thick night can pass.
The birds with beaks pulled to breasts, their small claws clasp

a wilderness humming sun-lit rooms and flitting. 

**********

  from  Ice Cream  by Robert Creeley

Where we are there must
be something to place us.
Look around. What do you see
that you can recognize.

.

Anxious about the weather,
folding the door shut, unwrapping
the floor covering and rolling it
forward at the door.

.

So that’s what you do:
ask the same questions
and keep answering.

.


Was that right.

*********
Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment.
~from Jennifer Moxley's 'Fragments of a Broken Poetics'

*********
APPREHENDING THE WEATHER IN KANSAS                 Jon Kelly Yenser
For Becca

I'd forgotten that
the front edge of a front
seems its opposite

a long in-drawing
a sough up high in the elms
in the maples a sigh.

Just before the first drops
icy and big as dimes change
things for the better

the wind comes up.
You never mistake the storm
for what came before.

I grew up agape
and breathless in this weather
and the pulse it kept.

**********

Ghost                 Mark Irwin

Now your name's just a guest here, one that cancels
all hellos. Fleshless
you come & go through the mansion

of air. How
will I address you, small
weather? Sometimes your name's

a dress like an iron
bell the years
swing shadows from

longer that home. Can you hear
that word peal? I'm going
there now,

carrying the windows
from inside
all the vowels. 

 **********

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Tokyo Poetry Reading this Sunday!

Don't miss this weekend's poetry reading by Paul Rossiter!

'Taking a Line for a Walk': The Pleasures and Surprises of the Poem
At 6:30 on Sunday 18th May at Good Day Books, Paul Rossiter will be talking about some of the pleasures, surprises, fascinations, and frustrations of reading and writing poems. In the second half of the talk he will introduce and read some poems from From the Japanese, his book which collects poems on Japanese themes, ranging in time from his first visit to Tokyo in 1969 (the era of Vietnam and Zengakuren) to the post-tsunami Japan of today. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

ADMISSION: Purchase from Good Day Books one copy of From the Japanese, or one copy of any other Isobar Press book (all at ¥1,500 + sales tax).

Good Day Books, Tokai Bldg. (big-b shoes building), 2-4-2 Nishi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0031. Tel: 03 6303 9116.

Five minutes walk from Gotanda station; click below for a map.

http://www.gooddaybooks.com/contents/home/new_location?language=english

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Mother

Zero Plus Anything Is A World
~Jane Hirshfield

Four less one is three.

Three less two is one.


One less three
is what, is who,
remains.

The first cell that learned to divide
learned to subtract.
Recipe:
add salt to hunger.

Recipe:
add time to trees.

Zero plus anything
is a world.

This one
and no other,
unhidden,
by each breath changed.

Recipe:
add death to life.

Recipe:
love without swerve what this will bring.

Sister, father, mother, husband, daughter.

Like a cello
forgiving one note as it goes,

then another.

**********

Getting Close

Because my mother loved pocketbooks
I come alive at the opening click or close of a metal clasp.

And sometimes, unexpectedly, a faux crocodile handle makes me
   weep.

Breathy clearing of throat, a smooth arm, heels on pavement, she
   lingers, sound tattoos.

I go to the thrift store to feel for bobby pins caught in the pocket
   seam
of a camel hair coat.

I hinge a satin handbag in the crease of my arm. I buy a little
   change purse with its curled and fitted snap.

My mother bought this for me. This was my mother's.

I buy and then I buy and then, another day, I buy something else.

In Paris she had a dog, Bijou, and when they fled Paris in 1942
   they left the dog behind.

When my mother died on February 9, 1983, she left me.

Now, thirty years later and I am exactly her age.

I tell my husband I will probably die by the end of today and all day he says, Are you getting close, Sweetheart? And late in the afternoon, he asks if he should buy enough filet of sole for two.

From a blue velvet clutch I take out a mirror and behold my lips in
   the small rectangle.

Put on something nice. Let him splurge and take you out for
   dinner, my mother whispers on the glass. 

**********
The Major Subjects           Lawrence Raab

Death is easier
than love. And true feeling, as someone said,
leaves no memory. Or else memory
replaces the past, which we know
never promised to be true.

Consider the sea cucumber:
when attacked it divides, sacrificing half
so that half
won't get eaten. Can the part left undevoured
figure out what to do?

The natural world is always instructive,
mysterious as well, but often
hard to praise. Love
is also difficult—the way it slides into
so many other subjects,

like murder, deceit,
and the moon. As my mother used to say
about anything
we couldn't find: If it had been
a snake it would have bitten you.

Fellow poets, we must
learn again to copy from nature,
see for ourselves
how steadfastly even its beauty
refuses to care or console. 

*********
'A woman knows when to be inside and when to be outside, her mother’s only useful lesson, and of course when to be neither.' Guy Davenport, from “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle

*********

The Dome  by CHAD SWEENEY


I’ll give you that red one.
When we were the poorest,
mom paid my weekly allowance
in birds. That one is yours, she whispered

so as not to disturb it.
If you clean the oven

In a few months
I owned all the birds on the street,
blue jays, finches, a lame owl

cowled in the clock tower.
We had to walk farther each Saturday
to find a new fountain or thicket

 

so mother could pay me what she owed.
We stood on a bridge.
Our soldiers were marching away,

singing
and trying to sound brave.
Their numbers were staggering.

I invented a mathematics
to understand them.
I subtracted them from summer

and it was winter. Most of our houses
were gone, and the birds too.
The university had been bombed

with my father inside, attending a reading
by some Polish poets.
The poems were so sturdy, he said,

they held up the dome of the ceiling.


*********
Family Portrait                                James Allen Hall
If I could turn the photograph, bring my mother's face
to the bright eye of myth, my unflinching lens,
you'd see she's mouthing the words: Take the picture already.

You'd see my father's lust, his loathing
molding her body into some four-legged
photogenic thing, whipped and adored.

You'd see my mother emerging from the ghost world
limb by limb, carrying on her bowed shoulders
Eros and his sadomasochistic twin.

In the dim violated light, she's marked
by a man who can't let any part of her go.
In the light my father makes in the dark,
I was mothered into art. 

*********
To See My Mother                                                Sharon Olds

It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn't looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother's dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.
**********
Sleep Chains                 Anne Carson
Who can sleep when she —
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
all the links
rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

*********

Lament for the Makers                                                     Frank Bidart

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

My father's ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee
                  •
Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art. 

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Mother's Day

I'm a good girl. I've always been a good girl. For most of my life, it could have been me that Mary Gordon was thinking of when she wrote, "There is no seduction like that of being thought a good girl." But recently I have definitely not been good, in my family's definition of the word, or what I thought was my family's definition.

This is what I mean: I have written about subjects we don't even talk about. And I have published a little bit of what I have written. And it's about my mother's family, her brother, his accidental death. I emailed her before publishing the poems, and we had an email exchange, and things went much better than I had expected. My mother said she hoped I would write about her brother's life, since she didn't want only his death remembered. And that seemed like a reasonable request. But a difficult one, since we don't talk about my uncle, and so I know very little about his life.

I know he was a good guy, and it was the surprise and pain of losing a 22-year-old that made my mother's family shut down on the subject. I have a little bit that was written by my grandfather about his son, and I'm going to talk to my mom about him and about their childhoods when I visit her this summer. And then I'm going to try and comply with my mother's request.

But in the meantime, I feel a little strange, having broached a topic largely considered taboo in my family. And I have brought up pain that has been for a long time pushed down. Or at least unexpressed. Despite my mom's apparent acceptance of what I've done, I feel odd, and will probably continue to do so, until I do as she has asked. After all, I am a good girl. Or was.

And tomorrow is Mother's Day. I feel like the relationship between me and my mother has been changed by what I've done. And this is the first Mother's Day when I haven't been sure what my mother is thinking of me. My first Mother's Day not knowing if I am still a good girl in everyone's books.

And I feel more free as an artist than I ever have, and more relieved than I did as a child unsure of why there were things I was not supposed to talk about. But I feel that I have made [m]other[s] pay for my freedom.


Happy Mother's Day, everyone.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Blog Tour Update

If you haven't checked my blog tour post recently, please do. It's been updated to include three more poets (yes, I went a little crazy and invited three poets)!

You won't want to miss the musings of Tara Mae Mulroy, Drew Myron, and Shawnte Orion, nor miss seeing which poets they have invited to join the blog tour next! It's an international bonanza of poets, so don't delay!

Thursday, May 8, 2014

The Insomniac is Available Now!

The new Isobar Press edition of The Insomniac's Weather Report is now available at Amazon, Amazon Japan, Amazon UK, and directly from me. If you want a signed copy, please contact me via the contact link at my website, or leave me a comment on this blog with an address or URL by which I can contact you. (The first 20 people who contact me directly will get free shipping anywhere in the world.)

In the meantime, you can download an excerpt from the book here.

Thanks!

And thanks to Paul Rossiter of Isobar Press for making this edition available in almost no time at all!

[Backstory: Some of you may recall the The Insomniac's Weather Report was first published in 2011 by Three Candles Press, as the winner of their First Book Award. Unfortunately, Three Candles closed abruptly only months after beginning to issue copies, so this book languished in a state of suspension until Paul Rossiter rescued it earlier this year, winning my true gratitude. Poets whose manuscripts have suffered similar setbacks, have hope!]


Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Single


Beautiful, mysterious images are static. Too many such images clog a poem. A mysterious image is a holy, wonder-working icon. How many of those can you have in a single poem?

Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, p. 48

*******

...now I understand about the comfort to be found in fear; also the power. Sometimes now I think it is the fear that keeps me safe; sometimes now I think the fear is all that keeps me safe. When I am scared of everything, the fear becomes a gauze bandage around me and I am convinced that if I stop being afraid, if I let my guard down for just one minute, all hell will break loose and fly apart in my face like a shattered windshield. On airplanes, I am so scared that I think If I relax and let myself enjoy the flight, the movie, the drinks, the conversation of the interesting woman beside me, we will crash for sure. It is my fear alone that keeps us airborne. All the other passengers can do whatever they damn well please: they have no responsibility and so no power. I realize there is a pumped-up vanity in this, a perverse delusion of grandeur in the belief that I could single-handedly avert disaster and save these smug, stupid strangers, not to mention myself.

 The power of fear lies in its conceit or the conceit of fear lies in its presumption of power.

 Diane Shoemperlen, from the short story "The Look of Lightning, The Sound of Birds" from the collection Red Plaid Shirt
******

Vocabulary of Dearness                           Naomi Shihab Nye
How a single word
may shimmer and rise
off the page, a wafer of
syllabic light, a bulb
of glowing meaning,
whatever the word,
try “tempestuous” or “suffer,”
any word you have held
or traded so it lives a new life
the size of two worlds.
Say you carried it
up a hill and it helped you
move. Without this
the days would be thing sticks
thrown down in a clutter of leaves,
and where is the rake?


*******

Anyone involved with the institutions of poetry would do well to remember this. With all the clamor in this country about the audience for poetry, a veritable barnyard of noise into which I myself have been known to bray, we shouldn't lose sight of one of poetry's chief strengths: how little of it there is. I don't mean how little there is in the culture, but how little there is at any one time that is truly excellent. Poetry's invisibility is deplorable and worth fighting. Its rareness is admirable and the chief source of its strength. Indeed, I sometimes think that if we honored its rarity more, poetry's invisibility would be less of a problem, or at least we might define the notion of visibility differently. Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry – rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.

Christian Wiman, Poetry, Dec. 2006
*******

Tread-softly (Cnidoscolus stimulosus)             Sarah Hannah

Hell, this is a field without end,
Wider than a gate, athrum with
Insect wing and Squawk. I might as well

Go swim in flame, but I can't swim,
So I'll just walk: bramble, spike,
And blame, without a single quenching

Drop of dew. Not a field—a ravine—
I mean a raving: You. And I'm
On double shift: daughter, nurse,

In double oxymoron: home hospice.
Some have said it's not worth saving,
This tiny family of Spurge: we two.

The hooks go in, the rash is swift, and
There's no poultice, only spur and spurned.
Even the milk sap burns. I've the urge to turn

And quit, but there's simply no one else to do it;
No one could or would—tread softly, that is—
Open the hand, toss the shoes and step back in,
Knowing what I know.

*******

She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul            Young Smith

(Mrs. Morninghouse, after a Sermon Entitled,
"What the Spirit Teaches Us through Grief")

The shape of her soul is a square.
She knows this to be the case
because she sometimes feels its corners
pressing sharp against the bone
just under her shoulder blades
and across the wings of her hips.
At one time, when she was younger,
she had hoped that it might be a cube,
but the years have worked to dispel
this illusion of space. So that now
she understands: it is a simple plane:
a shape with surface, but no volume—
a window without a building, an eye
without a mind.
                         Of course, this square
does not appear on x-rays, and often,
weeks may pass when she forgets
that it exists. When she does think
to consider its purpose in her life,
she can say only that it aches with
a single mystery for whose answer
she has long ago given up the search—
since that question is a name which can
never quite be asked. This yearning,
she has concluded, is the only function
of the square, repeated again and again
in each of its four matching angles,
until, with time, she is persuaded anew
to accept that what it frames has no
interest in ever making her happy.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Two Tokyo Readings (Plus Four Random Things)

Tokyo friends, two poetry readings you should know about:

1) 'Taking a Line for a Walk': The Pleasures and Surprises of the Poem
At 6:30 on Sunday 18th May at Good Day Books, Paul Rossiter will be talking about some of the pleasures, surprises, fascinations, and frustrations of reading and writing poems. In the second half of the talk he will introduce and read some poems from From the Japanese, his book which collects poems on Japanese themes, ranging in time from his first visit to Tokyo in 1969 (the era of Vietnam and Zengakuren) to the post-tsunami Japan of today. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.

ADMISSION: Purchase from Good Day Books one copy of From the Japanese, or one copy of any other Isobar Press book (all at ¥1,500 + sales tax).

Good Day Books, Tokai Bldg. (big-b shoes building), 2-4-2 Nishi Gotanda, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0031. Tel: 03 6303 9116.

Five minutes walk from Gotanda station; click below for a map.

http://www.gooddaybooks.com/contents/home/new_location?language=english


2) Launch of the second four Isobar Press books:

The launch of the second four Isobar Press books will be from 6–9 p.m. on Friday 6th of June in room 403/404 on the fourth floor of International House of Japan in Roppongi.

http://www.i-house.or.jp/eng/index.html

Royall Tyler will read from A Great Valley Under the Stars; Andrew Fitzsimons and Nobuaki Tochigi will give a bilingual reading of A Fire in the Head; Jessica Goodfellow will read from The Insomniac's Weather Report; and Paul Rossiter will introduce and read from Whispers, Sympathies, and Apparitions: Selected Poems of David Silverstein.


And now for some random things:

1) Each week, the Poets.org website will feature a different entry from Edward Hirsch's A Poet's Glossary. This week's word is 'poetry.' Sign up to get the weekly newsletter

2) According to Slate, Pennsylvania (my home state) is the most linguistically diverse in the union. I admit to missing the Philly accent, and to subscribing to two podcasts recorded in the Philly area in order to listen to the accent every week while living far away in Japan!

3) Slate also introduces us to the website Something Pop. It's a mathematical algorithm for helping you make decisions. I was intrigued but doubtful, so I used it on a decision already made but about which I feel ambivalent, and I was pleased to find that what I did chose was the (mathematically determined) better choice (the other option came in as not a bad choice either though). Believe it or not, that actually gave me some comfort.....though I continue to be intrigued but (slightly less) doubtful. 

4) Tapastic brings you Abstract Madlibs for PhDs and academics. If you're one of these (or partnered with one of these) you'll find this amusing. (Hat tip to Diane Nagatomo.)