Poem of the Week - L'Esperance

Poet and friend Mari L'Esperance's work is featured this week at PoemoftheWeek.org, curated by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Check it out!

L'Esperance at the Asian Art Museum

Mari L'Esperance reads her poem "Anju, from the Far World, after seven paintings by Fukuyo Matsui. The reading was at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.

Tracery, what a ghostly word, and such a pleasure to say. Thanks for sharing this poem, Mari!

Congrats to Ocean

One of my favorite new poets, Ocean Vuong, has won the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize for Younger Poets, through the American Poetry Review. Yay for Ocean!!!

Read an interview of Ocean with poet Mari L'Esperance here. And listen to one with Rachel Cruz here.

Congrats to Mari

Friend and poet Mari L'Esperance is interviewed by J. P. Dancing Bear on Outofourmind's Posterous. You can listen here, by clicking on the 6/9/12 show (hover over the number, and when it becomes an arrow, click on it, and you can listen without going to iTunes).

Mari also co-edited a forthcoming anthology with Tomás Q. Morín called Coming Close: Poets Pay Tribute to Philip Levine as Teacher and Mentor (University of Iowa Press, 2013).

Congratulations, Mari, on many things, poetic and otherwise!

Guest Blogger's Big Poetry Giveaway Results!

And now a word from our guest blogger, Mari L'Esperance!

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Thanks, everyone, for participating! I've used a random name selector to choose the two winners:

- Carol has won a copy of my poetry collection _The Darkened Temple_ (2008 U. of Nebraska Press)!

- Michael has won a copy of Yusef Komunyakaa's _The Chameleon Couch_! (2011 FSG)!

I'll be emailing the winners shortly with the news and to get snail mail addresses for mailing your winnings.

Congratulations to both winners and a VERY SPECIAL THANK YOU to Jessica for hosting me on her blog so I could participate in the Big Poetry Giveaway for National Poetry Month! —Mari

Guest Blogger & Giveaway Host: Mari L'Esperance

I'm happy today to have a guest blogger, poet Mari L'Esperance. Mari joins us as part of the Big Poetry Giveaway. Welcome, Mari!

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Jessica has generously agreed to let me "borrow" her blog to announce my participation in the NaPoMo poetry giveaway. I'm giving away a copy of my book The Darkened Temple, which was awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize and published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2008. Along with my book, I'm giving away a brand-new, hardcover copy of Yusef Komunyakaa's The Chameleon Couch (2011 Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

If you're interested, please let me know in the comments section and be sure to include your email address and/or blog URL. On May 1 I'll do a random drawing of all interested parties and notify the winner by email. Thanks so much and happy reading! —Mari L'Esperance (www.marilesperance.com)

L'Esperance Interviews Vuong

One of my favorite poets, Mari L'Esperance, interviewed one of my other favorite poets, Ocean Vuong, over at Connotation Press.com.

I've mentioned Vuong's writing practice on this blog before, and L'Esperance discusses it in her interview with him, describing it as "reassuring and forgiving," which is an apt way to put it.

Learn about Vuong's childhood, and read a few of his poems at Connotation Press too.

Below see the cover to his chapbook, Burnings, published by Sibling Rivalry Press.

Interviews with Two Poets

Here are a few terrific interviews with poets.

For the first I have to give a shout-out to poet extraordinaire Mari L'Esperance, who told me about this interview with Kundiman fellow Janine Oshiro at Lantern Review Blog. One of the most interesting points for me was when Oshiro talked about forming a manuscript from her poems and thinking about it as a single work with an arc, and how this larger perspective showed her new poems that she could write to complement the ones that existed. I was also cheered by her statement that poets need to be comfortable with their own processes, and not focus on quantity of output.

Another interview I enjoyed this week was a New Letters on the Air podcast by Angela Elam, talking with James Richardson.  Richardson talks about how the mood necessary for writing poetry is the opposite of the feeling of being productive. He says that when he makes himself write, he ends up writing the same old stuff. He explained that "it takes vast amounts of space" in order to come up with something new. Later he reiterates that particularly when ending up a book, "when everything you are thinking about is coming together...and you know everything, or think you do...", you can sit down and write a poem and get three lines into it and realize it is an old poem, which is why you need free time to "get back to your ignorance, back to your sense that you don't really know." "It's possible to be new just by your ignorance again," he says when comparing writing to the process of recent research in physics. Isn't that comforting?

Well, I've been a big fan of James Richardson for awhile, which is why I've posted about him one, two, three times in the past. And now I can't wait to get familiar with Janine Oshiro's work as well. Enjoy these interviews.