3 Interesting Things

1. A two-hour reading and Q&A with Etgar Keret here (from Front Porch Journal). What's not to love!

2. Shawnte Orion, participant in the Writing Process Blog Tour, has a new book out. Congratulations, Shawnte, on the release of The Existentialist Cookbook!

3. Rattle has a call out for Japanese forms for its Spring 2015 issue. Haibun, haiku, tanka, renga--all the different forms--they want 'em. Deadline October 15.

Narrative No-no's

I'm working on a project of narrative poems these days, so different from the lyric poems I generally write. There's a reason I want a narrative thread to my current project, and there are new challenges that come with it. The one I'm struggling with now is prose-iness (prosiness, prosyness, however you want to spell it).

I've found a few things helpful. Here are notes to myself:

1) Pursue constant persistent editing. Pull out anything that isn't necessary, and there will be more of it than there is in lyric poems. This is a difficult balance though, because more explication is necessary than in lyric poems, and yet you want as little as possible. How to decide? Look at the next tip.

2) Get rid of anything that doesn't advance the poem emotionally. If it advances the narrative but not the emotion, cross it out. Then if the narrative has become too sketchy, try again to add what detail you need, but remember the new line(s) must advance the poem emotionally or they will end up getting cut.

3). FORM! I have often lamented my tendency to write little bricks of poems, all left-aligned and stanza-y. Cutting out as much as I could from a narrative poem left me a stack of sickly little bricks that I hated. But then I teased them out--spread the words across and  over lines, indented some lines, used physical space to show where I had left out a part of the story it was my natural tendency to keep in, but that persistent pruning had convinced me to cut out. And then that missing bits didn't bother me anymore--the passage of time, the elliptical suggestion of missing elements there in the form left room for the missing parts without even having to mention them.

And now I had a poem that wasn't all brick-like and typical of me. Success with a narrative poem!

Eye Eye

"Into the Tunnel"     Chad Sweeney

Beyond the shipyard the pounded metal
of bay water, a helical structure of gulls,
and one great arm

sweeps the clouds over the edge.
I’ve wanted to be that decisive
as during the first moments in a new room

I look to find the windows
then go and stand beside them.
Factories stir fire into sky,

an airplane skids across
wrapped defensively in its sound
as a man is shouting into a tunnel —

a man with a name tag on his suit
and two drill-holes in place of eyes 

is shouting, Hurry son, the pipes have burst!

He is right to be afraid.
Water churns around the boy.
Excruciating to see this happen

and to not embrace them both.
What will you shout into the tunnel
given this one opportunity

when we all promise to listen?

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

Your eyes are on your side, for you cannot see your eyes, and your eyes cannot see themselves. Eyes only see things outside, objective things. If you reflect on yourself, that self is not your true self any more. You cannot project yourself as some objective thing to think about. The mind which is always on your side is not just your mind, it is the universal mind, always the same, not different from another’s mind. It is Zen mind. It is big, big mind. The mind is whatever you see. Your true mind is always with whatever you see. Although you do not know your own mind, it is there—at the very moment you see something, it is there. This is very interesting. You mind is always with the things you observe. So you see, this mind is at the same time everything. Shunryu Suzuki, Zen’s Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p. 134

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

Romanticism              Ashley Elizabeth Hudson

Held the telescope to your eye
late into the snowless night
and squinted into the cataract moon.

Oh it's that distant, as the boy who hung
the dingy white sheets and proposed
to the girl who wanted snow.

After the daylight peeled the label
off its clear blue glass and neurotically
became the night. Outside the body,

the disease was a heliotropic iris
offering its hope, as long as you stared
into the microscope.

The boy spent all day draping old linens,
and I suppose a trailer park is a kind

of snow globe, sex a sort of diamond. 

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

Taper, or Mary Tells All She Knows              Jeanne Marie Beaumont

A string to me says spine. I am patient
in long labors. In taking pains.
Dip, drip. Let them hang.
Repeat the steps.

I adore the odor of beeswax each day.
Authentic & pure as I suppose a
martyr would be. I'm none.
At dusk,

I light the tallest all along the stone mantle.
It is true I am a wisp of a woman,
smoke comes out my mouth,
my head heats up,

and sometimes if I hear a word that's especially apt
my eyes bounce like breezed flames.
But you shouldn't confuse
me with them.

These were born in the clean shrine of tedium
to accumulate evenly, cane straight.
Burning, they fly the flags
of thin victors.

And when they disappear—as is written—
leaving behind them no trace,
this is no miracle but ex-
pertise. 

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

Gloucester                                                             Ann Snodgrass

This seascape's now more cataract
of tired eyes—swept as it was by
too many winds, too many clouds
that are no longer.
Sails rise, fail.
It's time, then, for the children
to take over. Strange how they
just can't lie.
We, on the other hand, who came
here to forget, watch nameless
seabirds dive—soar—
dive, finding nothing.
Sails rise once again, fail.
It's certain then: anyone
could see that a child
would draw me—

even my own—as an outline. 

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

Obey Gravity      Cynthia Arrieu-King & Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis

A turnip puts a leg down in the earth
swift fingers of wind in her hair, crying
pebbles but not for reasons.

One star holds the sky pinched into place
the next keeps the beach from floating
another: a sea in satiny motion

colliding with shredded moon, salt
resisting large-bodied intentions to
  drag it down. Anything with lungs

can float there. Tripping forward,
anything with legs can hold its breath
for two summers or drop a penny. Anyone

out there? Anyone afloat in the snow globe
of someone else's memory: obey gravity.
Don't tip the turnip, the world up. Top-down,

shift your golden flags to indicate direction,
hold up your ounce breath invisible as a
hand pulling the blood through the tunnel

of artery of muscles, telling the eye beware,
the dawn the good-bye dreams, minute
the pillow's last kiss. The body, heavied


storehouse for gazes, pressed tight with
embraces, loaded with water, bugs, burlap—
thing to be stacked against floods. 

Things I Like

Things I like

*the color yellow next to the color dark blue

*when my husband brings home take-out tom kha gai (Thai chicken soup in a coconut base)

*when a poem I've been working on more than six months suddenly solves itself: a fix it took me more than six months to see, but there it is

Eye

6. The Critic  (from CHANTS)                 William Dickey

I unscrewed the lip from the mouth, the mouth I discarded.

I unscrewed the lid from the eye, the eye I discarded.

Here is a doll made from pieces. The pieces hate one another.

Here are the doll and I in a posed photograph.

After the photograph was taken, I unscrewed the camera. 

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

Self Portrait                   Edward Hirsch

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

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

Address to an Absent Lover          Sarah Manguso

The boy speaks in Russian (I understand him neither in the dream nor in real life). He opens his eyes and looks at me, apologizing in English for keeping them closed. When I wake up I think he must have seen me. But when I kiss him he looks surprised, as if he were blind. The night I met you I wrote It is possible I have imagined my entire life. * My great-grandmother's lamp is mine now. It is made of rose quartz -- that is, it is made of poetry. More poetry: A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor. Please come back and pick it up. More: The scar on my hand I got cleaning the house for you has outlasted you. In this way you are indelible, but only as long as I have my hand.

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

Pantoum Quilted from Agnes Martin's Writings by Carol Moldaw

Composition is an absolute mystery.

To penetrate the night is one thing

(you get light enough and you levitate),

to be penetrated by the night, another.

To penetrate the night is one thing, the mind knows what the eye has not seen;

to be penetrated by the night, another.

Overtaken, we feel a certain devotion.

The mind knows what the eye has not seen.

Perfection, of course, cannot be represented.

Overtaken, we feel a certain devotion.

Think of a shibori-dyed silk organza quilt.

Perfection, of course, cannot be represented

pieced and layered, a little bit off the square.

Think of a shibori-dyed silk organza quilt

but without batting, transparent, floating,

pieced and layered, a little bit off the square,

the layers hand-tied together with horsehair

(but without batting, transparent, floating).

Try to understand, court misunderstanding.

The layers hand-tied together with horsehair,

the grids of the layers overlap like voices.

Try to understand, court misunderstanding.

The seams, like leading, show through.

The grids of the layers overlap like voices.

One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse.

The seams, like leading, show through.

Before it's put on paper, it exists in the mind.

One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse.

Technique a hazard, interruptions a disaster,

before it's put on paper, it exists in the mind.

Rectangles lighten the square's weight.

Technique a hazard, interruptions a disaster,

composition is an absolute mystery.

Rectangles lighten the square's weight.

You get light enough and you levitate.

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

With That Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, What every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

-Hafiz

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

From "Elegy in X Parts"

Matt Rasmussen

X.

The self-murder mystery
begins like this:

We are more likely
to kill ourselves

than be killed
by someone else.

I am the pistol
saying I will only

say this once.
Do not open

the tiny door
in the back

of your head.
All alone when

all alone, we
are asleep

inside our
murderer. There’s

a metal word
in the chamber

of my mouth
and my eyes

are bored out.
I’m a noose

using the body
against itself.

I see
what’s too awful

to be true—
that house

with one lit window,
my brother’s

punctured skull—
yet is.