Featured Poet - Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner

Erika has published four books of poetry: Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore in 2003, Ideal Cities in 2010, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls in 2011, and Copia in 2014.

She is a first-generation American born and raised in Queens, NY by her Israeli father and German mother. Along with attaining her BA and MFA, she studied with poet Rita Dove at the University of Virginia as a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

I’ve been exploring interstitial, overlooked, and marginalized spaces: malls, office buildings, suburban developments, superstores, construction sites, and interstates. I am also working with the idea of women’s bodies as geographical locations and sites of inscription via sex, childbirth, and other highly physical acts.

Her work has been included in the anthologies such as Best American Poetry, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, Best African American Essays, The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace, and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2008).

She offers may of her works for reading on her own {website}. Click on her name at the top of this post to go to the site's home page. Here, have a couple of samples:


Big Box Encounter

My student sends letters to me with the lights turned low. 
They feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui. 

Like intervening and kinetic and tumult.  He strings words together
like he's following a difficult knitting pattern. He is both more

and less striking without a shirt on.  I know this from the time
I ran into him at Wal-Mart buying tiki torches and margarita mix

and, flustered, I studied the white floor tiles, the blue plastic
shopping cart handle, while he told me something that turned

to white noise and I tried not to look at his beautiful terrible chest,
the V-shaped wings of his chiseled hip-bones.  I write him back. 

I tell him there are two horses outside my window and countless weeds. 
I tell him that the train comes by every other hour and rattles the walls. 

But how to explain my obsession with destruction?  Not self-immolation
but more of a disintegration, slow, like Alka-Seltzer in water.  Like sugar in water. 

I dissolve.  He writes enthralling.  He writes epiphany and coffee machine. 
He is working in an office, which might as well be outer space. 

I am in the mountains. The last time I worked in an office, he was ten. 
I was a typewriter girl. I was a maternity-leave replacement for a fancy secretary. 

I helped sell ads at TV Guide.  I was fucking a guy who lived in a curtain-free studio
above a neon BAR sign on Ludlow Street, and all night we were bathed in pot smoke

and flickering electric pink light.  Here, the sun goes down in the flame
of an orange heat-wave moon.  The train thrums and rattles the distance,

and I think of his chest with the rounded tattoo in one corner and my youth,
the hollows of his hip-bones holding hard, big-box fluorescent light.

.

Double Sonnet Ending in New Testament
This poem is meant to have the make and model
of a vehicle in it, include a food I dislike, a musical
instrument. He gave up the cello. There were multiple
mandolins on his worktable. An item that is broken
beyond repair? My body. That’s easy. This & this
& this. A love note that falls into the wrong hands?
Every poem I have ever written. Please stop posting
your thumbs-up sonogram pictures. I don’t care
if you’re 43. If you’re an exception or a miracle or
whatever you are. A bird of prey. His son was learning
to be a falconer. Are these like vultures? I’m not sure.
An item of lost clothing—this doesn’t happen often
now that I’m married. Remember those bras
that went missing in apartments, knapsacks, cars?

Bless that time: fear of conception. Holy ruckery
& whiskey & some guy. I drive the highway
in my Honda Civic to the phlebotomist, try to arrive
early to avoid the trainee who always leaves
the bloodless needle halfway in my arm, then
calls for help to the other woman who looks like
a former heroin addict or the Mennonite; both can
deftly navigate my scarred veins. Falcons are
the fastest moving creatures on earth. Your baby
this week is the size of a poppy seed, a sweet pea,
a black olive. I hate olives. In the lab, they play
Spirit FM & don’t know anything about me. The DJ
croons, ‘I am the vine & you are the branches. Those
who remain in me, & I in them, will bear much fruit.


SOURCES: The Poetry Foundation, Poets.org, & Erica's own site.

Featured Poet - Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith

Ms Smith is the author of three prize winning books of poetry:  

The Body's Question (Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet) 
Duende (James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award)
Life on Mars (2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), referred to as  

"a collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain."

From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University, and in 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship.

Her other awards and honors a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2008 Essence Literary Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, a fellowship from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2005 Whiting Award. 
 
She studied at Harvard, where she joined the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University.

She teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

WHEN YOUR SMALL FORM TUMBLED INTO ME

I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed:
Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter.
Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor.
The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth
On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through
By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks
Night after night upon that room. You must have watched
For what felt like forever, wanting to be
What we passed back and forth between us like fire.
Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying
To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being.
From what dream of world did you wriggle free?
What soared — and what grieved — when you aimed your will
At the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?

from: Life on Mars. Copyright 2011.

I DON'T MISS IT

But sometimes I forget where I am,

Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,

Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,

The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.

Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.

And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is

I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.

Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe

In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want

To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,

Knowing perfectly well what they know.

from: Duende. Copyright 2007.

{Photo Source}
{Sources: Pulitzer dot Org; The Poetry Foundation; Poets dot Org)

Featured Poet - Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Claire
Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Ms Kageyama-Ramakrishnan has published two books of poetry: Shadow Mountain, winning selection of the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, and Bear, Diamonds and Crane.

She explores tragedy and trauma as they interact with history and culture. Her poetry evokes the atmosphere surrounding WWII, with the the xenophobia that victimized Japanese Americans and the internment camps that remain an ever present shadow on so many lives. She mines the memories of her grandparents, personal reflections, Japanese American history, and classical Japanese folktales, presenting the results in an array of poetic forms.

At the center of this mix are the people.

She also continues to grow her hair and donate 8 inch locks to create wigs for cancer patients.

"If my niece and nephew protest anything it’ll be to choose between a trip to Lego Land and Disneyland. At least that’s my hope. I am hopeful that things like the Iraq war will end by the time they make that transition from childhood to adolescence."

OTHER INFORMATION:

* Four Way Books * Critical Mass (interview) * The Rumpus (online chat) *

Terzanelle: Manzanar Riot

This is a poem with missing details,
of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane,
sand crystals falling with powder and shale,

where silence and shame make adults insane.
This is about a midnight of searchlights,
of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane,

of syrup on rice and a cook’s big fight.
This is the night of Manzanar’s riot.
This is about a midnight of searchlights,

a swift moon and a voice shouting, Quiet!
where the revolving searchlight is the moon.
This is the night of Manzanar’s riot,

windstorm of people, rifle powder fumes,
children wiping their eyes clean of debris,
where the revolving searchlight is the moon,

and children line still to use the latrines.
This is a poem with missing details,
children wiping their eyes clean of debris—
sand crystals falling with powder and shale.


from: Shadow Mountain. Copyright 2008.

INTERESTED in DONATING HAIR for WIGS for CANCER PATIENTS?

* Beautiful Lengths (Pantene) * Little Princess Trust *  Locks of Love *

NEED a WIG?

* Breast Cancer Freebies *

Featured Poet - Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee feels that the boundary between the local and the global has increasingly been blurred and she finds herself functioning as guide, investigating, interpreting, and chronicling.

"I write with the intersection of three cultures always looming over my shoulder - Indian, Filipino, and American - providing my writing with a layering and fusion of pop culture and customs."

She is the author of four poetry collections: Lucky Fish, At the Drive-In Volcano, Miracle Fruit, and Fishbone.  

How about a few samples:

What I Learned From the Incredible Hulk

When it comes to clothes, make

an allowance for the unexpected.

Be sure the spare in the trunk

of your station wagon with wood paneling

isn’t in need of repair. A simple jean jacket

says Hey, if you aren’t trying to smuggle

rare Incan coins through this peaceful

little town and kidnap the local orphan,

I can be one heck of a mellow kinda guy.

But no matter how angry a man gets, a smile

and a soft stroke on his bicep can work

wonders. I learned that male chests

also have nipples, warm and established—

green doesn’t always mean envy.

It’s the meadows full of clover

and chicory the Hulk seeks for rest, a return

to normal. And sometimes, a woman

gets to go with him, her tiny hands

correcting his rumpled hair, the cuts

in his hand. Green is the space between

water and sun, cover for a quiet man,

each rib shuttling drops of liquid light.

from: Miracle Fruit. Copyright 2003. 

The Rolling Saint

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for
            four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for
            world peace and eternal salvation.                                                
                                                                —Reuters

He started small: fasting here and there,

days, then weeks. Once, he stood under

a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting

            for nothing—not even to sleep. It came

            to him in a dream: You must roll

            on this earth, spin your heart in rain,

                        desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab

                        any cuts from the day before, and lay prone

                        on the road while his twelve men swept

            the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.

            Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man

            rolling through puddles, past storefronts

where children would throw him pieces

of butter candy he’d try and catch

in his mouth at each rotation. His men

            swept and sang, swept and sang

            of jasmine-throated angels

            and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.

                        He rolled and rolled. Sometimes

                        in his dizzying spins, he thought

                        he heard God. A whisper, but still.

from: Miracle Fruit. Copyright 2003. 

First Anniversary, With Monkeys

Periyar Nature Preserve

There is no crumbly frozen cake to thaw.

Today, we are in the jungle. I mean mosquito. I mean

tigers and elephants sludging their way

to the lake for a drink and Don’t make sudden moves

or snakes startled from an afternoon nap

will greet you fang first. I think we are lost. Too hot

for any cold confection to survive. Even my tube

of sunblock is as warm as a baby’s bottle. You get

to those places I can’t reach, those places I dared

not even whisper before I walked down the aisle

in white. You never worried if our families

would clash, if they would clang like the clutch

of pale monkeys clanging the thin branches of the treetrops,

begging for our trail mix. You never worried

about my relatives staring at your pale, muscled calves—

things not usually seen outside of the bedroom. You wore

hiking shorts anyway. And still, they lavished ladle-fuls

of food on your plate. I think we are lost. My eyes are dark

and wet as that wild deer that walked right past us,

a little off the trail. I think we are lost, but for once

I don't mind. Eventually you turn us back to a place

not on any map, but I know I can trace it back with my finger

if we ever need it again. We made it one year

without a compass and we’re not about to start now.

from: At the Drive-In Volcano. Copyright 2007. 

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck

in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,

the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—

then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,

bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—

and when I say I am married, it means I married

all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.

Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many

slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal

for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot

on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps

in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another

whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single

one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

from: Lucky Fish. Copyright 2011. 

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
the fear of long words

On the first day of classes, I secretly beg my students  
Don't be afraid of me. I know my last name on your semester schedule

is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can't help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels

to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor. You want something
to startle you? Try tapping the ball of roots

of a potted tomato plant into your cupped hand
one spring, only to find a small black toad
who kicks and blinks his cold eye at you,
the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the X-rays

for your teeth or lung. Pray for no dark spots.
You may have pneumonoultromononucleosis—
coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders

tiptoeing across your face while you sleep
on a sweet, fat couch. But don't be afraid
of me, my last name, what language I speak
or what accent dulls itself on my molars.

I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam
of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will
lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full

of tiny dinoflagellates oozing green light
when disturbed. I promise dark gatherings
of toadfish and comical shrimp just when you think
you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.

Verse Daily

SOURCES: Here & Here.

Featured Poet - Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley

* Chicks Dig Poetry *







Sandra Beasley is a Washington, D.C. based poet and author. She has two volumes of poetry: I Was the Jukebox, (winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize) and Theories of Falling, as well as the memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life. Her prose has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Psychology Today among other publications.


Cherry Tomatoes

Little bastards of vine.
Little demons by the pint.
Red eggs that never hatch,
just collapse and rot. When

my mom told me to gather
their grubby bodies
into my skirt, I’d cry. You 
and your father, she’d chide—

the way, each time I kicked 
and wailed against sailing, 
my dad shook his head, said
You and your mother. 

Now, a city girl, I ease one 
loose from its siblings,
from its clear plastic coffin,
place it on my tongue.

Just to try. The smooth
surface resists, resists,
and erupts in my mouth: 
seeds, juice, acid, blood

of a perfect household.
The way, when I finally 
went sailing, my stomach 
was rocked from inside

out. Little boat, big sea.
Handful of skinned sunsets.

from: Theories of Falling. Copyright 2008. 

Vocation

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino. 
For six months I played Brahms in a mall. 
For six months I arranged museum dioramas;
my hands were too small for the Paleolithic
and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit. 
I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them 
Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.
I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit. 
I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.
All I want to do is sit on a veranda while 
a hard rain falls around me. I’ll file your 1099s. 
I’ll make love to strangers of your choice. 
I’ll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it 
on that veranda. If it calls you, it’s your calling, 
right? Once I asked a broker what he loved 
about his job, and he said Making a killing. 
Once I asked a serial killer what made him 
get up in the morning, and he said The people.

from: I Was the Jukebox: Poems. Copyright 2010.

Flour Is Firm 

The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, line 4234

Baking two parts flour to one part water

could stop a bullet. So good soldiers

carried their hardtack over their hearts.

Break it down with a rifle butt, flood it,

fry it in pig fat to make hellfire stew.

Gnaw it raw and praise the juice.

Does wheat prepare for this as it grows,

seeking the light in a half-thawed field?

Do stalks know their strength is merely

in their number? What is ground down

we name flour in promise that it will be

made useful. Otherwise, it’s just dust.

Sheet iron crackers.

Teeth-dullers.

Would you call it starving, if a man dies

with hardtack still tucked in his pocket?

Can you call it food, if the bullet comes only

at the moment he gives in and swallows?

Source: Poetry (July/August 2013).

Featured Poet - Katherine Larson

Katherine Larson

A molecular biologist by trade, Ms Larson trained as a writer in university workshops led by Rita Dove and Charles Wright. A scientific sensibility definitely permeates her poetry. She was the winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, and the 2012 Kate Tufts Poetry Award.

Her first collection, published in 2011, is titled Radial Symmetry.

I live more authentically when I write. I pay more attention. I’m more curious. More imaginative. I ask more interesting questions. Writing allows me to approach my life with a greater passion: I risk more; I challenge myself more. When I’m able to spend at least part of my life fully traversing the landscape of my mind, I’m paradoxically able to be more present to the people and the world around me.

Writing offers a tremendous sense of freedom–the freedom to engage, to invent, to shape, to approach, to imbue. At this point in my life, it’s really no longer a choice. It’s impossible for me to think of being without it.

- The Kenyon Review.

Check out Katherine Lawson on PBS Newshour {here}

The Oranges in Uganda

Walking together, Death and I
are shopping for emicungwa
at night, in the market.
Each careful pyramid of fruit
is stacked on cardboard, illuminated
by candles. Death’s feet are bare
and covered with dirt
from the road.
We talk of small things.
How the mosque and the half moon
stand sentinel
against the bloody sky. That mangoes
will be in season soon.
I tell him I know why
people make love when they
come home from a funeral. Why the pull
of the body echoes the tides,
eyes wide as graves. The way the stamens
of a passion flower spin up,
defy their stem.
Thinking all the while,
fumbling with the prickly shapes of jackfruit
and their sticky sap. Yesu,
the death pulse ringing louder
than talking drums, viral in the blood.
Cloaked in barkcloth, Death
raises his ancestral spear, singing mouth full
of ulcers and steel. He has known the Tombs
of Kasubi,
Home of Kings.
The street children are out
stealing watches again.
There are no stars to behold.
Nkooye, Death says. I am tired.
He rises like a swallow
from the depth of grasses,
leaving a rip no word can cover.

Water Clocks

The singing of the blind school
    children and the
Mediterranean’s flat expanse are metaphors
for every kind of solitude made
    forgivable by time.
The hillside museum with rows of empty
earthen vessels is full of it. A stillness
    so replete
it resembles something like intimacy.
A fullness only partially fathomed.
    Like water clocks
and sundials that allowed time to be
translated into elements: droplets, shadows.
    And the laughter
of bathers from the spiaggetta.
 
The train stops just outside of Naples
    where I buy a glass
of cold juice squeezed from tangerines
and walk into Pompeii. I couldn’t have
    imagined the
magnitude of it. Brilliant pillars flush
with sky. Temples where sunlight
    streams white
and seems to radiate from inside
the stones. Certain histories require
    forgetfulness.
Others, strict belief. But I think
some histories live us. In the higher cities
    of the brain,
even the speechless ones are burning.

Study for Love’s Body
I. Landscape with Yellow Birds
The theories of Love
have become tremulous and complicated.
The way snow falls or Saturn revolves
repeatedly around some distance
where space is nothing
yet still something that separates.
Never mind time. Caterpillars
have turned the fruit trees
into body bags. The children paint
the mandibles of fallen ones with
silver meant for nursery stars.
Without the immense responsibility
of sympathy, these small deaths
are nothing more than
artifice. Like a single magnolia
in a cut glass bowl
we have no idea where
our roots went so suddenly.

II. Architecture in Ruins
Third floor of the doll factory,
ferns suck carbon
and sharper chemicals from air
near the women working.
They’re hunched over tables
of warped wood. 
Half of everyone is painting
eyes and lashes on porcelain heads, the rest
are threading hands to sleeves.  
Outside in the courtyard
a smattering of doves rise.
Have you ever wanted to
kiss a stranger’s hands?

III. Gardens Without Bats or Moss 
Gauguin writes to Theo van Gogh that in his painting he wants to suggest
the idea of suffering—without ever explaining what kind.

IV. In Stone Archways
The light is spilt green milk, which is languorous
as the red monkey Gauguin painted
by the brown body of Anna
the Javanese. At the Chinese Market
I buy two red teacups and a can
of coconut milk. I think—
Gauguin wouldn’t know
how Anna loved that monkey
and sang to him late at night.
Everywhere the sea screams
at me. A great pink slab of octopus arm,
beside it, babies seasoned in orange spices.
Such symmetry! Surely they swam
through the night like thirsty
flowers. I think you had it right
when you said love is the mathematics
of distance. Split like a clam on ice,
I feel raw, half-eaten. I rot
in the cold blue of the ego,
the crushed velvet of Anna’s chair.

Nursery Rhyme from Another Century

All over the neighborhood
          sleepwalkers sway
beneath glittering shelves of ice
dressed in cold light,
          confounded by doorknobs,
by the sea in their dreams.
Televisions belly-up in the alley,
          electrons stripped from trees—
Slow fallout of asbestos clasped
in the nursery walls, the grubby
          fists of stars prick
dark like a rash from toxic milk.
Corrosion on spark plugs, leaves
          whorled in the back seat
of a car oxidizing green.
And the nursery rhymes
          echo in the dark like radio,
a world talking cheerfully to itself
in the endless repetition
          of a pink cartoon
she begins to recognize
as the subplot of her life,
          the subplot of happiness.
Soon, they say, our houses will be made
entirely of glass. We’ll dance like mannequins—
          stiff and flawless
in the blue, fatal light of television.

Featured Poet - Camille Dungy

Camille T. Dungy

(Is that not a beautiful smile?)

{Her website}

Camille is both poet and editor. Part of her drive has come from what she saw as the low number of African-American poets included in nature poem anthologies. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Here are just a few of her poems:

Characteristics of Life

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
—BBC Nature News

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
                          speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                        of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                                                        I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
                        one thing today and another tomorrow
        and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

                        I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
        between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                                                        I will speak
                        the impossible hope of the firefly.

                                                You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
        such wordless desire.

                                To say it is mindless is missing the point.

First Fire 

Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses   

quivered in wet-black skin.   A shawl of haze tugged tight   

around the starkness. We could have choked on August.   

Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth,   

we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt.   

Could we, green girls, have prepared for this?   Yesterday,   

we played in sand-carpeted caves.   The store we built   

sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves.   

Our school’s walls were open sky.   We reeled in wonder   

from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning   

crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion.   

When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran   

into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning   

against a fury that we did not know was change.

Pity 

Christ bore what suffering he could and died   

a young man, but you waited years to learn   

how to heal.   Only when you could did you   

touch the man whose body blistered for yours.   

You posted him no news for sixteen terms,   

then just a signed graduation notice.   

The letter he wrote that week asked only,   

Now that your books are closed, can boys come in?   

At your wedding, you buried the woman   

you thought you knew inside a stranger’s name.   

This is how you found yourself: thirty-three,   

nursing a son. Soon there was another.   

Your mind had already begun to walk.   

But you were a mother.   Those cribs held you.

POETRY

* Smith Blue (2011) * Suck on the Marrow (2010) *  

* What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006) finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award *

AS EDITOR

* Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) nominated for an NAACP Image Award *  

* From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (2009, co-editor) * 

* Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (2006, assistant editor) *

ALSO:

* How a Poem Happens * Poetry Foundation * Poets.Org * Wikipedia *  

Featured Poet for March - Samantha Thornhill

This year I am going to try focusing on new and emerging poets rather than the established and well known. They need all the support they can get, and I'd like to think that my little blog can be of, at least a little, assistance.

 

Samantha Thornhill

 

Samantha has a {website} and a {blog}. 
Head on over and check out what she has to offer.

One of the first things you'll notice when you go looking for Ms Thornhill's poetry, is that you won't find it in the usual places. Samantha is a performance artist and you will find a lot of her her on {YouTube}.

Originally from Trinidad & Tobago, she teaches poetry & performance to middle and high school youth at the Juilliard School in New York City, and creative writing seminars at the Bronx Academy of Letters. Performing and lecturing all over the world, she is definitely on the rise.

* Mirror Mirror: The Art of Self Reflection * 
* Odelicious Poems *

Sources: here & here & here.

Featured Poet for February - Jennifer Chang

This year I am going to try focusing on new and emerging poets rather than the established and well known. They need all the support they can get, and I'd like to think that my little blog can be of, at least a little, assistance.

Our poet for February is:

Jennifer Chang

Ms Chang teaches Contemporary Poetry, MFA Poetry Workshops, and BFA Thesis Seminars, at the Bowling Green University in Ohio. Her debut poetry collection, The History of Anonymity, was published in 2008.

“As a scholar, I don’t trust autobiography, and as a lyric poet, I don’t trust narrative: both enforce a coherence that reveals more about the writer’s motives at the moment rather than the life or story being told. What I do trust is mystery; I trust confusion.”

"I write poems at my desk. I don't write every day, but I wish I did. The first draft usually begins with 'I,' and then I try to revise as much 'I' out as possible. Lately, I prefer to write about 'you.'"

Her work has been included in the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poetry Series and in The Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices (2008, edited by Mark Doty), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (2006, edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant, and Kelly Link), Best New Poets (2005, edited by George Garrett and Jeb Livingood), and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (2004, edited by Victoria Chang and Marilyn Chin).

Ms Chang co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the support and promotion of Asian American poetry. 


Her first collection


The History of Anonymity,


was selected for the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Poetry Series, and was also a finalist for the Shenandoah/ Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and is readily available. 

Genealogy

This stream took a shorter course—

a thread of water that makes oasis

out of mud, in pooling,

does not aspire to lake. To river, leave

the forest, the clamorous wild.

I cannot. Wherever I am,

I am here, nonsensical, rhapsodic,

stock-still as the trees. Trickling

never floods, furrows its meager path

through the forest floor.

There will always be a root

too thirsty, moss that only swallows

and spreads. Primordial home, I am dying

from love of you. Were I tuber or quillwort,

the last layer of leaves that starts the dirt

or the meekest pond,

I would absorb everything.

I would drown. Water makes song

of erratic forms, and I hear the living

push back branches, wander off trail.

Again a Solstice

It is not good to think
of everything as a mistake. I asked
for bacon in my sandwich, and then

I asked for more. Mistake.
I told you the truth about my scar:

I did not use a knife. I lied
about what he did to my faith
in loneliness. Both mistakes.

That there is always a you. Mistake.
Faith in loneliness, my mother proclaimed,

is faith in self. My instinct, a poor polaris.
Not a mistake is the blue boredom
of a summer lake. O mud, sun, and algae!

We swim in glittering murk.
I tread, you tread. There are children

testing the deep end, shriek and stroke,
the lifeguard perilously close to diving.
I tried diving once. I dove like a brick.

It was a mistake to ask the $30 prophet
for a $20 prophecy. A mistake to believe.

I was young and broke. I swam
in a stolen reservoir then, not even a lake.
Her prophesy: from my vagrant exertion

I'll die at 42. Our dog totters across the lake,
kicks the ripple. I tread, you tread.

What does it even mean to write a poem?
It means today
I'm correcting my mistakes.

It means I don't want to be lonely.

The Skin's Broken Aria

I cross the street
and my skin falls off. Who walks
to an abandoned lake? Who
abandons lakes? I ask questions
to evade personal statements. When you are
skinless, you cannot bear to be
more vulnerable. With skin, I
would say I am in love with
Love as in that old-time song
crooners like to croon. With skin,
I would wear elbow-length opera gloves
of pearly satin. Protect my skin.
Hide it. There is no skin
like my skin. How I miss it —
I miss it as I would a knitted bonnet, a
pewter teaspoon to stir sugar into hot water.
My great passion was my skin. The lover
I loved. They don’t
sell skin at Wal-Mart. And really, how
could I, humanely, buy it? Would you ever
give me your skin? This is a terrible world
we live in. There are mistakes and
batteries littering a junk drawer,
where Mother would hide my house keys and Father
would store his eyeballs. Do you know
Puccini? Do you spill silk
at the gorgeous onslaught of love, of Pinkerton’s
lurking return? Butterfly had no skin either
but you could not tell from the outer left
balcony. As I lay in a bed
of my dead skin, I dream of Butterfly
and what she could have done instead:
run away to this little room
to lose her aching voice, to listen
to the hourly ringing of bells
that is really the souring birdsong
of a child, skinned and
laughing, a child that will never be hers.

Sources:

* The Poetry Foundation * New American Poets * How a Poem Happens * BGSU *

* The History of Anonymity *

* The Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets University & College Prizes, Volume 9 *

Featured Poet for January - Tarfia Faizullah

This year I am going to try focusing on new and emerging poets rather than the established and well known. They need all the support they can get, and I'd like to think that my little blog can be of, at least a little, assistance.

The first poet of the new year is:

Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Midland, Texas by parents who had immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh. 

"My father (a doctor in private practice) often had Highlights magazine in the waiting room of his clinic," she says, "which I read from cover to cover. I also avidly read everything by Madeleine L"Engle, Cynthia Voigt, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to name a few. I wrote as a child, both poems and short stories. I think it was reading that ultimately led me to writing. It was through that act of immersion in someone else"s attempt to describe the world that I felt a strong compulsion to do the same. I used to copy poems I had read in volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica for Kids into my journal. Later, in college, I read this quote by Gunter Kunert in Stephen Dunn"s memoir Walking Light: "That"s why I write: to bear the world as it crumbles." That struck an incredible chord with me."

- Ploughshares.

 

Her book

                   Seam,  

winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, 
is due out in March of 2014, and it is available for pre-order. 

Her poems appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Washington Square, Best New Poets 2013, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and Sewanee Writers' Conference, fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop and Vermont Studio Center, and other honors. 

Seam is a book that narratively and structurally relies on distance: between two continents and cultures as well as between the year of Bangladesh’s independence and its modern moment. ...

I still have no words for how I felt about a woman enduring such horror feeling sorry for me. In this way, and so many others, my time in Bangladesh made me rethink culture, victimhood, violence, and empathy. 

 - Lantern Review Blog.

How about some poetry, after all, that's why we're both here. No?

from: Interview with a Birangona

In 1972, the Bangladeshi government accorded a new visibility to the 200,000women raped during the 1971 Liberation War by lionizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were often ostracized by their families and social circles.

What were you doing when they came for you?

Gleaming water sweeps over
Mother’s feet. Bayonets. Teeth.

My green and yellow Eid sari
flaps damply between two palm

trees. Grandfather calls to me:
mishti maya. Girl of sweetness.

Aashi, I call back. I finish braiding
my hair, tie it tight. I twine a red string

around my thigh. That evening,
a blade sliced through string, through

skin, red on red on red. Kutta, the man
in khaki says. It is only later I realize

it is me he is calling dog. Dog. Dog.

Who was in charge at this camp? What were your days like?

All I knew was underground: bodies piled on bodies,
low moans, sweat, rot seeking out scratches on our thighs,

the makeshift tattoos he carved on our backs to mark us.
Over milk tea and butter biscuits, the commander asks

what it feels like to have dirty blood running through our
veins. There were days we wooed him, betrayed each other

for his attention—now he turns me over on burlap.
Outside, bundles of jute skim the wide river. I turn

my face away. Kutta, he says. You smell. Tell me anything
you know about the body, and I will tell you how

it must turn against itself. Now I’ve seen a Muslim
girl naked, he says. How my body became an eddy,

a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time
came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango,

overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.

     Originally Published in Ploughshares

The Legacy of Women in the Liberation War, 40 Years On 

Learn more about the stories behind this moving poetry at The Stories We Tell. 

Ramadan Aubade
i.

Early pre-dawn mornings, a brief
          wind thumbing through coral bell
                    vine, the tea drowsy with
                             sweet.

Father in the kitchen, eating eggs quickly—
           the sun rising, pressing
the sin of eating
           onto his hands and feet.

ii.

The painted star. Its solid center,
           wet unseeing on my back—
                      my eyes opened, the star
                                  briefly
                                            spinning.

iii.

No, not another bite, I say.
           Bananas soaked in milk.
Coconuts shaved into
                                  moon-
                                              curls.

iv.

Hours on the prayer mat.
           I wanted to be sacrosanct,
                      rubbed clean, new palimpsest
folded—
           narrower and narrower threads of hunger.

v.

Later, I tried to sing myself into fire,
          but became a knife instead.
                    The center held briefly, then broke into
                              a wall of wine-red doorways.

Originally Published in Mid American Review

Aubade: Wedding

Sister, you left that one black hair
on the towel they used to dry your corpse, 
as well as one lilac dress, hanging
in the room our parents call your room, even 

though you have never lived here. If you want
to be the shade pulled over the window at dawn, 
I will still be the sister who lifted my hand, marked
your face with its palm. If absence wants a father

quiet with guilt, I will be the bride-to-be, awake
in your room the night before my wedding, breaking
open the wide-eyed dolls facing eastward, still pristine

on their shelves. Be the shade, Sister, that snaps open 
so light beads my hands, because the henna must be 
dry by dawn, rubbed away from my promised palms.

Originally Published in The Southern Review

Featured Poet - Wislawa Szymborska

Essayist * Editor * Columnist * Translator * Nobel Laureate

. . . and one of my favorite poets

I know, I know, I say that all the time. 

Described as a "Mozart of Poetry," she achieved a goal sought unsuccessfully by most poets - her book sales often rivaled those of prominent prose authors.

Ms Szymborska never failed to amaze me with the deceptive simplicity of her poetry. For her, the personal and the political existed on the same plane, and her poetry came from the places they intersected.

No poem brought that home to me more so than Photograph From September 11th. It is difficult poem to read because of the subject matter and choice of narrative. But it is probably one of the most powerful pieces I've ever read.

She continued writing poetry until she left us in 2012, peacefully in her sleep, at the age of 88.

Here are a few of her poems. They are not light reading. They can be uncomfortable, and they challenge us to rethink the way we look at the lives we live.


The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

A Few Words on the Soul

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.
It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.
We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

Children of Our Age

We are children of our age,
it's a political age.

All day long, all through the night,
all affairs--yours, ours, theirs--
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don't say speaks for itself.
So either way you're talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it's a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning
you don't even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

Love at First Sight

They're both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is more beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

Since they'd never met before, they're sure
that there'd been nothing between them.
But what's the word from the streets, staircases, hallways--
perhaps they've passed by each other a million times?

I want to ask them
if they don't remember--
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a "sorry" muttered in a crowd?
a curt "wrong number"caught in the receiver?--
but I know the answer.
No, they don't remember.

They'd be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.

Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.

There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn't read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood's thicket?

There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night. perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.

Hatred

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape -
our century's hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.
It's not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.
One religion or another -
whatever gets it ready, in position.
One fatherland or another -
whatever helps it get a running start.
Justice also works well at the outset
until hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred. Hatred.
Its face twisted in a grimace
of erotic ecstasy.
Oh these other feelings,
listless weaklings.
Since when does brotherhood
draw crowds?
Has compassion
ever finished first?
Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble?
Only hatred has just what it takes.
Gifted, diligent, hard working.
Need we mention all the songs it has composed?
All the pages it has added to our history books?
All the human carpets it has spread
over countless city squares and football fields?
Let's face it:
it knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins
and a certain bawdy humor to be found
in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.
Hatred is a master of contrast -
between explosion and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.
It's always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it's blind. Blind?
It has a sniper's keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.

To find out more about one of the world's finest poets, you can try The Poetry Foundation, Nobel PrizeDotOrg, PoetsDotOrg, & The New York Review of Books.

Here is a partial Bibliography: Poems New and Collected; View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems; Here; Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska; Monologue of a Dog; Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts; Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces; Nothing Twice: Selected Poems; People on a Bridge: Poems; Poems, New and Collected: 1957-1997.

1996 Nobel Prize in Literature:  "... for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."