Poem,“From the Dictionary of Nonexistent Words, a Sampler”

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Gwynne Garfinkle, Julie C. Day, Kaleidotrope, Lisa Bergin, poetry

Happy New Year!

2017 has just begun and already I’ve seen a rejection (thank you Upper Rubber Boot “Women Up To No Good”) and a publication (thank you Kaleidotrope).

“From the Dictionary of Nonexistent Words, a Sampler” is up at Kaleidotrope!

“Black Window Baby” by Cesar Valtierra

It gets better! Yes, it does. And this is the best part…I’m sharing this issue with two of my dear friends and writing family: Julie C. Day’s “One Thousand Paper Cranes” (Julie’s author website here), and Lisa Bergin’s “Scrapie’s Trap” (Lisa blogs with her writers’ group here). I’ve also had the honor of reading poetry with Gwynne Garfinkle before (Live & in person, at WisCon) and now I have the honor of our poetry appearing together–Gwynne’s “The Last Word” is in this same issue.

Life is good.

And with that, dear readers, I have some writing to do!

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A Bit of Good News- Poetry!

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challenges, Kaleidotrope, poetry, writing

My poem, “From the Dictionary of Non-Existent Words, A Sampler”, is scheduled to appear in the Winter 2017 issue of Kaleidotrope!!! I will post the link when the poem and issue are live.

It has been a very difficult year. I probably don’t even need to write that, it seems to be true for far too many people, for the obvious societal and social reasons as well as personal ones. I might write a post about some of my own personal challenges later, but for now, let’s leave it at “a difficult year”. Therefore, this news from Fred Coppersmith at Kaleidotrope was a much needed positive, good-things-can-happen-too, don’t-give-up-! reminder for me to keep working, to not give up.

And there’s one other bit of good news that I can share in a couple days.

There is hope. What I work so hard for with my writing does not always get lost in oblivion, does not always fall short. And I will work to remember this, work to share it with you, and work to manifest it for the good of all. And if I forget, if anyone dear to you forgets, please remind them. Remind yourself. There is hope. We affect each other, in a thousand small but not insignificant ways. Let’s be there for each other.

Poem up at Stone Telling–grand double issue!

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poetry, Stone Telling, That Thief-Melancholy, the Body

My poem “That Thief, Melancholy” is in Stone Telling issue 10, The Body. The photo above accompanies the poem. I think it’s a great visual adaptation/ accompaniment.

This is a double issue! Lots of amazing poetry for you to read and listen to. Excellent poems from Sofia Samatar, Lisa M. Bradley, Jaymee Goh, Bogi Takács, Sonya Taaffe, Emily Jiang, and oh so many more! [Links are to authors’ websites–for their poems click Stone Telling issue 10.]

From the editors Rose Lemberg and Shweta Narayan regarding issue 10: Speaking about the body is a radical act. The body – with its ills, idiosyncrasies and secrets, its daring, its slow or rapid disintegration; the body that is beauty of old age and the pain in bones; the labored, uncertain gasping for air that supercedes all other desires. The body and the passions of it; the shame that is societally circumscribed and weighs us down like chains; the mind, which is a part of the body, in all its brilliance and defeat. Stone Telling poets have long been in dialogue with the body. The body dancing and at rest, the body wounded and healing, the body clothed in words or stripped bare. The body fat, thin, unapologetic, apologetic, too angry to be shy, not angry enough, the body that crosses boundaries, the body that says “I am here, see me, see me,” the body that whispers, “move on, there is nothing to see”.

The body is not always the same, the body varies in brightness, its true brightness may be ascertained from the rhythm of its pulsing, the body is more remote than we imagined, it eats, it walks, it traverses with terrible slowness the distance between Wisconsin and Massachusetts, the body is stubborn, snowbound, the body has disappeared, the body has left the country, the body has traveled to Europe and will not say if it went there alone…

— “Girl Hours” by Sofia Samatar

I’ll be live on Radio Literature, January 23rd, 89.9 FM

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interview, poetry, Radio Literature, WORT 89.9 FM

Rhonda Lee will be hosting me on Radio Literature on Thursday, January 23rd, 7:30pm (central), at WORT 89.9 FM.

Rhonda and I will talk about poetry, writing and literature communities including Wiscon and the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and I’ll be reading some of my poems, both published and unpublished. You’ll hear about Bluebeard’s daughter, Saints and their smiles, eternity, and winter.

All this at WORT’s studios–that’s 89.9 FM on the radio dial and http://www.wortfm.org/ on the internet (the “listen live” button is in orange in the upper right-hand corner of their home page).

Can’t listen live? WORT archives radio shows for a week. You can reach their archives here.

Radio Literature News & Culture Thursdays @ 7:30 pm

Radio Literature is a weekly half-hour show devoted to airing poetry, spoken word, fiction, and non-fiction from Wisconsin and the nation. It often features discussion with writers, as well as readings of their work.

 

A Poem for Sofia

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on writing, poetry, Sofia Samatar, writing poems for others

Your prose has a texture, this wonderful quality of sepia flooded by warm light. Mine, well mine is cold and bare bones, a half-scraped white. My writing has no subtlety – everything shows in the antiseptic lighting: the rivets and seams, every dent and imperfection. How to create that atmosphere I breathe when I read your work, that wandering through breaking light so palpable I feel it brush my skin. Its sighing warms my bones. I shiver. I unfold. How to write that tone, redolent, everywhere, like a morning mist: the other world of imagination peeking through, but upon closer inspection it was just a shadow, a nodding flower, a bird taking flight. Yet, that glimmering in the shifting light leaves me wondering.

[Want to know what I mean about Sofia’s writing? Here’s Sofia’s blog; her gorgeous prose enchanted novel, A Stranger in Olondria, through Small Beer Press; recently published poem, “Undoomed“, and an interview at Ideomancer; her “Snowbound in Hamadan” in Stone Telling (which she read at the Open Secrets Poetry Reading at Wiscon37); her “Burnt Lyric” in Goblin Fruit; among many other things…]

Poem “Sea Change” up at Strange Horizons

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"Sea Change", poetry, Strange Horizons

 

Strange Horizons, a weekly speculative magazine, has published my poem “Sea Change”! And a fine poem for October it is, full of love and jealous seas, ship wrecks and drowned souls, stealing of hearts and stealing of hands. I so enjoy reading this one out loud – try it for yourself.

poem up at Stone Telling!

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"the art of domesticity", poetry, Stone Telling

Oh my goodness! It happened whilst we were moving and buying our house (which is surely a special ring of bureaucratic hell) and my life was in boxes and where did I put my socks or my driver’s license?…

Rose and Shweta at Stone Telling accepted a poem of mine! “the art of domesticity” was accepted for publication in Stone Telling’s eighth issue, “Together: Apart”. The issue is live so go check it out.

(please note: stanza breaks are missing from my poem. There is a break between lines 3 and 4, between 6 and 7, and between 11 and 12. This should be fixed on the website soon.)

Adrienne Rich

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poetry, writing news

I need to get back to work, but saw this and did not want to wait to post:

Huffington Post: Adrienne Rich: Writing as Social Practice
The New York Times: A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism
The New York Daily News: Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and essayist, dead at 82
The Poetry Foundation’s bio of Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012
Thank you for your strength, your poetry, your vision. You made the world a better place for us all.
As my mother said: a profound passing.

Poem accepted and Nikki Giovanni

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creativity, culture, poetry, politics, why art is important, writing news, writing philosophy

A few exciting things happened these last few days:

– poetry editors Erin Keane, Drew Morse, and Sonya Taaffe at Strange Horizons have accepted my poem “Sea-Change” for publication! How thrilled am I?! Thrilled! Not only are they themselves an accomplished group of poets, but they’ve also published works by Rose Lemberg, Anne Sheldon, Mike Allen, Jo Walton, and so many other talented writers.

– tonight I heard poet, activist, teacher Nikki Giovanni give a talk thanks to the UW’s Distinguished Lecture Series. Wow, what an amazing woman. Her clarity, passion, joy, intensity, knowledge… just, wow. I laughed, cried, scribbled notes… and afterward, I biked into the night with a renewed sense of hope and purpose. And duty.

Here’s a few quotes I’d like to share:
– This is the year two-thousand and twelve. I think being alive is a good idea. I want to recommend it, I really do.
– Nobody beats the machine. John Henry couldn’t beat the machine.
– I was so upset, I wrote a poem.
– I urge you not to think of success, but to think of truth.

Nikki spoke on so many topics. And like any intelligent, creative, engaged human being she wove these stories and anecdotes of seemingly disparate topics into a cohesive, moving, meaningful, urgent lecture. And there was poetry. Of course.
She spoke of the importance of a quality education and the difference it can make in an individual’s life, the importance of art education, women’s rights and reproductive freedom, Pullman porters and A. Philip Randolf, John Glenn and black women humming when faced with death and fear, eating dinner alone and watching tv, and she spoke of grandmothers as the hidden person of the 60’s – the hidden voice behind the civil rights movement telling their grandchildren “nobody is better than you” even though the kids were being spat on, beaten, worse… and who is going to say to their grandmother, “no, we couldn’t do it” after these women had survived so much, had thrived, built families and communities, and loved and worried and lived their lives… exactly. That’s how you move forward despite great odds. And the civil rights movement did just that.

And I think that’s what artists are charged with, too, to be true to themselves and humanity and create the best art they can create. Which is to say, not to give up, to keep fighting the good fight. Change the world for the better, do not let it conform you. Nikki said: “What you can do is what you believe in and not wind up saying ‘I wish I had.'” That’s one of the times I cried. I might question myself and my abilities as a writer, but it is what I believe in, it is where my passion lies. I can’t give up. I can’t go back and say “I couldn’t do it.”

Nikki said: “I believe the Universe is just.” Well, I don’t know if she said “Universe” or “universe”; regardless, the Universe is awesome and it is what we have and are a part of. As Carl Sagan said, we are a way for the universe to experience itself. That’s a duty, too.

“Woman of Wood” at Goblin Fruit!

Tags

creativity, fantasy, poetry, the creative process, writing, writing news

It is published! My poem “Woman of Wood” is available in the Winter 2012 issue of Goblin Fruit along with the poem “Qasida of the Ferryman” by my dear friend Sofia Samatar. You will find many fine and wondrous poems as well as the artwork of Rose Lemberg, the guest artist for this issue.

As far as content is concerned, writing of “Woman of Wood” wasn’t the most difficult of poems. I have pieces in my repertoire that I have been working on for years now; pieces where the right metaphors and images, the ones that will bring to life the meanings and emotions I’m looking to share, simply elude me. But “Woman…” was all right there, she practically sprang forth like Athena from my head (or thigh).

In a former life I was a wood worker; a residential carpenter, cabinet maker, and painter. There is something about working with wood that is satisfying on a very basic emotional level; the feel of a well-sharpened chisel through wood, the smell of the sawdust, the patterns of the wood grain, building something useful and beautiful with my own hands and back and brain. There is one piece of furniture I had in mind while writing the poem: a beautiful night stand made of air-dried walnut. Because of the drying technique the wood retains more of the complexity of its color than when kiln-dried, which is the more common technique of the two because it is faster (indicative of so many things in our culture – it’s faster so that’s the way we do it, but it is not necessarily “better” and it certainly isn’t prettier, just cheaper). The walnut I used for the night stand is layered with bands of lavender and silver and crimson. Real faerie wood! Gorgeous. I wish I had time and the facilities to make more furniture with that wood.

As for the implications of the content, the layers of meaning that brought it about and the layers of meaning that it holds, well those have been forming in my brain and psyche since I was born. You’ll no doubt see shadow images of faerie tales and other popular stories, of cultural norms approached from that fantastic stand point, you’ll hear the wood I worked with speaking through the hands that shaped the wood, and more. Surely there’s plenty of my feminist background stepping forth and commenting on the traditions passed on to me through the two cultures I was raised in. Perhaps I’m commenting on my creative feminine side through the eyes of my male-dominated career self.

What was difficult about “Woman…” was the format. That took, let’s see, over a year to figure out. I had the whole thing written in one voice: the now first person her side and the third person his side were all jumbled together. It was a bit of a mess. Powerful imagery and phrasing were there, a unique story, but the story was out of focus, chaotic.

It’s that process of thinking, of wondering ‘what is it that I’m really trying to say here,’ otherwise known as editing, that forced me to keep working on the poem and make it better. How these things happen, I don’t know, but there was the moment of epiphany when I realized that what I had written was a story of the woman of wood and her forced transformation as well as the story of how a woman of wood is created, the physical and social forces that shape her. And it occurred to me that these two related stories might be better told as two intertwined stories. It’s the magic of thought we call creativity, that moment… and since writing is how I think, that’s what I do: I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, because I don’t know what I’m thinking until I write it and analyze it and rewrite it to see if that’s what I meant to say.

As the saying goes: don’t believe everything you think. That’s what the process of writing is (that is writing, rewriting, and editing): a better form of thinking.

I hope “Woman of Wood” makes you think, and feel, and transports you to another place, a place filled with the sound of axes chopping trees and the snap and crackle of a log thrown on the fire, the smell of fresh sawdust and of woodsmoke.