Category: about poetry

• What Say You In June, Teachers?

  From a letter Sylvia Plath wrote to her brother:

  and I am to sacrifice my energy, writing and versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches…

  (qtd in Stevenson).

  Any artist knows exactly how Plath feels, especially if she is a beginning teacher. The first three to five years are the worst, especially in high school teaching.

  When I began teaching English composition at the university level, it took five semesters before I stopped feeling nervous before each class, and even still the classroom gives me anxiety dreams. But teach I must if I want to earn at least some money!

  I went into teaching after receiving a Master’s in Spanish with the hopes of writing poetry and short stories in the afternoons, but obviously that didn’t happen. I was too busy grading and planning to even think about any kind of writing besides in my journal.

  And I did not have Plath’s genius nor her frenetic, passionate drive to succeed. I settled into conformity and set my sights on having babies. The down side is that it took me almost 15 years to get back to writing. But here I am, my children in college, and I’m shaping up a manuscript of poems.

  
  Sketch of Benidorm, Spain by Sylvia Plath, where Plath honeymooned with Ted Hughes. Photographed from illustrations in Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson.

  June 27, 2012

  artists, quotes, Sylvia Plath

  ---

• Sylvia Plath Biography

  Halfway through Bitter Fame, a Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson, I can say that although she does not paint as sympathetic a portrait of Plath as does Alexander in Rough Magic, she does get to the inner struggles Plath experienced that led to her poetic apotheosis in a more acute way.

  Alexander had access to Sylvia’s mother while writing his biography, but he was writing blindly, because Ted Hughes did not allow him to view Sylvia’s letters or journals.

  Hughes’s sister, Olwyn Hughes, worked with Stevenson and allowed her to quote extensively from Plath’s journals and letters.

  Plath’s letters to her mother, as one might expect, give an optimistic report of Plath’s active social life and hard work at Smith and later at Cambridge, while her journal entries show she had an active, healthy sex life that unfortunately plagued her.

  Part of Plath’s problem lay in her inability to reconcile her “swing from violent vampire to virtuous nun,” as Anne Stevenson writes (28).

  The controversy around Plath’s life and death centers around her relationship with Ted Hughes. Obviously, she had an artistic temperament and was ambitious to the extreme. At the same time she was conformist and wanted to raise a family like her mother did.

  Even though I was born three decades after Plath, I understand her ambivalence about motherhood, art, sexuality, and a career.

  But her angst and passion led her to explore or flirt with death. She was too impatient to find out what lay beyond the moon at night.

  Of course the shock of losing Hughes would have brought about a despair she couldn’t find a way to exit, but reading her Ariel poems, one realizes she was in the throes of a Dionysian fury that went beyond Hughes.

  In the end, casting the blame for her death on Hughes means nothing. There are only the poems, which are as grand and sharp as polished steel.

  

  

  June 25, 2012

  drawing, poetry, Sylvia Plath

  ---

• Evening Poetry

  In his latest collection, We Almost Disappear, David Bottoms expresses stoic tenderness toward the passing of our human lives.

  The poems focus on the speaker’s memories of childhood and family, with many of the poems lingering on the narrator’s relationship with his father, his “old man.”

  Toward the end of the book we see the declining father shuffling on his walker against a backdrop of the Chattahoochee hill country, while the speaker contemplates the under currents running through existence.

  This collection narrates life with a reverential tone punctuated with the concrete imagery of everyday reality: a rusted truck, afternoon traffic,  a telephone that “shrieks in the middle of the night.”

  The tender attention to the details of light and objects reminds me of a Vermeer painting.

  The poems are shorter in length–only two are longer than a page. The verses lilt across the page in long lines that are often dropped or indented, inviting the reader to pause and savor the images and feelings.

  What will stay with me for a long while is the strong sense of abiding love that emanates from these poems–a cherishing of family, nature, words and even dreams.

  This love reveals itself through the inner monologues of an introspective soul who does not take himself too seriously.

  June 24, 2012

  David Bottoms, poetry

  ---

• Joy Harjo

  

  I had the good fortune to attend both a reading and a workshop given by poet, musician, and writer Joy Harjo.

  She came to the 41st annual Agnes Scott Writers Festival as a poetry judge, and she chose my work as the winning poem.

  In the Agnes Scott theater, Harjo enchanted the audience with her poems, her children’s story, excerpts from her newly launched memoir, and Polynesian songs she sang and played on a ukelele.

  Although the reading was joyous and celebratory, there was an undercurrent of mourning, because Joy Harjo had dedicated the night to her poet mentor and friend, Adrienne Rich.

  The next day the poetry finalists met with Ms. Harjo to talk about our poems. She asked us to share what we thought were areas where we could strengthen our work, and she offered suggestions for revisions.

  She admitted to the group that she was very much saddened by the passing of Adrienne Rich, and that the previous night’s dedication to her beloved mentor had taken a good deal of emotional energy.

  She encouraged us to accept that death is real and that young poets should not succumb to the allure of suicide, as many poets and artists have done in decades past.

  Of course, I am not a younger poet. I am a newly public writer who is not young. But some of the other finalists were in undergraduate writing programs, and a few of their poems were quite melancholy. It was good for all of us to hear Harjo’s wise words.

  May 12, 2012

  Agnes Scott Writers Festival, Doodles, poetry

  ---

• Adah Menken

  This doodle is the first in a series I’m starting titled “poets across the decades.” Just today I learned of Adah Menken from a friend who is writing her dissertation about this poet and actress.

  Adah Menken’s poem “Infelix” can be read on the Poetry Foundation website.

  

  Although her life ended during her Jesus year, she wrote an autobiography and a collection of poems, acted on Broadway and in Europe, and married four times.

  March 24, 2012

  Doodles, poets across the decades

  ---

• Art Is

  Freeboarder has been at art school for a month, and already he’s questioning the need for an academy to teach him how to make something.

  I’m proud of him for asking the questions. The same debate occurs in the world of poetry, with many wondering if there is a need for the now ubiquitous M.F.A. in creative writing.

  One talented student told Freeboarder that “art is dead.” My answer to that statement is that art simply is. The student was probably trying to sound provocative and oracular. Maybe he wanted to psyche out his competition.

  Going to art school allows the artist a chance to live within a community of skilled, committed people. Of course, we can create those communities ourselves, outside the Academy.

  Atlanta has a thriving arts community that originates with the people. We have wall art, street sculptures, and spoken word events, all outside the ivory tower.

  Freeboarder got a little shaken from the statement that art is dead. I told him that if art is dead, human culture is dead, because the act of making is an inborn, human right.

  

  

  September 24, 2011

  art, being, doubts along the path, life, making

  ---

• Practice

  In an effort to work my way back to a daily writing practice, I’ve started sketching in my journal. It’s very relaxing because I have low expectations of the results. Drawing is a way for me to “rest on the page,” as Julia Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way.

  Another good writing book is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She practices Zen meditation, and she said one of her teachers suggested that maybe writing would be her ‘practice,’ as in a meditative practice.

  She describes her daily writing as a focused free-write, not stream of consciousness. I’ve come to realize that my daily writing will not necessarily result in a poem or a story, but the practice itself if important to keep myself open to the world. Even when it’s as hot as a pizza oven in my city and I only like to go out in the evening.

  Philosopher told me what he learned from his poetry teacher: if you sit down to write every day your creativity will come to you.

  

  July 13, 2011

  daily routines, writing, yoga

  ---

• Literary Lists

  As for writing, I came up with one new poem this week and started cobbling together a ghazal.

  A friend, who I’ll call Statuesque Beauty, found a way to explain to me the art of a poetic free verse line. She suggested I write my drafts in lines, not prose. My usual process is to either write down random images and lines in my journal or my iPhone until I have enough to make a poem, or I free write for a certain length of time, usually in prose. But after my talk with Statuesque Beauty,  everything clicked! Each line of a poem is a mini poem.

  Which is why I’m trying my hand at a ghazal. Each couplet stands alone as a kind of aphorism. I like Sherman Alexie’s “Powwow Ghazal.” I’m using it as a guide for the pacing and sequencing of my couplets.
  **

  Met with Statuesque Beauty et al. for a poetry chat, and then moved on to Charis Books for the opening night of the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival. Lisa Allender hosted. Of the readers, I went especially to hear my friends, poets Dustin Brookshire and Jessica Hand–they both floored me, but tons of credit goes to all the readers. Each participant had moving poems and stories to share.

  Of course they all thanked Franklin Abbott, the founder of AQLF.

  

  

  

  

  

  Jessica Hand’s wife, Jeanna Melilli, wrote and performed music for flute to accompany one of Jessica’s pieces. You can hear Jessica’s poem and Jeanna’s music here: “The Beaten Dust Crowds the Light,” at the Cortland Review.

  Dustin Brookshire read a poem whose inspiration came vicariously through me, but the true impetus for the piece, in my opinion, is Dustin’s sass and wit.

  **
  Earlier in the week I went to Manuel’s Tavern for a poetry critique with some GSU buddies, but we skipped the poems and went straight for the beers. Still, through telling stories of my pitfalls and foibles, I realized maybe there was an idea in one of them. Of course, Statuesque Beauty hinted I should work my mishap into a poem. Now I have to figure out what my blunders mean.

  ***
  Multi-talented writer Collin Kelley is pictured above. He’s a well-known poet, but lately he has garnered more notice for his novels, a trilogy set in Paris, London, and the U.S. His most current project is the launch of Remain in the Light, part 2 of his Conquering Venus trilogy. (This link will lead you to a free download of sample chapters).

  June 25, 2011

  friends, poetry, writing

  ---