If you like surreal prose poems, this prompt is for you. Or maybe you’re feeling generous, and want to donate a first line. Check out the prompt based on Russell Edson’s zany poems at Read Write Poem.
Category: essays and commentary
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A Sneak Peek at Conquering Venus
Sunday night I settled in with a great read – the prologue and the first chapter of Collin Kelley’s debut novel, Conquering Venus (Vanilla Heart Books). The narrative hooks the reader from the first sentence and doesn’t let go, weaving in and out of the past and the present. Scenes shift from the US to Europe, and from waking life to recurring dreams. There is a mysterious symbol, sexual tension, the beauty of youth, and the salty wisdom of a middle-aged school teacher (who’s not as conventional as her colleagues). The dialog is fast-paced and witty, providing dramatic relief from protagonist Martin Page’s grief over his past loss. All this in the first 22 pages of the novel. I can’t wait to read the rest… .
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A Dinner with Poets
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3670825&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ff0179&fullscreen=1
Southern Poets Dinner plus Scenes around Atlanta from christine swint on Vimeo.Dinner with poets at the Colonnade, plus other Atlanta landmarks.
What wonderful dinner companions, and such a nice location in Atlanta, the Colonnade, known for its southern cuisine. I met up with Collin Kelley, Karen Head, Julie Bloemeke and Dustin Brookshire, all of whom have or have had poems in ouroboros review. Poet Rupert Fike was also there, as well as Cleo Creech and Chelsea Rathburn.
Thanks to Collin Kelley, who organized us and chose the location for our gathering. It was a big thrill for me to be included. I’ve only been writing poetry for publication for a year and a half, and it still seems like beautiful dream to be a part of the world of poets.
Dustin has asked all the poets in attendance to share a poem in the comments section of his blog. Cleo Creech wrote one just last night, inspired by the restaurant. His poem does a wonderful job entering into the atmosphere of a southern restaurant, and the life of a waitress. And Collin Kelley has shared a pithy, vivid poem about rain, travel, and umbrellas. I think he want to return to England.
I needed this outing at the restaurant. After all the hard work Jo and I did trying to get the magazine launched, our server was barraged with a DDos attack, and the site went down for over 24 hours. If you haven’t had a chance to read issue 2, please go have a look. It’s stunning, even if I do say so myself. Thank you, Jo, for all your energy and savvy.
Here’s the poem I shared with Dustin. It’s a re-write of one I wrote last spring.
If Ophelia were from Georgia
It might have happened like this,
that she does a drunken electric slide
down the hill till she reaches
the creek’s edge, wedges a sneaker
into a dogwood’s vee,
hoists herself onto a limb.
Filches buds to weave a garland,
scoots across knotted bark,
cracks off twigs as she seesaws
toward the water.I swear, that man’s a dog, she drones
and tries to pin down
her reflection in eddies
dark from silt and rain.
Who the hell is he to tell me
to straighten up?
And then the branch snaps ¬
she drops into the creek.Serene in the whirlpool,
gazing at a hazy sky,
she sings herself to sleep.
White petals snow
on a bed of pine needles
the day they find her body.
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ouroboros review issue 2 is released
The second issue is now online and in our bookstore, ready for your reading pleasure.
Atlanta Moon, cover art by Meg Pearlstein Here’s a brief sample of what’s inside:
- Michelle McGrane, featured poet interview and three poems.
- Collin Kelley interviews Vanessa Daou.
- Music, art, and poems from Amy Pence and Hunter Ewen.
- Deb Scott, Carolee Sherwood, Jill Crammond Wickhams’s poems (grouped here because of our mutual friendship and our affiliation with Read Write Poem.
And of course there’s so much more. We’ve been working around the clock – when I go to sleep at 11:00 Atlanta time, Jo is waking up a few hours later in London and gets to work. But today, issue 2 will be put to bed. Time for a cup of tea or a glass of wine and an hour to read ouroboros review.
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Dream recall made simple
After chatting with a friend about dreams, I thought it might be a good time to revisit a post from my old blog, maria cristina. I wrote this in July, 2007.
The main way to remember your dreams is to use the power of suggestion. If you say to yourself before you go to sleep, ” I’m very serious about remembering my dreams,” or something like that, eventually you’ll remember. At first you might only remember a fragment, but that’s fine. Write down the fragment. Think about the image. Ask yourself what associations you have with it.
Eventually you’ll remember more, until you find yourself recalling four of five dreams a night, maybe even more than you can handle. All you have to do is repeat your intention to yourself and keep a notebook and pen next to your bed.
I go through periods when I try to connect with my creative mind, usually in an effort to understand myself better. Before I go to sleep I say to myself, ‘ I would really like to remember my dreams tonight’. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I scratch a few words down in a spiral notebook, hoping to retrieve the whole dream in the morning. I’ve been working on my dreams off and on for many years. Has it paid off? Do I have a deeper understanding of my life? It’s hard to say, because the dreams keep changing, and so do I. I can say that for a moment, a remembered dream brings me a sense of fulfillment.
My dreams open a window into a mysterious world. When I’m able to draw that world into my daytime life, the wonder of it amazes me. I record the varied scenes and plots that gather over time: a dog comes loping out of a lake, I sail with a hundred ships on the open sea, a wild woman dances the cumbia, and emerald green insects crawl over my washing machine.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning, and the door is closed. The dreamscape is hidden. If I’m patient, the images will surface during the day. While taking a long walk a memory will pop into my mind, until I remember the entire dream by the time I’m home. It’s like taking a tapestry out of a dark closet and hanging it on the wall.
Freud wrote that all dreams are wishes or fears. Carl Jung spoke about archetypes and the collective unconscious. Their theories interest me and help me, but I rely on my own interpretations. The metaphors and symbols are personal. Usually, if I record the dream and let it simmer inside, my own meaning bubbles up. It’s a way of keeping my ear to the ground of my unconscious.
The images that come to me in the night might lead me down a path of enlightenment. Maybe I’ll bring what I find back from my sleep, and show it to others. Will I create a poem? Will I write a story? Or will I dream the dream of divine love?
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Connections
When my son Freeboarder told me I was a ‘computer beast,’ I felt like Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away when he yells on the beach, “I have made fire.”
Freeboarder was psyched because after struggling with loading Windows on his iMac, we finally achieved internet connection on the Windows side of his hard drive. The saga involved four trips to the computer store, stops at Subway for supplies in the way of food, three lengthy conversation with ATT, and a snowfall.
In Atlanta snow is a big deal. We were in the thick of computer hell when I looked up from the monitor and said, “hey, it’s snowing!”
“I know. It has been for almost twenty minutes,” he said, deadpan.
We were both exhausted from talking to technicians and installing software, and the snow stayed in the periphery. We read in one of his manuals a step he had left out, so finally the problem was solved. Today he can play Warhammer on his iMac, and he’s happy.
Last night my husband and I watched Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Angelina Jolie. It’s about a mother who is treated with terrible cruelty by the police after she reports the disappearance of her nine-year-old son. John Malkovich plays the part of a Presbyterian minister who befriends the mother and helps her in her dealings with the police. The movie, set in the late twenties, shows what little power women had then. Jolie deserves her Oscar nomination for the role – she played the part of the mother very convincingly. Of course it doesn’t hurt that she looks like Helen of Troy.
After the movie I went downstairs to say goodnight to Freeboarder, and gave him three big hugs and a kiss on the cheek. After watching a mother’s agony over losing her child, I felt particularly grateful to see my own son with his eyes glued to the computer screen. And he suffered the hugs with magnanimity, sweet kid.
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Fun stuff
I can make babies fly Instead of taking a nap yesterday, I decided to make a collage. I found my envelope of pictures, leafed through a few magazines, found some more pictures, and then assembled them on a makeshift canvas I had already prepared, made from an empty cereal box.
For some reason I thought of a poem I wrote last year while I was cutting pictures out. The babies caught my eye, so I went back to my old blog and found the poem, which I then doctored up a bit.
I’m not overly excited about my finished results, but it was fun to do. Maybe the poem needs the collage, and the collage needs the poem. However I look at the end result, the process is just as important, maybe even more so, to my well-being as a poet, and as a dreamer. It’s important to honor the dream energy by paying it forward, by doing something with the dream images in waking life. At least it is to me.
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I Can Make My Babies Fly
In dreams I have babies,
though in waking life
I’m done with birthing.I bathe them in milk,
rinse their pillowed bodies
at the sink.Sometimes a herd of bison
will tear through barbed wire
as if to trample us.I try to outrun
the bellowing beasts
infants in arms,but everywhere I turn
I’m hemmed in –
chain-link fences,rivers, spider webs, tall waves,
there’s no option.
If I want the babies to live,I need to rise up on tiptoes,
hold them high in the sky,
and lift them over the barriers.
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Donate some lines of poetry to a good cause
Calling all generous poets! We’re doing a collaborative prompt at Read Write Poem this week, and we’re asking people to donate two lines of poetry for others to use as a springboard to write a poem.
The instructions are to use the donated lines as the refrain of a bop, whose form I wrote about a few days ago. So check out the prompt, donate two lines, and grab two for yourselves. It’s nice to share the inspiration.
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This poem breaks my heart
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.— Robert Frost
This poem breaks my heart. I thought of it today because the first forsythia shrubs are in bloom, and I’ve seen some daffodils and crocuses making their way out of the earth. Nothing gold can stay.
My husband is from New England, Robert Frost’s birthplace, and studied Frost’s poems in school. This poem has always been his favorite, and he has it memorized. But even though the lines grab a hold of me, a part of me wants to rebel against the meaning. It’s the same part of me that rebels against my husband’s more realistic view of life. And realistic really isn’t the word. I don’t want to say pessimistic or negative either. But his world view is less hopeful than mine.
Maybe that’s because I quit my teaching job and he’s still slugging it out in corporate America every day. That battle can take the wind out of anyone’s sails. But what gives me hope is not the idea that the gold really can stay. I know the forsythias will lose their buttery petals. The daffodils will brown.
The reason I accept the dying of the things around me has to do with the nature of my inner life. Like most people, I have days when taking the dog out yet again seems like an insurmountable chore, when I ask myself if I can bear to fold one more load of laundry. And it gets worse. Even if nothing bad has happened I’ll start imagining possible tragedies, like my husband having a car accident driving home on the highway in the rain. I’ll work myself into a frenzy of fear.
But that’s where my hope lies. If nothing gold can stay, nothing shriveled and wretched stays either. The dying of the gold gives us hope that our garbage may one day flower. Of course this acceptance is a daily one. Each day I find my edge, and try to balance there.
Balanced On the Edge 