Poetry Workshop This Summer

I am happy to announce that I’ll be teaching a summer poetry workshop at The Attic Institute (on upper Hawthorne in Portland) as one of their Summer Teaching Fellows. The workshop starts the end of June and runs for 5 weeks on Sunday afternoons. I’m really looking forward to it, and plan to have a lot of fun with this workshop.

Made of Words Poetry Workshop:

William Carlos Williams said, “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.”  A love of words is likely what drew you to poetry in the first place. In this workshop we’ll take words as both subject and inspiration, exploring the possibilities of single words as well as more broadly discussing tone and diction. We’ll do in-class workshopping and discussion, and a whole variety of generative exercises using words as our creative springboard. We’ll talk about personal favorite words and words with social/cultural significance, explore the verbing of nouns and other instances of “messing with language,” take a look at the effect of generic versus specific terms, investigate some etymology, and more.

Registration link and more info here. If you’re in the Portland area, please consider signing up!

“The Work” in Andrew Feld’s Raptor

For this month’s animal poem, “The Work,” from Andrew Feld’s new collection Raptor.

Andrew Feld’s Raptor, which I picked up after reading Pamela Alexander’s review of it in the latest FIELD, is full of poems (which range from the heavily featured birds of prey to folks on their way to Sturgis to Johnny Carson) exhibiting excellent control of language, deft images, underlying but controlled rage, simultaneous emotional closeness and observational distance, and unexpected precise edginess.  Before I get to “The Work,” which along with “Cascade Raptor Center: Capture” and one of the Sturgis poems, “There,” are my favorites of many strong contenders, a couple sample stanzas from “The Art of Falconry,” which follow mention of an analogy of late-life marriage:Continue reading ““The Work” in Andrew Feld’s Raptor”

A.E. Stallings’ Olives

A.E. Stallings writes lovely poems. Lovely poems that are also of the gritty real, but they look at the world through clear, feeling but not crying, eyes. A classicist by training, she works in rhyme-and-meter forms (with the sort of deft touch that kind of makes all this free verse emphasis feel silly), and she’s won a number of awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant. Her poems tend to balance as equally well the demands of emotion and intellect as they do form and content.

Olives, published in 2012, has poems about ancient Greece, poems about daily life, poems about motherhood and children, poems about arguments and olives and telephones. When one, as one does, starts to talk about “the state of contemporary poetry,” her books should be part of the argument for a strong state of contemporary poetry, full as they are of both fine craft and thought.

Her poems are also often funny (it’s really tempting here to make some sort of joke about an archaic smile, but I won’t). The first section of “Four Fibs” (the form of which uses the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of syllables per line) for instance, goes,Continue reading “A.E. Stallings’ Olives”

Poetry Month = Poetry Everywhere

The thing I like about having a National Poetry Month is of course that poetry’s visibility gets raised. At least a little if you’re not looking for it, and quite a bit if you are.

Here are some links to a few of the cooler poetry-related things I’ve seen this week:

Many bookstores do Poetry Month sales (Powell’s is having a 15% off all poetry books all month sale) but a bunch of independent presses (including some of the major independents) are offering a twist on the usual BOGO — Buy One Give One: buy one book of poetry, get one free to pass on to someone else. A great way to spread some great  contemporary poetry around. Presses include Tin House Books, Coffeehouse Press, Archipelago Books, BOA Editions, Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Red Hen Press, Sarabande Books, and YesYes Books. Details and links to all those presses on Tin House’s blog.

The Knopf Doubleday Poem-A-Day: you can sign up to get their poem-a-day in your inbox every morning this month, and they are always excellent poems (and include links to audio recordings, the book from which the poem came, and more info about the poet). I was especially pleased to see my former professor David Young’s translations of Basho on the first day.

Pulitzer Remix: poems made from text pulled from the pages of various Pulitzer Prize-winning novels (you can sign up to get emails of all poems, or just of poems from specific books). I like collage-y projects like this.

The Sonnet Project, takin’ it to the streets —Continue reading “Poetry Month = Poetry Everywhere”

Tyger Tyger

This month’s Animal poem: William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The first four lines of Blake’s “The Tyger,” or at least the first two, are so firmly rooted in the canon they’ve nudged its way into the common lexicon. “Tyger tyger burning bright / In the forests of the night.” But how quickly after 10th grade English (unless you’re teaching same) do we forget the rest. Or I did at least. But after looking at it awhile again I find “The Tyger” feels very fresh to me, a couple hundred years of being a classic poem notwithstanding. The wondering tone of the questions, the awe, and most especially, that at the end of stanza after stanza of questions, the speaker is still stuck on the first question asked — who could have made something like a tiger? (with one small but important  change).

A teacher told me once that part of the exquisite energy of those first lines is that the last syllable is missing — it should be “brightly.” Instead we bite off the end of “burning bright” and there’s a thudding pause before the next line, that’s matched by “of the night” — we hear the same missing syllable after “night” even though you would never say “of the nightly.” But that missing rhyme holds such force in the ear. “Tyger tyger burning bright, [thud] / In the forests of the night [thud].” Continue reading “Tyger Tyger”

By Heart

I’m an increasingly big fan of memorizing poems, and have decided to do something I’d thought about before but never implemented: memorize one poem a week this year. (And now that I’ve said so publicly, well I’ll have to do it won’t I. Oh well, why not? This week it was “Musee des Beaux Arts” by Auden.)

I think knowing poems by heart is wonderful as a regular person (among other things, it means if you’re stuck somewhere totally boring you can recite a great poem in your head, or if you come to a split in a ski trail you can go all Robert Frost and impress your friends, and you just never know when you might wind up stranded on a freaky tropical isle, or a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and will need something memorized with which to entertain yourself between adventures, or console yourself during zombie terrors etcetera. Television has made me sure of that possibility.) And it’s probably essential as a writer. (How wonderful to not only have great poems even faster than “at hand” but also to internalize their rhythms and movements and mystery.)

There are lots of methods out there for memorizing poems — here’s mine. Continue reading “By Heart”

Taking Heart

I’ve taken heart recently, creatively speaking, from three books: Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,  Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Forever, and Keith Richards’ autobiography Life.

From Greenblatt’s very readable and fascinating biography of Shakespeare, just how much Shakespeare stole plots/basic ideas from other existing plays or stories. (I knew he had done so sometimes, but didn’t realize quite how much.) Creative lesson: you don’t, necessarily, have to reinvent the wheel. Continue reading “Taking Heart”

Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)

February’s Animal Poem: “Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)” by Mark Doty, from the new section in Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2009).

“Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)” is a thoroughly satisfying descriptive poem (it is of course redundant to say Doty poem and great description in the same sentence), full of sounds. Not all that many poems have a lot of noises, necessarily. Car horns and dog snoring and through-the-wall radio ads and all the rest — it’s noticeable when a poem really pays attention to them.

“Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)” begins with a place-setting, “Eight o’clock, warm Houston night /  and in the parking lot the grackles / hold forth royally, in thick trees.” (This, by the way, is what a grackle looks like.) Three lines and the scene is set, complete with the beginning of the birds’ characterization, with “hold forth royally.”

The main delight of this poem is, of course, Continue reading “Theory of Beauty (Grackles on Montrose)”

White / Arthur / Willis

Brief reviews of The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White (1982), Charms Against Lightning by James Arthur (2012), and Blood Sisters of the Republic by Wendy Willis (2012).

James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies is a gorgeous book full of beautiful, difficult longing. Its artful passion is simply excellent. The poems are both explicit and humble, (“Sometimes I’m their first. / Sweet, sweet men. / I light candles, burn the best incense. / Make them think it’s some kind of temple / and it rather is.”) and the general passion and exquisite human feeling speaks through them all (“In this joyous season I know my heart won’t die / as you and the milk pods open their centers / like a first snow in its perfection of light. // Good love is like this. / Even the smell of baked bread won’t make it better, / this being out of myself for a while.”).  Continue reading “White / Arthur / Willis”

Stumptown Mornings

I’ve been thinking this week about my “writing practice,” as the phrase goes. Had a conversation recently with a friend in which I’m pretty sure, thinking about it afterwards, we meant different things, mentally and logistically, when we said ‘writing.’ And I also attended a panel on creativity the other night featuring a garden designer, a woodworker, and a poet, which got me thinking about things like failure.

Here are the three things I believe about a writing practice: (1) It has to be daily. Discipline determines your fate; inspiration’s merely opportunity. (2) If you honor a space with hard work and lots of time, it will soon start to take care of you. (3) First drafts always suck.Continue reading “Stumptown Mornings”