Category Archives: Poetry

I Can Has Poem Plz?

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Today has not been successful when it comes to writing–as in, no poem writing has taken place.  Part of the problem was I really couldn’t decide which picture to use–there were two about Orpheus, who, because he was known for his poetry and musical ability, has always interested me.  

The first choice was the Lament of Orpheus, by Alexandre Séon (1855-1917), which I like because he’s destraught on the beach, one arm wrapped over his eyes, the other clutching a lyre made from a turtle shell,  after he’s come back from the Underworld, but lost Eurydice for the second time.   In fact, according to myth, after he lost he again, he was never to love another woman, and chose instead young men.   Something about his grief and love for Eurydice moves me.  

The other Orpheus picture, The Death of Orpheus, by Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (that’s a name for you!) (1852-1929), also shows Orpheus flinging his left arm over his eyes.  In the link I’ve provided, the color is much darker; in the postcard I have, it’s much more mossy-colored, and there is a strange, almost ethereal green hint to his skin tone.  I like this picture because of the forest setting, but I have a hard time thinking he’s dead here because he is, after all, standing up.  And he frankly doesn’t look like he’s been ripped to shreds by the Maenads.  Not to be lurid, but according to myth, his head needs to not be part of his body.

So, herein lies the quandary.  Do I write about Orpheus’ death, in which his head and lyre are carried to the Isle of Lesbos and enshrined, or do I write about his deep, abiding love for his lost wife?  Or, should I pick another picture entirely so I can eliminate having to pick between the two? 

Maybe I’m just not feeling Orpheusy.   There are plenty of other myths in my postcard book to choose from.  Of course, who’s to say that I’ll feel inspired enough by any of the others?

********ADDENDUM*******

Ok, so I wrote a poem based on Séon’s picture, and I like it–I mean, it’s got the usual early draft problems, but the main issue is that it’s 21 lines long (not counting the spaces between each tercet), and there is NO WAY I can handwrite the poem on the back of the post card.   I think even if I typed it up in tiny font, and glued it to the back of the card, I would be hard-pressed to get it to fit.  So I’m thinking I might have to either pare it way down, or just write something else.  Anyway, the title is “You Looked Back.”

Tomorrow, I will try to write another, shorter poem about Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as write on Dagnan-Bouveret’s painting.  I hope.

Sexy St. Sebastian

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As difficult as it was to write yesterday’s APPF poem, today’s was just that easy.

The postcard was St. Sebastian by Nicolas Régnier (1590-1667), and naturally, I was curious why this picture was included in the Hidden Love book.  So I checked him out, and found a very interesting article in The Independent that details St. Sebastian’s long-standing position as a Gay Icon.

From its inclusion in the book, I thought it just had to do with his being young and beautiful and practically naked (and pierced by phallic arrows no less), but the real way his image became homoeroticized was a bit more involved.  Because the Romans prayed to St. Sebastian during the Black Plague since he was known to have survived the arrow attack, and the epidemic miraculously ended, he became ultra popular as a saint, favorited by everyone.

Even though the historical St. Sebastian was in his 40s, wrinkled and grizzly, before he was actually clubbed to death, even in Middle Ages, peopled idolized beauty.  They wanted their saints to be gorgeous and blooming even as they’re dying, and artists couldn’t agree more.  So, he got a Cosmo makeover,  and he became an ever youthful pin-up boy of martyrdom.

So the poem I wrote, simply titled “St. Sebastian,” is basically a lecherous sonnet about ogling him.  I really like it.  Is it a great poem?  Probably not.  But there’s something titillating about eroticizing a saint and lusting after him (even if I’m not the first to do it).

Of course, not everyone would have been a fan of sexualizing the sacred.  The Church recognized the problem of the lone nude figure in art during the as Shiela Barker discusses in her essay “The Making of a Plague Saint” in Piety and Plague:  from Byzantium to the Baroque, which explains why St. Irene begins to appear in paintings with St. Sebastian.  The Church was afraid young women would experience lustful urges–which Irene’s appearance would theoretically quell.

Of course, if you have a perverse mind like I sometimes do, what’s to prevent you from thinking about corrupting both of them?  But I digress.  The point is, the poem is written and dropped in the mail, and I am extremely happy about it.

Day 5 Postcard Poem: FAIL

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Alright, I admit it, I didn’t sent out a postcard today.  I’m still working on the poem, which was going to be based on Donato Creti’s The Education of Achilles by Chiron, but it just wasn’t coming.  

I think the problem is I don’t really dig Achilles.   He had a bad attitude and a bum heel, big whoop.   Chiron is much more interesting, being a tender but strong Centaur whose interests include medicine and astrology.  So I mostly wrote about him, but the poem has too many abstract words in it.  It’s just not gelling.  

And I would just choose another image and try to throw a new poem together, but I’ve already written the name and address of the person I was to send it to, plus stamped it.  So I’m a little bit stuck.  Chris is at his club this evening, so I plan to work on the poem some more.  Perhaps the silence will help.

So I had been thinking that no one was sending me poems for APPF.  But today when I checked the mail, not only were there 4 postcards, there were about 400 bills, magazines, and ads.  Clearly, the USPS just hadn’t been in the mood to deliver my mail.  

These are the authors and titles of the poems I’ve received:

  • Josie Emmons Turner, “Ella vive”
  • Andrea Bates, “Last Chair of Summer”
  • Russ Golata, “Ambient”
  • Someone who didn’t put her name, “I am 3 years now past you” (which was really the first line of the poem)

I tried doing some detective work on the anonymous poem, by looking at the master list and counting back several days, but of course the postmark on the card (which was kind of fun because she handmade by gluing pictures from a magazine on an index card) is blurred.

You can’t beat 4 pieces of personal mail in one day, but I think I’d rather have it spread out over 4 days just the same.  It’s hard to take it all in.

In other news, I sent off a chapbook today (not the one I mentioned the other day where I wanted to put together “left over” poems)–this is the sixth press I’m sending it to.   What was really nice about this press was that it only had a $10 fee–which is practically a gift.   We’ll see.  I also sent a submission out to a couple of journals.  Hopefully, something good will happen.

Alright, I’ve put off writing my poem long enough.  I didn’t forget you, Chiron, I promise.  I was just temporarily avoiding you.

*******ADDENDUM******

For better or for worse, I’ve finished it.  “Horse Sense” still has a lot of abstract language in it, which I hope can be improved when I bring it to the DYPS (my writing group), but the postcard will go out in tomorrow’s mail as is.  I don’t think the poem is terrible, and as I said, the last line is very good.  The one thing I couldn’t do on the postcard was space the lines in couplets–I can only fit 16 lines on a postcard printing in teeny-tiny handwriting, so the spacing had to go. 

I Don’t Usually Write Ekphrastic Poetry, But…

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I was really happy with my Day 4 poem for the APPF, “How the Cypress Came to Be” (although there are a few iffy lines that could be improved).  I like “origin” poems, and in this one the speaker addresses Cyparissus about (accidentally) slaying the deer that Apollo gave him, and who, in grief, Apollo turns into a tree.  

In Dubufe’s picture, Cyparissus is draped over the deer, and Apollo is gazing at him rather tenderly.  (Well, this was in the Hidden Love postcard book.)  I was looking online for that image so you could see it, and  so far I haven’t found one in color, but you can see it  here in black and white. Both of the figures are slender, hardly muscularly developed at all ( youths, I guess you’d say), though Apollo is clearly older, and the concern–love, maybe–that he shows Cyparissus is evident in the way he holds the younger man.  

The Apollo in Dubufe’s picture is much more emotional than the  disdainful Apollo who appears in Pietro Perugino’s Apollo and Marsyas, the image on the postcard I sent yesterday.  I like this painting because it’s from the Renaissance, with a beautiful orangey patina and lovely depth of field.  And the appearance of castle and the mountains in the background amuses me, if only because it strikes me as anachronistic, as if this scene from Greek mythology happened in medieval Italy.  Perugino was known for his more Catholic art, though I seem to recall vaguely that Michelangelo  called him a hack.  Still, there is something almost sweet in the way Perugino has painted Marsyas as he plays his aulos-reed pipe.

In my poem, “Competition,” the speaker addresses Marsyas’s eagerness to engage in a music contest with Apollo, and is critical of him, particularly because in the myth, the Muses are the ones who judge this contest AND Apollo is basically the Muses’ choir master (a slight conflict of interest).  Clearly this is a myth about the perils of hubris, although I like to think in my poem I hint that the reason that Marsyas dies is not simply because the Muses choose Apollo as the winner, but rather because Marsyas was indeed the superior musician, and Apollo was jealous.

However, I am neither a scholar of art nor mythology, so I’m sure there are errors in what I have written here.

I know that the point of the APPF is to try to write a poem that somehow communicates what people usually use postcards for–to write about place.  According to the website, we’re to write about:

. . . Something that relates to your sense of “place” however you interpret that, something about how you relate to the postcard image, what you see out the window, what you’re reading, using a phrase/topic/or image from a card that you got, a dream you had that morning, or an image from it, etc. Like “real” postcards, get to something of the “here and now” when you write.

Perhaps I should make my poems more personal?  Postcards are generally personal, focused on the I.  Although, I have to say, in both of these last two poems, I’ve used direct address, so in a way, I am in the poems.  (Yes, I know, the speaker of a poem isn’t necessarily the poet–please, I wasn’t born yesterday.)  We’ll see.

Tomorrow I think I will choose the postcard of Donato Creti’s painting, The Education of Achilles by Chiron.  I hope the poem will turn out well.

On Prose Poems

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I was reading Christine Swint’s blog; she had posted her Day 6 Poem of the APPF, and I marvel at how she responds both to a poem she read by Lucia Perillo and takes ideas and creates a wonderful new prose poem about, as she says, “crows, sort of about women and what they wear.”  

In the poem, the blackness of crows comes in “black jeans and a sooty vest” and in “shoe-polish” hued hair.  Black is fashion and danger; crows themselves are often considered harbingers of death in mythology, and they eat carrion.

And twice the word “murder” appears in Christine’s poem,  which is interesting because it highlights the connection between death and crows, but it is also characterized as belonging to “her,” the female “crow” on the poem.  Is this crow a victim, or has she committed murder?   But she is not dead–indeed this crow “dances the Merengue with the others.”  

Christine’s poem is wonderful and strange, which to me is always the hallmark of a strong prose poem–a form that is completely mysterious to me.   I’ve tried writing prose poems.  They are, like my attempts at fiction, not to be borne.  And yet I am drawn to them–prose poems will usually quickly find a home in Chickenpinata (although we haven’t received many of them).  I probably ought to read some books about them as a form and educate myself. 

I’m not really sure why I like them–except, I wonder if it has to do with the fact that they are generally chock full of things–it’s a little bit harder to be abstract, I think, when you are writing a kind of paragraph of words that all have to be poetic.  I really admire those, like Christine, who can write them well.  You should all check her blog and read “This Crow is Not a Fashion Model.”

Speaking of the APPF, I sent off my Day 3.  I realize, when I mentioned in an early blog post about a “starter poem,” that was really Day 1.  So instead of having written 4 poems by today, I’ve only written 3.  That’s ok, as long as I come up with something for tomorrow.

I bought this postcard book called Hidden Love:  Art and Homosexuality, which has some really amazing art prints in it, and which I’ve decided will comprise the majority of the postcards I send.  (Some pictures are basically crotch shots of male genitalia, which is less impressive, and actually I worry that I could even send them in the mail–with my luck, they’d be flagged for pornography.)

But the poem I want to write for tomorrow is based on the painting Apollo and Cyparissus by Claude -Marie Dubufe (1790-1864).  If I’d been thinking, I would have written down the titles of the art on the two other postcards I’ve already sent, but alas and alack.  Anyway, I’ll keep up with it now.

I still haven’t received any postcards yet, but then when it comes to the USPS, I am cursed, so I won’t start worrying that I’ve been forgotten by other Poetry Postcard people until Friday.

So far, here are the titles of the poems I’ve sent:

8/1  “Folk Tale”

8/2  “Garden Variety”

8/3  “Competition”

“Monumental”

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“Monumental” is the name of the Exquisite Corpse poem that Karen Head put together on the 4th Plinth today from lines by Christine Swint, Ivy Alvarez, Collin Kelley,  David Matthew Barnes, Rupert Fike, and me, and she read poems by several of us as well as Bob Wood, Jo Hemmant, and Julie Bloemeke.

It was amazing.  At first, it didn’t look like Karen was doing much–just sitting in a chair with her Mac on her lap, but then the Twittering started, and it was fast and furious.  Sometimes she’d call out to the audience to ask for a line, and I couldn’t help wondering what those people in Trafalgar Square were thinking.  

It was hard to keep up with the feed, because you couldn’t see everyone’s posts, and people would be trying to come up with the next line, but couldn’t see what the line before was.  So it was crazy!  I know I tweeted 30 times in one hour–which I’ve never done before.  It was like almost being likes a sportscaster making blow-by-blow comments on the situation–except there were all these other people doing it at the same time.

I loved it.  And the poem she came up with is fantastic.  I can’t wait to read it on the page.  

If you missed her performance, or you’d like to see it, go here.

Karen Head on the 4th Plinth Tomorrow

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One of my best friends (and a terrific poet) is Karen Head, who has been teaching over in GT’s Oxford Program this summer.  I don’t know how she was selected, but she was one of 2400 hundred people chosen to participate in the Fourth Plinth program by One and Other in Trafalgar Square, where, for 100 days and 24 hours a day, a person can stand on top of it and do whatever she wishes for her hour.  Karen will be on the Plinth from noon to one, Eastern Time tomorrow, and she will be broadcasting a Twitter-based poetry project.

She sent us the details this evening in an e-mail.  Apparently, she will basically create an Exquisite Corpse poem, where she will alert one of her specific Twitter followers to contribute the next line of the poem.  She will be transcribing everything on her computer and reading it aloud.  She will also periodically call on people in the audience around the Plinth to contribute lines, so it should be quite an amazing poem, I think, when it’s done.  I hope the lines I contribute won’t suck!

Even more amazing, Time Magazine will be covering her hour!

Read more about Karen’s project in the AJC.

See a live webcam of the Plinth.

Chapbooking

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I already have three different chapbooks “in circulation,” which is a fancy way of saying that I’ve submitted them to several publishers/ contests and am waiting to hear good news.  Ok, let’s be real:  ANY news.  Two have not won the contests they were submitted for, but I continue to send them out.  Still, this is getting expensive.  I think I’ve already spent over $200 sending these chapbooks out.

When I hear about other people on the contest bandwagon, I know they’ve often spent way more than I have, but they persist because publishers have pretty much moved to the contest model of publication.  To some extent, I can understand this.  Poetry, after all, is not a money-maker, and publishers know they won’t recoup their investment, so they shift some of the financial burden on the poets who are desperate to get published.  Hence the proliferation of first book contests, as well as the myriad chapbook contests whose announcements fill up writing listservs.

There are some presses, such as the sublime Tupelo Press, whose publications are beautiful and glorious collections I love to read. Tupelo Press has open poetry reading period during July, and, because of the economy, has reduced the reading fee from $35 to $25, which, considering that small presses desperately need money, is quite an act of generosity.

As an aside, let me mention, if you’re looking for a fantastic book of poetry from Tupelo Press to read, for the love of Goddess, buy Kristin Bock’s Cloisters, which is so good you’ll cry.  I’ve already read it twice, and I got it like 2 weeks ago.  It will be the best $16.95 you’ve ever spent.

Anyway, I haven’t submitted a book to Tupelo Press, but that’s because I don’t have a book-length collection.  Oh, I have plenty of poems, enough to fill 60-80 pages worth, but my problem is, they don’t fit together.  They’re all disjointed.  So that’s why I’ve been working on chapbooks.

And all of this is by way of saying I’ve decided to put another chapbook together to send out, and am currently choosing among the rest of my poems to find ones that might (emphasis on might) resonate with each other.  It’s hard because the poems that are left over from the first three chapbooks I’ve put together have been excluded because they just don’t fit.

So I was thinking if I put 20-24 pages of poems together that don’t fit individually in the other chapbooks, maybe they will fit together by the very nature of them not fitting.  (Got that?)  In other words, maybe because they are disparate, I can create a collection that works because it doesn’t have an obvious theme.  I don’t know about that.

Maybe, too, I can write a few poems to help them gel a bit more as a collection–so if the theme is “difference,” maybe writing a few poems where that theme is expressed can help bridge the differentness of the other poems.  There’s a chance this idea might fall flat.  But I have some time, because the contest I plan to submit the manuscript to has an October deadline.

You might say, why not put all of these chapbooks together and slap a numbered section on each one, and voila, a book-length collection?  Don’t think I haven’t had that thought already.  But that won’t work either.  There’s no common thread among the three different collections other than that I wrote them.  And I’ve read enough poetry books that I can feel when the poems are organically organized, and when they’re clearly not.  Putting my chapbooks together would feel like… someone slapped three chapbooks together.

Anyway, beginning to organize this fourth chapbook is my goal for this weekend.  As is thoroughly cleaning the kitchen.  Hurrah.

August Poetry Postcard Fest

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So I’m really excited about the APPF, because the prospect of receiving 31 postcards in the mail (32, if you count the starter postcard)  with a new poem on each one will bring happiness into The Month I Always Dread.

But I’m nervous too, because I know how I am an overly self-critical perfectionist prone to losing heart when I can’t get words to go right.  (This probably describes every poet, doesn’t it?)  And holy, moly, I have to write 32 poems?

Even though the participants have been told not to agonize, I know I will.  I’m already agonizing a little bit.  But I’ve been trying to get a few poems written down this week to spell me on those days that I’m feeling especially uninspired and incapable of writing (or am so busy I can’t breathe, like during fall registration).

Of course, I also realize that the poems I receive will give me strength as well as inspiration, and that will be awesome.   Nothing like being compelled to write every day because someone is counting on you for mail!  But what a sad comment that I have to be compelled to write.  Sometimes, I’m such a dilletante.

If you want some information about the APPF, read the APPF blog, maintained by Lana Hechtman Ayers and Paul Nelson.

A Day of Poetry

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Today was the 122nd Quarterly meeting of the Georgia Poetry Society, of which I am a Executive Board Member.  I always like these meetings because there are two sessions of member poems, usually about 15-20 poets reading in each.  Everyone gets to read one poem, and while some are better than others, it makes my heart glad to see so many people writing and reading and loving poetry.  

One thing I especially love about these meetings is they never feel cutthroat–and sometimes I feel that academic poets thrive on that.   Oh, some academic poets may claim that they are supportive and will help you in their way, but at they same time, you know one is saying, Oh, I can’t believe she got published in Such-and-Such Review.   And someone else is saying, Well, you know, she and the editor had a thing at Breadloaf.  Academic poets can be so full of bullshit.

Now, I realize I am being somewhat disingenuous here.  I am, after all, an academic poet.  I have a Ph.D. in poetry with a focus in creative writing.  My aesthetic taste is informed by academia, and I generally tend to read poems by academics.  Granted, the reason for that might be because it seems that most journals are constipated with poetry by M.F.A. and Ph.D.-types.   Plenty of this work is solid, fine poetry, and I like it.  But plenty of it is just as drivelly as the moon-june writers–they’re just more accomplished technically and they have an alphabet after their last names.

The writers of GPS do much different kinds of writing.  Some of it seriously not great.  But then there are writers who use rhyme and meter and form quite effectively, even if they end up with poems that seem, to my academic mind, quite old fashioned.  There is a gentleman there, probably in his late 60’s, who almost always either reads a ballad or a narrative in rhymed couplets, and they are invariably charming and hilarious.  My academic friends would probably scorn such writing.  I find it refreshing in a retro kind of way.

This is not to say there aren’t academics there.  I know at least four other people who regularly attend who have Ph.D.s in the humanities.  Their poems tend to be more technically proficient, more deliberate in the language and poetic devices they use, than the non-academics’ writing is.  But their work isn’t joyless and mechanical as some of the poems I’ve seen in several journals lately are.  There is definitely something to be said for not overly associating with academic poets, who are often greedy about padding their C.V.s and getting their next book together so they can parade it in front of the tenure committee.

In some ways, I’m no different.  I prize getting acceptances, and would love to have a book of poems to sell at readings.  A book would somehow “legitimize” my poetic efforts, would give me a little more credibility with the academic poets I associate with.  But therein you see the hypocrisy.  Because I do, after all, want to impress my academic friends.

At GPS, I never feel that I must impress them.  If I do, when I read my poetry to them, that’s wonderful, and I’m glad they’ve enjoyed it.  But I don’t feel less than–because GPS isn’t competitive.  And maybe that’s what it boils down to:  academic poets are competitive, and that kind of competition leaves me cold.

In other news, tonight I read at the Essential Theater.  They had a poetry reading before the play Ice Glen, and I was a featured reader, along with Ginger Murchison, whose chapbook, Out Here is quite excellent.  It was not well attended, but that’s ok. 

Maybe when I publish my book, I’ll have bigger crowds to see me.  I can dream.