https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-28 17:59:472022-01-28 17:59:47“At the Prado, Age Eighteen,” by Chloe Martinez (Poetry ’09)
The two-edged sword of being human and knowing it: blades of grass never compare themselves to an oak or look in mirrors. I never love you more than when I watch you look at your reflection and relish what you see. Only a human would do something so dirty and shrewd and divine.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-27 18:34:002022-01-27 18:34:00“Sonnet with Quartz and Rice,” by Robert Thomas (Poetry ’02)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-26 18:26:002022-01-26 18:26:00“How to Hold the Heavy Weight of Now,” by Dana Levin
Poetry faculty member Daisy Fried was recent featured in On the Seawall. Read an excerpt of Fried’s poem “Hate Barrel,” a poem after Baudelaire, below:
The organizers of the 2022 Summer Virtual Goddard/Warren Wilson Alumni Conference (“Wally Camp”) are happy to announce that the conference date has been set! Clear your calendars for Wednesday, July 13 through Sunday, July 17.
As with the last three conferences, it will be hosted via Zoom. We’re sorry that we can’t meet in person this year, but the vagaries of the pandemic continue to make that unworkable.
On May 3 we will send out a registration form, and you will have between then and June 5 to submit it. In the meantime, work up your manuscripts; dream up your classes, caucuses, and bookshops; and get ready to rally with Wallies!
If you’re new or have forgotten how a Virtual Wally Conference operates, see the Wally Camp website at to get an idea of what it was like last year. (The 2021 website will be taken down in April.) https://sites.google.com/view/wallycamp/
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-25 20:55:592022-03-04 17:03:25Save the Date: The 2022 Alumni Conference
1992 poetry alum Cheryl Baldi was recently featured in One Art. Read an excerpt of Baldi’s poem “Later” below:
Later
We speak in whispers, move in silence from room to room, listen to the oxygen’s steady pump, moisture bubbling through the tubes. Three days unresponsive. I sit with her until someone else comes in. Years from now I will remember these moments, the counter scattered with crumbs from half eaten sandwiches, the tide low, winds calm…
I’ve been told I was coaxed to life—jolted, shocked, pumped. Some days, I remember the muted glare of hospital light, tubes, and wires. Other days, I hear the whisper of nurses’ feet as if they’re just in the other room. Stories of my birth lurk in every corner of the house until they become tangled with my own memories. Night after night, my mother slept next to me. Me, her half-formed baby glinting in the incubator. Let God take her, the Baptist doctor advised. No, my mother snapped. Me, her half-formed baby. Undo me, unwish me, unmake me.
TWO SIGNS FLANK the corner of Foster and Ashland and tell me that I’m beautiful. They tell you that too. They’re democratic, meant for everyone.
One is on the old Trumbull Elementary marquee, the school closed now, a casualty of the mayor’s 2013 public ed blitzkrieg, and the marquee, once like the town crier, dispensing news and notifying parents of the next local school council meeting, repurposed for fashionable positivism: you are beautiful. Even the typography is democratic, all lower case.
The other, across the street — bigger, the outsize letters affixed to a chain-link fence enclosing the Swedish Museum’s parking lot — is in cahoots.
you are beautiful.
It’s inescapable.
That’s how I feel, stopped at the light, catching sight of first one and then the other. Hemmed in by these converging signs, this suspicious sentiment. Or maybe the suspicion is all mine. What is this public treacle? I balk at being forced to feel good by signs put up by feel-good public artists. It’s coercion with a smile.
When I mentioned the you are beautiful signage to my friend M. — who’d seen it as well, in another part of the city, this time against the backdrop of Lake Michigan — she said it felt like a prayer.
I much prefer this New Yorker cartoon I come across a few days later. It seems like a well-timed act of cultural providence for those who favor the scouring effects of reality to the desperate fakery of well-meaning pablum. The cartoon is set in Times Square. Throngs of tourists — many of whom are taking pictures with their outstretched cell phones or tablets, devices raised in salute to self, kitsch, food, money — are dwarfed by the manic commercialism surrounding them. Everyone is jammed together, seen from the back, assembled like a congregation in worship of the Square, except for one guy turned away from the mainstage and stuffing an oversized sandwich in his mouth. Screens reign; even the empty square of somebody’s backpack looks like a laptop. The signs — all but McDonald’s, whose arches dominate — dispense with the corporate signifiers of the stores and cut right to the chase. You’re too fat/You’re ugly/You’re hungry!/You’re thirsty/Eat now/Eat more/You’re horny/You’re poor/You’re very ugly/Be less ugly/Boobs/Escape/Spend more $/Just Fat/You’re still ugly/You are dumb. A cab’s top light gets in on it too: Eat. The packaging has been ripped off, the messages relentless. Warning, insult, mockery, yearning. An American flag flies overhead. We don’t know what we’re buying but we do.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-20 18:08:002022-01-20 18:08:00“you are beautiful,” by Peggy Shinner (Fiction ’94)
Thinking of My Wife as a Child By The Sea, While We Clean Mussels Together
A poem for Sunday
Before prising keel worms off the backs of mussels, we have to tap them with a knife, when good sense, fear, life, shuts their lips. I do chop the lemongrass. I do close the lid. Their bodies inside are soft. It hurts me to do it, but not for long. We bring the shell-clatter after to the loch with our dog and son…
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-19 18:02:002022-01-19 18:02:00“Thinking of My Wife as a Child By The Sea, While We Clean Mussels Together,” by Nomi Stone (Poetry ’17)
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Cynthia Dewi Oka
Brian S: As I wrote in my piece introducing Fire Is Not a Country as the Poetry Book Club’s November selection, I was drawn to the theme of fire—in the title as well as in so many of the poems. Can you talk some about the centrality of that image to your work?
Cynthia Dewi Oka: That’s a great question, Brian. Similarly to you, I was brought up in a very religious family, and fire as a purifying and divine element was a major theme throughout my childhood, mostly used to inspire fear and obedience. But fire was also a constant in my environment. This is kind of dark, but church burnings were quite regular when I was growing up in Indonesia, as well as trash fires dotting the night.
Kimberly Sailor: Hello! Cynthia, I loved this book. Or rather, “love,” to be active about it, because I think about your poems quite a bit. I would love to know more about your choice to include the “interludes.” As writers, we’re taught to make sure everything fits, that everything is tidy… did you question your process with these interludes?
When I first read the title, I presumed it meant living in a world on fire is no way to live.
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Kimberly, yes! Both in the way we imagine fire as a destructive and purifying force.
The interludes were an important element of the creative process for me when I was finalizing the manuscript.
I was feeling at that point, limited and exhausted by poetic techniques. I was also thinking about the people I wanted to engage, who are in fact central figures in the book—like my mother, for instance, or my son, to whom the book is dedicated. Writing in screenplay form allowed me to both expand the frame of the book, as well as to create a more collaborative, interactive space within the book. It was important to me to be able to engage the people in the communities I write from, for whom poetry is not necessarily an accessible form.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-01-18 17:53:002022-01-18 17:53:00An Interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka (Poetry ’19)
