2014 poetry graduate Mary Lou Buschi was recently featured in One Art. Read an excerpt of “Turning” below:
Turning
There is room enough for two
in your bed but I stay off to the side
wanting to pull just one corner
of one blanket over myself.
Instead I reach my arms around you,
pull the blankets in tight,
curled you up as if I was meant to send
you somewhere dangerous.
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://oneartpoetry.com/2020/09/16/turning-by-mary-lou-buschi/
Poetry alum Jeneva Stone recently had an essay featured in the New England Review. Read an excerpt below:
R: An Aftermath
But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance . . . Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water— endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
ABDUCTION
The act of being taken. Away, perhaps.
In Greek mythology, abduction precedes violation. For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woman after woman is removed from a place of safety and transported elsewhere for violation, by ship or chariot, sea or land, or the ethereal machinations of the gods. Blossoms and baskets are dropped by these maidens, life interrupted.
The Metamorphoses are tales of violence and resulting human change: to trees, to animals, to birds. When I read these tales as a young woman, I imagined transformation as both punishment and safety. When the gods shape-shifted a person from human to nonhuman, it might be punishment; however, that transformation made further violence less likely.
In fact, on the cover of my college edition of Metamorphoses, a Duchamp-like figure of a woman, geometrical, transitions to a tree with roots as feet and leaves as a bower of curled hair. She has become impenetrable.
I thought of the myths as having a sequence:
1. Abduction
2. Sexual violation
3. Transformation
Sequences radiate clarity. They can be interrupted, or, perhaps reversed. I’m comforted by these mathematics.
Alphabets have sequence, too; however, language itself isn’t constrained by its origin in order. Words are formed by disorder, and translation reorders that disorder further. The Greek verb viasmós collapses the concepts of abduction and violation, as does the Latin verb rapto. It doesn’t matter if English separates them.
Word, body, mind. I can separate these pieces of experience, aligning them with abduction, violation, transformation. But when I open the cover of Metamorphoses, on its heavy paper backing is inscribed a room number with the name of the dorm I lived in the second semester of my junior year.
Body, word, mind: These collapse.
Read the essay in its entirety here: https://www.nereview.com/volume-41-no-3-2020/r-an-aftermath/
2010 poetry graduate Hannah Fries recently had three poems featured in Terrain. Read an excerpt of one below:
To Take a Pregnancy Test After Miscarriage
Remember the place where you hid as child,
the pile of rocks that made a room
beneath a stand of arcing saplings.
Be there. Remember the satisfaction
of loneliness, the space you occupy
inside the secret of your body.
Wherever death has lodged itself,
tucked in the crevices of your being,
unfold: run your fingers through it,
soften it with beeswax and almond oil, feel it
loosen. Call down your most feral angel,
all wings and eyes and gale-force winds
Read the poem, as well as two others, in its entirety here: https://www.terrain.org/2020/poetry/hannah-fries-2/
2009 poetry graduate Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., recently wrote for the Paris Review and discussed one of her poems for the Poetry Society of America. Read an excerpt of her reflection on “The Obstacle” below:
ON “THE OBSTACLE”
The obstacle described here is barbed wire, rows of carefully entangled and interconnected snarls of barbed wire built in front of British front-line trenches in Sanctuary Wood near Ypres in Belgian Flanders in June 1916. Rows of wire designed to protect British and Canadian soldiers from waves of German infantry. Rows of wire which are no longer there. Had you been riding by with the family on a bicycle on that summer day in 2016 you could not have seen the beginning of the trench system, with its saps and parapets and traverses, nor the expanse of barbed wire, thirty feet across, lying in wait in shallow hollows in front of the firing trench at the edge of the wood.
Read the reflection in its entirety here: https://poetrysociety.org/features/in-their-own-words/elizabeth-t-gray-jr-on-the-obstacle
Fiction alum Andrew Joseph Kane recently had a story featured in the Chicago Review. Read an excerpt of “Farmsteadburg” below:
Farmsteadburg
Welcome to Farmsteadburg! Here you may spend your Credits. Take over the decrepit farm north of town. It was willed to you by old Uncle Alfred. He left instructions in his journal: Get this place in shape! Fix the broken timbers, unclog the well, clear the south pasture. But first you need better tools. Lift stones to shape, gather branches to bend. Craft them at the Work Bench. Or go to town and buy them in Smithy’s Shop (if you have the Credits!). Use Work Points to hoe, plant, and cultivate. Advance the Farmer skill tree. Soon your pantry will fill with radishes, lettuce, carrots, and more. Eat them for Health Points, or sell them for Credits. Recover Work Points by sleeping at night. Do you hear a voice beneath your bed? Go to the earthen cellar and listen. Then start digging!
Season shift: Spring Carnival. Fish for fish in the river. Try different rods and lures. Win medals for fish records! Talk to suitable paramours: Polly, Lilly, Layla. Learn what they like, and buy them gifts (flowers, ribbons, lockets). But also: boy paramours (Charlie, Hector, Dax). Everyone is welcome! If courting takes up all farming time, collect green apples in the woods. Cook recipes in your Kitchen (built with blueprints from Paul the Master Builder). During night, tunnel deeper into the cellar. Find the voice! Is it the ghost of Uncle Alfred? Burn his journal in your Blacksmith Furnace. Then use the ore you mined while digging to refine your tools!
Season shift: Summer Festival. Apprentice with renowned entomologist Sir Zeke and catch butterflies for Insect Display. Then: Butterfly Pinning Mini-Game! Hold thorax until wings separate, pin thorax to spreading board, find veins of forewing and hindwing, and pin, pin, pin! Show Display Case to Dax. See Heart Points rise! Take quick nap at Campsite Bedroll to recover Work Points. Then spend them on Basket Weaving with Lilly. Assure her that Dax is just a woodcutting companion. Attend religious celebrations at Church with Charlie. Get to know congregation and learn new recipes as Trust Points rise. Raise livestock to collect milk, butter, eggs. Brush them, feed them, give your animals custom names! Bake muffins, biscuits, Bundt cakes. Give apple pie to Layla because it will raise more Heart Points than Shop-bought gifts. But: Exhaustion. Health Points low. Work Points low. Never enough Credits for top-shelf inventory. In bed, the voice keeps you awake. No time to sleep. There’s too much to do!
Read the story in its entirety here: https://www.chicagoreview.org/fiction-staff-feature-september-2020/
Poetry faculty member Brooks Haxton recently had a poem featured in Scoundrel Time. Read an excerpt below:
TO SIRIUS B
Your sister, the Dog Star, was the brightest.
You, the Pup, nobody even saw, until one night
in eighteen sixty-two, when a young man
with a telescope of his own devise looked up,
and there, where the wobble in your sister’s gait
suggested you might be, you were, a white dwarf.
Scientists, when they could read your temperature,
said a thimbleful of you must weigh a ton.
Read the poem in its entirety here: https://scoundreltime.com/to-sirius-b/
2015 poetry graduate Jennifer Sperry Steinorth was recently interviewed for the Massachusetts Review. Read an excerpt below:
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Hmmm. One piece, back in undergrad, I remember clearly. I was studying with Diane Wakoski; her workshop method was unusual. Each week we passed around copies of our new poems and read them aloud without comment, while she took notes. After, we watched as she arranged the poems from “best” to “worst”; then we workshopped in that order—“best” to “worst”. You never knew who was next, and if your poem was towards the bottom, you didn’t get workshopped. As a teacher, it is not a practice I would deploy, but as a student, I learned a lot!—though it was weeks before a poem of mine was workshopped— perhaps because of it.
So, this particular poem I submitted in my second semester studying with Diane. It was fall, our first assignment, and I’d written the poem over the summer. I fell in love that summer and wrote a heap. And so many drafts of this one poem! There was false translation—bits in French—an attempt to get at the madness of losing and finding oneself in another. I brought the poem in—nervy, but you know, trying to be detached— and lo! After the reading and the shuffling, mine was the first poem. And Diane said—I’ll never forget—“This is a perfect poem.” I was floored. In hind sight, I’m not sure exactly what she meant by “perfect poem”; I think she meant—it was a poem.
I’d like to say I learned what it took to write something worthwhile—the slow work of revision, the discomfort of revealing something terribly at stake—but really, it was just the first time I learned a lesson I keep needing to learn.
You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://massreview.org/node/9183?fbclid=IwAR2rMyxxkJDARaCy6VviI11rbGku2dKA_JxVJ-tYl17L2DCY0lGLxt-h2IM
Friends of Writer congratulates Tommye Blount (poetry ’13 ) and Victoria Chang (poetry ’05 ) whose books (seen below) have been longlisted for the National Book Awards.
Southern Humanities Review, a literary journal published quarterly since 1969, is seeking book reviews for publication in the website’s ongoing series. I am the co-editor of SHR. And, remembering the Warren Wilson MFA’s annotation-writing and craft lectures well, I imagine that fellow alumni would make great reviewers.
Here are the details: Southern Humanities Review welcomes book reviews of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
Please submit a 150 to 300 word pitch including the title of the work you would like to review, the book’s author, and a short summary. Also include your bio in a brief cover letter.
Complete reviews are to be 1300 – 2000 words. They should contain quoted material from the book throughout, as well as information on the book’s publisher, the publication year, the number of pages, and the price.
There are many reviews at www.southernhumanitesreview.com. Here is an example of one that is well-structured for SHR:
http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/review-for-want-of-water-by-sasha-pimentel.html
If you’re a graduate of the program, there’s no need to go through Submittable. Just email this address: [email protected] and mention that Friends of Writers’ blog helped you find us.
Maya Phillips, a 2017 poetry graduate, recently had poems featured in the New Yorker and The Baffler. Read an excerpt of “Rauschenberg” below:
Rauschenberg
Our first concern might be did the artist consider the impossibility
of defining
nothing without speaking of absence without speaking
The white paint of the artist carefully selected and applied so as to
seem
an uncreased space unwrinkled unnippled a whatever indefinite
nondescript discreet
But even without a mouth without figure or form or face the
canvas if it were to speak
as we the viewers imagine would it not speak of powdered sugar
and cocaine,
chalk, marshmallows, and salt
and even that a betrayal of substance
Would it not privately murmur something about the white simmer
of stars
Would it not speak of something not nothing would it not
You can find the poem in its entirety here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/rauschenberg
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