Brambles knotted into the Klamath mist, swamp pop on the radio, bad coffee in a good doughnut shop: some things you love more than me. And the guy who picked you up when you hitchhiked to Minneapolis, when you had to go AWOL from the sun. The way he didn’t say a word and then he did—how the sky blushed over Utah as if it knew you were hitting on it, and I love that you hit on everything: fig jam, for fuck’s sake, and closets and clocks and libraries Open 24 Hours. . . . You love them more too, and there’s real snow now falling like secrets in the Oakland hills.
[…continue reading the award winning sonnet crown at Nimrod.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-29 15:41:002022-02-25 17:14:55“Negligee and Hatchet: A Sonnet Crown” by Robert Thomas (poetry ’02)
An excerpt from an interview conducted by Curtis Smith with J. C. Todd (poetry ’90), published by Small Press Reviews.
Curtis Smith Interviews J. C. Todd (poetry ’90)
Curtis Smith: Congratulations on The Damages of Morning. There’s a lot of history in these pieces. Have you always had a thing for history, especially this particular, horrible time? If so, what attracts you to it?
J.C. Todd: Thank you, Curtis, for all these questions that go directly to the core of the poems. They’ve sent me back to the origins of this long project in the seeds of poems from travel journals dated eighteen years ago.
I’ve always had a thing for people and their stories. Where they come from, how they got to where they are. The stories that underlie this book led me to historical and cultural museums and documents, to diaries, recollections, histories and fiction and poems and visual art that reveal life during the twentieth century wars in Europe. Many of the poems in this chapbook include bits of stories I’ve heard or read and snatches of visual memory from travels to Central and Eastern Europe
CS: Was the idea for a book dedicated to this time and these themes part of the plan from the beginning, or did you find yourself with a few poems and then discovering a current you wanted to follow? If that’s the case, when did the notion hit?
J.C.T.: I write poems. When recurrent images, themes, or tonalities draw together in a critical mass, I begin to wonder what argument they are making, what dilemma or bewilderment they are investigating, what they are searching for. I have in the back of my mind Denise Levertov’s observation that after gathering poems into her first book, she decided she would no longer write poems but instead write books of poems. I wish I could do that, but my interest and pleasure is in the close work of drafting the poem.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-28 15:34:002022-02-25 17:14:54An interview with J. C. Todd (poetry ’90)
An excerpt from a poem by Rosemary Kitchen (poetry ’13), published by Painted Bride Quarterly.
How to Cauterize
Pack with clove oil and minced garlic. Dress with poultices of peppermint, a tincture of myrrh. Count the beats of your pulse with the underside of your tongue pressed against the opening; count the seconds since he went.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-26 16:48:002022-02-25 17:14:53“How to Cauterize” by Rosemary Kitchen (poetry ’13)
An excerpt from an essay by Marit MacArthur (poetry ’13), published by The Paris Review.
John Ashbery’s Reading Voice
The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y has a seventy-year archive of recordings—it began hosting readings in 1939 and recording them in 1949—and it offers a unique opportunity to study poets’ voices and reading styles. Between 1952 and 2014, John Ashbery made seventeen appearances on the stage of the Poetry Center. He read with other poets—Barbara Guest, Mark Ford, Jack Gilbert, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. He read with painters—Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. And he joined in readings honoring other poets—tributes to Frank O’Hara (1970), Elizabeth Bishop (1979) and Marianne Moore (1987). Ashbery, who made regular Poetry Center appearances from the ages of twenty-four to eighty-seven, is on a short list of poets whose Y readings spanned so many decades (others include W. S. Merwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur, and Galway Kinnell).
As a scholar and poet who uses software to analyze performance style in poetry recordings, I was thrilled when Bernard Schwartz, the Poetry Center’s director, invited me to study the archive. The Ashbery readings seemed, to me, like a perfect corpus to begin with.
But even those who loved attending Ashbery’s poetry readings (I am one of them) might feel that he’s the last poet in the world whose performance style is worth studying. He typically read in a restrained, unassuming voice, and the unofficial consensus is that the performative energy of his poetry plays out not in the vocal delivery, but in the slippery syntax, the sly comedy of skewed idioms, the rich mixture of vocabularies and startling tropes, the momentum of swerving thought. His poems can elude the audience’s understanding in a live reading, and they elude many readers on the page as well.
An excerpt from “Penelope’s Song” by Megan Pinto (poetry ’18), published by The Cortland Review.
Penelope’s Song
Somewhere, Odysseus dips his cracked lips into the sea. A cloud sinks. The porpoise cannot taste. And tonight the tide runs low in the estuary where she waits, where little fish dry out on the banks. This is a moon song, for when the moon is gone: Odysseus lighting the night with a candle, Odysseus, loving his boat as he loves the sea.
An excerpt from “The Unvisited” by Daniel Jenkins (poetry ’18), published by Medium.
The Unvisited
Route 91 South curved on tight, Sided right by the thin-deep clear of Stream and creak babbling over stone, Sided left by a rock-face colored In layers — one shade like pencil lead, Others the shade of caked mud on Boots spent hours in the afterlife of Daytime. From the layered rock face Icicles dripped like sweat, unexpected, Beautiful maybe. Even the wax green Rhododendron leaves clamored from Dirt clumps crusting under the whiz The rock facade was by the velocity.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-19 16:04:002022-02-25 17:14:47“The Unvisited” by Daniel Jenkins (poetry ’18)
An excerpt from “Ferries: A Love Story” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction ’02), published by Medium.
Ferries: A Love Story
The ferry Seastreak glides across New York Harbor, bringing our sleepy family home after a July 4 outing to Sandy Hook beach in New Jersey. Off to the left, a seagull skims the water, its speed momentarily matching ours. To my right, the towering Parachute Jump at Coney Island glows red in the late afternoon sun. Moments later, the Statue of Liberty fills our windows, so close we could practically tug on Lady Liberty’s robes.
It’s a busy day on the harbor: jet skis, sailboats, shipping tankers, a massive Royal Caribbean cruise ship. I went on a cruise once. Once was enough. I jet skied once, many summers ago. It was fun until the thing ran out of gas and left me bobbing helplessly in the middle of Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay. Another long-ago summer, I took sailing lessons in the deep harbor of Baltimore. Harnessing nature’s force to navigate brought me, briefly, into spiritual communion with our seafaring ancestors, but after my two free lessons I didn’t join the pricey sailing club. No, the vessel for me is the one I’m on — not too big, not too small, humble and utilitarian. A ferry.
[… continue reading “Ferries: A Love Story” at Medium.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-18 16:00:172022-02-25 17:14:45“Ferries: A Love Story” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction ’02)
In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators employ intertextuality to grapple with and subvert male expectations in romantic contexts. Intertextuality, in this context, alludes to the referencing, retelling, or summarizing by narrators, within the short stories, of external narratives. In “Famous Actor,” café-server and narrator Katherine summarizes and capsule-reviews films. She brings a famous actor home from a party, and nonchalantly has sex with him, yet he wants more: her deepest thoughts. Carmen Maria Machado folds urban myths into her narrator’s coming of age story: the narrator falls in love with a man and gives him everything, except permission to touch or untie the green ribbon encircling her neck. Each of these women keep secrets to protect themselves, in direct opposition to their lovers’ expectations. In these stories, intertextuality serves as a fortress. And not all fortresses withstand protracted sieges.
[… continue reading “Self-Salvation, Structure, and Sex Part I” at Craft.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-11-17 16:00:592022-02-25 17:14:44“Self-Salvation, Structure, and Sex Part I: Intertextuality in Jess Walter’s ‘Famous Actor'” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19)
The poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, whose new collection is “Felon,” on the writer who helped him come to terms with himself.
A decade after Lucille Clifton’s “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980” and “Next: New Poems” were both finalists for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, I was a prisoner at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, befriended by a brother with long locs, a knife stashed in the dirt on the rec yard and a copy of Michael Harper’s anthology “Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep.” The man’s name I’ve long forgotten, but Clifton’s poems in that book — all of them taken from her first four collections, also found in “Good Woman” — would follow me in a way rivaled only by those years in a cell.
This is the thing. Back then every day teemed with violence, and the poems, like all of Clifton’s poems, let me imagine even the wildest dudes around me as my brother. I read “cutting greens” as a way to understand my bid and all its contradictions. Prisons held our “bodies in an obscene embrace” and we were left, often, “thinking of everything but kinship.” But at some point, you realized that “the pot is black, / the cutting board is black, / my hand, / and just for a minute / the greens roll black under the knife / and the kitchen twists dark on its spine / and i taste in my natural appetite / the bond of living things everywhere.”
During those days, no one called me by my father’s name. Instead, for a few years I’d been going by Shahid, christening myself with the Arabic word for witness. Everyone around me was changing his name, the chosen nom de plumes all abstract and aspirational: Divine God Allah, Wisdom Self, Double-barrel, Icepick. Then I read Clifton’s “my poem.” The poem was an announcement, this is who I am: “mine is already / an afrikan name.”
[… continue reading “In Praise of Lucille Clifton” at The New York Times.]
