Manuscripts

Are we going to circulate your manuscripts? (at least amongst ourselves)

D

PS Happy TURKEY 

No Rest Yet for Federico Garcia Lorca

Yahoo calls it a "grave dispute."

There's a slide show also.

Better yet, though, words from Lorca himself...

Great Baldwin Quote

The body waits for love to give it meaning. We discover,

finally, this love is at the center of our peril and our salvation.

-James Baldwin

Our YoYo A Go-Go

Too sexy for the camera.

Teresa Cader in Slate

http://www.slate.com/id/2196659/

I think her reading is really good and adds to the poem.

YoYo's the smartest and greatest

I love Yolanda's idea that we should all send each other what we're writing each month. I don't think we can expect that we'll all respond to everything, but it would be fun to see what we're all writing.

So...email me your poems.

Do it.

happy surprise

I came to our blog this morning just to see if anyone posted anything--I was so happy to see you guys had.

Will someone post a poem they're working on?

Some thoughts by Boris Pasternak

No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.
_____________________________________________________________________

By its inborn faculty of hearing, poetry seeks out the melody of nature amid the tumult of the dictionary, and then, picking it up as one picks up a tune, abandons itself to improvisation upon that theme....

As it weaves its fantasies, poetry stumbles across nature. The live, real world is the only project of the imagination, which, having once succeeded, goes on forever, endlessly succeeding. Look at it continuing, moment after moment a success. It is still real, still deep, absorbing, fascinating. It is not something you'll be disappointed in next morning. For the poet it is an example, even more than a model or pattern.

(from The Poet's Work, ed. Reginald Gibbons)

Check it out

So Cool

possible names

Cellar Door Press

Basement Choir Collective

In Residence Publishers

An Infinity of Little Hours (i already used this line....don't steal it)

The Relative Neighbors Press

Poem I'm working on but need some comments

Sawyer

Wait for midnight.
Then everyone will be gone.

Wait for the TV to go black.
Then call the deceased child:

The one a tree honors
and tries to be remembered.
The one who disappeared for days
with twin brother, whom life depended.

Stop neglecting his existence,
though his voice is hard to hear.

How were you so calm,
a model of concentration?

Wait for the night to light the room
(the color of day-old bone bruises).
Then he may give you an answer.

Pause as the cold air fills the room.
Then you’ll notice his octave.

You’ll conjure up recess at Woodbridge:
jungle gym, foot races.

*

You will search the hallows of the cold,
ask if he breathes in the shadows of dying trees.

The mask you see behind the tree
is not his face.

And the whisper in the welkin
is not his voice.

He may travel with the leaves,
crisp and crumbling, carefree.

Then you’ll remember his life
as a book of matches,
each impression a moment of burning light.

Don't know if you happened to read this poem...

but I thought it was pretty interesting, (from AGNI online).

“Perhaps We Are What We Want to Remember”
by Matt Donovan


Take Saint Augustine at his word, & watch as you become

last May’s cold snap crusting locust buds, one sticky night

tipped back in bucket seats, three neat rows of gravel

in a shoebox labeled Petrified Rain. Cleaved emerald shells

of a dragonfly snared in a wolfspider’s web, that mouth

biscotti-crammed you can’t ever give up. And what you’re not,

since these are merely things which surface at times –

undesired, unbidden – is the doughy, swollen neck of some guy

named Barry who collapsed at the Vatican into your arms,

that tangerine-poached, gone-off tilapia choked down in bed,

or Mac Magoon with cupcake clumps in his hair, bat-wild

beneath a piñata as you touch Sarah Jordan’s sun-burnt calf

beneath that leopard-print spread. Memory, Augustine wrote,

is like a great field, one in which leek-like hibiscus roots creep

through soil until, on an otherwise forgettable day, they flame

with morning light in a bourbon bottle vase. Or one in which

a farmer finds among his withered stalks an owl that must have been,

he thinks, snared in the wires, its talons still gripping

some sleek, whiskered thing. Although this is what you hear

mumbled from a diner’s smoke-filled booth as you finger each name

carved into the tabletop, about now you should drop the act.

No one believes you want to become a cream-colored beak

in a dying patch of earth, that ant-rich feather splay.

Doesn’t this dead bird engraved in someone else’s mind

only allow you to loosen your hold on your own chosen past,

those misremembered scraps of what you once held close to your lips,

to your bare, pimply chest beneath the Ocean City boardwalk

as the night surf tossed & churned? Admit you remain what you are:

a man eavesdropping at the Kettle Stop, someone wishing

what would last of today was something more than that electric-blue

smear of boysenberry syrup, someone else’s story about wings.

A Poem About Salt Lake

I am supposed to write a two-line poem about Salt Lake City in January for Spencer. This is proving much more difficult than one might imagine...

"What Do Women Want?"

I can't get this poem out of my head. I think it's the ending.

What Do Women Want?
by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Great Hart Crane Poem to start things off

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

by Hart Crane

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough

For the letters of my mother’s mother,

Elizabeth,

That have been pressed so long

Into a corner of the roof

That they are brown and soft,

And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space

Steps must be gentle.

It is all hung by an invisible white hair.

It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play

Old keys that are but echoes:

Is the silence strong enough

To carry back the music to its source

And back to you again

As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand

Through much of what she would not understand;

And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof

With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.