HICKORY POET HOW-TO, PART I
(first published in Outlook)
So, you want to be a poet in Hickory, NC? Many have tried; many have failed; and a perhaps surprisingly large number have done pretty well. A word to the wise, however; it’s not easy. There is not what could be called a lot of interest in poetry in Hickory (or anywhere else these days for that matter). There is even less opportunity for financial remuneration. So, whatever you do, don’t give up your day job to become a poet.
If, despite these unfortunate facts, you are still interested, then here are some tips on how to get started and keep going.
1. READ. Whether you’re in Hickory or Paris, this is the most important element of developing one’s prowess with language. Read everything, of course, but in particular read good contemporary poetry. Anthologies like Contemporary American Poetry and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems are a good place to start. You can find the poets you identify with there and then seek out their books to read further. There are also over 1000 regularly published poetry journals in America, many of which are available for free online. Nearby examples include Wild Goose Poetry Review (www.wildgoosepoetryreview.com), Dead Mule (www.deadmule.com), and Main Street Rag (www.mainstreetrag.com).
2. WRITE. Seems intuitive, but I know many would-be writers who get so caught up in the “busy-ness” of being a writer, that they never get much writing done. Aside from one’s job and family, the only thing a writer should be doing more than writing is reading. There are two possible keys to this process. First, one can schedule his or her writing for the same time every day, just like exercising or bathing, and stick to it. If family and work make that difficult to manage then one can purchase a nice journal and carry with them everywhere and write during whatever free time presents itself.
3. Read “Musings” (this column). The column comes out every other week and is also available online at www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com if you miss the paper. It will include details on upcoming poetry events in the area, profiles of poets giving readings in the area, sample poems, and the occasional exploration of various poetry topics and issues (like this one).
4. Attend Poetry Hickory and Writers’ Night Out. On the second Tuesday of each month, two well-published writers and three Open Mic readers are featured at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. The featured writers read for about 20 minutes each, and the Open Mic readers for about 10 each. The featured writers usually have copies of their recent books to sell and sign as well. The readings start at 6:30 and are free. They are preceded by Writers’ Night Out, sponsored by the NC Writers’ Network and also free, which begins at 5:00. These are networking sessions attended by anywhere from 10 to 20 area writers, including several “newbies” as well as 3 journal editors, 2 creative writing instructors, and 4 writers who have published at least 5 books each.
5. Take a class. Both CVCC and Lenoir Rhyne offer creative writing classes every semester. If you already have your degree, you can sign up to audit the class as a way of honing your skills and increasing your motivation to write.
Okay, that’s a start. Come back in two weeks, and we’ll continue with the list.
Showing posts with label Outlook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Outlook. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
What a Week
Last week was almost the best week I've ever had as a writer. I had a total of 23 poems come out in 7 different journals. First there were the poems "Absence of Animal Presence," "The Word for What Only 4-Year Olds Can See," and "After the Flood" in Joe and Chenelle Milford's new journal, Scythe, at www.scytheliteraryjournal.com.
That was followed by "Light Falls and Runs Red" in the new issue of The Pedestal at http://thepedestalmagazine.com/. Next was one poem ("Second Chances" and ("All I Want") in each of the two new issues of Waterways, in print only, but info is available at www.tenpennyplayers.org/mags.html.
One of my favorite "blog" journals, protestpoems.org, at www.protestpoems.org.blogspot.com, then published one of my favorite new poems "Letter to Ahmadinejad," and I published my own poem "Relic" alongside Joe Young's photo "Time Goes By" in Outlook and then in my blog to help promote the Aroma of Art fundraiser going on this month in Hickory. That same day Outlook also published a profile of me written by Ann Fox Chandonnet.
A couple of days ago, Jane Crown released her latest issue of Heavy Bear, at www.heavybear.janecrown.com, which contained the poems "Meat Jesus" and "Arse Poetica" and an audio file of me reading 10 of my poems, most of which will be in Paternity, due out in just a couple of weeks. And now, today, Helen Losse has released the February issue of Dead Mule, which includes three of my poems written in honor of Black History Month, "Soundings," "Primer," and "in which the poet speaks as a sixth-grade classmate."
Thank you to each of these editors and to the readers who support these journals.
So why was it just "almost" the best week I've ever had? Because my new manuscript, which I really thought was good, didn't win the contest I had sent it off to, and because like most writers, I suspect, I take the rejections more personally than I do the acceptances. I tell myself to use rejections as motivation, but they still hurt, they still cause doubt, and they still linger in my mind longer than they should. Call me sensitive. Call me insecure. Call me spoiled. Self-doubt is just a tough thing to overcome.
That was followed by "Light Falls and Runs Red" in the new issue of The Pedestal at http://thepedestalmagazine.com/. Next was one poem ("Second Chances" and ("All I Want") in each of the two new issues of Waterways, in print only, but info is available at www.tenpennyplayers.org/mags.html.
One of my favorite "blog" journals, protestpoems.org, at www.protestpoems.org.blogspot.com, then published one of my favorite new poems "Letter to Ahmadinejad," and I published my own poem "Relic" alongside Joe Young's photo "Time Goes By" in Outlook and then in my blog to help promote the Aroma of Art fundraiser going on this month in Hickory. That same day Outlook also published a profile of me written by Ann Fox Chandonnet.
A couple of days ago, Jane Crown released her latest issue of Heavy Bear, at www.heavybear.janecrown.com, which contained the poems "Meat Jesus" and "Arse Poetica" and an audio file of me reading 10 of my poems, most of which will be in Paternity, due out in just a couple of weeks. And now, today, Helen Losse has released the February issue of Dead Mule, which includes three of my poems written in honor of Black History Month, "Soundings," "Primer," and "in which the poet speaks as a sixth-grade classmate."
Thank you to each of these editors and to the readers who support these journals.
So why was it just "almost" the best week I've ever had? Because my new manuscript, which I really thought was good, didn't win the contest I had sent it off to, and because like most writers, I suspect, I take the rejections more personally than I do the acceptances. I tell myself to use rejections as motivation, but they still hurt, they still cause doubt, and they still linger in my mind longer than they should. Call me sensitive. Call me insecure. Call me spoiled. Self-doubt is just a tough thing to overcome.
Friday, January 22, 2010
My Favorite Poem of the Past 2 Years
For the past year and a half I have had the wonderful opportunity to write a column on poetry each week and have it published in the local newspaper "Outlook." I've used that space to highlight area poets as well as poets coming to the area to give a reading, to make statements on the practice of or world of poetry, and to bring a little extra attention to the many deserving efforts going on in poetry today, including journals like "Main Street Rag," "Shape of a Box," "Dead Mule," and "Wild Goose Poetry Review," blog talk radio shows like the Joe Milford Show and the Jane Crown Show, programs like the Aroma of Art, and organizations like the NC Writers' Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Council of NC. I've also posted those columns on this blog to give those not from the Hickory area an opportunity to read and respond to them.
I was recently told that starting in February my column will be reduced to once every other week. The newspaper has added a couple of other columns and can't realistically give me the kind of space they have been without slighting other columnists. All of this is fine, but since I usually write these columns about a month ahead it does leave me in a bit of a lurch regarding the column about Felicia Mitchell that I was going to run before her reading in Hickory on February 9. Publishing the column after the reading would do little to inform the reader what they might expect by attending the reading. Nevertheless, I can still publish the column here, as I do below. I will also post it on the Poetry Hickory website (www.poetryhickory.com).
One possible benefit to this alteration in schedule is that I will blog less formally more frequently. Because I've used the blog to post my column each week and my reviews from Wild Goose Poetry Review, I've always been hesitant to use the blog just for informal commentary. I felt doing so might unnecessarily crowd the blog and detract from the authors whose work I was featuring in the columns and reviews. Now, however, since I don't want the blog readers to have to wait 2 weeks between blogs, I'll be more inclined to include a wider range of comments.
I hope everyone who reads the blog finds this satisfactory. And now, here is what I wanted to say about Felicia Mitchell:
My column today will consist almost entirely of a poem. It is my favorite poem from the past two years and one of my favorite ever. It was written by Felicia Mitchell, a poet who teaches at Emory & Henry College in Virginia and will read at Poetry Hickory at 6:30 on February 9 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. Mitchell is the author of 3 chapbooks, including last year’s The Cleft of the Rock, which I reviewed in Wild Goose Poetry Review (http://wildgoosepoetryreview.com/files/fa09_reviews.pdf). Both that collection and the poem below illustrate some of the features common to Mitchell’s outstanding work: evocative imagery, a strong sense of the dramatic, an awareness of the vitality of connections and all that we too often take for granted, and most importantly, a defiant embrace of life. Here is “Album,” first published in Blood Orange Review in 2008.
Album
1.
In the photograph I do not take,
my father’s feeding tube
feeds itself on his body:
the body that he has willed to outlast
every possible medical intervention.
And though he is not underground,
or lying in a wooden coffin,
there are flowers around his remains:
the Judas branch I snapped out front,
the hotel’s daffodils, azalea blooms
from my mother’s garden.
All of these fit in a Styrofoam cup.
All of my father fits in one bed.
2.
In the photograph I do not take,
my father is not smiling
but his hand is waving,
its bandages white like flags of surrender.
He is waving at his grandson
whose yo-yo is a pendulum,
whose eyes are very sad,
whose note to his grandpa
written so precisely in a schoolboy’s hand
is answered with the truth
by a man who cannot hear himself speak it:
“Not so good, Guy, not so good.”
3.
In the photograph I do not take,
my mother is out of the picture.
As much as she has seen, she has never seen this.
She has never seen quite this.
4.
In the photograph I do not take,
nobody can see my cousin Walter
seated at the foot of the bed.
My father’s companion since his death,
Walter takes up so little room
not even the night nurse mentions him
to her supervisor, or turns him in to God
for being AWOL from the hereafter.
Walter the politician has no pull now,
but he lets my father in on little secrets
and pulls the blanket over his toes.
5.
In the photograph I do not take,
all my father’s children are standing by
at the same time in the same room.
The black hair John pulled from our father’s head
to mantle his own bald head is long.
Of all of us, he knows the most.
He knows how veins burn out and needles hurt
and nights are long when your roommate sleeps.
He knows how handicapped the healthy are,
how hard it is for them to focus
when they pass through the door downstairs
to halls that smell of old urine.
Our father knows that John knows the most
and holds the hand whose last pulse he counted.
The rest of us fan out like angel wings
on either side, waiting for a sign.
6.
In the photograph I do not take,
I am crying tears like baroque pearls
in different, scattered sizes,
and the miracle is that they fall
painlessly from my tear ducts.
The camera is not on a tripod.
My arm is long enough, my fingers deft.
I can capture myself in time.
Later, I will string the pearls with silk thread
that looks nothing like a feeding tube.
I will wear them to my father’s grave.
Another daughter might bury them.
I will wear them to my father’s funeral
every day I wear them
and I will wear them every day.
I was recently told that starting in February my column will be reduced to once every other week. The newspaper has added a couple of other columns and can't realistically give me the kind of space they have been without slighting other columnists. All of this is fine, but since I usually write these columns about a month ahead it does leave me in a bit of a lurch regarding the column about Felicia Mitchell that I was going to run before her reading in Hickory on February 9. Publishing the column after the reading would do little to inform the reader what they might expect by attending the reading. Nevertheless, I can still publish the column here, as I do below. I will also post it on the Poetry Hickory website (www.poetryhickory.com).
One possible benefit to this alteration in schedule is that I will blog less formally more frequently. Because I've used the blog to post my column each week and my reviews from Wild Goose Poetry Review, I've always been hesitant to use the blog just for informal commentary. I felt doing so might unnecessarily crowd the blog and detract from the authors whose work I was featuring in the columns and reviews. Now, however, since I don't want the blog readers to have to wait 2 weeks between blogs, I'll be more inclined to include a wider range of comments.
I hope everyone who reads the blog finds this satisfactory. And now, here is what I wanted to say about Felicia Mitchell:
My column today will consist almost entirely of a poem. It is my favorite poem from the past two years and one of my favorite ever. It was written by Felicia Mitchell, a poet who teaches at Emory & Henry College in Virginia and will read at Poetry Hickory at 6:30 on February 9 at Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory. Mitchell is the author of 3 chapbooks, including last year’s The Cleft of the Rock, which I reviewed in Wild Goose Poetry Review (http://wildgoosepoetryreview.com/files/fa09_reviews.pdf). Both that collection and the poem below illustrate some of the features common to Mitchell’s outstanding work: evocative imagery, a strong sense of the dramatic, an awareness of the vitality of connections and all that we too often take for granted, and most importantly, a defiant embrace of life. Here is “Album,” first published in Blood Orange Review in 2008.
Album
1.
In the photograph I do not take,
my father’s feeding tube
feeds itself on his body:
the body that he has willed to outlast
every possible medical intervention.
And though he is not underground,
or lying in a wooden coffin,
there are flowers around his remains:
the Judas branch I snapped out front,
the hotel’s daffodils, azalea blooms
from my mother’s garden.
All of these fit in a Styrofoam cup.
All of my father fits in one bed.
2.
In the photograph I do not take,
my father is not smiling
but his hand is waving,
its bandages white like flags of surrender.
He is waving at his grandson
whose yo-yo is a pendulum,
whose eyes are very sad,
whose note to his grandpa
written so precisely in a schoolboy’s hand
is answered with the truth
by a man who cannot hear himself speak it:
“Not so good, Guy, not so good.”
3.
In the photograph I do not take,
my mother is out of the picture.
As much as she has seen, she has never seen this.
She has never seen quite this.
4.
In the photograph I do not take,
nobody can see my cousin Walter
seated at the foot of the bed.
My father’s companion since his death,
Walter takes up so little room
not even the night nurse mentions him
to her supervisor, or turns him in to God
for being AWOL from the hereafter.
Walter the politician has no pull now,
but he lets my father in on little secrets
and pulls the blanket over his toes.
5.
In the photograph I do not take,
all my father’s children are standing by
at the same time in the same room.
The black hair John pulled from our father’s head
to mantle his own bald head is long.
Of all of us, he knows the most.
He knows how veins burn out and needles hurt
and nights are long when your roommate sleeps.
He knows how handicapped the healthy are,
how hard it is for them to focus
when they pass through the door downstairs
to halls that smell of old urine.
Our father knows that John knows the most
and holds the hand whose last pulse he counted.
The rest of us fan out like angel wings
on either side, waiting for a sign.
6.
In the photograph I do not take,
I am crying tears like baroque pearls
in different, scattered sizes,
and the miracle is that they fall
painlessly from my tear ducts.
The camera is not on a tripod.
My arm is long enough, my fingers deft.
I can capture myself in time.
Later, I will string the pearls with silk thread
that looks nothing like a feeding tube.
I will wear them to my father’s grave.
Another daughter might bury them.
I will wear them to my father’s funeral
every day I wear them
and I will wear them every day.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Twins, the Weasleys, and "The Wait of Atom" or What's the Difference Anyway?
Musings for January 14, 2010
Twins, the Weasleys, and “The Wait of Atom” or
What’s the Difference Anyway?
Twins are intriguing. They seem to be the living embodiment of the idea of comparison and contrast. We are astutely aware of each twin’s similarities to the other, but we know they are different, even if we struggle to put their differences into words.
My favorite twins are not the Olsens or the Weasleys or Castor and Pollux or anyone, living of myth for that matter, but rather the twin concepts of art and science. The two words have been linked in the phrase “arts and sciences” for as long as I can remember and I’m sure a great deal longer, but we use them separately as well, albeit not always with any clear distinction. There have been, for example, recent books called both The Art of Cooking and The Science of Cooking. My son is majoring in political science, but when he finishes his degree he’ll receive a Bachelor of Arts. There are countless books about the art of love, but just last year NBC ran a special called The Science of Love. And finally, while a recent Psychology Today article was titled “The Science of a Good Marriage,” Wilferd Peterson’s well-known poem on the topic is called “The Art of Marriage.”
And that’s where I begin today--at the intersection of poetry, art, science, and relationships. This intersection is where one finds the fascinating new book of poems called The Wait of Atom, by Charlotte poet and Poetry Hickory regular, Jessie Carty. The poems in this book explore the often contrasting, often complementary, and often surprisingly contrary-to-convention perspectives of a man and a woman in a relationship. Each of the poems is also couched in the terminology of the Periodic Table of Elements, creating a wonderful juxtaposition of what is usually considered art (poetry) and what is usually considered science (the table of elements), implying that even these seemingly disparate concepts are much more closely related than we typically imagine them to be. While we all too readily imagine that art is “from Venus” and science “from Mars,” this collection of poems blurs those lines, making it clear that sometimes art is “from Mars” and sometimes science “from Venus,” and illustrating that while, like all twins and all people in a relationship, art and science are distinct, taken together they also exist as a single complex and vibrant entity.
Not only are the poems in Carty’s collection works or art (or science), but so too is the book itself. Handcrafted, embossed, and bound by Folded Word Press, the book can be ordered for $9 at http://www.foldedword.com/buy.html. If you go to that site, you should also watch the informative and very entertaining video called “Constructing Atoms.” To give you a sense of what to expect from The Wait of Atom, here is the title poem, first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review:
The Wait of Atom
It wasn’t that he wouldn’t wait for her
or not even that he didn’t want
to wait for her, he just couldn’t
stand still. She couldn’t stand it,
the way his eyes became nearly crossed,
how he jangled the change in his pocket.
She’d complained before.
To keep his face from registering
annoyance, he began mentally listing
the noble gases by weight: lowest to highest,
using his hands in his pockets to count each one.
He could do this without moving his lips.
His face relaxed even though she was still
transferring her personal items
from a brown purse to a black one.
She had explained, on more than one occasion,
how her purse had to match her shoes. How
his belt should match his shoes and he’d learned
to keep his eyes focused on a point
just over her shoulder while he let his brain
scan the periodic table of elements.
Twins, the Weasleys, and “The Wait of Atom” or
What’s the Difference Anyway?
Twins are intriguing. They seem to be the living embodiment of the idea of comparison and contrast. We are astutely aware of each twin’s similarities to the other, but we know they are different, even if we struggle to put their differences into words.
My favorite twins are not the Olsens or the Weasleys or Castor and Pollux or anyone, living of myth for that matter, but rather the twin concepts of art and science. The two words have been linked in the phrase “arts and sciences” for as long as I can remember and I’m sure a great deal longer, but we use them separately as well, albeit not always with any clear distinction. There have been, for example, recent books called both The Art of Cooking and The Science of Cooking. My son is majoring in political science, but when he finishes his degree he’ll receive a Bachelor of Arts. There are countless books about the art of love, but just last year NBC ran a special called The Science of Love. And finally, while a recent Psychology Today article was titled “The Science of a Good Marriage,” Wilferd Peterson’s well-known poem on the topic is called “The Art of Marriage.”
And that’s where I begin today--at the intersection of poetry, art, science, and relationships. This intersection is where one finds the fascinating new book of poems called The Wait of Atom, by Charlotte poet and Poetry Hickory regular, Jessie Carty. The poems in this book explore the often contrasting, often complementary, and often surprisingly contrary-to-convention perspectives of a man and a woman in a relationship. Each of the poems is also couched in the terminology of the Periodic Table of Elements, creating a wonderful juxtaposition of what is usually considered art (poetry) and what is usually considered science (the table of elements), implying that even these seemingly disparate concepts are much more closely related than we typically imagine them to be. While we all too readily imagine that art is “from Venus” and science “from Mars,” this collection of poems blurs those lines, making it clear that sometimes art is “from Mars” and sometimes science “from Venus,” and illustrating that while, like all twins and all people in a relationship, art and science are distinct, taken together they also exist as a single complex and vibrant entity.
Not only are the poems in Carty’s collection works or art (or science), but so too is the book itself. Handcrafted, embossed, and bound by Folded Word Press, the book can be ordered for $9 at http://www.foldedword.com/buy.html. If you go to that site, you should also watch the informative and very entertaining video called “Constructing Atoms.” To give you a sense of what to expect from The Wait of Atom, here is the title poem, first published in Wild Goose Poetry Review:
The Wait of Atom
It wasn’t that he wouldn’t wait for her
or not even that he didn’t want
to wait for her, he just couldn’t
stand still. She couldn’t stand it,
the way his eyes became nearly crossed,
how he jangled the change in his pocket.
She’d complained before.
To keep his face from registering
annoyance, he began mentally listing
the noble gases by weight: lowest to highest,
using his hands in his pockets to count each one.
He could do this without moving his lips.
His face relaxed even though she was still
transferring her personal items
from a brown purse to a black one.
She had explained, on more than one occasion,
how her purse had to match her shoes. How
his belt should match his shoes and he’d learned
to keep his eyes focused on a point
just over her shoulder while he let his brain
scan the periodic table of elements.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
The Art of the Poetry Book Review
“Musings” for December 17
The Art of the Poetry Book Review
Over the past nine months or so, I’ve written somewhere around 50 reviews of new books of poetry for Outlook and for journals like Main Street Rag and Wild Goose Poetry Review. I’d like to think that the reviews are a sort of public service, that they bring a bit more attention to good books of poetry that they help poets and bookstores sell those books, and that they help buyers of poetry know more of what to expect from a book than they would know by simply looking at the cover or reading the blurbs on the back of the book.
Those, of course, are all good things. I enjoy doing community service, and I like feeling like I’m helping others. The truth is, however, I would still write book reviews even if I didn’t believe they served any purpose for others. That might sound self-serving, but it is nonetheless true. Writing book reviews achieves four vital purposes for me as a writer: it keeps me reading; it forces me to engage meaningfully with what I’m reading; it shapes my own writing; and it gives me the opportunity to say something about poetry.
I believe it is vital, if you want to do something well, to immerse yourself in it. Thus, I try to read at least one new book of poems every week. But, as with anything that isn’t in front of my face all the time, it is easy to de-prioritize or put off that commitment in favor of mowing the grass, watching the new episode of The Amazing Race, or any of the other innumerable requests upon my time. Knowing that I’m expected to write reviews and getting requests for reviews from publishers and authors goes a long way towards keeping me reading, which is in essence the equivalent of “practice” for a writer.
Writing reviews not only keeps me reading, but keeps me reading on a deeper level than I might otherwise achieve. To write a decent review, I have to go beyond simply reading the poems. I also have to strive to understand what they say and how they say it. The task of the reviewer, I think, is not just to tell a reader whether a book of poems is good or not, but to help them understand it, or even better, to help them know how to understand it.
To do that, I have to delve into what the poet is doing and possibly even consider what I think they should be doing. I have to examine the effectiveness of the choices they’ve made in language, structure, theme, imagery, purpose, etc., and the impact those choices could have upon the reader and the world at large. In the process of evaluating their practice of poetry, I also unavoidably evaluate my own, which inevitably hones my own aesthetic, my own concepts of craft and function.
Finally, as I reflect upon what other poets do and why they do it, I participate in critical activity, that wonderful habit of asking questions and attempting answers in the light of reason and experience. The reviewer, perhaps every bit as much as the poet, makes meaning, makes, in fact, meaning-ful certain poems, certain poets, certain practices or purposes in poetry. Thus, writing reviews gives me the opportunity to say something about poetry, to exert perhaps a little bit of influence over what readers expect of poetry, to help readers read well, and maybe to even help writers write better, at least according to my own standards of quality. In other words, writing reviews might be seen ultimately as an existential act, bringing into or helping keep in existence those poems, poets, practices, and purposes I think should be pursued and preserved by clarifying, proclaiming and adding to their value.
The Art of the Poetry Book Review
Over the past nine months or so, I’ve written somewhere around 50 reviews of new books of poetry for Outlook and for journals like Main Street Rag and Wild Goose Poetry Review. I’d like to think that the reviews are a sort of public service, that they bring a bit more attention to good books of poetry that they help poets and bookstores sell those books, and that they help buyers of poetry know more of what to expect from a book than they would know by simply looking at the cover or reading the blurbs on the back of the book.
Those, of course, are all good things. I enjoy doing community service, and I like feeling like I’m helping others. The truth is, however, I would still write book reviews even if I didn’t believe they served any purpose for others. That might sound self-serving, but it is nonetheless true. Writing book reviews achieves four vital purposes for me as a writer: it keeps me reading; it forces me to engage meaningfully with what I’m reading; it shapes my own writing; and it gives me the opportunity to say something about poetry.
I believe it is vital, if you want to do something well, to immerse yourself in it. Thus, I try to read at least one new book of poems every week. But, as with anything that isn’t in front of my face all the time, it is easy to de-prioritize or put off that commitment in favor of mowing the grass, watching the new episode of The Amazing Race, or any of the other innumerable requests upon my time. Knowing that I’m expected to write reviews and getting requests for reviews from publishers and authors goes a long way towards keeping me reading, which is in essence the equivalent of “practice” for a writer.
Writing reviews not only keeps me reading, but keeps me reading on a deeper level than I might otherwise achieve. To write a decent review, I have to go beyond simply reading the poems. I also have to strive to understand what they say and how they say it. The task of the reviewer, I think, is not just to tell a reader whether a book of poems is good or not, but to help them understand it, or even better, to help them know how to understand it.
To do that, I have to delve into what the poet is doing and possibly even consider what I think they should be doing. I have to examine the effectiveness of the choices they’ve made in language, structure, theme, imagery, purpose, etc., and the impact those choices could have upon the reader and the world at large. In the process of evaluating their practice of poetry, I also unavoidably evaluate my own, which inevitably hones my own aesthetic, my own concepts of craft and function.
Finally, as I reflect upon what other poets do and why they do it, I participate in critical activity, that wonderful habit of asking questions and attempting answers in the light of reason and experience. The reviewer, perhaps every bit as much as the poet, makes meaning, makes, in fact, meaning-ful certain poems, certain poets, certain practices or purposes in poetry. Thus, writing reviews gives me the opportunity to say something about poetry, to exert perhaps a little bit of influence over what readers expect of poetry, to help readers read well, and maybe to even help writers write better, at least according to my own standards of quality. In other words, writing reviews might be seen ultimately as an existential act, bringing into or helping keep in existence those poems, poets, practices, and purposes I think should be pursued and preserved by clarifying, proclaiming and adding to their value.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Happy Anniversary to Us
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO US!
A little over a year ago, Barbara Burns, the editor of Outlook, and I hatched a plan to create a print venue for bringing more attention to poets in the Hickory area. We thought a column, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever we could manage, featuring a poem by a local writer would do the trick. It was not really a novel idea. In fact, the “poetry corner” was once a staple of locally-owned newspapers across the country. In recent years, however, that tradition seems to have fallen out of favor. That, combined with the fact that Hickory has become home to a surprising number of widely-published poets, made it seem the perfect time and location for just such a column to be reinvented.
We quickly decided on the name “Musings,” and a year ago today, the first installment of this column was published in Outlook. We decided the standard format of the column would be to include a poem and a brief biography of the poet, but we also decided to be flexible and occasionally venture into book reviews, interviews, and commentary on anything related to poetry. In fairly quick order we also expanded our scope to include poets coming to Hickory to read their work at Poetry Hickory or other local venues.
Not surprisingly to anyone who knows anything about poetry in the Hickory area, the first poet we featured in “Musings” was Tim Peeler, a native of Hickory and long-time fixture at CVCC and in the Hickory poetry community. From that beginning we’ve gone on this past year to publish 44 poems by 37 different poets ranging from NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer to local high school student, Jeni Conklin. Taken together, these poems form an impressive array of work (hmm, maybe an anthology should be in the future).
We have also featured information on events like Poetry Hickory, Aroma of Art, the Ekphrastic Poetry Event, Poetry Month, and the Women’s Resource Center Book Release Party for Voices and Vision. We have highlighted area poetry journals like Wild Goose Poetry Review and Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, local presses like Main Street Rag, vital organizations for poets like NC Poetry Society, Poetry Council of North Carolina, and NC Writer’s Network. Then, perhaps my personal favorites were the op-ed style columns on “The Top 10 Reasons for Going to a Poetry Reading,” “Why Poetry,” “Why Poetry Doesn’t Sell,” the loss of NC’s Poet Laureate, “How to Read a Poem” and other topics.
I discovered along the way that we were not as alone in this as I first thought. I found other weekly poetry columns in print, including Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” which is published in a large number of newspapers across the country, Bill Diskin’s “Poetryork” in York, Pennsylvania’s York Daily Record, Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s Choice” in The Washington Post, as well as columns in The Lawrence Journal-World, The Oregonian, and England’s The Guardian. I am grateful that we are not the only ones who think such coverage of poetry is still justified.
I am also grateful to Barbara Burns, to the staff of Newton’s Observer News Enterprise, to the poets who continue to share their work with us, and of course most of all, to the readers of “Musings” and their continued understanding of the vitality of poetry today. I hope this will be the first in a long series of anniversaries to come.
A little over a year ago, Barbara Burns, the editor of Outlook, and I hatched a plan to create a print venue for bringing more attention to poets in the Hickory area. We thought a column, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever we could manage, featuring a poem by a local writer would do the trick. It was not really a novel idea. In fact, the “poetry corner” was once a staple of locally-owned newspapers across the country. In recent years, however, that tradition seems to have fallen out of favor. That, combined with the fact that Hickory has become home to a surprising number of widely-published poets, made it seem the perfect time and location for just such a column to be reinvented.
We quickly decided on the name “Musings,” and a year ago today, the first installment of this column was published in Outlook. We decided the standard format of the column would be to include a poem and a brief biography of the poet, but we also decided to be flexible and occasionally venture into book reviews, interviews, and commentary on anything related to poetry. In fairly quick order we also expanded our scope to include poets coming to Hickory to read their work at Poetry Hickory or other local venues.
Not surprisingly to anyone who knows anything about poetry in the Hickory area, the first poet we featured in “Musings” was Tim Peeler, a native of Hickory and long-time fixture at CVCC and in the Hickory poetry community. From that beginning we’ve gone on this past year to publish 44 poems by 37 different poets ranging from NC Poet Laureate Kay Byer to local high school student, Jeni Conklin. Taken together, these poems form an impressive array of work (hmm, maybe an anthology should be in the future).
We have also featured information on events like Poetry Hickory, Aroma of Art, the Ekphrastic Poetry Event, Poetry Month, and the Women’s Resource Center Book Release Party for Voices and Vision. We have highlighted area poetry journals like Wild Goose Poetry Review and Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, local presses like Main Street Rag, vital organizations for poets like NC Poetry Society, Poetry Council of North Carolina, and NC Writer’s Network. Then, perhaps my personal favorites were the op-ed style columns on “The Top 10 Reasons for Going to a Poetry Reading,” “Why Poetry,” “Why Poetry Doesn’t Sell,” the loss of NC’s Poet Laureate, “How to Read a Poem” and other topics.
I discovered along the way that we were not as alone in this as I first thought. I found other weekly poetry columns in print, including Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” which is published in a large number of newspapers across the country, Bill Diskin’s “Poetryork” in York, Pennsylvania’s York Daily Record, Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s Choice” in The Washington Post, as well as columns in The Lawrence Journal-World, The Oregonian, and England’s The Guardian. I am grateful that we are not the only ones who think such coverage of poetry is still justified.
I am also grateful to Barbara Burns, to the staff of Newton’s Observer News Enterprise, to the poets who continue to share their work with us, and of course most of all, to the readers of “Musings” and their continued understanding of the vitality of poetry today. I hope this will be the first in a long series of anniversaries to come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
