Gratitude

After three months away from the blog, dear reader, I have decided to return. Over the past few months, I have been thinking about the endless navel-gazing that blogging can be--that so much technology can be these days. I am bit troubled by the role that social-networking, texting, and other technologies can serve in feeding our own narcissism.

However, I have also come to realize that blogs can be a great place to celebrate the wonderful things in our lives--poetry and so on. And lately, I am growing more and more interested in gratitude. Here are some little poems of mine on the subject that have appeared over the past few months. My thanks to these journals:

"The Gardener in Haying Time" in The Orange Room Review

"Being Young and Green" in Bolts of Silk

"The Pear Tree" in A Handful of Stones

"Conesus Lake" in The Basilica Review

I also wanted to share some great poems that I discovered recently by some wonderful poets:

"Elegy for an Engineer" by Lanette Cadle

"Erasing Digital Photos" by Carey Salerno

"On What Once Was Love" by Kate Evans

Six Poems by Robert Peake

It's wonderful to speak with you again, dear reader, and I look forward to future conversations. Best wishes to this beautiful fall weekend.

What's been on my mind for the past month...

Hello, dear reader! I've been rather absent from the blog for the past month, but this summer I made a resolution that I would spend time writing and reading before blogging. If my day does not allow the energy or time for one of these activities, I forfeit blogging first.

However, as always, I've been thinking about poetry/writing/music/the arts/pop culture over the past month and here are things I've been thinking about:

1. Kay Ryan may be the most interesting poet laureate the country has had in some time, mostly because she is completely unconcerned with being "en vogue" or writing poems that would deemed "Americana." Instead, her work discusses grander (and perhaps more important concepts) than nationalism, regionalism, or trends. Not to mention, she's not a straight white male who teaches creative writing at an ivy league institution, which tends to be the trend in laureates. She is a masterful and independent poet, and I appreciate her concern for language and literary arts, as well as her total lack of concern with po-biz.

2. I think Joni Mitchell is the Kay Ryan of the music industry--respected, brilliant, successful, but in many ways an outsider.

3. Speaking of art/poetry about/by women, check out this great new journal: Melusine.

4. A friend of mine has a poem and a review of her chapbook forthcoming in Melusine. I have been thinking about the wonderful joy it is to see one's friends' and colleagues' work in print. Though it is a joy to discover a wonderful piece of literature by anyone, there is a unique pride one feels to discover a great piece of literature by someone you know. Here are some great pieces/book samples/chaps by poets that I know that are available for free on the internet:

--The Broken World by Marcus Cafagna

--"The Bottle/The Body" by MaryJo Mahoney (scroll down for poem excerpt)

--Bleeding Yellow Light by Heather Bartlett

--"Winnowing Out Our Souls" by Jane Hoogestraat (scroll down for poem)

--"You Did All Of These Things" by Laurie E. White

Time and Materials by Robert Hass

This past Thanksgiving, a friend gave me a copy Robert Hass's Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, and at first, I did not take to the book. However, it wooed me slowly over the past several months, and I now have sincere interest in and respect for Hass's work--respect that concurs with the book's garnering of both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.

What I love most about the book is Hass's complete disregard for trendiness and fads. With Time and Materials, Hass makes it clear that making interesting, sincere, and diverse poems remains his primary preoccupation. His poems discuss relationships, memory, history, romance, art, and landscape with a unique, friendly, and at times humorous voice. These are poems of biology, of beauty, and of hope.

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Thanks to the Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley, you can watch Hass read many of the poems that appear in Time and Materials in the following video. The reading is about 46 minutes and gives you a wonderful sense of Hass's voice and demeanor.

Video Blog: A.E. Housman

Poems featured in this video:

Housman, A.E. "XVIII." A Shropshire Lad. New York: Dover, 1990.

Housman, A.E. "II." A Shropshire Lad. New York: Dover, 1990.

Interview with Heather Bartlett

Heather Bartlett recently published her first chapbook with FROM YES PRESS, a micropress I started with a few friends this winter. Bartlett's collection, Bleeding Yellow Light, navigates issues of sexual abuse, female identity, and despair. Bartlett received her MFA from Hunter College, and her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Conte, RealPoetik, and other journals. She currently lives and teaches in upstate New York. Below is a short interview I had with Heather regarding her new book.

Bleeding Yellow Light makes strong allusions to confessional poets, particularly Sylvia Plath. Can you talk about what poets (both classical and contemporary) influenced writing the poems for your chapbook?

Sylvia Plath is certainly someone whose work I admire and am inspired by, not just as a confessional poet, but as a strong female voice. I tried to pay tribute to that with the poem, “Obituary.” When writing these poems I was also very moved by the contemporary voices I was reading - Marie Howe and Cornelius Eady, in particular.

In the collection, there is a poem called “Dear Reader” that directly addresses the poem’s audience. Do you see poetry as a conversation with the reader?

Yes, a conversation between speaker and reader, speaker and self, reader and subject, poet and speaker… 

Andrea Yates has a strong presence in this collection. What compelled you to use her as a character in the poems?

I was actually searching for a way out of the BYL poems, for new voice and subject matter, and I had just read Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination, in which he takes on the voice of the man Susan Smith claimed kidnapped her children. The way in which he inhabited this space, created persona and voice, really struck me; the poems are so haunting and moving. I remembered Andrea Yates – the headlines, the trials – and how haunted I had been by her story. I thought by taking on this voice that both fascinated and terrified me, I might be able to discover a “new” voice of my own. 

How do you think the title "Bleeding Yellow Light" defines the collection as a whole?

I don’t think it defines the collection at all, really. As you know, I struggled to find a title for the chapbook. I tried to designate a title poem in here, but as these poems speak to different kinds of pain and trauma, it didn’t feel right to try to define it all in such a way. I think (I hope) the line "bleeding yellow light"  resonates throughout the poems, and helps to link together the separate narratives that run through here without making any one more important or relevant than another.

The last line of the collection is one word: “Look.” What do you hope readers see in the poems?

Something that they recognize. These poems are about pain, but they are also about beauty. I hope readers will look for that.

You can download Heather Bartlett's Bleeding Yellow Light for free or order a paper copy here.

You can also order the book through Amazon.

Video Blog: Summer Reading Recommendations--Loy, Clifton, Duhamel

Books featured in this video:

Clifton, Lucille. Voices. Rochester: BOA, 2008.

Duhamel, Denise. Ka-Ching! Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 2009.

Loy, Mina. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems. Ed. Roger L. Conover. New York: Farrar Straus, Giroux, 1996.

Video Blog: Stopping on the Old Highway

Check out Stopping on the Old Highway and other great free recycled karma press e-books here.

You can buy a bound copy of Stopping on the Old Highway here.