🌬️ Poems
🌬️ A former student of mine (Hi, Zora!) was just published in 4x4 Magazine and I could not be more thrilled to share their fantastic poem! Check out 4x4 Mag and Zora Day-Friedland’s poem attached
🌬️ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to her literary mentor, Tomas Wentworth Higginson on April 25, 1862:
“I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none — and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.”
Memorize a poem so if you are alone and afraid you have something to keep you company.
Poem I memorized from this week:
Peace | Gerard Manley Hopkins, can listen to it read here
🌬️ Elated to be reading poems this Sunday at don’t panic, enjoy, a reading series run by the artistic Joey Healey and Sofia Bagdade / also incredible reading poster made by Joey, name list version coming soon. ✍️ I’m going to wear something spooky and there will be refreshments 🕯️👻 – sunday | 138 w 15th st. | 430pm
🌬️ Mark Strand | Orpheus Alone
Highly recommend listening to his reading of it on Poetry Foundation
In the houses of friends, with his head back, his eyes / Closed, trying to will her return, but finding / Only himself, again and again, trapped / In the chill of his loss, and, finally, / Without a word, taking off to wander the hills / Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken / The image of love and put in its place the world / As he wished it would be
🌬️ In honor of poet Richard Howard’s 97th birthday I was able to attend a remembrance of him / his book library giveaway annnnd though i got many books worthy of mentioning — i nabbed this 1948 Quarterly Review dedicated to Marianne Moore, which came out right before her Collected Poems swept the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and the Bollingen. William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Ransom, Bogan, Brooks, and Elizabeth Bishop contributed to this edition to write about Moore and Bishop’s tribute poem and As We Like It first appeared here!!! Christmas came early for me!!
🌬️ Big day for capital P Poetry! Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature 🐐 wahoooo!
🌬️ 🗽 🐦⬛ Loved the (spooky!) sunrise Edgar Allan Poe reading at the Gowanus Canal this morning
🌬️The generous folks at the Poetry Society of America photographed this year’s Storefront Prize poems in front of their headquarters. I’m so grateful mine is one of them, and congratulations to my fellow winners! Check out their post from today here.
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Big week in NYC for poets and literary heads. Brooklyn Book Festival is on, and I truly want to be in many places at once. A friend says it feels like AWP but in New York! A few readings I’m excited about (Em Dash has a good full list):
Tonight (Mon): My friends at DGN, Branded Saloon, 7pm. I might be biased, but it’s a consistently great monthly reading bringing some heavy hitters ⚾️ . See ya there
Wed: Eileen Myles, Benjamin Krusling, and Brandon López at the Poetry Project. Yes, Eileen
Thu: Dara Barrois/Dixon & John Yau at Poetry Society of America. What in the New York School!
Sat & Sun: All-day events at Poets House and Brooklyn Poets.
The list is long and getting longer, but I’ll surely make it to 2/3 of these. If you go to any, stick around and talk to some poets who seem cool. I dare you!
⭐️ 🌬️ New blog post # Lineage & The Royal I
When I was involved in church ministry, another lifetime ago, one of my favorite parts was thinking about lineage and schools of thought. How the church had changed and, when I was feeling imaginative, where it could go…MacIntyre says a living tradition is an argument extended over time about what the practice is for.
What I love about poetry is that it is born from a tradition and still seen, even in contemporary circles, as working with a tradition, even when it is breaking away from one. Some of my closest mentors have the same thread in them. They see their role as preservers of the art form and its connecting lines.
🌬️ Some favorite quotes from Valéry’s, Poetry and Abstract Thought:
A poet’s function—do not be startled by this remark—is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others.
The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.
“Thought is, in short, the activity which causes what does not exist to come alive in us, lending to it, whether we will or no, our present powers, making us take the part for the whole, the image for reality, and giving us the illusion of seeing, acting, suffering, and possessing independently of our dear old body… Anticipation and its gropings, desire, planning, the projection of our hopes, of our fears, are the main interior activity of our being.”
🌬️ 🕊️ Sharing a poem today that was immensely popular days after the 9/11 attacks and published in The New Yorker.
Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski
Praise the mutilated world / and the gray feather a thrush lost, / and the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns.
🌬️ Just discovered the term Catachresis yesterday and I am so glad there is a word for one of my favorite literary devices. It is when someone uses a metaphor but stretches it out so it’s wrong on actual level, but in it’s wrongness it is right. It’s a very extreme metaphor that is working in both directions!!
EX: Deafening silence We know this is impossible, but what the deafening modifier does is adds a new layer on the type of silence. Only language can do this. 🙃
Shakespeare uses this so often: “Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse” (a season being shoved in a purse jumps over the use of a standard metaphor because it’s talking about finance trouble)
🌬️ Excited to discuss Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds today in class.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come. / Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom: / If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare uses negation all throughout this sonnet! So lovely and so clarifying.
⭐️ 🌬️ #Make a Ritual of the Thing You Dread, after CA Conrad, poetry prompt #5
Poetry is spiritual. It’s where you can communicate to the dead. It’s where you can meet the duende, the angel, and the muse.
⭐️🌬️ September Prompt #2
#Build a Labyrinth like an Oulipian
Oulipians are “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.“The lipogram, then, is one maze among the many Oulipo builds. But the technique is inert on its own. It becomes literature only under the Oulipian wager: that a constraint obeyed without exception stops being an obstacle and becomes a heuristic, yielding locutions the unconstrained ear would never reach. The discipline is not to negotiate the prohibition but to submit to it and let it do the thinking. The prohibition is not the poem’s cage. It’s the poem’s argument.
Read the full prompt → here
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Happy September! I love this month & the beginning of Fall. I figured I would do a poetry prompt series throughout the month of September. I’ve been writing a poem a day recently, and it’s because of prompts that have helped me find a (new) place to start rather than the blank page I am a little too familiar with at times. I hope you can find a piece of this prompt that is helpful on your own exploration! 💫 🔭
Read the full prompt → here
🌬️ What an example of a debut poetry collection! I am going to keep this one in my back pocket to recommend. Finished reading: Slow Lightning (Volume 106) (Yale Series of Younger Poe… by Eduardo C. Corral 📚
Attached is a poem Want from the collection and a excerpt of Variations on a Theme by José Montoya
