Image of the Day: Wet chickadees rustling their wings.
I hope your poeming is going well. I got some poems, not as many as I'd like, but some, anyways. And there's always next month, right?
Don't forget to enter the big poetry giveaway! Comment here for my giveaway and check out the list over at Kelli's blog. There are so many poets giving great books away you've got a great chance at getting something.
Bird-Language
Trying to understand the words
Uttered
on all sides by birds,
I recognize in what I hear
Noises that
betoken fear.
Though some of them, I’m certain, must
Stand
for rage, bravado, lust,
All other notes that birds employ
Sounds
like synonyms for joy.
— W. H.
Auden
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Friday, April 11, 2014
Guest Blogger: Angele Ellis's Writing Process Blog Tour
Welcome Angele!
WRITING PROCESS BLOG TOUR / Angele Ellis
Alf shukran (a
thousand thanks) to poet and blogger Carol Berg for inviting me to join the
Writing Process Blog Tour, as well as for posting my answers on her blog.
For more writing process goodness, check out
writer-superlibrarian Leigh Anne Focareta’s blog, Be Less Amazing <belessamazing.wordpress.com>
and poet-visual artist Jill Khoury’s new blog <www.jillkhoury.com/blog/>
As usual, I have several projects
going at once. I’m revising a dystopian YA (young adult) short story after
receiving suggestions from an editor—and this may be the germ of a novel. I’m
also retooling my new poetry chapbook manuscript (working title, “Departing
Chameleon,” which is fitting, as it continues to change) for another round of
submissions. My “family” Arab American novel, Desert Storms (several chapters/excerpts of which have been
published) is hanging fire…I must finish a draft this year. I’ve been doing
poetry reviews for Weave Magazine,
and I hope this will continue. I still take on freelance editing assignments…and
I’m meeting with a neighbor who’s opening an arts and crafts shop about a
saleable literary idea.
As I work in several genres, I’m
thinking about some common differences (preoccupations, obsessions) that
influence my work. I was weaned on Victorian and Modernist poets, whose work my
mother recited to me; I know a number of these poems by heart myself. An early
reader, I devoured every form of fairy tale and folk tale I could find, along
with classic children’s novels and biographies of distinguished women (there
weren’t many then!). By the age of ten and eleven I had moved on to Lewis
Carroll, Shakespeare (both sonnets and plays), Dickens, Maugham. The film
version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
had a profound impact on me (along with other movies, from classics to cheesy
science fiction), although I didn’t read him until high school, along with such
writers as Emily Dickinson, Katherine Anne Porter, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore
Roethke, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky—and Mahmoud Darwish’s “A Lover from Palestine.”
By the time I was in college, writers inspired by/claimed by second wave
feminism had made inroads into the canon—Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Marge
Piercy, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Adrienne Rich, and Judy Grahn, to name a
few.
So history and politics are
important to me as a writer. (I was heavily involved in the peace and justice
movement during the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, and since 9/11, I have actively
embraced my Arab American identity and the stories it leads me to tell.)
Stylistically, I am more traditional than experimental—I love narrative
(however fantastical), form (including sonnets, ghazals, pantoums, haiku, and
haibun), meter, rhyme, and the connection rather than the disassociation of
themes and images.
Having ventured into this answer
in Question 2, my simple retort is compulsion.
This can work well, when I’m in a fever to get something done—or badly,
when my “teeming brain” is pulled in multiple directions, and only fragments of
different pieces seem to emerge. But nothing is wasted—like matter, my writing
is transformed (sometimes), rather than destroyed.
I have to write something daily—even
if it’s only “finger exercises,” as I call the birthday and other occasional
poems I compose and post for Facebook friends (and for other friends and family). Fueled by Earl Grey tea, I work well under
deadline, although I’m better with deadlines imposed by others—editors,
clients, colleagues, contests—than with those I impose on myself. Once a night
owl, I now find myself more productive in the mornings—unless I’m under
deadline or obsessed.
Other than that, my process is
haphazard. The only time I felt I was really smoking was when I had the privilege
of spending four weeks at a writer’s retreat in Costa Rica, courtesy of a
fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Cut off from regular
responsibilities, I drafted thirty poems—thirteen of which have been published
in revised form—and six loosely connected short stories, four of which have
been published in revised form. But like most people, I couldn’t live like that
forever—and after four weeks, I didn’t want to (and I couldn’t keep up the
pace, because of my chronic health problems). The trick I haven’t mastered is
how to transfer more of that discipline into the everyday.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Big Poetry Giveaway 2014!!
Okay so here is the big poetry giveaway deal:
I will be giving away one copy of my poetry chapbook Her Vena Amoris (and possibly another of my chapbooks if all goes well).
I will also be giving away What Animal by Oni Buchanan. This is a fabulous book--I love Oni because she reminds me of some of the Swedish poets I love, she is uber-creative and talented (she plays classical piano as well as writes fabulous poems) and well here is the opening few lines from "The Ginea Pig and the Green Balloon":
I approached the luminous stranger who came to me
from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet
cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark,
so that should tempt anyone. I may also throw in a copy of The Journal, Winter 2014, in which a poem of mine appears.
So there you have it! If you want to enter, please leave a comment and I will put your name in a hat come May.
If you are interested in participating as a blogger, here is a link to Kelli's blog that explains all the details.
Good luck! And happy poetry month!
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
April Is The [Fill in Your Own Adjective Here]-est Month
Image of the day: Red nibs of tulips slipping through the earth.
Happy April 1st! Which means it's also National Poetry month wherein poets have their own sort of marathon and try to write a poem a day. I will be trying that as well and luckily I can write that since I've written today's poem. Not gonna worry though if I don't make it through--it is really enough to write one poem.
Also, it is the Big Poetry Give-away and yes, I'm going to participate in that as well once I can figure out what book I have to part with. I was going to give Blowout by Denise Duhamel away, but I started to read it and now can't put it down. I may still give it away, heartbreakingly. I will also be giving one or two (and perhaps my brand-new chapbook The Ornithologist Poems, which is in production) of my chapbooks away. So stay tuned for that announcement.
I'm trying to read several books of poems at once: I've got Kelli Russel Agodon's Hourglass Museum, which is amazing and full of lists that I want to try and riff on. Also, When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz, which is, well, you need to go read some of those poems right now.
There are several ways of celebrating poetry this month--readings and putting poems in your pockets to share at a moment's notice and writing oulipo poems or taking a chapbook challenge.
So choose whatever poetry potion you'd like and take a big swig.
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?)
[translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]
Happy April 1st! Which means it's also National Poetry month wherein poets have their own sort of marathon and try to write a poem a day. I will be trying that as well and luckily I can write that since I've written today's poem. Not gonna worry though if I don't make it through--it is really enough to write one poem.
Also, it is the Big Poetry Give-away and yes, I'm going to participate in that as well once I can figure out what book I have to part with. I was going to give Blowout by Denise Duhamel away, but I started to read it and now can't put it down. I may still give it away, heartbreakingly. I will also be giving one or two (and perhaps my brand-new chapbook The Ornithologist Poems, which is in production) of my chapbooks away. So stay tuned for that announcement.
I'm trying to read several books of poems at once: I've got Kelli Russel Agodon's Hourglass Museum, which is amazing and full of lists that I want to try and riff on. Also, When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz, which is, well, you need to go read some of those poems right now.
There are several ways of celebrating poetry this month--readings and putting poems in your pockets to share at a moment's notice and writing oulipo poems or taking a chapbook challenge.
So choose whatever poetry potion you'd like and take a big swig.
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.
Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?)
[translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]
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