- Another Jen Bryant interview
- Illustrator Melissa Sweet interview
- Discussion guide for the book for teachers and parents (PDF)
February 22, 2009
A River of Words: WCW For Kids
February 20, 2009
Paterson: The Falls and The Poem
—Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident— split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained— secret—into the body of the light!Dr. Williams, M.D., who maintained a medical practice in nearby Rutherford where he was born and acted as a kind of poetic reporter giving readers "the news" in poetry. For the writing of Paterson, he said:
I started to make trips to the area. I walked around the streets; I went on Sundays in summer when the people were using the park, and I listened to their conversation as much as I could. I saw whatever they did, and made it part of the poem.That is clear in many of his poems, such as
The Young Housewife
At ten A.M. the young housewife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband's house. I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
February 8, 2009
Prompt: Dorianne Laux: Not Just The Facts
Among the many facts I learned that night the one that stuck was the fact that since the expansion of the universe, the moon has been steadily and significantly backing away from the earth, which meant the moon once appeared much larger in the past and would only appear smaller in the future. I couldn’t get over it. I went to bed trying to imagine it and woke up thinking about it. I was obsessed.
That obsession led her to seek more information about the moon and was the prewriting for the poem.
I also read everything I could get my hands on about the moon. That fascination has been long-lived as I’m still reading about the universe and am just now I’m finishing up Timothy Ferris’ Coming of Age in the Milky Way .
The second aspect of the poem is that my extended family was going through a life-crisis, a not uncommon state of affairs for them, so that was in the back of my mind. I was in the process of working to pull away from them. Maybe I became obsessed with the moon as a way to curb my obsession with the latest family crisis. But the tug of the family is tremendous. Even a crazy family can seem better than no family. The poem is two obsessions in collision.
This idea of two obsessions or ideas in a collision is also something we would love to see in your poem.
Laux's original intent ("That the listing of the facts was in some way interesting was my only concern.") took that leap in another direction that led to the poetic collision.
As I mention on the website, you could cheat on the prompt and work backward - start with an idea for a poem and then research the facts about a subject within the poem.The leap from the planetary to the personal might have been a technique had I thought of it consciously, but I didn’t. It happened naturally, organically, without my being aware of it until I had finished the poem. I really thought the poem was about the moon, and these two people I had made up, the woman and her boy, strangers to me, but realized then it was my mother and my sister, or my sister and my niece, in disguise.
It might be difficult to "prompt" a leap in writing a poem, but I have the feeling that if you can put one obsession into motion, perhaps it will naturally collide with another and produce enough energy for the poem to move.
February 4, 2009
Call For Poems of Protest
They have a new editor - Richard Pierce-Saunderson. He sent out their projected publication dates for the first half of 2009 and included these submission guidelines.
We’re not looking for partisan propaganda. We’re not looking for party-political mouthings. We’re not looking for sentimental depictions of what you see on the TV. We’re not looking for rhyming greetings card verses.
We want you to champion, not yourselves, but human rights; the rights of those who don’t have the freedom to write and speak as we do. Rage. Celebrate. Mourn. Demand. Scream. Dance.
Formal complaints are especially exciting. There’s something wonderfully subversive about a villanelle that attacks a government deliberately making the same mistake over and over again.
If you need to be inspired, read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Then check out any objective newsfeed or news site.
Paste your poems (a maximum of 3 one-page poems), into the body of an email and send to write@protestpoems.org. If necessary, you can email a single .doc or .rtf file containing all the poems you are submitting.
Include a brief bio.
We will accept poems previously published on paper, as long as you hold the copyright. We will not accept poems which are already (or have previously been) published online (including blogs). We will publish a poet only once a year.
If your poem deals with a specific call for action, or commemorates a specific person, please let us know.
Publication dates for the first half of 2009 are :
14 Feb
28 Feb
14 Mar
28 Mar
11 Apr
25 Apr
09 May
23 May
06 Jun
20 Jun
I'm really looking forward to reading your submissions, and want us to be able to publish high-quality, edgy material.
Hoping for peace in a violent world,
Richard
Consider a submission...