Rick Barot: How a Poem Happens

As the diary entry says, I wrote the poem in a couple of hours. At that point, I was still writing everything on a typewriter: a beige electric Brother that hummed and clattered when I used it. What I remember of those two hours, from this far distance, is that I would write a stanza or two of the poem, then pace around the apartment for a spell, then go back to the typewriter and write another stanza or so, then do another round of pacing. I have a manila folder with the drafts, and there are in fact only a few drafts.

I'll Take Oversexed Writers for 200, Alex

From the NYT:

He describes a quickie with the travel writer Bruce Chatwin here; a three-way with the poet John Ashbery there.

Out Now: Tsim Tsum: Sabrina Orah Mark

Tsim Tsum by Sabrina Orah Mark

Where Babies Come From

“Where,” asked Beatrice, “do babies come from?” Walter B. was hanging a painting in the crawl space. It was a painting of the babies. “Basically,” said Walter B., “babies come from rubbing babies together. They rub and they rub. Once, I heard them rubbing.” “Are you sure those are the babies where babies come from?” asked Beatrice. She was staring at the painting. It was a painting of the babies. Walter B. stepped back. “They seem,” said Beatrice, “to be different babies.” Walter B. tilted his head. A door slammed. They stood for a long time and examined the painting. Beatrice was right. These were not the same babies. These were different babies. Some of these babies carried twine. There were not the babies where babies came from. Some of these babies were not rubbing. Some of these babies had books about babies tucked under their arms. These were not the same babies. These babies would never be the babies where babies came from. These babies were different. And Beatrice was the first to call their bluff.

Call for Submissions

Shape of a Box, YouTube’s First Literary Magazine, will be open for submissions during the month of October 2009 for our 2nd year of publishing our video literary magazine.

We are seeking: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, stage/screen, graphic/comic work, cover art, reviews, interviews all under 5 minutes and/or 1000 words.

Complete guidelines here.

bits

hot dang! the picture of pablo montero below is all kinds of hot. i'm melting, i'm melting...
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lately, i've enjoyed verse daily way more than poetry daily. am i the only one?
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imported more cds last night to my itunes library: the smiths, juan gabriel, don henley, sufjan stevens, morrissey, u2, leonard cohen, and alanis morissette.
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everyday is like sunday. everyday is silent and grey...
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the fear was in the northeast by g.c. waldrep.
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once upon a time people left a lot of comments on my blog. now i'm lucky if i get one comment a post. i think facebook is to blame.
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i did something naughty today.
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contest season is here. and i'm scared! what if i'm one of those poets who spends years sending out before getting a hit? i don't want to be that poet. i mean no disrespect, but i don't want to be jennifer richter:

Her manuscript "Threshold" has been a finalist in twenty major book competitions, including the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize and the 2008 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition.

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did i just jinx myself?
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look who just won the 2009 crab orchard series in poetry!
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do the right thing by adrian matejka.
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Hottie of the week: Pablo Montero

ha

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing.

rigoberto gonzalez reviews Jennine Capó Crucet

Though the Cuban-American experience has been well presented by such luminaries as Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina García and Pablo Medina, Capó Crucet's characters benefit from a second-generation, post-exile energy that moves her characters one step away from international conflict and cultural displacement, and into a position of challenging the roles and expectations shaped by the influential components of Cuban identity.

One Hundred Years of Solitude has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years, says survey

Márquez's novel was the only book to be selected more than once. It was chosen by three authors: Chika Unigwe, Sujata Bhatt and the Ghanaian writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes.

Parkes said: "[It] taught the west how to read a reality alternative to their own, which in turn opened the gates for other non-western writers like myself and other writers from Africa and Asia.

Poets House

I can't wait to visit the new home of the Poets House next time I'm in NYC.

from the NYT:
Glass walls surround the entryway — in which a Calder mobile floats — and enclose the second-floor exhibition space. The blocklong second-floor reading room offers views of trees and water and is punctuated by nooks and a quiet reading space — no talking aloud — with photographs on the walls of contemporary poets taken by Lynn Saville.

Here are more pics.

looking forward to this book

Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević

ploughshares!

i've taken down my How-Long-Will-It-Take-Ploughshares-To-Pay-Eduardo post because the issue has been resolved.

thank you, ploughshares.

Chills Down My Spine

next time i teach i'm going to use the third edition of helen vendler's poems, poets, poetry: an introduction and anthology, which comes out in october.

65 new poems make it one of the most inclusive introductory collections available. New additions include:

important canonical poets such as John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and Elizabeth Bishop;

well-known 20th century poets such as Charles Simic, Margaret Atwood, and Lucie Brock-Broido;

culturally diverse poets such as Victoria Chang, Eduardo Corral, Terrance Hayes, Srikanth Reddy;

new contemporary voices such as Shara McCallum, D.A. Powell, and Timothy Donnelly.

chills went down my spine when i found my poem in the table of contents. how cool is that?? freaking cool, i tell you!!!

Now, I just need to publish my first book. Ha.

DANIEL NESTER

Toward the end of my 12 years in New York, the novelty of poet misbehavior having long worn off, I attend a book party for an anthology in which one of my poems appears. I look around and see, at least to my mind, the Leading Poets of My Generation. There is the Editor of That Big Journal. There’s that Guy Who Runs the Best Small Press in Massachusetts. Those two have the run of the two Leading Poetry Organizations. There’s a Whole Group of People Who Went to Iowa; that Well-Dressed Trust Fund Poet appears in the latest Best American Poetry. There’s the Woman Who Knows the People Who Give Away That Two-Year Grant Who Got That Two-Year Grant. Those two will soon start Teaching Jobs Out West. Everyone, it seems, wears the latest clothes and glasses.

Lives of the Poets: Laura Jensen

from the Poetry Foundation:
...Jensen has been called “one of our very best living poets,” published three full-length collections of poems, and largely disappeared from the national poetry scene. She’s invited me to visit this library for a group reading from In Tahoma’s Shadow, an anthology of poetry by Tacoma poets that includes one of Jensen’s new poems, a fact that might confound the contemporary poets and bloggers who have made her into a Salinger-like cult figure. Yes, she still writes, and yes, she still publishes, just not how or where one might expect.

$$$$$$

Edwidge Danticat and Heather McHugh have won MacArthur Genuis Grants.

ron slate on andrew zawacki

We often think of Surrealism as playfulness. Some traditionalists think of it as having corroded artistic standards. But French modernism grew out of a fear of cultural dissolution. Paris was under siege during the age of Manet and again during the youth of Andre Breton and Soupault. Like the Italian tradition of austere melancholy as expressed in Leopardi, French artists and writers recognized a suffering that is coincident with the foundation of life itself -- not a common theme in English or American poetry. It’s sadness that guards against inauthenticity, claims of moral rectitude, and shallow emotion.

Review of All Screwed Up by Steve Fellner

Adopted as an infant, Fellner always knew he was poor. But it would be inaccurate to characterize his family as dysfunctional. The roles of the children were well and clearly defined, as were those of the parents. They did not, however, always play those roles to the best of their abilities. Dad was a philanderer; mom was a recovering alcoholic, crazy and brilliant in equal measure; and young Steve always knew he was gay. He presents the family unit as a paradigm of slovenly, lower-class obesity in the ubiquitous sweatpants-and-sweatshirt style of the Midwest.

DAISY FRIED on FRANZ WRIGHT

Those who believe constant self-reference is the wrong procedure for poetry — those who are strenuously traditional or strenuously hipster — won’t cotton to “Wheeling Motel.” “You went to death, I to life, and / which was luckier God only knows,” Wright says, apparently to his father, in the book’s title poem. Troubled childhood, bad brain chemicals, addiction, recovery and death dominate Wright’s work. You couldn’t fake his obsessions, not over a 30-year career so steadily, idiosyncratically productive.

Brushstrokes: Gouache on paper: Sol LeWitt: 2000

interview: james allen hall

My younger brother and I were talking one night while we cooked dinner. Dustin had met this beautiful man, they dated briefly, and we were analyzing the demise of the relationship over dinner. Dustin said to me, “Whenever a man says I love you, the first thing I think is, Great. Now you’re the enemy.” It was the saddest and most lacerating statement; it nailed exactly the feeling of the poems I’d been fashioning—this book about loving a self-destructive mother figure, how that shapes subjectivity, and what happens when we find ourselves shipwrecked on the shores of Love Always Fails Us.

bits

the sun is out. thrilling news, no?
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congrats to mark conway for winning the american poetry journal book prize. i met mark at the mcdowell colony in '06. he's the kind of person you want to meet at a colony: smart, funny, down-to-earth, full of po-biz stories.
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saguaros!
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from steve fellner's blog: The Possibility of Excessive Glibness as Romance in Eduardo Corral’s Poem “Caballero”
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i want to be lady gaga.
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Craig Santos Pérez reviews Javier O. Huerta

...Some Clarifications y otros poemas weaves poems in English and Spanish, with a few poems working within both languages. Since I don’t read Spanish and I couldn’t find the book at half-price, the bilingual nature of this book raises the question: is this book worth the purchase price for those who don’t read either Spanish or English? To answer this question, we must ask (as Wordsworth compels): do the poems contain “a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents”?

from the new yorker

Mother’s Quail by Paula Bohince

Alternate Take: Levon Helm by Tracy K. Smith

The Saint of the Uplands

Their prayers still swarm on me like lost bees.
I have no sweetness. I am dust
Twice over.

In the high barrens
The light loved us.
Their faces were hard crusts like their farms
And the eyes empty, where vision
Might not come otherwise
Than as water.

They were born to stones; I gave them
Nothing but what was theirs.
I taught them to gather the dew of their nights
Into mirrors. I hung them
Between heavens.

I took a single twig from the tree of my ignorance
And divined the living streams under
Their very houses. I showed them
The same tree growing in their dooryards.
You have ignorance of your own, I said.
They have ignorance of their own.

Over my feet they waste their few tears.

I taught them nothing.
Everywhere
The eyes are returning under the stones. And over
My dry bones they build their churches, like wells.

W.S. Merwin

Almost as Beautiful as an Immigrant Rights March down International

click here to read javier o. huerta's chapbook.

i've been living with this chapbook for the past few weeks. this work has helped me refine "variation on a theme by josé montoya," a longish code-switching sequence in my ms.

thank you, javier.

Hottie of the week: dylan ratigan

a few bits

tomas q. morin, one of my bread loaf friends, just found out he placed third in this contest. congrats, buddy!
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facebook has been acting up for the last two weeks.
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i keep watching crappy SyFy movies. why? why? why? did you catch the giant shark/ octopus movie starring debbie gibson? the acting and the special effects were beyond terrible. but hey, i watched the whole damn thing. the joke's on me.
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thank you, daisy fried.

2 reviews

Rigoberto González on Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Zachariah Johnson Gonzalez -- Zach to his friends -- is the son of an alcoholic father and a manic-depressive mother "who was allergic to the sky," and with an older brother whose drug-induced rages inflicted fear and violence on the family. So it was only a matter of time before Zach ended up in a rehabilitation facility after a near-fatal drinking binge -- his way of numbing the pain of witnessing the ills of his loved ones.

Oscar Bermeo on Luis H. Valadez

Valadez’s speaker continues to wrestle between the details of his life against the decisions forced upon him. The modern urban environment is filled with similar stories but Valadez’s poems rise above these common tropes with bold leaps into experimental and fractured narratives that look to bring together the disparate pieces of the speaker to help him reach a new path.

Call for Submissions

Currently we are accepting submissions until December 15th for the 2010 annual issue of Reverie. The theme for this issue is dedicated to Allison Joseph, the recipient of the 2009 Aquarius Press Legacy Award. Allison Joseph was born in London, England and is of Caribbean descent. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Allison Joseph’s accolades include the John C. Zacharis First Book Prize, sponsored by Ploughshares; the Word Press Poetry Prize; and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Breadloaf, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her sixth full length poetry collection My Father’s Kites will be published by Steel Toe Books. She directs the MFA program at Southern Illinois University, serves as Editor and Poetry Editor of Crab Orchard Review, and maintains the CRWROPPS-B listserv, an invaluable resource for writers.

Reverie is a journal devoted to featuring good literature and is open to African Americans with “ties” or “loose ties” to the Midwest. With that said, for the upcoming issue we will consider all submissions, especially those dealing with the work for Allison Joseph. Reverie appears in print only. We are a literary journal that publishes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. We will also accept book reviews as well.

For the upcoming issue on Allison Joseph, we will consider critical essays, personal accounts and/or testimonies as well as book reviews of Allison Joseph’s work.

Please send artwork for the cover–payment will be 2 copies.

Reverie is switching from a quarterly publication to an annual. We currently pay in two contributor copies of the journal.

Writer’s Guidelines for Reverie:

Submit in standard manuscript format, with a word count not to exceed 50 lines (poetry) and/or 3,000 words (Fiction/Essay). No more than three poems, please. No urban crime fiction or erotica, please. Publisher reserves the right to make light edits as necessary.

Email reverie.journal@gmail.comand type “Reverie” in the subject line and attach submission in Microsoft Word or Rich-text format (rtf). Reverie only accepts submissions by email. If you have any questions please email the editors at reverie.journal@gmail.com.

Call for Submissions

The Los Angeles Review is accepting submissions from September 1 to December 1 via email only.

youtube vids: poetry readings

oscar bermeo has kindly uploaded some cool videos to youtube. thanks, oscar!

dead bees

I was also sort of shocked/excited to find out the three poems that he thought were the best/had the most potential in my thesis. He pulled out my actual MFA application this morning, and his “favorite poems” of mine were right on top of my manuscript—these were the poems that got me into the program—these were the kind of poems that made him/the application committee people think that they could work with me. I spent hours and hours figuring out what poems I wanted to send out with my MFA applications (as I’m sure most of you did choosing short stories/essays, whatever), and to actually find out which poems were the ones that “did it” is really interesting!

jean valentine interviews kate greenstreet

I think, in some basic way, I have a religious temperament. It's like being sexy, for instance -- some people just are, you know? They're filled with that thing that makes them sexy. Well, I'm filled with whatever it is that would make a person religious, except I just don't have religion.

book lust

i'm with victoria! we need to step up our efforts to help out small presses. we must buy more books! i will purchase the following five books this month:

Tsim Tsum, Sabrina Orah Mark
If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting, Anna Journey
Collapsible Poetics Theater, Rodrigo Toscano
Odalisque in Pieces, Carmen Giménez Smith
Areas of Fog, Joseph Massey

"Northeastern University has decided to suspend its Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize because of financial difficulties."

The annual competition, run since 1983, awarded $1,000 and publication by Northeastern University for a first or second book of poems.

Call for Submissions (For Keith Montesano)

The Normal School: A Literary Magazine: Now Accepting Submissions for Spring Issue.

Manuscripts are read from September 1 to April 30. Unsolicited manuscripts received between May 1 and August 31 will be printed out, sculpted into a political effigy, and burned ceremoniously in front of an unruly mob. Please address your submissions to the appropriate editor (i.e. Nonfiction Editor, Recipe Editor, Miscellaneous Editor, etc.). Please do not include pictures of yourself unless it is an extraordinarily funny picture of you wearing ridiculous glasses or unnecessarily tight pants with a large gravy stain. Please tuck an SASE in with your submission.

The Normal School accepts submissions at this address:

The Normal School
5245 North Backer Avenue
M/S PB 98
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740-8001

Complete guidelines here.

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Alex Espinoza showed me a copy of the magazine at Bread Loaf. It's a beautiful object. And the table of contents was loaded with impressive names. I should submit! Yes, I think I will. Join me, Keith!

I am Don King!

In this corner, Keith Montesano:

As a disclaimer, if you don't want to hear when my poems are published, don't read my blog. (I could give a shit whether you do or not.) If you can't tell, that's one thing I do here. I like when others do it also, for the record, very much. There are so many writers I wish I could follow, who don't have books out, who are never able to let you know where they have work out. If anyone reads this and likes my work, that gives them an opportunity to possibly seek out work or read it online. All the Steve Fellner's of the world can call me whatever they want to for announcing such news. Again, I don't give a shit.)

In the other corner, Keith Wilson:

By the way, I found this blog, ironically, from a blog I was getting sick of reading, since all he ever did was brag about where he had been published. So today I read one of his newer blog entries, and he said he 'didn't give a shit' if anyone didn't like his bragging. It seemed very out of no where, but by the end of it, he said don't read his blog if you don't like it. So I left.

But not before clicking on the link to the blog that apparently set him off. This one.

You speak the truth. :P

Brittingham Prize in Poetry & the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry

The University of Wisconsin Press awards the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Each winning poet will receive $2,500 ($1,000 cash prize and $1,500 honorarium to cover expenses of reading in Madison). Prizes are awarded annually to the two best book-length manuscripts of original poetry submitted in an open competition. Each manuscript submitted will be considered for both prizes. There are no restrictions on the kind of poetry or subject matter, although translations are not acceptable. The winners will be announced and the prizes awarded in February of each calendar year, with publishing contracts to follow soon thereafter.

Complete guidelines here

dead duck

we took the kids to the park yesterday so they could feed the ducks. unfortunately, there were no ducks to be found. except this fellow. he was floating beak-down in the lake. one my nephews picked him up by the neck. we screamed.

do you see the little fishes eating the duck bit by bit?

Barbara Jane Reyes on raulsalinas

In the poem, “About Invasion and Conquest,” commemorating the 500 Years of Resistance, he tells us, there have been poets, and there will always be poets, to witness and to pass down the people’s history. He really believed this, and he really did this: “Talk for healing. / Knowledge is living.”

Call for Submissions

Caravan: A company of merchants, pilgrims, or others
who travel together . . . a troop of people going in company. . .
a company in motion . . . the traveling house of gypsies . . .

Quercus Review is putting together a special section of Latina and Latino imaginative writing—“Without Camels: A Caravan of Latino Writing”—for its 10th anniversary edition. The writer Fred Arroyo will help edit this section.

Complete info here.

Francisco Aragón on Maurice Kilwein Guevara

The range of artists and eras Guevara engages is admirably ample, and the sensibility throughout—its engagement with what I’ll call more avant-garde techniques in that they resist facile narrative, and the allusions to various events in the history of the region— places the collection, in my view, within a tradition that is arguably as Latin American as it is American. Put another way, Poema establishes the Colombian-born Guevara as the most “Latin American” of Latino poets in the United States, if not simply one of our most cosmopolitan poets, period.

APR is rocking it

Delenda Undone by Patrick Rosal
Fenix by Tom Sleigh
Read the Signs by Patrick Donnelly
At the Pumpkin Festival, My Lips Burn Bright by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

5 microreviews by Dave Lucas

On Randall Mann

Despite the title, it's less the late poet Thom Gunn who haunts these pages than the same old unknowable gods - love, fate, and lust among them - of which Gunn wrote so beautifully. So does Mann; this, his second book, is set in gay social scenes in Florida and California.

And as Mann demonstrates in these compact, ringing lyrics, love gets even more complicated when whom you love has political implications: "The city lights are on / for us, to us, tonight." I knew little of Randall Mann before reading this book. From now on, I will be listening.

On Jack Gilbert

Jack Gilbert would be the Leonard Cohen of poetry if Cohen didn't already write poetry: the spare life in exotic locales, lust for women conflated with a pseudo-Buddhist spiritual yearning. Gilbert's poems are often elegies, and many here fit the bill, often elegizing a remembered Pittsburgh childhood.

Some of these -- "Dreaming at the Ballet," "The Dangers of Wisdom" -- display a fierceness reminiscent of W.B. Yeats. Yet some risk self-parody. The word "love" shows up often, but in this book Gilbert is better on the thrill and ache of lust won and lost. If there is indeed a "secret chord," Gilbert may find it yet.