Birches by Robert Frost

I love Robert Frost's digressions in Birches. His mastery of poetry is evident (to me) in the way he seems to wander away from his point, then shows you that he's had a slightly different point in his crosshairs all along.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

And today is the kind of day to read Birches. When you're tired but going on anyway, because that's what you do, and it's good that you go on. Because this is the right place to live, although you might like to get away a while.

Open Mic Day

You know the drill.

Click here. Comment.

Open Mic Night

It's been a long day, but it's finally time to head over to Hazel and Wren for Open Mic night.

This I Love

I love the 3 Things visual writing prompt that Hazel & Wren post each week.

I like it more than a traditional prompt because it doesn't push me into a story-box. I can bring whatever emotions to the picture I'd like.

Open Mic Day

Feedback day! (click the link already!)

On Fables and Poems

I've lost my copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Most likely, I've lent it to someone, said, "You have to read this, you'll love it." And it's gone. I need to replace it and re-read it myself.

In many ways, the Just So Stories are the quintessential fables- origin stories that also impart a lesson. How did the elephant get his trunk? Why, by being too nosey (get it?) about what the crocodile had for dinner.

I often think of good poems as fables- little encapsulations of a moment or a feeling. They have an arc, a moral, and (at their best) an impossible moment that just feels right. It is human life distilled to its most essential ingredients.

I think about Robert Frost's Birches, which is one of the poems I've re-read and re-listened to most in my life. The impossible moment is perfect:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.	50
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Without this moment, Birches is an old man wishing to be young again- to swing from trees, to have the innocence to believe that the bent birches along the road were brought low by being swung from too often. But because of the plea "May no fate wilfully misunderstand me" this a poem about a man who recognizes that for all life's hardships, for all the broken ice and slow thaws, no life could be better than this one.

I wonder who has my copy of Just So Stories. If I could remember, I could call them up and asked if they ever read it. I wonder if they love the stories' simplicity as much as I do?

"Eventually" at Red Fez

One of my 30 Before 30 goals was to submit poems to 6 publications this year. I'm half way to my goal, and one of my poems (Eventually) has been accepted for issue 60 of Red Fez.

Check it out (and all the other poems and fiction in issue 60, too).

30 Before 30 Update: Submit or be Conquered

Goal #15 on my 30 Before 30 is to submit poems to 6 publications. This week, I heard back from locations 2 and 3, both of whom want one of the poems I offered to them.

When I set this goal, I thought that going 0 for 6 was a real possibility, which is why I made my goal submissions and not publications.

It was, frankly, a real possibility. But if I'm 0 for 3 with my remaining submissions, I'll still be ecstatic to have this two poems in print.

*** Helpful advice: the image results for a Google search on "submit or be conquered" are Not Safe For Work. Do not look for an image to accompany your blog post on this topic during your lunch hour.

Open Mic at Hazel & Wren

My favorite ladies from the Twin Cities have another Open Mic today, so if you need me, I'll be there.

My poem.

Open Mic at Hazel & Wren

Today's the day!

Poetry, Fiction and Payoff

So I'm a sap when it comes to well written music. Any genre, any singer; if the lyrics are good, I'm hooked.

This often leads me down a rabbit-hole of folk music, and lately I've been hooked by Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now. And on a recent road trip, while I was thinking about the two graphic novels I've just reviewed (Archeologists of Shadows and Akira), it occurred to me that what I want is for the two books to be like Both Sides Now.

Let me explain.

National Poetry Month Kickoff

Last year, I had a lot of fun completing the April poem-a-day challenge and posting the results here. This year, I'll be doing things a little differently.

Goal #15 on my 30 Before 30 is to submit poems to 6 different publications (one down, five to go), and since last year I've learned that many publications consider posting a draft of a poem to a blog to be "previously published" and therefore unacceptable for future publication.

So, as I write, I'll try to share each day the prompt or theme I had in mind (either the theme I started with, or the theme I ended with, since they're often different).

Day One: On the way to work

Here's wishing you a happy April!

Open Mic

It's Open Mic day.
Go. Comment.
Then return.

30 Before 30 Bucket List

1. Read In Search of Lost Time (A Remembrance of Things Past)

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel writes "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past." That quote struck a nerve with me, and once I decided that 2013 would be my year for Remembrance... the rest of this list started to take shape.

Notes on Surviving a Hurricane

from here

Take the candles out of their hiding spots, all of them. Pull the tea lights from the back of the cabinet with the blue table cloth. Spread the table cloth across the dining room table and array the lights.
Take the thin tapers from behind the liquor bottles- take out the whiskey and the rum while you're there.  Pour. Fill as many candle holders as you own with tapers, and leave the rest on the mantle.
Set multi-wicked jar candles in the bathrooms and along the hallways leading from the dining room to the bathroom.

Light them all while the power is still on. Let them make up for the missing warmth.

Let each sputter lead to another and wait for the freight train wind lashed with rain, the approaching sirens. Breath, quick sharp shallow huddled. Breath, the sirens are not for us. As iron skinned engines doppler into the distance, thankfully count problems like blessings. Count problems like candles, like lit wicks burning down, that must burn down and die.

Place buckets beneath anything that leaks.

Wednesday Open Mic

It's Hazel & Wren's Open Mic today.

Go comment on all the poems, but especially on mine.

Open Mic Day

It's Open Mic Day over at Hazel & Wren, so I'll be leaving comments on people's poems over there.

You should leave a comment on mine.

For the Comfort of Automated Phrases by Jane Cassady, Book Review

from Sibling Rivalry Press

Jane Cassady's For the Comfort of Automated Phrases was released this month by Sibling Rivalry Press. It is a collection of poems about human failing, about the connections we want but cannot have. It is about trying to make those connections anyways.

This is how the poems unfold: slowly, with a cascade of details to parse, because one of them is a key to unlocking everything else that came before and that follows.

The third section of the title poem is written in the second person, to someone who needs to be dressed:

You have one shoe on.
Attempts at the other make you shriek
and cry and lay down and as I hug you,
you have the strongest elbows.

Suddenly the autistic boy mentioned in the second section of the poem takes on new relevance. The first section's road trip through America, which we're told God created on the third day, is something much bigger and longer than we might have originally signed up for.

Cassady's writing is full of love misplaced or misdirected, because she is willing to give so much love in every direction. There are love poems to cities, to states, to tour guides, to parents who don't get it but keep trying, to jobs that don't deserve our work, and to women dancing in a Zumba class.

Life is messy, she says. Too many stray signals to misunderstand. But keep trying because sometimes, like in the book's final poem, an ode to the impossible could have been To Amy and the Rained-Out Science Carnival, even though we don't get the thing we set out for, sometimes life gives us something just as special.

Listening for Earthquakes by Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Book Review

Listening for Earthquakes, Jasmine Dreame Wagner's book of poems published by Caketrain Journal and Press, is a love letter set to everything poetry can be. Alternating stretches of prose with stanza poetry, Wagner must be read like Whitman- the clang of the words mean something to the ears, but the sight of the words on the page are designed to have just as much impact. Wagner delights in shades of ink, and in words located on lines in ways that can't be spoken or performed. You have to see the book, which is itself as much a work of art as the words it contains.

My favorite poem in the collection, "There Is No Part of the Body That Hasn't Been Pierced," demands that the entire book be turned sideways to be read. The Beatitudes that pour off those pages are an affirming and often mind-bending collision of words.

Blessed are the firecrackers, cherry bombs, snapdragons, for they are 

    the waterworks, sweaty palms, calendulas of sudden vision.

In that poem, Wagner rolls on, exclaiming (not asking with a question mark; these sentence end with a period) of the sun:

...how is it not unlike a feather headdress on a mule...

...a silk-bound door...

...how is it not a stoplight...

from Caketrain Press

Wagner's approach to definition is through the impossible- prove to me the negative, she says over and over again, and then I will be willing to see the world your way.

Listening for Earthquakes is a book about the world as a canvas, about the painful painting we do in it. It is a book filled with bridges and doors and pathways marked by missed connections.


One thing more I love about Wagner's book is that she is not afraid of her stupendous vocabulary. It has been a long time since a book made me read it with a reference at hand, but Listening for Earthquakes is that kind of book. Hepafilter. Filigree. Ameliorates.

Don't read passively, she says. Turn it sideways, crease the spine. Maybe even put the book down so you can grasp at the meaning.



Book 28 of my book-a-week challenge.

Open Mic at Hazel & Wren

It's the second Wednesday of the month, so that means it's another Open Mic at one of my favorite places.

Here's the direct link to my poem. Leave comments so writers like me can improve our drafts.