Tag: poet

Project Bookshelf: Sarah Ann Winn

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Best to Last

This is always my least favorite part of packing. I leave my desk and its bookshelf of my essential books til near the end. As a former librarian, every shelf I own shows a stunning lack of apparent order, but each has an internal logic. There are the shelves of books I probably never will reread, but can’t bear to purge, the books I might need someday for teaching, the poetry bookshelf, the children’s bookshelf, and then the desk bookshelf. The one by my desk reveals the contents of my messy mind, the books I want to use in my writing somehow, or need for quick reference. Some bolster me when I need a prompt or a stiff upper lip, some inspire me with their innovation. They sit at my right hand, my favorites, my personal heaven. What if this is the box that goes missing in the move? How will I replace the book of fairy tales I first read as a child, which still has my peanut butter fingerprints, my pressed feathers and leaves? How will I write the poems which have not yet emerged from this beautiful jumble?

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Sarah Ann Winn lives in Fairfax Virginia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Apeiron Review, [d]ecember, Lunch Ticket, Massachusetts Review, Rappahannock Review, and Stirring, among others. Her chapbook Portage is now available for free download from Sundress Publications. Visit her at bluebirdwords.com or follow her @blueaisling on Twitter.

New SAFTAcast Features Sundress’s Own Darren C. Demaree

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The SAFTAcast, a part of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, is pleased to announce that it will feature Darren Demaree in an upcoming episode. This new episode and all previous episodes and promos are available for on iTunes for free download and can also be found on the podcast’s blog on SAFTAcast.com.

SAFTAcast prides itself on being a writer’s podcast that is not about writing. In fact the subject of writing is immediately ruled out as a possible conversation topic. These programs are more focused on learning about the creators as opposed the creation. This often inspires candid and no-pressure conversations about whatever may be on their minds. Host Scott C Fynboe brings an electric charge to the program with witty insights that spur on guests and eccentric promos for each upcoming episode. Scott C Fynboe is a former radio disc jockey from upstate New York. He received a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and currently lives and teaches on Florida’s Treasure Coast

Guests on the SAFTAcast range from Sundress Publications authors or, in the case of Demaree, more widely published poets and writers from around the country. The feature with Demaree will include his interests in country music, celebrity encounters, and the personalities of writers.

Darren C. Demaree is the author of “As We Refer to Our Bodies” (2013, 8th House), “Temporary Champions” (2014, Main Street Rag), and “Not For Art Nor Prayer” (2015, 8th House). He is the Managing Editor of The Best of the Net Anthology. He is currently living with his wife and children in Columbus, Ohio.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces Episode Featuring Poet Mary Stone

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The SAFTAcast, a part of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, has released its 15th Episode featuring poet Mary Stone. This new episode and all previous episodes and promos are available for on iTunes for free download and can also be found on the podcast’s blog on SAFTAcast.com.

The SAFTAcast prides itself on being a writer’s podcast that is not about writing; in fact the subject of writing is immediately ruled out as a possible conversation topic. These programs are more focused on learning about the creators as opposed the creation. This often inspires candid and no-pressure conversations about whatever may be on their minds. Host Scott C brings an electric charge to the program with witty insights that spur on guests and eccentric promos for each upcoming episode. Scott C Fynboe is a former radio disc jockey from upstate New York. He received a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and currently lives and teaches on Florida’s Treasure Coast.

Guests on the SAFTAcast range from Sundress Publications authors to widely published poets and writers from around the country. In her interview, Stone discusses with host Scott C. a run-in with the girlfriend of a guy named Donkey, and how being confiscated by a bounty hunter is a much better experience in a small town.

Mary Stone is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Stirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

You can also like The SAFTAcast on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Project Bookshelf: Kristin LaTour

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I know, I know. It’s a mess. Book aren’t supposed to be kept on their sides. Someday, I’ll have a huge library. For now, Ikea shelves are okay.

My books are pretty organized. At the very top, there’s books on witchcraft and voodoo, my travel journals and books on Greece. I spent a month in Greece when I was in college and loved it. There’s not much better than getting a gyro on the street stuffed with meat and fries with an Amstel (not that light crap either) on the side. That vase is my hubby’s from his trip to Greece before we met. Another sign we were meant for each other. (Stop gagging.) That wooden box holds a Bible I got when my great-grandfather died when I was in 8th grade. I never thought about the fact that it lives next to witchcraft stuff. Hmmmm….

On the second level are all my poetry books. You can tell the Hyacinth Girl Press ones from the ribbons.  I’m obviously running out of room. There’s also a photo of my paternal grandfather as a baby and my mom and aunt.

Third shelf is almost all British and Irish authors, at least the ones that are shelved properly. We keep the Bevington because we need a booster seat for friends’ kids once in a while. “Get the Bevington!” we holler. Piled above my lovely Brits are a handmade journal my sister made me, some poetry books that haven’t made it to the second shelf yet, my Vintage Hairstyling book, and Dream Symbols, which really isn’t helpful and will probably get donated to my local non-profit bookstore. When I had a dream that my husband’s family was all vampires living in a barn, there really wasn’t anything helpful there. It did make a good poem that is published in Adanna this fall.

Fourth shelf… stereo obviously. I think I was magnanimous when we were setting up the shelves, and I offered to house it. My husband’s bookcase is opposite of mine with the cds keeping peace between them. Anyway, this shelf is American authors, mostly dead ones. The antique Kodak Brownie is from my in-laws’ house. The photo is my maternal grandma’s senior picture.

The fifth shelf is where all the excitement is. My city has a non-profit used bookstore, where I also volunteer, so I get lots of books there. The Newberry Library also has an awesome used book sale twice a year. All my finds go on this shelf for future reading. Behind those three stacks are all my novels that I love and can’t part with.

The bottom shelf is 1/3 travel scrapbooks (England twice, Ireland twice, France, a road trip we took in 2002, my collection of children’s books, most from my childhood with the addition of a collection of different illustrated copies of “The Velveteen Rabbit.” The last pile there is more poetry books and journals I haven’t read, and some books that need to get donated.

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Kristin LaTour has three chapbooks: Agoraphobia, from Dancing Girl Press (2013), Blood (Naked Mannequin Press 2009) and Town Limits (Pudding House Press 2007). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review, Fifth Wednesday, Cider Press Review, Escape into Life, and Atticus Review. Her work appears in the anthology Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, she teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL with her writer husband, a lovebird, and two dogitos. Her first full-length collection is due out from Sundress in 2015.

Where the Political Poets Are

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NPR wants to know where all the poets have gone. Or at least that’s the clickbait-y headline on a recent think-piece in which Juan Vidal laments that poets aren’t political these days.

Mr. Vidal suggests that “literary provocation in America … is at a low” now that the Beat generation has died off. He name-checks a bunch of canonical male poets of the past and laments that they are no longer with us. He praises rappers and slam poets and Lupe Fiasco. He closes his overwrought commentary with a question: “Did they [poets] stop speaking, or have we stopped listening?”

I can’t tell if that query is intended as a mere rhetorical flourish or if it’s supposed to be a self-deprecating joke. Because it’s entirely clear that poets have gone nowhere. We’re still here, still writing, still engaging with the world, still challenging injustice. What’s not clear is whether Mr. Vidal has read any poetry published in the past few years.

It’s entirely predictable for the poetry community to react defensively when someone suggests there’s no such thing as a poetry community anymore, and the poets I follow on Twitter and Facebook bristled for obvious reasons when Mr. Vidal’s piece first appeared. So I’ll try to keep my own bristling to a minimum here, providing instead a sincere answer to the question of whether American poets in 2014 are taking on the important issues:

Yes. We are.

It’s not just slam poets and rappers, either, though to be sure the spoken-word crowd offers plenty of compelling and important social commentary (check out the Button Poetry Facebook page for examples).

If Mr. Vidal is truly interested in poets engaging on the page, here’s a list of places where he could turn:

  • Jamaal May brilliantly engages with Detroit and the plight of the American urban environment in his book Hum.
  • Timothy Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation is a subversive and intellectual examination of the effects of capitalism and corporate power on meaning.
  • Brian Turner served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, then came home and wrote eloquently about his experiences in two books of poetry, Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise.
  • The poetry journal Rattle has an ongoing call for poems that respond immediately to the news of the past week.
  • Bob Hicok’s Words for Empty and Words for Full is, in large part, a response to the shootings at Virginia Tech, the university where he teaches.
  • Nikki Finney’s Head Off and Split (which only won the National Book Award) is intensely immersed in contemporary issues of race and politics.
  • In 2013, Nightboat Books published an anthology of “Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics,” giving voice to a community often overlooked by the canon and the academy.
  • Patricia Lockwood’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals is an argumentative and intelligent response to the 21st-century American power structure.

And this is but a starting place, the first names and books and poets that came to my mind, poems from my own shelf, my own recent reading list. Every single person who reads this blog post can surely provide their own list of political, engaged, reactionary, challenging poets.

So much of the best poetry being written today is doing exactly what Mr. Vidal wants it to: taking on the tough issues of the day, speaking truth to power, grappling with the limits of language to express what matters most. In his closing paragraph, Mr. Vidal offers this view of how poetry once functioned:

“They once fed us, our poets; emptying themselves in the process. Generously, courageously, they brought the darkness to light. They said what we felt, and didn’t mind taking the heat for it — whatever that meant.”

It seems unlikely that Mr. Vidal will ever read what I’ve written here, and unlikelier still that he’ll read my examples and rethink his stance. But if he somehow does wind up here and is reading this, I challenge him to read just one poem – Patricia Lockwood’s “Rape Joke,” which first appeared in The Awl and was probably one of the most-read poems of 2013. This poem checks every box on Mr. Vidal’s wish list. Written well before his commentary, it offers the best rebuttal I can think of.

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Amorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. His poems appear in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2012, The Poetry of Sex, and Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, as well as journals such as Rattle, The Collagist, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Menacing Hedge, and others.

Amorak Huey on Writing Funny

A FOOT WALKS INTO A BAR. BARTENDER SAYS, “HEY, ARE YOU A FOOT?” FOOT SAYS, “YES, IAMB.”

For openers, a peeve: It’s highly annoying when poetry reviewers seek to praise the poetry in question by insulting other poetry.

In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Patricia Lockwood’s Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals drew the following blurb as an editor’s choice: “Lockwood offers a collection at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our time and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get.” I like Lockwood’s poetry, I’m happy to see it earning mainstream attention, and I do find it generally fun, angry, bizarre, attuned to our time. But she’s certainly not the only poet to whose work these labels apply.

When I see such sweeping declarations, I tend to think the reviewer probably hasn’t read much poetry since that Intro to Lit survey back in sophomore year, and is amazed that the book in his or her hands seems so different from Whitman or Wordsworth, Keats or Dickinson. (Never mind that each of those poets also wrote with their share of fun, angriness, bizarreness, attuned-to-the-times-ness.)

These no-other-poems-are-like-this pronouncements are particularly common when a reviewer comes across a poet whose work is funny. Readers seem perpetually astounded – shocked, I tell you – to discover that poems can be humorous.

But of course poems can be funny. Poets have been bringing the mirth since Shakespeare, since Chaucer, since Sappho, since – well, since poetry.

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My forthcoming collection from Sundress is titled Ha Ha Ha Thump, and I guess I’m setting myself up for trouble – title like that, you’d better be funny, poet boy. Honestly, I have no idea how funny the poems are, if at all. It’s not up to me to decide, anyway. I am reminded of a story I heard Lia Purpura tell a crowded auditorium at AWP a few years ago, about calling one of her pieces a lyric essay and having someone respond, “Shouldn’t you just call it an essay? And let the reader decide whether it’s lyric?” (She got a lot of laughs with that one.)

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I have to battle against an abundance of earnestness in my writing; my first drafts are often tediously heartfelt. Humor, for me, is a hedge against that, a way to temper my innate sentimentality.

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David Kirby was the first poet whose work gave me permission to think of poems as possibly funny. One of my favorite poetry-memories is watching him read a poem about a summer job he once had in which he and a co-worker had to repossess wigs from delinquent housewives. The audience was roaring with laughter by the end of the poem.

I have to learn some lessons more than once. My writing ever backslides toward sincerity. Billy Collins, Mark Halliday, Tony Hoagland – these were the next poets who gave me permission to seek humor in poems. Then Bob Hicok, in particular his poem “What Would Freud Say?” The line “explosion kills asshole” belongs in the Funny Poetry Hall of Fame.

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I have a distinct memory of the first time it occurred to me that I could make other people laugh. It was October of my freshman year in college, and a group of us went to a haunted house out in the country – more a haunted estate, really, with a tour guide leading us through a series of rooms and dark paths as masked people jumped out from behind bushes with roaring chainsaws, bloody cleavers and the like.

Our group included seven of us: three couples and me. So I walked up front with the guide and offered a running commentary on the events of the evening – acting like an ass, basically, I mean, I was 18 years old, I’m sure everything I said was obnoxious and juvenile. But I had people laughing. Being the funny guy at the front of the group had never been in my wheelhouse before. Still isn’t, if I’m being honest, but it was nice to know it was at least a possibility.

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A classmate in the MFA program at Western Michigan, Jamie Thomas, gave me lots of insight into writing funny. He has a knack for the clever detail, the smart observation, the absurdity of the mundane, and I knew from my very first workshop with him that I wanted to steal from him.

Jamie told me that he thinks of humor in poetry more as the employment of wit than simply telling jokes. And that’s right. The humor – like metaphor, simile, form, content, truth – has to be in service of the poem, not the other way around. A poem may have much in common with a joke, from structure to content, but a poem cannot be merely a joke.

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It’s hard for me to think of a contemporary poet I truly admire whose work isn’t witty: marked by word play and incisive observations about the idiosyncrasies of human behavior. Poets and standup comedians, we aren’t so different.

A friend who does improv comedy taught me the “yes, and” rule, wherein each participant works not to halt the momentum of a scene, but to elevate the stakes, heighten the absurdity of the moment, before passing it along to the next player. In other words, do not challenge or question or apologize for the world being created, but explore it, invent it, change it. Humor should arrive organically. You don’t need me to tell you all the ways the same principle applies in poetry.

 

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So who’s funny these days in the poetry world? Kirby and Hicok, of course. Lockwood, too. Erin Keane is a personal favorite (I mean, she has a poem called “How Do You Get a Clown to Stop Smiling? Hit Him in the Face with an Axe!”; talk about your Funny Poetry Hall of Fame). Rebecca Hazelton is another favorite, as is Kiki Petrosino.

Jason Bredle and Jennifer L. Knox are deliberately, provocatively funny. Catie Rosemurgy’s poems are often darkly hilarious. Jessy Randall has a delicious sense of the domestic absurd. Besides being brilliant, Mary Ruefle is sneaky funny (check out the “mint” line in that linked poem). Matthew Olzmann and W. Todd Kaneko and Dean Rader and Jill Alexander Essbaum – I could go on and on. And on.

These are not the only funny poets, of course. Far from it. Most poets are funny at least some of the time. (Although you’re probably better off not trying to convince a class of grumpy first-year writing students of this fact. I’m just saying.)

 

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Humor and poetry both rely on verbal surprise, the pairing of the unexpected. Humor in poetry works best when it’s juxtaposed against some other mode: anger, insight, sadness, tenderness. Poetry happens when a poet presses up against the limits of language when it comes to capturing the human condition. Poetry is utterance, is act, is disruption, is the reaching for that which is understood but previously unarticulated. Humor is these things as well.

The other thing I remember about that night at the haunted house, about that entire autumn, about my whole freshman year, is how dreadfully, desperately lonely I was. Without question, my jokes that night were a response to being the only person in the group without someone to hold onto when the bogeymen popped out of the shadows. Humor, like poetry, is how we cope with the fact of our aloneness in this world.

At the end of the night, as we walked through a field back to our cars, the jokes had run their course, we were all tired, the couples leaned against each other. My roommate and his girlfriend held hands, and she noticed me, walking apart from them. She reached over and took my hand, too, such a small, tender, generous gesture, and we walked like that, the three of us, quiet and connected in the darkness.

 

 

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10295556_716543425070275_5388953265068860591_oAmorak Huey, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His chapbook, The Insomniac Circus, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. His poems appear in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2012, The Poetry of Sex, and Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry, as well as journals such as Rattle, The Collagist, The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Menacing Hedge, and others.

Sundress will be publishing his first full-length collection, Ha Ha Ha Thump, in 2015.

National Poetry Month Poetry Playlist: Virginia Smith Rice’s Picks

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To celebrate National Poetry Month, our Sundress editors are sharing some of their favorite poems, most influential poems, and poems that they are really digging right now. Put them all together, and you have the Sundress Poetry Playlist!

Today’s picks come from one of our Sundress authors, Virginia Smith Rice!

Here are two Tranströmer poems. He has been an incredible influence on my work, and these are two (of the many) that continue to resonate with me throughout the years.

Tomas Tranströmer ,  from Friends, You Drank Some Darkness,  tr. Robert Bly


TRACK

2am: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon.

As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember that he was there
when he returns again to his room.

Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a
swarm,
feeble and cold on the horizon.

The train is entirely motionless.
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars.

 

SOLITUDE

I have been walking a while
on the frozen Swedish fields
and I have seen no one.

In other parts of the world
people are born, live, and die
in a constant human crush.
To be visible all the time – to live
in a swarm of eyes –
surely that leaves its mark on the face.
Features overlaid with clay.

The low voices rise and fall
as they divide up
heaven, shadows, grains of sand.

I have to be by myself
ten minutes every morning,
ten minutes every night,
– and nothing to be done!

We all line up to ask each other for help.

One.

 

Virginia Smith Rice will be reading from her debut collection tomorrow at 7PM at Powell’s Bookstore in Chicago!

 

FINAL FINAL

 

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Virginia Smith Rice earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, where her poetry manuscript, “One Voice May Survive the Other,” received the Distinguished Thesis Award. Her work appears, or is forthcoming, in 2River View, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, Stirring, Stone Highway Review, Superstition Review, and Weave, among others. She was the Assistant Poetry Editor at TriQuarterly, and currently works as an art teacher in Woodstock, IL. Her first full-length collection, When I Wake It Will Be Forever, was published by Sundress in 2014.

Press Release: When I Wake It Will Be Forever by Virginia Smith Rice

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Knoxville, TN— Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of Virginia Smith Rice’s first full-length book, When I Wake It Will Be Forever. Rice’s debut collection collapses the natural and material world into instances of loss, longing, memory and sensory expression.

Rice investigates the emptiness of language with a lyrical and alliterative force with a jarring, poignant, and distinct ability to deconstruct place through the linguistic fabric it emerges from, to create a more intimate presence with the physical landscape of existence. Rice builds her ethereal and imagistic poems with a deep engagement of the senses.

“Both shimmering and seething, haunted and haunting, the complex, dazzling contours of When I Wake It Will Be Forever beckon the reader with the imperative of ‘listen’; and we do, because Rice’s poems vibrate with a ‘voice thorned and singing / but not human.’ Like her poetic parentage—Desnos, Szymborska, Tranströmer and Csoóri—there is a wisdom contained in this work that transcends a singular being’s experience; ultimately elegiac, yet ‘lit by inner, hidden suns,’ this book is a stellate network of memory, loss, longing, silence, and voice. Often serving as witness (to an aunt’s suicide, a stranger’s suicide, ‘the suicide in my voice’) Rice pays tribute to the manifold ghosts that clamor inside us. This is one of the most solidly exquisite and lingering first books I’ve had the honor of reading.”
-Simone Muench, author of Orange Crush, recipient of the 2013 NEA Fellowship in Poetry

“Virginia Smith Rice has created a tremblingly precise, intricate, bright-edged evocation of a world both ecstatic and ominous, grieving and vital, broken and mending, but rarely mended. Her poems are richly colored and intensely focused on the shapes and forms of the world and of inner life and relationships. They are crowded with living plants and creatures and intense feeling, and Rice can even describe the color of solitude. Her language is sensuously complex, her angle of vision is oblique and finds the memorable touch of reality off-center, at the edges, just this side of perceptibility. She has created a delicate yet vivid response to what she calls the ‘percussed absence’ that haunts human life. This is a marvelous first book.”
-Reginald Gibbons, author of Fem-Texts and professor of Humanities at Northwestern Univeristy

Virginia Smith Rice earned her MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University, where she received the Distinguished Thesis Award for her poetry manuscript, “One Voice May Survive the Other.” Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Meridian, Rattle, and Third Coast, among other journals. She currently lives in Woodstock, IL, where she teaches art and serves as co-editor of the online poetry journal, Kettle Blue Review.

When I Wake It Will Be Forever is now available at www.sundresspublications.com.

Meet Our New Intern, Chris Barton!

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I feel a little odd narrating myself in this context, but I will say a few things. Lately, I have tried to write things that explore/meditate on the events, activities, and interests in my life in a way that promotes awareness, while also trying to understand more complex systems of social and economic influence. If for no other reason, so I can better understand the world surrounding me, and create an aesthetic of daily experience that may allow me to connect with, inform, or bring happiness to other people.

As a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee, my knowledge base has mostly been shaped by academia. While my social/intellectual capital has benefited from this education, I also realize the structural inadequacies of concepts like the cannon, and the need to be openly aware of how this type of instruction can limit/subjugate certain other perspectives. I am excited to be interning with Sundress Publications, because it has allowed me to connect with a diverse artist-community. I currently view Sundress as a new type of instruction for myself and others, which is an exciting thought.

Mostly, I am trying to navigate the social climate of growing up in East Tennessee as a post-graduate, in a way that may promote kindness or bring more happiness to people. I mainly write poetry. I generally enjoy poetry that’s casual, connective, and creates a sensation of ‘involvement’ that allows the reader to help construct a meaning. I am feeling somewhat anxious about ending this post. So, I’ll say that I am still trying to understand what Ginsberg meant when discussing a “lost America of love”. That there are three Chinese restaurants in a walking distance of my apartment. That I sometimes like to eat avocado and carrot pita sandwiches. Thank you for reading this post.

Chris Barton is a 2013 graduate from the University of Tennessee. His work has appeared in Still and Polaris. Books he has enjoyed recently are Begging for It by Alex Dimitrov, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by Tao Lin, and Selected Poems, Frank O’hara. He currently lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.