Tag: sundress

Interview with Donna Vorreyer

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks. She is the reviews editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection, and she works as a middle school teacher in the Chicago suburbs.

Sundress: Tell me about your process: Do you plan what you want each poem to accomplish, or does your writing evolve as you are working on it?

Donna Vorreyer: I rarely go into a poem knowing what I want it to accomplish. Each poem starts with some trigger –a piece of language, an idea, an image, a prompt, even –but then takes on a life of its own. I can start free-writing about tomatoes and end up with a long poem about a persona unearthing childhood trauma. I think that, once the poem lives on the page for a while, I can perhaps shape it to my will, but in a draft, the ideas and images of a poem have to be allowed to spread like ripples in a puddle. I believe that intellectualizing the poems too much at the beginning of the process can lead to stilted work. That’s why, during dry spells in my drafting, I don’t force ideas on to the page. The minute I say, “I’m going to write a poem about…” is the minute that I will draft a lousy poem. My initial drafts tend to be pretty rambling and somewhat prose-y in nature. In revision, I tend to hone image with particular attention to sound. And, as you have seen, most of my completed poems end up fairly short. So one could say I am more of a whittler than an architect.

Sundress: What’s on your bookshelf? Who are the main writers who inspire you and inform your work?

Donna Vorreyer: My bookshelves (there are many, all over the house) have a lot of poetry, of course, but also everything from biographies to novels to strange non-fiction topics like deadly plants and museum artifacts. In terms of main writers who inspire me, there are many, but I have a shortlist. Classic favorites, I would say, are Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickens and Melville. The richness of their language and syntax teaches me something new each time I read and re-read. In terms of informing my work, anything that I am reading is an influence. When I was reading the journals of Lewis and Clark, the language of nature was an inspiration. Reading Melville, the long sentences make my brain move differently. Reading Katie Ford or Traci Brimhall makes me consider image, emotional urgency, and surprise. Reading Amorak Huey and Diana Goetsch teaches me about humor and movement from idea to idea. So, I can’t honestly say that one particular writer influences me more than others.

Sundress: You often reference an unnamed “you” in your poems. Do you consider it the same “you” throughout, or does the title imply that these poems are many different “apocalypse stories”?

Donna Vorreyer: It could be read either way. I’d like to leave it to the reader to decide.

Sundress: You use water imagery throughout the book: “of the sea pulling into itself, the science of tides,” “Useless life, wharf/ with no docks” “When we wake, we walk to the river,” etc. Did you intentionally use water as a theme, or is it an image you are drawn to as a writer?

Donna Vorreyer: I do not intentionally return to water as an image, but I am drawn to water in a personal way, so I think it creeps into many poems (hopefully not in a clichéd way). I love the sound of waves and rushing falls, the fact that water can be both transparent and opaque, its colors, its moods…As someone who grew up near enough to Lake Michigan to know water but far enough away to yearn for it, water holds a sense of mystery and grandeur for me. Of course, there is also the human dependence on water –we are, after all, made of those atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, and anytime one is writing about the human condition or relationships, the body looms large. And the body contains oceans.

Sundress: Tell us a little about the title of the book and its significance.

Donna Vorreyer: The book was conceived as a way to explore how society tends to escalate any problem or obstacle to the level of apocalypse. I work with teenagers, and their tendency to inflate the size of a problem is normal. But I’ve also noticed serious issues with scale in all aspects of life today, especially on social media. Everything is either great or a crisis, and that idea needed a story to frame it.

A love story is the most universal of all stories, and love is rife with problems, so in that sense, every love story is an apocalypse story.

Sundress: How were the subheadings chosen, and how do they affect the progression of the book?

Donna Vorreyer: The subheadings are lines from different poems in the book and are meant to guide the reader through the stages of the relationship: a sweet beginning, typical ups and downs, a betrayal, a descent into crazed almost feral mourning for what was lost, and then a reconciliation of sorts. The sections were originally numbered, and my editor Sara Henning suggested section titles, something that had also worked well for me in my first book.

Sundress: What is one thing you wish people knew about you?

Donna Vorreyer: I started writing poems by writing song lyrics when I was in junior high school. I play the piano (pretty well) and the guitar (badly) as well as sing, and I had teenage angsty heartbreak enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. (Damn you, Mike Dalton!) I stopped writing in college and didn’t start again until I was in my early 30s. It’s never too late to start over when it comes to something you love.

You can purchase Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story at the Sundress store!

Lyric Essentials: Sarah Kain Gutowski reads “The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Sarah Kain Gutowski reads “The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop.

I brought up Elizabeth Bishop in an interview with Sarah Winn—stating how Bishop is one of my favorite poets and how her poems always feel “fortified.” I’m so thrilled you’ve elected to read “The Armadillo.” Let’s just get right to it. What makes this poem so essential?

Sarah: This poem struck a chord with me before I knew much about Lowell, before I knew anything about Bishop, before I’d even read much poetry. I can find myself excited by and devoted to poems before I have any context or even true understanding of what the poet is going on about. For better or worse, I’m very much an intuitive reader, not an intellectual one. So my first answer to that question is simply: It moved me, or spoke to me, in a way other poems have not.

But when I read the poem closely, and really consider what I value (aesthetically, philosophically) I believe what struck me most when I first read it, many years ago, was this sense of two selves within the poem: the self who witnesses and accepts random cruelty (“illegal fire balloons”), blind, unwise allegiances (“rising toward a saint/ still honored in these parts”), and brutal, inevitable annihilation (the baby rabbit “a handful of intangible ash/with fixed, ignited eyes”) as essential qualities of existence – and all with a kind of impersonal, analytic detachment; and the self who feels an intrinsic compassion for all creatures created and destroyed within this existence, and who clings to those moments of beauty that contradict its crueler aspect: “their whirling black-and-white/stained bright pink underneath.”

That’s a wordy explanation, but it captures what, essentially, makes me return to this poem after my initial “YES.” And ultimately, I share with Bishop a tenderness for the abiding, the underdog, that “weak mailed fist/clenched ignorant against the sky!”

Chris: I dig the reading of the dichotomous self. It introduces levels of intricacy—a celebratory act becomes (potentially) an act of violence against the self, others, and the world. The personified “weak mailed fist” always intrigues me. It’s something about feeling the need for armor despite knowing it won’t necessarily provide protection. Can you speak more to your idea about the abiding underdog in this poem and who/what the “weak mailed fist” represents?

Sarah: Lowell is the “weak mailed fist.” Bishop is too. Also, the poem and the poet are the abiding. The poet continues in the face of uncertainty and “falling fire,” the threat of death and annihilation that comes as a surprise, and the poem is her “weak mailed fist” against the sky. Our words are small defense against fate and/or tragedy, and yet we wield them in defiance nonetheless. So we are all the underdogs, really – the fire balloons could have landed on the speaker’s own home, after all. Instead, she watches these creatures abandon their “ancient” nests from her own home. She speaks from the vantage point of luck – not quite good fortune, because she witnesses this destruction – but luck, for sure.

Chris: Is the impersonal, analytic detachment you referred to an essential quality of the poem? And is that something you seek to accomplish in your own writing?

Sarah: I think so. Bishop would not have been the crazy cat lady out on the hilltop trying to wrangle owls and skittish baby bunnies into a hutch in her yard – through most of her poems she has a journalist’s objective measure in both meter and tone. And the poems are more effective for the moments when she breaks from this objective, cool distance – as in the last lines of “The Armadillo,” as in the last lines of “One Art” (“the art of losing’s not too hard to master/though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”). And yes, if I could write with Bishop’s coolness, her exactness, I’d be pretty damn happy. (For the record, I’m not there yet.)

Chris: You mentioned experiencing this poem before knowing much about Bishop and Lowell. Has your relationship with this poem changed after learning more about the two poets and their friendship?

Sarah: Absolutely. My appreciation for it has grown because it’s this artifact of their friendship and respect and love for one another as poets. You don’t have to read their letters if you have this poem and Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” in front of you. (I mean, I own Words in Air and I plan on finishing it some day, but that’s mostly because I’m nosey.) I love reading Lowell’s poem (which he dedicated to Bishop) and seeing the parallel structure, how “The Armadillo” is in conversation with Lowell’s poem but also entirely its own creature. The little rabbit with its “ignited eyes” appears in the penultimate stanza as do Lowell’s small army of skunks marching up Main Street with their “moonstruck eyes’ red fire.”

In “Skunk Hour” the mother skunk is such a badass, checking the moony poet in his sadness and despair with her resilience and fortitude. Her “wedge-head” and “ostrich tail” remind him that the world gives no fucks about his sadness, and it’s Lowell’s ability to see this that makes the reader forgive him for his earlier melodrama, because he admires the mama skunk who “will not scare.” Bishop may be this figure for Lowell in “Skunk Hour,” but in “The Armadillo” she reminds him, and us, that all creatures feel terror and flee when threatened by fire, particularly when it rains from the sky, but also when it originates inside our own heads. There’s such tenderness in that gesture, such empathy. And her formalism is gorgeous. I just love her.
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Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of Fabulous Beast: The Sow, a chapbook published by Hyacinth Girl Press. Her poems have been published in Menacing Hedge, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Verse Daily, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Epiphany, The Threepenny Review, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art, and she has a review in the latest issue of Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. She keeps a record of her writing life, experience in academia, and motherhood at http://mimsyandoutgrabe.blogspot.com.

Chris Petruccelli continues his battle against the ever growing and never ceasing light in Fairbanks, Alaska. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Nashville Review, Rappahannock Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. You can check out his chapbook Action at a Distance over at University of Indianapolis’ Etchings Press. In his free time Chris enjoys drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Ruth Foley Reads “Sea Monsters” by Tomasz Różycki

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Ruth Foley reads “Sea Monsters” by Tomasz Różycki.

Ruth, this is a wonderful poem. How did you come across the work of Różycki? Do you read a lot of translation work?

Ruth: I don’t actually read much in translation, but I probably should. I’m always worried that something will be lost if it’s a language I’m not at least a little familiar with, and I don’t have a clue about these poems in the original Polish. This poem is part of Różycki’s collection Colonies, which is one long sonnet cycle. The poems build and weave and I really had never read anything else like it. Also, I want to give a shout-out to his translator, Mira Rosenthal, because I get no feelings of removal or distance from these poems, as I sometimes do with translated poems, and so I think she must have super powers.

Last year, one of my core poet friends brought some of Różycki’s poems to an annual conference we both attend, as part of a talk she was giving. I had never heard of him, but when I got home I read through her handout again and kept coming back to his poems. I memorized this one, and a handful of others, because I wanted them in my head and in my mouth, if that makes any sense. I spoke them out loud over and over as I was memorizing them, and each repetition brought me something new.

Colonies is one of those books that I should own multiple copies of. I’ve loaned it to a few friends and I always miss it when it’s gone. Is that weird? I should just buy another one. It’s also maybe a little weird that it became so essential to me as a poet so quickly, but Różycki writes of loss, longing, damage, and displacement in a way that takes me over.

Chris: Haha I don’t think missing books is weird at all! Sometimes I picture my own books as pets—they’re very near and dear. What do you think it is about Różycki’s writing that makes it so powerful and appealing?

Ruth: For me, it’s a mixture of things that make this poem, and this book, so powerful. There’s the building and weaving I mentioned above, but there’s much, much more. “Sea Monsters” is typical of the poems in the book in that you can track the sonic shifts. Just look at the lines “Just past tank glass, in silent film, in dream, / the sea’s strange creatures bask. I ask them riddles,” or rather, don’t just look at them; read them out loud. They’re lovely, aren’t they? And yet, the sounds are fairly harsh, with all those hard “a”s and “c”s. Różycki softens them up with the “s” sounds, and the long “e”s, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how it’s not all too much. But it doesn’t feel overwrought to me, and part of that, I think, is that the language is deceptively simple, especially before the volta (which, since you can’t see it, I’ll tell you comes exactly where it’s expected, after the second quatrain, where he writes, “And me?”). In those first eight lines, there’s exactly one three-syllable word, “hypnotized.” Then after the turn, the language gets a little fancier, the words get a little longer, but it still isn’t terribly complicated diction. I love that pull of sound and rhythm.

And then, of course, he asks a question in the first line and doesn’t answer it until the last word. The whole poem is building toward that “No,” and when I get there, it’s like a small stone has moved into my gut. There’s a little heaviness there, more than a little sadness. Of course the answer is no—else why the sea monsters moving toward us through the fog?—but the first time I read this poem it never occurred to me that his opening question was anything but rhetorical. I love that surprise. I hesitate to say more because part of the joy of Różycki’s poems for me is discovery, but there are issues of place and displacement, the political, my own obsession with the sea…I could go on and on.

Chris: You mentioned this poem being part of a sonnet cycle. Is form something that your usually drawn to? Is the form of “Sea Monsters” something that contributes to its essentiality?

Ruth: I beat you to the punch up there in terms of the essentiality part! And yes, I love truly well-written formal poetry. My own roots are with formalists and poets who, if not formalists, are comfortable with form, and I still write a lot of formal verse. Even my free verse poems don’t escape my formal background, and I don’t want them to. I read and enjoy all sorts of poetry, though, and I make it a point to see what I can learn from poets writing in very different ways from those I’m naturally drawn to.

Chris: You mentioned obsessions earlier. Does Różycki write about the sea and use the sea monster image elsewhere in Colonies? Also, there’s a strange tone in this poem—almost as if the narrator is contemplating not only their existence, but their right to be in the place in which they are travelling. What do you make of the narrator’s constant questioning?

Ruth: He does use sea imagery in other places—I’m thinking of his poem “Land!” which has sailors approaching an island—but often the monster is us, the damage we can do to other people. I’m sure the fact that he’s in Poland, with its rich history of political poetry and the troubling need for that poetry, has something to do with that. I suspect that history also influences his theme of displacement. He doesn’t only ask if the people in his poems belong where they are, but if they belong anywhere at all, if it is even possible to belong. He writes about place as a physical, literal space but also as what it means for us as people, our relationships to the places we inhabit, our place in the place if you will. Time is a part of this as well—the past in particular—and what we leave behind. Time becomes an almost corporeal being, with a place and attitude of its own. Such great stuff.

Chris: Have you read Różycki’s other books and does he employ the use of forms beyond the sonnet? Also, how do you see formal verse manifesting itself in contemporary poetry? Are there writers that are writing especially exciting formal poetry?

Ruth: I own Twelve Stations, which is an epic poem (translated by Bill Johnston), but I’m holding out until the semester ends and I can devote proper attention to it. I know just from its form that it’s going to involve the travel of the quest, and I’m dying to read it.

As for formal contemporary poetry…that’s a more difficult question than it might seem. A.E. Stallings is a favorite of mine, and Molly Peacock does formal work that I quite admire. Finally, Laurie Ann Guerrero’s book A Crown for Gumecindo is a heroic crown of sonnets combined with some other writing, and that’s at the top of my reading list for the end of the semester, too. I often find myself going back to older poets—Bishop, obviously, and Auden and Yeats, but also Thom Gunn (whom nobody seems to know as well as they should if you ask me). I find myself wary to name anyone: the term “formalist” or “new formalist” can carry some pretty heavy baggage with it, and I’m aware that even though I don’t look at formal poetry as stodgy or constrained, a lot of people do. I know poets who find use of end rhyme insulting on its own, and all we need to do is take a look at how many submission guidelines prohibit rhyme of any kind to know that there’s an issue.

I think the issue is that there is a lot of disappointing formal poetry out there. There’s also a lot of disappointing free verse poetry out there, but it’s so much more convenient to label formal verse—it’s easy to recognize, and thus easy to dismiss it all. But my favorite contemporary formal poems—like the Różycki poems, for example—take a form and make it so essential to the poem itself that the poem simply has to be formal, there’s no other choice. Really, I think all poems should do that, but it’s a ridiculously high standard!
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Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including Adroit, Sou’wester, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poems can also be found in several anthologies, including the Best Indie Lit New England anthology. She is the author of the chapbooks Dear Turquoise and Creature Feature, the forthcoming chapbook Sink and Drift,and the full-length collection Dead Man’s Float (forthcoming from ELJ). She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.

Chris Petruccelli is still hanging out in Fairbanks, Alaska. He survived the winter, but is now facing off against eternal daylight. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Connotation Press, Still: The Journal, Nashville Review and elsewhere. In his free time Chris enjoys drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes with older women.

An Interview with Sundress Author, Jill Khoury

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Jill Khoury is the author of Suites for the Modern Dancer, which was released this month from Sundress Publications.

Sundress: What is it about the body and disability that inspires your poetry?

Jill Khoury: From a young age my body was an object of the normalization efforts of others. At the same time, it was made clear that the body was a private thing. So I was told to be like the other kids, and be quiet while I was at it, and I internalized that message for a long time. So I do it because I was told not to. Nor are notions of normalization and privacy something that our society has moved beyond, so I guess I also write about these things because I want other people to tell their stories of difference and tell it loud.

Sundress: Did you ever read a work about either that really spoke to you? Anything you recommend?

Jill Khoury: So many! Here’s a brief list of books of poetry and memoir that have inspired me to think/re-think how I write about the body, in chronological order of when I discovered them:

    • Anne Sexton- Collected Works
    • Sharon Olds- Satan Says
    • Toi Derricotte- Captivity, also Tender
    • Stephen Kuusisto- Planet of the Blind, also Only Bread, Only Light
    • Georgina Kleege- Sight Unseen
    • Paul Guest- The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World
    • Tom Andrews- The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle
    • Jim Ferris- The Hospital Poems
    • Ed. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, Michael Northen, – Beauty Is A Verb: The New Poetics of Disability
    • Danielle Pafunda- The Dead Girls Speak in Unison 

Sundress: Your description of blindness throughout is very real. What’s your secret? How were you able to convey the experience of being blind in so few words?

Jill Khoury: My secret would be that I’m blind! Actually I’ve been trying to write elegantly about blindness for a long time, since college really, and I failed at it for many years. The (blind) memoirist and poet Stephen Kuusisto shaped a lot of my ability to write successfully about my own personal version of blindness. He taught creative nonfiction at Ohio State when I was pursuing my MFA there, and took several classes with him.

It turned out that I had to write about blindness in essay form first, before the poetry would come anywhere near to being how I wanted it. Although I don’t care for writing in prose too much, I needed a boundless space (which is usually what I don’t like about writing in prose) to give me enough room to explore the relationship with my blindness without the pressure to distill it into a poem. I really like the lyric essay. Steve introduced me to that form. It was just what I needed.

Sundress: In this book you write several poems about characters who are children or young adults. Do you think children have a special awareness of the body and the stigmas attached that older adults may miss?

Jill Khoury: Like I mentioned, I was taught in early childhood to not like my body and its differences. I spent most of my time after age 18 unlearning those things. I do think children are aware of their bodies with an innocence and a freedom that is so easily quashed by adults. The stigmas are learned very early, and internalized by all bodies. To say that I found the received stigmas about my body inhibiting would be an understatement.

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Sundress: Have you ever written a poem that you felt you just couldn’t get right? What’s your revision process like?

Jill Khoury: The title poem of the book, “Suites for the Modern Dancer,” was started in, I think, 2004. I wrote the final draft of it about two months before Suites-the-book was published. An earlier version of the poem appeared my 2009 chapbook, Borrowed Bodies, but it still was not complete, not nuanced enough to accurately convey the complex fluidity between blindness and seeing, and the consequences of, as mentioned in the previous question, received stigmas about the body.

My revision process is different depending on the poem. “Suites” was sparked by reading A. R. Ammons’ essay “A Poem Is A Walk,” in which he said:

“The motion may be lumbering, clipped, wavering, tripping, mechanical, dance-like, awkward, staggering, slow, etc. But the motion occurs only in the body of the walker or in the body of the words. . . . It can’t be translated into another body. There is only one way to know it and that is to enter into it.”

All my life I had struggled with walking. I went to a school for kids with cerebral palsy when I was very young to improve on some coordination issues that I was born with. As far as I know, I don’t have CP, but I do have issues with balance and motor control that seem similar to people with mild versions of CP.

I lived in one of those small towns where you go to elementary and middle school with the same kids that you graduate high school with. I would say I did not have a “normal” looking gait until I was somewhere in the elementary school years. That, along with my low vision, was grand fodder for childhood cruelty, and somewhat, for cruelty from teachers who really wanted to normalize me. Again, received stigmas.

It may have been the case that the professor who assigned the Ammons essay, also gave us an assignment to think or write about poetry and walking—I can’t remember now. But I thought a lot about the history of my walking and of my newly acquired walk, the one with the white cane I had recently learned how to use in order to forge across the wide midwestern streets of Columbus, Ohio. The cane gave me much better balance and bodily confidence, but I also felt like that girl who was learning how to walk being pointed at by all the mean kids, only everyone was grown.

Sundress: What’s interesting about these poems is that some have a more traditional format and structure while others don’t. Do you ever find yourself leaning toward one or the other or does it always depend on the poem?

Jill Khoury: The poem determines itself. They each emerge organically. I wish I had a more adroit answer for this question, but it really is based on an intuitive feeling of sound and breath and the emotional timbre of the subject matter.

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Sundress: What progress do you think still needs to be made for disability representation in poetry and literature?

Jill Khoury: A lot of progress still needs to be made. Last year I heard an editor of a young, vibrant press that publishes “edgy” work and has been inclusive of other work based in identity, a place that I might submit my work to otherwise, say “I hate hospital poems [or poems that dwell on the body and its illness] because they are such a downer.” I was stunned. It was a comment you might expect to hear from a traditional “old guard” sort of press that had very particular ideas about what poems should and shouldn’t be about, but that wasn’t this.

With that in mind:

  • More journals and presses should be open to examinations of disability and the body as another facet of identity, much like has (recently) been given to examinations of the complexities of gender and race, for example.
  • Space should be given to works that focus on intersections between facets of identity, such as race, sexuality, and disability.
  • The personal narrative should be emphasized–meaning: more space for disabled voices writing about disability and much less space being granted to disability used as a prop, trope, or conflict to give more “depth” to a nondisabled person’s narrative fiction.

 

Purchase your own copy of Suites for the Modern Dancer in the Sundress Store!

Jill Khoury is interested in the intersection of poetry, visual art, representations of gender, and disability. She is a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow and has taught writing and literature in high school, university, and enrichment environments. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Arsenic Lobster, Copper Nickel, Inter|rupture, and Portland Review. She has also been anthologized in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Pudding House Press released her chapbook, Borrowed Bodies, in 2009. Her debut full-length collection, Suites for the Modern Dancer was released by Sundress Publications this month.

2015 Best of the Net Anthology Released

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Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of the 10th anniversary edition of the Best of the Net Anthology! This year’s anthology includes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in 27 different journals and features work by Claudia Emerson, Chen Chen, Jennifer Givhan, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sandra Meek, Eric Tran, Harmony Neal, Jesse Goolsby, Kimi Traube, and many more!

This year’s judges included Bruce Bond, Brian Oliu, and Kate Schmitt.

Bruce Bond is the author of fourteen books including five forthcoming: Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). Presently he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.

Brian Oliu is originally from New Jersey and currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He is the author of three full-length collections, So You Know It’s Me (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011), a series of Craigslist Missed Connections, Leave Luck to Heaven (Uncanny Valley Press, 2014), an ode to 8-bit video games, & Enter Your Initials For Record Keeping (Cobalt Press, 2015). essays on NBA Jam. i/o (Civil Coping Mechanisms), a memoir in the form of a computer virus, is forthcoming in 2015. His works in progress deal with professional wrestling and long distance running (not at once).

Kate Schmitt‘s Singing Bones won the 2013 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. A writer and visual artist, Kate Schmitt has an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Her work has been published in a number of anthologies, including Earth Shattering Poems (Holt, 1998), Light Gathering Poems (Holt, 2000), I Just Hope It’s Lethal (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press, 2007), as well as the literary journals Paradigm, Birmingham Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Louisiana Literature. She was a nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast and served on the journal’s Board of Directors in 2008-2009. She has also edited and written for the companion website to a pilot television series created by Shelley Duvall, a wind energy company, and most recently for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her courses include nonfiction and poetry workshops, 20th-century literature, young adult literature, and Chinese literature in translation.

You can read the newest edition of the anthology online.

The Desiring Object OR Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them by Jessica Rae Bergamino Released

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of The Desiring Object OR Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them by Jessica Rae Bergamino, which was the runner-up for the 2015 Sundress Chapbook Contest.

“In Jessica Rae Bergamino’s The Desiring Object OR Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them, each word carries a heavy weight. This chapbook forced me feel every vibration in order to fully experience the hybrid collage of science and sound. From the epigraph that contextualizes the ambitious theme, and through the immediacy of every line down to the last, I traversed the stars.”
-J. Nicole Oquendo, 2015 Sundress Chapbook Contest Judge

“We rarely ask about the instruments behind scientific discoveries, but perhaps we should. Or, better yet, perhaps we should ask them how they feel about themselves and their work. Jessica Rae Bergamino’s The Desiring Object imagines the inner workings of a Voyager Two who—like Star Trek‘s V’ger and Welcome to Night Vale’s Fey—has become sentient and pursues desires of her own. As she wonders ‘what body knows what’s left of herself / when she’s drifting from her shadow,’ we can’t help but turn skyward, dream of probes barreling through interstellar space and how, if they spoke as beautifully as Bergamino, they’d answer our questions.”
-T.A. Noonan, author of The Bone Folders

 

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Jessica Rae Bergamino is the author of two previous chapbooks: The Mermaid Singing and Blue in All Things: a Ghost Story (dancing girl press 2015). Individual poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Slice, So to Speak, West Branch, and elsewhere. She splits her time between Seattle and Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

 

The Desiring Object OR Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them
is available free download from the Sundress Publications website!

 

Sundress Academy 2016 Poetry Retreat

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The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Summer Poetry Writing Retreat, which runs from Friday, May 27th to Sunday, May 29th, 2016. The three-day, two-night camping retreat will be held on SAFTA’s own Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee. This year’s retreat will focus on generative poetry writing and include break-out sessions on publishing, kicking writer’s block, and much more!

A weekend pass includes one-on-one and group instruction, writing supplies, food, drinks, transportation to and from the airport, and all on-site amenities for $200. Tents, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment are available to rent. Payment plans are also available!

The event will be open to writers of all backgrounds and provide an opportunity to work with many talented, published fiction writers from around the country, including Gerry LaFemina and Karyna McGlynn.

Gerry LaFemina
Gerry LaFemina

Gerry LaFemina is the author of nine collections of poetry and prose poetry, numerous chapbooks, two books of fiction, and Palpable Magic: Essays on Poetry and Prosody. A new collection, The Story of Ash, will be released in 2017. Among his awards and honors are a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Irving Gilmore Emerging Artist Foundation and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. A distinguished literary arts activist, he directs the Frostburg Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is an associate professor of English. He also serves as a poetry mentor in the Carlow University low residency MFA Program.

 

 

Karyna McGlynn
Karyna McGlynn

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and three chapbooks: Scorpionica (New Michigan Press 2007), Alabama Steve (Sundress Publications 2014), and The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution, forthcoming from Willow Springs Editions. Her poems have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, AGNI, Ninth Letter, Witness, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna’s honors include the Hopwood Award, the Verlaine Prize, and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and recently earned her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston where she served as poetry editor and managing editor for Gulf Coast.  She is currently the Diane Middlebrook Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin where she serves as the senior poetry editor for Devil’s Lake.

 

 

Space at this workshop is limited to 15 writers, so reserve your place today at
http://mkt.com/sundress-publications/safta-poetry-retreat

 

Sundress Publications Presents a Night of Three Celebratory Off-Site Readings

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Sundress Publications is pleased to present three readings celebrating the launch of our Political Punch anthology, the tenth anniversary of Best of the Net, and Sundress’s Sweet Sixteen.

This event will take place on Thursday, March 31, at 7pm and will be held at The Lexington Bar located at 129 E 3rd St, Los Angeles, California 90013.

From 7PM-8PM, we will launch our new poetry anthology, Political Punch: The Politics of Identity, with readings by Timothy Liu, Cam Awkward-Rich, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Chen Chen.

At 8PM, we will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Best of the Net Anthology with readings by previous contributors and judges, including Traci Brimhall, Matt Hart, Nicole Walker, Alix Olin, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Sarah Einstein, and more!

In our final hour, we will honor Sundress’s Sweet 16 with readings by our authors, including Fox Frazier-Foley, Amorak Huey, Letitia Trent, Jill Khoury, Saba Syed Razvi, Jessica Rae Bergamino, and M. Mack.

Sundress Publications is a (mostly) woman-run, woman-friendly non-profit publication group founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of online journals and publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats. We also publish the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online.

RSVP today!

 

Lyric Essentials: Blas Falconer on “Infidelity” by Stanley Plumly

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Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Blas Falconer reads “Infidelity” by Stanley Plumly.

Chris: Blas, this poem strikes me as “confessional.” Am I wrong in thinking that? What can you tell us about Stanley Plumly’s writing? Is he the type of person to be offended by the confessional mode?

Blas Falconer: You know, Stanley was my professor back in the day at the University of Maryland, and if he had not helped me to break out of a terrible rut, I would have stopped writing twenty years ago. So I committed to memory as much of what he said as possible and often hear his voice when I am working through a poetry problem.

When I read your question this morning, I remembered him say, “Every poem I’ve ever written is somehow about my father.” I can’t remember the context, but it was probably an offhanded comment in workshop in response to someone else’s poem, something about poetic obsessions. This wasn’t terribly surprising, I suppose, but it left an impression because of what he said soon after: “Every poet eventually has to learn how to not write about himself.” I think that these comments come to mind because, after all of these years, I’ve never thought of this poem, any of his poems, come to think of it, as confessional, though it’s easy to see why someone would. When I imagine the speaker of the poem, I don’t think of Stan.  Nonetheless, I don’t think that he’d be offended.

Chris: So much depends upon that single letter, “I.” It must be a tiresome role. It’s interesting that he doesn’t come to mind as the narrator. Do you think the poem suffers in anyway if it is read with Plumly as the speaker? What does the poem gain if it isn’t him?

Blas Falconer: No, I don’t think that the poem suffers or gains anything either way.

Chris: I really like the idea of “poetic obsessions.” Are there other obsessions that inhabit Plumly’s poetry? Do you have any poetic obsessions yourself?

Blas Falconer:  As for Stanley, I don’t know, maybe birds.

As for me, I often return to the landscape of Puerto Rico, my mother’s homeland, and to my mother, and to exile. I return to these subjects even when I’m not writing about them explicitly, which was Stanley Plumly’s point, I think.
Chris: I also enjoy this idea that poets have to learn how not to write about themselves. To me, that sounds like a thing easier said than done. Was not writing about yourself something you were already practicing when you were at Maryland? Or did that come with experience?

Blas Falconer: I think that Stanley meant to suggest that eventually we had to move beyond our own stories to address our obsessions. We needed to find alternative approaches, other devices. I don’t think that he wanted us to do away with narrative altogether.

For some of us, it was a thing much easier said than done. At the time, I was, for the most part, writing poems inspired by personal experience, and I still often have to challenge myself to move beyond some version of my own story.

Chris: Do you think Plumly was attempting to get students to write universality into their poetry? For instance, in order to write about our obsession accurately we have to consider and understand them both subjectively and objectively?

Blas Falconer: I’m sure that he was, Chris, and I think that he was also encouraging us to find multiple methods of approaching a recurring theme so that we didn’t write the same poem (or same kind of poem) over and over again.

Chris: This may be a bit of an odd question, and it’s definitely the wannabe critical geographer in me talking, but given how you return to the landscape and your mother in your writing, I’m curious, what does “place” mean to you? How do you perceive and understand the landscape?

Blas Falconer: The Puerto Rico of my childhood was somewhat Edenic, and so in my mind, rendering the landscape became a way of infusing my poems with a sense of wonder and loss. I guess that I often use landscape as a means of conveying a sense exile. For example, my first book, A Question of Gravity and Light, often juxtaposed imagery of the island with the imagery of Tennessee to express this sentiment.

Chris: Blas, sorry for the strange detour from Plumly’s poem. We’ll get back to it now. What characteristics of “Infidelity” make it essential to your bookshelf?

Blas Falconer: It’s been fun, Chris, and this question is perfect because it helps me to better articulate my first point. When I read “Infidelity,” I’m drawn into it the way that I’m drawn into a compelling film. Watching a good movie, I don’t think about the actors or the screenwriter or the director. I’m not wondering if the trees in the background are real. (They probably aren’t.) I just give myself over to the experience. Only after the magic is over will I wonder how the movie was made.

Similarly, after reading “Infidelity,” I begin to see how hard everything is working to create the experience: the title, how it speaks to both to the parent and the child in the open-ended final lines, the narrative with all its pauses, the descriptions, the lines, the line breaks, the turns, the repetition, even the comma in the middle of the thirteenth line, for crying out loud. Everything works together to draw me into the world of the poem, not the world of the poet, and it happens every time. For me, this is why it’s essential for my bookshelf, because it’s a model for the kind of poems that I like to read and the poems that I aim to write.
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Blas Falconer is the author of two poetry collections, The Foundling Wheel and A Question of Gravity and Light, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latino: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, his poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Puerto del Sol. He is the Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the low-residency MFA at Murray State University. His third poetry collection, Forgive the Body This Failure, is forthcoming through Four Way Books in 2018.

Christopher Petruccelli is an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and is currently trying to survive his first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska. His poetry has appeared in Connotation Press, Still: The Journal, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Action at a Distance, is available from UIndy’s Etchings Press. In his free time, Chris enjoys smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Natalie Easton Reads “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds

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Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Natalie Easton reads “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds.

I’m such a Sharon Olds fan, I’m excited you picked her. Before we get into the great poem you recorded for us, can you tell us a little about your first Olds experience?

Natalie Easton: Picking her was almost unavoidable, for me. She’s always the first to spring to mind when I think about whose work I’ve enjoyed wholeheartedly. I knew of her, of course, but my first real introduction to her came after you visited my house in May 2014 and left Satan Says behind. (I still have it–sorry, you’ll get it back, promise.) I loved her accessibility, her lack of frivolity, her poetic narrative full of truth and completely lacking in pretense. I loved the way her poetry made me cringe; her descriptions of our bodies, of her sense of family, of conflicting emotions so tightly entwined that betrayal and love become almost indistinguishable. She makes it easy to believe that this dynamic is the norm. She implies–more than explains–how these feelings came to mesh in her mind, but manages to completely avoid sentimentality.

My love cemented further in June of that same year when I devoured Strike Sparks on a camping trip, her book in one hand and a drink in the other.

Sundress: I think what strikes me most about “Sex Without Love” is how she first compares two people having sex without love as “beautiful as dancers” and “gliding over each other like ice skaters,” then as pros, “the great runners, alone with the road surface” and how these ideas feel so contradictory, and yet, both are imbued with a sense of wonderment and admiration by Olds. What strikes you most?

Natalie Easton: What strikes me most about the acts you mentioned is obvious, of course: the physicality involved. These are sports she’s talking about, where there are goals achieved and medals given. Of course, those things can just be done for pleasure, but nonetheless there is a competitive nature there.

 What grabs me in general about the poem is her desperation to separate herself emotionally from the act, and how she even subtly hints at the pain involved when one cannot do that: “wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away.” She envies these lovers, but never has to state it; we come to conclusions about her emotional state of mind through what she doesn’t say.

Sundress: I agree, it is a lot about “What she doesn’t say.” Okay, for a minute, let’s say “Sex Without Love” is a lesson—what does it teach?

Natalie Easton: In terms of interpretation, I think perhaps it could teach us to look closer at how even the supposedly pleasurable is something to be worked toward. (Her work always teaches us about the failings of our humanity.) Common, everyday occurrences get parsed endlessly by people with high emotional intelligence, which I think certainly describes Olds. One person may experience something and walk away feeling strangely discontent, but an artist like Olds brings those muddled feelings to light and identifies them.

In terms of formatting, when I read this poem aloud I tried my best to capture the breathlessness of it–the running, the gasping for air: the passion in those line breaks. I’m not sure how well I got that across, but that was one thing that, for me, reading the poem aloud revealed. The other thing I notice in this poem is the imagery: first we have ice skaters, but then red steak and wine and wet babies and runners. Mixing images like this is something I’m wary of doing in my own poetry because it can easily become distracting and inefficient, but she makes it flow; there is a logic in her associations.

Also: no stanza breaks. She shows us with these poems that they aren’t always necessary, but again, this poem is all about breath; in this instance, the reader should feel close to running out.

Sundress: Having read the entirety of Strike Sparks, how would you say “Sex Without Love,” from her second book, compares to her newer work? What is essential Olds?

Natalie Easton: What the poems of Strike Sparks, her collected works, have in common is the gut punch. This is something she has always been capable of, but I feel that her more recent work has seen her style become more polished, her descriptions more keen. There’s that constant kernel of truth that makes you want to barrel on ahead recklessly, sucking in your breath the whole time. Of course, there is no questioning that she’s always been pretty fantastic.

Essential Olds is, I would say, about getting to the uncomfortable, and then living there so comfortably that we all squirm to read it but are unable to look away; who would want to, when what she has to say is so human and interesting? I marvel at her ability to discuss intimacy in the way she does, and how her own fractured relationships have led her to long for things in a way that never seems requited. Sadly. Maybe that’s partly the temperament of artists in general–a driving factor.

Sundress: How has Olds influenced your own writing?

Natalie Easton: I don’t know that my answer to this question will be anything but banal. I think what every artist does, in the face of work they admire, is try to learn by osmosis. There’s a certain helplessness there, as well: the idea that I will never do this. But we try to take elements of what we love so much, and then put our own spin on it. For me it’s the way Olds describes things…I feel the same way when reading Ted Hughes’ work: “How did she/he get to this description, to this thing I feel all the time, and put it into words?” Everything is so clear; even what we haven’t experienced feels like truth in their experienced hands. They make it all look so easy. It’s anything but. That’s the level I’d love to reach one day.

Sundress: Who else “makes it all look so easy?” Other than Olds, who would you recommend?

Natalie Easton: I love Mark Doty, always, though I can’t say he always makes it look easy; at times he gets quite cerebral. I enjoy it, but can’t emulate that. Ellen Bryant Voigt is fantastic; I particularly enjoyed her book Shadow of Heaven. I frequently recommend C.D. Wright’s “Deepstep Come Shining,” which was suggested to me by the poet Russel Swensen, who reminds me of a poetic Bret Easton Ellis. He’s a Black Lawrence Press poet, and they always put out good stuff, so give him a go. Michael Bazzett is another one; You Must Remember This is worth a read. I also have a slew of books I acquired while at Bread Loaf that I haven’t managed to get through yet, so when I’m done with those I’ll have a lot more to recommend, no doubt.

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Natalie Easton’s poems have appeared in such publications as Jet Fuel Review, Superstition Review, and Sweet. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2014, and was a contributor at Bread Loaf in 2015. Later that year she went to Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a week-long SAFTA residency.

Rhiannon Thorne‘s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Midwest Quarterly, and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, among others. She is the Managing Editor of cahoodaloodaling and an associate interviewer and a book reviewer at Up the Staircase Quarterly.