"Drought" in New Statesman

My poem, "Drought," in the last print issue of New Statesman, is now available to read online. Imaginatively set in central Illinois, it comes from a manuscript in progress about home, family and death (would that I were joking) titled The Weather in Normal.*





*You know Normal's the name of my hometown, right?

Heather Phillipson's Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe, 2013)

Some favourite passages from this delightful first collection:


I had discovered that the earth goes around the sun.
Copernicus pre-discovered it.

last stanza of 'Heliocentric Cosmology'

Enjoy your western wafts of coolth, thwacking in off the broad Pacific. It's not possible to describe the climate here. We lie low like coy carp.

end of 'Dear Johnny Bunny,'

(that title should be struck through)

                                                        Only those

who still have hope can capitalise on sobbing. 

end of 'Darling, You Missed a Revelation'

Remember when I was this tall

a flourishing know-nothing at the height

                         of her drawing pencils!

*

Is this true why did I say it?

from 'Speech to Be Delivered at the First Convenient Occasion'

Bookcases aren't reassuring, love.

Literature is too exciting, enmeshes you in its concerns

and irregular verbs, half-lost in personal sundry items.

from 'An Encounter in the New Language'

Remember the mind has uncharted districts.

Fork up events. Prime them to happen.

from 'Fingers Are Not Ignorable'

                                                                     Touching the dead

marries them to us, us too death marries.

from 'Oh. Is he dead?'

Is there no law against junk thought? Is this modernity?

from 'When the City Centre's at a Standstill, It's Really

Quite a Thrill to Lie in the Road and Read Herman Melville'

Through windows, the road is an extensive misunderstanding

confirmed by an engine. It is panoramic condensation.

opening stanza of 'How Things Haven't Changed'

At time of posting, Instant-flex 718 is 25% off at Foyle's (UK).

Jennifer Militello's Body Thesaurus (Tupelo, 2013), second selection

A second and final selection of favourite passages from this book:


                      Never and always sleep so close
their hair intertwines and tangles as they twist.

*

         Sometimes this means ignoring the nudity
of a quiet day.

from "The Smoldering Hand"

As it is, I am rich with different versions of myself, and I do not know an antidote for me.

from "Autobiography toward a Study of a Thousand Wounds"

The corridors of me whisper with chains.

*

                              I pass through ghosts 

of my own gone self. The little winds

that are its pulse.

from "Autobiography with God Complex and Epidemic"

How the sleep came, a downdraft

of birds.

 from "Autobiography in Not-Song and October"

                              The impossible strings

of pearls I once believed were days.

from "What Cultivation Means"

Welcome to changing everything. Welcome to starving

out of sleep. By morning, weariness will have replaced

the jawbone of a thinned and willful sky.

This illness is savage. These clouds, they are scythes.

end of "There Remain New Branches"

They kept evolving unpredictable results, found a vertigo of snakes and called it the mind, found time and called us its puppets.

from "Antidote with Attempts at Diagnosis"

What hooks you breaks you. Rides you clean.

*

Blessed are those for whom the sound of memory has a sharpness of violins.

          They shall feel scaffolding deep in the blood.

Blessed are those who walk a shoreline while its whispers swarm.

          Meaning is a bird call in the interim.

from "Antidote with Beatitudes"

                              It is not the trait

of an inherited gene, it is not inherited:

it is ours to take. What being means

is a trick that brightens. One finds oneself

queen among the dead. One finds oneself draped

in ashes and made. The shapes of rain and

candid lenses. The facts of hammer and grease.

end of "Wholeness Is an Imagined State"

At the time of this posting, Foyle's has Body Thesaurus for 35% off.

Jennifer Militello's Body Thesaurus (Tupelo, 2013), first selection

Back in 2008, I posted some fine passages from an issue of one of my favourite American literary magazines, Denver Quarterly. One of them was by Jennifer Militello, who in turn found me on Facebook. We met for the first time at the AWP conference in Chicago in 2012 (as she lives in New Hampshire). 

While I liked her first collection, Flinch of Song, I'm loving her second collection, Body Thesaurus. Here's my first selection of some of my favourite passages from it.


Then the color blue, like the pupil music dilates
inside us, throws wet on the line a twisted dress,
so free of the body's stem that within its shape

a storm is seen.

*

Truth brings in its hissing room.

from "The Skins We Slit Seeking the Vertebrae of Snakes"

I paled like a throat of birch.

*

Each small animal fallen wild. What I thought

was cold cried in the night like an abandoned well.

from "Personality State: Prophet"

I want to give fate a reason

to hate me and exhaust me and lick me up.

*

One eye to the nowhere periscope of sleep.

*

The many bicycles of memory and their many

broken chains.

*

                                                         Flock

of road, wind forbidden, excellence of coast.

from "Personality State: Scavenger's Daughter"

...the sky's white sheet drying in the wind....

*

The wheat has a wind-violence in it yet.

from "Personality State: Persephone"

I am only wolves, a thin endless shiver of what

is undernourished, of what I once saw drinking

with its stone-cold tongue at the plethora of rain.

*

Death: its mere parasol baptized me once.

My memories are necklaces made from its teeth.

from "Personality State: Animal"

A hungry downriver in my voice.

from "Somnambulism"

Things too thin inhabit our dreams and we take on

their starving.

*

There is an entire August storm in everything said,

and to open the violent hives of remembering,

we imagine marigolds, birds drowned in the creek,

the lights left on in a room left behind.

from "Afterburn"

Late August already. The jagged at their sins.

God crouching at the labor of us, us crouching

at the labor of ourselves....

*

I hear reasons not to cry but I am crying to feel

the cold come in like an illness that will recover me.

from "Interview under Hypnosis"

When joy is hollow armor, fractures can be seen

where clean breaks are imagined; in a world

where nothing is clear, the world is a wound.

from "X-Ray of a Rib Cage"

At the time of posting, Body Thesaurus is available from Foyle's for 35% off.

"Interview under Hypnosis" by Jennifer Militello

I've been reading Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press), the new second collection by my friend Jennifer Militello, and asked her if I could post the following poem here.

Interview under Hypnosis

Describe what you would have seen had the roosters

woken you closer to dawn.

Late August already. The jagged at their sins. 

God crouching at the labor of us, us crouching

at the labor of ourselves, with iron rods sewn

inside our clothes to keep our glass bodies

from breaking. Listening shivers at

the nerve endings. Things unfailingly cringe.

Describe being endangered.

I hear reasons not to cry but I am crying to feel

the cold come in like an illness that will recover me.

A bruise finds me, a bruise knows where I sleep:

the pear’s sickly skin the color of a throat,

ravines that sing where ravines never were,

the sky in igneous ropes. 

Describe being unreal.

When I finally woke, what was the world

but sleep. Graveyards where the wind is why,

wild as cursive and motorcycle-stark and white

as a gown of waiting. I am melting toward a world,

the small belly, into vivid such-liquids and

a disguise of lavishes. October lacerations.

The neon nears. No one tells me what

to believe and for once I believe in nothing.

Jennifer Militello

At the time of posting, Body Thesaurus is available from Foyle's at a brilliant 35% discount. 

National Poetry Writing Month: Done! (Whew!)

This afternoon I managed to write the draft for a last poem for National Poetry Month, and I'm relieved, pleased and tired. How have others done? 

I enjoyed the process much more when I was on spring break; when I came back to teaching, in the final weeks of term, writing a poem a day felt like more of an assignment than an indulgence. I'm tempted to pass on it next year and do something similar in the summer instead. We'll see. 

I'd be glad to hear what exercises people tried that they found most effective or successful, as I use such exercises in my teaching and try to stick to the ones that prove most useful.

Congratulations, everyone!

NaPoWriMo, one week to go!

Who's still doing a poem a day? (I am!) If you've fallen behind, there's still time to catch up!

Poetry Prompts, Nos. 20-30

How did I come to feel obligated to provide a prompt for each day of National Poetry Month this year? I don't understand it, but I feel it and persist nonetheless.

20. Sandra Lim has some splendid titles in her first collection, Loveliest Grotesque. Use one of these as the title for your own poem: "Curious This"; "The Horse and Its Rider"; "Reasoning in a Raw Wind"; "Ballad of the Last Chance"; "Year of the Gallows Birds"; "You Could Feel That Freedom Coming on Too".

21. Find a photograph or online image of the place you live from at least fifty years ago, and describe the place as though you were there now.

22. Write an ode to your favourite vegetable. For inspiration, here's Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Artichoke."

23. Think of something unpleasant that happened to you as a child--a bee sting, an embarrassment, a natural disaster, a car accident, an illness, etc.--and write about it in third person. Don't tell us how the child feels--show it through her actions, the description of the environment, etc., and don't be afraid to fictionalize what happened for the sake of the poem.

24. Look at a poem of yours that you never finished or don't feel is really working, and choose your favourite line. Using it as the opening line, write a poem that takes on a subject or direction different from the one in the original poem.

25. If you have a pet, show, in a poem, how its behaviour influences your own. Don't say what kind of animal it is anywhere in the work. Your description can identify it, or you may prefer greater ambiguity, such that the poem might apply to a number of different creatures. 

26. In a place where you have lived before (or where you live now), list some specific names of the flora and fauna of that environment: the names of one or two birds; other animals (squirrels, coyotes, rabbits, etc.); one or two kinds of trees, plants and wildflowers. Now place yourself, as a character, in this environment, with one particular worry on your mind. In the poem, let the details of your concern intermingle with the details of the environment, and bring in other senses in addition to sight to give a stronger impression of the place.

27. Write a poem in response to a song. Argue or identify with the song's import as you describe a particular experience, whether real or fictional. 

28. Write an anti-ode about something you don't like or an action you don't like to do. Use vivid, concrete details to make your dislike palpable without saying it.

29. Write a poem about an object that belongs/belonged to one of your parents. You might find it easier to convey the object's meaning if you describe your parent using (or whatever word's appropriate) that object in a particular moment in time.

30. Remember a song you loved as a teenager. What might you have been doing as you heard it (driving, sitting on your bed, dancing, etc.)? Describe one scene involving your younger self and the song in such a way that the reader readily discerns how the song made you feel. Again, don't be afraid to fictionalize for the sake of the poem.

That's all, folks! I'd be glad to hear whether any of these prove useful.

Sandra Lim's Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006)

Some favourite passages:


Fall shudders red and ochre, clean through to a various pain.

*

Once, inside a night of live stars and other improbable sky lights, the conversation seemed indispensable. I'll be so willing. Ever was. Ordinary behavior, and you can walk there.

from "A Village Journal"

I wanted to see the themes grow inside us

like a talent or a tumor. Pure accident.

from "Last Mash Note"

Survival & reverie salt the palate....

from "Ballad of the Last Chance"

--sub-rosa ways of understanding self and others. The blue streak you take as a personal asterisk.

from "Where Metaphorical Moves Get Started"

...the thickening allusions alighted on all our shoulders with a look of loneliness.

the end of "What Is an Image?

                                        So there

we are, in low relief: creaturely, comely,

deducible wholly by what we have lost.

the end of "Year of the Gallows Birds"

The saddening ways slam

back and forth like a metal screendoor.

opening lines of

"You Could Feel That Freedom Coming On Too"

So often you don't think,

"Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it."

last lines of "Just Disaster"

Intent on being expressive rather than lovely, they are practically breaking with light and dark.

*

Dear unkind world, should we wonder after quiddity?

*

These rifts, these hungry expressibles, they are swiftly drawing me on.

from "There Is No Wing Like Meaning"

There is ground between loving and being pleased. See, it is a city unto itself.

from "'Wish You Were Here'"

The ferocity of the world inside has the might of weeds.

*

I feel so "personal" despite the fact that I am standing alongside myself, subject to dispersal.

*

I sing as a girl shedding the fever garden, as a boy tasting the knife of her. Word-slung and feral, I happen upon "those places in the body that have no language" but there really is no shielding in the end.

*

You'd like something of maximum vehemence and physical grace. Instead, "A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!"

from "Equilibrium"

(NB This poem has footnotes I couldn't easily include here.)

I hang the air with barbeque smoke

winding up my walk and my weft.

I longitude, I latitude, I spangle

from the core.

from "Touring, Touring, Gone"

Much later, what emerged unexpectedly but poppy. Nodding red, nodding orange, but always darkly nodding away. Between her and poppy, a torn-up world of cause and effect, pasts and prologues, broken clocks, the clatter in parting.

last stanza of "Afterword"

And the indifference of the island

bellows from shelf to shelf. A turtle rubs along.

from "Blind Future"

Loveliest Grotesque is available in the UK from Foyle's.

Poems sought for poetry anthology on human rights

The University of London’s Human Rights Consortium, in conjunction with the Keats House Poets and the Institute of English Studies, seeks submissions for a new anthology of poems about human rights. The deadline is 15 May, and further details are available here. Those writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month may want to devote a day to drafting an appropriate poem, then revise and submit it once the month's out.