The Mimeo Revolution

The “Mimeo Revolution” was a period stretching from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s when small-press publishing proliferated. Many poets started their own presses, producing small books and magazines that ranged from letterpress publications to mimeographed and photocopied pamphlets.

In the late 1960s, I "published" my own "underground" newspaper, The New Times, photocopied covertly on the Xerox machine at my after-school job and distributed by hand at my high school and to friends.

Handmade books, self-publishing and publishing others who had few opportunities to be published in the mainstream presses. Some of the poets of the period include LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Jones, co-founders of Totem Press, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights.

The avant-garde Mimeo Revolution fostered diverse literary communities and gave new voices a national and occasionally international platform.

Poets House in New York has one of the most comprehensive and various chapbook collections in the United States. You can find out more about this period in publishing that helped foster many poets in their digital collection of chapbooks. One example that you can read online is Diane di Prima's 1973 Loba Part 1 from Capra Press.

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A Constellation of Kisses

A Constellation of Kisses, is a brand new anthology edited by Diane Lockward.  The song says that "A kiss is just a kiss," but poets often remind us that a kiss is rarely just a kiss. Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets.


You'll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed, ritualistic kissing, delicious kissing. There is kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union.

Kisses in this anthology may be romantic or funny or comforting or erotic or mournful--and more.

We may hope that kissing always begins in delight and keeps on being delightful. But the truth, of course, is otherwise. This is, after all, a constellation of kisses.

May there be no end to the most genuine kisses, the right kisses, the ones that are good and meant for us to savor. And while we're at it, let's wish for no end to poems about kissing. (from the Foreword by Lee Upton)

Full Disclosure: A poem of mine is included in this anthology.

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Prompt: The Summer Of

Summer is fully upon us. I was flipping through the anthology Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools that was a project of Billy Collins when he was U.S. Poet Laureate and I noticed several summer-title poems. 

To a high school student, summer is some faraway paradise when you are sitting in a classroom. I could imagine myself back in high school English class hearing one of those poems and drifting away to summer past or future.

The poem I settled on for this month is "The Summer I Was Sixteen" by Geraldine Connolly which Collins found in her collection, Province of Fire (1998 Iris Press). It is set at the town pool, but it would work set at any public lake or beach. Her poem is in the Duke-of-Earl1960s but not much has changed in the rituals of summer pool life with sun lotion, blankets on the grass, the snack bar and boys studying girls and girls study boys with an intensity they didn't give to studying poetry in school weeks earlier. I understand those kids looking at:

"thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine

across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance

through the chain link at an improbable world."

In another poem from the collection, "Summer in a Small Town" by Linda Gregg, the voice is older, but still thinking about the opposite sex.

" When the men leave me, 

they leave me in a beautiful place.

It is always late summer."

And in this adult view, we are not looking across a crowded pool and hearing the sounds of kids singing summer songs.

"I swim in the public pool

at six when the other people

have gone home. "

And I might have chosen the more famous poem in the collection, "The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver. No pool here. The voice is having one-on-one time this a grasshopper who she encountered while strolling this summer field.

It makes the speaker wonder "Who made the grasshopper?" and eventually to say that she doesn't know "exactly what a prayer is. "

What she does know, as many poets know, is "how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed."

She concludes with another question - this time more to you than to the universe of a God: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

For this July, we asked for poems that specifically begin with a title that tells us the age of the speaker (as Connolly does) or the year of the summer that is being written about. That is, write a poem of a specific summer and use the speaker's age or the year itself as the basis for the poem.

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Podcasts and Poetry

An NPR story talks about how "Podcasts Are Providing A New Way Into Poetry" for listeners.  I have been listening to podcasts since 2005 when iTunes made them more accessible via subscriptions in their software.

Today, there are more ways to subscribe and listen. iTunes still works and many podcasts are available on a website. I prefer listening and downloading ones to listen to later using Stitcher on my phone or tablet. It's a free app and almost all podcasts are also free.

Besides my daily doses of news and many interview programs that I am listening to all week, I subscribe to a variety of programs devoted to poetry. You can do a search for them in whatever app you decide to use.

Here are my current top 5 favorites.

1. The Slowdown - Former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith does this on weekdays. She opens with a personal essay and then reads someone's poem that relates to that topic. Highly recommended.
2. Poetry Off the Shelf – poets, poems, poetry topics from The Poetry Foundation
3. The New Yorker: Poetry - Hosted by poetry editor Kevin Young. A guest poet selects and reads a poem from the magazine by someone else and also one of their own.
4. The Poetry Magazine Podcast - Poetry magazine's editors go inside the new issue and talk to poets who read their contributions.
5. The Writer's Almanac - I start each day with this 5-minute podcast hosted by Garrison Keillor who reviews events that occurred on this day in history - some literary, some not - and then reads a poem. 

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Post Your Poems

POETS ONLINE has a Facebook page, but we also have a Facebook Group page where we encourage poets to discuss our prompts, post their poems (not related to the monthly prompt) and share links to articles and other ars poetica.

Please visit and post your poems for others to read at facebook.com/groups/poetsonlinediscussion/

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Will there really be a ‘Morning’?

Will there really be a “Morning”?
Is there such a thing as “Day”?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Man from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called “Morning” lies!

by Emily Dickinson. Public domain

So simple and yet so hard to fully interpret.

Looking online, I find a number of places where people ask questions of the poem. Of course, the poem itself is full of questions.

• Is "morning" heaven? 
• Is it another day of life as opposed to an eternal night (death)? 
• Does morning coming from the East, from countries that we don't even really know? Perhaps, those countries are the unknown of an afterlife - if there is an afterlife. 
• How do we know what we know?
• Is the "little Pilgrim" that this is a child questioning the world?
• Are these religious references? Walking on water ("feet like Water lilies"), angels (feathers like a Bird") and a "pilgrimage." 

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Prompt: Epistle

sealed letter - via Flickr

An epistle is a letter in verse, usually addressed to a person close to the writer. They are sometimes moral and philosophical, or intimate and sentimental. It was most popular in the 18th century, but has continued to be used by poets. Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" is an example of this classic form.

Lord Byron and Robert Browning composed epistles in the 19th century. One of Byron’s is the “Epistle to Augusta,” written to his sister.

But the epistle is an ancient Roman poetic form. You might associate it with the epistles that are commonly found in the Bible, especially the New Testament.

Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter," are poems that read as letters. They are poems of direct address. They are free verse, without rhyme scheme or line length considerations. They are addressed to real people, imagined people, groups of people and even to things and abstract concepts.

But poets like to break rules.  Elizabeth Bishop’s "Letter to N.Y.," uses rhyming quatrains. It begins:

In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl

In the past two centuries, the epistle is generally less formal and more conversational. An example is “Dear Mr. Fanelli” by Charles Bernstein.

In Hayden Carruth’s “The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill,”  he addresses his epistle to a fellow poet and translator who was a friend to Carruth. Is Sam dead? Can we construct a person from our imagination?

The poem I chose this month as a model is by Jean Nordhaus. When I first read it, I immediately thought of the mail that I still receive at my home for both my mother and father, both of whom have died - my father a long time ago; my mother more recently.

Her poem, "Posthumous," begins:

Would it surprise you to learn
that years beyond your longest winter
you still get letters from your bank, your old
philanthropies, cold flakes drifting
through the mail-slot with your name?

There are many other epistles old and new to consider as examples, including "The Correspondence-School Instructor Says Goodbye to His Poetry Students" by Galway Kinnell.

Our June writing prompt is to write your epistle.

Submission deadline: June 30.

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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