Finalists for National Book Awards in Poetry for 2018

The finalists for the 2018 National Book Awards have been announced, and the Finalists for Poetry are:

Rae Armantrout, Wobble

Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of

Justin Phillip Reed, Indecency

Jenny Xie, Eye Level

                     

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Are You a Practicing Poet?

Are you a practicing poet?  The new craft book, The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics has in its title a double meaning. As an adjective, "practicing" means actively working at a profession, such as medicine, law or poetry. But as an implied verb, all poets are practicing their craft, like an athlete always trying to improve.

The editor of this collection of craft essays, writing prompts, and sample poems is Diane Lockward. Diane fits both definitions.

As a practicing poet, her collections of poetry include, most recently, The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, as well as What Feeds Us  and Eve’s Red Dress.

As a teacher and poet, Diane knows the need for continuous practice in the craft of poetry. Her blog and newsletter includes many prompts and craft lessons.

The Practicing Poet is her third craft book. It was preceded by The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop and a sequel, The Crafty Poet II.

In this new book, there are ten sections with each devoted to a poetic concept, such as "Discovering New Material," "Working with Sentences and Line Breaks," "Crafting Surprise," and "Transforming Your Poems." The final section, "Publishing Your Book," covers manuscript organization, book promotion, and how to present a good public reading.

The book includes thirty brief craft essays, each followed by a model poem, analysis of the poem's craft, and then a prompt based on the poem.

Full disclosure: I have known Diane for many years, going back to when both of us were high school English teachers and poets who were practicing. I also have sample poems in The Crafty Poet and The Practicing Poet.

Her craft books are suitable as a classroom text, a guidebook in a workshop, or an at-home tutorial for the practicing poet who is working independently.

Each section includes 3 craft tips from such poets as Nicole Cooley, Patrick Donnelly, Barbara Hamby, Molly Peacock, Diane Seuss, Maggie Smith, and Lawrence Raab.

Plus, each section also includes 3 model poems contributed by such poets as Thomas Lux, Joseph Bathanti, Camille Dungy, James Galvin, and Vievee Francis. These 30 model poems each have an analysis of its poetic techniques, and a prompt based on the poem.

There are also 60 sample poems suggest the possibilities in the prompts, 10 bonus prompts, and 10 poets each compiled a list of their best poetry wisdom. The lists come from Patricia Smith, Lee Upton, George Bilgere, David Kirby, Robert Wrigley, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Ellen Bass, Alberto Rios, and Oliver de la Paz.

The book represents three years of work from Diane in compiling the material in this book and the result shows her care.


          

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Prompt: Acquainted with the Night

I think most people would consider an "acquaintance" to be a person we know, but not someone we would describe as close friend. In this time of social media "friends," we probably have many more acquaintances than we have true friends.

When I heard Garrison Keillor read Robert Frost's “Acquainted with the Night,” I thought about the word and wondered if Frost's relationship with the night was like that - known, but not known very well.

A dictionary will tell you I am wrong because "acquainted" means having personal knowledge of something by way of study and experiences. A lawyer is "acquainted with law" and that (hopefully) means he is informed about it through studying it and dealing with it in real situations.

This made me reread Frost's poem looking for the deeper relationship the speaker has with the night from studying and experiencing it. This is not some lightweight relationship with the night.  

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

When I studied this poem in college, it was presented the poet's thoughts on depression. Experiencing depression was like walking through the night. Whether the person walks in a city or beyond it to where there is no light, he is alone.

That interpretation seems less certain to me now. I feel that the poem is as much about experiencing the literal night and darkness as it is about any symbolic meanings we attach to the night.

The night does not "call me back or "say good-by" and the night - and my interpretation - is "neither wrong nor right."

For our October writing prompt, write a poem about something (not someone) that you are acquainted with. That means you know it quite well - both by study of some kind and by personal experiences.

Follow Frost's titling and use "acquainted with" as part of your title.

You also might want to follow Frost's other formal elements. His poem is strict iambic pentameter. It has 14 lines like a sonnet. It has a terza rima rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc dad aa). That rather complex "third rhyme" is credited to Dante Alighieri from his The Divine Comedy. Be warned: terza rima is easier in Italian because so many Italian words have vowel endings.

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Publish, Don't Perish

The question that poets probably get asked the most in workshops is how to get published. There are thousands of articles, hundreds of books and an endless amount of advice that is shared about how to get published.

I'm sure there is good information in all those places, but I would say the best answer is that you have to write good poems and you have to send them out regularly.

No one is going to come up to you at a reading or at your writing desk and ask for a poem or manuscript for them to publish. That is the one in a million kind of story I associate with starlets being spotted by a director at a soda fountain on Hollywood Blvd. in the 1930s.

We can offer a few places to look for places to publish.

How about this appealing headline: "1,290+ Literary Magazines Ready to Publish Your Work?"  That was the tagline for the Literary Magazines database at Poets and Writers magazine.  You can use it to research publications before submitting your work, and then use it for deadlines for contest and submissions.

It has a wide variety of publications, from the well known to the never-heard-of: That Literary Review is interested in "creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry of the mysterious and the wonderful." New Letters seeks "creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry regardless of subject, style, or genre." Your Impossible Voice publishes "brash and velvety new work," including creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.

Poetry Mountain also has a list of literary magazines, as does poetrykit.org.

Again, the secret is sending out your work. Prepare for rejections. A baseball player only has to hit once out of three at bats to have an excellent .333 batting average. For poets, one acceptance for ten submissions would make you an all-star. But you have to take some swings.

          

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Author Realia

There is something about the homes, writing desks and objects from writers' lives that people find fascinating.

The New York Public Library's Berg Collection is an archive containing of manuscripts and archival materials. The NYPL labels as "realia" non-paper items.

They have Charlotte Brontë’s writing desk (with a lock of her hair inside) Jack Kerouac's harmonicas, boots, lighter and a card upon which he wrote 'blood' in his own blood. Interesting, but what would we hope to take from these objects or from typewriters belonging to S. J. Perelman and Paul Metcalf, Mark Twain’s pen and wire-rimmed glasses, Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly drawings?

As a poet, what would you take away from viewing the death masks of the poets James Merrill and E. E. Cummings? They might inspire you to write about the poets, I suppose.

On March 28, 1941, Virginia Woolf took her final walk, into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex with her her trusty cane in hand and you can see that cane with her things in the short New Yorker video below.




Does being in the presence of a writer's "realia" impart some creative or other spirit to the viewer? I know that I have felt something when I have visited the homes and even the graves of writers. I haven't decided on what that something might be.

There are some writing prompts to be found in these homes and in the objects there. I know I felt it when I walked through Walt Whitman's home and visited his grave.

Have you ever experienced this yourself? Share that experience in a comment to this post.

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Prompt: Poetry in School

Most of us were introduced to poetry in school. As a teacher, I hope it was a kind introduction, but there are many people whose introduction to poetry in school seems to have been unpleasant.

Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry" is one that is often used to make a point about poetry in the classroom. The teacher asks the students to "take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide / or press an ear against its hive." Though the teacher wants the students to simply enjoy the poem - "to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author's name on the shore" - the students have been trained in school about how to read a poem, so they want to "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means."

You may have more pleasant memories of your introduction to poetry or a good classroom encounter with poetry in a classroom. I can recall how Mrs. Cavico read and spoke about Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" with such love and appreciation - and how she recognized that I "got it" while most of the class looked out the window at kids in gym class.

Having met her and heard her read and talk about writing, I imagine poet Naomi Shihab Nye would be a great teacher to have for poetry. In one of her poems, "The Young Poets of Winnipeg,"
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase…
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
encouraged them to stretch, wouldn’t let their parents
attend the reading because parents might criticize

These very confident young poets had not been taught to tie down a poem or beat it.

They knew their poems
were glorious, that second-graders could write better
than third or fourth, because of what happened
on down the road, the measuring sticks
that came out of nowhere, poking and channeling
the view

For our September, back-to-school prompt, write a poem about poetry in school. I'm guessing we have positive and negative tales to tell, from our own experiences as students and teachers or from imagined classrooms.

Submission guidelines.        Submission deadline September 30, 2018

         

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Listening

Not everyone has the opportunity to attend poetry readings in their local area, but thankfully there are many available online. One source I was browsing and listening to today is the PoetryFoundation.org which has almost 3000 audio files.

I was just browsing and clicking and listening - the audio equivalent of doing that through an anthology.

I will admit to clicking on poems just because a title caught my attention - like 

"On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes" by Mary Szybist, which begins:

 

—how her loose curls float 

above each silver fish as she leans in 

to pluck its eyes— 

or listening to "How to Love Bats" by Judith Beveridge:

open your mouth, out will fly names

like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,

listen for a frequency

lower than the seep of water, higher

than an ice planet hibernating

beyond a glacier of Time.

As with browsing a poetry anthology or journal or an open reading, you will encounter poets you have never read before, which is always a good thing. 

I also subscribe/listen to the Poetry Foundation's podcast in which the editors talk to poets published in Poetry magazine and critics to discuss in more detail the issue. Conversations about poems are also something you might get at a reading. For example, I listened to a discussion about Terrance Hayes’s poem “How to Draw a Perfect Circle” and then promptly sat down to write a how-to poem of my own.

Some people say clicking these links leads you into a rabbit hole of more and more clicks. That is sometimes true for me. After listening to the Haye's podcast, I did click deeper into the prose selections on the site and read an essay "Another Life - Terrance Hayes and the poetics of the un-thought" by Joshua Bennett Hayes’s latest collection, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. It is a collection from the 200 days between President Trump’s election and the early summer of 2017. He wrote 70 sonnets which come from that time but are more about what led up to Trump's election.

After that though, I needed to return to some poetry to cleanse my poetry palate - perhaps William Blake's "The Ecchoing Green."  After too much reality, Blake sounds so happy that we might view him as naive. That would be a mistake.

...laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green...’

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