What would you want to do for your community for poetry?

If you had the opportunity to do whatever you wanted to make your community a better place for poetry, a more artistic place, a place where people would actually want to read and talk about poetry…what would you do?

I’ve lived intermittently on the East side of Seattle for thirteen years, ever since I was recruited here by Microsoft in late 1999. Back then, I wandered through libraries and coffee shops looking for posters or notes about poetry readings or workshops, not finding anything. I remember complaining, I am ashamed to say, with other East siders, about the lack of culture on the East side, how we had to go downtown to do anything literary – even though the East side is and has been crawling with artistic types, writers and visual artists. Redmond and Bellevue actually have some of the best libraries I’ve ever used. Yes, the lack of bookstores (since Borders closed recently) is a little offputting (I have to drive 20 minutes to Woodinville or Overlake to find a literary magazine…)

So over the last ten years, I got the opportunity to know some people with RASP (Redmond Association of Spoken Word) and volunteered briefly with the poetry reading series at Soul Food Books. So there are poetry communities here. But if I wanted to do more…to create more opportunities for people to hear poetry, to write their own work, to create a useful space for poetry…Instead of complaining, to actively go out and create what we’re looking for…

What would you do?

The first poems you loved – Summer flu edition

I confess to having been in bed all day today due to a sudden onset of flu, complete with middle-of-the-night stomach upset and fevers that make me flushed and hot and then freezing, so forgive me if I indulge in a little nostalgic reminiscing. You can blame the fever! Although I was productive yesterday, today it took all of my mental and physical energy just to catch up on reading magazines. I just read Mary Ruefle’s lovely essay in Poetry Magazine’s 100 Years issue, and her essay made me reminisce about the first poems I fell in love with. My mother went back to college, having dropped out when she was 18 to marry my father, when I was in grade school, and so during her classes she would share what she learned, read me her textbooks out loud. I especially loved two of her books – a biology text by Stephen J. Gould and X.J. Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry (the 1969 edition.)
Two poems I first loved, I remember being nine, were John Berryman’s Dream Song that begins “Life, Friends, is Boring” and T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to middle-aged insecure men, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” My mother would read these poems out loud to me, and we would laugh and repeat our favorite phrases to each other throughout the day. The first poem I ever memorized was e.e. cummings’ “anyone lives in a pretty how town” for a middle school poetry recitation contest. The second was Louis Simpson’s “My Father in the Night Commanding No,” pretty much still the best disaffected suburban childhood poem ever. Mad Men has nothing on this poem in terms of mood and tone, trust me. Though both of these poems had a set rhyme scheme, both seemed to be written in casual, conversation language, none of that awkward phrasing that characterized (I thought as later as a teen in English classes) those terrible Romantic poets. Wordsworth and Longfellow? No thanks! And honestly, while I admire a rhyme that doesn’t call attention to itself, I’d still rather read something that at least seems like free verse, that doesn’t seem…well…caged or trapped in its form. Shakespeare aside. 
I was awfully young at nine and ten to understand or identify with Eliot’s early midlife crisis (he was in his twenties when he wrote Prufrock, FYI) and it’s curious to think about why I loved the poem so much. It’s great sonics? The sense of humor? The precarious sense of decay and disaster? The slightly whining tone and the sense of irony in both this and “Life, Friends…” would seem totally outside the experience of a nine-year old girl who grew up on a farm in Knoxville. I read these poems out loud in my room, memorizing the poem by repetition, trying different inflections, different tones and speeds, trying to understand the mindset of the writers.
I wonder how these poets affected me as a person and a writer, how the idea of humor from Eliot and Berryman being important in poetry, how Simpson’s use of surrealism heightened the sadness of his poem by making it slightly dreamlike, how their tricks might have slipped into my own work over the years. Once in a while I’ll be re-reading a poem – maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I loved in sixth grade, or H.D., whom I loved as an undergrad – and I’ll notice the echo of one of their lines in a poem I had just written. Now that I am, ahem, middle-aged myself – quickly approaching forty, not thirty – do Berryman and Eliot’s angst resonate any more than they ever did? The magic of poetry is the willingness of a nine-year-old girl to imagine a thirty-year-old man’s fear of balding, a child to imagine the state of mind that would render great art and literature dull. What were the first poems you loved? How do you think they’ve affected you?

Rose Red Review feature, Persona Poetry Discussions and LA Review in Redmond!

A kind of mini-preview of my next book, Unexplained Fevers, is up as a feature at the brand new and wonderful Rose Red Review’s summer issue. There is a poem from Unexplained Fevers and a piece of accompanying art by Deborah Scott here and here. (We’re thinking about using Deborah’s “Snow White” piece, the one with my Rapunzel poem, as the cover for our collaborative art/poetry book…what do you think? She has so many good fairy-tale-themed paintings, it’s hard to pick just one!)

Kathleen Kirk has an interesting discussion my essay on Persona Poetry at Escape into Life here, along with Sandy Longhorn’s work…bringing up interesting points about empathy, how one person’s vanilla might not be so vanilla to someone else…

Last night I got to see two LA Review editors read at Soul Food Books, Kelly Davio and Tanya Chernov. They did a wonderful job reading, and I’m so excited to find more poets on my side of town! And LA Review remains as beautiful as ever – a great journal! 


I’ve got so much stuff coming up this summer…a special (job-related) announcement coming up July 17th…then I’ll be teaching up at Port Townsend Writers Conference…then doing Geek Girl Con and a reading for Cincinnati Review in August – what happened to the long slow days of summer? And speaking of which, as it’s 59 and raining outside…what happened to summer in general? (Weather report: gray cold rain for six days straight. Okay, Seattle, ha ha. Joke’s over. Let’s bring out that blue sky!)

In Which it Doesn’t Quite Feel like Summer Yet…

While the rest of the country has been in the throes of a heat wave, we here in the Seattle area have been shivering into our wool coats and fuzzy boots with day after day of cold drizzle. Yesterday evening around 7 PM the sun broke out and it reached almost 70 degrees for the first time in ages. Summer? It barely feels like spring has arrived yet…

I confess I haven’t been spending enough time writing, but lots of time on administrative work for jobs and such. I turned in the grades for my National class; last weekend we had friends over to celebrate the new house, which was really fun (most popular foods: blanched asparagus with white bean hummus and chips with grilled watermelon salsa – the health conscious poets! and most popular drink, pomegranate champagne cocktail;) yesterday I attended my first ever city council meeting, and tonight I’ll go to my first HOA meeting. All over the place, appointments that I’ve put off for yearly doctor and dentist things. I feel too busy to read, even sit still for long, and when I do either something needs to be written up (still in the middle of finishing a book review and my class notes for the Port Townsend Writers Conference) or I need to respond to e-mails or…well, you know the feeling.

I am looking forward to a little more down time, a little more of a creative spark, a little time to wonder and ponder and pay attention to the insistent bird calls, the way the roses have snuck up on us with their blooms.

In Which a Writer Pieces Together Her Life

I realize from talking lately to friends that so many of us, as writers, live fragmented lives…we have writing lives, and work lives, and family lives, and maybe a couple of other lives as well. It’s really hard to keep giving to each different life, keeping them all going. It might well lead to fragmented selves. I’ve been at the task of piecing together a work life and a writing life that leads to some kind of reasonable balance, trying to get organized and focus on my long-term goals. While taking stock of the years from age 19-current, you know that the single stable factor was across all the years, more than the type of job, longer than my marriage has lasted, besides poetry? Volunteering. Mostly with teens and children, at schools, churches, children’s hospitals, writing workshops. I realized that this probably means that what I want to do is have a positive impact on the world, more than making money, more than any specific career goal. It’s something I hadn’t realized about myself. I mean, I need to pay off those student loans eventually, right?

I went through my giant three boxes of literary magazines and realized that some writers I thought I was just now discovering: Karyna McGlynn, for instance, whose book “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl” I reviewed for The Rumpus and loved, or Karen Carissimo, the wonderful perfumer, whose poetry I have literally had in my possession for over ten years in different literary magazines…these writers aren’t new discoveries, I’ve been reading them for years! I thought about how long it takes writers to make an impact. I was thinking I’m going to be on my third book next year and how it still feels like a struggle to even make a little bit of noise in the howling hollow of the poetry book world. The other thing these boxes made me realized is how many of these magazines had a sentimental value: my friend Natasha Moni’s first issue of Crab Creek Review as editor; an issue of a defunct magazine a bunch of my Seattle and blog friends are in; my fellow Pacific U alum friend Felicity Shoulders’ first story in Asimov’s. The first issue of A Public Space, which included a ton of contemporary Japanese lit stuff that helped me research my second book. A six-year-old issue of Paris Review that has an amazing AS Byatt story about contemporary mermaids. Heck, I still have my seventh-grade poetry textbook, with my loopy cursive handwriting notes on the poems.

So it would seem that though I think of myself as a poet who is pretty hard-headed, practical, business-y, (at least for a poet) I’m actually full of sentiment and care-taking impulses. Sometimes our physical possessions indicate something about our real selves, and unpacking forces us to realize this.