Poetry Daily: Alicia Ostriker

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

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Click on the link for a gorgeous photograph which reminds me of this poem.

I was fortunate enough to hear Ms. Ostriker read this poem during a panel discussion at AWP Chicago. I love it.

A Walk Through the Memory Palace

I'm up at read write poem. Go take a look...

This is the cover of my chapbook, which is the work of the fabulous artist Carrie Ann Baade.

"I Think This Is the Start of a Beautiful Friendship

October 26, 1900: Henry James and Edith Wharton begin corresponding

On this day in 1900, writer Henry James first writes to Edith Wharton, whom he will finally meet in 1903. Wharton, then 38, had published her first collection of stories, The Greater Inclination, the previous year. An enormous admirer of James, she modeled parts of her work after his, including his attention to form and his interest in ethical questions. The two became great friends, and James encouraged her writing.

Wharton was born to a wealthy, patrician family in New York in 1862. She grew up in an opulent world where pre-Civil War society kept the nouveau riche at bay, maintaining its own isolated sense of superiority. Wharton, expected to become a typical wife, mother, and hostess, instead showed intellectual talent and began to write at an early age. She had begun to fear spinsterhood when, at age 23, she married prominent socialite Edward Wharton--who had no profession or money worth speaking of. The match was unhappy and troubled, but the couple did not divorce until 1913. Wharton returned to writing, often dealing with themes of divorce, unhappy marriages, and free-spirited individuals trapped by societal pressures.

Wharton's 1905 novel, The House of Mirth, told the story of a New York socialite with a strong sense of individuality who cannot adapt to the roles expected of her. The book became a bestseller.

Wharton traveled abroad frequently and after her divorce began writing for women's magazines. Her novella, Ethan Frome, detailing a New England farmer trapped by the demands of the women in his life, is still one of her best-known works. Her 1920 novel, The Age of Innocence, won the Pulitzer. Wharton published numerous other books, but some of her later work suffered from the deadlines and pressures imposed by writing for money. She remained in France during World War I, assisting refugees, and was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1916. She published another bestseller, Twilight Sleep, in 1927, and her autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934. She died in France in 1937.

(from History.com: Today in Literary History)

Can you imagine those letters?

Hart and Hull: This Week in Poetry Class

Don't they beg to be adored...

Lose control, tumble overboard?


This semester, after decades of trying, knowing I should but not having the capacity, I have finally fallen in love with Hart Crane. It took Lynda Hull's poems to bring me to his with a new understanding.

That's one of the aspects I love most about poetry, the fact that we can go forward and backward, learn and relearn lyrics.

New Poem and Old Favorite

Finally the muse has given me something into which I can sink my teeth/the nib of my pen. I have been worrying for over a year (since finishing my thesis) that I'd never write anything else. It's here, it's big for me, and it's very scary/exciting. I write more--everywhere--when I'm writing poetry, so expect to see more frequent posts again.

In our online class, we've been reading Mark Doty, and I've been thinking about turtles...Here's a little bit of Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath:

Now the going was easy, and all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side. A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached. She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment and then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot.

And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. The truck went back to its course along the right side. Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull it over. Its front foot caught a piece of quartz and little by little the shell pulled over and flopped upright. The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground. And as the turtle crawled on down the embankment, its shell dragged dirt over the seeds. The turtle entered a dust road and jerked itself along, drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust with its shell. The old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust. (from chapter 3)



Beauty bespeaks survival, right?

Juicy Juice: From Today's Writer's Almanac

It's the birthday of humorist Roy Blount Jr., (books by this author) born in Indianapolis (1941) but raised in the South in a "sort of a suburb of Atlanta" named Decatur, Georgia. He's the author of more than 20 books, covering subjects that range "from the Pittsburgh Steelers to Robert E. Lee to what dogs are thinking."

But Roy Blount loves to tell stories, and his recent book, Alphabet Juice, is a collection of stories about words — often in stream of consciousness digressions and arranged loosely like a dictionary. The book's subtitle is "The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory." He explained: "Alphabet Juice is my glossographia. Juice as in au jus, juju, power, liquor, electricity. (Loose words and clauses left lying around are like loose live wires — they'll short-circuit, burn out, disempower your lights.) As in influence; as in squeezin's; as in, the other day I saw a woman walking down the street wearing some highly low-cut shorts. On her hourglass figure, the top of those shorts was at about, I would say (not a snap judgment), twenty minutes. Just below that part of the back where some people — she, for instance — have dimples was where her waistband cut across; and just below the waistband, in two-inch letters, was an inspired, if vulgar, brand name: Juicy. (See zaftig.)"

In Alphabet Juice, there are entries for synchronicity; synesthesia; syntax collie; syrup, tallywacker; tango; taxicab; teh (originally a typo for "the"); Terpsichore; Times, The New York; tmesis ("inserting a word or nonsense syllable into another word for intensifying effect, as in … absobloominglutely"); tump; TV, on being on; and TV, being on, p.s.

There are entries for unacceptable, unbeknownst, understand, uneven, unreliable narrator, unscribable, Urbandictionary.com, Utopian and uvula. There are entries for zydeco (comes from beans) and zyzzyva (a class of weevils).

Blount devotes several pages — rife with humor and utter earnestness — to an entry on "y'all," declaring, "People who grew up with this word face the Sisyphean task of correcting people who didn't and who insist that it is sometimes singular."

Roy Blount Jr. once said, "Language seems to me intrinsically comic — noises of the tongue, lips, larynx, and palate rendered in ink on paper with the deepest and airiest thoughts in mind and the harshest and tenderest feelings at heart."

Hollywood's Byron: James Dean (died 09/30/55)

Both of them share a name (James Byron Dean) and a mythology. Too fast to live, too young to die, bye bye. *



(Eagles, "James Dean).

Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896)

I love this passage from The Crack-Up:

This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain that you are, “a constant striving” (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it). only adds to this unhappiness in the end -- that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books -- and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural -- unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over

Read more at the link above from Esquire, which published all three sections of this fine essay in 1936.

Chapbook Makes Its Debut

I'm so excited and grateful about this. Please check out the amazing job qarrtsiluni has done with the poems. The sound files, which were masterminded by Matt Markgraf, are fabulous, especially those where Harvey joins me in the two-part poems. And here's all you need to know about the cover: CARRIE ANN BAADE.

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN: TWO DAYS

till my first chapbook, A Walk Through The Memory Palace, is released...I'm so excited that I can barely stand it. There will be sound files and a beautiful cover and electronic poems and an order-me-on-Amazon spot.

I wish I could show you the cover--but it's definitely worth the wait. If I tell you the artist is Carrie Ann Baade, you'll understand why. (see the link).

Pins-and-needles-ly yours,

Pamela the Stoked

Tearsheet on Tears: Two Men in Hats

214.

TEARS! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears;
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand;
Tears—not a star shining—all dark and desolate;
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head: 5
—O who is that ghost?—that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?
Streaming tears—sobbing tears—throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering, with swift steps along the beach;
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind! O belching and desperate! 10
O shade, so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace;
But away, at night, as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosen’d ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears!

Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892 edition
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Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Tennyson, from The Princess, published 1847
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After a Stroke: Sun in an Empty Room

Still life (painting), there's still life...As in the hope of recovery. Hopper helped me get through some of the roughest patches of my post-episode convalescence. I know he's seen as a painter of loneliness, but the trinity of light is crucial.

"Whether we like it or not, we are all bound to the earth with our experience of life and the reactions of the mind, heart, and eye, and our sensations, by no means, consist entirely of form, color, and design." Edward Hopper, age 81

(This lightest of yellows is the exact color of my bedroom and the light falls in similar parallelograms).

A Walk Through the Memory Palace

Announcing the finalists and winners of the First Annual Qarrtsiluni Chapbook Contest.

At the outset, let us say thank you: thank you to the poets who submitted fifty manuscripts of astounding variety and complexity to our contest, thank you to the first-round readers and to Dinty Moore, our 2009 judge for taking on the extremely difficult job of deciding among such excellent work. Choosing the poetry that speaks to us will always be, to some extent, subjective, and it’s not only possible but likely that a different set of judges would have come up with a different set of choices. Because of that subjectivity, and our own desire to encourage written expression, experimentation, and creativity, Dave and I have always had a love/hate affair with contests. So we want to congratulate and thank all the poets, and reiterate that the quality of the work – as is so often the case at qarrtsiluni - was very high, and the choice clearly difficult. We’ve learned a lot in doing this, and hope all of you will be thinking ahead to next year.

THE PROCESS: Eight first-round readers, all of whom are former guest editors of qarrtsiluni, read the fifty submitted manuscripts in order to narrow the field to a shortlist of no more than ten. Each chapbook, identified only by title, was read by at least two readers. A shortlist of ten anonymous manuscripts was then forwarded to Dinty Moore for his final decisions.

On September 1st, we’ll begin online publication of one poem from each of the shortlisted manuscripts, and the winning chapbook in its entirety. The winner will also be published in a professionally designed paper edition, and available for sale.

THE SHORTLIST:

Paper Covers Rock, Chella Courington
Calamity Jane, Diane Gage
The Three, Richard Garcia
Wavelengths, Dick Jones
Prison Terms, Diane Kendig
Influence of Two Moons, Kit Loney
The Goatfish Alphabet, Kristen McHenry
A Walk Through the Memory Palace, Pamela Johnson Parker
ashes, ashes, Susanna Rich
And Not As She Was, Jeneva Stone

THE WINNERS, with Dinty Moore’s comments:

First Prize:

A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker

“The language is textured, clear, and sometimes disquieting, the images both sensory and sensual, and each line crafted with painstaking care. Whether writing about rich gardens, sagging breasts, or the ink of a tattoo, this poet sees through the obvious to something radiant on the other side, painting a startling portrait of an intimate world. Not a wasted word here: the nouns are like gemstones.

Pamela Johnson Parker is a medical editor and adjunct professor in creative writing and poetry. Her poems, flash fiction, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in qarrtsiluni, The Binnacle, The Other Journal, New Madrid, Pebble Lake Review, Holly Rose Review, 6 Sentences, Mipoesis, Muscadine Lines, A Journal of the South, and Anti-. She is also the featured poet in the April 2009 Broadsided series of poetry and art. A graduate of the MFA program at Murray State University, Parker lives in western Kentucky.

Pamela has had three poems published in qarrtsiluni previously.

Runners-Up:

Paper Covers Rock, by Chella Courington

“Crisp narrative lines filled with energy, indignation, and fierce beauty. The images can take your breath away, and the title poem is one I’ll never forget.”

With a Ph.D. in British and American Literature and an M.F.A. in Poetry, Chella Courington teaches writing and literature at Santa Barbara City College. Having moved west with a fiction writer and two cats in 2002, she finds that California provides her imaginative space. Her recent poetry appears in Mademoiselle’s Fingertips, Permafrost, wicked alice, Iguana Review, and The New Verse News. Her first chapbook, entitled Southern Girl Gone Wrong, was published in 2004. She’s new to the pages of qarrtsiluni.

The Goatfish Alphabet, by Kristen McHenry

“All manner of creatures combine in exuberant lines full of foxfire and jellyfish, rock-teeth and tongue-muzzle, Miss America, St. Clare of Assisi, and our frailest secrets disclosed. These are lovely poems.”

Kristen McHenry is a resident of Seattle, Washington and is a poet and freelance writer by night, and health outreach worker by day. Among other publications, her work has been seen in Wanderings, Trellis Magazine, Boston Literary Magazine, Tiferet, Sybil’s Garage, and several anthologies, including Meanderings and Flowers Bloom in the Moonlight. She is currently a finalist in the national competition “Project Verse”. She is the creator and facilitator of the Poet’s Cafe, a weekly poetry workshop for homeless teens at the New Horizons drop-in center in downtown Seattle.

Kristen lives in the Ballard neighborhood with two cats, two firebellied toads, and one husband. She loves to sing, but only in the car with all of the windows rolled up.

This will also be Kristen’s first publication in qarrtsiluni.

So there you have it. Stay tuned: we hope you’ll anticipate reading these poems in September as much as we look forward to publishing them.

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Qarrtsiluni Chapbook Contest 2009

Final Judge: Dinty Moore

First-round Readers: Ivy Alvarez, Rachel Barenblat, Dale Favier, Brent Goodman, Tom Montag, Yemi Onafuwa, Peter Stephens, Carey Wallace

Contest Coordination and Print Publication: Beth Adams

Qarrtsiluni Managing Editors: Dave Bonta and Beth Adams

http://qarrtsiluni.com/2009/08/01/chapbook-contest-we-have-winners/

"Beds of Bronzing As Harmful as the Tobacco"

La Tribune, a newspaper written in French, apparently turned to Babelfish to translate text for the English web version of its headlines. Click on the link above for more unintentional hilarity...

I think Babelfish may be the source for my other favorite French mistranslation. The wages-of-adultery film Unfaithful, which starred Diane Lane, Richard Gere, and Oliver Martinez, showed up in a French review as...Inaccurate. Thou shalt not commit inaccuracy might have to be the 11th commandment.

Here's something bronze, burning and tobacco related:

Gratitude Journal: A Singular Entry

This week I have been cleared by my neurophysiologist to teach after possible strokes. From January through April 2009, I had at least 4 episodes that I thought were due to extreme fatigue but were in retrospect probably TIAs (mini strokes). On Memorial Day I had what Fred Sanford would call "The Big One, Elizabeth!" I was hospitalized for 5 days in the cardiac/neuro ward. Nothing showed up on my MRI, MRA, or CT to document strokes, but I had extreme weakness, trouble with speech, moving the right side of my body and using some fingers of my left hand. I also had (and still have to a minute degree) problems with language and concentration. I've worked really hard for the last 2 months to improve my speech, concentration, and physical health to get better. I can now read and concentrate for 3 hours at a time, which is less than half of what I could do before, but it's much much better. I didn't lose any written (reading or writing) skills except for lingering over a word sometimes--and I don't think that's a disadvantage for a poet.

I'm looking forward to reading and writing more in August. That's my vow--read more, walk more, and start to write again.

I'm really grateful for the opportunity.
BEST BOOKS THIS YEAR: Leslie Harrison's Displacement, Jericho Brown's Please

LOOKING FORWARD TO READING: Holly Goddard Jones' Girl Trouble (Harper Collins, short stories), Nicky Beer's The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, poems)