Thursday (Onward) Musings

Today is a new day and I’m feeling better. One of the good things about my mood swings is that they don’t last very long, especially when it comes to my work. Quit writing? Who am I kidding. I might as well quit thinking all together and that isn’t an option. I received another rejection letter yesterday afternoon, but there was a note urging me to send to this publication again, so that’s encouraging. Rejections don’t discourage me as much as they used to. It’s just part of the deal. At this point, I have nine publications and one contest to hear back from. I’m sure they’ll start rolling in relatively soon. Production on the spring issues will begin shortly, so content decisions need to be made (it’s useful having been on staff for a couple of journals). Tomorrow, I’m getting up early, working out and then heading somewhere to write. I don’t have anywhere to be until 2, so the morning is mine.
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Children in a Field

They don’t wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

Angela Shaw

Wednesday (Anxious) Musings

I began filling out my self evaluation at school yesterday. This is standard operating procedure at my community college as part of the end of the semester review. The evaluation itself didn’t cause any anxiety, but as I wrote it, I began to reflect, and, well, you can guess where that went.

Today is one of those days where I’m considering (not too seriously) of giving up the poetic ship. I think I’m just frustrated that I’m not writing as much as I should be. On the bright side, I am reading a lot (collections, journals, email postings, etc). I have some ideas but I can’t really commit them to paper just yet. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing enough and sometimes I don’t. There is also the “book question” that keeps drifting in and out of my consciousness like a dream I can’t quite remember. I’m a really slow writer, so the prospect of a book is very daunting. I keep thinking about cohesiveness in a collection and I’m starting to worry that my poems don’t really relate to one or another, or maybe they do and I’m not smart enough to understand how.
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In other news, the winners for the poetry contest I judged at my community college are now posted. I awarded first place, second place, third place and an honorable mention. I also chose one winner in the haiku category. Enjoy!
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Plenty, and at least part of it is personal. I recently finished my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist and his girlfriend can’t spend the whole book unable to get in touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.

Monday (Spring Rains) Musings

Two poems that came into my in box this weekend. Good times.

Yellow Bowl

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

Rachel Contreni Flynn

Long After Hopkins

Nothing at dusk, lord, but dust

and road to keep it. The ﬁeld kneels

under white pines, umbra the edge

to whom this is addressed :

a mind part fern, part birch :

two turkeys slowly S-ing their necks

through inﬂorescence, arrangement

more precise than what light leaves

ﬁelds : painterly ﬂowers more color

than picture, more words for color

than tint : alizarin or violet, you could

write goldenrod, write cornﬂower,

but Queen Anne’s lace still hems

the low horizon. Faith, what is it

abides, what’s left of pastoral

but unreality. Ask artiﬁce. Ask ornament.

Go ahead and ask : what principle

animates the natural : owl pink Lady’s Slipper

orchid white-tailed deer woodchuck :

is it only what’s visible that’s knowable.

Twenty dandelions gone to seed;

tent worms slung in the articulated

tree; what’s tiresome : mind

unanswered, writing to supply

scaffolds to hold up scenery, nothing

but queries and plywood, string

strung to a high struck bell auguring :

it’s too late to see a third turkey

left headless, wreck of feathers

the owl scared, scattered in grass—
Brian Teare
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Friday (Easter Weekend) Musings

I slept in till about 10 this morning and it was awesome. These last few weeks have been really busy and I’m looking forward to this three day weekend. Ashley is visiting and arrived at 1:00 this afternoon from Pittsburgh. Talk about ready for a few days off. Anyway. Right now RJ and Ash are playing Rock Band and Kweli is asleep under the coffee table. All is right with the world.
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Nocturne
Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons
in a broth of wind. Last week
they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,
and each car moves in the blind sack
of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—
the river passing under the tracks,
the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,
I rose violently toward my reflection
hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window
like a page I was reading—a face
coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,
looking for a phone. I gave him
a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found
I was alone with the voices that bloomed
as he opened the door. It’s time

to slip my body beneath the covers,
let it fall down the increments of shale,
let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,
my voice landing in its cradle—.
How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.
Which is not to be confused with sleep—
sleep gives the body back its mouth.

Wayne Miller
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Wednesday (Sunshine Returns) Musings

Last night I received an email notifying me that my poem “Pink Ruffles” was accepted for publication by the GW Review.
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Two Sewing
The wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.
Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.
Hazel Hall

*Courtesy of Poetry Daily
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Monday (Winter’s Last Gasp) Musings

This poem welcomed me when I walked into my office this morning (I have a poem a day calendar):

First Blush

A freak spring snowstorm makes us take old
toute along a creek that flushes, gushes, touches
off tremors of foaming water so cold
and bright we know we’ve come to a sources,
the beginning rush of water’s course
that later will slake the thirst of millions–
but now we are alone with it and know
its potential. Possibility plays before us.
It fizzes and spills through consciousness,
rolling its April of yeses through groves
it will melt by noon, forcing
a green through naked fields, through us.

Molly Peacock

The first line of this poem is eerily relevant, as this morning I awoke to snow flurries and the prediction that the temp would drop down to the low 30s this evening. I knew the mild weather, sunshine, and flowering trees were all a little too good to be true, but snow flurries in April? Get out of here winter. I’m over you.
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A friend of mine already posted this link via Facebook, but for those who are not slaves to the social networks (I am one of those slaves) here it is again:

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone.

I plan on sharing this article with my creative writing class Thursday night. They are required to memorize a poem for their poetry presentations.
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I have not jumped on the write a poem a day bandwagon for National Poetry Month, but I have been thinking a lot lines of poetry lately or just images that pop into my head that could eventually turn into poems. Yesterday, while driving along a street lined with magnolias, I started thinking about trees shedding petals, silken petals, and how those petals take on a translucent quality, kind of like skin or paper. And how when we walk over these petals, we leave our footprints, much in the way people leave their mark of words on paper. I don’t if that will amount to anything, but it kept me occupied for about an hour.

Saturday (Spring Cleaning) Musings

Our apartment has been in state of disrepair since we returned from Cabo, so today I’m going to do something about it. I don’t mind organized clutter but this place is just out of control. I also purchased a new elliptical machine for my birthday. I was not a planned purchase but the deal was too good to pass up, so I ordered it Wednesday, canceled my gym membership Thursday, and it arrived on Friday. I’m looking forward to powering it up.
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These were taken outside our apartment building this morning.

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Elegy for Sol LeWitt

The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.

The lines on your walls
follows directions
as if

as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

Anne Lauterbach

*Courtesy of the Academy of American Poetry and their poem a day project for National Poetry Month.

Friday (Poetry Floods My Inbox) Musings

One of the best parts of National Poetry Month, as far as I’m concerned, is getting poems from different places everyday. A number of list serves, blogs, and organizations I belong to or follow are flooding my inbox with poetry. I love it. There is such a great variety.

I’m at school today until 5. This is usually my “free day,” but grading and interviews were on the agenda for today. It seems like this week has flown by. I think the main highlight was last night in my creative writing class. My students are working on drama, the last unit of the semester, and their assignment is to write original 10 minute plays. They’re in small groups and last night was their first official brainstorming session. I dismissed class about 15 minutes early and every group left, save one. These three stayed in the back of the room until 9:50 (at night mind you) and practiced kung fu moves for their play. Is there anything better that can be said about teaching?
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While grading I’ve had Hazards of Love on repeat…

Won’t Want for Love

Margaret:

Gentle leaves, gentle leaves
Please array a path for me
The woods are growing thick and fast around

Columbine, Columbine
Please alert this love of mine
Let him know his Margaret comes along

And all this stirring inside my belly
Won’t quell my want for love
And I may swoon from all this swelling
But I won’t wait for love

Mistle thrush, mistle thrush
Lay me down in the underbrush
My naked feet grow weary with the dusk

Willow boughs, willow boughs
Make a bed and lay me down
Let you branches bow to cradle us

William:

O my own true love!
O my own true love!

Can you hear me love?
Can you hear me love?

Tuesday (Happy Poetry Month!) Musings

Yesterday kicked off National Poetry Month. I had posted about the writing contest (is it really a contest) that the Academy of American Poets is putting on. Write a poem every day for the month of April. I briefly considered doing this, but then looked at my schedule and decided that I would have to scale down a bit. I plan to read more poetry and write more this month. I’ve written three new, actual poems since January and I don’t feel that’s so terrible. I’ve started countless others but they have not panned out. I’m also judging a poetry contest here at school, so I think that counts for something.
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Vernal Equinox

The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me and
my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candle quiver.
My nerves sting a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside in night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and
urgent love?

Amy Lowell
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I’m listening to the new Decemberists album, The Hazards of Love, while I’m in the office today.

I love this group. It doesn’t hurt that their lead singer was a creative writing major, but I also like how their albums all have a story and a concept and that the lyrics are excellent.
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Monday (Ringing in 28 Years) Musings

Today I turn 28. I feel pretty good about it. I don’t really set goals in my head that are determined by age, but I think to have my Masters and Master in Fine Arts and a stable full time teaching position at this age is a good place to be. I also have a lot of great people in my life right now, so it feels good to be 28.

I took a quiz on Facebook to determine “which poet I am.” Yes, I know but these are the things one does when they don’t want to grade papers. Anyway. Turns out that I am channeling Sylvia Plath, so in honor of that and in honor of birthdays, here is your poem for this week:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Sylvia Plath
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