bripike@gmail.com
My poem, “Toad,” is up this week at Bread & Beauty. This press describes itself as the “Indiana Jones of small publishers,” and I think that’s pretty awesome. They publish online content as well as a print journal and they were a dream to work with during the publication process. A special thank you to Allison & Carly for your professionalism and enthusiasm.
Bread & Beauty is still open for submissions, so to all my writer friends, please submit!
Kelli Russell Agodon started compiling a list of Contemporary Women Poets Writing Today (2015) over at her site, book of kells. This is a wonderful resource and huge thanks to Kelli for putting this list together.
I’m pleased to share issue #10 of Glassworks Magazine, which features my poem “Forsythia” among many other great pieces. It’s a beautiful publication and I love the photograph, Meditating Horse by Toni Bennett, that appears opposite my poem. I also appreciate the streamlined design of the online content and the feature “Looking Glass” where author’s are asked to reflect on their own pieces. I always think it is interesting to get a glimpse into an author’s writing process and I think it’s a great idea to include that kind of content alongside the writing itself.
Monday night the the grad jury announced their decision not to charge Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed 18 year old Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO on August 9, 2014. I watched the coverage with my my husband, whispering to the the television, “please be safe” over and over again as the split screen showed the gathering protestors. It’s the closest I could come to prayer. At one point, I went into our small half bath and wept.
I have a lot of feelings about the events leading up to and after the announcement on Monday night. I also have the urge to write, so for now, that’s what I am going to do.
I offer up these two pieces by the brilliant poet, Danez Smith. The first is his poem, “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” which I posted on my Facebook wall several months ago, but felt the need to re-post in light of the decision that came down Monday night. The second is an open letter Danez Smith posted on Tuesday.
I have a poem up this week at Heron Tree. It’s a wonderful publication and they are taking submissions until December 1st. I’m very pleased that they took this specific poem as it is particularly close to my heart.
You can find it here: http://herontree.com/pike1/
I have
excellent friends. I have excellent friends who are also talented writers. I have excellent friends who are talented writers and generous souls. One of my generous, talented friends, Sam Snoek-Brown, author of Hagridden, was kind enough to include me in an submission call for Zen Space’s 2014 Autumn Showcase and today three of my poems went live. They are among excellent company, including my friend and talented poet, Natalie Giarrantano. I blogged about Natalie’s debut poetry collection, Leaving Clean, earlier this year.
Check out the showcase & The Zen Space here.
Happy October!
Over the past year or so, I’ve had the good fortune of placing several poems in several different publications, which has left me in the position of withdrawing said poems from journals. I have engaged in simultaneous submissions ever since I started sending out work several years ago. With the advent of software like submittable, this process is far more streamlined and efficient than it used to be, and for the most part I’m able to sit down for half hour or so and notify all the necessary journals of my wish to withdraw a poem.
But…
I’ve noticed over the past six months to a year that it is not always as easy to withdraw a poem as it should be, so what follows is a genuine plea to all small literary journals, because I love you and want to support you all day everyday, please be as clear in your guidelines to withdraw as you are in your guidelines to submit. What follows is a short list of easy improvements that could make the process of withdrawing a poem(s) easy as pie:
1. Allow notes in Submittable. I like submittable. I use it all the time and the longer I submit work, the more I notice journals switching over to their software. However, if as a journal or press you allow submissions through Submittable, then take the next step and allow notes so that if a poet submits five poems and only wants to withdraw one, they can just add a note to their submission file.
2. Clear contact information. If a journal does not use the note feature in submittable, then the next step I take as poet is to check out their website to see who I need to email regarding my submission. If you have a paragraph in your submission guidelines that outlines the process an author should take to withdraw a piece, then you should have a link to the email/contact in that paragraph. It is frustrating to read a sentence that states “Simultaneous submissions are encouraged but let us know immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere,” and then have to scour the website for five minutes trying to find that person to contact.
3. Please consider allowing us to withdraw one poem/story instead of the entire packet. I understand from an administrative point of view, it might just be easier to withdraw and entire packet, take out the accepted poem, and then upload the updated packet (although as I type that out, I’m not convinced) but I’ll be honest, the only desire this inspires in me is to just withdraw the entire packet and be done with it.
To be clear, I love literary journals. I appreciate all the hard work that goes in to reading submissions and designing a journal (print and/or online). I want to keep sending my work to as many places as possible, but in the event that someone snags it first, the easier it is to notify other journals, the better.
When I decided to attend graduate school at the University of North Texas in the fall of 2003, I don’t think I really anticipated how challenging the entire experience was going to be. I didn’t know anything about Texas. I also didn’t know anyone in Texas. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that I talked myself into going at all. However, I was lucky in many ways while I was at UNT but I think I was most lucky in all the amazing writers I met and became friends with through classes and workshops.
One of my dear friends from those days in Denton, Natalie Giarratano, is the winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize for her debut collection Leaving Clean.
Leaving Clean is filled with thick, grit that is both beautiful and haunting. At times, the poems stand up, address the audience candidly, almost daring the reader to continue through a less than hospitable landscape. Other times the poems are quieter, asking you to lean in and listen carefully. These are poems that you return to and that you linger over long after you’ve closed the book.
One of my favorite poems, “Trophy: Photo of a Dead Boy” comes near the end of the first section in the collection. The opening of the poem immediately grounds the reader in the real world, but there is something unsettling just beneath all those concise details: “I was thirteen when I saw your photograph/in my uncle’s study: he told me/you should have been mounted on the wall,/his taxidermist’s masterpiece.” As the poem unravels, the images build and the feeling of unease intensifies to the point where I want to break away from the poem. Away from the photograph. But I can’t. And I’m glad that I don’t when I reach the ending lines “You look strangely fierce with eyes open/staring through my wholeness.”
Leaving Clean is fu
ll of poems that pull the reader in close, force an intimacy is both uncomfortable and revelatory at the same time. “Armenia at the Dinner Table” is an example of this intimate lens as we find a woman whose hair “had it not been knotted up on her/square head to work the grid of farmland” and “…Her face/is just lazy from the sun and soy beans/ and eight babies, a few who couldn’t outlive her.”
I could keep going about all there is to admire in this collection. I’ve read it a half dozen times and every time I return to it, I find something new to think about. I’m proud to know Natalie and beyond excited that her collection is out in world for people to read and appreciate. I can’t wait to share her poems with my students and I encourage you to go out and buy Leaving Clean. There’s a rumor going around that Natalie will even sign it for you if you.
Last week I came across this article: Dispelling the Myth: Why All Writers Should Defend Their Craft by Lisa Marie Basile who is the founding editor of Luna Luna Magazine. You will notice, if you clicked around on my blog, that I have a link to Luna Luna under writing blogs I follow, so I was interested the article right away.
Ms. Basile wrote a eloquent, intelligent article about why writers should embrace and celebrate their craft and work. Why they should not feel ashamed or guilty about being a “writer.” Why they should talk about their writing with other people who are not writers. Why they should hold their heads up high and talk with confidence about why they do what they do and how they do it.
My response to her declarations? Yes! Absolutely. Right on!
And then I found myself remembering all the times I had stood in mixed company at a dinner party or luncheon or volunteer meeting and when the inevitable question arose “so what do you do?” my answer would simply be “I teach creative writing at a community college.” The fact that I actively write poetry. That I’ve recently had poems picked up for publication. That I’m putting together a chapbook. That I received an MFA in poetry (for god sake). None of these things tumble out after the simple response of “I teach.”
Why?
I think some of it is what Ms. Basile addresses in her article. I know the stereotypes all to well. I teach an intro level creative writing course. I know what my students think of poetry and the people who write it. I spend most of my time trying to take those neat little stereotypes and tear them apart, but I’m still vulnerable to them.
I think the other issue for me is perhaps a more specific one, but I often find myself defending the profession of teaching and more specifically of teaching at a community college. This is a whole other post in itself, but when I find myself in these conversations, I often think to myself “well, if these people don’t think teaching is valuable occupation, wait till they hear I’m a poet.” In other words, there is only so much punishment I can bear in one conversation. It’s exhausting.
This idea is best illustrated by a conversation I had with my husband’s current boss when I first met him about a year ago. He’s a lovely man and a fellow lover of poetry, so his response was especially disheartening/irritating. After making small talk for a few minutes, he says to me “RJ tells me you teach at (insert my community college). What’s your specific area of focus?” When I responded with creative writing with a concentration in poetry, he replied “So when are you going to law school?”
Are you kidding me?
Now, the point of this post is not to throw a pity party for myself or to get other people to throw it for me, but these were thoughts that coursed through my head while reading Ms. Basile’s article. But after all those thoughts shuffled out of my brain, I thought to myself, you know what? This is BS.
So from now on, when people ask me what I do? I’m a poet and and teach creative writing.
Boom
My interest in tattoos began in college when my fellow peers started showing up with various images and/or text etched into their skin. Admittedly some of the tattoos fell into the cool/interesting/quirky category (a typewriter on the back on a calf , a song lyric winding around an ankle or flower blooming over the bicep) and some of them fell into the “what the hell?” category (Chinese characters or anything involving a rose). I began to seriously consider getting my own ink towards the end of my senior year in college, but the road toward my own tattoo had some detours.
Tattoos cost money and I was a student for about 7 1/2 years straight (BA, MA & MFA), so that proved to be a bit of a challenge during my 20’s. The bigger challenge was deciding what tattoo I was going to get and where. As I do with most of my major life decisions, I turned to my younger sister for advice. She produced a detailed rendition of a goldfish, complete with hundreds of scales, that her friend had sketched out for her. We thought it was a cool picture but at the end of the day, we didn’t like it enough to follow through. In the following years I considered the image of sweet peas. These were to commemorate my aunt who passed away from ovarian cancer. They were her favorite flower. Then I thought about the greek muses and the idea of lyric poetry. My favorite response to this idea came from my mother, who when I presented the idea/image to her said, “I think that would make beautiful stationery.” While this didn’t deter my desire to get a tattoo, it did convince me this wasn’t my best idea.
Eventually two things happened to inspire me: my sister got her own tattoo. A music note tucked neatly behind her ear. And I discovered the website The Word Made Flesh. Why it didn’t occur to me to think about “literary” tattoos in the first place I don’t know, but the images on this site made me realize that the only tattoo that made sense for me was something to do with poetry. This focused the whole brainstorming process quite a bit because once I realized a line of poetry was the way to go, there was really only one poet that I could look to: Elizabeth Bishop.
Bishop is my touchstone. She’s the first poet I discovered in college that I really love. I’ve read all her poetry. I’ve read her letters. I’ve read her essays. I’ve looked at her paintings. I read the fictional story based on her love affair with Lota de Macedo Soares. I’ve heard it rumored they might be making a movie based on that book (The More I Owe You) and I’ll be one of the first in line if that happens. If you follow my blog, you know I write about her a lot. I love her.
This is all to say, that when I was thinking about lines of poetry that would be permanently pierced into my skin, it didn’t take long to locate a line from Bishop. The line is chose is from her poem “Three Valentines” and reads “…love is feathered like a bird.” “Three Valentines” is from Bishop’s uncollected poems and it is written in three sections, hence the three valentines. The entire first stanza where this line appears reads:
Love is feathered like a bird/To keep him warm,/To keep him safe from harm,/And by what winds or drafts his nest is stirred/They chill not Love./Warm lives he:/No warmth gives off,/Or none to me.
As for my tattoo, it contains that line of poetry and five birds: one for my husband, one for my sister, one for parents, one for my grandparents and one for my aunt (the one I mentioned above). It begins on my left shoulder, continuing towards the middle of my back. I love it.
The actual act of being tattooed isn’t as interesting as the tattoos themselves. I went to a reputable studio here in Indy, Metamorphosis and scheduled an appointment. The appointment wound up coming a few days after my 33rd birthday, and the whole process from start to finish took about 20 minutes. It didn’t hurt that much. The tattoo wasn’t very red or irritated nor was the skin surrounding it. I followed the aftercare instructions and it healed well.
Will I get another one?
Never say never but for now, I am more than happy to have a piece of Miss. Bishop permanently pressed to my left shoulder.
Brianna Pike 