Poetic Dove Presents Intimate Sessions

Poetic Dove Presents Intimate Sessions by Patricia Garcia 9781434383075

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He remarried the following year. In the hewn angularity and symmetry of his stanzas one sees the imprint of an obsessive designer; here are verse-rooms adorned with complexly irregular stress patterns that embellish like molding, tracery, or cornice -- meticulous masonry. Larkin lying in bed at 4 a. And to what alien terrains, what modes of being and desiring that run counter to whoever you thought you were, will sleep waft you? Resisting such self-dissolution, such loss of control, the insomniac hangs on, clinging to consciousness that is the binding agent of identity and our way of retaining our hold on the world.

It may be true that, as Greg Johnson has suggested, this holding fast to consciousness -- a clutching at cognizance that fends off self-loss -- is most pronounced in writers. That numerous poets have approached the business of sex with a trepidation to match their fear of sleep is practically proverbial. Eliot remained virgins till 30 and 26, respectively; Christina Rossetti , gorgeous and much sought-after as a young woman, never married, and in Goblin Market imagines fleshly pleasure as an addictive, otherworldly fruit capable of depleting and devouring the soul.

Sleep is an occasion for self-loss, but so is sex. Here then is the crux of the matter: Beds are where we go to lose ourselves. But sex too entails a kind of dying: And it can lead to intervals of self-annihilation and a communing with otherness that few other pastimes can. But this might be a thing to embrace rather than fear. The capacity of sleep and sex both to catalyze a death-like self-abandonment has been, historically, what certain poets have most cherished about these phenomena.

O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. The perspective of Keats and Gandhi -- which looks enthusiastically on the nightly metamorphoses of self that happen under the covers -- may be an altogether healthier one than dread. It may be, too, a perspective consistent with recent advances in microbiology. That is, those who dread self-loss would do well to ask themselves what it is they are holding onto, and whether their endeavor to retain it might not have been doomed from the get-go.

We now know, as microbiologist Ed Yong has shown in his gripping I Contain Multitudes , that our bodies play host to trillions of immigrant microbes and quadrillions of viruses that momently multiply on our faces, hands, and in our guts, making up roughly half our being and forcing us to reconsider what we even think of as a self.

Yet insomniac writers have been grappling with how to make sense of this fact since at least the Victorian era. They bring the image of one washed out beyond the bar in a sea at an ebb, losing even his personality, as the elements of which he is composed pass into new combinations. Struggling, as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he loses at every moment. Lying awake at night and contemplating our eventual demise, we fret over an event that is already behind us, that has played out unendingly since we came into being and will repeat itself innumerable times in the future.

Accepting this, we might more cheerfully brave the windows of self-loss that lie in wait for us in bedrooms: American poetry has performance issues. As the poet approaches the mic, you brace yourself: The poet could make conversational eye contact with the audience, as poets Naomi Shihab Nye , Forrest Gander , and Toi Derricotte do; or she could never look up from the podium. Why do some poets perform as though they had just come to in a bad dream? Meanwhile, the other American poetry — the stage-centered continuum that runs from slam to rap and back again — whose lifeblood is making poems sound and feel good out loud, has taken a long time to get a break.

As these poets have developed a new kind of poetry career, where a packed performance tour can predate a first-book publication by years, the line Bloom so firmly drew in the sand has been eroding. Other, less hidebound critics have taken note: Susan Somers Willett , in The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry , notes that slam has, since its inception, put critical power directly into the hands of the audience, making slam attendees feel that they, not the editors of book reviews, are cultural tastemakers and determiners of authenticity.

As poets with performance backgrounds rise through the ranks of poetry print culture, American poetry appears caught between a fear of performance and a celebration of it. To disdain them is to shoot yourself in the foot. No one speaks that way. Slam poets have typically not shied away from associations with the theatrical, maybe because slam is more likely to embrace genres, like persona, that lend themselves to character-building. These movements, she writes, provide a precedent for the audiences at poetry slams, who are predominantly white while the winners of major slam competitions are predominantly black.

Is the opposite true — do poets who came up in performance communities shy away from line and form? And poets comfortable with both are aware of the potential for groundbreaking work. In between the two columns, naturally, is a seam of space. The video opens with a shot of the left column, folded along its seam, black ink on white paper. Later, we see its right half, white ink on black. By lingering on the text, May calls attention to the form of the poem as it can only be seen on the page, with all three performance possibilities presented simultaneously to the reader.

But he also makes his performance of the work essential, moving a hand across his mouth, closing his eyes. At one point, he quietly doubles his voice. What kind of poet does May want to be? Steeped in the familial community of Detroit slam, May is now finding the kind of success most poets in MFA programs dream of: Is this inter-weaving of genres, this promising poetry Frankenstein, actually changing the way students and teachers approach poetry and its performance?

The litmus test, as usual, is high school and undergraduate students. And some of them are making it clear that you can have your cake and eat it too… They are also imagining their poems as different things — poems for performance and poems for print. Two very different kinds of composition. If beginning writers start to perceive poetry as being only for performance, Taylor fears, this will scare off some great talent.

Consider that when this video premiered on MTV, I was four years old. On Poetry The Millions Interview. Megan Kaminski's first book of poetry, Desiring Map , revels in landscapes and ecosystems -- both natural and manmade -- as well as the disturbances that assault them. Megan teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas and also curates The Taproom Reading Series in Lawrence, recently named one of the top 10 reading series in the Midwest.

The idea of place is central to so many of your poems in Desiring Map. From the prairie to the coast to the Florida wetlands, your language revels in site-specific spaces. Could you talk more about the role of landscape in your poems, as well as the ways that desire is evoked by environment? And also, having lived in many diverse locations, ranging from exotic Casablanca and cosmopolitan Paris, LA, NYC , to the prairie Kansas , could you speak to the ways that your physical environment informs, invades, and influences your writing?

Yes, place and especially the "natural world" and we can talk about how we want to define that is very important to my creative project, and it's a tricky thing to write about in certain ways. As a writer, sitting at my desk or at a table typing away on my computer and looking out the window, I am always looking at the landscape -- here in the town where I live in Kansas, or in Oregon looking out at the ocean or the gorge, or in Paris looking down on the tree-lined street -- and of course its beauty inspires me, but there are problems with writing from that perspective.

I'm wary of the tradition of the poet who stands outside of the natural world, observing it with some sort of special authority and then seeing it primarily as a site for personal transformation. I'm not interested in the kind of poetry that Evelyn Reilly describes as the "aesthetic use of nature as mirror for human narcissism. That said, I am very interested in our very weedy human appetites, such as longing and desire. Along with that exploration of human possibility in nature came questions of subjectivity in the questioning of the lyric "I. It's this beautiful thing, the way pronouns work -- the ease in which a person can slip into and out of the subject position.

Could you talk more about the way that words function as landscape in your poems? There seems like an overlap between word and place for you, linguistic terrain and landscape. I think that sense of overlap starts with the sense of landscape becoming language -- the movement from the world to the text.

But there is also a sense in which language becomes landscape, too. I am very much interested in the dissolution of these boundaries between language and the outside world. And this all also very much relates to neural patternings, which also become landscape in the book and vice versa. Much of this has to do with the nature of cognition on a very basic level.

If all human thought occurs in language, then we are constantly dissolving in and out of language. I experience the prairie -- I see it before me, around me; I perceive it with all my senses -- and while this is happening my brain is also processing it all. The prairie is taken into my neural pathways and taken into language -- it translates and dissolves into my body, my thoughts, my tongue when I speak it.

And at the same time, when I write about and talk about the prairie, it spills out of me into the world. I admire how the domestic and wild as well as the textual and physical are in dialogue here and elsewhere throughout your work. What are the crucial tensions that pervade and inform your work? I am definitely interested in the tensions between wildness and cultivation, both in the natural world and in our own human natures. One of the texts that weighs heavily in my imaginative considering is Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping , which presents a kind of feral domesticity.

Even though Sylvie is obviously a horrible housekeeper in the traditional sense of keeping things clean and tidy, there is a sense of care and looking after. Of course, that all kind-of falls apart -- but there is that seed of an idea. And maybe this is part of the reason why I keep being interested in and coming back to this tension. There is something beautiful about providing a home and comfort, something beautiful about the domestic arts. But there is also this sense of having been mastered, of women being responsible and unrecognized for performing all sorts of affective labor, of performing domesticity as a way of submitting.

This is all complex and tricky, though, because I do think that mothering as well as other sorts of care-taking is important work -- that kindness and nurturing has its own value.

And, of course, I am also interested in cultivation and wildness in the natural world. Weeds and feral animals cannot come into being without humans.

Weeds were just plants before their growth became counter to productive agriculture, and animals have to have been domesticated at some point in order to become feral. So conceptually, weeds and feral animals reclaim the wild. I am also interested very much in the greening, both planned and unplanned, of Detroit and other post-industrial spaces around the world. Eventually, she stopped telling me. For 14 years, we focused on a subject we both loved: The overt parts of who I am, I immediately trace to my father.

I was a chubby kid as was my dad , and my three older brothers were not, which made everyone assume I was the primary recipient of his genetics. We are both viscerally stubborn, until quietly we are not. We lash out defensively, then, over time, we let them watch us change. My time slot at the Jazz Festival is just before the headliner: Gregory Porter is a legend, and the park quakes for him.

The ten minutes it takes his band to set up is to be filled with poetry. The festival host from Jazz The crowd communicates two types of people: It was only about of 6,, but sounds like a shitload. It documents the night Ben first knew he loved Wendell, four months into their relationship.

This man, possessed only by the desire to bring him joy, unlocked Ben. In my high school of 2, kids, Ben was the only student out-of-the-closet.

He came out the summer before his junior year, but four years prior, after being bullied at choir practice by an eighth grader who called him a faggot something that had happened to him since he was in second grade , he quietly admitted to himself that everyone was right. He walked into our bathroom and swallowed a bottle of Advil. The doctors induced vomiting, and he spent the next four hours in a hospital bed while my mother brushed the hair across his forehead and whispered over and over again that she loved him.

I read the poem I wrote for his wedding to this man who I need to never lose faith in me: The poem had to claw from my mouth as we held each other sobbing on the couch. The reading in Tompkins Square Park is less cathartic. Some are angry that I am still on stage. A few have tears in their eyes. As though nudged from a dream, my set is over, and I am free to consider what just happened.

She drowned in a lake behind their house. My mom is 60 now, sitting with me in Goodale Park. He had carried the body back to their house. Each brother and sister saw her laid out at 4: A neighbor cooked them all hot dogs and heated up frozen corn, and by 5: In the morning, they woke for the wake, and by 2: Mary was buried forever in Fort Lee, New Jersey. She tells me that when the family got home from the funeral, her two eldest siblings, both in high school, were scheduled to attend a weekly sock-hop.

My mother would learn in her adult life that they had spent three years of nights privately crying in the dark. My mom was seven, learning that grief did not involve sadness. You die, then a hole closes around where you were, perhaps leaving a small scar, and then the survivors continue with the business of mortality. Her parents fought, perhaps, the most difficult battle of their lives in silence in order to not burden their children with even a small share of grief. Her realization, thousands of miles from her gigantic family and past, was that if she died, it would be a small story on the Creighton Campus, a small story in New Jersey, and ultimately, no one depended on her survival.

Then she tells me, her youngest son, what I never thought to ask. So that if I died it mattered.

Tears begin to drop from her cheek and gather on the wood. I can see all that I have inherited in this life from work my mother did before she ever knew me; what it means that I am sitting across from her in an empty park watching her cry. I picture my mother again at the hospital with Ben in I can see how she must have wanted nothing more than to protect him at choir practice, to defend him in study hall, or anywhere else that adolescence proved itself relentless to her year-old son; how all she had to give was the person she had become, how it placed her by his hospital bed: Since I was born, I have always assumed I was becoming only my father.

I can see how the desire to matter is not a charge that began with my birth, or will culminate with my death. My eyes are open, and I can see, for a moment, who I have become. Book Previews On Poetry.

Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline: The New Jersey Poems of Timothy Walsh

Poetry forces us to slow down, sit, and pay attention. Stories of transfigurations and conflagrations. Poets affirming their existence on the page. Poetry that cuts through the daily noise and does justice to words. Here are five notable books of poetry publishing in July.

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Old whiskey is downed. Her lines pop and pivot, from sex to God and divine absence , to immigration and identity. McLane In McLane's poetic-memoir, My Poets , she's written about how listening to recordings of poets transforms their works: So much for majesty. His poems trouble desire, they trouble the world…until it fractures into the sort of captivating music a modern day Orpheus might sing. He works as managing editor of Two Lines: World Writing in Translation and is a contributing editor for Tin House magazine.

His previous collection, Ghost Machine , was selected for publication by Michael Burkard and chosen as one of the best books of for Believer Magazine's Reader Survey. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Elana Bell and Tiffany Higgins, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash.

Elements basic to life—bread, fruit, water, and rats—are here in profusion. These poems are built for our time. Patrick Herron says of it, "Tiffany Higgins' anachronistic and recast hero is one brilliantly charged nexus of exploitation and war; she is captured, tortured, and released as a series of heartbreaking lyrics. She blogs at http: David Wojahn says of it, "Like James Wright and Sherwood Anderson—both of whom he pays homage to in this stunning collection—Joseph Campana understands that the Midwest is less a place than a strangely inscrutable state of mind, where our losses and vulnerabilities are shown in terrifyingly high relief…Campana also understands…that the principal business of the lyric poem is heartbreak.

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Kjell Espmark and Mariela Griffor, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. She is the founder of Marick Press and author of three books of poems, Exiliana and House, both published in , and the collection Heartland , about which Jim Schley says, "While she is capable of acknowledging and dramatizing ghastly geopolitical realities with stark veracity, she always—yes, always—approaches the momentous historical complexities she is uniquely situated to describe with a tenderness most people…can only summon for their home life…She is dedicated, intellectually penetrating, and endlessly curious.

His published work includes several chapbooks, the verse novella The Misogynist's Blue Nightmare and the poetry collections, Perplexed Skin and Making Music. His work has appeared in many anthologies including Separate Islands: His play Beauty and the Stalker was produced at the Granary Theatre, Cork in , and he has published short fiction in journals and newspapers.

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Sweeney has published not only many poetry collections for adults but also several poetry collections for children and two children's novels. Writing Poetry , which he co-wrote with John Hartley Williams, appeared in , and he has co-edited two anthologies of poems. He has held several fellowships and writer-in-residence positions, most recently at University College Cork. He was nominated for the T. Eliot award for Black Moon. Horse Music Bloodaxe, is his most recent collection. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Jennifer Elise Foerster and Andrew Schelling, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash.

Joy Harjo says, "Wow. This first book of poems by Jennifer Foerster reminds me of the urgent vision fueling Kerouac's On the Road …Foester spins her poem-songs like wheels. She's from a younger generation, and not a man but a native woman trying to put the story of a broken people back together.

Andrew Schelling 's new book of poems is A Possible Bag. Kit Robinson says of it, "Translator, scholar, poet Andrew Schelling works from linguistic roots both East Sanskrit and West Arapaho to imagine how we might relate to earth differently since we can now see human inhabitation as a limited engagement. Poetry, Ecology, Asia ; the most recent of his translations from Sanskrit—he's been studying Sanskrit and Indian raga for thirty years—is Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India.

Fanny Howe says of it, "In, out, secrecy, exposure. The book is resonant with the poetry of Hafiz and Rumi but stays grounded in the contemporary, especially in its candor and unease. But then the language and vision is also Romantic and pleasurable, calling to be heard aloud. His exciting, transgenre work Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities , part detective story, part memoir, part imagined past, originally published in , is being re-issued. Tony Barnstone 's latest books of poems are Tongue of War: Translator and scholar as well as a poet, he will present a visual and art slide show in collaboration with the artist Alexandra Eldridge at this event.

This last collection stems from his recent two-volume translation of The Restored New Testament. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and the distinguished author of some seventy volumes of poetry, prose, and translation. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Alex Dimitrov and Genine Lentine, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash.

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Mark Doty says, "Dimitrov's passionate, headlong poems seem to want to carve beneath the surface of gestures, beneath the skin, to the warm and dangerous blood beneath… Begging for It is a fierce and memorable debut. Genine Lentine 's new book is Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model. Mark Doty says, "Poses dwells in a space between forms, and in fact these pieces feel like spaces, each block of text becoming the rectilinear space of a drawing.

The white space between passages of ink creates a rhythm, a sense of time passing, as each piece points toward a different moment of composition. Her previous poetry collection is Mr. A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. Camille Norton says of it, "Tim Kahl's poems are an "open source" for the end of the West. These big, bold poems swerve between history and pop culture, between nineteenth century bull and bear baiting to twenty-first century bull and bear markets.

Joshua McKinney 's new book is Mad Cursive. In this book, McKinney, an accomplished swordsman, moves toward the Japanese concept of binbu ichi —"the unity of martial and literary arts"—a Samurai ideal. Claudia Keelan wrote, "The poems in Mad Cursive move gracefully between beauty and destruction, the essential real locale of poetry in our times.

A mad swordsman inside a poet-seer, McKinney dares to locate what resembles, in my reading, spirit laid bare. Morin, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. How did they do that? She played professional basketball for several years in Europe and Asia, and now lives in Mojave Valley, Arizona and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. He teaches literature and writing at Texas State University.

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Kim Shuck and Chris Hoffman, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. His new book of poems is Realization Point , about which Joseph Bruchac says, "Chris Hoffman's poems speak with a clear meditative voice that bridges the gap between our human lives and the healing spirit of nature. Kim Shuck is a writer, weaver, and bead artist, who has shown her artwork on four continents.

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Shuck's new book, Rabbit Stories , is fiction, about which Deborah A. Miranda says, "Kim Shuck's collection is tenderly constructed, finely woven in and out of Rabbit Food's lifetime as girl, young woman, new mother, and mature artist. Poetry Flash presents a reading by Bruce Isaacson and Jan Steckel, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor poetryflash. His new book of poems is the chapbook, Book of Rebellions ; his other recent books of poetry include Dumbstruck at the Lights in the Sky and Ghosts Among the Neon.

Former San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman says, "[Isaacson] gives his realist and insightful eye to seeing and revealing how poetry remains the king of affirmation amid devastating negations and the ghosting of the soul.

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