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The online magazine At Length is celebrating their first anniversary in New York City tomorrow night (5/15) by serving up an evening of poetry and music. The entertainment for the evening includes Kimiko Hahn (reading from her brand new collection Toxic Flora), Joanna Klink, Major Jackson, Craig Morgan Teicher, and The Lisps. Admission is free but the location is super secret so send an rsvp to rsvp@atlengthmag.com to get all the details. Doors are at 7:30.
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Young writers—as well as random people who come up to me after a reading—often want to know the tricks of the trade. And there are a few that I learned as an undergrad (show don’t tell; every item on a list needs to be equally extraordinary; etc.). In general I frustrate the person by simply badgering her or him to read more poetry, both classic and contemporary.
But the truth is I do have my own “tricks.” This feels like a good moment to share one in particular.
When I taught workshops in the past, I used to bring in a volume of Emily Dickinson, a hand weight, and a newspaper. The first was obviously in the “go read poetry” category. The hand weight was there to remind students to take care of their bodies (since even the deskbound have bodies). And the third was meant to inspire them to read the newspaper.
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Well, here’s your chance. Rumpus poetry editor, Brian Spears, is “in awe” of Sandra Beasley’s second poetry collection I Was the Jukebox and is looking for someone to review it for the online magazine. From Spears’s blog:
I finished Sandra Beasley’s latest, I Was the Jukebox, and I am in awe of it…just pure awe. It’s not what I do, and it’s not what I want to do, but damn, do I want to read it again. It’s easily one of the best collections I’ve read this year so far. Now I just need someone to offer to review it for The Rumpus for me.
Send your pitch to review this awe inspiring new collection to Brian at poetry AT therumpus.net.
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This week’s “Poem of the Week” selection from The Guardian, chosen by the poet Carol Rumens, is the final poem from Marilyn Hacker’s most recent collection, Names. The poem is called “A Braid of Garlic.” Rumens writes:
A Braid Of Garlic, the last poem in the collection, is partly an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish, “whom, daring, I called a brother”. The verse is written in an informal Sapphic quatrain, its stanzas sometimes impressionistic ‘scenes’ or vivid jottings. The dying fall of the feminine endings and foreshortened last lines seems appropriate to the overall mood. But against this sorrowful cadence is pitted a vigorous appetite for joy and survival, expressed in the muscularity of the syntax, and embodied by the “aging women” who continue valiantly to shop and write and celebrate their “memories and continence”.
Read Marilyn Hacker’s “A Braid of Garlic” at The Guardian.
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according to e. e. cummings
If you’re not familiar with the “common terms and phrases” feature on Google Books, then you should probably get familiar because it’s pretty great. It lists the words and word groups that appear most frequently in any full text available on Google Books. In novels, this list is often overrun by character names. But in E. E. Cumming’s Erotic Poems, things are a bit more interesting. For your Friday afternoon pleasure, please enjoy the Top Ten Most Unexpected Common Terms and Phrases in E. E. Cumming’s Erotic Poems:
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What does it mean for a poet to have someone edit her collection? I am not sure what that might involve for other poets—aside from having some lines cut or stanzas rearranged—but my own experience has been extraordinary. On a panel last year, I spoke to a room of emerging writers on this topic; seated beside me was my editor at Norton, Jill Bialosky. This column feels like an appropriate place to relate some of my comments.
Mosquito and Ant was the first manuscript I submitted to Jill, who was familiar with an earlier book of mine, The Unbearable Heart. She found the new book intriguing but not quite ready—that was the gist of her response. A year later, I tried again and she returned the manuscript with a few comments on the parts that felt most compelling to her. She suggested I add a prose section (what I’d been calling zuihitsu, a Japanese genre) that would give the dominant sequence some kind of backdrop. I love assignments, and so I wrote two zuihitsu: “Reflections Off White” (a sort of catalog of weddings) and “Morning Light” (a more narrative piece on a wife’s leave-taking). If memory serves, I already had two other such zuihitsu: “The Downpour” (written in response to a Sei Shonagon millennium celebration at The Poetry Project) and “Sewing without Mother” (a prose elegy). I saw that Jill was right: these changes added some backdrop and the manuscript felt richer. After about another year, I sent this new version. At that point, the collection resembled the finished book—except for arrangement. Given that Jill is a writer herself, I’ve often wondered how she finds the time and energy to offer such guidance. Even with no guarantee of publication, I was intensely grateful.
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Whiting award winner Julie Sheehan’s third collection, Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise, will be published on June 7th. But she’ll be giving a sneak peak of the new bar-themed volume at New York’s legendary KGB Bar on Monday, May 3rd at 7pm [more info]. She’ll be reading with David Lehman who actually co-founded the Monday night poetry series back in 1997. Who else needs a drink?
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An Excerpt from Nothing Happened and Then It Did
Now, the conclusion of the serialized excerpt from Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did, in stores now. [Need to catch up? Read Part 1 | Read Part 2 | Read Part 3 | Read Part 4 | Read Part 5 | Read Part 6 | Read Part 7]
My plane did not leave until the following morning. I spent Tuesday night in the casino. The Nugget is not actually as big as I’d thought at first—a trick of mirrors—and most of my time was passed at the Aquarium Bar. The musical entertainment came in the form of a well-oiled duo known as Bobby and Ricky, whose engagement was listed as “indefinite.” Bobby was a sax player with a genial smile; Ricky, a guitarist in a leisure suit with curly gray hair. When I arrived Bobby was tying up the last few bars of “Secret Agent Man.” When the song was through he grabbed the microphone and shouted, “Have some more tequila!” pronouncing the last word with a lascivious sneer. The mostly geriatric crowd responded with a lusty yell. I noticed a table of famous poets, all wearing their medallions and drinking heavily. Bobby and Ricky started into “Unchained Melody.” Dancers crowded the floor. An elderly couple stood in the center, barely swaying, locked in an embrace. A man wearing a cowboy hat and a shirt patterned with the American flag asked one of the poets to dance. I knew her. She had bent my ear the night before, telling me all about her unhappy marriage that fell apart a few years back and the poetry that had helped her through it. Her first poem had come to her on her birthday at the exact hour of her birth. Smiling, she gazed up at the cowboy and laid her hand on his outstretched forearm. Some of us began to sing along with Bobby. The din of the slots died away. Out of the fake thatched roof descended Apollo, god of song. The waitress stood and watched, her tray full of tequila shots, limes, salt. The muse of the lyre visited Ricky, and he strummed a lovely chord. Time and loss for us seemed distant, made-up things. At the center of the world were Bobby’s lips, singing the immortal verses, and in these verses our hearts were gladdened. This was poetry.
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An Excerpt from Nothing Happened and Then It Did
Now, Part 7 of the serialized excerpt from Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did, in stores now. [Need to catch up? Read Part 1 | Read Part 2 | Read Part 3 | Read Part 4 | Read Part 5 | Read Part 6]
The Famous Poet’s Society had impressed upon us throughout the convention that we were all winners: that as far back as the first night when we had put pen to paper we had ceased to lose. But some would leave Reno with less than others. This fact was underscored by the $6,000 in door prizes that greeted our return to the Rose Ballroom.
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A Serialized Excerpt from Nothing Happened and Then It Did
Now, Part 6 of the serialized excerpt from Jake Silverstein’s Nothing Happened and Then It Did, in stores today! [Need to catch up? Read Part 1 | Read Part 2 | Read Part 3 | Read Part 4 | Read Part 5.]
That night at the Shakespeare banquet we hashed out the odds on the twenty-five grand. From the open field a few favorites had emerged. At my table a dental hygienist from Dallas advised that the smart money liked a man from her class. “His name is James Stelly,” she said, “and he’s given his whole life to going around and telling what drugs did to him. He can bring tears to anyone’s eye that hears him.”
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