This week we’ve been finding out a lot about how accomplished poets feel about their earliest published work. We’ve asked Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn what they think about their first book now and how they went about creating their first collection. Today, we simply wanted to find out which of their early poems still stick with them to this day. Here’s what they had to say:
Yesterday we asked four poets how the feel about the work they published years ago. Now, the same four poets tell us how they struggled to find the best order for the poems in their debut collection. The methods range from rudimentary to abstract, logical to magical. There seems to be no right way, but in each case the poet knew the moment it felt right. Here is Beth Ann Fennelly, Stephen Dunn, Eavan Boland, and Linda Pastan looking back on their first book of poetry.
The recent publication of Gerald Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 made us curious about how poets feel about their early work. Would they agree with Pericles when he said, “Time is the wisest counselor of all?” We got in touch with Beth Ann Fennelly, Eavan Boland, Linda Pastan, and Stephen Dunn and got the scoop on how they react to their early poetry now that a few years have passed.
Following a tip from Poets & Writers on Twitter, I just read an article in Canada’s National Post about Katherine Leyton. Leyton is a young poet from Toronto who, with the help of a few friends, has been asking strangers to read poetry on camera for the blog, How Pedestrian. From the National Post article:
“I’ve been very surprised by how open people are to being approached, to hearing about the project and to engaging with poetry in front of a camera,” she says, and adds that about 95% of the people she approaches agree to read, and that those who refuse usually do so because they’re nervous about the camera, not the poetry. “I’m bothering people randomly, and yet almost everyone is genuinely excited about participating. The experience has really reminded me of how alive [Toronto] is,” she says. The majority of readers react noticeably to what they are reading, and many request to keep a copy of the poem, to which she always readily agrees.
Sometimes, the week’s poems are grouped around a theme, often tied to an event in Toronto. For two weeks in June she captured the World Cup fever that is consuming the city, bringing poems about soccer to the bars and cafes where supporters congregate. Last week featured G20 protesters reading poems about resistance.
Click through to watch one of the videos filmed at the G20 protests in Toronto.
Julie Sheehan has lots of readings coming up to support her new collection Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise. Check out all her Summer 2010 tour dates after the jump.
Guest contribution by Andrew Hudgins:
When strangers ask me what I do, I usually follow the lead of W. H. Auden, who said he was a teacher. So much easier than saying “poet,” and having to deal with the inevitable follow-ups: Have I heard of you? What books have you written? Do they sell that in bookstores?
Those questions are just tune-ups for the really hard one.
“You’re a poet, you say?”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“What kind?”
“Yeah, what kind of poetry do you write?”
I know I’m being offered an opportunity to promote an art that needs promotion and maybe sell a book or two. I know the question is coming, but like a recalcitrant student, I’m always unprepared.
On Tuesday, June 2nd, Adrienne Rich received The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Recognition Award, citing fellow female writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, Anne Carson, Nicole Brossard, Lisa Robertson and Dionne Brand as inspirations. Since receiving the Yale Younger Poets award in 1951, at the tender age of 21, Rich has strived to make the political personal in her poetry and prose. Rich’s list of achievements is extensive, to say the least, and she has authored 30 books of poetry and prose. It goes without saying that Rich has shaped the content and the form of American poetry in the latter half of the 20th century. I’ll go even further to say that she has been a driving force in dictating the place of women in literature and in the world. I remain truly grateful that she dove into that wreck.
Look for Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007—2010, a new work from Adrienne Rich, in January 2011.
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.
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.
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”.
