Seeing Light in Richard Blanco's Inaugural Poem for Obama

Hi friends of reading and writing,

I have been thinking about seeing this week, even before hearing the poem Richard Blanco read for Obama's second presidential inauguration.  My weekly idea to chew over and live with is that we can only see through light, that we mainly learn to "see" aka understand by our visual sense, and that it can both convince us and mislead us.  We can see and understand something only because it's presented to our eyes, illuminated in light.  But also, we can use vision to fool others (think of magicians, for example, or people who try to make you think they're something they are not.)

So Blanco, following the light of a day from sunrise to the newest constellation awaiting our creative response in the evening, taps into these thoughts.  He shows us concrete objects like the shoes without which he could not have gone to school, traces the role of his parents' sacrifices in providing them, but gives all that in a fleeting glance aside from the whole flow of society.  We each see and understand things that are part of the river of society, and depend on light to let us intepret them.  I highly recommend this poem to you.  You can find it in Hector Tobar's LA Times piece.

cheers,
Laura

PS Photo from Creative Commons with thanks to photographer Till Credner.

The Blackbird Sings, Coming Soon

Hi readers and writers,

I enjoy the annual project of Writing Our Way Home authors Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita, the River of Small Stones they collect in January.  Writers all over the world try to observe something with great intensity and write a short description of it, each day for a month.  A few of these "small stones" are collected by Fiona and Kaspalita and made into a book, an ebook and usually a paperback as well.  The collection of small stones, with philosophical musings of Fiona and Kaspalita, will be released soon.  It's called The Blackbird Sings this year, and I really like the cover design, shown above.  It will be for sale on Amazon and its release will be celebrated by a world-wide festival of new Small Stone poetry.  I'm proud to have a poem in the collection, but I bought last year's even though I had not participated in the project.  I'd encourage you to look at it and if you enjoy short poems, to buy it and perhaps to try your hand a small stone writing.  January will be here soon, and you would surely enjoy joining in if you decide to participate.

cheers,
Laura

Robert Mezey Interview on Poetry International

Hi readers and writers,

Robert Mezey kindly took time out from his schedule to do an interview with me for my internship at Poetry International.  It has just been posted online and you can read it here (click or go to this address): http://pionline.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/an-interview-with-robert-mezey/

In addition to writing poetry and collecting the poems of major figures such as Thomas Hardy, Robert Mezey, along with his colleague in English and Comp Lit at Pomona College, Richard Barnes, translated Borges' poetry.  Some of the interview is about how he thinks about translation of poems.  It's very thought-provoking! It might be that the translator has to write a whole new poem.

Also, my friend Vicki selected some interesting quotations about Robert Mezey by famous authors.  Take a look, enjoy!

cheers,
Laura

Sand in the Oyster

Dear readers and writers,

I've been reminded several times lately that things-out-of-place make a great theme for writing.  One reminder was in my Pomona College Magazine, where I read about Angolan students studying in Portugal when Portugal embarked on slaughter of Angolans in Angola.  You may have read Heart of Darkness by Conrad in one of your literature classes.  It was about the Portuguese occupation of the Congo, the next door neighbor of Angola.  When the dictator and his henchmen recollected the ones studying in Portugal, would they be far behind?  So the story was about a man who spent days driving batches of these students across Spain to France, where they could get papers and receive protection.  It was riveting.  I mean, I started reading it in the bathroom when I was about to go to bed and could not stop, no matter how sleepy I had thought I was.

The next reminder was my reading in preparation for our trip to the inland passage mentioned in my last posting.  As the glacial ice disappears, the ocean rises and the safety of animals that cross the glacier decreases.  The animals WERE in their place but the place has changed so much it's no longer safe.  So now, home is out of place, a scary concept for thirsty humans living in a big city in desert country; a concept that made me write a few sad poems lately.

The third reminder was my husband's shoes.  We both take off our shoes in the house, but unlike the Japanese people, we don't keep them on a rack by the door.  Each of us has a favorite spot.  But sometimes, they come off elsewhere and then when we need them, they're elusive.  It almost seems as if they're hiding on purpose.  What if they did?  So goes a funny little microfiction.

Think about the sand in the oyster when you're looking for inspiration.  Things out of their normal places make great story or poem starters.

cheers,
Laura

Check Out Poet Ellen Bass

Dear writers and readers,

This semester, I've been an intern at Poetry International literary journal from SDSU.  One of my enjoyable tasks was to interview poet Ellen Bass for our blog.  You can check out my blog post here: http://poetryintlreports.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/ellen-bass-interview/ and hear how Ellen Bass views the role of courage in a writer's life.  For a long time, I found it puzzling that so many writers talked about courage.  Then I found the vein of powerful writing rooted in personal experience, fiction or nonfiction, and I suddenly understood what they were talking about.  Ellen Bass spoke at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference I attended a few years ago, and her words about courage and writing really resonated with me.  Take a look at the PI blog to see more, some quotations from Ellen, a short video of her reading one of her poems.

best, Laura

Ruth Stone Is a Poet Worth Knowing

Ruth Stone has passed away at age 96, an inspiration to writers like me, who took up the sport after their youth was spent doing other things altogether.  Ruth, according to William Grimes, writing Nov 24, 2011, was relatively obscure until at 87, she won the National Book Award for her colletion, "In the Next Galaxy."  She was living in Vermont, a feat that I admire in its own right.  As I drifted into using a cane regularly and then into needing a disabled hang tag for my car, I gave thanks for good weather regularly.  I know there is good weather in Vermont, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't last all winter.   In my sixties, I might have simply fallen in love with my chair and sat there forever, should I live where the S word accumulates.  Not that I don't agree with those of you who think it is beautiful.  I recall a snowfall at Snow Mountain Ranch in Colorado, when I was pregnant with my son, when the crystals of snow floating down in the moonlight gave me that "I love you" catch in the back of my throat.  But back to Ruth Stone.  She lived in "rural solitude" near the end of her life; she had raised three daughters as a single parent after her poet husband committed suicide in 1959.  Her poetry was, to quote Mr. Grimes, "fierce and funny, by turns elegaic, scathing, lyric and colloquial."  He quoted a poem, as follows, "Things will be different/ No one will lose their sight,/their hearing, their gallbladder./ It will be all Catskills with brand/new wrap-around verandas."  It was the title poem in her collection entitled "In the Next Galaxy." In an interview in 2001, she said, "I was hanging laundry out and I saw all these ants crawling along the clothes line. Well I just dropped whatever I was hanging and ran upstairs in the house to get a book and write it down. Never keep a poem waiting.  It might be a really good one, and if you don't get it down it's lost."  I love that, because I still dream about certain pieces I never captured on paper. They were really good, I'm sure of that!      best, Laura

Inspiration from where?

Dear friends of reading and writing,

It's often hard to start writing.  Books have been written about writers' block.  I sometimes have a hard time, especially if I am trying to write a new type of genre.  This semester, it's poetry in Marilyn Chin's class at SDSU.  But luckily, the day Word's blank page was looming over me, I had seen the search of Gadhafi's trailer in Libya on TV.  They found this scrapbook of cutout pictures from magazines, all of Condoleezza Rice.  I was off and running.  How did he really feel about her?  What else did he do? I looked on the internet, but mostly I imagined and wrote about this creepy and fascinating obsession with Rice.  So, keep a mind open for strange bits from the news, strange smells or sounds, strange impressions of any kind.  They could give you a blowtorch to melt away writers' block.  And BTW, Rice's biography which has more information about the obsession, was released Nov 1, 2011.  Check it out!

 Cheers, Laura

Music and Poetry

Music and poetry seem to go together, both with rhythm and color inherent in their being. I just recently enjoyed an event celebrating a new book called Chopin with Cherries (available via Lulu) which celebrates the 200th anniversary of Chopin's birth with poetry new and old. I'm pleased that one of my poems, "Goodbye to Poland," was selected for the anthology. The bond between poetry and music was reinforced for me at a reading/performance arranged by the editor, Maja Trochimczyk, at South Pasadena Library. Many of us read our poems, and between poetry sets, an established pianist and a collection of students from Azusa Pacific University played Chopin pieces on the grand piano. The alternation drew depths from the music and from the poetry that I hadn't expected. I plan to listen to music with my poetry reading more often, now.

Interview with Martha Ronk

LH: How did you get interested in writing?
MR: I read a great deal as a child, taking books from the public library to read in stacks through the hot Ohio summers. I liked creating sentences and diagramming sentences and rearranging sentences and analyzing literature and studying Latin. I wrote a dissertation on Milton for my PhD and have taught Shakespeare at Occidental College for many years; teaching literature has made me awed by writing.

LH: What was your first success?
MR: My first book, “Desire in LA,” was selected at random for a contest sponsored by the University of Georgia, published 1991. A recent success: I had work chosen for a Norton Anthology, “American Hybrid.”

LH: What kind of books or articles do you most enjoy writing?
MR: I like conceiving of an entire project in which the poems are all related to one another by theme, approach, style, or form. At the moment I am working on “Transfer of Qualities” (quotation from Henry James) in which people and objects transfer qualities with one another—the manuscript is made up of prose poems, short essays, and short “fiction” pieces. In an earlier book, “Why/Why Not” (Univ. of CA Press), I had Hamlet and the phrase “to be or not to be” in mind for each of the sections. In fiction, I like obsessive narrators.

LH: Do you have an agent? Tell us about your experiences with/without agents.
MR: Poets mostly don’t have agents. My work has been published by means of literary contests offered by University Presses or by request from a publisher. If I try for another work of fiction, I would ask all the fiction writers I know for advice; my own fiction, “Glass Grapes and other stories” was published by a small press, BOA Editions, because one of the editors had published one of the stories in his anthology.

LH: What are your thoughts about marketing? Do you have any great tips on how to do it well?
MR: For publishing poems in literary journals, it is most important to know the journal and the editorial approach so that the work you send is fitting and appropriate. Most journals have instructions on how many poems to submit and when. I also think that it is important for all authors to attend conferences, to read at bookstores (and other venues), to attend readings. For poets, the major meeting is the Associated Writing Programs meeting in spring every year. I have had the opportunity to be an editor for Littoral Books, a small press here in LA, but we published 10 books of poems, and for several literary magazines; I learned a great deal working with other writers.


LH: If you could go back in time and start over, tell us one thing you have learned that would help you to succeed better/faster/with less struggle.
MR: I would start earlier. It also helps to begin with a community formed in graduate school, in one’s city, in publishing ventures with others, in other projects. Writers help support one another and since there is little financial support, this aesthetic support is crucial. I also wish I had tried fiction earlier; it was writing my fictional memoir, “Displeasures of the Table,” that got me to thinking that I might try fiction. For me fiction offers more opportunities for the comic.

LH: Any other thoughts to share?
MR: Writing is the most interesting and exhausting thing I do. And every time I read a great piece, a poem (C.D. Wright, for example) or a novel (I just finished “The Book Shop” by Penelope Fitzgerald with ironic, wry sentences) I am eager to write more, to find yet another juxtaposition of words. Each one offers something of a solution to the mystery of how it is done.

I have chosen photographs for the covers of my books; I have written a number of poems about photographs and I love black and white photographs and decided early to use photographs on the covers (although I didn’t have a choice for my last, “Vertigo” from Coffee House Press). My website is through Occidental College, English and Literary Studies Department at

http://departments.oxy.edu/ecls/07%20webpage/ronk/. LH note: Martha Ronk's most recent poetry book, Vertigo, is a National Poetry Series winner, selected by CD Wright.

New Orleans

New Orleans, the dreamscape, before, and then during Katrina. I have no images of the aftermath. Last night, I heard a very gifted poet read his surrealistic poem about the aftermath and felt touched by his grief and pain. On the way back, my friend told me of a recent trip to the destroyed part of New Orleans. She saw lines halfway up houses, where the water had submerged them. One house had “NO DOG FOUND” in big black letters on the clapboard front of the house. I can’t get that phrase out of my mind, that and the fact that it was fine to write on the clapboard where no word had ever appeared before. If you know about New Orleans post-Katrina, or can connect with the feelings of a city that has “lost” about a third of its population, use that for inspiration.