3rd annual Big Poetry Giveaway — get your free poetry here

image by Kelli Russell Agodon

It’s that time of year again, when the poets of the blogosphere join together to send free poetry all around the world. Kelli Russell Agodon is the ringleader of this poetry circus, and you can find out more about the Big Giveaway on her blog.

(**Oh, and I forgot to say in the original post that Kelli will be keeping and updating a list of all poets participating in the giveaway if you want to try for a bunch more books!)

If this is your first visit to the stanza, welcome and thanks for stopping by. This blog is a labor of love where I write about poetry, the writing life, parenthood, and life in general. I invite you to poke around a little bit while you’re here: for poetry, craft talk, and poetry resources try the roundups; for inspiration look at sunday words; if you’re a fan of stories told in a single image, take a look at wordless wednesdays. What I love most is when this blog becomes a place for conversations amongst readers, so I invite you to chime in with your thoughts if you’re so inclined.

And don’t forget to enter your name in the comments of this post for your chance to win one of the following poetry collections:

Threshold by Jennifer Richter

Threshold was winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition, and published by Southern Illinois University Press in April 2010. In spare and finely honed language, Jennifer Richter weaves moments of everyday life — putting the baby to sleep, talking with neighbors — with an account of illness and, ultimately, survival. The poet looks at each strand of her life with grace and clear-sightedness to give us a collection of beautifully crafted poems that help us see our lives as something luminous and growing despite our struggles.

Rookery by Traci Brimhall

Rookery won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2010. This book is part story, part book of spells. We are just as apt to find crickets, ants, and mice grinding their teeth, as angels and saints making themselves known in daily life. In Brimhall’s beautiful and urgent language, stories of betrayal, coming of age, and historical events combine to create a sensual study of our human nature shaped by forces of love, loss, and life.

I promise you won’t be disappointed with either of these titles, and I hope you’ll enter for your chance to win by commenting on this post. Please make sure to leave some way for me to get in touch with you if you’re the lucky winner. Winners will be selected at random and I’ll announce the lucky pair on May 1.

Happy April is Poetry Month to all of you!

friday roundup: living vicariously, shoebox poems, and total eclipse

This morning I moved all the scary piles off my desk and started fresh. This is not to say I accomplished anything that’s waiting for me in those scary piles, but at least they can no longer taunt me as they’re out of my sight. For now. And it’s Friday, so it’s time for a roundup. Here we go:

Claus W. Vogl; public domain from wikimedia

living vicariously Those of you who swim around in the writing world know that the annual AWP conference was last weekend. I’ve been reading everyone’s AWP posts and updates, living vicariously through their accounts of the conference. If you’d like to live vicariously, too, here are a few links to: Donna Vorreyer’s reflections on AWP, including a lovely poem; Laura E. Davis’ Top Ten Moments of AWP; Sandy Longhorn’s summary of what she learned and what she’s thinking about from AWP; a few updates (you may have to scroll down to find them) from Kathleen Kirk, who packed particularly light (very impressive, Kathleen!); and this list of “overheards” (caution: not to be read with small children looking over one’s shoulder) which includes one very funny question from a cab driver. And here is one of my all-time favorite AWP post-mortems by Kay Ryan. Ah, AWP, I hope to meet you next year in Boston.

shoebox poems  Every week, Poets&Writers posts a poetry prompt (fiction, too, I think), and this week’s prompt really appealed to me. I often use prompts if, for nothing else, to get me to the point of pen on paper. As the words begin flowing, the prompt often goes right out the window, but at that point it doesn’t matter. This prompt is a bit different as it involves collecting snatches of this and that over the course of the week, and making a poem from the collection. I use the word ‘making’ purposely — the word poet comes from the Greek for poiein, “to make or compose.” To say  ”I’ve made a poem,” feels different than “I’ve written a poem,” no? Here is the prompt from P&W:

During the next week collect images, photographs, small objects, lines of poetry that you’ve written, passages from other writers’ work, snippets of conversations you overhear. Throughout the week put these things in a shoe box or something similar. At the end of the week, sit down and lay out each thing around you. Use the things you’ve collected as the ingredients for a poem.

I’m going to try this exercise this week, and next Friday I’ll let you know how it goes. If you want to try it, too, please join in and let us know how it went for you. And, to a certain high school English teacher in the readership, you’re welcome for your next lesson plan.

total eclipse This week I re-read one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing: “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. No review or summary can do justice to this piece — it’s precision, its tension, the descriptions of the earth under the eclipse, the inner and psychological spaces the eclipse takes us down into. Do yourself a favor and go read this piece here, or check it out of your library, or order it here, or ask for it at your friendly, neighborhood, independent bookseller’s. And did you know that the next total eclipse of the sun viewable in the U.S. will occur on August 17, 2017, in an area near Hopkinsville, Kentucky? Might have to road trip.

Reader, that’s it for this week’s roundup. Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend, and thanks for reading. And, P.S., if you know of other AWP reports circulating the web that I should read, let me know in comments!

friday roundup: the VIDA count, Cerise Press, and my new front door

Good morning, Reader. Another week comes to a close. Which reminds me of my favorite line from Season 1 of Downton Abbey: “What is a weekend?” That’s the Dowager Countess of Grantham asking. Unlike at Downton Abbey, at our house a weekend is a couple of days to run around like farmyard fowl to basketball games, birthday parties, and various stores and shops. Our weekends are busier than our weeks — so, before the madness begins, let’s get on to the roundup:

the VIDA count  VIDA has just come out with their 2011 count that looks at the percentage of women vs. men are published and reviewed in leading journals. It’s no surprise to anyone that the gals are underrepresented. There are probably 100 reasons for this disparity. My experience reading for Weave Magazine is that  men submit a higher proportion of poems. This makes total sense to me: Women are busy running households and raising children. Women tend to put the needs of others in front of their own needs. I realize I’m generalizing here, and that plenty of men run households and raise children these days. Still, I want to say: Send your work out ladies! Let the laundry pile up! Go ahead, run out of toilet paper! Serve popcorn for dinner! Whatever it takes! And also, I want to say that I couldn’t disagree more with Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, who said:

And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing, too.

As I said once to a fellow poet that suggested changes to one of my poems “to make it post-feminist”: My writing will be post-feminist when the world is post-feminist. We’re not there yet.

Cerise Press   I spent a while yesterday afternoon with Cerise Press, a beautiful (beautiful!) online journal of literature, arts, and culture. There is a lot of good stuff here, Reader. I especially enjoyed Chloe Garcia Roberts’ translations of Li Shangyin. Do yourself a favor and go read Untitled (to see each other…). There’s also an excellent review of Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Their Circle by Harriet Lane Levy. My fellow writer and classmate Kathleen Brewin Lewis, wrote the review. Kathleen is also the editor of a new journal: Flycatcher: a journal of native imagination.

my new front door  This has nothing to do with poetry, but my sense of relief is so great, I can’t help but share it. After offering on two houses and getting outbid on both, Husband and I finally did the outbidding. Our new abode is tiny (1100 square feet) but lovely, and is only a couple of blocks away from our rental. Will I have a room of my own for writing? Sadly, no. But I will have a three-foot stretch of wall of my own, and really, that’s all I need. I’m so glad all the time I spent house-hunting will pour back into the “writing time” column… at least until it’s time to pack up and move — but I’ll think about that when the time comes.

Reader, have a lovely weekend.

granted

the moment of truth

Dear reader, something funky just happened. I started writing this post and all of a sudden it published itself. Maybe I bumped the button reaching for my nice, hot cup of spicy/sweet tea? Or something. Anyway, mea culpa for the empty email in your inbox.

What I wanted to tell you is that I spent most of this week up to now working on a grant application. It’s the first time I’ve ever applied for a grant for writers. This particular grant came into my radar screen thanks to one of my excellent po-friends who saw it advertised and sent the info my way. The grant is specifically for writers and artists with families, so she (the friend) thought it a perfect fit.

I marked the deadline on my memo board, and then went about my merry business of being a mother, and a writer, and a wife, and a cook, and a house-hunter, and an auntie, and a person whose procrastinates listening to voicemails for months at a time, and who also hates grocery shopping.

The truth is, I think I would’ve let the deadline pass me by if the same friend who sent me the grant information in the first place hadn’t followed up with an e-mail last week. Subject line: This is you! Body of message: Apply!

That short and sweet bit of encouragement got me started working on the grant application.

I was flying by the seat of my pants, having never written an artist’s grant before. Ironically, my training in public administration came in pretty handy (Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, even for me, but my degrees are in Economics and Public Administration — almost as unpoetic as you can get, except that Economics has its own obscure and hard to follow poetry if you look for it, e.g., the Nash Equilibrium). I knew how to draw up a very detailed budget and statement of work, so I did that first. The Bio came fairly easily, especially because they asked to know about how parenthood has influenced your writing and writing life. The hardest part was the Artist’s Statement. I’d never done one of those before. I did some googling, read some advice, then just did my best. The easiest part was assembling 10 poems for the Portfolio portion of the application, and I did that last of all. After having reflected on and written about my work, and after having identified precise goals and the steps required to achieve them, choosing the 10 poems that best exemplified my work was a snap. I confess, I was (and am) proud of those 10 poems.

So, here’s what I learned:

1. Never underestimate the power of a few, choice, and well-timed words of encouragement. Thank you, friend.

2. You can learn a lot about your work and your goals if you take a few hours to step back and survey what you’ve been doing, and where you want to go next with your work. I think this is true for anyone and for any kind of work. The hardest part is taking the time to do it, but once you do it I think you’ll feel proud of yourself and have a clearer notion of what your work is all about.

3. Beware the trap of the False Choice. While writing the Bio about how parenthood has influenced my writing life, I discovered that at one time I had fallen into the trap of a false choice. Here’s what I wrote: “At one point in my life, before (the children) were born and intuiting how all-consuming both motherhood and an artistic life were likely to be, I thought it best to choose one path or another: mother or writer. I chose mother. And yet, in the process of becoming a mother and expanding our family, I went back to writing. Both the joys and the challenges of family life were enormous and mysterious to me, and the only way I could process that mystery was to write about it.” To some extent, it’s human nature to create false choices for ourselves when we can’t see our way clear to something. But, having articulated this particular false choice for myself at long last, I’m going to be on the lookout for other false choices I set myself up for — and I’m not going to let them fool me.

4. Defining clear priorities will help you get your work done. On Sunday, I opened my writing calendar and wrote in big letters all across the page for this week: THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THIS WEEK IS THE GRANT APPLICATION. All week I felt pulled and tugged by what I wasn’t doing: the laundry, my reading and writing for the class I’m taking, submitting, revising, volunteering at school. Then I would open up my calendar and read out loud about the most important thing this week. It’s hard to let other things slide and now I’m behind on everything else, but the grant application’s done. Wahoo!

Today’s a chilly, wet day. It’s minimum day, the kids’ weekly half-day of school. There’s a pot of beans soaking on the stove, waiting to be transformed into soup. There’s, uh, quite a bit of laundry and not enough toilet paper. I’ll be shifting my focus for the rest of the day. But it sure feels good to have tried something new. I hope you’ll try something new-to-you sometime soon, Reader. Who knows what you’ll learn… ?

friday roundup: infinite corn, AWP envy, and the worst thing that ever happened to poetry

Friday already! This week has been all-mama-all-the-time for me, as the kids had a week off school. Still, I’ve been squeezing in some poet-time, too (mostly before daylight. Sigh.). Here’s this week’s roundup:

photo by Jamie Lantzy, public domain from wikimedia

infinite corn I’m reading Sandra Beasley‘s book, I Was the Jukebox, this week, and, Wow. It won the Barnard Women Poets Prize in 2009. These poems are not afraid. Joy Harjo, in the prize citation, calls them “fresh, crisp, and muscular,” and I can’t improve on that description. One thing I love about this collection is that many of the poems are both laugh-out-loud funny and cut-like-a-knife piercing– a combination I truly love because isn’t that life? I also love that these poems give voice to all sorts of worldly objects and elements: sand, the world war, a piano, an eggplant, and even a platypus.

I’m about half-way through the collection now, and I want to share this fabulous poem with you:

*

I Don’t Fear Death

But what I’m really picturing
is Omaha: field after field

of sorghum crisp to my touch
and one house high on a hill,

sheets on the line. You tell me
everything ceases, that even

our fingernails give up, but
what I really believe is that

we keep growing: infinite corn,
husk yielding to green husk.

I look back on the miles
connecting me to Earth, think

I’d never have worn those shoes.
I slip them off like anything

borrowed. The clouds are thin
and yellow, smelling of

fireworks and salt. In Omaha,
the town votes me Queen of

Everything. You are the slow
dance, the last ring of smoke:

to be held tight, and then only
this colder air between us.

*

I never would have worn those shoes, either. Reader, go get this book today!

AWP envy  I confess, I wish I were going to AWP (non-poets in the readership: this is the annual conference sponsored by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and it is the mecca of the writing world). I fantasize about the book fair, acres and acres of books to read. I long to crouch in a corner of one of the panels, furiously scribbling notes. I want nothing more than to stop by the Crab Orchard Series table and have my copies of Threshold and Rookery signed by the amazing poets that authored them (Jennifer Richter and Traci Brimhall, respectively). Alas, this is not the year for me….. but to all my writerly friends who are going, I wish you a fantastic time. May you return home exhausted and brimming with poetry.

the worst thing that ever happened to poetry  I love this quote from an interview with poet Richard Tillinghast in the latest issue of The Pinch:

“The worst thing that ever happened to poetry was the idea that a poem was something to be understood. A saner approach to poetry would be that, instead of being understood, a poem wants and needs to be enjoyed. A lot of the things we enjoy, we don’t fully understand. Maybe we enjoy them more because we don’t fully understand them. When you meet a new person, do you understand him immediately?  People aren’t that simple and life isn’t that simple.  Reading poetry is good training for understanding life and other people.  Poems are as multilayered and as complex as people are.”

Let the people say, Amen! And here’s another thought, this time from the poet Gregory Orr:

“It is heartbreaking the way we teach poetry is an elite art form. (Poetry) is a natural expression, an impulse. Song and poetry is the only thing that lets us process our emotional life. Poetry says ‘tell me what you’re feeling.’” (from this article)

Reader, may your Friday be touched by song and poetry.

happy new year, here we are

Ok, are we all here? Welcome to the stanza. There’s not much to see yet, but let me show you around.

• For basic information about this blog, you can read the about page.
• If you’d like to subscribe to new posts, you can enter your e-mail in the designated field in the right-hand margin.
• Also in the right-hand margin are blogs I follow, as well as a series of links to the poetry world. The po-links are offered both as a resource to you, Reader, and as a reminder to me (so I don’t lose track of all the cool poetry resources in the world).
• If you want to comment on a post, click on the dialogue bubble to the right of the post’s title. If you’d rather not comment publicly, but want to share your thoughts with me directly, you can e-mail me at mollycspencer (at) gmail (dot) com.
• I am new to WordPress, and I’m hoping the learning curve will be fairly gentle, but please bear with me for any bumps in the road.

And now, for a bit of reassurance (if you need any). One of my readers asked me if I thought the stanza would still be interesting for people who aren’t that into poetry? Would it still have elements of regular life, motherhood, general musings, humor, etc.? The answer is yes. You’ll find the content and tone here to be very similar, if not identical, to what I’ve written at Both Fires over the last several months. I’ll just feel better about my kids’ privacy and sens(es) of self if I put some distance between the posts I wrote when they were little ones and what I’m writing now (for more on this, see the about page).

I’m looking forward to connecting with you and learning from you here at the stanza. Thank you, as always, for reading.