Sherry Chandler

Live at qarrtsiluni

Yippee! I’ve been waiting for this.

My poem “Relics” is live now at qarrtsiluni, the health issue. Please click the link to give a listen.

It’s a fun issue so far, by the way. You should give a look to the whole thing.

For a look at the pastel drawing my son did to accompany this poem, follow this link.

Ann Neuser Lederer

Sieve Motions

                          A lake, carved by rock

minuscule curlicues, chalk-soft,

          never perfect

spewed, wigged-out minnows,

      when stirred

puree of substances migrate

to too-bright smear of green

Pica, a paste to eat when desperate

Upon meeting strangers, pay strict attention

to what is framed initially

a lone, fossilized freshwater coral,

stark white

in the murk

The strategies of seeds, or sperms

          two trapped in a rinsed tin can, circling,

          metallic

The secret feeds of what is needed anyway.

— Ann Neuser Lederer, originally published in Red-Headed Stepchild, reprinted by permission of the author

Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Ohio, and has also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky. Her poems can be found in journals, anthologies, and her chapbooks Approaching Freeze (Foothills), The Undifferentiated (Pudding House), and Weaning the Babies (Pudding House). She has degrees in Anthropology and in Nursing, and is employed as an R.N. For more information, please visit her website .

Laurie MacKellar

Alan is not the only poet in the multitalented MacKellar family. Here is an Easter poem from his daughter, Laurie, who serves as Librarian at the Elizabethtown Community and Technical College. Laurie MacKellar is a brilliant musician who plays violin with Foggy Dew, a hammer dulcimer group.

One of the joys Facebook has brought me has been the opportunity to get to know Laurie better.

She is participating in the National Poetry Month poem-a-day challenge and this poem is one of the results. I love its language play

Poem for Holy Saturday

It is time
to order the thyme
to border the path
to the door. It is time
to shop – catalogs popping
from mailboxes, sending
wood pulp photo shoots
up through fast food coupons;
poking past ads are corners of covers
covered in cosmos, roses,
butterfly bushes
burning bushes
and the glorious gold
of florescent forsythia
bursting forth
with the force of breaking doors,
the pages bright, reflecting the light
on kaolin surfaces. It is Holy
Saturday, Christ
is not yet risen but already
he has broken the bars,
shattered the gates,
and has in hand
Adam’s hand, leading him
up to the earth’s surface
followed by Eve
Abraham, Isaac and John. And I
cannot decide
between the dogwood and redbud;
I need bleeding hearts
for the part-sun spaces.
Some people grow grapes.
Grapes have grown
in popularity. I’d like to grow
roses, but I’m afraid
of the thorns

— Laurie MacKellar, featured by permission of the author

__________
Poetry lover becomes shoestring publisher

Links

More on careerism in poetry from Sina Queyras

The reality of the writing world is few writers—even those who write more popular forms such as fiction—actually make a living from writing let alone find readers. So the question is how can one find a way to sustain oneself as a writer. It’s a big question, and it doesn’t only include financial concerns. The reality of time to write is a big reality, and the matter of how one uses one’s time, and one’s brain, impacts the quality of thought and the level of resources one brings to poetry. I’m not really arguing for much more than a little space around some of these formulas and assumptions. There is no perfect poet’s life. Why all this anxiety in search of it? And what does it look like? A major prize, a plush teaching job, perfectly intelligent students, half the year off?

What about the ability to live as a poet? That is one thing that makes me shake my head every time I say it. Who knew? One can be a poet. I have never come down from the high of that simple fact. The technician who came to give an estimate yesterday was fascinated too. I was the first poet he had ever met. What is it like? What does the life of a poet consist of?

It’s easy to forget what a privilege being a poet is. We get to organize our lives around poetry? For real? To partake in readings, conferences, have publications, reading groups. We share a network of colleagues having read similarly. Now if we could just loosen up our thinking about the ways in which we can build our lives around that, about what constitutes “success.”

And here’s a link Leatha Kendrick sent that is also about careerism in poetry: FUNNY WOMEN (COMBO!) #18: Publishing House

Submission Guidelines
by Jane Roper

. . .

As for poetry, we tend not to like narrative poetry, or poetry that tries too hard to be “poetic” and/or poetry that contains the word “pomegranate”—it’s just a thing we have. For us to publish a sestina (yawn), it would have to be really, really exceptional. It has happened. That is, it happened once because one of our exceptional editors wrote it and she can do whatever she wants.

Please familiarize yourself with the kind of material we publish before submitting your work, preferably by subscribing to our magazine for several years. We do check subscriber accounts, and we give preference to submissions by subscribers. The only addiction/abuse essay we’ve published in the last three years? Yep. Subscriber. The only pomegranate poem? Just kidding; we really never publish those.

We also don’t publish so-called “genre” writing. That means romance, thriller, mystery, western, science fiction, vampire stories, or anything else that lacks weight, meaning, or artistic merit and/or that we wouldn’t display proudly on our bookshelves. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t submit it, however. We actually love receiving this kind of crap, because it gives us a good chuckle and makes us feel better about our own writing, especially late at night when we’re drunk and/or stoned. Mostly stoned.

The poet Ai died on March 20. Here is her obit [PDF] from Oklahoma State University, where she was on the faculty, her obit from Tulsa World, and her bio from the Poetry Foundation.

Accredited Online Colleges list of 100 Best Poetry Blogs

A different kind of bombing

Bombing of Poems is an art project in which cities that have experienced aerial bombing in the past are now bombed with poems. Bombing of Poems over Warsaw consisted of dropping one hundred thousand poems printed in bookmarks from a helicopter over a symbolic location in the city. The poems were printed in two languages and they are by Chilean and Polish contemporary poets more info www.loscasagrande.org

This event took place in August 2009.

My thanks for Mark Brown. This is perhaps old news, but it’s good news.

And you may be interested in this bit of follow-up to the Les Paul playing zebra finches: The day an egg stopped the rock-chick show

Dorothy Sutton

Women writing in Kentucky today share two themes.

One is a loss of culture. Not nostalgia precisely, though it can look a little like it. Rather an urgency to record what was of value about the older skower ways before they disappear.

The second is an honoring of our elders, a need to record the extraordinary heroism of their ordinary lives (a phrasing I think I may have stolen from my friend Georgia Green Stamper).

In Backing Into Mountains (Wind Publications, 2009), Dorothy Sutton explores these themes with extraordinary grace, whether it be the Appalachian schoolbus drivers and mechanics of the title poem:

Your life depends on brakes and lights
up here in these Kentucky hills.
The school bus whines and groans to climb
through hollers, with creek-beds the only roads.
. . .
We try to maintain machines that can roll
without crashing, hold the young ones
back from the edge . . .

or Uncle Lester in “No Man’s Land”

One day he was husking the corn,
feeding the greedy, muddy pigs,
. . .
the next day halfway around the world
in Paris with the prostitutes of Pigalle
. . .
The next day mired in confused
trough trenches of muddy slop
. . .
the next day back in Pike County
slopping the hogs, begging the world
to stop . . .

This selection shows not only Sutton’s great compassion but also her craft: the circling around the sounds and images of pigs and slop in a way that is both humorous and heartbreaking.

Sutton explores far and wide in the matter of Kentucky, from Gorgeous George and Casey Jones to Robert Penn Warren and George Keats.

“Casey Jones” is one of my favorite poems in this collection. Having grown up in a singing/strumming family, as many of us here in Kentucky did, I love the play on the theme of this most famous of all train ballads (not to be confused with the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones) .

We’re the children of “Casey” Jones
from Cayce, Kentucky. In 1900,
Casey Jones died trying
to find the time he’d misplaced somewhere
between Memphis and Mississippi.
. . .
They dug him out, one legend says,
one hand on the throttle, to increase his speed,
the other hand firmly gripping the brake.

Here is the central dilemma of the theme of loss of culture. We tend, us older folk in Kentucky, to come from timeless sorts of places but now we are very much caught up in the rush of time. Our roots are in the folkways, our branches embrace Richard Dawkins and Picasso.

And right about now, Uncle Lester is crying “Whoa, damn you,” not just to the mule of the twentieth century but also to that last metaphor. Both of ‘em kind of got the bits in their teeth and took off.

Here’s a much better extended metaphor, from the Richmond Register:

Dublin poet Eileen Casey said recently of Sutton’s work: “The title poem of this collection pays tribute to the tenacity of the bus drivers of Appalachia, a cultural region in the Eastern United States, forced to breathtakingly negotiate very difficult terrain. In the same way, Dorothy Sutton takes each poem (and us) from one imaginative location to another, by the sheer force of her deep and intimate knowledge of what it is to be human. The poems are exquisitely crafted, steering through words, like those Appalachian bus drivers, trying to maintain machines that can roll without crashing, hold the young ones back from the edge, carry them all the places they need to go. These poems are a joy to read, in terms of capturing the cadences of lives lived and voices heard in the Kentucky of her childhood, different and yet the same as mine in Ireland. An emotional bridge is formed between Kentucky and the rest of the world, indeed a breathtaking reading experience.”

Dorothy Sutton is reading this Tuesday, March 9, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning‘s Kentucky Great Writer series. It’s an evening to celebrate Wind Publications. Her fellow readers are J. Stephen Rhodes, author of The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (my remarks here) and Normandi Ellis, author of Fresh-Fleshed Sisters. The festivities begin with open mic signups at 6:30, featured readings begin at 7:30.

Mr. Longfellow had a birthday yesterday

I had intended to post this yesterday, which was Longfellow’s birthday. But I got distracted, so I’m going to let it go out today

A Psalm of Life

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

&mdash Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Lounsbury, Thomas R., ed. Yale Book of American Verse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912; Bartleby.com, 1999

I had to memorize this one in high school. I’ll bet Jim Bunning and Mitch McConnell did too. Maybe they should revisit the penultimate and the antepenultimate stanzas.