The circumstances behind our respective diagnoses are all different. My mother-in-law was feeling nauseous and unable to eat for months before she was finally diagnosed several specialists later. I saw that a crumb-sized mole on my foot had mushroomed to the size and depth of a pea. But it’s my wife’s step-mother’s diagnosis that is truly incredible. Earlier this summer, she was in a head-on car crash in broad daylight that not only required surgery in her leg, but also cracked five of her ribs. If it hadn’t been for the other driver, uninsured and reckless, she wouldn’t have cracked those ribs, and there never would have been a reason for the MRI that found the mass.

When my mother-in-law passed away, the poem I wrote for her was an easy one, in terms of topic and structure. Before she passed, I had actually been thinking of the poem that would need to be written if her fight didn’t end well, so it had basically written itself by the time of the service.

When I was diagnosed, that was an entirely different story. They say in times like this a lot of bad poetry is written for every good one. That was certainly true for me. I wrote a lot. I do have a couple of instant keepers that came out of it, but I don’t believe in throwing the others away. Revising, I told my eldest son the other week, can take years. I didn’t listen to my golden rule of writing poetry: resist the urge to write. Instead, I wrote when it came to me, with no regard for patience or rationality. Very little good comes to my poetry when I write this way; I don’t know if the bad poems came from this refusal to follow my golden rule, or because it was the saying that a lot of bad poems come out of experiences like this, or if the two are somehow intertwined and really the same thing. But regardless of the reason, the poems need to be worked on, however long it takes, until they are ready.

It was poor timing in another way, as well. I had just clued myself in on the great powers of social media for writers that Spring of 2010, and while I had begun to come out of my introverted shell like a lone poet wallowing in the corner at a party, I had at least attended the party. Social media networking had also grown a sprout for me to actually network in the real world. My first real chance at doing this (outside of an on-line poetry class, which is suspect) was attending the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival that October in Sheperdstown, WV. I had signed up for a couple events there, but ultimately I was still too weak to go. It would have been an all-day event for me, and I just didn’t have the energy after having two major surgeries that summer. I distinctly remember “meeting” Deborah Ager of 32 Poems on Twitter, knowing she was already there, and thought there was someone I could actually meet and greet. It was this sort of social process for poets that had come to mean so much to me in the past six months, and I blamed cancer for stalling it.

This year, I don’t know what the creative process has in store for me. My father-in-law’s wife’s cancer diagnosis came a few weeks ago, but it looked like surgery could remove the mass and the survival chance was high. Now that we now how far it’s spread, we’re looking at a new prognosis altogether. The wonderful woman the cancer is attached to is full of energy, entertaining, a wonderful cook, and a good wife and mother. I care for her deeply, even though in the 15 years I’ve known her, I’ve spent relatively very little time with her. I am not as close to my step-mother-in-law the way I was my mother-in-law. So I don’t know what poem will come out of this experience. It’s not easy to think about the potential poem the way it was in 2009. And in some ways perhaps it will be harder to get it right than it was in 2010. All I know is that four years ago I knew no one who fought the cancer battle; now, I know too many. This is the kind of thing poets dream of, in a way, topics that are in your face and challenging to the soul, but ultimately I would rather have the people in my life than the poems for whom they are written.

The appreciation month takes place in March, and you can find the details here:  http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/02/call-for-guest-posts.html

Agusto-Cox is also looking for guest reviews of independently published fiction and poetry.  Reviews should be sent to Agusto-Cox by Feb. 25 for inclusion.

*****

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity–that is, not necessarily constructing the “scene of instruction” about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want. But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings. We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter@claudiarankine.com.

In peace,
Claudia
openletter@claudiarankine.com

No Shoes Required for this Kind of Poetry Reading

Online journals, workshops, and literary relationships existing entirely online have reinvigorated poetry and hardened it against accusations of it being a dying art. Part of this effect, I’m sure, is the immediacy that the internet can provide. An immediacy which HTMLGIANT is using to its fullest with their series of ‘Live Giants’ online poetry readings. Can’t get to New York or Chicago to experience Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey read? Just tune in online, instead. To be honest, the virtual ‘crowd’ that gathers for these readings is larger than most poetry readings I’ve ever been to. Not only does it allows the wonderful poems to be heard by people who are geographically inaccessible, but it provides yet another online platform for poetry folk to come together. Who doesn’t enjoy a love-in? Ok, so the animal masks are a little scary, but it all adds to the experience. HTMLGIANT are up to number 8, and previous readings have included Mairéad Byrne, Zachary Schomburg and Sam Lipsyte

Best of all, HTMLGIANT’s archives mean you can replay the readings over and over and over until your heart’s content. It’s always frustrating when you grow to love a poet’s work after you’ve seen them live and can’t quite recall the poems in the same way. Well now you can, whenever you like. Doing laundry, cleaning, jumping up and down… the possibilities are endless.

Who wouldn’t want poets in animal masks reading you to sleep?

McBreen is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Heather Island. She has put together several significant anthologies of Irish poetry, including The White Page: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets. McBreen’s is a poetry of memory and rooted in the Irish landscape of her various homes in Sligo and Galway. She enters into the Irish poetic tradition of emotional geography, mapping her relationships onto the surrounding terrain. It is a terrain traversed by Michael Longley and Eamon Grennan, who are McBreen’s neighbours both in Ireland and in Emory’s archives.

Personally, it’s incredibly exciting to have access to such a wealth of material, and I cannot wait to explore them. Still, something seems not quite right with the situation. Ireland has an immense cultural heritage and, as recently highlighted in Brian Cowen’s inaugurating speech for Harry Clifton as Ireland Professor of Poetry, poets are particularly elevated within the Irish arts. So surely the archives and manuscripts of Ireland’s brightest literary stars belong on their home turf? Emory’s collection even includes the papers of the Nobel laureate and arguably Ireland’s second largest export (after Guinness, of course), Seamus Heaney, despite the fact that Queen’s University Belfast has a wonderful centre for poetry named after him.

To look at it negatively, this collection could be viewed as cultural theft. Or it could just be admiration. So, is a nation’s literary heritage bound to geographical borders? Or is it free to the highest bidder?

Caroline Crew is on Fellowship at Emory University in Atlanta, GA for 2010-2011. She is an editorial assistant at 32 Poems.

Morse has penned ten haikus in total, and placed them all over the Metro Atlanta area. You can find a map of all the locations here. Saying that these signs, read by almost everyone in a quick glance in traffic or on the bus, offers ‘an ideal place for poetry’, Morse aims to make ‘compact observations and commentary on modern life’. My personal favorite packs a ton of poignancy into just seventeen syllables:

CASH 4 YOUR OLD GOLD

The Value of Memories

Measured by+ the Ounce

Still, it seems that not everyone is a fan of the public poetry. Speaking to Atlanta’s wsbtv.com Peggy Denby from Keep Atlanta Beautiful said, “We call signs like this, ‘litter on a stick’”.+ This is not empty griping, either. Flux Projects, the arts program sponsoring Morse’s poetry signs, has been notified of the illegality of the signs and advised to take them down. Fines for the offense range from $50 to $1,000.

Such controversy can only lead to more attention for the project—and maybe even inspire some copycat signs!

What do you think? Are unauthorized signs always litter? Or does art have a higher law?

You can find out more about the roadside haiku project with a video from John Morse here.

Berlin and LA are “bombed” with poetry.

I’m digging this poem from Julie Carr.

Jessie Carty made it onto the poetry bestseller list.

Can you write a novel in three days?

The big secret about writing? You don’t need anything special.

I’m reading–for a second time–Dan Albergotti’s Boatloads. Yes.