Casey Thayer: Interview with Serena M. Agusto-Cox

June 23, 2011

Poet Casey Thayer

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I hesitate to identify myself as a poet, having heard too often the response, “Oh, can you recite a poem for us?” Or the reply, “My daughter writes poems too.” I feel the same hesitancy I imagine comedians might experience when faced with this question: if we admit our interest in poetry or comedy, we’ll be asked to prove it, either that, or our efforts will be simplified as something anyone can do. It’s slightly irksome because while I encourage everyone to write, I have difficulty with those who equate my dedication to writing with those who sit down and write poems in their journals. There’s nothing wrong with journal writing, certainly, but I become frustrated with the common misconception that poets don’t work (and often work hard) on their craft. [click to continue…]

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Dear Tina Fey

June 15, 2011

Dear Tina Fey,

We have much in common. Recently, I discussed our commonalities in a Facebook update.

We have, for instance, brown hair.

And children.

We’ve survived the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We fall asleep when our husbands drive. Except I wake up when he swerves to miss roadkill.

You and I? We have not had plastic surgery (yet).

Like you, I’ve taken Benadryl to remain breathing at the home of my in-laws, who have a cat. For years, after taking Benadryl, I often responded to their queries with: “Qwtyruuuu uuuhhhhhhhhh dddddddddagh.” And then I’d fall face first into my Michigan apple cobbler. I think it was years before they knew I could speak English.

Although I never made it happen, I dreamed of meeting relatives at mid-way points so we’d not have to drag an impatient, screaming baby across the country. Eventually, I decided to look at these travel moments as an opportunity for deep personal growth. I let my husband drive while I drank bourbon.

On another note, I too have survived the Western middle-to-upper-class woman’s diatribe on how and why I should breastfeed all day and night while allowing my child to sleep in my bed until she’s 24.5 years of age.

I love this quote from your book:

“Women who not only brag about how much their 5 year old still loves breast milk, but they also grill you about your choices…let me be clear, millions of women around the world nurse their children beautifully for years without giving anybody else a hard time about it. The Teat Nazis are a solely western upper-middle-class phenomenon occurring when highly ambitious women experience deprivation from outside modes of achievement”

Have I mentioned I may love you a little?

What I wanted to say to the Teat Nazis was: “Dude, they didn’t breastfeed in Versailles.” And I like the idea of breastfeeding. I just don’t like the idea of the western upper-middle-class parent telling me what I should or should not do.

On a more positive note, I have learned many things from your new book. For instance, who knew men working in television urinate into jars? I thought only male novelists did this.

I figure you are like the rest of us despite your fame. You get up every day and put your pants on one leg at a time–and then you Google yourself. It’s these kinds of actions that bring humanity together.

Below are some other blog posts about your book and its affect on others. I hope it’s nice to know at least three of us read your book–maybe four if you count your mom, who sounds very nice by the way. I think about five people read my book of poetry (available on Amazon–cough, cough).

Why Tina Fey and I Are Totally Awesome
Heidi Zone

Love,
Deborah, your new “BFF” in a totally unthreatening way

PS: I think our Dads would like hanging out.

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Hope Snyder: An Interview with Serena M. Agusto-Cox

June 7, 2011

Poet Hope Snyder

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I would say I’m a poet, a translator, and the founder and director of the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

I believe that the power of a poem begins with the poem on the page. The poem has to work on the page before it works on the stage. That said, I also think that reading a poem in front of an audience is a crucial experience for both poet and public. It is important for the poet, if she chooses to read her own work, to read as well as possible. I believe poetry and theater go well together. In my opinion, writing can create a dialogue between writer and reader, a dialogue that could lead to understanding, and, eventually, to tolerance. Think of all the novels and poems that have helped us appreciate different cultures, while at the same time capturing a universal experience.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I am obsessed with my desire to have people recognize the importance of poetry in our lives and to value its power. This is what led me to found the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival and what motivated me to organize it for the past seven years.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I do not belong to any writing groups, but I have attended workshops at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Gettysburg Review’s Conference for Writers, and the Latino Writers’ Conference in New Mexico. Workshops at Gettysburg and Bread Loaf were helpful. I’ve also taken a couple of workshops with Stanley Plumly at The Writers’ Center in Bethesda. These were very beneficial.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I believe that poetry has something to offer everyone. Poetry is about language and about the human experience. Just as there are many different languages and unique human beings, there also are different styles of poetry that appeal to different readers. A reader can choose the poetry that he or she prefers. In my opinion, poets have an obligation to speak the truth as they see it. The reader may or may not understand the poet’s message, but that is true of all other forms of art. In my opinion, the purpose of poetry, like the purpose of all art, is to express through word or image what matters to the artist. The reader/viewer, brings his or her own experience to the work of art and a dialogue is created. If, as a poet, you want to write poems that only you will understand and if you do not feel the need to be read or understood by others, that is your choice.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

Even though I think I should listen to music while I’m writing, I don’t always do it. That is something I would like to change. I think music can be very helpful while writing. In the past, I’ve listened to classical, Latin American, Spanish, and Italian music. Among my favorites, Beethoven’s 7th symphony, a Spanish singer named Rosana, the sound track for the film “Frida.”

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Yes, my friendships have definitely changed since I began focusing on my writing. Most of my current friends are poets, fiction writers, and editors. It is comforting to know that there is a community of writers out there that understands and appreciates what I’m trying to do.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I try to walk or engage in some sort of exercise every day. Most days I walk 30 to 40 minutes. This year I joined a gym. I’m seriously considering hiring a personal trainer.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I love pasta, most Italian food, good salads, Thai food, and red wine. Coffee in the mornings is very helpful.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

At present I have two writing spaces, one at home, and a tiny office in town. My study at home is very pleasant, but it’s overcrowded with papers and books. That’s a distraction. Also, I have a hard time detaching from my home environment when I write there. The telephone rings, people stop by, and I find it difficult to get back to my work. I don’t know how other writers feel about this, but it has been my experience that friends and family who are not writers do not understand or respect the fact that writers need time and freedom in order to write. My office is quite small and does not have a bathroom, but when I do make it there, I can work for a couple of hours without interruptions. I’m still trying to find the perfect writing space, though I realize that I’m fortunate as it is.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

At present, I’m working on a poetry manuscript titled OLD LIES AND NEW PREDICTIONS. I have also started translating the poetry of a Cuban writer named Wendy Guerra. I’m taking a sabbatical from the poetry festival in order to assess it and to decide what direction I would like to take it in the future.

Thanks to Hope for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of her work below:

In The Changing Light

At first he believed she would be back, and that he would open the door.

In the meantime, he kept his job, adopted a dog without a tail,

soaked in the hot tub, and lounged on the couch they had bought

on sale. “Custom made,” the sales woman had explained

stroking the velvet. In the afternoon light, it shimmered

like silver.  After four years, the other woman

has learned to cook rosemary chicken and threatens

to fill his days and his bed.  She goes through the house,

gathers sweaters, pictures, and paintings. Now there will be

room for her pills and her make-up. With a drink and Barry White

on the stereo, he rests on the couch in the changing light. In his hand,

the pearl earring he found while re-arranging the cushions last night.

–Published in The Gettysburg Review (Summer, 2009)

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Charles Jensen: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

May 25, 2011

Poet Charles Jensen

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

Along with writing poetry, I am an off-and-on arts administrator, an editor for a small press, a writing teacher, managing editor for a sporadic online literary journal, an arts advocate on the local and national level, and a consultant to small arts organizations. I wear a lot of hats, but I don’t necessarily consider them mutually exclusive from being a poet. Being a poet makes me a more meaningful arts advocate in some ways–I can speak to the power of writers in the schools, for example.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

I don’t like the limiting writing into discrete genres that are then put into opposition to each other. I think writing is most effective, most meaningful, when it cribs from many genres and traditions at once. To touch on the next part of your question, one book that had a profound effect on me and my writing was Claudia Rankine‘s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which explores toxic culture, grief, and racism in America–but from a very personal, subjective perspective. If you’ve ever seen her read/perform from that work, you know it’s a multimedia experience with video, with her voice adding a significant layer of meaning to the work. How we can divide those impulses into camps? I prefer to look at the tools available to me and then choose which ones are essential to whatever project I’m completing.

I have written a lot of work about the American experience of gay people, partly in an effort to establish some understanding of difference. Is it effective? I don’t know. But it was work I felt called to do. On the flipside, not all writers need to take on this kind of burden–there are many stories to be told, many ways to tell them.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I’m pretty sure none of them are secrets. I love some aspects of “low” culture like trash pop music. I aspire to find ways to sew that into my work as a poet somehow. I am also really connected to film, both as a narrative art and as a form. Physical aspects of film are closely related to the work of poetry for me. I give extensive thought to sequencing, montage, collage, and narrative. Any two things placed in juxtaposition create a narrative. There’s a great story of the Kuleshov Effect, wherein an audience’s construction of narrative changes when the same photo of a person (mostly expressionless) is interspersed with a shot of soup or a shot of a baby, for instance. In the soup narrative, the audience describes the man as looking hungry. In the baby narrative, he looks happy. That effect of context is something I carry with me–how do individual poems, individual lines, individual images speak to each other?

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I think it’s hard to find good poetry manuals because so many of them use floofy platitudes to describe the work: “The poet is the person who hears the elephants coming and makes the graves!” “The poet must plug in the lamp and make it sing!” Etc. That’s why I think it’s more effective to look further, at other art forms. The language of design–line, color, etc.–were very instructive to me in thinking about the physical presence of a poem on the page. Film theory, as I alluded to above, was important too–ideas of subjectivity, the lens/the eye/the I, “suture” (editing theory)…

I think everyone should read “Ron Carlson Writes a Story” by Ron Carlson. He is brilliant and his enthusiasm for writing is entirely palpable in this how-to “manual” that deconstructs his writing of his story “The Governor’s Ball.”

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poetry itself is none of those things. It is the attitude of the reader that determines what poetry is. The only way to dispel the myth is for people to encounter poetry on their own. I always liken it to television. If you had never seen television in your entire life and then one day turned it on, only to see Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, you might say, “Gosh, I hate television.” But most of us realize that television is a multi-dimensional form with various strategies aimed at different audiences. If you watch television long enough, you will find something that speaks to you. This is true, too, of poetry. But because the poetry world has a reputation of being closed, or because it is taught in high school as a “symbolic” art practiced by dead white people, it loses a lot of its contemporary allure. I think now, more than ever, poetry strives to be egalitarian in a lot of ways–people just need to look.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I almost never listen to music when I write. I have basically no routines or rituals, either. There is a great TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert in which she describes how the poet Ruth Stone explained her inspiration to write, that she could hear it coming through the fields like a train rushing at her, and she would run into the house and grab paper and a pen to get it down before it passed. That is similar to my experience of writing. It’s not as loud or as obvious as a train, but I am sensitive to a change in the way my interior monologue sounds, and that moment is the beginning of a poem. If I write it down, I am generally rewarded with a complete poem. If the moment passes, it can’t be recaptured (not always a bad thing, in my mind, as many of those I do catch end up in the “circular file” anyway). I do tend to revise poems for a very long time, though–often for years, and I often work best on revision once the work has been placed in the greater context of a full manuscript.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I find teaching is an essential way to stay engaged with writing on a level that is very enriching for me. For example, I confessed to a student recently, “I just don’t understand why people write in syllabics.” Four days later, I was experimenting with syllabics in a new poem. I said the same thing in a workshop but about iambic meter, and for three months wrote nearly every poem with an iambic meter–and really enjoyed it! In a lot of ways, teaching forces me to embrace and/or interrogate my own assumptions about poetry as I strive to encourage my students to make their own decisions and determinations. And oftentimes, our discussions help me see work in new ways, and for that I’m very grateful.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I don’t get writer’s block. If I seem less inspired to write poetry, it is my creative brain telling me it is either time to revise old work or read books. Reading generally prompts me to write, and so does going to art museums (the Portrait Gallery is one of my favorites).

I cook dinner almost every night, which I suppose might be one of my few rituals. I have really come to enjoy it after years of feeling at sea or underprepared to complete new recipes. It has become a meditative time for me, and also a time when I become aware of the “physical making” of something, the hands-on work of bringing together various ingredients to develop flavors. I try to connect this to the practice of writing.

I also work out five days a week–a combination of yoga, cardio, and weightlifting. It’s a gift to myself, about an hour a day when my brain gets to check out while my body does the–forgive the pun–heavy lifting. That, too, is part of my writing practice. While my body exercises, I train my brain to associate and go off on its own to wherever it lands.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

It is always a total disaster–I would change that! My apartment is very small and my desk is very big–about 30% of my living room. The window is behind me. The room gets almost no natural light. It is absolutely not my ideal writing space. In Phoenix, I had a loft apartment with 20′ ceilings, 17 feet of which were windows. My desk sat up in the loft area, overlooking the living room, facing all the windows and light. That was an amazing place to write. I miss it every day.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I have a lot going on! I’m putting the finishing touches on a new manuscript of poems and have been writing a few kinds of fiction–a novel for adults, a YA novel, and I recently finished a YA short story that will appear in an anthology for GLBT teenagers. I’m also very slowly writing new poems, but I feel like now would be a better time for me to read, so I have a big pile of books all ready to go!

Thanks to Charles for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below:

IT WAS OCTOBER
–for Matthew Shepard

I was love when I entered the bar
shivering in my thin t-shirt and ripped jeans
and I was love when I left that place, tugged along at the wrist
as though tied, with a man I did not know.

I was love there in the morning
when our sour kisses bore the peat of rotten leaves,
fallen October leaves. And it was love that we kissed anyway, not knowing each other’s names.

I was love in that bed
and I was love in the hall and down the stairs and into the freezing rain.

I was love with hands punched deep
into the pockets of a coat.
I was love coated in frozen rain.

Back home, I was love stripped of the cigarette-stung shirt, love pulling the stiff jeans from my legs.
I dried my hair and I was love.

It was October. What did I know of love that year,
shuddering in my nervous skin. Miles away, the boy was lashed to a fence and shivering.

Where that place turned red and the ground soaked through
with what he was, I was love.

What did I know of love then
but that it wasn’t enough.

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Julie Brooks Barbour on Mary Oliver’s “Singapore”

May 23, 2011

On the 32 Poems Facebook page, we discussed our favorite poems. Julie Brooks Barbour took us up on our offer to write about one of her favorite poems. What follows is a brief essay on “Singapore” by Mary Oliver. 

Singapore

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
     in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
     rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
     neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
     which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
     hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Copyright @ 1990 by Mary Oliver. First published in House of Light, Beacon Press. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems, Volume One, Beacon Press.

This poem was posted to my office door during the years I worked as Staff Support for a university composition program, supporting my husband through graduate school. At that time, graduate students and professors surrounded me, and many saw me as a secretary, nothing more. Like anyone else, I hoped I would one day arrive where I wanted to be and that this was simply a stopping place. I was always a grad student’s wife, uncertain about my place in the world.

What I love about this poem is its wide social significance. I didn’t post it on my door to remind others that my job didn’t define me. It was a reminder to not judge others by the jobs they perform. My position, though it may have paid more, did not make me a better person than a custodian or groundskeeper. This poem is a lesson in humility: though the work of another person may disgust her, the speaker realizes that she is no better than the woman because she can flee (“I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket”). The janitor’s smile is only for the speaker’s sake; her hair becomes as beautiful as the wing of a bird because she is human, not because she cleans toilets. The “darkness” that is “ripped” from the speaker’s eyes is the darkness associated with dirtiness, and, more possibly, class distinctions.

Though the title is important in defining place and how we, as readers, might visualize the woman in the poem, I think that is where its significance ends. Since the woman we meet through the speaker never utters a word, acting as a silent movie character, she could very well be any woman cleaning any airport anywhere in the world. What is most significant is the way in which the speaker argues against how the larger culture has taught her to treat a janitor or anyone working a job that would make her cringe, and how she accepts this woman as part of the world, as a human among humans, in the only way she knows how: through a poem.

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Recipes for Poets

May 20, 2011

Happy May 20th! This is a day for recipes for poets. I have no idea where I came across this recipe, and so I don’t know whom to credit. Eek. I love sweet potato buritos and hope you do too. If you’re on this poetry blog and wondering why I’m sharing a recipe, please read the part after the recipe. That should explain everything.

Sweet Potato Burritos

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
6 cups canned kidney beans, drained (I use black beans and use dried)
2 cups water
3 tablespoons chili powder
2 teaspoons ground cumin
4 teaspoons prepared mustard
1 pinch cayenne pepper, or to taste
3 tablespoons soy sauce
4 cups cooked and mashed sweet potatoes
12 (10 inch) flour tortillas, warmed
8 ounces shredded Cheddar cheese

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Heat oil in a medium skillet, and saute onion and garlic until soft. Stir in beans, and mash. Gradually stir in water, and heat until warm. Remove from heat, and stir in the chili powder, cumin, mustard, cayenne pepper and soy sauce.
3. Divide bean mixture and mashed sweet potatoes evenly between the warm flour tortillas. Top with cheese. Fold up tortillas burrito style, and place on a baking sheet.
4. Bake for 12 minutes in the preheated oven, and serve.

I asked poets via Facebook and this blog if they’d like to share a recipe. The idea I had behind asking poets to share their recipes is that time management is one of the most important (yet seldom discussed) aspects of being a poet or any kind of artist. Are your eyes glazing over because I wrote “time management”? Stick with with me a for a moment, please.

Here’s the original invitation:

Since most poets have other work that takes their attention away from art, it’s important to have time management skills. One of the many ways I save time is by cooking healthy meals that do not take long to prepare.

For that reason, I invite you to join me in posting your favorite 20-minute (or so) recipe on May 20, 2011. Post your recipe to your blog or website. I will share all of the links in a big post here on the 32 Poems blog. To participate, please do the following by May 15, 2011 (thanks to Kelli Agodon for inspiration on the guidelines):

Recipes for Poets Guidelines

  1. Create a blog post that lets people know you will participate. If you can, refer them to this post.
  2. Leave me a comment on this post that includes your blog URL and name if you would like to participate.
  3. On May 20th, post a recipe that takes 20-30 min (or less) to prepare on your blog or website.
  4. It’s easiest if you place the recipe into the blog post you wrote above, so I’d already have the link for it. If you don’t want to do that, you can just send me the new link.
  5. I will include a master list of all of the participating blogs right here on the 32 Poems blog.

Can I count on you? Are you in?

Participants so Far:
Kelli Agodon, Book of Kells blog
January O’Neil, Poet Mom blog
Bernadette Geyer
One Minnesota Writer
Spoon Fed Writer
Inkwell Blackout
Hungry Poet
Monica Wendel at No Ideas But
Being Poetry
Jessica Goodfellow
Kristin Berkey-Abbott

{ 36 comments }

Maine to Virginia by Sandell Morse

May 18, 2011

I don’t know why I’m obsessed with this, why sitting here in my studio at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, looking out a rusted chain link fence, at trees leafed in the fullness of a Virginia spring, surrounded by the still quiet of this place where writers write, painters paint, composers compose, I see in my mind’s eye the face of a man I don’t know, didn’t meet, a man who approached my car in a parking lot outside of Panera Bread. I’d spent the night in a Comfort Inn at an exit off of I 81 in Harrisonville, and that morning I’d found the espresso that I loved. I was juggling a water bottle, travel mug, wallet and car key when I heard a voice. “Excuse me, Ma’am.”

BIO: Sandell Morse holds a Master’s Degree in Liberal Studies with a concentration in the Humanities from Dartmouth College and a Master’s Degree in English with a concentration in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire. She has taught at the University of New Hampshire and at the University of Maine, Farmington. She facilitates both fiction and nonfiction workshops for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and for the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.

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Confession Tuesday: I Might Be a Weirdo

May 17, 2011

PEACEI confess my brain likes to wander when I should be working on my book. My brain has an advanced degree in thinking of one hundred things I could do besides writing. The activities my brain thinks up may vary and may include:

  • Eating chocolate
  • Drinking jasmine green tea
  • Reading, which is acceptable
  • Exercising
  • Calling my dad for “research,” which was helpful

My dad, when I called him, asked what I was writing about in my essay. I’m writing about how I could not sleep well at night. It seems I never slept, yet I know I must have. Instead, I battled sleep and then, the next morning, always battled the morning too. I thought no one noticed how I rarely slept or how I went to bed so late. I was wrong. My mother said, “I knew you stayed up late, but your grades were good so I decided to let you stay up.” If I had a cough, my dad gave me whisky cut with water. If I had insomnia, my dad warmed me milk and served it in a mug. In this way, I learned that love shows itself in multiple ways.

My father asked me, “Where are you?”

“Virginia,” I said.

“Mmm.” I figured he assumed I was in Northern Virginia, that he might not understand I was away from home.

“I’m in southern Virginia.” In Maryland, we know southern Virginia is a world away from northern Virginia.

“Oh, are you near Asheville?”

“I think so. I’m about an hour south of Charlottesville.”

“Then, you traveled, I’d say, 350…no…380 miles.” I’d traveled 378 miles. Can you see now why I track my trips down to the mile?

“Yes, dad, you got that exactly right.” I smiled.

Last night, another artist quoted Stephen King—with the disclaimer he wrote a good book about writing—as saying that you should learn to be different from others if you want to be a writer. Of course, he had a better way of saying it. The point is: Artists are considered weirdos. Those who have no inclination to create art—oh, how I envy you some days!—think we’re odd for working on projects that bring in relatively little money. Even for those raking in the occasional commission or book deal, what seems like a large amount is often smaller than it first appears if you calculate the hours put into the project.

I come to the VCCA to be among others who do not think I’m weird for writing poems (no money!) or creating prose (who will buy it!?). I create to make the invisible visible, to connect with people, and to connect people with each other.

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William Fain Roby on Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain”

May 16, 2011

I love “Convergence of the Twain” because it is both terribly flawed and intensely frightening.

Hardy’s poem is not the steel chambers, the currents, the moon-eyed fishes. Hardy’s poem is not even the gilded gear, or the vaingloriousness—as he probably wanted it to be. “Convergence of the Twain” is, in fact, the sea-worm, crawling “grotesque” and “slimed”, though Hardy’s description of the worm as “dumb” and “indifferent” is hardly appropriate. I think we can cleave that off, chalk it up to his lack of a cutting room floor.

Had the executors of Hardy’s estate not burned his letters and notebooks, we may have more insight into those two little words, those nagging things that hold the poem back. Any middle of the road workshop worth its salt would have led Hardy to cut those vagueries—the worm’s presence in the poem is what brings me back to it time after time. The worm is hardly “indifferent,” though he may in fact be “dumb.” That’s the fault of his biology.

Hardy, who famously argued that “Peace is poor reading,” gives us very little of it in “Convergence of the Twain.” From the (admittedly overwrought) “salamandrine fires” of the foundries that stitched the Titanic and the “shadowy silent distance” of the Atlantic ocean, we are forced to swallow a picture of the wreck of the Titanic that is at once capital-N Natural, small-n natural, terrifying, even Calvinist. Forget the sweet pink cheek of the movie star, or the grip of the blonde boy stowaway—forget the murky algae-swamped submersibles shining lights across “the mirros meant / to glass the opulent,” this is the picture of the Titanic I love: a ship that grows in “stature” and “grace” like the boy Christ in his great Lost Weekend. Stately, sharp, tragic, terrified.

BIO: Will Roby is a poet and playwright from Texas. His poems have appeared at Stirring, Carte Blanche, anti-, and Tri-Quarterly.

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Joaquin Miller Poetry Series

May 15, 2011

We took the “cabin” out of the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series this year. Please come celebrate with us and come listen to the poets chosen to read in this year’s series.

  • June 9: Kelly Cherry with Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Trevor Bobola & Julia Holemans
  • June 16: Pia Taavila & Ian Williams
  • June 23: Adam Tavel & Melissa Tuckey
  • June 30: Yvette Neisser Moreno & Iain Pollock
  • July 7: Hailey Leithauser & Suzanne Rhodenbaugh
  • July 14: Benjamin S. Grossberg & Michele Wolf
  • July 21: Joe Bueter & Lynn Wagner
  • July 28: Michael Gushue & Jennifer Militello

Although the series will no longer take place at the cabin in Rock Creek Park, we are more than pleased with the new space.

We’ll be indoors with comfortable seats, air conditioning for those who need it, and a handy reception space. We will also have the option of reading inside or outside, so we will always, always have a “rain” location at the ready (and at the exact same address).

Thursday evenings at 7:00 at the Rock Creek Nature Center, 5200 Glover Road, NW, Washington, DC near the intersection of Military & Glover roads. Sign up for opening reading at 7 pm. Wheelchair accessible. Nature Center is located at the far north side of the Horse Stables. For more information, call Kathi Morrison-Taylor at 703-820-8113.

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