32 Poems Magazine —

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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Day 36: 5 Favorite Poetry Books by Brian Spears

May 10, 2011

We had so many poets willing to share their favorite poetry books that we’re continuing past National Poetry Month and into May. Today, Brian Spears, shares his favorite books:

I should retitle this to read “My Favorite Book of Poetry and Four Recent Books I’ve Fallen In Love With,” because there’s no way I could actually make the first list happen. It’s an impossible task, I think, to narrow the field in such a way, especially given the way my feelings toward books can change depending on my mood. So instead, I’ll give you the list I want to give you, which is my all-time favorite book along with four books from last year that I thought were really awesome.

Favorite Book: A Selection of Poems by E. E. Cummings

I was already writing poems when I was a junior in high school, but they were very formal, filled with forced rhymes and inverted syntax, clichés and abstractions. Then, in what I imagine must have been an act of desperation to get us to pay attention, my teacher, Ms. Nancy McKee, started writing out “in Just” on the chalkboard. I could tell she hadn’t planned it out—she didn’t have the text of the poem with her and she openly acknowledged that she couldn’t really explain it—but even if she didn’t get another student to perk up, she got me. I went to the local bookstore and got them to order this book, and paid for it with the money I was earning slinging chicken at a local fast food chain, and given that I was making $3.35 an hour, that was a solid shift’s worth of work.

I stopped writing like Cummings eventually, but I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had when I saw that poem going up on the chalkboard and saying to myself “you can do that?” I still have my copy of that book today, 25 years later.

Four Great Books From Last Year, In No Particular Order

Diwata by Barbara Jane Reyes is creation myth and song and foot-stomping rhythm and glorious metaphor throughout. I still pick up this book every few days and read a few pages and revel in them.

Julie Sheehan’s Bar Book, Poems and Otherwise proclaims that it’s not just poetry from the title, but it’s still one of my favorite books of poems from last year. Part of my enjoyment stems, no doubt, from the fact that I (like many other writers, I suspect) spent considerable time behind a bar during a part of my student days. I never worked in a bar as nice as the one Sheehan inhabits, and I never married one of my customers, though I did have one move in with me for a while. Long story. Sheehan veers from witty prose to strongly formal poems with ease, and some of the funniest parts are in the footnotes, which you absolutely must read.

Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts is one of the most beautifully honest books I’ve ever read, with incredible range. And he uses the ghazal better than most contemporary practitioners of the form.

The Network by Jena Osman was one of the books I selected for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, and I chose it because I wasn’t even sure it was poetry. It stretches the boundaries of the genre in complex ways I can’t even begin to describe. This is a book you have to experience on your own.

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Emily Van Duyne on Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”

May 9, 2011

On the 32 Poems Facebook page, many of us discussed our favorite poems. Emily Van Duyne took me on my offer (challenge?) to write about a favorite poem.

“Ariel”— Microessay

“Ariel” is a poem steeped in silence and movement, by which I don’t mean the literal horse ride it’s famously about, but rather, the way Plath speeds the language up, and slows it down to stretch out time. This has something to do with a camera—“Ariel” is a poem that occupies a lot of space in my brain, a poem I can walk into if I want, or look at like a film. When I do this, when I look at it, it’s like a camera is zooming in & panning out, turning seconds into minutes, minutes into days.

Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe rather than stretching out time, Plath somehow manages to capture eternity, which is outside of time, which is timeless. This is also about silence— there is something wildly synesthetic about “Ariel,” the whole experience melded into one big thing that you can’t unpack—so silence and time and sight and flight are all the same. The poem begins, “Stasis in darkness.”, and there it is: Timelessness, silence, suspension, stasis, the whispery triple S telling us everything we need to know about a vast, packed emptiness, a time before action, when the action is somehow already known, but not yet done. The time before a poem is written, but just as it’s engendered. and then that period, that full stop, that line break— I can hear the silence of it. It sounds like a thunderclap; gunshot before a race.

Then, of course, we’re off: “split furrows,” “blood mouthfuls,” “shadows;” Plath tells us early that this strange landscape is “substanceless,” a word she essentially coined. This is a place where the only constant is change—in thirty-one lines, we go from total stasis to flight, from pure kinesis to annihilation, a place where whatever we touch, we fuse to—and now I see I’ve lapsed unintentionally to the plural pronoun, something I think Plath intended, cheeky, bitchy genius that she was—“Ariel” is one hell of a wild ride, a poem where the speaker and the reader are just as connected as the speaker and her horse, the speaker and her force.

One hell of a wild ride, yes, but totally, perfectly controlled. If you can find a poem as flawlessly executed, without one word out of place, I’d like to see it. Levis once spoke of Plath’s genius as, “an instrument of some kind,” an “otherness” she could pick up at will. To me, it’s as though she wears her otherness like a dress, a total fusion where words are dimensional, where she, where we, for a timeless minute, can be anything we desire.

BIO: Emily Van Duyne is a poet and mom, living in Texas. Her poems have recently appeared in Diagram, Anon, Solstice, and Naugatuck River Review.

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Day 35: January Gill O’Neil’s Five Favorite Poetry Books

May 7, 2011

I pulled off 15 poetry collections from my shelves and whittled my choices down to five favorites. So tough.

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds When I read Sharon’s poem “The Victims,” in which the narrator “fires” her father—I was hooked. That book gave me license to “go there” in my own work.

Good Woman: Poem and a Memoir, 1969-1980 by Lucille Clifton. Reading Ms. Clifton’s work (little or no punctuation, all words in lower case) forced me to reexamine the notion of a traditional poem.

Local Time by Stephen Dunn. Dunn’s poems are the right combination of sensitivity and craft in this collection.

Words Under the Words, Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye Some of my favorite poems come from this collection, drawn from Nye’s Palestinian-American heritage.

Nappy Edges by Ntozake Shange Read the poem “With No Immediate Cause,” and then get back to me.

BIO: January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, December 2009).Underlife was a finalist for ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and the 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize. She was featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s January/February 2010 Inspiration issue as one of its 12 debut poets. One of her poems has been nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She is on the advisory board/planning committee of the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, January is a senior writer/editor at Babson College, runs a popular blog called Poet Mom, and lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

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Day 34: Lisa Russ Spaar’s Five Favorite Poetry Books

May 6, 2011

I am always falling in love with poetry. Right now my favorite poems are those by my MFA thesis students, the undergraduates in my two advanced poetry writing workshops and capstone class, the three books in manuscript sent to me by former students, and several newly written or published books by former students and colleagues. Being invited to name five favorite books of poems reminds me of the question my three children would ask me, sometimes alone, sometimes in each other’s company: whom do you love the most? All of you, I’d respond, and truly mean it. I love you all the best.

But here are five books I turn to if not daily, then nearly every day, touchstones, texts that provide sustenance, inspiration, consolation. To this list I would add The Bible, King James Version, a collection of Tang Dynasty verses, and the unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays. For me, Shakespeare’s most breath-taking poetry is in the plays: Caliban, Ariel, Mad Tom (“Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool”), Ophelia, Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Othello – all offering those incomparable lyric speeches, forging self and truth through language.

Emily Dickinson. The Selected Letters, the Master Letters, the Poems. Who writes like Dickinson? That psychological intensity, word jones, the float of eroticism, despair, God-hunger, meta-poetic awareness, and salvific trust in language? She is infinitely challenging, infinitely illuminating, infinitely daunting: “The soul has moments of escape – / When bursting all the doors – / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings upon the Hours . . . .”

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems and Prose. I love the spiritual and linguistic difficulty of Hopkins’s inimitable music. And the soul in crisis, the courage in the poems, especially the “dark sonnets,” helps me to live: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man / In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”

Charles Wright. The World of the Ten Thousand Things. I can’t pick a favorite Charles Wright book (his brand-new Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems is a stunner), but The World of the Ten Thousand Things contains work from four books Wright published from 1981 – 1990, and it includes his masterful series of “self-portrait” poems, the iconic homage (to Cezanne, Lorrain, Pavese), and those gorgeous journal poems, their cyclic engagements with skepticism and belief. “Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our own mouths we are sentenced. . . . .” Such metaphysical mojo.

John Keats. The Complete Poems & Letters. Could I live without Keats? The Odes burn with the romance of oblivion and ecstasy’s vision, that conspiracy of mutability and the beauty of artifice, the “viewless wings of Poesy”: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veiled melancholy has her Sovran shrine, / Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; / His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

BIO: LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. A new collection, Vanitas, Rough, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner, 2008). She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (University of North Texas Press/Trilobite, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Slate. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar directs the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English, an Advising Fellow, and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009-2010. She serves as poetry editor for the Arts & Academe feature of The Chronicle of Higher Education Review.

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Day 33: Andrea Hollander Budy’s Five Favorite Contemporary Poetry Collections

May 5, 2011

Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins: I have read this powerful and stirring collection numerous times. Most unforgettable are the two poems titled “Ashes,” which begin in humor and end close to the bone. Hudgins’s poems grab at something inside us that is both vital and elusive, and they don’t let go.

Song and Dance by Alan Shapiro: This beautifully wrought collection of poetry is pure elegy, and yet Shapiro takes us with him on this personal journey of loss and grief, and reminds us that the language of elegy can inhabit us not only with solace but with beauty.

Vinculum by Alice Friman: If you haven’t read a book by one of our most articulate contemporary poets, this marvelous new collection is a good place to begin. Friman understands the fragility of nature, the human body, and our often fractured spirit, and her sense of humor is winning.

Late Wife by Claudia Emerson: In this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Emerson maps the terrain of the often encumbered human heart. The book is beautifully organized and emotionally resonant. Emerson is a poet who matters.

Then, A Thousand Crows by Keith Ratzlaff: This is one of my favorite books by one of my favorite contemporary poets who deserves much more recognition. Ratzlaff brings together disparate threads and weaves them together deservingly and surprisingly, always with the alarmingly powerful results.

BIO: Andrea Hollander Budy (pronounced BEW-dee) is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and the author of three poetry collections: Woman in the Painting (Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Budy splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and Mountain View, Arkansas. Since 1991 she has worked as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her website is www.andreahollanderbudy.com.

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Kathleen Winter: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

May 4, 2011

Poet Kathleen Winter

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 love living in the country, being outdoors. After growing up in Texas, I shipped out to Massachusetts after college, then to California and lately to Arizona to get an MFA at Arizona State University. My favorite job ever was night-shift in a Brookline bookstore, working with lots of other writers. I love the Pacific. I’m not religious; yoga is about as spiritual as I get. I’ve worked as a baker, tech editor, lawyer and writing teacher. I’m a sloooow reader. The last time I had a TV was in 1989–can’t take that stuff. Also, I’m looking for a teaching job! Within two hours drive of Glen Ellen, California.

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?

Poems can bring us into other people’s brains, so poetry can help enhance our empathy, tolerance, interest and understanding by helping us realize how much we have in common with the strangers who surround us. Also, reading poems can connect us to writers from the past, giving us a sense how they were similar mentally, although they lived hundreds or thousands of years before us and probably on different continents. That realization can make us more aware of ourselves as part of the project of the species, and the species and life on Earth as a continuum, and therefore, with any luck, make us more interested in acting in ways that will help folks in the future.

As far as modes of delivering poetry, what I’m most familiar with and practice is the written version, or the written version read aloud in a fairly non-performative way. But I heard Patricia Smith recite her poems in a performative style a few years ago and she was terrific, so maybe I need to get out more. I just heard singer and guitarist Michael Zapruder (Matthew’s brother) this month at Gulf Coast’s off-site AWP event, performing poems by some of the Wave Books poets, and I loved that show.

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

I’m obsessed with swimming, dogs, reading and writing. Also with trying to find, enhance, extend, maintain, and understand fluidity and human interconnections. Also, with getting rid of every single billboard in California, starting first with the ones on highways. (We’ll start there and then move east across the country.) Also, frozen yogurt and Tarkovsky movies.

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’m a junkie for school, so I’ve loved being in an MFA program, and all the workshops, classes, readings, conversations that involves. Before going back to school I was in several workshops with poets in Sonoma County, Calif., and at Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Those experiences helped keep poetry at the forefront while I was working as a lawyer.

The essays in Stephen Dobyns‘ collection “Best Words Best Order” and Jane Hirshfield’s “Nine Gates” have helped me to better understand what I want to accomplish technically, and how to go after it. Maybe more importantly, I find that reading good non-fiction can inspire me to immediately want to write. Donald Hall’s anthology of essays by poets, “Claims for Poetry” is useful but frustrating, because Hall includes far too few women poets and far too few poets of color.

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?

Since poetry is joy, knowledge, power, beauty, news (and entertainment), I think helping more people find poetry–either to make it themselves and/or to enjoy reading and hearing poems–is an important mission for poets. But that doesn’t mean we have to or should write in any certain way. I guess volunteering is the means. Making yourself available in communities where poetry doesn’t abound yet.

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 can’t listen to music while I write or edit poems–it interferes with my ability to compose and to hear the rhythms, sound qualities of the words. If I’m reading, I prefer music without words, especially jazz, baroque, or ambient music. Favorites are the Impulse recording of Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, the “Passages” CD by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, and anything connected with Jordi Saval.

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?

Many more writers now. ! Halleluja !

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

I swim, walk a dog, and try to eat green things in between the tortillas.

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 write when I’m seized by the energy of inspiration. For me, “inspiration” generally means intriguing words, sounds or phrases that came to mind (lots of times this happens when I’m trying to go to sleep, or have woken up in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning). So I think I start lots of times with the music of language. A bit less frequently, an image or idea or possible “subject matter” will occur to me and get me started. Sometimes running or swimming will kick me into the writing zone. Food usually doesn’t work (too distracting!)

I’m not so great about overcoming writer’s block . . . I guess I just wait it out, in hope and faith that the poems will start again. I’ve noticed over years of writing that my periods of writing are very cyclical: weeks or months of intense creativity, followed by a fallow time. So far, thankfully, the words have always come back, eventually.

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

Now, while I’m finishing up the last semester of the MFA program in Tempe, I write in a rented room in a house that’s two states to the east of the house in California where my partner and dog live. So the ideal writing space is back in Glen Ellen with Finnegan lounging next to me in the ratty dog bed. My desk right now is two filing cabinets with a board across them; I’m looking at drywall. Back home I often write in bed, and look out through the windows at douglas firs, toyon, and madrone trees.

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

I’m trying to publish my first full book manuscript, “Nostalgia for the Criminal Past,” which is free verse lyrics with a few prose poems mixed in, and maybe four or five poems (loosely) written in form. The second book I’m working on now has a double crown of sonnets and then a lot of experimental (at least for me) style poems, so I’m trying to figure out if all these poems can live together in one book.

Thanks to Kathleen for answering my questions. Please check out her sample poem:

Wrong Sonnet: Multiplicity

My husband asks Why don’t you write a poem
about why you like Virginia Woolf when
nobody else does.
The excruciating detail of a marriage
is what I like, I say, the drifting
in and out of Clarissa’s mind and into Peter’s,
how they notice the flow of London traffic
as a living animal, how they feel
themselves distributed in sub-atomic
bits into each other and over the city’s squares
and towers, out into the hedgerows, the waves.
But Clarissa wasn’t married to Peter
he would say, if he’d read it, she was
married to Richard. And I’d say
maybe she was, maybe she was.

–Previously published in The New Republic.

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Day 32: Caki Wilkinson | Favorite Poetry Books

May 2, 2011

Maurice Manning, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001)
I just adore this book. Manning achieves a near-perfect balance of all the hard-to-balance qualities: humor and pathos, high and low diction, invention and convention. And I am a little in love with Lawrence Booth.

James Merrill, Divine Comedies (1976)
Here, Merrill hits his stride, managing, somehow, to make personal material epic and epic material personal. Divine Comedies contains some wonderful single poems (“Lost in Translation,” for instance), but for me the standout is The Book of Ephraim. With the genesis of Ephraim and the other spirits of the Ouija board, Merrill set in motion the 500+ page epic that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Marianne Moore, What are Years (1941)
A mid-career book, this is Moore at her best, from the title poem to “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron” to the “The Paper Nautilus.” The poems are strange and dense, but there’s a palpable sadness, too.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923)
Of all the poetry published in the boom of the early twenties, this is the book I don’t get tired of, home to maybe my all-time favorite poem, “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

Mark Strand, Blizzard of One (1998)
A short book, every piece is in its proper place, Blizzard of One opens with one of my favorite poems (by Strand or anyone else), “Untitled,” which I first read in the New Yorker when I was in high school. (I clipped it and left it thumbtacked to the cork board in my bedroom for years.) Also, who can resist “Five Dogs,” a series spoken by, that’s right, five dogs?

BIO: Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collection Circles Where the Head Should Be, which won the 2010 Vassar Miller Prize. She was the recipient of a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, Yale Review and other journals.

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On Attention: A Poet Party Recap

May 1, 2011

At the Poet Party tonight, we discussed attention.

I thank Karen Maezen Miller for the inspiration behind this idea. “Attention” seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate. Have you been asked to “multitask” lately? The brain can’t pay attention to multiple things. It may seem you are—that your brain is—yet it isn’t. We all suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, and I do not mean the kind of you read about in the papers. We’re suffering from a deficit of attention directed at us, at our work, at our writing, at whatever we care about.

In case you were not able to join us at the Poet Party tonight on Twitter— or even if you were and like to read the transcript—here’s what we discussed tonight.

The Poet Party, by the way, takes place on Twitter. Use the hashtag #poetparty to follow the conversation at 9 pm ET on Sundays. Collin Kelley is my fellow host.

Once the introductions were completed and the Great Poetry Giveaway Winners Announced, I asked what people paid attention to today. Sundays always seem so good for paying attention.

QUESTION 1: What did you pay attention to today?

People paid attention to a dead snake, the wind, a boyfriend, Celebrity Apprentice, roller skating, a weeping willow tree, and Salt Hill Magazine to name a few. Here’s what else people gave their attention to today:

ericqweinstein
A1.2 I also paid attention to the new issue of Salt Hill: http://bit.ly/ePjOtG #poetparty
»
Tina Nguyen
A1 #poetparty I paid attention to my daughter’s fever rising and falling today. And the poetry I heard as we napped together.
»
Julie Carter
A1:I paid attention to nature upon seeing a dead snake. Also, I heard a lot of people giving compliments today.All great material! #poetparty
»
Collin Kelley
A1.5 Sadly, I’m having to pay attention to Celebrity Apprentice to recap for the magazine I edit. Sigh. #poetparty
»
ek_anderson E. Kristin Anderson
A1 I paid attention to the boyfriend, Law & Order reruns, and small press submissions. #poetparty
»
fullofstars
A1: Jellyfish, #leverage & a sestina. Two of those are related. #poetparty
1 hour ago
»
alotus_poetry
I paid attention to the strength of the wind today as I walked around my church. I had a rolled-out-of-bed look! #poetparty
1 hour ago
»
hosking
A1 – Art over at VASA my daughter was entered in the middle school category. Cyndy Carstens was guest speaker. #poetparty
1 hour ago
»
brooke_farmer @32poems A1 Small victories #poetparty
»
CollinKelley
A1. I paid attention to the corrections and rewrites on my second novel. #poetparty
»
rmfenwick
A1 The 5 poems I’m submitting to @robertleebrewer for the #aprpad. Sharpening up the month’s worth of poetry, too. #poetparty
»
briankspears
A1: I paid attention to the tightness in my chest from stress, and then to the Book Club chat with Dean Young I moderated #poetparty
»
spiderdreamz Victor Perrotti
the inside of the VA Beach Lighthouse #poetpart
»
Eric Weinstein
Game of Thrones; a new poem I’m working on; Call of Duty: Black Ops; the weather; the temperature in my apartment; and #poetparty.
1 hour ago

Throughout the conversation, people shared their views of attention and how it played into their poetry.

Attention can be affected by mood:

Mr. Enlightenment
kilowattpoet Mr. Enlightenment
your mood will dictate your poetry even when you dont want it to #poetparty
1 hour ago

Attention is editing:

E. Kristin Anderson
ek_anderson E. Kristin Anderson
Attention is editing, y’all. Paying attention to the first draft. Paying attention to word choice and line breaks. #poetparty

Attention can be reflection:

@AMYCHAMP Yes! We’re living in a world where things move too fast. Attention is a way for us to stop & reflect. #poetparty

Attention can be love:

32poems
QUESTION 3: Someone said “attention is love.” What are your questions about attention and poetry? #poetparty

AMYCHAMP
attention is the foundation of solid spiritual practice, and so it goes with writing. there are levels of attention… yes? #poetparty

Attention can take the form of professional eavesdropping:

brooke_farmer
@hosking I think of myself as a professional eavesdropper for this very reason. #poetparty

I have the same experience as Mr. Enlightenment:

Mr. Enlightenment
kilowattpoet
most of my ideas come when poetry is not my main point of attention #poetparty
»
32poems
A2: Attention plays into my work by coming up in odd ways…I can’t control what happens. #poetparty

Attention must happen to get beyond accuracy to the TRUTH.

Brian Spears
A2 Cont# I have to pay attention if I’m going to get beyond accuracy to truth. #poetparty

Brook Farmer wrote that the answer to paying attention in poetry is self evident. I agree and think that it can still be hard to get the point of attention in the first place. Many failed poems failed due to lack of attention.

brooke_farmer
@32poems A2 I feel like the answer is self evident almost. Can’t effectively write about something you aren’t paying attention to #poetparty

Attention affects writing:

hosking
A2paying attention to conversations can create some great jumping points for writing. You never know where great material will be #poetparty
»
Collin Kelley
A2. Listening to music I enjoy while I’m writing and editing makes me more relaxed and helps me focus my attention. #poetparty
»
TinaNguyen
A2 #poetparty If I don’t pay attention, there’s no poetry. Paying attention is the foundation.
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ericqweinstein
A2: I try to attend to two things at once in my poems. I like the complexity it offers (in terms of emotions, images, &c). #poetparty

Richard points out how April poetry prompts helped him focus. I think the challenge of writing a poem a day encourages us to think more about what we’ll write next. Then, we start to see the world in a way that helps us make the human experience visible in words.

rmfenwick Richard Fenwick
A2 – Surprised: the poetry prompts for April really focused my attention extremely well. I was surprised. #poetparty

We thank @thethepoetry for the link to Donald Revell’s essay, “The Art of Attention.” http://j.mp/mq9uFe

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