Balanced On the Edge

Poetry news
- Jo and I are beginning a new reading period for the third issue of ouroboros review, ending Sunday, May 3, and due to be released in July. We’ll take a break for the summer, and then resume reading in the fall for a winter issue.
- It’s a happy day – Deb Scott and I have a poem up at qarrtsiluni for their Mutating the Signature series, edited by Dana and Nathan, who now have a blog together with the same name as this current edition of qarrtsiluni. Thanks to Dave Bonta, Dana, and Nathan for making it happen.
- Jill, Carolee and I have written thirty prompts for the month of April, which has been dubbed National Poetry Writing Month on the web. It’s also National Poetry Month in the United States. As if we needed a month to celebrate poetry! You can go to Read Write Poem every day next month to find a new idea to inspire your writing. Because of a conversation we had with Michelle McGrane, we have dubbed ourselves The Madwomen who Stand Outside the Supermarket Passing out Poems to People. We we also be in your pockets the day you need to carry around a poem in your pocket. So look out.
- Poet Robert Lee Brewer, who runs a poetry blog for Writer’s Digest called Poetic Asides, has announced a poetry marathon for the month of April. He’ll be posting a prompt a day, and will choose his top favorite poems posted on his site for each day. And there’s more. He and a group of distinguished judges, including Marky Doty, Collin Kelley, Nick Flynn, Shaindel Beers, and Dorianne Laux, will choose the top fifty poems from these entries to be included in an e-chap anthology. April is going to be a frenzy of poems.
March 25, 2009

ouroboros review, Poetic Asides, qarrtsiluni
A mock sestina for Poem

Jill and Carolee have a fun poetry site aptly called Poem, where they post a poem for participants to read, enjoy, study, and maybe use as a springboard for writing. The first for this season is Denise Duhamel’s mock sestina, Delta Flight 659: to Sean Penn.

My imitation is about a local celebrity, a gorilla named Willie B, who was kept indoors for 27 years, until they renovated the Atlanta Zoo. It’s so sad to see animals kept locked up.

I see this piece as more of an exercise than a poem, and a hard exercise at that. In Denise Duhamel’s piece, she plays on Sean Penn’s name, ending each line with a different word that includes the syllable pen. I’m very impressed with her results now that I’ve tried it myself.

Glass Houses

In Atlanta there lived a gorilla named Willie B
who died in 2000, the year before
911. He was forty, I remember,
because I was too, just beginning
a new millennium as Willie B’s heartbeats
were fading, six years after his baby

Kudzoo was born. The last time we saw Willie B
he squatted between
boulders on a hillside, behind
thick glass walls, maybe
listening to human kids bellowing
Willie B! Willie B! Bees

and flies drew invisible lines beneath
tree limbs where he lounged on a bed
of grass, near females nursing babies.
His eyes were as dark as tea. Crabby
kids pressed their hands on the glass, beseeching
Willie B to pound his chest like a typical beast,

as if he were King Kong, bedazzled
by a lovely blonde. But he was no sucker for bedlam,
he was the prince of his tribe, a beatific
icon who didn’t seem to notice the bedraggled
trees in the pretend forest, or the Frisbees
flying through the sky beyond

the walls of his outdoor bedroom.
His keepers had made him live behind
bars for twenty-seven years, in a room befitting
an ax murderer or an embezzler.
Now he was as free as the Bengal
tiger in the zooscape nearby.

He had a full belly and his days were benign,
a becoming epitaph for human beings
too, we who bate bears and belabor the point that we’re human.

March 23, 2009

Denise Duhamel, sestina
A fun, collaborative prompt at read write poem

If you like surreal prose poems, this prompt is for you. Or maybe you’re feeling generous, and want to donate a first line. Check out the prompt based on Russell Edson’s zany poems at Read Write Poem.

March 20, 2009

read write poem, Russell Edson
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A first draft of something

Between words

Each time I lift my pen from the paper
there’s a break in transmission,
a lost signal.

Grab a can of seltzer from the fridge,
listen to the birds outside my window –
if I tune in a second longer
I might understand their speech.

Reach for a tissue to wipe my damp nose,
decide it’s time to practice Neti,
feel warm salt water rush through my sinuses,
as if swimming in the ocean,
even though I’m hours from the sea.

See in the mind’s eye my son and his friends
camping at the beach – he’ll let
his shoulders burn without me
around to nag about sun screen.

Greenhouse gasses, polar bears,
no solid ice floes to launch
their seal hunts, three hundred
years from now maybe all

mammals will be blistered
from ultraviolet rays,
and cockroaches will drop from poison
ivy grown as tall as trees, will enter our
homes, build nests in our walls,

crawl over our unmade beds.
Humans, cats, and dogs will have
burrowed underground or escaped
to the moon to protect their skin from burns.

And still I turn my antennae toward space,
scribble hieroglyphics in a notebook.

***

I wrote a twenty-minute free-write with the idea in the back of my mind of what I do instead of writing. It was inspired from a poem Michelle McGrane shared with me, and also from different comments I’ve read on poetry blogs about people feeling sort of blocked, myself included!

March 19, 2009
A found poem

The Magic Lantern*

is a pleasing Family Amusement
well-suited to all ages
and both sexes,
ready in a few minutes
for the entertainment
of friends or families;
in fact, a cheerful house
should never be without one.

Each has twelve sliders,
on which are finely painted
about sixty grotesque figures,
which by reflection are magnified
from a miniature, as large as nature,
according to the size of the lantern,
which, when humorously displayed,
may entertain twenty persons,
or more at the same time,
and are well adapted
for Youth at this season.

This is a found poem, taken without any changes to the text accept for line breaks, from a digital version of News From the Past, 1805- 1887, by edited Yyvonne Ffrench in 1934.

Magic Lantern

March 18, 2009

found poem, magic lantern, nineteenth century
A Sneak Peek at Conquering Venus

Sunday night I settled in with a great read – the prologue and the first chapter of Collin Kelley’s debut novel, Conquering Venus (Vanilla Heart Books). The narrative hooks the reader from the first sentence and doesn’t let go, weaving in and out of the past and the present. Scenes shift from the US to Europe, and from waking life to recurring dreams. There is a mysterious symbol, sexual tension, the beauty of youth, and the salty wisdom of a middle-aged school teacher (who’s not as conventional as her colleagues). The dialog is fast-paced and witty, providing dramatic relief from protagonist Martin Page’s grief over his past loss. All this in the first 22 pages of the novel. I can’t wait to read the rest… .

March 16, 2009

Collin Kelley, Conquering Venus, fiction, Vanilla Heart Books
A Dinner with Poets

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3670825&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ff0179&fullscreen=1
Southern Poets Dinner plus Scenes around Atlanta from christine swint on Vimeo.

Dinner with poets at the Colonnade, plus other Atlanta landmarks.

What wonderful dinner companions, and such a nice location in Atlanta, the Colonnade, known for its southern cuisine. I met up with Collin Kelley, Karen Head, Julie Bloemeke and Dustin Brookshire, all of whom have or have had poems in ouroboros review. Poet Rupert Fike was also there, as well as Cleo Creech and Chelsea Rathburn.

Thanks to Collin Kelley, who organized us and chose the location for our gathering. It was a big thrill for me to be included. I’ve only been writing poetry for publication for a year and a half, and it still seems like beautiful dream to be a part of the world of poets.

Dustin has asked all the poets in attendance to share a poem in the comments section of his blog. Cleo Creech wrote one just last night, inspired by the restaurant. His poem does a wonderful job entering into the atmosphere of a southern restaurant, and the life of a waitress. And Collin Kelley has shared a pithy, vivid poem about rain, travel, and umbrellas. I think he want to return to England.

I needed this outing at the restaurant. After all the hard work Jo and I did trying to get the magazine launched, our server was barraged with a DDos attack, and the site went down for over 24 hours. If you haven’t had a chance to read issue 2, please go have a look. It’s stunning, even if I do say so myself. Thank you, Jo, for all your energy and savvy.

Here’s the poem I shared with Dustin. It’s a re-write of one I wrote last spring.

If Ophelia were from Georgia

It might have happened like this,
that she does a drunken electric slide
down the hill till she reaches
the creek’s edge, wedges a sneaker
into a dogwood’s vee,
hoists herself onto a limb.
Filches buds to weave a garland,
scoots across knotted bark,
cracks off twigs as she seesaws
toward the water.

I swear, that man’s a dog, she drones
and tries to pin down
her reflection in eddies
dark from silt and rain.
Who the hell is he to tell me
to straighten up?
And then the branch snaps ¬
she drops into the creek.

Serene in the whirlpool,
gazing at a hazy sky,
she sings herself to sleep.
White petals snow
on a bed of pine needles
the day they find her body.

March 15, 2009

ouroboros review issue 2, southern poets
ouroboros review issue 2 is released
The second issue is now online and in our bookstore, ready for your reading pleasure.

Atlanta Moon, cover art by Meg Pearlstein

Here’s a brief sample of what’s inside:
- Michelle McGrane, featured poet interview and three poems.
- Collin Kelley interviews Vanessa Daou.
- Music, art, and poems from Amy Pence and Hunter Ewen.
- Deb Scott, Carolee Sherwood, Jill Crammond Wickhams’s poems (grouped here because of our mutual friendship and our affiliation with Read Write Poem.
And of course there’s so much more. We’ve been working around the clock – when I go to sleep at 11:00 Atlanta time, Jo is waking up a few hours later in London and gets to work. But today, issue 2 will be put to bed. Time for a cup of tea or a glass of wine and an hour to read ouroboros review.
March 13, 2009

ouroboros review
Protected: Obsessing over a fairy tale

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Grimm’s Fairy Tales