Finished reading: Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy. Thank you @CommonplacePod! I respect the rigorous attention to craft that makes the weaving together of the personal, political, and historical seem so effortless.
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I wrote this blog post almost ten years ago about “Coitus Interruptus,” a poem that talks about my own experiences with domestic violence. Seems appropriate to link to it now.
I’ve published work in four journals this year, two nominated me for Best of The Net: iambapoet and Contrary Magazine. It’s lovely to know editors feel that strongly about my work, especially since this is the first year I’ve been submitting in earnest after a ten year hiatus.
I had new author photos taken. The one I chose is now on Micro.blog, Twitter, and Facebook. It was, I think, the obvious choice, but I really like the other three as well. I hope I one day get to use them. If you’re in the New York area, I highly recommend Brian T. Silak
The true poet gives up the self. The I of my poem is not me. It is the first person impersonal, it is permission for you to enter the experience which we name Poem.
–Sam Hamill, “The Necessity To Speak”
In the annals of idiot things poets sometimes write:
The mother goddesses of Crete were always sculpted with their breasts bare, as if to say: I have breasts, therefore I am.
From Robert Bly’s Sleepers Joining Hands, in the essay “I Came Out of the Mother Naked” that is the middle of the book. He was already writing Iron John in the early 1970s.
A thought for Yom Kippur: If you do not learn to love the questions, how will you ever learn to love yourself?
That feeling when you realize that the last three lines you’ve written are indeed the last three lines of the poem you’ve been working on for over a month.
We become active readers of poetry only after learning to discover in it that which is conducive to discovery. And, to invent, without violating its overall logic, that [which] remains undiscovered.
—Fatemeh Keshavarz
Working after 12 AM on a poem that has become an irreverant letter to a friend who died too young of a heart attack 6 years ago. It’s an unconventional in memoriam, a eulogy of sorts, though addressed directly to the deceased, which is not entirely fair, since he can’t respond.
This is well worth reading: How the CIA failed Iranian spies in its secret war with Tehran
It’s always the last few sentences, and especially the last one, that take the longest.
I’ve reached the point in my life when it’s not hard to know what I want to say in an artist’s statement, but editing, refining, polishing the prose is still the exacting and often difficult process it always it.
Monday Morning Music
The Mamas & The Papas - California Dreamin'
If you’re looking for a really interesting read, try Spruce, Queen of Serpents, @mmdevoe’s version of a Lithuanian folktale.
Shanah Tovah!
Sunset paints the sky,
leaving the old year behind.
Carry what you’ll need.
Leave room for what you’ll find.
Shanah Tovah to all who celebrate! (Photo credit Megs Harrison)
Fatemeh Keshavarz, writing about the 13th century poet Saadi, suggests that the eclectic nature of his formalism represents a kind of gratitude for the literary tradition in which he wrote. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between poet and tradition.
Finished reading: Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi 📚A fascinating book, a dystopia, translated from Chinese by Shelly Bryant, that I need to read again. I think anyone who’s a poet should read this book, but I’d recommend it in general as well.
When you write what you think will be the first two paragraphs of the concluding section of a very long essay, but they turn out instead to be the first two paragraphs of the section you thought wasn’t the conclusion, but now probably is. Time to set it aside for a few days.
“From the late 1990s to 2014, Twenge found, drawing on data from the General Social Survey, the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year to 54 times. A given person might not notice this decrease, but nationally, it adds up to a lot of missing sex. "
From Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex? It’s a good question.
Monday Morning Music
Earth, Wind & Fire - September
From The Atlantic: Workism Is Making Americans Miserable
“The economists of the early 20th century did not foresee that work might evolve from a means of material production to a means of identity production. They failed to anticipate that, for the poor and middle class, work would remain a necessity; but for the college-educated elite, it would morph into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence, and community. Call it workism.”
This is worth reading: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
“Curious, I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed.”