Summertime & Reading = Poets Crush List Time

If you are looking for poets to read this summer I offer you my 2015 Poets Crush List.  These are poets who I presently cannot get enough of.  I haven't done a PCL since 2013 - for some reason I missed last year but here goes....  the envelope please. (these are in no special order because they are all special.

• Dean Young - I first met Dean Young in Kansas City as I was monitoring a Masters class at UMKC.  I read is 2011 book Fall Higher and was very taken by the abstraction of his writing. I was further intrigued by the class which lead me to purchase his book, The Art Of Recklessness. A truly cerebral examination of the art of poetry. I still pick up these books and read from them from time to time.
• Sandra Beasley - I read Sandra's blog (Chicks Dig Poetry)  for a number of years now. She is not near as active a blogger as she once was but I got to hear her read this spring in Minneapolis where she was a featured reader at AWP15. Upon returning  home I read her book Theories on Falling. This dead to the purchase of I Was The Jukebox, and her most recent book Count The Waves. Her approach to the craft of poetry leaves you feeling  excited. 
• W.S. Merwin - This man is like one of the Deans of contemporary poetry. A national treasure that I return to reread frequently. He has historical ties to some many ineradicable poets who have since left us. I believe this must inform his work in some way. I own two books of his many. They are Migration and The Shadow of Sirius. His work feels very organic to me. 
• Kelli Russell Agodon - wow! The energy, the inventiveness, Poet and Editor. She is co-editor of Two Sylvias Press which she claims happened as an accident, This Press is doing some magnificent things including but not limited to the Poet Tarot Cards. But that's not why Kelli is on this list. She has published one Chapbook and three poetry collections. All three noteworthy in my opinion. Letters From The Emily Dickinson Room, her second collection really resonated with me. So much so that as her third collection was about to be released I knew it would be good but could it top Letters. Well it did! Hourglass Museum was an adventure that rocked my world. It's a journey both through her museum between pages but a life study of what it means to be an artist/writer/poet! I wish all good things for her growing press, but I hop it never takes her away from her own writing. 
• Marry Biddinger - Mary is another editor and writer. I saw her at AWP15 and have three of her books that have been very much to my liking and she has won me over as a fan of her work. The first Saint Monica and the second  O Holy Insurgency grabbed my attention as they both were rooted in Catholic culture which I enjoyed. The most recent A Sunny Place with Adequate Water merged the pas and the present in surrealism. 
• Jessica Smith - I can thank Jessica for my somewhat new interest in experimental poetry. I own two of her books, The Organic Furniture Cellar and her newest Life-List.  Jessica is also a birder, which is pretty cool. I got an opportunity to meet her at AWP15 as well. 

There you have it.  If you have not read any of these poets or their books, there is still time to incorporate them into your summer reading.

Shhh.... listen

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

 - W. S. Merwin

Did You Know?

A few bits of interesting facts you may not know about the next Poet Laureate, W.S. Merwin-

I've actually been enjoying Merwin as a poet for quite a while now.  I own three of his books, one being Migration which is a quite lengthily manuscript so I've read a lot of his work. As such, I've learned a bit about him over the last couple of years, but recently, a few more facts and I believe he is as interesting a person as he is a part of the American poetry landscape.

Here are a few of the more interesting bits of information.   How many of these did you already know?

1. Merwin is a two time Pulitzer Prize winner and was a winner of the National Book Award (for Migration).
2. During the1960s Merwin decided to stop using punctuation in his poems. He said that he had "come to feel that punctuation stapled the poems to the page ...  Se said, “I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word.”
3.  He and an earlier wife, Dido figured prominently in a period of time when Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were in Europe.
4. Merwin was the son of a Presbyterian minister.
5. Merwin and his present wife reside on an old Pineapple plantation on Maui that had been restored to a more natural state. He's cultivated more than 700 endangered species of indigenous plants including the Hyophorbe indica, a palm tree he helped save from extinction
6. The 18 year old Merwin  sought out the advice of  poet Ezra Pound, who told him to write 75 lines every day.
7. He claims to never have composed a poem on any sort of mechanical or electronic device, preferring a small spiral notebook or even a paper napkin.
8. He does not have e-mail, further says he doesn't want it.
9. He was first awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1971, and used the occasion to speak out passionately against the war in Vietnam, donating his prize money to the anti-war effort.
10. He has began studying  Zen Buddhism in the 1970's.
11. Merwin, a pacifist, was incarcerated in a naval mental hospital near the end of the second world war for his pacifism.
12. He has translated materials from from French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, among other languages.

So how many of these things did you know?  What if anything surprised you?


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Linking to Another Place or Time

 

 

I love this quote from Merwin… it’s sort of how I see poetry. A poem can be the link between another place or time. It’s a stone.

"The story of each stone leads back to a mountain." — W.S. Merwin

 

Technorati Tags: poetry in theory

Any Peeps in the Seattle Area.... WS MERWIN Thursday Night

Would love to see this tomorrow night - If I were in Seatle I'd be there.  But wait, I have a reading to attend locally anyway.



W.S. Merwin will be joined by Copper Canyon poets of a younger generation at Town Hall Seattle on February 4 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are available at •Town Hall Event Tickets
 

Dead Poet Mentor

I was thinking tonight the way I’ve been zipping through poetry books these past few weeks, (Just finished WILD IRIS by Louise Gluck) one a week for the past four months that I’m going to have to be thinking about what next soon. I’ve actually got the next two weeks covered.

Two books on my list to acquire and read are The Shadow of Sirius by W.S. Merwin. and The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton. I’ve already developed a taste for Merwin’s work. Migration is a wonderful collection of work that I often get lost in.

Sexton’s Complete Poems: I’ve often started to purchase but ultimately arrived at the checkout with something else. I’ve decided recently with the help of another poet to make Sexton my dead poet mentor.  You ask, “How’s a dead poet going to mentor me?” That’s what her book is for. A source of inspiration. A place to go for ideas. A place to search for answers when I am stumped… WWAD? (What would Annie Do)

I admit the idea seemed a little far fetched to me at first.  I mean there were several things that seemed odd. She’s dead for one. She’s female. There are however advantages to selecting her for this role. The difference in gender actually could work as a plus, providing a clue to the female persona for poems. She has a significant collection so there is plenty to learn from. Anne was not timid about subject matter. She wrote quite freely about topics. Something I could learn to do better.

I had actually thought of Sexton as sort of the Patron Saint of those who came to poetry through a less traditional (non-academic) route.  Sexton was not a product of academia though she achieved sufficient recognition for her work that she went on to teach at Boston University as well several other Colleges.   At any rate, I’ll soon be putting her to work mentoring me from the grave.

 

Technorati Tags: Anne Sexton,W.S. Merwin,Mentoring,The Shadow Of Sirius

W.S. Merwin featured on PBS News Hour

W.S. Merwin has become one of my favorite poets over the past couple of years. At 81 he is still quite an active writer and has yet another book coming out  "The Shadow of Sirius."

PBS has done a profile and featured some of his poems and it can be seen on their web site here. I enjoyed it. I think it's worth taking a look at.

Technorati Tags: W.S.Merwin,PBS

Recommended Reading

Dana Guthrie Martin is one of those people who's simply magical in her word choices. She has a poem in the latest Boxcar Poetry Review.

Another poet I have come to appreciate recently is Jayne Pupek and she's in Stirring this issue.

With that, I'll serve up a W. S. Merwin quote, since he is yet another poet I that elicits strong feelings:

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

Poetry News

A few poetry items:

• John Ashbery Reads at Haverford (story)
• Robert Frost's Dartmouth Lectures Published (story)
• ‘Living In Storms. Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression’ (review)
• Ezra Pound's birthplace in central Idaho draws poetry pilgrims (story)
• Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet and Essayist W.S. Merwin to Lead All-Star Cast at 2008 The Kenan Writers' Encounters 'Earth: Writers and Artists Engage the Environment' April 12-22, 2008 (information)

Movie and a Book Store Date

mood:full
listening to: Shostakovitch Symphony No 5 in D minor

Wife and I got away today to the movies ans saw Juno. It was my wife's choice and she gets points for the selection. I would assume this was a relatively low budget movie. No awesome special effects, just a dynamite performance by Ellen Page, a teenage girl who carries herself through a serious adult sized crisis in comedic style. I found the storyline, bursting with pop culture, adorable. The author brought a range of emotion to the story, Page carried the weight of it beautifully.

Next to B & N where I bought W.S. Merwin's Migration today with a gift card I got for my birthday. I have one other Merwin book, and I have come to have great appreciation for his work. Remarkable poetic mind!

We capped it all off with a stop at Starbucks!

The short list

"Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers." -Mignon McLaughlin

Oh my God! How true is that?!!

Anyway, I've thought about the poet I'd pick to spend the day tagging along with (see my earlier post) and it's a tough call. I am narrowing it down... Ok, honestly I kept adding to the list as often as I whittled it. It was like two steps forward and one back. But this is where I am at now...

• W.S. Merwin
• Sharon Olds
• Donald Hall
• Cecilia Woloch
• John Ashbery
• Kim Addonizio
• Denise Dehamel

There is a lot of variety between these poets, and there is something about each that makes them and or there work fascinating enough to believe that one could learn a lot from them if you had the opportunity to follow, observe, and ask questions of them through a day of watching them work. Now, the trick would be to decide upon just one of them. Oh, and not add any more to the list in the meantime.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

The brain lateralization test from October 10th prompted me to ask my immediate family if they would take it as well. My wife and two of my daughters have obliged. Interestingly the two daughters both scored 40% left - 60% right. Not far off my 35% - 65% split in favor of the right. My wife, not surprisingly split 85% -15% left favored. I will say, she has a strong aptitude for creativity so that 15% is well spent. Still, I am not otherwise surprised to see her more dramatically left brain orientated. She carries it quite well. ::smile:: ~0~

Let me take a moment to plug the e-mail syndication of stickpoet. If you find yourself reading these posts frequently, why not go to the left sidebar and sign up to get the posts in your e-mail? ~0~

This weekend I read a post on Kelli's blog in which she cited a poem by W.S. Merwin entitled Berryman (after John Berryman the poet).

I will tell you what he told me / in the years just after the war (it starts) and true to his word, the poem elicits advise. I was especially taken by the final stanzas of the poem.

...I asked how can you ever be sure /that what you write is really /any good at all and he said you can't //you can't you can never be sure /you die without knowing /whether anything you wrote was any good /if you have to be sure don't write

We write, proof, rewrite multiple times and finally conclude we are finished... yet worry endlessly. These are good words to remember. ~0~

Tuesday Flashes~

• Cheney was central voice in torture debate -He helped lay path for Gitmo interrogations / The Washington Post
• Editorial -Soft on Crime - New York Times or, it all depends on who the criminal is. Guess what Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby don't have in common.
• I see Paul Wolfowitz has a new job. Hey maybe he can get his girlfriend yet another plum job....
• Mary Ellen Solt, Poet of Words and Shapes, Dead at 86 /New York Times
• World-wide reading against the regime of Robert Mugabe
• "War and Peace Art Exhibit" - More than 100 artists and writers have contributed their work toward a "War and Peace Art Exhibit" this month at a gallery in Makawao, Hawaii. The exhibit includes a signed poem titled "Ogres" by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin and several prints about the war in Iraq by nationally known artist Sandow Birk. The exhibit attracted more than 500 people on opening night and has had crowds in excess of 150 people on several other nights. / Star Bulletin

Sometimes poetry makes things happen

Robert Pinsky relates a resonant example of a poem that had consequences. [here]

The End of Periods

In terms of my own poetry, I tend to move in and out of the usage of punctuation I suppose based more on mood than anything. Exactly why, I could not say and this bothers me. Sometimes in the process of rewrites I’ll add it and at other times I’ll take it away. There seems to be no real rhyme (no pun intended) or reason for my adherence or departure from punctuation. It bothers me not that I punctuate or not punctuate. What disturbs me is that if asked, I could not justify my decision. Line breaks, stanzas, etc. I’ll be able to give you a reason.

Some time in the 1960’s W.S. Merwin, whose work I greatly admire, moved away from punctuation. Merwin writes that, “By the end of the poems in The Moving Target I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in.”

I find a great deal of favor with Merwin’s justification, at least the idea of separating my poetry from prose. Yet, I am from the school that believes seeing the poem on the page can be an essential part of enjoying it as well. The spacing, open or closed on the page, the length of lines can so often speed up or slow down the reader to give the poet some control over tone. I don’t deny that punctuation can add to that process as well. Perhaps this is one reason that I have trouble making the break altogether.

I do find some comfort in knowing that Merwin’s change seemed to be an evolutionary transformation and did not just occur over night.