A Place to Kill Some Time. You Won't Regret It!

If you are looking for some awesome poetry to read / listen to - I have just the recommendation. Today I settled in and took in Nic Sebastian's Forever Will End on Thursday .  Just as Nic had done with the audio of poems by many others, she delighted me with her readings.  The writing is strong, the reading is captivating. I've heard so few people even come close to adding such a positive dimension to any one's work orally. Some people are more into spoken word poetry. I don't considered myself one of them. While I personally do enjoy giving readings and going to readings-- if I had to choose between the written word and spoken word I would choose written hands down. I'm pretty visual about poetry in that I like to see how it fills the page. That said, Nic has the ability to make the words on a page mystical.

By the way, one of my favorites among her poems as part of the link above is Oboe. In the Poems II section there are three poems that are titled  Places of Happiness (followed by three different places) each of these have such a bright lyrical quality.  I can't really do any of these poems justice here... go and listen for yourself!  Which ones speak to you?

An Editor's View

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies. ~ Marilyn Hacker

Magpie Tales 67 / Poem: Dangerous Liaison

just past the hour of lunacy

I made love on my Mandolin

melody riper then the grapes missed

on the vines

bread  broken and settled

the talk fallen to slumber

women seriously quiet

music all there was between us

fools we were drunk on our own

magical creations

2011 © Michael A. Wells






Magpie Tales 67

Confession Tuesday

Dear Reader:

It's been one week since my last confession. One week of monstrous tornadoes. Here I am tripping over the clock to make it to the confessional before midnight.

I confess that I have the people of Joplin, Missouri on my mind. And those in Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and anywhere else that have been faced with loss of life and property due to the mammoth sized tornadoes that have struck this week - more even tonight.  I've spent my entire life living in tornado alley so I'm not unaccustomed to tornado watches and warnings.  While these were not a threat to our immediate area, when you live in the the states of Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma you never take your safety from such storms for granted.  A good part of Joplin, Missouri was just decimated and the death toll is something around 120 and people are still unaccounted for.  Shocking and sad.

I have to admit I've fallen of the submission wagon. After a really good start to this year I confess I just seem to have fallen and can't get up. Considering I had really good response to my early flurry of submissions it seems like you would think I would learn that submissions are the key to successful publication where as those who don't submit don't publish. Hitting myself over the head - well duh! I confess I need like a week long campaign to get back up to speed. I think I will plan to start that over memorial weekend.

With that affirmation of a plan to do better - I'll call this confession a wrap.

May your week be a safe and productive one.

Under The Influence...

There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.  ~    Edmund Burke
I'm thinking I need to write more often under the influence...

Dead Poet Mentor Series Part 3 - Censoring Yourself

This week Anne seems to be reinforcing a notion that is not new to me but one that I still neglect (perhaps intentionally) to adhere to often enough in my writing.

In reading some of Sexton's poems from her book Transformations again, I see a poet (artist) stretching her work in what I must presume to be beyond a comfort level. Sexton is not at this point in her life new to taking her work into what would surely be uncomfortable zones for most people, but for example in Rapunzel she approaches the poem in what for 1970 must surely have been a most difficult light to offer to the general public to read. She writes:

"A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young...
they would play rummy / or lie on the couch / and touch and touch / old breast against young breast"

In a September 22, 1970 letter to her agent Claire Degener, Anne speaks of two of the Transformation poems (Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty) as her best. She tells Claire they have been turned down by the New Yorker. Of course I could only be surmising if I suggested the New Yorker found the poems to have pushed the envelope a little too far for the time.  There could have been any of a number of other reasons that they were not picked up by the magazine, but Sexton was no stranger to them. Sexton had no less they 21 poems published by them making her a bit of a New Yorker hog!

Transformations was published the following year - 1971.  Even a writer familiar with and critical of the work prior to publication came around and decided he had over reacted to it.  Transformations went on to become highly acclaimed in spite of taboo subjects.

Was Sexton brave or simply not at all concerned about public perception?  Did she truly have the discipline as a writer to not self censor?  Whatever the answer is, the fact remains that her body of work exhibits a willingness to take her writing to places that most would intentionally back away from.  And to her credit, Sexton has to be viewed as a significantly influential poet of her time.
Her lesson here... You've heard if form others coaching you.. don't let fear dictate what you might have written, move past your comfort zone.

Dead Poet Mentoring Series:

Part One - My Selection

Part Two - Anne Sexton From Beyond

Magpie 66 / Poem: Timeline

birth

transformative

thoughts to ink

ink to page

page after page

after page

pressed

bound

catalogued

2011 © Michael A. Wells







Magpie Tales 66