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New Poems

New poems are scheduled to appear in theSanta Clara Review, a publication of Santa Clara University, and the upcoming anthology, A New Season: Poems from a World in Flux. Edited by Vallejo co-Poets Laureate Jacalyn Eyvonne and Kathleen Herrmann, the anthology will highlight San Francisco Bay Area voices but “welcomes poets from all regions…” Due around the end of January.

Revision

In the last year or two, especially, I’ve come to enjoy the process of revision. There’s a certain perspective gained in seeing how a poem develops from point A to point B, and beyond. Of course, it helps if you’re not attached too much to the status quo. Case in point, I recently observed as one troublesome word changed from “rising” to “meandering” to “wilding” to “rewilding.” Of course that last change was what it should have been all along. Sometimes you just have to sit down in the chair at your computer or your writing pad and put in the time.

Those Winter Sundays

Born and raised in Detroit, Robert Hayden (1913-1980) “was the first Black American to be appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (later, U.S. poet laureate),” according to poets.org. One of his most memorable poems, “Those Winter Sundays,” evokes a “tumultuous” childhood but it also speaks of love’s austere presence. It appeared in A Ballad of Remembrance, Paul Bremen, 1962, and can also be found at www.poets.org.

Contests and Submissions

Ninth Letter, a print journal from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is currently accepting both experimental and traditional forms of prose and poetry. www.ninthletter.com

Publication in Booth Magazine and $1,000 will be awarded to the winner of the Susan Neville Poetry Prize. Submit up to three unpublished poems stories through December 31, 2025. www.booth.submittable.com

Ecotheo Collective accepts all forms of literary and visual expression for their print and website issues. They seek work that reflects “questions of ecology and spirituality from within and outside all religious traditions.” Publishes four times a year. www.ecotheo.org

Wishing you peace and joy now and in the New Year!

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Garden Notes

This was the wettest summer on record in San Francisco and the coldest July in over forty years. The fog has returned with a vengeance, but here in the burbs we’ve had a mild summer so far with many days in the mid-seventies — just right for working in the garden. It’s mostly clean-up here to cut back and remove debris. As usual, the bamboo is a mess and the morning glories have sent out their runners all over the place, but there are also layers of dried weeds. I do everything with hand tools, so it’s a quiet practice for the most part, interrupted by the sound of bamboo stalks cracking and branches coming down.

A garden is never finished — an ongoing process full of little surprises. I like coming through the gate in spring to see the nectarine tree in blossom. Or, in summer, finding the first bunch of fruit hidden in the leaves. I can gaze at an empty space, imagining what might grow there, examine an overgrown patch to figure what should be removed. It’s a lot like reviewing a poem and seeing something I didn’t see before, an implied metaphor that could be developed or a few words that should be omitted. A “they” that might to be changed to a “we”.

The Wild Iris

In Louise Gluck’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection, The Wild Iris (1992), the title poem and others are spoken in the voice of a flower reflecting on the mysteries of this world and the “hidden” world beyond. I remember reading this book, or trying to read it, for the first time. At first, the poems were largely opaque — I just wasn’t used to thinking about flowers as having a voice, much less a philosophical one. And then something clicked. Suddenly I suspended my disbelief and the poems came alive, although they weren’t always transparent. Some of them may be deliberately ambiguous, which allows for multiple interpretations. Writing in The New Republic, Helen Vendler observed that The Wild Iris “…wagers everything on the poetic energy remaining in the old troubadour image of the spring, the Biblical lilies of the field, natural resurrection.” Like nature, it revolves as much around winter and oblivion as it does around renewal, and these images evoke trauma. As Gluck writes in her title poem, “…whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.” It’s this voice that appears “like a great fountain” in the closing lines and resonates page after page with a hard-won wisdom.

Opportunities

The Fourth River, a print and online publication of Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing, is seeking submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction until September 15th, and then from November 15th to January 15th. They want to see writing that “explores the relationship between humans and their environment, both natural and built, urban, rural, or wild.” The current theme is “innovation.” See www.4thriversubmittable.com for details.

Modern Haiku is open to submissions of haiku, senryu, and haibun year round with cut-off dates on March 15th, July 15th, and November15th. Regarding the content of haiku submissions, their perspective is that “syllable and line count are not vital in English-language haiku” while seasonal references, concrete images, and a lack “views or values” characterize the best examples. Submissions may be made by mail or email, and are free. For details visit www.modernhakiu.org.

Finishing Line Press is now accepting entries for the 2025 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. The competition offers publication and a prize of $1,500 for a writer who “identifies as a woman and has not yet published a full-length collection,” according to their website. Ten finalists will also be selected for the chapbook series. Contest ends October 15, 2025. www.finishinglinepress.submittable.com

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The Wayless Way

“Within each of us is a divine treasure, and if we hope to discover it we need to go deep into the heart of who we are.” – Meister Eckhart

Readers of Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light: Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way (Hampton Roads), by Mark S. Burrows and Jon M. Sweeney, will no doubt appreciate these lucid translations in poetic form, taken from the “treatises” of Christian mystic Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). The writings of the controversial priest point to a “wayless way” toward inclusive love. “There is a light within you, in your soul, uncreated and uncreateable; it simply is,” Eckhart  wrote. “What Coleman Barks has done for Rumi, Sweeney and Burrows have done for Eckhart — making his insight accessible and his wisdom sing,” observed Carl McColman, author of The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism and Eternal Heart.

Poetry of Presence

This hefty anthology (252 pages) collects some of the best work of contemporary poets, including Ellen Bass, Billy Collins, Jane Hirshfield, Derek Walcott, Li-Young Lee, Tich Nhat Hanh, Alice Walker, and Joy Harjo, along with ancient poets such as Li-Po, Hafiz, and Rumi. A treasure trove of poems from diverse voices, it reminds us that mindfulness is accessible in the midst of everyday activities. Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, Grayson Books, edited by Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson. (Poetry of Presence II is due in May, 2023.)

Poetry of Awakening

This volume collects 78 poems, written mainly by Buddhist and Daoist poets from across the first millennium. Translated by Joe Lamport, the poems in The Poetry of Awakening: An Anthology of Spiritual Chinese Poetry (Fomite) express a sense of liberation through language. A later poem by Su Shui illustrates this paradoxical practice:*

“The bubbling stream is his voice,

the mountains his vast body.

The night bird sings sutras of wisdom —

how can I possibly convey this to others?” 

​ *version by jg

Mountains and Rivers Mind

“The mind is no other than mountains and rivers, the great wide earth, the sun, the moon, the stars.”

​– Dogen

Author and Zen Roshi Ruben Habito tells the story of his teacher Yamada Koun Roshi, who was riding on a train from Tokyo to Kamakura many years ago. He was reading from a book by the 13th century founder of Soto Zen, Eihei Dogen, when he came across the above line that stirred something deep in him. He began laughing, trying hard not to make a spectacle of himself. But lying in bed that night, the line returned with a vengeance. With a “loud burst of laughter,” he realized clearly what it was pointing to — that mountains and rivers, all things of the earth, the sun, moon, and stars, indeed all people everywhere were “no other than me,” that “they are me and I am them.” Experiencing Buddhism: Ways of Wisdom and Compassion, by Ruben L. Habito, Orbis Books; Mountains and Waters Sutra (Sansuiko), translated by Shohaku Okumura with an introduction by Gary Snyder, Wisdom Publications.

News

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Ways to Help

Following the Russian invasion on February 24th, over two million refugees have fled Ukraine, approximately half of them children. A recent article in the Washington Post (“Here’s How Americans Can Donate to Help People in Ukraine,” February 27) provides links to several helping organizations, including Voices of Children and Save the Children (www.washingtonpost.com). Below are addresses for some other organizations that have dedicated their efforts to helping refugees displaced by this war, including UNICEF:

www.unicefusa.org

www.globalgiving.org

www.internationalrescure.org

www.doctorswithoutborders.org

www.airbng.org

www.unhcr.org

Poem Goes Viral

Ukranian American poet Illya Kaminsky’s poem, “We Lived Happily Through the War,” went semi-viral after the invasion. In an article in the New York Times (March 3), poet Victoria Chang introduces the poem, which originally appeared in Kaminsky’s volume, Deaf Republic (a NYTs Notable Book). The theme is complacency during a time of war. Born in Odessa, the author emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1993. He speaks at greater length about his work in an interview with Dan Kois (Slate, March 4).

Auden’s 1939 Meditation

W.H. Auden’s poem, “Crisis” first appeared in the Atlantic magazine in 1939, on the same day the German army invaded Poland. It’s been described by the Atlantic as “a meditation on the creeping horror of fascism and the dread of invasion,” and “an unofficial prologue to Auden’s famous poem on the beginning of the war, “September 1, 1939.” He continued to revise the latter work over the years, never content with the final line. Yet that line, “We must love one another or die,” continues to resonate. 

Teach This Poem

The Academy of American Poets offers lesson plans for teaching Kaminsky’s poem, as well as for those by Auden and others. Activities include reading, writing, speaking and listening, with suggestions for remote and blended learning. See “Teach This Poem,” www.poets.org. Biographies and poems of more than 3,000 poets can be found on the website. 

Poetry Peace Award

The annual Barbara Mandigo Kelly Poetry Peace Award contest is accepting entries until July 1, 2022, and is open in three categories: for adults, youth, and youth under twelve. First prize is $1,000 and publication. For more details, see www.peacecontest.org.

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Books Noted

Kindest Regards, New and Selected Poems, by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), contains four decades of poetry in addition to recent work. The Pulitzer Prize winner, who hails from Nebraska and served as Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006, is known for his short, imagistic poems that focus on everyday events and objects. Reflecting the landscape of Midwestern towns and farms (he lives on acreage in Garland, Nebraska), his poetry expresses universal experiences and the need for meaningful connection. He has said of his work that, “I want to show people how interesting the ordinary world can be if you pay attention.”

As the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo gathered the poetry of Native peoples past and present in the 222-page An Anthology of First People’s Words: Living Nations, Living Words (W.W. Norton, 2021). Poets such as Natalie Diaz, Sherwin Bitsui, Ray Young Bear, and Santos Perez address themes of displacement, visibility, struggle, resistance, and other subjects here. The anthology demonstrates “that heritage is a living thing,” Harjo writes in the introduction, “and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship.” A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, she is the author of several poetry volumes and a memoir, “Crazy Brave.” 

Poet and teacher John Brehm’s The Dharma of Poetry: How Poems Can Deepen Your Spiritual Practice and Open You to Joy (Wisdom Publications, 2021) is geared toward poets and poetry lovers who practice meditation, but it’s a rich resource for readers and writers of any persuasion. Brehm presents poetry as a “powerful way to disrupt the habitual momentum of the mind, its automatic reactions and obsessive self-concerns.” His analysis of poems such as James Wright’s “A Blessing” and Ryokan’s “First Days of Spring” point out how these poems offer the reader an opportunity to pause while “full of imaginative engagement,” and invite us to enter “the timeless experience the poem describes.” The book also contains writing prompts and suggested meditations.

In Memoriam

Three of San Francisco’s former poet laureates died in 2021 — Lawrence Ferlinghetti (at age 101), Janice Mirikitani, and Jack Hirschman. In addition to their innovative literary output, each made a vital contribution to the city’s cultural life — Ferlinghetti as co-founder of City Lights Bookstore and publisher of the Beat poets, Mirikitani as ambassador of love (with her husband the Rev. Cecil Williams) and Hirschman as an outspoken writer who reminded us of the importance of politically relevant poetry. Other outstanding American poets who passed recently are: bell hooks, Stephen Dunn, Thomas Kinsella, Jean Breeze, and Robert Bly. May they all rest in peace.

Open Submissions

Split Rock Review, an independent online publication, is accepting submissions for Issue #18, including poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, hybrid, photography, and art with an emphasis on place and the environment. Until Jan. 31st. www.rockreiew.org

The Emerson Review, out of Emerson College, is now open for submissions until February 1st for the spring issue, due to be published in April. Seeking poetry, fiction, nonfiction, photography and art. Selected pieces are nominated for a Pushcart Prize. www.emersonreview.submittable.com

Beloit Poetry Journal, a print publication, is open for poetry submissions in various forms and styles. Send up to five unpublished poems or one long poem by January 31st.  www.bpj.org

Haiku Notes

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…The Awakened One, a new anthology of Buddhist-themed haiku, is now available on Amazon and other platforms. Published by Poetry Chaikhana and edited by Adjei Agyei-Baah and Gabriel Rosenstock, the anthology features haikuists from around the world in dialog with Japanese masters such as Basho, Buson, and Issa. 

…The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan, by Abagail Freidman with an introduction by Michael Dylan Welch (Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA, 2006). Abigail Freidman was living in Japan as an American diplomat when she met haikuist Momoko Kuroda. At that time Kuroda was already a prominent teacher who had been featured in the anthology, Far Beyond the Field: Haiku by Japanese Women, by Makoto Uedo (the title comes from one of Kuroda’s haiku):*

greening the sky

far beyond the field —

lightning flash

Friedman, who was already studying calligraphy, joined Kuroda’s haiku group, Aoi Kaiku Kai, writing her first haiku in Japanese. She traces her learning curve here, offering passages on the significance of kigo and cutting words, and the value of working with a group. This lively account is as revealing for its intimate glimpses into Japanese culture as it is for its many insights into the practice of haiku.       

…The Poems of Nakahara Chuya, translated by Paul Mackintosh and Maki Suglyama (Gracewing Publishing, 2017). One of Japan’s early 20th century poets, Nakahara Chuya was influenced by both Dada and French symbolism and has been referred to as the “Japanese Rimbaud.” He is known for his collections Yagi no Uta (Goat Songs, 1934) and Arishi Hi no Uta (Songs of Bygone Days, 1938).

*trans. jg

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Stories We Tell Ourselves

I don’t know anyone who isn’t concerned about the environment these days. The impact of air pollution and climate change can be seen around the globe. As sea levels rise, currents are expected to shift dramatically. From what I understand, there are approximately 1,000 species becoming extinct every day. In her book, Staying with the Trouble(Duke University Press, 2016), theorist Dr. Donna J. Haraway suggests that “staying with the trouble” brought on by climatic and environmental crises can encourage new ways of thinking and new means to sustain us in the future. At the same time, there needs to be a change in the stories we tell ourselves.      

“Everything is held together with stories, that’s all that’s holding us together, stories and compassion,” essayist and fiction writer Barry Lopez once said. Many of these stories influence our actions. The anthropocentric story that humans are the apex of nature, for instance, underlies the idea that we’re entitled to treat the world as an exploitable resource. Yet there are other stories that support sustainability and the interdependence of life. Some of them are ancient, coming from indigenous cultures. Some are new and science-based. We know that organisms in an ecological system depend on each other for their survival, for instance, reinforcing the importance of conservation and species preservation.     

Dr. Suzanne Simard’s recent book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Knopf Doubleday), reports on her lifelong research with trees in the rainforests of British Columbia, demonstrating that forests are “social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities…” Not only are they capable of recognizing other trees around them, they “can remember the past and have agency about the future,” according the publisher’s notes. Simard’s work offers compelling evidence of the interdependence of these noble organisms. More than that, it presents scientific inquiry in a humanistic light, showing that “it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and how old growth trees “nurture the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.” Finding the Mother Tree offers a compassionate model as a way forward, one based on a benevolent relationship with the earth, rather than a commodity to be exploited. As poet Wendell Berry has put it, “The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it — you and every other creature.” 

Eco News

In February, 2021, a snowy owl was spotted in New York City’s Central Park for the first time in over 130 years. Within days it moved on, possibly disturbed by the crowds that came to admire it, or maybe just wanting to return to the Arctic where the majority of the white raptors with black markings make their home

Plans for a controversial oil pipeline project, slated for construction in Memphis, Tennessee, were cancelled in July during the midst of protests and ongoing lawsuits. The proposed 49-mile long pipeline would have carried thousands of gallons of crude oil daily over a protected zone that supplies drinking water to residents of Southwest Memphis, home to several predominately black communities. Led by Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP) and Protect Our Acquafier, locals rallied to protest the plan they believe would have put neighborhoods such as Boxwood and surrounding homes and businesses at risk, while the Southern Environmental Law Center opposed litigation against long-time residents whose homes stood in the path of the project. The plan, which drew fire nationally, was condemned by former Vice-President Al Gore and others

In Galveston, Texas, volunteers rescued over 2000 green sea turtles that were “cold-stunned” in late February of this year by unseasonably freezing temperatures. Approximately 200 threatened sea turtles from Matagorda Bay and Padre Island were also rescued and taken to the Galveston Laboratory Sea Turtle Hospital for treatment.   

Contests

The 2021 Porad Award, sponsored by Poetry Northwest, is now open. Submit up to five haiku (www.haikunorthwest.org) by September 20th. Named for Francine Porad, the late founder of Haiku Northwest and a former president of the Haiku Society of America, the contest is free this year and will be judged by Susan Antolin, editor of Acorn and author of The Years that Went Missing. Results will be announced on October 30th… The Miller Williams Poetry Prize: submit a full-length collection by September 30th… The Patricia Dobbler Poetry Award: submit two poems up to 75 lines each (for women over forty who haven’t published a full-length book) by 

Putting a Full-length Collection Together: Part 2

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Looking at a variety of poetry collections can be useful when it comes time to assemble your own. Many are thematic like Stag’s Leap, by Sharon Olds, which focuses on the years before and after the poet’s divorce following a thirty-year marriage. Others tell a story, such as Ann Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Illya Kominsky’s Deaf Republic. Less common today are those that concentrate on formal poetic forms, such as Dana Gioia’s 99 Poems: New and Selected. There are countless ways a collection can coalesce, and a strong vision combined with other factors can help to make it shine.

The poetry of Frank O’Hara has a distinctive voice that’s conversational in tone. One of the things that makes his Lunch Poems so effective is that it combines voice with theme. These pieces were written when O’Hara was on lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and have a spur-of-the-moment quality that evokes the pace of city life. Like the poems themselves, the collection comes across as spontaneous with a lively mix of topics and emotional content.  

A distinguishing facet of Lucille Clifton’s poetry is its visual appeal. Reviewer Peggy Rosenthal wrote of Clifton’s work that, “The first thing that strikes us about Lucille Clifton’s poetry is what is missing: capitalization, punctuation, long and plentiful lines. We see a poetry so pared down that its spaces take on substance, becoming a shaping presence as much as the words themselves.” Visual appeal is closely related to voice, and when these two qualities are combined with strong themes, as they are in Clifton’s Blessing of the Boats, New & Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (winner of the National Book Award), the result can be unforgettable.        

Lyric ordering is another way to enhance cohesion. With this approach, each poem is linked to the previous one in some way, for instance, by imagery or repeated words or phrases. An alternative approach is to place “hinge” poems at the close of each section and the beginning of the next one to guide the reader from one section to the next.

Editing

The conventional wisdom is to begin the editing process after you’ve finished your first draft. But editing a poetry collection is different from editing the draft of a novel, say. I find it to be an ongoing process from start to finish, of writing, revising, and editing. Whatever your method is, when you get to the point that the manuscript feels complete, it’s advisable to let it sit for several days, or even weeks. Then, you’ll be able to give it a final edit with fresh eyes. At that point, it may seem that you’re looking at someone else’s work, a huge advantage because you won’t be blinded by attachment it. 

A final edit can reveal some surprising oversights. It might be a wordy poem that could be tightened up or one that needs to be reformatted, or tweaked. It might be a repeated misspelling or that fact that you used a certain word too many times. (This is where spellcheck and the search function come in handy.) Even if you’ve never been a particularly good judge of your own work, you may find that your editorial eye has become hawk-like, zooming in on a misplaced modifier or a less than effective image. You may also get a sense for what ails the manuscript. Poet and editor April Osserman, who served as Executive Director for Alice James Books, points out that one of the hardest tasks for a poet who’s assembling a collection is to let go of those pieces that aren’t “book strong” or those that “don’t fit the major or minor themes of the book.”  Save those for another project, she recommends in her article, “Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript,” March/April 2011 (www.https:pw.org).  

It’s advisable to look closely at your first and last poems, too. Does the first poem set the right tone? Is it one of your stronger poems? Does the last poem in that section foreshadow the next section? If not, is the transition effective as is? Re-examine key poems and those around them; do they expand on your vision or “talk” to each other? Then read through them sequentially. If there’s a narrative line, does it carry the reader in an engaging way from point A to point B?  Does the last poem in the collection reiterate your vision while adding something new?  Last, if you haven’t been doing this all along, you’ll want to read the poems out loud to yourself. How do they sound? What do you notice about reading them out loud versus reading them silently? What would you change?

Selecting a Title

It’s not absolutely necessary to have a working title, but it can help as a kind of stabilizing force around which the poems revolve. As the project moves along, you may come up with alternative titles, some better, some worse, and the right one may not appear until the last moment. You may hear it from a trusted reader or editor who points out that a little noticed phrase in one of your poems might be the one. Or you might compose a new poem that introduces it. One way or another it will show up.

Some questions to ask when deciding on a title:

  • does it reflect your vision?
  • is it memorable?
  • is it original?
  • does it invite the reader in?
  • does it resonate with the style or voice of the poems? 
  • is it intriguing, or even mysterious?

Sometimes a prospective title just needs a twist, a little something extra to make it stand out. Try switching out a lackluster word or adding a verb to give it action. Rearrange the word order, adding other words to the mix if necessary and see what comes up. Consider making a list of your favorite titles, whether or not they’re poetry collections. Here are a few of my favorites: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude, Bright Dead Things, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth, Petals of the Moon. Some titles emphasize verbs or verb forms, such as Trainspotting, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, and If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun. At thirteen words, this last one definitely gets my attention.