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Putting a Full-length Collection Together: Part 1

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Getting Started

There are a lot of articles out there about how to put a full-length collection of poems together and some of them are of the “ten easy steps” variety. But the truth is, it’s more complicated than that. The process calls on intuition, trial and error, and a good deal of rewriting and editing. A full-length collection can take three years or more of reworking and polishing before it’s ready to be published. Teaming with an experienced editor may speed up the process, but the time it takes to turn a manuscript into a book is valuable, even precious, to a poet’s growth. Why rush it?

Like writing a poem, assembling a collection of poetry is a non-linear process that invites deep immersion. Through close observation you begin to recognize the shape and purpose of the work. You note its weak points and its strengths. You go over it multiple times with various lenses, looking for connections and commonalities. You sink into the mystery of it, not looking for answers necessarily, but alert to questions.

In her article, “How Do You Pick and Arrange the Poems for a Poetry Collection?” poet and blogger Christina M. Ward, author of the collection “organic,” stresses the importance of cohesiveness (www.https:medium.com): “When I say plan a theme, I don’t mean that each poem needs to be about one topic, but the book as a whole needs to have a definable “purpose” or “theme” or “feel,” she says, suggesting that poets think of this as the “vision” of the book. It helps if a book is about something but not every collection needs a specific theme to be cohesive.

Selecting, Sectioning, and Sequencing

Once you’ve identified your vision for the book, you’re ready to begin selecting the poems that are most aligned with that vision. In assembling my second collection, I began by separating poems into two stacks, those that worked or had the potential to work, and those that clearly didn’t. At that point I had about thirty-five poems and knew I needed more. Searching what I laughingly call “my files” — a couple of drawers full of loose papers and others in manila folders — I found a few more possibilities, bringing the total to fifty-one, just enough for a full-length collection. I wasn’t exactly off and running, but there was a glimmer of a hope that I might find a book in there someplace. 

One way to jump-start your collection is to divide the manuscript into sections. This will let you zone in on specific areas and can make it feel more manageable. It also offers visual breaks, along with an opportunity to add section titles and related inscriptions that can help to transition the reader from one thematic focus, or mood, to the next. But like everything else in the process, these details are apt to change. For me, those changes are a sign that I’m beginning to hone in on the finer details. At some point, sections and inscriptions may appear superfluous or even interrupt the flow — if so, it’s okay to let them go. They will have served their purpose like scaffolding on a building site. 

One of the most challenging tasks in putting a collection together is sequencing. Phoebe Stuckes, a former Foyle Young Poet and author of Platinum Blonde (www.https:poetryarchive.org), compares the process to stand-up comedy, in which you “tell your second best joke at the start of your stand-up set and your best joke at the end.”  She suggests printing out your manuscript so you can physically try out various sequences until you find the right one. I’d compare this stage to putting an album of songs together; you want some ballads and some up tempo numbers, some highs and lows, some short numbers and some longer ones. These variations will add texture and interest. Avoiding repetition is key. If you have two poems that are both on the same topic and use much the same vocabulary, you’ll need to rework one or drop it. Feel free to experiment. Playing with different formats such as prose poems and concrete poems can reap unexpected benefits, not only in the way the poems look on the page, but in how they “mean,” and can open the work up in unexpected directions. If you decide later that an experimental poem doesn’t make the grade, you can always pull it.   

Having an accurate table of contents early on is an advantage if you decide to submit the manuscript on the spur of the moment or if you want to share it with a trusted reader for their input. Yes, it’s going to change a lot over the course of the project, but the benefit is that you can scan it from time to time to get a sense of how the “narrative line” is evolving (more on this later). It’s also a good place to enter any notes about what you think might be missing. Do you want a title poem? If so, where do you think it ought to go? Scanning the table of contents will help you decide. Granted, it can be tedious to update page numbers as you shift sections or shuffle poems around, but I’ve found that it’s worth it. This is the uninspiring part of the work, the busy work you might call it, that nevertheless helps to bring a sense of structure to the chaos. (Next time: Looking at structural models and selecting a title.) 

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Books Noted

The Art and Craft of Poetry

In case anybody hasn’t heard, April was National Poetry Month, but any time is a good time to enjoy poetry in its various forms. Here are a few recent offerings:

Three Simple Lines: A Writers Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, by Natalie Goldberg (New World Library, 176 pages). Natalie Goldberg’s latest offering on the art and practice of writing takes her to Japan where she explores the origins of haiku among the country’s ancient temples and hidden gardens. Classic haiku by masters such as Basho, Buson, Issa, and Chiyo-ni appear in a narrative “as irresistible as a mountain stream…” says author Henry Shukman, “…and come alive in ways that still the mind, expand time, and open the heart.” As insightful as Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Writing the Landscape of Your Mind, this book reminds us of what it means to be open to growth, and how the practice of writing — and haiku, in particular —lends itself to mindfulness.

How to Write a Form Poem, by Tanya Runyon (T.S. Poetry Press). Even poets who primarily write free verse are likely to find this this “how to” book useful. It contains instructions and prompts for writing ten traditional forms, such as sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, haiku, and pantoums. Included are dozens of examples from Runyon and other poets, among them Elizabeth Bishop, Natasha Trethewey, Frank O’Hara, Matsuo Basho, and Wallace Stevens. An author and teacher, Runyon has also written How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem, both of which are geared for use in classrooms. 

Accidental Gardens, by Rob Carney (Stormbird Press). This is Carney’s take on the contemplative Japanese form of haibun. First used by Basho in the 17th century, the term refers to a hybrid genre that combines haiku with prose — typically, observations such as travel logs, and sketches of people, activities, or landscapes. Basho’s Okku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Interior) is probably the most well-known example of the form. Comprised of four sections — 42 haibun in all — each of the short ruminations in Accidental Gardens ends with a brief poem or compelling image. Focusing on the natural world and our reckless disregard for the environment, the collection reads as “a journey through the absurdity, tragedy, and black comedy of late-stage capitalist and consumerist America,” writes author Nick Hunt. A professor of English at Utah Valley University, Carney has published seven other poetry collections.  

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Books Noted:

Black Girl, Call Home, by Jasmine Mans, is one of the most anticipated books of 2021, according O, the Oprah Magazine, and is “arresting as only spoken word artistry can be.” The publisher (Berkley Books) describes it as a “literary coming of age narrative” and “a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood.” It features many of Mans’ viral YouTube poems in print for the first time, as well as active phone numbers that readers can dial to hear her perform “bonus poems.” Poet Danez Smith has written that “Mans takes up the tools of Brooks (Gwendolyn) and Sanchez (Sonia) into her good hands and chisels us an urgent and grand work, proving why she’s the favorite of all the girls in the back of the bus.” Raised in Newark, New Jersey, Mans graduated from The University of Wisconsin Madison with a B.A. in African American Studies and currently serves as resident poet of the Newark Public Library. 

Spencer Reece, who struggled with rejection for years before his first collection, The Clerk’s Tale,was published to acclaim in 2004, now has a memoir out, The Secret Gospel of Mark: a Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021). Poetry and faith are intimately linked in this saga that chronicles his battle with alcoholism, his orientation as a gay man, and his calling to the Episcopal priesthood. Chapters explore the work of mentor-poets who inspired him along the way, from Emily Dickenson and George Herbert, to Elizabeth Bishop and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others. National Book Award-winning author Andrew Solomon writes that Reece “brings into sharp focus a life of authentic despair and ultimate redemption…it is a tender but unforgiving, clear-sighted exposition of Christian faith.” Poet Carolyn Forche’, Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University, calls it “A profound and necessary work, luminous and full of grace.”

Love Unknown: the Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, by Thomas Travasino, isn’t new — it came out in 2019 — but it’s notable for the comprehensive account it offers of this “poet’s poet.” Bishop published sparingly, but she won both the Pulitzer Prize (for Poems: North & South/A Cold Springin 1955) and the National Book Award (for her Complete Poems in 1970). Her poetry is “marked by precise description of the physical world” — much of it inspired by her extensive travels — while “her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing,” according to the Poetry Foundation. Her style is characterized by structured rhyme and a syntax that often reads more as prose than as formal verse. A selection of her work, including “The Armadillo,” can be found at www.poetryfoundation.org.

In The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, author Christof Koch defines consciousness as subjective experience, “no matter how banal or exalted.”  It’s “the feeling of being alive,” he says, and speculates that it’s present in even the simplest life forms. A leader in the field of consciousness science, Koch asks the question, “How is it that a physical organ like the brain can give rise to feelings?” Arguing for a quantitative theory, he notes that science can now “detect and track the footsteps that any conscious experience leaves in the brain.” He doesn’t believe, however, that computers will ever feel. “Consciousness is not a clever hack. Experience does not arise out of computation,” he says. Nature has called his work “Invigorating…Koch tracks the ‘neural footprints’ of experience, swims off the wider shores of integrated information theory, and speculates about the ‘feeling of life itself’ in ravens, bees and octopuses —along with related ethical concerns.” (The MIT Press, 2019) 

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A Man of Many Hats: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

Poet, painter, publisher, and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti died at his home in San Francisco on February 22rd, aged 101, with family by his side. One of the main figures of the “Beat Generation,” the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore in the city’s North Beach neighborhood was an award-winning poet who also published many of his peers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel, and Bob Kaufman, among others. But he’s also recognized for his historic commitment to freedom of expression. After launching Ginsberg’s expletive-peppered poem, “Howl” in a book of the same title in the late 1950s, he was arrested by the S.F.P.D. on obscenity charges, making the book an instant cause celebre’. The resulting trial acquitted Ferlinghetti of all charges, with the judge declaring that the work had “redeeming social importance,” a decision that facilitated the distribution of other controversial titles.

For a lot of us who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, Ferlinghetti was a cultural icon, and City Lights was more than just a book store — it was a sanctuary, a place where you could find classic literature in paperback at affordable prices, shelves full of obscure literary magazines, and tabloids of various political stripes. I remember my first visit there was on a trip with some of my high school friends — this must have been in 1963 or 64. The poet Michael Palmer was standing outside the entrance on Columbus Avenue, dressed and made-up convincingly as Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp”, tipping his bowler hat and greeting one and all. He explained the connection for me — Chaplin’s film, City Lights, was the inspiration for the name of the store. Those were the days when you could hang out in the basement at one of the little round tables, thumbing through the latest edition of the Pocket Poet’s Series (Ginsberg’s Howl was the fourth in that series), when you could get a steaming bowl of minestrone soup with parmesan cheese on top and a slice of sourdough bread for a dollar at Mike’s Pool Hall across the street. Mike’s is long gone, but City Lights is still hanging in there, even during these challenging times, thanks to a GoFund Me campaign last year that raised $400,000 in just four days.

Ferlinghetti was a familiar sight around North Beach in those early years, sporting one of his many hats and riding his bike around the neighborhood. He didn’t regard himself as a “Beat” poet, but as one of “the last of the bohemians,” cultivating an appreciation for jazz and the visual arts, as well as letters. (He wrote his M.A. thesis on the painter, Turner, and recorded many of his first poems to jazz accompaniment.) The author of more than 30 books, including the bestselling volumes, Pictures of the Gone World, A Coney Island of the Mind, and, most recently, a novel, Little Boy, he served as the city’s first Poet Laureate in 1998. Among his many awards are the Robert Frost Memorial Medal from the Poetry Society of America and the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, the quirky building that houses City Lights Bookstore was granted landmark status and in 2019, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, March 24th was declared Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day by the City of San Francisco.

Writing in the Paris Review, John Freeman described his work as Whitmanesque, with a “long, prosey line, but his I is softer, stranger, and less verbose…” as it steps “…across the pages with sudden, perfectly timed enjambments…” Some of his other influences were Thomas Merton, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Yet, in the end, the voice and the vision were unmistakably his own. An unapologetic lover of life and its many pleasures, he celebrated the joys and beauty of the world in his life and art, but he also took a stand against the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the moral turpitude of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and many other issues of the day. 

I’m sure there will be countless heart-felt tributes to him in the weeks ahead, and more studies, too, that recognize his extraordinary contribution. Poet Tess Taylor, for CNN, has written a tribute that reads as part poem, part prayer (“Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the Hive and the Honey,” 2/24/21). It’s full of sweet reminiscence and gratitude for what he gave to the community he lived in for over sixty years, but I’ll quote just the last three lines here: “Hail and farewell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. May you rest under the good oaks. May you find someplace wonderful to sit in your hat, and may you speak long and well with the bards in the beyond.” Long-time employee Elaine Katzenberger, who now serves as director of book store, said that “I feel very grateful that I got to see him during the virus, and I’m glad that he lasted this long. I wish he was still here.” Reverend Mark Stanger, an Episcopalian priest and teacher at the Cathedral School for Boys, said that, “His words were a great friend to me.”

On Tuesday evening, February 23rd, an impromptu vigil took place in Jack Kerouac Alley between Vesuvio’s Cafe and the store. Poets Jack Hirschman, Deborah Drozd, Scott Bird and several dozen other mourners gathered to read from his poetry and to share memories and toasts. Inside, “a shrine was placed in the upstairs poetry room,” according to Sam Whiting and Nora Mishanec, writing in the S. F. Chronicle. “His trademark black bowler, frayed at the brim, sat next to some vintage photos and a basket of free postcards with his poem, ‘The Golden Gate,’ on the front.” Ferlinghetti is survived by a son, Lorenzo, a daughter, Julie, and three grandchildren. No public memorial has been scheduled due to the pandemic.      

Tongo Eisen-Martin Appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco

“Poetry is really the opportunity to see what your mind has to communicate or how it wants to communicate when not tasked with some kind of social reproduction or some kind of survival…it’s just you and your thoughts,” Tongo Eisen-Martin said recently after his appointment as the eighth Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Raised in the city’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, he was nominated by a nine-member panel and appointed by Mayor Breed during Black History Month in February. Asked by KRON what his vision is for the role, he said: “It’s a pretty simple equation, it’s just workshops with people, providing open mikes, providing publications…the aim is to move poetry more into the trenches of the city where it belongs.” An educator and Columbia graduate, Eisen-Martin has taught in prisons and youth homeless shelters, “even youth group psych wards, everywhere our conditions are most wretched,” he told PBS New Hour last year. He’s also the founder of Black Freighter Press and the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which received the 2018 American Book Award and the California Book Award for Poetry (Pocket Poet’s Series, City Lights Publishers).

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Looking at “Halley’s Comet”  

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Stanley Kunitz’s poem, “Halley’s Comet.” It’s one of my favorites — the work of a poet at the peak of his powers — and it’s still fresh and relevant over twenty-five years after it was written. It covers feelings many of us are experiencing today in varying degrees — fear of death, fear of the unknown, and a sense of loss — subjects that, at first glance, some readers may want to turn away from. Yet Kunitz tackles them with skill and insight, and even humor. Besides offering solace during difficult times, poetry can provide an alternative lens for viewing ourselves and the world — in this case, a telescope. If you were born after 1985 (when it last appeared) you may not have heard of Halley’s Comet, but every seventy-six years it swoops visibly near the planet earth, and when it does it arouses both fear and awe. Kunitz’s poem shares the impact of this event on the poet as a child — he was just five years old when the comet passed by in 1910. Late in life, he commented that, “I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” I think he achieved that here. (Spoiler alert: you can hear this poem at www.poetryarchive.org.)

The first sentence glimmers with the qualities that make it so poignant in its entirety — a sense of immediacy, of place, of intimacy, and wonder — transporting us into another time, and into the heart and mind of the young protagonist. In that brief introduction, we learn that Kunitz  is in the first grade and that his teacher, Miss Murphy, has written the words “Halley’s Comet” across the blackboard with the advisory that if the comet “wandered off course/ and smashed into earth/ there’d be no school tomorrow.” The fear of disaster and the promise of “no school” is a heady mixture for a child, and I wonder how kids today might relate to this poem since their own schooling has been interrupted due to the pandemic.   

The second sentence develops the theme of fear in the description of an itinerant “preacher from the hills with a wild look in his eyes” and his warnings to “repent,” a familiar scenario today, as well. The fourth sentence offers details of the young poet’s home life with the observation that “At supper I felt sad to think/ that it was probably/ the last meal I’d share/ with my mother and my sisters.” The directness of this statement is in keeping with a child’s perspective, revealing the depth of his of anxiety. In the sixth sentence, Kunitz changes the tense from past to present, depicting his younger self sneaking into the hall after the others have fallen asleep, and climbing “the ladder to the fresh night air.” The effect of this subtle change takes us out of the realm of reflection and closer to the moment.

The concluding eighth and ninth sentences confirm an absent father, establishing longing in contrast to the vastness of the universe as seen from the rooftop “of the red brick building/ at the foot of Green Street.” It’s there a boy in a “white flannel gown” on a gravel bed searches “the starry sky/ waiting for the world to end.” Although it’s emotionally resonant, there’s only one word in this poem that describes a specific emotion. Yet the accumulation of details evokes a felt sense of commonality and something we don’t usually associate with childhood — existential awareness. This quality can be found in other examples of the poet’s work, too, and it’s no doubt been observed that some of them represent a kind of dialogue with the father he never knew.

Poetry can help to connect us to each other but it can also connect us to parts of ourselves we may have lost touch with. Kunitz was approaching 90 years of age when he wrote this poem, and by looking back to the events surrounding the comet’s arrival, he was able to reconnect to the boy he once was. As a student of Jung, he would have recognized this archetype as the “wounded child.” For younger readers, the image of a child alone under a starry sky will have other implications. One of them may be that loneliness is relative. In the poem, we see that the young Kunitz isn’t exactly alone; his mother and sisters are in the apartment, below, and there’s an entire town that surrounds the building on Green Street — asleep for the moment, but still there. And there’s the sky itself, boundless, darkly glimmering, containing everything. (The Collected Poems, S. Kunitz, W.W. Norton, 2000).

Connecting with Poetry

Political turmoil and uncertainty about the pandemic have left people feeling stressed-out and anxious about the future. Author and educator Diana Raab believes that poetry can help. “Reading and writing poetry encourages a certain interconnectedness and helps establish a sense of community between oneself and others,” she says (“How Poetry Can Heal,” Psychology Today, posted April 11, 2019). That interconnection is vital to mental health, and can help to overcome feelings of isolation. “It can also be a form of meditation because it encourages a sense of mindfulness and the ability to tap into what we’re feeling, seeing, and experiencing at the moment of writing,” she says. Poet Tess Taylor suggests much the same, and believes that reading poetry can help us to reconnect and recharge. The author of “Rift Zone” told PBS recently that “sharing breath with people outside our family is a big no-no these days. And, as a result, a lot of us are lonely” (March 2, 2021). She recommends “spending some time each day with a poem” as a way to connect with its cadence and syncopation, and to experience the story the poet is telling. Doing so, “you become the poem’s instrument. You share its breath,” she says. “In a time when we’re cut off from other people, poems allow us this conversational intimacy…” and “we can feel larger, more awake, more social, more whole.”  

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Amanda Gorman Shines as the Sixth, and Youngest, U.S. Inaugural Poet 

During the inaugural ceremony in Washington D.C. last month, twenty-two year old Amanda Gorman delivered her poem “The Hill We Climb” just days after the deadly insurrection there. Describing herself as “a skinny black girl, descended from slaves, and raised by a single mother,” her poem aspires to “envision a way in which our country can still come together and still heal,” she said in an article by Alexandra Alter in the New York Times. Gorman, a recent Harvard graduate, was raised in Los Angeles where she sang in the youth choir and recited her poetry at St. Brigid Catholic Church in South Central L.A. “Í think a lot of times in cultures we think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with water. I think of the ways we can cleanse ourselves with words, meaning that the poem was an opportunity to kind of resanctify, repurify, and reclaim, not just the Capitol Building, but American democracy and what it stands for,” she told Trevor Noah of the Daily Show. Inspiring and polished, Gorman’s performance was just about as good as it gets, at any age.

The focus on healing is shared by Richard Blanco, an openly gay Latino, who read his poem “One Today” at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural in 2013. Speaking to NBC’s Sandra Tulley, he suggested that “Poetry uses language to make us feel and think in new ways. That’s how it can help heal us — by asking questions we aren’t asking of ourselves and others, and by changing the conversation, the rhetoric, the discourse, so that we can see beyond the abstract language of sociopolitical jargon and arrive at greater truths,” said Blanco, who aims to “build bridges of empathy” with his poetry.

Maya Angelou was already a best-selling author with her candid memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” when she served as inaugural poet at the swearing in of President Bill Clinton in 1993.  Her recitation of “On the Pulse of Morning,” with its themes of inclusion and responsibility, was stirringly theatrical, calling on her training as an actor and speaker, and echoing the oral tradition of African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas. At least one critic has suggested that Angelou’s greatness is attributable to that poem, but her enduring message may be in her life as much as in those words, in her role as a black woman writer, teacher, activist, and humanitarian.

The tradition of the inaugural poem is relatively recent in U.S. history. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy was the first of four presidents to select a poet to compose and read an original poem for the inauguration. His choice of Robert Frost resulted in one of the most memorable images from that time. Standing at the podium, sunlight reflecting off his untamed white hair and the snow on the ground, Frost recited his poem, “The Gift Outright” — completely from memory. But that wasn’t the poem he’d planned on delivering. Glare from the snow prevented him from reading his original text, “Dedication, For John Kennedy His Inauguration,” composed for the occasion. Both works can be found in “The Poetry of Robert Frost” (Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1969). More recently, Miller Williams and Elizabeth Alexander have also served with distinction as inaugural poets for the second terms of Clinton and Obama. For more on this, see “Inaugural Poems in History,” www.poets.org.

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Karumi

The quality of karumi, or lightness, can be found in Basho’s haiku as early as 1667. He was twenty-three years old when he wrote the following:*

cherry blossoms

in the breeze — breaking out

in laughter 

Haruo Shirane, Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, has described karumi as “a focus on everyday subject matter, on the use of ordinary language, and on a relaxed rhythmical, seemingly artless expression.” Here the traditional topic of cherry blossoms takes on an unusually welcome aspect. Rather than contrasting the beauty of the flowers with sadness at their brevity, for instance, Basho depicts the exuberance of the moment. Is it the blossoms that have broken out in laughter or the poet? Or both? In this case, ambiguity adds to the impact of the lines.

Much haiku is celebratory in nature. An exclamatory haiku such as the one above is a good example of this. Another approach, common to the Basho school of haiku, presents two juxtaposed images, offering up a view that embraces them both. Below, a view of the garden, written near the end of Basho’s life, evokes a minimalist yet wholistic response: 

morning dew —

muddy melons

on the ground

Here there’s no trace of poetic conceit, just the pristine scene as Basho found it. In that sense, karumi may be considered not only in its literal sense as “not heavy or dark” but as possessed of a light artistic touch, allowing the reader to bring to the scene what he or she will. Even on his deathbed, Basho found an unexpected lightness:

flies everywhere —

how lucky they are to meet up

with a sick man

In the 20th century, Nakagawa Soen was a lifelong practitioner of haiku. As a literature student at Tokyo Imperial University, he wrote his thesis on Basho and later became a Zen monk and teacher. This haiku, written in 1946, presents two images pointing to the connection of ordinary things:

small plums

and dewdrops —

alive together

Although penetrating, there’s nothing heavy about these lines. Instead there’s a clarity and freshness, and a sense of happiness at the simple pleasures. We, too, are alive together with the plums and the dewdrops. How wonderful! These are the primary characteristics of karumi.

*all versions by jg

Writing Prompt

This haiku prompt is aligned with the Basho school, using juxtaposed images. The purpose isn’t to create great haiku necessarily, but to gain flexibility in different ways of observing. Try juxtaposing an image of:

  • something large with something small
  • something animate with something inanimate
  • an experience of one sense perception with one of a different sense perception
  • nature with an emotion
  • something old with something new
  • something appealing with something unappealing

Then, play around with the lines, mixing and matching them to see what possibilities come up.

Poems, for Now

Last month I was invited to join with other poets for a Zoom reading sponsored by the River Heron Review out of Bucks County, PA. Hosted by co-founders Judith Lagana and Robbin Farr, it showcased work addressing the socio-political climate that appeared in the online venue Poems for Now. The reading provided a chance to see and hear poets from around the country and offered a refreshing change from the jingoistic language so prevalent today. Kudos to all those who participated and thanks to Judith and Robbin for making it all come together. www.riverheronreview.com

How to Haiku

Thanks to editor Bruce Ross for including the haiku, “sheltering in place” in the Fall/Winter edition of Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, out of Maine (www.autumnmoonhaiku.com). The author of How to Haiku, a Writer’s Guide to Haiku and Related Forms, Ross seeks selections that “express feeling connected to nature” and that “produce a haiku moment…”

Joy Harjo Reads

As part of the Poetry Society of America’s “Reading Through the Decades” series, U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo reads How to make good baked salmon from the river, by Nora Marks Dauenhauer: https://poetrysociety.org/features/reading-through-the-decades/joy-harjo-reads-nora-marks-dauenhauer.

“On Grief in the Holidays…”

Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, speaks to Kat Chow on how she processes grief during the holidays and her rituals for the new year (NPR, 12/2/20). https://www.npr.org.

New Year Wishes

Here we are in December, wrapping up a rough year as the pandemic continues to take its toll. The light at the end of the tunnel, of course, is that there’s a vaccine on the horizon. It may not be a cure-all but it promises to save thousands of lives around the world. I’m grateful for that, and for the many gestures of generosity and courage I see and hear about every day. May this season bring hope and not just more hype, and may it be a time of light and healing as we move forward into the new year.            

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A Rare Voice

Diane di Prima (1934-2020)

Poet, memoirist, and activist Diane di Prima, who was born in Brooklyn and launched her writing career in New York City’s Greenwich Village, died October 25th in San Francisco where she had lived and worked for over fifty years. She was 86. The author of This Bird Flies Backward (her first book) and Memoirs of a Beatnik, she penned over 40 books of poetry and prose, including the best-selling Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. One of the few women writers associated with the Beat Movement, she co-founded the New York Poets Theater and the newsletter The Floating Bear with playwright LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka), was befriended by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights imprint. Although suffering from Parkinson’s and arthritis in her later years, she managed to write up until a few weeks before her death by using a cell phone or dictating her work, her long-time partner, Sheppard Powell, told the L.A. Times (10/28/20).    

I remember the first time I heard her read from her poetry. It was in the early 1970s at a small publishing venue, Panjandrum Press, a few blocks from where I was living in San Francisco. I loved her presentation — confident, clear, and soft spoken. After hearing her read, I felt that we, the audience, had been gifted in the way that we’re gifted by the elemental sounds of a running stream or wind in the trees. There was nothing pretentious about her or her work, nothing felt forced or unnatural. I wouldn’t see her again until the early 80s, this time at the San Francisco Zen Center where she was teaching a one day workshop. Here, the class was down on the floor, practicing automatic writing and, as I remember, cutting up poems to rearrange them in unexpected ways. Later, in the 90s I heard her read once again, at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. The room was packed and we were lucky to get seats. The occasion was the publication of her collection, Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990). Ferlinghetti was there, his blue eyes happily taking it all in, the crowd, the energy. Each poem was just right, belying the work that went into them, and they rolled off her tongue as if she was uttering them extemporaneously. I saw her a few more times after that, greeting people at a bookstore in San Rafael where a series of Tibetan Buddhist teachers was appearing. “You’re just an old hippie, aren’t you?” she asked me once, and I laugh thinking of that, now. How easy it was for her to break through the walls and find common ground, which is exactly what her poetry does. 

She took poetry out of the halls of academe and into the streets, the coffee houses, and the bookstores. Yet her work is informed by a wide range of knowledge and interests, including metaphysics, Sanskrit, and Buddhist philosophy (she was a practicing Buddhist), as well as her early study of Keats and Pound (she sought out Pound as a mentor while he was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital). In 2009, as Poet Laureate of San Francisco, she read from her poem, “First Draft,” which still resonates today:

my vow is:

to remind us all

to celebrate

there is no time

too desperate

no season

that is not

A Season of Song

The New York Times has described Diane di Prima as “…a rare female voice in a male world…” while NPR has referred to her as “one of the most prominent voices of the Beat Generation.” She taught in the poetics programs at the Naropa Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the New College of California. Among her honors are the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. Her most recent book, The Poetry Deal, was published by City Lights Foundation in 2014. In his review of that book in Poetry Flash, Brue Isaacson wrote that, “In principle and poetry, di Prima is all about people — loved ones, family, social observations of simple interactions that show larger truths.” Besides her husband, Sheppard Powell, she is survived by five children, four grandchildren, three great grandchildren, and two brothers, according to the L.A. Times.   

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Peace Poetry Contest

Congratulations to the winners of the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Contest, sponsored the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The annual contest honors BMK, the late Santa Barbara-based poet, and encourages poets of all ages to “get to the core of the spirit of peace.” To read this year’s winning poems, and for information on the mission and educational programs of the NAPF, visit www.wagingpeace.org.

Journaling During the Pandemic

The emotional impact from COVID-19 may be the “third wave” of the virus, say Gabrielle Birkner and Rebecca Soffer, authors of Modern Loss: Candid Conversation About Grief (www.newsbreak.com). Loss is never easy, but this pandemic has been especially difficult because people who are hospitalized with cornonavirus are isolated from loved ones. Family members have had to communicate on FaceTime and conduct memorial services on Zoom, and “The toll taken on survivors is tremendous,” the authors say.

There’s also “a communal grief as we watch our work, health-care, education and economics systems — all of these systems we depend on — destabilize,” says Sherry Cormier, Ph.D, a specialist in grief mentoring. “It’s important that we start recognizing that we’re in the middle of this collective grief. We are all losing something now” (COVID-19: Mourning our Bygone Lives, by Kirsten Weir, www.apa.org). Acknowledging grief is vital, psychologists say, whether it’s for a person, a marriage, a job, or something ambiguous such as a sense of safety or security. One way to do this is to write about it. Cormier suggests journaling as a way “to put words to losses, and to help identify ways to move forward.”  But, “It’s not about writing perfectly,” stresses Heather Stang, M.A, author of Mindfulness and Grief, who advises keeping “your journal handy, for you never know when insight or something else you wish to record will arise.”

Morgan Ome describes how journaling can assist individuals to reflect on uncertain times rather than just react to them (Dear Diary: This is My Life in Quarantine, Atlantic, 8/6/20). She tells the stories of Angela DePalma, a 27-year old from Dutchess County, New York, who struggled with her grandmother’s coronavirus diagnosis and work-related stress before turning to journaling, and of Justyn Williams, an out of work, 29-year-old actor in Los Angeles who writes twice a day in his journal as “a way to check in with an invisible therapist.”

For the PDF Journal Prompts To Facilitate Coping with the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, visit www.conncoll.edu.  For the PDF Navigating Grief: The Mindful Way to Cope With Loss, visit www.mindfulnessandgrief.com.