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In the Marketplace

img_0182-2.jpgI remember running into poet Michael Palmer in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza one afternoon, back in the day when people weren’t glued to their cell phones and walking around the city like zombies. He was offering hand-written poems for a penny each. I wish I still had that poem, but like so many things, it disappeared into the biosphere from which it came. What remains for me, though, is the memory of a friendly street encounter, and the notion that poetry can be much more than a solitary pursuit.

Writing in the Atlantic, Bhavna Patel looks at street poetry around the country, noting that it can sometimes serve a therapeutic purpose (“A Verse to Go, Please: Poets and the Lives They Touch”). Patel tells the story of Neal Ewald, who asked poet Jacqueline Suskin for a poem at the Arcata Farmer’s Market in Northern California where she’d set up a folding chair and was balancing “a manual typewriter on her knees…. A small sign next to her read, ‘Poem Store — Your Subject, Your Price.’” What Ewald wanted was “a five-dollar poem about being underwater,” Suskin said. Rereading the impromptu poem while sitting in his car, memories of his late wife, Wendy, came “flooding” back to him, Patel writes. Eventually, he commissioned Suskin to write a longer poem to honor his wife’s memory.

San Francisco resident Mc Allen dedicates one day a month to “free-range poetry,” writes Caillie Millner in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Taking Time for a Line of Rhyme”). Standing at a favorite spot on Cole Street in front of the Reverie Café, Allen can be heard calling to passersby, “Would you like to hear a poem? It’s completely free.” One afternoon he read Tom Wayman’s, “Did I Miss Anything?” to a bicyclist and Mary Oliver’s “Humpbacks” to a group of “tech bros,” Millner notes. “I’d say that one in every dozen or so people will stop,” said Allen, who brings a trove of poetry books along with him in a toolbox and recites from a variety of poets. “You never know who needs a poem in their life at that moment.”

“Entangle”

“Sometimes I prefer not to untangle it,

I prefer it to remain disorganized,

because it’s richer that way,

like a certain shrubbery I pass each day…”

– Tony Hoagland

(1953 – 2018)

Plumbago, grape ivy, and morning glory vines have taken over a largely untended corner of the yard. At sundown, the blue flowers of the plumbago take on an electric glow against the faded violets and purples of the morning glories. When I consider this rampant mix, I think of the late Tony Hoagland’s poem, “Entangle,” which first appeared in the Paris Review. It’s a beautiful, wrenching work. It’s not just about the confluence of branches and flowers, of course, but memory and mortality, and our deep connections to each other. In his poem, “Lucky,” Hoagland” tells us… “If you are lucky in this life,/ you will get to help your enemy/the way I got to help my mother…you will get to raise the spoon /of pristine, frosty ice cream/ to the trusting mouth of your old enemy/because the taste buds at least are not broken/because there is a bond between you/and sweet is sweet in any language.” These are poems that draw you back for a closer look, to savor their details and the way they convey our foibles and frailty.

Calls for Poetry and More

Nowhere Magazine is sponsoring a travel writing contest for a poem, short story, or essay “that possesses a powerful sense of place.” The prize is $1,000 and publication. Submit online by December 31. http://www.nowheremag.com/contests

Quercus Review Press out of Modesto Junior College has announced their annual Poetry Book Award. The prize is $1,000, publication, and fifteen author copies. Deadline, December 28th. For details, visit http://www.quercusreviewpress.com

Willow Books is offering two prizes of $1,000 and publication for “a book of poetry and a book of fiction or creative nonfiction by writers of color.” Submit by December 15th. http://www.willowlit.net/willowbooks-literature-awards

Bayou Literary Magazine will award two prizes of $1,000 each for a poem and a short story. Submit by January 1st. http://www.bayoumagazine.org

Applications for the James Merrill House Writer-in-Residence Program in Stonington, Connecticut will be accepted until January 8th, 2019. Writers of all genres, including translators, are eligible for the four to six week residencies that come with a stipend. For more information, visit http://jamesmerrillhouse.org/residency/writer-in-reseidenceprogram

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The Curlew, out of Wales, is a non-profit journal that supports conservation projects and offers “art, photographs, essays, poems, and short stories with a connection to the natural world.”  My thanks to the editor, Dr. Lynn Parr, for selecting “Pulling Weeds” for the latest issue. www.the-curelew.com

In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Academy for American Poets is sponsoring a poster contest for grades 9 through 12.  Opening September 1st, the contest will be judged by award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye and designer Debbie Millman.  The winner will receive $500, and the winning poster will be distributed to approximately 100,000 schools, bookstores, and libraries across the U.S.  www.academyforamericanpoets.org

I’ll be taking a hiatus from the blog for the rest of the year, returning in early 2019 with a new direction.  This should give me time to finish up a couple of projects. I hope you’ll rejoin me then. Meanwhile, let me leave you with the last stanza from Martin Espada’s wonderful poem, “The Republic of Poetry”:

“In the republic of poetry,

the guard at the airport

will not allow you to leave the country

until you declaim a poem for her

and she says, Ah! Beautiful.”

     

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I’m happy to announce that Rumors of Wisdom was selected for the Concrete Wolf Louis Book Award and is slated to be published early in 2019.  My gratitude to the judge, Timons Esaias, and to Lana Hechtman Ayers, Managing Editor of Concrete Wolf Press, for their belief in this project (www.concretewolf.com).  Named in honor of Ayers’ grandfather, who inspired her love of poetry, “the award is for a first full-length book by a poet age fifty or over.”  Rumors was approximately three years in the making, although a few of the poems go back farther than that.  It went through several versions and various titles, as I continued to revise and add new poems. In the process, I learned a lot about what makes a cohesive collection.  Like Spell of the Ordinary, Rumors is essentially about mindfulness.  It suggests that deep attention to the moment offers a portal into the “enduring mutable,” that nature and the human spirit are salvageable.

Just received my copy of Arts, jointly published by the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities and the University of St. Thomas.  The visual arts are represented here by photographs, drawings, and paintings, along with in-depth articles that explore the work of Frida Kahlo, the making of mandalas, and art as ministry in an immigrant detention center.  An article on The Mount Tabor Ecumenical Center for Art and Spirituality (Villa Via Sacra) in Barga, Italy, traces the Center’s origins and the connection between creativity and religious faith, while poetry and reviews round out the selections.  This is an inspiring and visually inviting issue. www.societyarts.org

Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet, by Joan Halifax (Flatiron Books, 2018), offers insight into the “bivalent qualities” of what she terms Edge States, including altruism, empathy, and engagement.  Citing experiences from the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements, as well as from her work as a medical anthropologist and Buddhist leader, Halifax describes what can happen when good intentions lead to despair and burnout, and what we can do about it.  Standing at the Edge is a wise and practical guide for navigating challenging times, and a valuable resource for teachers, caregivers, and those in the helping professions.

The Summer Writing Program at the Truro Center for the Arts on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, offers workshops in a variety of genres, including poetry, memoir, travel writing, and playwriting.  Some of the poets scheduled to participate this year are Robert Pinksy, Lorna Blake, Rebecca Fost, and Peter Campion. Be sure to bring your sunscreen. www.info@castlehill.org

Hannah Aizenman, poetry coordinator for the New Yorker, addresses the questions: “From a craft standpoint, what causes you to accept a poem?” “What advice do you have for new poets who are submitting work?” and “How many rejections have you faced and how do you deal with them?”  www.frontierpoetry.com

The Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence Program offers residencies in March, 2019, to three women writers at Wharton’s former estate in Massachusetts, the Mount.  Included are a stipend of $1,000, lodging, and work space. www.edithwharton.org/visit/the-edith-wharton-writer-in-residence-program

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Poets Illya Kaminsky, Bruce Beasley, and Alexandra Teague are among the faculty of the Centrum Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, which will take place July 15 – 23 at Fort Worden State Park in Washington.  Scholarships are available. For more information, visit www.centrum.org/theport-townsend-writers-conference.

It was fun returning to SFSU to attend the Creative Writing Student Awards Reading and Reception, and to share my memories of Kay Boyle.  The campus never looked better, just the way a bustling urban campus should look: the expanded library sparkles in its glass skin and the new humanities building adds a note of verticality.  My thanks to Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff of the Poetry Center for making me feel so welcome, and congratulations to all of this year’s graduates and honorees. I thought that all of the students who read were amazing, and everyone showed the kind of originality and attention to detail that can make a writing life.       

The Southern Humanities Review is sponsoring the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, open through June, to honor the late Jake Adam York…WaterWood Press is sponsoring the Carolyn Forche’ Prize for Humanitarian Poetry, open through mid-August…The Spokane Prize for Short Fiction offers an award of $2,000 and publication, open until June 15th…Information on hundreds of writing grants and awards can be found at www.pw.org.

Reading Reynolds Price’s preface to his Collected Poems (1997), I came across a reference to Poetry as a Means of Grace, by C.G. Osgood.  “Conceived in the 1940s as lectures to young Princeton theologians, Osgood’s still keenly provocative chapters propose that, in a hectic and book-filled world, a thoughtful person might well choose a single inexhaustible poet and fix upon that poet’s work as a lifelong spring of refreshment in the driest times.”  Price’s choice, early on, was Milton, but he also had a special kinship with Dickenson. When I met him, Price was fresh from his first literary success and teaching a class in fiction writing. At the time, I had no idea he wrote poetry, that you could do both, but it’s clear that poetry remained for him a saving grace through youth and old age, health and disability.  In “Pears,” he depicts the ephemerality of experience and memory with quick brushstrokes, and in “Neighbors,” inhabits his dilemma in the form of inquiry:

“My name is Edward Reynolds Price,

So here on the ward, I’m Edward Price.

 

Last night I looked at my new neighbor’s door.

He’s Edward Reynolds, plain as ink.

 

Which one is the other’s doppelganger?

Scapegoat?  Porter of an alternate fate?”

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the-golden-gate-bridge-1956459_1920“The Beat Goes On: Celebrating the Bay Poetry Collection” is the title of an exhibit at California State University East Bay (Hayward, CA), featuring publications from the library’s special collections.  Highlighting the work of “Beat” luminaries such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, it traces the development of contemporary poetry in San Francisco and the Bay Area. While Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Publishing has played a pivotal role on the local literary scene since the early 1950’s, contributions by others such as Panjandrum Press and Sixteen Rivers Press are also featured.  (Runs through December.)

“Cherries, After,” a sense-memory poem that pulls together images from my visit to a small farm near Dartmouth, Massachusetts, was selected for the 2018 Robert Frost Poetry Prize, sponsored by the Frost Foundation.  Many thanks to the judges for this honor, and my gratitude to Executive Director Jessica Sanchez and President Jim Knowles for their efforts in promoting this annual contest in celebration of Frost’s poetry. Like a lot of people, the first time I encountered his work was in a high school English class.  We were studying “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Although I admired both poems, it was “Snowy” that held me with its imagery, the resonance of its rhyme scheme, and the tinkle of harness bells.

Poet, translator, and founder of Copper Canyon Press, Sam Hamill, “died on April 14th at his home in Anacortes, Washington,” according to an obituary by Daniel E. Slotnik of the New York Times.  He was seventy-four years old. As a teenager in Utah, Hamill ran away from an abusive environment and made his way to San Francisco where he met poet Kenneth Rexroth who “helped him give up drugs and taught him about poetry — kindnesses that Hamill said changed his life,” Slotnik wrote.  Known for his sensitive translations of poets such as Wang Wei and Matsuo Basho, Hamill went on to publish several collections of his own poetry and initiated a national protest by poets and others against the Iraq war. In his poem, “True Peace,” he wrote, “Not for me, Nirvana./ This suffering world is mine,/ mine to suffer in it’s grief.”  Recipient of PEN’s Freedom to Write First Amendment Award, among other honors, his most recent collection, After Morning Rain, will be published later this year by Tiger Bark Press, according to the Times.    

“Longing has its own quiet place

in the human heart, but love

is sometimes rapturous, noisy,

almost uncivilized, and knows

no boundaries, no borders.”

from After Morning Rain,

          by Sam Hamill

Headlands Center for the Arts is now accepting applications through June for residencies in 2019.  Poets, fiction and creative nonfiction writers, and other artists are eligible. Located on the scenic coast of Marin County, CA, just outside of San Francisco, “Headlands” offers airfare for qualified applicants, a private room in a shared house, studio space, five meals per week, and a monthly stipend of $500.  Residencies are for periods of from four to ten weeks. For details, visit www.headlands.org.

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“Spell of the Ordinary” was mailed the first week of February, so everybody who ordered should have received their copies by now.  Thanks, again, to Editor Christen Kincaid, the staff at Finishing Line Press, and to Tony and Mary Sanchez for their help with the cover and the blog.

Natalie Goldberg discusses haiku as a spiritual practice at https://www.upaya.org.

The Andres Montoya Poetry Prize for work by a Latinx poet offers $1,000 plus book publication. For more publishing opportunities, see https://entropymag.org.

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After The Book Shop closed its doors for good, former manager Renee’ Rettig raised $70,000 through Indiegogo to open a new store across the street.  Dubbed Books on B, the independently owned store in Hayward, California, is a light-filled space that’s a testament to Rettig’s dedication and the generosity of booklovers.  You can read more at www.sfgate.com.

Pleased to hear that my new poem, “Pilgrimage,” was selected by editor Mark S. Burrows for the journal, ARTS.  Along with Jon M. Sweeney, Burrows is co-translator of “Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, Meditations for a Restless Soul” (Hampton Roads, 2017).  These are short, sometimes ecstatic meditations that speak directly to the heart.

Photographer Fred Lyon’s visual essay, “San Francisco Noir” (Princeton Architectural Press) was released earlier this month and it’s a joy to take in.  But just as evocative as the after dark images of The City, lit by neon and shrouded in fog, are Lyon’s photos of San Francisco by day — an old man playing a harmonica on the sidewalk, rickety backstairs, and wash hanging out to dry.        

Reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s, “San Francisco Poems” (City Lights Foundation), I came across “They Were Putting Up a Statue (of St. Francis),” which originally appeared in “Coney Island of the Mind.”  It was recorded on Fantasy records back in the day and can now be heard on You Tube.  Still rocks.

Poet Aline Soules (Meditation on Woman) writes about her recent visit to Seamus Heaney’s Home Place, a small museum in Ulster devoted to the Irish poet’s life and work, and provides links to podcasts and videos.  If you haven’t heard Heaney’s poems, pour yourself a cup of tea (or something stronger) and settle in.  https://alinesoules.com

Words of Witness: Remembering Kay Boyle (1902 – 1992)

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Although it was a few years ago, it feels like yesterday when I ran into Kay Boyle’s former secretary, David Ryan, while working at a bookstore on the edge of the Tenderloin in San Francisco.  It was a happy reunion.  He channeled her in a spot on impersonation that got me laughing and thinking back.

As a student at San Francisco State University, I was lucky enough to spend time with some amazing writing teachers.  Kay was the most memorable of them.  She was — for me, at least — larger than life, even though she was quite thin and in her early seventies when I met her.  Having lived as an expatriate in Europe in the 1920s and 30s with the likes of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, she had stories to tell.  When I expressed my admiration for the poet Hart Crane, she said, “Oh, yes, Hart,” and told me a story about one of his little-known escapades.

I remember a class I attended at her Victorian house on Frederick Street in the Haight Ashbury District.  On the hall table was a surreal looking “tree of hands” that Jean Cocteau had bought for her at the Paris flea market.  “It’s for holding calling cards,” she explained.  But for me it was pure magic, evoking daydreams of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.  I got a sense of her mindset early on, though, when she responded to a student who complained that he didn’t have enough time to work on a story.  “Andre Malraux found time to write, even when he was working with the French Resistance and helping Jewish children escape from the Nazis,” she said crisply.  “If you’re serious about writing, you’ll find time.”     

Boyle’s growth from an idealistic young writer to a savvy witness of political realities can be seen in her early novel, “Death of a Man,” which exposed the threat of fascism to a largely unsuspecting world.  It can also be seen in her long story “The White Horses of Vienna” (winner of the O. Henry Award), which depicts the need for artists to engage in the political and social conditions around them.  It’s a theme that shaped much of her poetry over the years, too.  Her poem, “A Testament to My Students,” supports student demands for a Black Studies program and other reforms in the 1960s; “Dedicated to Terre Des Hommes” laments thwarted efforts to transport wounded Vietnamese children to European hospitals ” (Doubleday & Company, 1970).

A critic once faulted Boyle for a tendency toward romanticism, to which she responded with atypical indifference, “This may very well be true.”  At its core, though, her work reminds us that people need to speak out, to stand against injustice in every era.  The message couldn’t be timelier.  The opening lines from “A Poem for the Teesto Dine’ of Arizona,” below, suggest that the source of Boyle’s commitment wasn’t simply anger, although that was part of it, but respect for others and a deep reverence for life.  The complete poem can be found in “This is Not a Letter and Other Poems” (Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1985).  

“The Mountain is old.  They say she is a female mountain.

The women who know her are not young, yet they call her

The Mother.  She stands tall against the sky, fragrant with herbs,

embellished by shrubs…”

“…She is The Mother who stands in silence

when the land is fettered and barbed with wire, when it is parched

to dust by the drought of uniformed men…”

– Kay Boyle

Two of my favorite books are Boyle’s memoir, “Being Geniuses Together, 1920 – 1930,” written with alternating chapters by Robert McAlmon, and her collection of short stories, “Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart.”  Both evoke the world of pre- and post-war Europe through the voice of an insightful narrator who was ahead of her time.

Writing “Spell of the Ordinary”

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The poems in this collection are about paying attention to ordinary things and the activities going on around me.  A barometer hanging on a wall, a bowl of lemons, an aphid on my arm.  Looking for the connections they sometimes evoke.  Usually they were prompted by a recognition or memory that I’d seen something in a new way.  Sometimes a line would come to me and I just went with it, not knowing where it would go.  Sometimes I found myself confronting loss (“Cranking the Wheel”), sometimes a sense of gratitude (“Gifts”).  Sometimes, what I would call paradox or mystery (“Spotting Turkeys,” “Crow Makes a Scene”).

Although most of the poems required polishing, they generally came as a single piece, or slice of life.  (Happy day!)  I didn’t add or take away much.  Sometimes I got stuck.  “Crow,” for instance was all about pronoun usage.  Should I refer to the crow as he or she?  Or should I address the whole experience as “You?”  I think I finally got it right and was pleased that editor Daniel Rice of Riverfeet Press selected it for the recent anthology, “Awake in the World.”

Lately, I’ve found myself more invested in the idea of shaping a poem.  I’ve let go of the idea of expecting them to arrive in any sort of finished form.  The process of polishing is a time for making associations, and possibly for finding some kind of personal meaning, as much as it’s an opportunity to experiment with form.  For me, the moments of “Spell of the Ordinary” were openings to go below the surface but also to appreciate that surface, to savor the penumbra around a pear, or the light off frost.