Tag work

News

jeromegagnonblog

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

News

jeromegagnonblog

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?”

Writing “Spell of the Ordinary”

jeromegagnonblog

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.