Elizabeth Bishop has been an important poet for me for a long time, yet she was famous reticent about her personal life. In this beautifully written and authoritative literary biography, critic Thomas Travisano helped me to understand the intersections between her personality and life and the work these gave rise it. Understanding the person Elizabeth Bishop was has deepened my love for the work. Love Unknown (Viking, 2019) was a book I treated myself to last spring, when I knew that the pandemic would curtail many activities and open up more time for reading. (Little did I think reading it, and Bishop’s own work, would inspire me to write an homage poem to her “In the Waiting Room” while actually in my own dentist’s waiting room! But that is another story.) If you are interested in understanding Bishop’s life and work, this is the biography for you!
In future posts, I plan to share more volumes from my library on Bishop and by Travisano, just when the mood strikes. For now, on this rainy Thursday, it is time for a bracing cup of tea and some housework that requires coordination, determination, and an apron!
Regarding the Poem for April 8, “Vapid“:
Over the past twenty years, I have enjoyed many “reality” television shows. Favorites have included “The Old House” and “A Chef’s Life,” “What Not to Wear” (British and American versions), and “Project Runway.” This past week, however, I hit the wall. “Love Island”? Well, let’s just say I am not the right demographic. Time to tune in to the semi-final episode of the latest season of “The Great British Baking Show”–after, of course, brewing a cup of tea. Be still, my heart!
This book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop by Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2013) is a handy resource for when I want a fresh approach to writing a poem. Lockward, poet laureate of West Caldwell, NJ since 2009, offers a free monthly poetry newsletter and helms a small publishing arm called Terrapin Press. The Crafty Poet (which now also has a sister-sequel volume) is a composite work dreamed up and coordinated by Lockward but containing craft tips and sample poems from a host of interesting contemporary poets (see contributors’ names below) thoughtfully arranged by topic–from “Generating Material/Using Time” to “Writer’s Block/Recycling” and many gems in between. Material was generated from and originally shared on her Poetry Newsletter.
Regarding Today’s Poem: “X = ?”:
As you know, I have been traveling through the alphabet backward this year. Backwards or forwards, it doesn’t matter: the letter “X” is a daunting prospect. Today, it was Lockward’s book, above, that helped me see the challenge from a fresh vantage point. From the chapter on “Voice,” which suggests locating one’s own voice by internalizing other voices through deep study and frequent reading of a poem (or poems) you love, I used the prompt by Jeanne Marie Beaumont that uses her own poem, “After” as an illustration. Her poem is inspired by Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” using the first word of his title for her title, then weaving two stanzas out of an acrostic use of the second word in Frost’s title. I am drawn to memorize and recite the poems of other poets anyway, so for me the springboard into my own poem was the idea of creating an acrostic, playing with the ideas of “X” as the unknown quantity and of mysteries encountered at crossroads.
If you would like to know more about this acrostic form, there is a wealth of information online. It is an old form, beloved of children (they enjoy making up poems based on their own names!) and poets of all ages. The trick, I think, is to balance the body of the poem carefully against the seed letter at the beginning of each line. Best of all is when the reader encounters the poem first without realizing it is an acrostic (as happened with me as I read “After.”)
Thanks for reading this! Hope you enjoy today’s construction project!
This collection of essays by poet Jane Hirschfield has been in my library for nearly a quarter of a century, and it still pulls me back in every so often to reread and mull over Hirschfield’s quiet but authoritative wisdom. (I also love the cover image, all that bright citrus partially obscured and in different stages of revelation and accessibility.)
Here are the two sentences that open the preface:
Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.
A longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Hirschfield’s prose and poetry reflects the values of spare elegant surface opening the mind to penetrating depths. Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz has written of Hirshfield’s “profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings,” another hallmark of Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion.
Nine Gates is equally appealing whether approached as a reader of poems or as a maker of poems, exploring as it does the enlarging function of poetry for both the reader and the writer. (Her other collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform theWorld, is one I still have not read, but I am looking forward to dipping into it. As a well-regarded translator of poems from Japan and India, she is well qualified to ponder this. I am also hoping to explore more of Hirschfield’s body of work in poetry. If you have a favorite among her volumes, please let me know!)
Regarding today’s Poem: “Yellow”
Today’s poem, “Yellow,” cohered around a memory of homeschooling days, when Julia was gaining new confidence as a cook and baker in a circle of friends that extended out from her peers through multiple generations and across state lines–gifts that matter in the moment and linger in the heart and mind. In this case, a yellow gingham apron, practical and beautiful, made especially for her with love, the gift of a grandmother who extended her caring beyond her own grandchildren to their friend, our daughter.
I think the combination of the prompt of the letter “Y” and maybe the cover of Hirschfield’s collection were the catalysts for the poem.
Until tomorrow, maybe you experience increased existence! LESLIE
It is warmer here, today, and windy. If the wind abates, we are thinking of having a fire in the garden at dusk to relax after a long but productive week.
Library Spotlight on
A poet whose work I care deeply for, Stanley Kunitz, famously wrote that “a garden is a poem that is never finished.” And I feel that I am never finished reading and rereading his prose autobiography by way of a garden narrative, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. This account of the making his East Coastal garden in Provincetown, Massachusetts was published by W.W. Norton in 2005, when Kunitz was celebrating his 100th birthday by still tending to and enjoying his garden. It is lushly illustrated with photographs and adorned with excerpts from Kunitz’s work as a poet, but the focus is on the nitty gritty of gardening, the exhilaration and the heartbreak of amending soil and amending airy ideas by making room for the ideas your own patch of earth has to offer.
Born on July 29, 1905, Kunitz lived a life active in mind and body, winning the National Book Award in 1995 and serving as our national Poet Laureate — for the second time — in 2000.
This volume opens up in many directions, making it a wonderful gift for anyone who delights in gardens, poetry, photography, and thoughtful autobiography highlighting persistence, integrity, and a willingness to listen to what is and what might be.
REGARDING TODAY’S POEM:
These two sonnets, “The Exchange,” show the two points of view and are twins, in a way. After hours of writer’s block this morning, all it took was one old uncomfortable memory, an iambic pentameter first line, and the hope of exorcising the memory. The second sonnet was the gift, seeing the whole encounter from the other side, at least in my imagination! Both turn on questions and self-questioning.
Until tomorrow!
Leslie
Garden tags that I use as book marks for The Wild Braid
Today, a package arrived on our front porch, a bit early. I had been expecting it next week. It contained copies of my newest collection, the cover an image I took one dawn on the same porch.
Never heard of Green Ginkgo Press? Neither has anybody else, except for those living under our roof (the press’s, ahem, “galactic headquarters.”)
The poems in Larksat Sunrise: Light-hearted Poems for Dark Times have been written over many years, here and there. A few have found their way into journals, but not so many. Partly that is because I tend not to send them out, and partly, I think, because they just don’t fit the aesthetic of many journals. Similarly, only a couple here have seemed to make sense in the book collections I have put together. And yet, when I have shared them over the years privately, others have enjoyed them, even (perhaps especially) those of my acquaintance for whom poetry does not occupy a central place on their own reading and writing radar.
Late last year, during this seemingly interminable time of isolation and pandemic, I got the idea to create a chapbook of humorous poems–light-hearted poems–that might appeal not only to my core of friends but to some people they know who need a chuckle. And so this mss. was born. First, I rounded up likely poems, did my best to order them, and asked a small group of beta readers to look hard at what I had with a goal of culling the ones that didn’t quite work. (Enormous thanks, here, to Tim, Julia, Karla, Beth, and Liz!)
Having a strong feeling that it would not be quite right for her, I then shared the manuscript with my established publisher. My intuition confirmed, I thought briefly about other avenues, including chapbook competitions. This little collection though didn’t seem like a good candidate for such contests; it is not trendy or edgy enough to appeal to the guest judges, I reasoned. Further, I simply did not want to delay its publication. Having published my first chapbook, Living Room, in 1981, and then spending decades writing the poems and shaping manuscript after manuscript before publishing my first full-length collection, Still Lifewith Poppies: Elegies, in 2016, I knew how long the process can take. Moreover, I have this oddest and strong conviction that it needs to be in the world, and now, not in three or four years–or three or four decades–or posthumously–or never!
The ginkgo in our back garden, planted for Julia the year she was born.
So, I took the not-unexpected rejection in stride, decided to be calm and chose to create a little press of my own: Green Ginkgo Press. It helped that I have had a small amount of experience with this. In 2000, a friend and I created a press to publish materials on labyrinths. (I have done some posts on this on my blog. Her name is Marilyn Larson. She is a visual artist with a specialty in labyrinths. Our second title is still in print!)
And, maybe eight years ago, as a homeschooling mom of a classical Greek-loving daughter, we had a family adventure with a book Julia felt needed to be in the world–a coloring book called Alpha Beta to help young children learn the Greek letters. Julia had wanted to study Classical Greek since falling in love with D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths as a pre-schooler. When she was in middle school, an understanding classics professor helped us find college student classics majors to serve as tutors. Julia was convinced that Latin was more popular (!) with young students because of the wealth of available materials, and that the different alphabet was the stumbling block. I couldn’t fault her analysis, but I did get a bit weary of hearing “They should have a coloring book for young kids.” I am sure you can imagine the back and forth–“Who is this ‘they’ of whom you speak? Well, if it is such a good idea, why don’t you create this book?”
So, knowing it could be done, and, after considering the options, I decided to use the printing company, Blurb, which had good reviews and reasonable prices. The software they offer, Bookwright, was a bit futzy to work with. At least for me, the learning curve was steeper than I was expecting. Thank goodness Tim has more confidence than I do. Fulfillment also took weeks longer than I expected, to receive the paper proof copy, due, in part, I understand, to the icy storms in Texas where the printing was done. On the other hand, the copies I ordered arrived in just a few days.
While the layout is still a tad seamy, I love the final result. I am glad to give these scattered and ephemeral poems a place to roost together, and thrilled that my sister, Karla, allowed me to use her images of larks on the back cover. Here is a peek inside:
You might recognize some of these, as a couple have been included in other collections, and some have been published on Winona Media because they were composed for the National Poetry Writing Month challenge in recent years. If you would like a copy of Larks at Sunrise: Light-hearted Poems for Dark Times, let me know (winonapoet@gmail.com) I will send you a copy ($20.00 which includes shipping).
Wishing you fair skies and wind in your sails, wherever your day takes you!
LESLIE
Author portrait with ship “Trade Wind,” at Vesterheim Museum, Decorah, Iowa (Photo: Ann Lacy)
