Tipton Poetry Journalis based in Indiana and took local root in 2002. Today, it attracts and publishes work from poets not just from the Midwest but from those based nationally and internationally. I am very pleased that the Winter 2023 issue, #55 for this seasonal quarterly, includes my own poem, “Notes on Design.”
The journal can be read online HERE; print copies can be ordered through Amazon. It contains work by 37 poets as well as a Editor Barry Harris’s review of Reckless Pilgrims by Allison Thorpe. Out of so many poems that pulled me in, I was particularly taken with Ted Kooser’s “A Lake of Starlight,” Patricia Joslin’s “Kintsugi,” Wally Swist’s “Looking at Putin,” and “Spectral Bodies,” by Amit Shankar Saha.
Iowa-born Nebraska-transplant Ted Kooser’s prose is as lucid as fresh, cold well water. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (for Delights & Shadows, 2005) and Poet Laureate/Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (2004-2006), his poetry is both deep and accessible, sophisticated and plain-spoken. He has worked as a publisher, the Vice President of Lincoln Benefit Life Insurance Company, and as a university professor. If you haven’t read a Kooser poem lately, this short one, “A Jar of Buttons,” is one of my favorites, and has permanently changed the way I think about small repairs, small gestures. Video clips, news, and more can be found on his personal website. Though he has recently passed the torch to poet Kwame Dawes, who continues the popular weekly poetry email series, “American Life in Poetry,” that Kooser established in 2005, now, in his vigorous early eighties, Kooser is still very much an active working poet.
This book, which focuses most closely not on generating new poems but how”…the craft of careful writing and meticulous revision…” in order to communicate with readers in the most effective way, is one I return to regularly. The twelve chapter titles begin with: “The Poet’s Job Description,” “Writing for Others,” “First Impressions,” and conclude with: “Fine Tuning Metaphors and Similes” and “Relax and Wait.”
As much as I enjoy (and benefit from) Kooser’s technical advice, I even more taken with his shared thoughts about his own life and reading, the background that informs his opinions. I am engaged whether he is assessing and refining classic advice (perhaps on discussing the willingness to risk “sentimentality” as poet Richard Hugo counsels in his seminal work, The Triggering Town–Kooser is of the mind that “sentimentality” can’t be defined but “gushiness” is easier to identify–or disclosing his earliest motivations for wanting to be taken for a poet without writing a poem. He writes of his very young self, longing to look like, if not actual be a cool chick magnet, “Being a poet was looking the part. I was an artificial poet, a phony, when, by rubbing shoulders with poetry, I gradually became interested in writing it.”)
All this volume has the subtitle “Practical Advice for Beginning Poets,” it is no secret that we are all beginners each time we embark on trying to create something new. For poets and writers, that means facing the blank page, messing it up, and then fixing up the mess without losing the excitement. Although I have published hundreds of poems and written hundreds more that might never be published, which might qualify me as an intermediate professional, I have never outgrown the need for the comfort of wise counselors at my elbow, and through this volume and his own poems, Kooser is one of them.
Regarding the Poem for April 14, 2021, “Pumas”:
Yes, you get the picture. “The Blur” we called her. Two minutes before, she was a puma. Two minutes before that, an entirely different puma, with a different name and backstory. Two minutes after, she was sleeping like a floating cloud.
The newest issue ofThird Wednesday is out. Once again, I am dazzled by so many poems in its pages and proud to have one of my own included. In this issue, too, I have been especially impressed with the photography.
In the Spring 2019 (Vol. XII, No. 2) issue, I find it harder than ever to cite favorites — but I will anyway. Take a look at Steven Deutsch’s poem “Sam and Saul” about twin musical prodigies; or the frozen lake shore landscape of Scott Lowery’s meditative “Vacancy;” or Jeanie Mortensen’s look at the discrepancies between literature and life in “Dick and Jane;” or Ted Kooser’s consideration of time in “Red Stilts;”or Kathryn Jacobs’s startling perspective in “Calling All Lemmings.”
Like the poetry, the photography in this issue kept surprising and delighting me. My favorites range from the lyrical juxtaposition of a flower and an open book called “Birth” (by Fabrice Poussin) and a study of dunes and sky called “California Dreaming (also by Fabrice Poussin) to the subtle view of exhortatory texts plastered on a gated driveway and house called “Signs” (by Gary Wadley), to — maybe my favorite of all — a head and shoulders portrait called simply “Robert” (by David Jibson.) This one is arresting because it is at once utterly contemporary and positively classical, as though a Roman philosopher visits and observes contemporary complications with earned detachment.
My own poem, titled “Poem in Which I Try, Very Hard, to Do My Own Bidding,” was inspired by a poem by William Butler Yeats called “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Perhaps, like me, you have memorized this gem? My own poem doesn’t echo so much the form of the poem as the way in which the heart can be split in its desire to live in two different places or modes at the same time, while recognizing the need to somehow integrate both rather than to choose.
Thank you for allowing me to share these thoughts with you! Leslie
