Poetry Tips: Inspired by the Arts

Often poets are inspired by other artists whether they be musicians, photographers, or painters. Today’s idea is simple, find a piece of art you think is inspiring and write a poem for it. You can also create a poem for a piece of music you enjoy and see if you can use the music as a background when you read it aloud. You could write a poem about a photograph and then pair them together for all to see. Either way, you get to mix up your typical style a little bit.

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by Monday for another featured site…

Blossombones Open Submissions

You have until November 1st to submit up to five poems with “Last Name/Poetry Submission” in the e-mail heading to susan.blossombones (AT) mail (DOT)com and be sure to attach a cover letter that includes the titles of your submitted poems. For in-depth detail and to explore their site to see if your work fits with their style, click on the link below:

http://www.blossombones.com/submit.html

Good luck to all those who submit, please stop by tomorrow for more poetry tips!

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://arseniclobster.magere.com/170701.html
“The Dance of Curb Chickens” by Jacob Olschner

http://www.poolpoetry.com/Athena%20Nilssen%202007.html
“Girl in Porn” Athena Nillsen

Thank for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Justin Barrett's [Untitled]

Justin Barrett’s new chapbook [Untitled] from Alternating Current through their Propaganda Press is quite an interesting mix with poems that range from mournful to funny, witty to sentimental, and you can expect that Justin has maintained the not-for-the-faint-of-heart spirit that I and many of his regular readers enjoy.

A quick note for those of you who purchase books from Alternating Current in the future: Authors receive royalties. As many of you know, I am a huge advocate of poets being paid for their work. In addition, Alternating Current also throws in free chapbooks from their back catalog with every purchase of a new chapbook. Think of it as the ultimate prize in your proverbial cereal box.

Now back to [Untitled]:

With permission from the editors and the poet, I am able to post and discuss several poems from this collection, the first of which is titled:

broken spoon

there’s also the
time when i was six
and i was digging
in the dirt in
front of our apartment
building
with a broken
spoon
and i found one
of the
red horns of
satan.

i believe it was
his left horn.

i ran into the building
fast, and
knocked on
my friend’s door.

his mother
answered, her hair
tangled and her
eyes three
shades of bloodshot.

she yelled at me
for waking her up.
i ran back outside,
faster.

even then i knew
you stood a
better chance
with the devil
than with
most people.


I think of this as a tongue-in-cheek poem. We can relate to digging in the dirt as kids and making a discovery of something we aren’t sure of, but our imaginations lead us to a fantastical idea and when we run off to report this it often is not met with the same excitement by the adults in our lives. Not only that, but this poem exposes the dysfunctions of adulthood and how a child interprets it which in the last stanza is a rather alarming and funny insight: “you stood a/better chance/with the devil/than with/most people.” The ending stanza slams the door on the whole experience for the reader in the way Justin Barrett words it, just as the child’s discovery is slammed to his face by his friend’s mother. The poem’s trajectory is unexpected yet comical the more you think about it because you can immediately think of so many times something similar happened to yourself as a child.

The second poem is:

double helix

two scientists recently decoded
the entire Human Genome
and have made bold
predictions
that this breakthrough
will revolutionize
the way humans are diagnosed
with, and treated for,
diseases.

it appears it will be theoretically
possible for doctors
to take a sample of your
DNA, genotype it
and figure out the probabilities
of you acquiring certain
deadly diseases and other genetic disorders.

this is, allegedly, a good thing
as it will equip all of us
with the knowledge
of our potential deaths,
which we can then,
supposedly, prevent
through diet, exercise and,
in drastic cases,
gene-manipulation therapy.

the one prediction i will make is
this foreknowledge of
every disease that
has the potential of
ravaging our bodies and,
eventually, killing
us will only spawn an
especially virulent,
more-concerned,
more-educated
and vastly more
paranoid
strain of

hypochondriac.

At then end of this poem the first word to come to mind was “Amen!” This poem reads as though a friend were going on a rant and as you are listening, engaged, the conclusion becomes inevitable and agreeable. This poem distracts the reader from the fact that it’s a poem, at least it does for me, because it sounds like any day’s conversation which I think makes this poem all the more interesting. Sometimes you want a poem to say what it means to say without inflating it with fanciful language and this poem does just that.

I think this third poem is hilarious:

heredity

my mother used to tell
me that i could
be anything i wanted
to be when i grew up,
yet here i am
working a menial job
for minimum wage,
thousands of dollars in
debt with the drink
as my only escape.

i don’t ever recall
wanting to be
my Uncle Jimmy.

I find it hilarious because the first stanza seems logical enough, the second one seems hopeless, then the third stanza sounds like a punch-line. You can almost picture this poem becoming a commercial if used in the right vein. Also, coming from family stock that reminds me of “Uncle Jimmy” makes it all the more humorous for me. Perhaps you can relate as well.

This final poem featured is also funny:

at the Sunshine Laundromat

while staring
at the swirl of colors
spilling around and around
one of the industrial-
sized dryers
i noticed a placard
riveted to
the dryer with a list
of instructions on
how to use
the machine.

#1 is:
Check inside of machine for children, pets and foreign objects before loading or starting cycle.

i paused for a second
and opened the dryer
door to quickly
look into the mess
because i didn’t check
before i loaded or started the dryer
and i wanted to
be sure there wasn’t
a Doberman or a
small child trapped in
my underwear

or a foreign object
lodged in one of
my socks.

Really, this poem is just plain entertaining and funny to me. In the words of Forest Gump “That’s all I have to say about that.”

I hope you enjoyed these poems and that you will visit Alternating Current and check out their site and perhaps buy a copy of Mr. Barrett’s collection. There is a wide range of poems and I selected the ones I thought of as funny since it is hard to write poems that make people smile, grin, and/or laugh.

Thanks always for reading, please stop in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

One Night Stanzas Site

Thanks to Jim Murdoch who alerted me to this site a couple weeks ago, I wanted to check it out and then share it with all of you as well. It’s a great resource for poetry with helpful tips of all kinds and please visit by clicking on the link below:

http://www.readthismagazine.co.uk/onenightstanzas/

Thanks for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poet…

Poetry Tips: Think Outside the Box for the Holidays

Now that it is officially October, people are gathering decorations for Halloween and Thanksgiving because some of those items coincide such as pumpkins. After that is December in which there are multiple holidays for various religions, and then we have New Year’s. So what about poetry amidst the shopping, baking, and decorating?

This year why not think outside the box with your poems? You could cut out construction paper in the shapes of your holiday sugar cookies and write poems that are yours or another poet’s on there and use them as decorations. Another idea is to use your piped frosting to make short one to three line poems on your cakes, brownies, or line up sugar cookies on a tray. (That would be a great way to eat your words, wouldn’t it?)
You could even embroider a poem into a blanket.

If you think of any other ideas please share with all of us by typing it in the comments section. In the meantime, have fun thinking outside the box this Holiday Season!

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by Monday for another featured site…

Propaganda Press Open Submissions

Thanks to leah angstman and Mike Litos for e-mailing me about their Open Submissions:
”Propaganda Press currently has open submissions for consideration for the poetry journal "Poiesis." Issue number 2 will be out in January 2009, and we are accepting submissions currently. Send your one favorite or two favorite pieces, no more. Poetry only. Any length, any subject, any genre, any format. No blatant unnecessary hate speech, otherwise not censored. Only one poem per person per issue will be accepted, but you are welcome to send two. Please do not inundate us with tons of poems, just one or two. Save some trees: no cover letter required, no resumes, no bios, no photos. Just poems with your name and full contact info on them [please include an email address, if you have one], legible, with titles clearly marked. Please proofread; it saves everyone some time. Free submission; you will receive one free copy if your work appears in the issue. Mail to: Alternating Current, PO Box 398058, Cambridge MA 02139 USA or email to alt.current@gmail.com.and here is a link to our last issue, if you would like something to link to: http://alt-current.blogspot.com/2008/07/poiesis-1.html”-- leah angstman & Mike Litos, coordinatorsAlternating CurrentPO Box 398058Cambridge MA 02139 USAalt.current@gmail.comalt-current.comalt-current.blogspot.com

PS Deadline for the 2009 issue is December 1st, 2008.
Good luck to all who submit, and thanks for dropping in! Please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found By Poet Hound

http://www.knockoutlit.org/Larissa%20Szporluk,%20Accordion.pdf
“Accordian” by Larissa Szporluk

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14150
Kevin Young’s “I shall be released”

Thanks always for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Lost Data

Sorry everyone, looks like my computer turned off and I lost unsaved data for today's post. Everything will be back up tomorrow.

Thanks for dropping in! Please stop by tomorrow when I figure out what happened...

Swink Site

Swink magazine has a site worth exploring for poetry and fiction with an on-line edition and print edition along with contests for publication. There are various links to check out and they all offer something interesting. Check it out at:

http://www.swinkmag.com/index.html

Thanks for dropping by, please stop by tomorrow for another featured poet…

Poetry Tips: Catch Phrase Poems

We all know catch-phrases and clichés so why not use them in poems much like Andy Warhol made use of pop culture in his art? You could do an Ode to Erkel with a repeating line of “Did I do that?” Perhaps old commercials like the one that said “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” You could even try to pile in all the catch-phrases and clichés that you know and see if you can line all of them up into a poem that makes sense once it is all put together. Good luck and have fun!

Thanks for checking in, please drop by again Monday…

Knockout Open Submissions and news regarding Reginal Shepherd

Knockout Literary Magazine Open Submissions

You may e-mail 4-6 previously unpublished poems to Brett at knockoutpoetry(AT)gmail(DOT)com via Microsoft Word attachment and be sure to check out the site for further details and there are sample poems you can check out to get a feel for their magazine’s style preferences. They even have a printer-friendly submission guidelines link, so check them out at:

http://www.knockoutlit.org/submit.htm

Good luck to all of those who submit…

http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2008/09/reginald-shepherd-1963-2008.html
My condolences and prayers go to Robert, and all of Reginald Shepherd’s friends and family. For those of you who are unaware, Mr. Shepherd passed away September 10th. I will be keeping Shepherd’s blog linked on the side so that anyone who drops in may have a chance to read this man’s wonderful thoughts and essays during his lifetime.

Thanks always for dropping in, please stop by tomorrow…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://arseniclobster.magere.com/170102.html
Talia Reed’s “Package Deal”

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/poetry/bowen_a/vendettas.htm
Ash Bowen’s “All My Vendettas I’ve Given Your Name”

Thanks for reading, please stop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions..

Interview with Simone Muench and her Chapbook Orange Girl

1. Thank you for letting me ask you some questions about your book, Orange Girl from Dancing Girl Press. What was the inspiration behind this collection?

The poet Kristy Odelius and I were trading 20-lines a day via email in a writing project (ala Harry Mathews). Once I became aware of the re-occurring elements and image patterns in my writings, they become the vertebrae for the collection. The motifs arose from my interest with Buffy, film noir, and a recollection of reading True Detective when I was kid with these disturbing images of women in bondage, as well as an ongoing dialogue in my head with the archetype of the dead girl.

As a culture, we are obsessed with images of dead girls but I think women experience the concept of “dead girl” less as a fascination object, and more as a subjective residue. In a world that still devalues women at birth, regrets us, or in worst cases even expects/wants us dead, we retain a connective ghost tissue of dead girls in our psyches. And not just in the figurative sense of being silenced, violated, and erased, but the real accounts of girlfriends, sisters, mothers who’ve been preyed upon in some way: beaten, raped, murdered. As my friend the poet Lauren Levato says, “I lived through that violence and I was the walking dead. And it sucked. And there will always be these girls in me - the girl who was raped, the girl who was abused 6 ways to Sunday before that, the girl who _____________”.


2. The title Orange Girl and every subsequent poem, refers to “orange” in some way. What does the orange represent in context of this collection?


I recently finished a manuscript that was originally called The 29th Bather, but is now titled Orange Crush, which pays tribute to the figure of the “orange girl”. The term “orange girl” historically refers to girls during England’s Restoration period who sold oranges at the theatre. Selling oranges was often a euphemism for prostitution. The orange girl, and the word “orange” (which, for me, connotes illumination), become a device, a type of familiar, in which to view the various binds that women find themselves in, even as the poems shift quickly from Elizabethan England “Which girl hath the merriest eye?” to the present, so that history is observed as a loop instead of a line.

Within the same manuscript is a sequence of prose poems, called “The Orange Girl Cast,” which are about actual contemporary women, all living poets, whose language is gathered and re-considered and finally re-configured into homages, language portraits if you will, of women who through language, through the act of unsilencing in their decision to be writers, are re-inventing the “orange girl” so that she becomes, as the final poem in the orange girl sequence suggests, "Like riddles and diseases we are a multiplying sigh. . . blazing through doors of sugarwater and fire”.

3. I loved the first stanza of poem #2 and it led me right through to the end with intense interest. May I post the entirety of poem #2 and could you explain what this poem is about?

Yes, of course. Einstein says, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” so for me, the explanation of the poem is the poem. I can’t paraphrase it, but I can tell you some of the materials that were spinning in my head at the time I wrote it: film noirs, specifically Double Indemnity; a painting of a tree by Gabert Farrar; Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; Nick Cave’s song “Lime Tree Arbor.”

The poem is as follows:

2:
[The orange-girl is generally allowed to enter an auction-store, for auctioneers are mortal, and sometimes eat oranges]

I’m stone and pulp, like policemen’s wives.
you’re an emerald, buried in dark clothes.
your eyes leaf, bone.

your fingers so many songs

out of tune

I have fallen out of trees singing your name; I have
fallen into foliation

into your moth-mouth, plum-
thick tongue.

wherever you are, I’ll be white teeth,
an abandoned town, a wrapped parcel.

I’ll be a blonde in a black smock with sex
appeal, smelling of apiaries.

I’ll be a cold sea in an old war film.
I’ll be insubordinate

and seville sweet.

you’ll be long gone
though you said you’d never leave
“those poor crippled orange trees”


4. Is the entire collection a reflection of a particular group of women or are they separate lives? Sometimes I get the sense that this revolves around a group of women who sell themselves to make a living, other times I wonder if they are individual girls in their individual tragedies?

Both, and all of the above. See answers to 1, 2 and 6.


5. Poem #16 is tragic but you don’t know what happened, specifically. May I post this poem and could you tell me what happened to this woman or how this poem came about?

The poem is essentially an ekphrastic poem in response to a 1926 painting by Yves Tanguy that’s located in the Met. It is also an acknowledgment of the surrealist painter Kay Sage who married Tanguy and committed suicide after his death, as well as Virginia Woolf, thus the reference to the lighthouse. But, hopefully, the poem is more than just tragic. It is a salutation to creation, not waste; and the belief that even after death, we continue to transmit our stories.

The poem is as follows:

16:
[Till all the crimson changed, and past into deep orange o’er the sea]

The water owns her, wears her
like a blue ball gown embossed

with froth. Cypress swoon
from white light. Leaves fall

into goldfish. Beneath a boat,
a girl. Beneath the girl, a poppy

spilling into fire-tangles into
a balefire wheeling in the water.

In one version, she folds up

like a hand fan, her songs
pleated gills panting underwater.

In another, she fashions
the wires of her earrings

into antennae, transmitting
her story across the harbor,

her taffeta dress sliding
toward the lighthouse without her.


6 The perspectives of your poems change between “I”, “we,” “you,” and so on. How did you decide which poems had a sense of ownership from your perspective as opposed to an outsider’s?

In my latest manuscript I have several epigraphs: one is by Lisa Robertson, “Dear Reader—a lady speaking to humans from the motion of her own mind is always multiple;” the other is by Dara Weir, “(we hadn’t been cursed or blessed) (we’d been syncopated)”. For me the “I” is vertiginous, a constantly revolving pronoun, inhabiting the roles of confession, personae and community, sometimes functioning separately from one another, and sometimes simultaneously. In most of my work, although the “I” seems confessional, it is often times a persona; but the familiarity and intimacy the “I” helps to create is central to the material at hand. The “I” and “we” become umbrella pronouns that create a connective empathy. The alternation between first, second, and third person in the manuscript goes to both quotes’ sense of syncopation and identity as a multiple entity (which nods to Whitman as well). The quick-stepping between points of view also has to do with the previous response about the circularity of history.

7. Which poem are you particularly fond of and may I post it if it isn’t already mentioned?

Probably #11, which has been re-titled “Psalm”.

11:
[An orange a day keeps the doctor away]

Fever-damaged girls
light up in a row. Spells
and vixens and dead calico kittens.
The convent said fire. The fire
said kindness. Kindness
took a victim. Bone
bonnets for the little girls
sleeping, and blue
beds for their snapped
necks. A kiss is a bite
is a bit. Slit in the clouds
above a slit throat. A black
coat and a black glove
went missing.

*

One girl was fallen
in cold golden light. Girl
was killed by frost, a man’s
hand on her starched
white collar, undone and
saturated with woodburn
while snow descended
like laudanum.

*

Doctor, come quick, the little girls
are sick, their voices muffled
by smoke and wool,
hands and psalms.

Hurry, hurry, it’s the eclipse,
the girls aren’t breathing
and the chapel is breaking.

Doctor, come quick,
someone’s a heretic someone’s a witch.

8. How often do you write around a theme like you have with Orange Girl and where does the inspiration for the theme(s) come from?

Even though Orange Girl is definitely spun around a theme and historical figure, I don’t customarily think of my work as being theme-oriented; however, I do have obsessions: ambivalence, drowning, the uncanny, dead girls, estrangement, subterranean southern landscapes, crime scenes, the colors orange and blue, clothing as an articulation of self, violence and the silencing of women, the mouth as a window with its capacity for two types of language, both kiss and tell. These fixations resurface even when I’m not consciously attending to them.

9. Your collection is very tight and each poem can be more stunning than the last, which is difficult for a poet to do with any sized collection. Any advice for poets who want to round out or complete a collection based on an idea or theme without losing its intensity or integrity as they add more poems?

The only advice is to read people who do it well. . . Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Gwendolyn Brooks’ “A Street in Bronzeville” and her sonnet series “Gay Chaps at the Bar”; Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters, Marilyn Krysl’s Soulskin, John Berryman’s “Op. posth.” series, John Yau’s “Russian Letter” series, Ed Roberson’s “Beauty’s Standing” sequence. . . Also, it doesn’t’ hurt to be passionate about the material at hand. It is the obsession that propels you forward and helps sustain the recursivity of a particular theme.

Thank you again for answering my questions Ms. Muench! Please let me and Poet Hound readers know where and when there are more collections available from you.

Courtesy of Ms. Muench:

Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005)
http://www.amazon.com/Lampblack-Ash-Poems-Simone-Muench/dp/193251127X
The Air Lost in Breathing (Helicon Nine, 2000)
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Air-Lost-in-Breathing/Simone Muench/e/9781884235306/?itm=1


Thanks to all the readers for dropping in, please visit the links included in the interview and please stop by tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Bulletin and Alternating Currents Blog

Bulletin:
If you are a small press devoted to poets and are looking for more readers/subscribers/submitters, please e-mail me at poethoundblogspot[AT]yahoo(DOT)com if you would like to be featured!

I am also looking for anyone who has current Open Submissions, as well as anyone who publishes poets and just wants to get their name spread out there a little farther. You can title your subject line “Monday Site Feature” or “Thursday Open Submissions.”

Now back to our regularly scheduled program:

Today’s site is a publishing blog called Alternating Current that features poetry, arts, indie, and more! You’ll see mentions of poets that have been interviewed here such as Justin Barrett and Chris Cunningham, along with many other delightful items. Check it out at:

http://alt-current.blogspot.com/

As always, thanks for clicking in, and please don’t be shy about recommending a site or Open Submissions, I’m always happy to receive tip-offs. Please stop by tomorrow for an interview with Simone Muench about her chapbook Orange Girl from Dancing Girl Press…