Miriam’s Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond

The title says it all! There are posts about poets and poems, inspirations from teaching college class, and check out the red thread journal dress pictured on the site at:
http://miriamswell.wordpress.com/

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

Prick of the Spindle Open Submissions

There is a small reading fee of $2.00 to submit up to five poems on-line (any length) so definitely read the on-line journal to get a feel for what is published before deciding which of your poems to send. Many poets I admire have been published by them so I believe it to be a sound and worthy journal to submit to. For more details go to:
http://posprint.submittable.com/submit

To check out the on-line journal full of poems, book and art reviews, short films, go to:
http://www.prickofthespindle.com/

Good luck to all who submit, please drop in again next week…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/244218
“Unemployment” by Mark Levine

http://www.alicebluereview.org/main.html
“Tenebrae” by Colleen Coyne

Thanks for clicking in, please drop in again tomorrow…

Tales of Fantasy and Reality by Chinwe D. John

Chinwe D. John’s collection of poetic tales of love and loss is titled Tales of Fantasy and Reality and she includes the tales of her travels from all over the world to create these fascinating poems. Published by CreateSpace in 2012 I am happy to share a sample below:

Hand-Festa

He looks up the jagged hills to see
The castle hidden behind the trees
Medieval walls gleaming in the sun,
Within its fortress, a jewel to be won.

He fears neither the moat nor barricades,
For victory belongs to the bold and brave.
With sword in hand, he scales the gates,
Hungry to grasp the treasure that awaits.

She has sat by the window forever
Waiting an eternity for a hero to save her.
Vacant sockets sunken into an absent face,
A golden scepter is clasped in a bony embrace.

Threads of tangled lace and spider webs
Form a shroud from crown to legs.
On her finger sits a diamond ring,
The finest stone that wealth could bring.

He bursts triumphantly into the ancient halls
Marveling that the legend was true after all.
Swiftly he takes hold of her skeletal hand;
Deftly he tries to remove the dazzling band.

Suddenly, a vise grip seizes his eager wrist.
He lets out a howl of dread and tries to resist.
She will not resign; her faith has kept her alive—
A corpse, waiting for love until the end of time.

This poem reminds me of Sleeping Beauty only she wakes up and lives long past her time out of sheer determination. Imagine the treasure hunter following up on the tale only to find the princess rotting away, stubborn and determined and alive. I like this twist on the typical Fairy Tale. *In the back of the book are notes, “Hand-Festa” is an old Norse word meaning “to strike a bargain by joining the hands,” and is likely the origin of the word “handfasting” in which the bride and groom’s right hands would be tied together during medieval weddings. Interesting, yes?


Hunter’s Foil

Through the forest’s strong walls he pushed,
Bow in hand and threading with a light foot.
Stooping down, he aimed his arrow low,
Striking one of two antelopes as they roamed.

Resting under an Iroko tree on his return home,
He sipped palm wine and sang an old hunting poem.
The leaves rustled, and he saw a figure approaching.
She moved with a grace that was stately and becoming.

At first he asked no questions, and she gave no answers.
From that night on, she would become his steady partner.
In time, he wished to know the secret that she kept.
Relenting one day, she asked that he follow where she led.

As they made their way, she sang of love lost and found,
Of vengeance and fidelity—both to which she was bound.
They were well into the forest when she slipped from his side.
He, on realizing, turned around to face a pair of haunting eyes.

In this poem, the hunter is lured into the darkness by the spirit of one who he has hunted. I like this twist, too. If he had never asked about the secret, I wonder if he would ever have been led into the darkness?



An Artist Remarks

Who sits at my grave and weeps?
Whose salty tears disturb my sleep?

These loud laments that fill the air
Come when I no longer care.

Save those black designer clothes;
There’ll be other times to primp and pose.

Turn away your mournful, pensive face,
Lest I should awake and return your gaze.

Where was all this love when I had need?
You mourn for yourselves and not for me.

The press now hails my work as genius.
My face has found its way onto t-shirts.

My sales have soared to an all-time high;
I hear that happens after one dies.

Hollywood is frantically casting for my likeness
Anyone who exhibits box-office prowess.

How good to be free from the gimmicks and games.
Pack up the band and kindly go away.

I really like this poem. What artist doesn’t secretly fear exactly the above scenario? You work and create and strive for recognition and while you’re alive you do not see the respect or interest you want for your work and then… When you die, there is the sudden interest, the accolades, people parading around in finery acting as if they knew you and that you were important to them though they never gave you the time of day when alive. Again, I really like this poem.


If you enjoyed this sample of Tales of Fantasy and Reality, you may purchase a copy for $7.95 by going to:
http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Fantasy-Reality-Chinwe-John/dp/1470042525

You can also watch Chinwe D. John perform her tales to live music on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/lyricalgroovemusic

You may also friend Chinwe D. John on Facebook at:
www.facebook.com/LyricalGroove

Thanks always for reading, please drop in again tomorrow…

Bent Lily Site

Samantha Reynolds invites us to read one poem a day at her website and she has guest poets in which you can submit your own poems to be featured as well. A wide range of appealing poems for all kinds of people, parents, celebrity fans, those going through the effects of love and loss, it is all here at:
http://bentlily.com/

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

Only Human by Definition by Jay Passer

Jay Passer’s collection of poems, Only Human by Definition, is published by Crisis Chronicles press in 2012. It is a stark collection of urbanized humanity in which Mr. Passer describes scenes involving dreams infected by corporate sponsors, blue collar men drinking beer at lunch, the untouchable and unreachable nature of outer space and its stars and constellations. It is dark and gritty and I am happy to share a few poems with you:

Amends

It didn’t work,
the perfectly imperfect sea-stones,
the dissonance of lilac,
the natural intention of yeast,
haiku written in the sand,
the fedora hats of old black-and-white footage,
the earth on a frayed rubber band course around the sun,
sheets of paper balled-up and tossed
through the smoke-filled air of the room
landing just short of the wastebasket.

forgive me.

This poem makes me think of a writer who tries to put into words all of the visions above and cannot make it work on paper, hence sheets of paper ball-up and tossed around the wastebasket. The apology could be directed at himself, or an editor, or a loved one who he is trying to express something to. Either way, I can picture Mr. Passer smoking a cigarette and the sun fading outside giving way to the “frayed rubber band course around the sun” reference and tossing wad after wad of words that did not quite fit. Of course, this poem could be about other things entirely but this is what I picture, how about you?



The Harvest

maybe since it’s getting cold out
the flies are flying around my wine glass
I spit blood since my diet’s so high in wine
the leaves rot on the sidewalk
and the buildings erode magnificently
as if the world were asleep
the flies are thirsty too
they circle the glass fearlessly
I drive my fist into the wall
I drink and drive and close my eyes
my diet high in iron
mosquitos high on my iron
trees sucking the life out of the streets
so we cut ‘em down
we pave the world since it’s cheaper that way
and we like things cheap
nothing has changed since the day I was born
the state of the world is a shit storm
as the new year approaches
I’m thrown out on my ear
to make room for
condominiums
it’s cold out ask the flies
they like to drink wine and fly around and drown
I ask myself
maybe it’s the cold or
maybe it’s a world soon without horses

This poem reaps the opposite of harvest in the traditional sense. Instead of mining crops and goods out of the earth the poet paints the picture of paving the world in concrete. While the poet steeps himself in a diet full of iron ( earthly metal) the world outside also pushes him aside for more metals and materials (composite materials for condominiums). I like the flies buzzing around the chaos, along with the mosquitos, the pests that never go away whether the world is made of dirt and growing things or composite materials that deaden things. I’d like to know Mr. Passer’s inspiration for this poem. I like the ending, too, the world soon without horses puts in mind, to me, the vision of cowboys in the spreading land of the west being slowly paved over, pushing horses and men connected with nature aside.


If you enjoyed this sample, you may purchase a copy of Only Human by Definition by Jay Passer for $5.00 by going to:
http://press.crisischronicles.com/2012/02/11/only-human-by-definition---by-jay-passer-cc18.aspx

Thanks always for reading, please drop in again next week (I took a vacation over my weekend and will have more posts up next week)…

Hill's Chronicle Blog

For poetry reviews, pictures of poets at book readings, and all wonderful things poetry, see Greg’s blog at:

http://hills-chronicle.blogspot.com/

Thanks for clicking in, please drop by again tomorrow…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

https://sites.google.com/site/whiteknucklechaps/jeffrey-park/2
“Diet Revolution” by Jeffrey Park

https://sites.google.com/site/whiteknucklechaps/jeffrey-park/7
“Bitten” by Jeffrey Park

Thanks for clicking in, please drop by again next week…

Angela Veronica Wong's how to survive a hotel fire part 2 of our Interview

Welcome back to the second half of our interview with Angela Veronica Wong regarding her collection of poems titled “how to survive a hotel fire.” Please read on for more insight and links to learn more about Ms. Wong and how to obtain a copy for yourself:



8.) “In Which Our Heroine Prepares For A Climax” the poem makes me think of “trying to keep it together.” In other words, trying to hold in all the emotions, ideas of the world inside you. Can you tell us a little more about this poem? I especially love the second stanza where “she/ignores new things because/she can’t understand what they want.” I often feel like that myself, the world is full of changes I cannot understand and it is frustrating at times. Is that idea where this poem came from? (Poem below).

In Which Our Heroine Prepares For A Climax

Silence, silence.

These days she
ignores new things because
she can’t understand what they want.

Outside her window the city
is ripping something apart solely
for the sake of putting it back together again.
Inside her skin holds her body in place.

Inside orchids open, just like that.

Things are repeatedly lost.

That necklace.

The crane.

Yes, definitely a nervousness about change in general, though in this poem I was thinking more directly about the beginning and ends of relationships. I was working, again, with this outside/inside theme (public/private, internal/external, feelings/actions) and ending on the word “crane,” I liked that it represents the crane, the machine, a symbol of (re)building and the crane, the bird, and of course all the symbolism of those strangely beautiful birds too.


9.) Your section titled “What We Learn About Trust” sounds more to me like learning to distrust. There are poems about bad dreams, broken things, of small, bad things happening such as blisters, broken blueberries when making muffins, crying, sleeping through things that are happening around you. How did this section of prose come about? What was the inspiration behind it? Below, a prose piece from the section about suffocating next to someone the narrator is sleeping next to which sounds like a Freudian version of feeling suffocated emotionally and/or mentally:

the same night and earlier i was falling asleep
and dying, hands like a wrench around my neck
and breathing no longer an option. i was lucid
dreaming, i knew i was being strangled. i knew i
was dying. i knew i was lying next to you.

I wrote this fourth section mostly during and after a trip took me to Morocco and Tokyo, and maybe also in a response to the “In Which” section before. It was a really strange time in the world; I went to Morocco about a week after the bombing in Casablanca, and a few days after Bin Laden, and there were still major aftershock earthquakes in Japan – the one-line poem about sleeping through an earthquake came from when apparently we had slept through a somewhat significant aftershock earthquake after a late night out. I think this series was a lot of me processing the trip, the preparation and the coming back as well as the huge and small unknowns surrounding things we took/take for granted.

Plus, trust is hard, it’s a dangerous, terrifying, tender, quiet thing. But its presence is essential for any relationship to work and you can’t half-ass trust. Trusting someone is letting go of that self-protecting, self-survival instinct to control and run away. And sometimes what happens is that the earth shakes, and tears itself apart. Sometimes blueberries burst while you are trying to make muffins. But once you get past the terror, maybe it’s electrifying to trust in someone else.

I said earlier that I was trying to negotiate the uncertainty of the personal in the physical world around us, but I guess maybe it can be turned around too. Some really amazing experiences and people came into my life by chance while I was writing these poems, and in a large part due to all of this uprooting of things we thought we knew. That is a major part of the collection.


10.) The following prose piece describes bed sheets and folding, uncurling, of sleeping alone. It reminds me of the way someone feeling down might stay in bed and limit their focus to their bedroom to avoid more painful subjects or feelings. Can you tell us the circumstances that brought this poem about?

i’d like to spend the remainder of my time
discussing: how a bedsheet gathers where there is
just one body: sleeping: alone :: that curve and
cutout over the mattress like the sweep of a door:
opening: the edges of fabric braiding into itself
and how making the bed requires: uncurling: like
a piece of parchment a declaration an admission

I think I wrote this after getting back from Tokyo, and was feeling that sort of silence – not always a bad silence, but a silence – that comes when you’re back to being alone after spending a lot of time with someone.

There are a lot of beds in this collection. You are totally right – the bed, the bedroom, is where we take solace when we are emotionally or physically debilitated; it can be a site of solitude and comfort. But it’s also the site of intimacy and connection. I believe the bed is the heart of the house. It is often the place life begins and ends. There’s something unbelievably powerful about the bed as site, as physical space.


11.) We come to a section titled “How To Survive A Hotel Fire” which is not only the title of the collection as a whole but the title of each poem and prose piece within. What was the inspiration behind these poems which encompass a variety of subjects and feelings such as love, potential disasters, sex, and growing up. It makes me think of a person wading through their past and trying to climb to the surface unscathed. How did this collection come about and why the same title for each piece?

Last year, at AWP 2011 in Washington D.C., in a drawer of the desk in the room, I found a pamphlet that was chapbook size entitled: How To Survive A Hotel Fire. I wrote the first few Hotel Fire poems on the bus ride back to NYC, and then most of the rest of the poems were written on a tear in the next two months. Every poem I wrote during that time seemed to be a Hotel Fire poem – there was some sort of an enormous urgency, a bravado and a bruising that I was exploring through them – that’s why they all share the same, or similar titles.

But now, also, I think the idea of hotel as place is so interesting – I think about Bachelard’s A Poetics of Space and the way he rather brilliantly unpacks the spaces of our homes—attics, basements, wardrobes—as it intersects as infused with our experiences and our lives. It’s interesting to think of a hotel within the context of public/private space, because it manages to be both public AND private, to be ours but not ours, and also the concept of a hotel room versus a hotel. Of how our own transience influences our understanding of space like a hotel room, and hotel beds, allowing for hotels to become “home” even know we know it is not home. And how knowing that allows us to explore alternate personalities than our “normal,” everyday versions of self.


12.) This poem about heartbreak is dramatic and funny because so many women can relate to the various scenes depicted in this poem and the intense emotions that well up from these scenes. I love the lines “which is to say i/need a boyfriend because carrying my own stuff/is boring.” I think most people can relate to the idea that they get tired of their own woes and would like to be burdened with someone else’s for a change or to unload them on an unsuspecting victim. How did this piece come to fruition?

How To Survive A Hotel Fire

first stop the fucking tears because it’s pathetic, really, all this crying like you
are a single woman at home on valentine’s day, watching a particularly relevant
romantic comedy. just because you are in the airport
doesn’t mean there is a home to return to. just because you were fucked
against a wall doesn’t mean it will happen again. in fact,
i’ve never been kicked out like that before. i can barely
bear anything anymore, which is to say i
need a boyfriend because carrying my own stuff
is boring. when i sneeze i think: this is how i will die: caught
somewhere between all those things that
weren’t and the ways we prepared. a secret is: i’ll love you
even if you can’t keep my hands warm while we make up animals
and place them in zoos. or: there is little to express when you wake up too late.
i can list the things i didn’t mean to do on two hands.

I think I wrote this at an airport, at Newark. I’m pretty sure I texted that boyfriend line to my friend Maggie and then promptly thought: that needs to go into a poem.

This was one of the first Hotel Fire poems, and I was thinking a lot about “steps” to follow in “how to” situations, which is why it starts out with “First … .” There are a couple of poems like that in the section, though even the ones that are not explicit about instructions are still fairly instructive and demanding on the reader. (I think of someone who saw these poems very early on and said, “Wow, I’ve never been told what to do so much by poems). I think too, this is another one of those poems where it’s loud and brash (and definitely starts out that way) but underneath it just wants a hug and wants to be allowed to love and be loved.


13.) Then there is this poem of the same title that is quite a bit more upbeat. There is hope and brighter disposition in the words of this poem about the little pleasures in life and I’d like to know why you stuck to the same title and how this came into the same grouping as the rest of the “hotel fire” poems?

How To Survive A Hotel Fire

in ways our lives are collections of pleasures: the first grocery trip on return from vacation to
stock an empty fridge, the smell of a new bar of soap, the bright pattern on the cover of a
notebook, flipping thin pages of a hotel Bible, peeling the rind of a clementine.

like a dancer being unwound by her partner we center and collect, each line rejoining at the
horizon.

Okay, so this is the point where I say: I hope people don’t think that the whole collection is or all the poems are down and depressing! I actually would say that as much disappointment and heartbreak that probably can be seen in these poems, the collection is almost all about hope – the hope to love and be loved.

I think the Hotel Fire poems are more about that first part of the title—How To Survive—than the latter. So even though the tone of the poems may differ wildly, they are fundamentally about this same thing. They’re not about the disaster. They’re about the living. And while the living can sometimes be a disaster, the living is beautiful and wonderful! We all have different definitions for what makes living beautiful and wonderful. I love going grocery shopping and bar soap. Each day I wake up hoping I will find someone who will love those things with me.

14.) The final section titled “In the Kingdom We Are Now” has just one piece of the same title that is about a princess and the world she lives in. It reads like a flash fiction story about a girl whose life is so sheltered she does not even recognize her own feeling of remorse or that there are people who live a different life from her across the seas. Where did this story come from and why do you use it as the closing to your collection? It brings home the idea that the world we hope for is often not what turns out to be.


The epigraph of this poem is from Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen” and really I just thought it was an incredible sentence. I knew I wanted to write something from it. I love fairytales—the way they stand as both morals and warnings, as hopeful romanticisms and secret ambitions, I love how dark they are, I love the way they reflect of our most intense good and bad desires.

I can see why you read it as a story of a girl who is sheltered, though I suppose I think of it more like a story of a girl who is exploring isolation and that feeling of loneliness without really knowing how to address it. I think I wanted her to experience these seemingly singular, simple emotions but also show that there is no such thing as a singular, simple emotion – we are all complicated human beings being complicated with other complicated human beings.

When I organize a manuscript of poems, I look to create a narrative arc through the collection—of course I want each poem to stand alone, but I also want there to be a conversation that the poems are having with each other. I am interested in how each poem is changed or affected by the other poems that are included in the book.

Ending the book with that line is not necessarily an indication that the world that we hope for is impossible to achieve, or not the way it is, but just saying that there are many versions of ourselves that are out there, many ways our lives could have turned out and didn’t. I don’t mean for it to be a judgment on whether this current version is good, or bad.

And also, if the “In Which” poems are my attempt at constructing a fairy tale, this last piece serves as fairytale. Maybe not the whole tale, but a part of it. I think that there probably are many ways to show how the princess got to where she is at the beginning of the piece, and many ways for her to carry on after the piece. But this last section is only a vignette of a life, and I do still believe that this whole collection is more about hope than about sadness, more about love than about heartbreak, more about the potential than about the failures.

(I should make a note here that originally, I had tried to include this poem in the Hotel Fire series, because I wrote it in the middle of writing all the HF poems. I sent about 15 of the Hotel Fire poems to Katherine Sullivan and YesYes Books when they generously asked me to be a part of their Poetry Shots, and she pulled it out and put it at the end, which immediately made sense to me and felt right. This is why good editors are so important.

Bruce, too, throughout the whole process of this book was so great. He challenged me to investigate the decisions I had made, and he listened to my crazy ideas and was so insightful in his responses. While I don’t think we made too many changes to the manuscript, but just having conversations about the manuscript, I feel the confidence I developed in my decisions made the manuscript stronger.)

Thank you, Ms. Wong, for allowing me to interview you. Please let us know what you are working on now and what we can look for in the future?

I have a chapbook that will come out on Dancing Girl Press in the fall. Also, my collaborative chapbook with Steven Karl has just come out on Lame House Press, and I really love the poems in that chapbook – I can say that because Steven is awesome. The inimitable Amy Lawless and I have been working on a collaboration, which I think will be an emotional slaughtering. And I’m also just doing readings to support how to survive a hotel fire. If anyone is looking to fill reading spots, give a holler!



If you enjoyed this interview and would like a copy of how to survive a hotel fire for yourself, you may purchase a copy from Coconut Books for $16.00 at:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781938055003/how-to-survive-a-hotel-fire.aspx

To read the interview about Ms. Wong and her collection at Cold Front, go to:
http://coldfrontmag.com/features/snapshot-angela-veronica-wong



To learn more about Angela Veronica Wong, find more of her published work and learn about her writing, please visit her website at:

http://angelaveronicawong.com/



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

Salamander Poems Blog

This blog features inspiring art and poems and includes links to the poets and artists featured there, check it out at:

http://salamanderpoems.blogspot.com
By Annie Wyndham

Read a Good Book: Milligan and Murphy by Jim Murdoch

Jim Murdoch’s novel, Milligan and Murphy, published by Fandango Virtual in November 2011, focuses on a pair of half-brothers who begin with a simple, short journey only to wind up on a much larger one. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s characters Didi and Godot in Waiting for Godot and Mercier and Camier, these two brothers start out living rather hum-drum lives who have never thought of the bigger questions of life such as whether they are happy, whether they should travel, whether they should find a greater purpose. This story is an enjoyable read and Mr. Murdoch makes it easy to travel alongside the brothers. Mr. Murdoch jumps in to explain the scenery and the characters in detail during the parts where the brothers are simply moving forward without much action other than their walking onward until they encounter a new town or a new character.

In the story, we find the two brothers living with their Ma who sends them to a nearby farm to lend a hand and as they walk down the path they stumble onto a man they’ve never seen before. The man leaves them with questions. Then, before they know it, the two brothers change their path and just keep walking without a true plan in place and ultimately decide they should find the sea which they have never seen before. Their Ma has no idea why she’s been abandoned and the brothers themselves do not know why they’ve abandoned all they know for this journey. The story’s ending leaves you to imagine the next steps the brothers take and perhaps there will be a sequel which I would look forward to reading. What I like is that the pair gives absolutely no forethought to things such as having money for travel or sleeping accommodations and must fly by the seat of their pants throughout their journey. In the process they stumble onto some memorable characters such as another seemingly aimless traveler like themselves, an older woman who puts them to work, as well as barkeepers and the tallest barmaid they’ve ever seen. I recommend this book as a good summer read, take it with you on your own travels and enjoy.

If you enjoyed this review, you may purchase a copy of Milligan and Murphy by Jim Murdoch at:
http://www.fvbooks.com/jmurdoch/jmurdoch5.htm

To learn more about Jim Murdoch please visit his blog at:
http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.com/


Thanks always for reading, please drop in again next week…

An Interview with Angela Veronica Wong’s how to survive a hotel fire two-part series

Angela Veronica Wong’s collection of prose and poems titled how to survive a hotel fire is immense in the best possible way. Section by section I could not put it down and was eager for more. As a result this interview is a little longer than most in order to capture all of the sections in her collection, how to survive a hotel fire. Published by Coconut Books, this collection is humorous, imaginative, and enigmatic. Ms. Wong’s work has appeared in numerous places, her chapbook Dear Johnny, in Your Last Letter is available as a winner of Poetry Society of America New York Fellowship and she has had other chapbooks published by Lame House Press, Cy Gist Press and Flying Guillotine Press respectively. In other words, she is a busy lady whose writing is exciting and far-reaching and I am happy that she is allowing me to pick her brain on her first full-length collection.


1.) Your first full-length collection’s title is borrowed from the title of a collection of poems within this book. The cover features the various symbols for fire, fire extinguishers, phone, and elevator buttons, how did you decide to title your book this way and to feature your cover so that it looks more like a Quality Control Manual than a collection of poems?

The cover is something I felt pretty strongly and clear about from the beginning.
From the outset, I wanted a cover that was stark and minimalist, something that acknowledged its “designness.” And certainly, I wanted a cover that would entice someone to pick it up, and something that might not be a typical poetry cover, whatever that means.

I was fortunate enough to work with a smart and understanding and kind editor, Bruce Covey, who allowed me to take over a little (I was slightly more despotic about it than I am proud of—not just with the cover but with the whole manuscript). I should also mention that the cover was made by the Atlanta-based designer Abby Horowitz, and she was really great. She worked with my original idea, and then creating that wonderful back cover.

One of the interesting conversations that Bruce and I had about the cover came when he suggested using a photo of a real fire extinguisher (as opposed to a drawing/illustration of one). The suggestion prompted me to consider why I wanted to use icons on the cover. It was a move toward deliberate design that may in fact seem to be contrast with the emotional content of the poems in the book, but I believe is reflective of the deliberate construct within the poems and the collection itself.

My hope was that the relationship (both complementary and contradictory) between the aesthetic (exteriors) and the content (interiors) would support the construct of the book, which is that the poems and the contents of the book fundamentally hold a tension between presentation (often the bravado) of self versus interiority and self-reflection, seen in those moments of self-exposure in the poems. The book being constructed around a construct, but also a construct that is about construction.

In other words, if the whole collection is about discovering and managing that tension/struggle, a deliberately designed cover that is self-conscious of its design-ness seemed, to me, true to what the poems inside attempt to accomplish. I want the cover to be unexpected, but I also want it to be a little not-real (hence icons as opposed to actual things, though of course a photograph is not the actual thing, which is another level as well), which is simultaneously done as a slight nod to the commingling of fairy tales and the warning directive of “how to survive a hotel fire,” and to acknowledge that this book is doing a constructing of something (which I hope readers can find under the layers in the poems - like Honor Moore’s amazing blurb saying that this book is the one placed on the piano, referencing a line from the book).

Within this context, there's something interesting about using a sign or a symbol (a warning) of something as opposed to the actual thing itself that would be a tool of prevention more so than a warning. Those “icon” signs are there to warn, whereas the actual axe or fire extinguisher is there to be used. And something about “how to survive a hotel fire” (the title itself, though also the poems of that section, and the whole book) rings more true as a warning—it's a guide that you would read before, not during—and, looping back to constructing and the unrealism, it's something that is an imagined situation.


2.) The introduction includes a parable about a mandarin waiting for a courtesan for 100 days only to leave on the 99th. It is a story that gives the impression of “giving up.” Why this introduction to your collection of poems?

The epigraph is from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, an exploration/treatise on love as presented through literature and philosophy. The language Barthes uses is often breathtaking, and he manages somehow to animate Love, the Lover and the Beloved, beyond cliché.

I think the parable is a little about “giving up,” but I wonder if it’s also about “moving on.” About how we move on. And how we (as the mandarin) are willing to do crazy things to connect or possess something or someone, and how we (as the courtesan) demand or manufacture space and distance that might be unnecessary or even damaging. In the story Barthes gives us, there is no reason why the courtesan asks the mandarin to wait 100 days. And there’s no reason why the mandarin goes away on the 99th day. The believer in me always wants the ending of this to be different—I always want the mandarin to be still waiting. (Also, random sidenote: there is this somewhat charming Hong Kong movie called Hot Summer Days in which a factory girl makes the boy who likes her stand100 days in the heat before she will date him.) But sometimes that’s the way it is. And sometimes even if there are completely rational, totally understandable reasons behind actions, the actions are still really hard to accept.

I think sometimes to love something, or at least a way to love something, is to accept the possibility of loss, to overcome the fear of losing.

I suppose that is somewhat depressing, but I think it’s also rather brilliantly hopeful, that it’s in spite of pain or heartbreak that we still search to connect, to love, to be with someone.


3.) Overall, your poems and the titles of the sections speak to the idea of lowered expectations and self-deprecating humor, such as your section title (which is also the title of one of your poems) “If You’re Hoping Something Interesting Comes From This I Would Hold Your Breath.” What is your thinking behind this overall feeling and how did you decide to mold it this way?

I recently read this quote from a woman writing on social mockery in mid-seventeenth century France: “To mock well, you must have a fiery intelligence, delicate judgment and a memory full of a thousand different things to use on different occasions." That is a succinct and apt description, right?

Who but yourself do you know the most embarrassing, idiotic things about? I find using self-deprecation as humor a surprisingly delicate task. It’s about balance—it works best when people believe you truly do hate yourself but that you also truly do believe you are better than everyone else. That paradox makes the humor.

I’m not sure if I set out to use self-deprecation as a trope through the collection. I was (and still am) interested in scrubbed-down, raw emotion that creates those kind lines that reflect an almost adolescent sort of melodramatics, and I wanted to see whether or not I could get away with them in the poems. Did I get away with them? I don’t know. But I wanted to play with vulnerability and bravado (as I am really interested in persona), which is probably why the poems are so self-aware. They need that self-deprecating sensibility (like lemon juice, adds acidity) to cut itself down.


4.) Your prose piece (featured below) makes me grin because I can picture anyone who is frustrated doing the same thing. I often feel like throwing my computer out the window when it acts up so how did this piece come about? (Prose piece below)


Every time I feel I’ve lost something I
throw plants over my balcony. I don’t
watch just listen as they hit the sidewalk
below.

The apartment I was living in at the time had a balcony, and I am always desperately trying to cultivate plant life—grow vegetables, herbs, flowers. I really think I was just sitting on the balcony one day and thinking, I am angry and sad and lonely and I am missing someone and I want to be rid of everything I feel and what if I just got rid of everything here instead. It’s also possible that I was really annoyed by people who were making noise on the street.


5.) Your prose piece that starts “Outside children scream like death” caught my eye. In my apartment complex all the children are at the pool screaming the same way and I have stopped looking out my window. How did this piece come about? I especially like the ending line as though you feel guilty for not caring and feel “dirty.” Can you tell us more about this piece and how it came to be? (prose piece below)

Outside children scream like death and I
would worry except I am no mother plus
they are just playing games in the sun. In
the beginning it always feels like a good
idea: moving images onto a big screen and
staying up past nine. I don’t know what I
would say to you if I ever see you again.
The feeling of not caring for someone is
a revelation. The acknowledging of caring
for someone is a wave breaking. Hush we
finger empty notebooks and then feel dirty
about it.

That same apartment I was living in (with the balcony) was right next to a small park and playground. During the sunny afternoons, children from a local elementary school would be brought there to play. I would hear them screaming, having so much fun chasing each other around, but because I’m a little dark, I thought about how if I didn’t look out my window, those screams could have been for darker things.

This poem and section was written shortly after the 2011 earthquake in Japan. I was living in Taiwan, and being so close and also living on an island nation on the Pacific Ring of Fire, I think I felt the emotional and psychological impact of that huge earthquake and the worries afterwards in a way I didn’t expect. And then with our 24-hour news cycle, the whole thing was magnified eight million times over.

I have no idea if it plays out, but a lot of the uncertainty of personal relationships that exist in the book I have tried to fold and layer into or with this uncertainty of the physical world around us.


6.) You have a section titled “In Which Lessons Should Not Be Learned” that encompasses a series of poems that start with the words “In which.” How did these poems come to be? Many of the titles speak of a “Heroine” and the poems themselves describe myriad things that the heroine could learn from but the implication is that she should not. Can you explain this counter-intuitive structure and how this group of poems came to be?

Sometimes I call this the fairy tale section, because in a way, I was trying to build a fairy tale by exploring or creating a love story, from “beginning” to “end” (or non-end).

I think I was trying to understand truth and truthfulness, what would it sound like if we said the things we really wanted to say, or if we admitted what we were feeling. And of course, the poems still don’t really say anything forthright. Even when they do try to make bold statements, they build off of and explore through allusion and metaphor. Because everything we do is layered and nuanced, colored and affected by other parts of our lives in ways we probably will never fully unpack.

Fear of loss is a big part of this section—and the struggle to not be debilitated by that fear.


7.) Your poem “In Which A Leap Is Leapt” is beautiful to me. I love the imagery and the idea of the entire poem. Can you tell us a little more about it? The idea of a bed sheet being used as a letter to be sent in the mail is romantic and fascinating all at once. Once sent, the man who receives it hangs it as a backdrop for shadow puppets with no indication that the man ever bothered to read the letter. The poem is below:

In Which A Leap Is Leapt

Once
she was writing in the dark an

mistook the bedsheet
for the page.

She composed
an entire letter this way and pressed

for time she
sent it along through the post.

He
hung the letter up and

used it as a backdrop
for shadow puppets.

Look how beautifully he conjures
a steed with

just his two hands.
What girl says no

to that?


This poem surprised me a little when I wrote it. Am I allowed to say that it is one of my favorites in the collection?

The first part of the poem came when I was writing furiously in my bed at night, mostly in the dark, and I realized the pace I was going, and a part of me didn’t want to stop to turn the page of the notebook, a part of me just keep writing the line onto the bed, onto the sheets, all the way until everything was written on and written out.

Because I love sending things in the mail to people, and because, at the time, I was sending a series of notes and letters through the mail to someone, I thought: how amazing would it be to send (or receive) something so unexpected but intimate—a letter written on sheets, a letter written on sheets because it was so urgent for the letter writer to write what needed to be written there wasn’t even time to find a piece of paper.

As for the second part, yes, I do think there is an uncertainty, a darker side in this poem, the unknowable part of someone else, the uncertainty that comes with just beginning. Perhaps it’s the other side of hope.


I enjoy the idea of the letter written on the sheets and would love to pause here and let our readers marinate on the book so far.

The book is available through SPD for $16.00 here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781938055003/how-to-survive-a-hotel-fire.aspx




We’ll continue the second half of the interview next week as we dive deeper into your collection of poems. Readers, please stay tuned for next Tuesday and thanks always for reading.

Please also click in Friday for another Read A Good Book Review…

Brave Little Books Blog

Katie (I couldn’t find her last name) posts short video reviews about poems and novels and I envy her, quite frankly. I wish I was brave enough to post videos of myself reviewing what I read and her reviews are enjoyable. Definitely check her out at:

http://bravelittlebooks.wordpress.com/

Thanks for clicking in, please drop by again tomorrow for an interview with Angela Veronica Won on her collection, how to survive a hotel fire…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

https://sites.google.com/site/rhptulsa/the-rye
“The Rye” by C.L. Bledsoe

https://sites.google.com/site/53rhpissue/paul-hostovsky
“Pleasure” by Paul Hostovsky


Thanks for clicking in, please click in again next week…

Double Shot Review: What Is Old Is New Again and Ill-Fated Solutions

What is Old is New Again is “A Steampunk Anthology edited by C.D. Turner and Chris Bartholomew.” This was sent to me by poet David S. Pointer who gave me the details that the editor had passed and that the family wanted to finish and publish this anthology that he had been working on. C.D. Turner edited this book before he passed away and was in turn edited by his younger sister Chris Turner. This is a collection of varied stories that range from time travel to the adventures of hot air balloons followed by a few poems and then leads into recollections of the editor by friends and family. Charles Dean Turner was born in 1952 and passed away in 2011 with his family by his side in Rapid City, South Dakota. This book was completed in his honor and published January 2012 by Static Movement. Below I will share one of the poems:

Gear Head Orbit
By: David S. Pointer

The ship-a

red glass chandelier descending
with a busy sea captain’s desk
to send laser memos-n-lightmail

to earthly loved ones below, and
refrigerated morgue repairman
that nobody nodded to or noticed

until he started a steam punk band
with Gatling gun sounding guitars-
burning diesel fuel like space napalm

igniting the propeller head hop into
mosh pit parade with overjoyed air
pirates demonstrating the astrophysics

of early late night dance floor light.

When read aloud I get the sense of an average Joe by day who becomes a fast-paced punk band player by night, energetic and buoyant.


If you’d like to purchase a copy of this heartfelt compilation, What is Old is New Again, you may purchase a copy from Amazon for $15.99 at:
http://www.amazon.com/What-Old-Again-C-D-Turner/dp/1617061743/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341670058&sr=8-1&keywords=what+is+old+is+new+again



Ill-Fated Solutions by Joseph Veronneau is a collection of poems that expresses the awkward moments of relationships, their memories, and the moments while wandering a city that leave you stunned. This is book 17 in the Pocketbook Series from Alternating Current’s Propaganda Press published in 2012. Below I am happy to share a few poems:
Session

Listen to the positive
and the negative together. Think
of how big things will get. Imagine
the object in relation to yourself.
Feel the light blanket you
and how it feels
warm or cool.
The shadows, what color
they are, and whether
they are really the same shade
as the inside of your eyelid.
Imagine the story told,
and how it will be narrated.
What language shall make of it,
how clear or muffled it will be,
and picture the ceiling
making its way
toward you,
dropping, bit
by
bit
and how
our time
is up.

I imagine the poet or the main character sitting in a psychiatrist’s chair being walked through visualization and at the moment they finally relax and clear their mind they are told the session is up. How often have we all gone through some variation of the same thing whether it is a massage, a vacation, talking to a friend on the phone who has to go somewhere, or even on the psychologist’s couch?


Away

he drops off
the prescription
heads out into an evening
where the chill comes from
screaming winds and
those hailing cabs
with bottles of their own
in hand
wants to see what is going on
at the other side of town
wishes to have
a say in the nightlife
circling around
walks outside
the confines of this
cerebral trap
and
takes off.

I like this poem, it sounds like a man whose mind is full and he just wants to get out to relieve himself of all the cloying thoughts. I can picture him joining the mass of people out on the streets, blending in, and riding to the other side of town for a change of scene.


Familiar One

Cold winter whipping,
familiar face drifting to
settle with the snow
crunching under the feet
on sidewalks, change tossers
snicker and continue conversations.
Unfamiliar with history,
they don’t know
he was once a construction worker
putting shelves together, painting walls
at the mall 10 years ago now,
time chipping away
at his once semi-proud face.
He slouches, has the wind of life
knocked out now, hollowed stance
of the forsaken, the acquaintance
of many that pass him by
from after work coffee sessions
of rambling politics, of his 3 dogs
taken from him by the city,
of his departure of his quaint apartment
several years ago, where many
drunken mornings were realized
and dealt with.
Hey guys, do you have any…
before he finishes, my friend and I
search our pockets
for something to save him
even if it’s just for a few moments
of refuge.

This poem breaks my heart and hits close to home. Many people are still out of work in this country and the mention of the construction worker is especially striking for me since Florida had such a large amount of construction before the bottom fell out. I can easily picture the people I once knew walking into the insurance office who were in construction and I know many of them are struggling nowadays while I’ve moved to a different field and venue. For those of us who are employed, we count our blessings, and for those who are struggling my heart goes out to them. This poem strikes at the core.

If you enjoyed this short sample, you may purchase a copy of Ill-Fated Solutions by Joseph Veronneau for $3.00 at Alternating Current’s Propaganda Press:
http://alt-current.com/pp/pp_item.html#ill-fated_solutions


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