Seamus Heaney's District and Circle

Seamus Heaney is another highly regarded and well-known poet the world over and hails from Ireland. Specifically, he was born in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939 on April 13th. He has written a plethora of poetry books and has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This information comes from Poets.org and there is, as always, the link below you can use to find out more about him.

His book of poems titled District and Circle was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2006. I’ve seen reviews about this book on many web pages but finally got hold of it myself in the library. First, let me tell you that he is another poet that I’ve had some trouble “getting into” over the past few years, for whatever reason. When I’d see his books of poems in stores I’d flip through them stopping at various poems and just wasn’t as interested in them as other poets I’d end up flipping through. I think, for me anyway, you have to bring his poems home and read them. I could not tell you why, but I took this book home and I was finally able to really read his words and let them sink in without distractions of background noise or people scooting around me on their way to, say, the Gardening books section.

Enough about all that, let’s move on to Seamus Heaney’s poems!
The first poem to grab my attention is titled “The Turnip-Snedder” dedicated to Hughie O’Donahue. I enjoyed it because it took an otherwise predictable process into something that had a sinister tone at the end. The lines toward the beginning read “it dug its heels in among wooden tubs/and troughs of slops,/hotter than body heat/in summertime, cold in winter…” This seems to be the basic description of the Turnip-Snedder but then towards the end the lines turn darker “as the handle turned/and turnip-heads were let fall and fed/…as it dropped its raw sliced mess,/bucketful by glistering bucketful.” I picture it being similar to the character Sweeney Todd with that last line myself, which brought a wry smile to my face. What a wonderful way to create a normal process that is perhaps seen as boring and turn it into something far more interesting, don’t you think?

Another poem that grabs my attention is “Anything Can Happen” with a note “after Horace, Odes, I, 34.” Now I’ll admit I don’t know the reference, but the poem nonetheless is beautiful in its eloquence. It’s difficult not to include the entirety of the poem, but I will lend you some of the lines: “You know how Jupiter/Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head/Before he hurls the lightning?” Mr. Heaney goes on to describe how Jupiter shakes the ground and water, leaving nothing untouched. “Stropped-beak Fortune/Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,” which are lines that I love reading aloud, especially making the air gasp. You can almost picture the creature, Fortune, being an almost violent shaker of the world. Towards the end, “Ground gives. The heaven’s weight/Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid…” The imagery in this poem is subtle enough that I read it again to absorb more of it. The way his stanzas flow in this particular poem held me to the end. I ended up going back for more to absorb it more deeply. I always think that any poet who can make me repeat reading the entire poem is a success. If any of you know the reference to Horace above, please enlighten me as I am unfamiliar at this point. It would certainly make the poem that much more meaningful to myself and anyone who reads it.

Thanks for stopping in to read about Seamus Heaney, please use the link below to find out more about him.

http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/211



PS I will be out of town at a conference for the next three days, so I hope you will come again on Monday when I return to my regularly scheduled blogging on June 2nd…
Thank you!

Mountain View Public Library

Now this blog doesn’t necessarily feature poetry but I love the fact that a public library has its own blog featuring books and events. Since I am always talking about visiting my own public library I thought you might all like to visit this one and if any of you have any connections to your public library perhaps you could start up your own fun library blog. After all, the possibilities are endless! Check it out at:

http://mvpl.blogspot.com/

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

Poetry Tips: The Spring Fever Blues

It’s getting warmer and more beautiful by the day, and if you are like me, you’re feeling trapped at your desk wishing you could be outside doing anything else instead. Whether you are a student or an employee stuck inside, a truck driver stuck delivering packages, or any job where you find yourself gazing longingly at the outside world’s beautiful sunny weather I urge you to write a Trapped By The Spring Fever Blues type of poem. You can use a catchy refrain through a repeating line or stanza, you can lament the stuffy wardrobe you’re forced to wear when you’d rather be in your shorts and t-shirt outside, anything you wish for while “trapped” in your position.

May the muse be with you, thanks for dropping in…

Ballard Street Open Submissions

http://www.ballardstreetpoetryjournal.com/Submission_Guidelines.html

I copied and pasted all the details below, but check out their site before submitting your work!
To submit: send 3-6 original, unpublished poems at a time. Send us your best work. No greeting card verse. Be professional: include your name, address, phone number and email address in your cover letter. No simultaneous submissions please. Include a brief bio with your submission. There is no line limit, but shorter poems are preferred. Anything received outside of the reading periods will be returned unopen. Please do not send your work express mail or priority mail in order to meet the deadline- the post office automatically returns your submissions if it is not picked up on time. We check our mailbox every two weeks.
SASE must be enclosed for all postal submissions if you would like your work returned to you.
E-mail Submissions: after much indecision, we will continue accepting e-mail submissions for as long as we can handle the flow of incoming e-subs. E-mail submissions should also include a cover letter and brief bio. Send your poems in the body of the email; no attachments please. Bold face all titles. Include a back slash or forward slash to indicate line breaks.
Response time: approximately three months. The editorial staff meets after the deadline. We read our submissions blind and the editor mails/e-mails responses within 2 weeks after the deadline.

Editorial Address:
Ballard Street Poetry Journal
P.O. Box 3560
Worcester, MA 01613

Email Submissions:
editor@ballardstreetpoetryjournal.com

Good luck on all of your submissions, please stop by tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/maria_hummel/letter_to_cain.shtml
Maria Hummel’s “Letter to Cain”

http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=14002
Jane Shore’s “Shopping Urban”

Thanks for clicking and reading, please stop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Les Murray

I picked up Les Murray’s book of poems titled The Biplane Houses from Farrar Straus Giroux. Les Murray is from Bunyah, New South Wales Australia and was born there October 17th, 1938. He writes novels in addition to collections of poetry and I thoroughly enjoyed reading his collection of poems. You can find out more about him using the link below which also includes links to some of his poems.

Several of his poems that I enjoyed were also quite short and it would be difficult to discuss them without including the entire poem. So I have selected two poems which are longer in his book so that it gives me more “room” for discussion, so to speak.

In his poem “The Kitchen Grammars” he likens the world’s languages to cooking a recipe. It’s a delightful way to create a poem and I was very happy to encounter it. There are clever lines such as “It’s the opening of a Celtic sentence/is a verb. And it was more fire and pot/for us very often than ingredients./” Then it goes on to say “…in Chinese/the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion/with its subjects and qualifiers./Down every slope of the wok they go/to the spitting middle/to be sauced.” I would love to include the poem in its entirety but of course I don’t usually give myself much time to request permission from the author. I hope you get to run across it yourself in the book-store or on the internet.

The next poem is “The Domain of the Octopus” which is several pages long and kept my attention the whole way. The octopus described in the poem sounds akin to a tall tale as it has a very peculiar description and long reach in lines such as “The Octopus can build dams/of tide to suspend the Axe creeks/” and “The Octopus can’t love/but can be loved…” This poem brings to life the sea and its participants, from the animals to the land and the people. I love the lines “Dolphins, like 3D surfboards/born in the ocean, curvet/around fenced oyster gardens.” It seems such an obvious comparison but one I’ve never made, Dolphins shaped like surfboards. Or how about “and the oysters lid themselves/in their gnarled cups, against pressure.” The pressure is from power boats, by the way. The oysters responding to humans who have no clue what lies below the surface seems typical of our every-day lives. I love imagining all the characters of the scene described by Mr. Murray in this poem and how everything connects.

If you ever get a chance I hope you’ll read his poems however and wherever you may encounter them. Like I said before, you can use the link provided to learn more about him and read some of his poems.


http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/226

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

Shadow Poetry Site

Now here is a useful site! Countless forms and types of poetry are described here for any poet that is looking for a new way or a reminder of how to structure a poem. This site guides you to solid resource books and has many wonderful ways to help any poet out there. I urge you to check them out at:

http://www.shadowpoetry.com/

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

Poetry Tips: Ridiculous Rant

You know those days where even the coffee pot is uncooperative? Or, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t prevent your sandwich from getting soggy overnight in the refrigerator? Your challenge is to write a Ridiculous Rant Poem. That small, banal, stupid little thing that is just driving you up the wall: It’s time to write a poem about it. Let it all hang out, experiment with whipping that rant all over the page, or control it into a sensible set of stanzas. Either way, it’ll be cathartic. May the muse rant with you!

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by on Monday for another poetry web-site feature...

Conjunctions Open Submissions

While I wasn’t able to find too many requirements, you can always find out more at their web-site by using the link below. I directly copied what they had under submissions below:

“Submissions should be directed to the editorial office at 21 East 10th St., New York, NY 10003. Unsolicited manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Electronic and simultaneous submissions will not be considered.”

http://www.conjunctions.com/about.htm

My recommendation is to send 3 to 5 poems, that is typical of most any journal. Good luck to you all who submit, may the muse be with you.

P.S. If you happen to know of a journal or are the editor of a journal/poetry site and you would like your Open Submissions call featured here, please send me an e-mail and I’ll be happy to oblige the following Thursday. Several editors have asked me to do so in the past and I always appreciate it on behalf of my readers. Thanks!

Thanks for checking in, please return tomorrow for another Poetry Tip…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.alicebluereview.org/main.html
Mathew Savoca’s “Two Hundredths of a Woman”

http://cimarronreview.okstate.edu/currentissue_sample1.html
Jeremy Gregerson’s “Long Division”

Thanks for dropping in, please stay tuned for tomorrow’s Open Submissions…

Poetry Magazine for May

Sometimes when I run out of time to get to the library I resort to my subscription to Poetry and this is one of those times! What I love about being able to review this magazine is that you can also check out parts of it at their site, whose link I provided below:
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/

Luckily, they have a link to a poem I enjoyed titled “Photo (Op/tative) Synthesis” by Liz Waldner. The stanzas seem to break into two subjects, the idea of photosynthesis according to plants but utilizing it in regards to human relationships. She mentions the natural world yet you know she is speaking of sensuality between people, herself and another. Lines such as “with a growing and specific gravity/about –it hopes--/ to be undone like a bud,” are an example. Being able to tie unlike things from the title at the top of the poem all the way to the ending line are admirable in my eyes. I hope you’ll check out the poem which is available on the site so that you can enjoy it also.

If you already have a subscription or are able to buy a copy at the book-store, there are several other poems I enjoyed. One of them is: “I Imagine My Father’s Death” by Bryan D. Dietrich. In a sense, you could take this to be a biblical reference because lines such as “My father’s death is bigger/than a planet, bigger than the gravity/wells worlds make…” but I personally assume this is about Dietrich’s own father. There is a void that has been left behind as a result, a personal one. A clue to that for me are lines in the beginning “It is bigger than a Ford/Escort, than a Zeppelin, black and vast/and slow moving, oozing over an Oklahoma/arena.” References to moments and places that mean something to the author and the loved one, then expanding out to planets, the universe… I enjoy this poem because I imagine it would be how I felt if my own father passed away, which I certainly hope isn’t for countless years to come. This poem is good at bringing you in without overwhelming you with despair and sometimes you want a poem that touches you without also rattling you too much. You are left feeling the void and the power of loss but also the sense that all is not lost, there are still ways to reach out to the void and perhaps even cross it.

I hope you are able to enjoy Poetry magazine where you are and I thank you for reading. Please stop by tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Flying Guillotine Press

I stumbled onto this site via Press Press Press and hope you’ll check it out. There’s a chapbook available and they seem very new, not sure when they offer open submissions but keep it on your radar.

http://flyingguillotinepress.blogspot.com/

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

Poetry Tips: Mother's Day

Surely, you knew this was coming? In other words, write a poem about your mother, or write a poem for your mother. In fact, it doesn’t have to be your mother per se, but anyone you’ve looked up to for guidance. So for Mother’s Day I ask you to write a tribute poem to the woman you admire most in your life and send/give it to her for Mother’s Day. Sounds simple enough, but if you are like me, many times those turn out to be cheesy poems. So I wish you luck and eloquence, may the muse be with you!

Thanks for dropping in, please stop by again on Monday…

Gloom Cupboard's Print Edition 3: Open Submissions

Straight from Richard’s e-mail:

Print Edition #3: It's only PoetrySubmissions are now being accepted for our third Print venture. All I ask is that you send a decent selection as this time each writer will have four pieces showcased. Mark your email 'Print Edition Submission'.Send what you deem to be appropriate

Also we have a new feaured writer section cleverly name 'Out of the Cupboard'

Out of the Cupboard: If you want to be considered for this new feature then all you need to do is send a batch of words and a bio. We will then interview you and shine the light in your eyes.

http://gloomcupboard.blogspot.com

email all subs. to aprilmaymarch777@yahoo.co.uk


Cheers
Richard


Thanks to Richard for the heads up, good luck to all of you submitting! Please drop in tomorrow for more Poetry Tips

Poems Found By Poet Hound

http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/Bernato.html
“Mission” by Richard Bernato

http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter_2007/poems/D_Revell.html
“Under the Railway Bridge in Albi” by Donald Revell

Thanks for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow…