Poetry Tips: Unusual Obsessions

This idea actually comes from the fact that someone I love teases me around this time of year because I am obsessed with chocolate hollow bunnies and cannot get enough of them. So while it inspired me to write bad poetry it got me to thinking that everyone has an unusual object or person they lust after and why not use it for the sake of a muse for poetry? What do you lust for that others would find highly unusual if not just plain weird? Can you turn it into poetry?

Good luck to all of you who try it and please drop in on Sunday for our second interview in honor of National Poetry Month with B.Z. Niditch…

Rattle Open Submissions

While the theme of Issue #32 is Sonnets, only half the poems selected for publication will relate to this theme so if you have other types of poetry definitely submit those, too! Send 5 or 6 poems along with a short bio to:
RATTLE12411 Ventura Blvd.Studio City, CA 91604
Or via e-mail to: submissions AT rattle DOT com

For more details please click the link below:
http://www.rattle.com/callsforsubs.htm

Good luck to all who submit and please drop in tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://www.versedaily.org/2009/dramaqueen.shtml
“confessions of a teenage drama queen” by D.A. Powell

http://juked.com/2009/03/mtfuji.asp
“Hello Mt. Fuji, My Favorite Mountain” by Anjali Khosla Mullany

Thanks for clicking in, please drop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Kay Ryan's Niagara River

I spotted the words “Winner of The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize” and snatched up Kay Ryan’s The Niagara River from my public library, published in 2005 by Grove Press. She also happens to be our current Poet Laureate and was born in 1945 in San Jose, California.


The first poem is titled “Niagara River” and lucky for us, I found it on Poets.org so please click the link below:
http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20196
I love the lines “we position/our table and chairs/upon it, eat, and/have conversation.” Since it is such a tourist attraction you can picture taking for granted how truly marvelous this natural setting is by ignoring it for conversation and that’s the idea I get from her lines. She also uses the idea of taking the Niagara Falls for granted and presents it in the lines “We/do know, we do/know this is the/Niagara River, but/it is hard to remember/what that means.” What does the Niagara River mean? Is it only an attraction or a vital source? I love the simplicity of her lines and the simplicity of her point.

Another poem I enjoyed is titled “Weak Forces” where Ms. Ryan is succinct in sharing her idea with us in the beginning lines “I enjoy an accumulating/faith in weak forces--/a weak faith, of course/easily shaken…” then she moves into more elegant wording through “all the/slow untrainings of the mind,/the sift left of resolve/sustained too long, the/strange internal shift” which describe a weak faith’s inner workings. Her ending echoes the poem’s title which buttons up the poem perfectly: “There are soft/affinities…glowy spots that are not/the defeat of something,/I don’t think.” The entire poem is perfect in explaining itself from beginning to end while also appearing to meander in the middle but it seems merely a trick of this clever poet’s ability.

The other poems I wanted to share are so short that I can hardly find a way to quote them so I will have tell you to find this collection for yourself instead.

For a little more, here is a podcast of a poem titled “Crown” not included in this book but you can listen to Kay Ryan read this poem by clicking the link below:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=502

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

Lilliput Review on Twitter

If you love the poems in Lilliput Review as much as I do, or if you just enjoy poems that are ten lines or less then you will love what Don Wentworth has done. He is featuring poems from Lilliput Review at Twitter and you just have to check it out for yourself by clicking the link below:

http://twitter.com/lilliputreview

Thanks for clicking in, please drop in tomorrow for another featured poet…

An Interview with M Kei about Slow Motion, The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack

M. Kei volunteers on the skipjack, Martha Lewis, a wooden workboat that specializes in dredging oysters, on Chesapeake Bay. M. Kei is no stranger to Poet Hound. His chapbook, from Lilliput Review, Bridge of Bones, was reviewed back in December and as a result of the review I was able to establish contact with him.

His wonderful, perfect bound book, Slow Motion The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack, is available from Modern English Tanka Press through Lulu.com. This collection includes brief journal entries of his travels across the waterways along with countless little gems of poems detailing the tiny events such as spiders sharing his pillow, to the large as skipjack boats race across the water, to breathtaking and tongue-in-cheek moments revolving around this historical vessel. Given my predilection for short poems and already being a fan of M. Kei’s brand of poetry I had to ask him to consent to an interview. Here is what transpired:

1. Before we get too deep into your adventurous book of poems, may I ask when you first fell in love with poetry?

I can't say as I ever 'fell in love with poetry,' but I have loved language ever since I fell in love with reading. When I was a child I read for entertainment and later read with an appreciation for the words themselves. It was at the same time that I started attempting to write poetry. I can't say what motivated me, but I do recollect what demotivated me. My family discouraged me from a young ambition of being a writer and told me I needed an education and a practical job. Yet I continued to love reading and continued writing. To me it is simply one of those things that is part of life. You might as well fall in love with breathing.



2. Which poets inspire you the most and why?

Kamo no Chomei (1155 - 1216 AD) was a medieval Japanese poet. Originally a member of the Imperial court in Kyoto, he was part of the elite culture that composed tanka poetry. Japan, and especially Kyoto, suffered terribly during natural disasters and civil war. However, the poets of the day excluded such things from their poetry. They heard bad news around them all the time and they didn't want it in their poetry. They wrote some of the most beautiful--and insulated--poetry the world has ever seen. Chomei, who was a Buddhist monk and a dilettante, began to get serious about his world and his religion. At one point Kyoto was afflicted with a famine that caused the rich as well as the poor to suffer, and people resorted to breaking up their own houses to get firewood. He counted more than forty-three thousand dead within the city limits. Kyoto was also afflicted with a tornado, a conflagration, an earthquake, and a plague, and civil war. None of this appears in the poetry of his contemporaries, not even the great poet Saigyo, who also was a monk and lived at Kyoto during this time. It was Chomei that made me realize that it is not enough for poetry to be beautiful, poetry must bear witness.



3. Your poems, as far as the two collections I’ve now read, are very short and follow the Eastern style of writing poems. Is there any particular reason you prefer this style?

I prefer tanka poetry, the form that originated in Japan more than fourteen hundred years ago because its brevity forces a poet to get to the point. I have read far too much bad poetry to be willing to put up with it. In a short form like the tanka the poet's competence is immediately tested and displayed. Either it's there or it isn't, and you don't have to waste your time with it if it's not. Further, tanka is capable of great feats of poetry despite its short form. Although it is often described as a 'five line poem,' that's not strictly true. It is a 'five part poem,' and the five poetic phrases that make it up provide a structure that can be manipulated in almost infinite ways. The poet must use every piece of it to good effect, and if he or she does, they create something that looms much larger than the mere words printed on the page. Good tanka harnesses what the classical Japanese called 'yugen' (mystery and depth) which we modern poets working in English call 'dreaming room.' Each poem is complete as a pebble tossed into a pond is complete, and yet the ripples that radiate out from it expand endlessly.



4. Your experiences as a crew member on the skipjack are detailed throughout the poems. For Slow Motion, could you give a brief explanation of what you do as a crew member and a brief description of the vessel you work on for the readers of this interview?

The Skipjack Martha Lewis is a historic wooden sailboat used to fish for oysters on the Chesapeake Bay. She is on the National Register of Historic Places. The skipjack is technically a 'two sail bateau', which is to say, a shallow-draft vessel with a simple but powerful rig used to pull a pair of dredges over reefs to bring up the oysters. Once upon a time the Chesapeake Bay provided forty percent of the world's oyster harvest, but no longer. Martha is now owned and operated by a small non-profit organization as a museum on the water. We keep her working to keep the heritage alive. In summer we take tourists out for cruises and their ticket money helps keep the boat afloat. During the winter we oyster for a short season -- only 1% of the Bay's oysters remain, so nobody makes a living dredging for oysters with a skipjack. Her meager catch is sold to local restaurants, making her the last vessel in America to fish commercially under sail.






5. Some of the poems I read make me grin or laugh such as the ones that follow. May I ask how you and the crew keep a sense of humor and how it gets reflected in these poems?

five days on a skipjack—
more Jimmy Buffet
than I can stand.

Deal Harbor Island


I’m not
at the end of
my rope,
but I can see it
from here

Perryville


watermen’s humor:
sending
the new guy
to bring
a crab stretcher


Traditional culture is earthy and humorous. It has to be. This is dangerous work, even when done with the greatest of safety. Imagine getting up around two am on a winter morning so that you can leave harbor while it's still dark in order to be on the fishing grounds and working at dawn. Lunch is 7 am. If you work close to home, you can motor home with the morning's catch and eat in a warm place, otherwise you stay out all day, even if it's raining, and work intense manual labor in an open boat.

And the things you see. Some of them are tragic, and they all happen much more slowly on the water. You can't simply whiz past in your car and forget about them. One day I spent eight hours working the boat in February. It was so cold my hot chocolate was tepid before it reached my lips. Another dredge was working--a police dredge. They were dredging under the Francis Scott Key Bridge for the body of a three year old who had been dropped off the bridge by her father. It took forty-five minutes to pass that boat. You spend forty-five minutes staring at the dark hulk of a police boat crawling over the iron grey water with no one else around and it brings it home to you in a way that a sound bite on a news show never can.

So you have to laugh. You have to joke. If you can't stand the cold and the work and the weather and the poverty, you have to leave. And many do.




6. Other poems are insightful and wise in their scope such as the ones that follow. Can you explain how or why you are able to write them in such short and powerful lines?

no horizon
but the sea,
no dream
but tomorrow

Perryville


seaweed
wrapped around
a crab float…
how we cling to
little things

off Worton Creek


expensive houses—
they want to
get away from it all,
but they
bring it all with them

Tilghman Island


It's a matter of paying attention to the world around you. Poetry is everywhere. A poet is simply somebody who notices and puts it down without letting the words get in the way. The water makes a person wonderfully observant. If they're not observant, they won't survive. The sea is a harsh mistress; she forgives nothing. Let me tell you, if you go up to the top of the mast in a bosun's chair, you notice if the halyard holding you up is frayed! You think about what could happen. That's the kind of detail and meaning that meshes perfectly with tanka poetry: the objective reality and the subjective response, melded into a single brief moment.



7. There are so many intriguing, small moments such as spiders living among you, hot chocolate that gets cold too fast, the experiences of racing other skipjacks and the hospitality of each port the skipjack enters. I couldn’t possibly pick among my favorites to post here. Please share with me a few of your favorite poems that I haven’t included yet and explain why you pick these particular moments/poems:

I wrote them all, so it's hard to pick favorites. Nearly at random, here are a few:

Calvert Cliffs—
a schooner
the size of a moth

The Calvert Cliffs are red and nearly as tall as the White Cliffs of Dover, but not nearly as famous, not even locally. Sure, we all know about them and talk about them, but if you're a landlubber, they just don't mean the same. Spend hour after hour passing them in a wooden sailboat, knowing that there is only one harbor in all that expanse of cliff, and remembering how many vessels have wrecked on them when the weather turned foul; they aren't just a site of natural beauty, they're a reminder of the mortality of men and the fragility of these thin wooden shells we call 'boats.'


southern breakfast
asparagus fresh from the garden,
eggs and bacon
served on broad china plates
in an old plantation house

We spent five days aboard the boat going down to Deal Island and back, and another five going down to Crisfield and back. We slept on the deck in autumn. It was chilly, but we had a harbor cover (awning) over the boat to keep the dew off. But you're talking about a bunch of middle-aged to old guys (with a few exceptions), sleeping on the hard planks of an open boat. To be sure, you see things at night if you have an old boat, like the night heron perching on the piling in the berth next to yours, but you also get to listen to the bumper board squeaking all night long. To be invited to spend the night on the sofas of an old plantation house (and hot showers!) was a great luxury. The house itself dates to the early 1700s. Like all the old houses, it sits on a creek that leads to the Chesapeake Bay, and faces the water.

as night
surrenders to dawn,
a slim mast
emerges from the mist
of Red Cap Creek

Nothing, absolutely nothing, is more beautiful to me than the magic way that boat slowly materialized in the dawn. And what a boat! A log sailing canoe with a skipjack rig. Built in 1895 and loving restored, she was exactly where she was supposed to be: tied up at the dock of an old plantation, waiting to go to sea. Her owner took several of us out on her and we all got a turn at the tiller. A skipjack has a low freeboard, but the freeboard of a log sailing canoe is measured in inches. A thirty foot boat has as much freeboard as a kayak.

flat calm
Orion and his hounds
leading the way
to the western sea
this morning

Orion is a hunter with a pair of hounds. That too is part of the watermen's culture on Maryland's Eastern Shore--gunning for ducks and other fowl are as integral to the area as sailing is. Even our huntdogs are water dogs. The Chesapeake Bay Retriever breed originated in a pair of dogs shipwrecked on the Bay in the early 1800s. Our Bay Retrievers have an oily undercoat that helps protect against the cold and wet, so they will willingly go into the water even when it’s cold. Everything entwines. Sea, sky, shore, life.



8. Your journal/log entries help immensely in preparing me, and any reader, for the poems that follow. Was this part of an original journal you kept with poems included or did you end up combining entries and poems from separate notebooks to produce this particular volume of poems?

The log is the poetry. The prose parts are later additions for the benefit of the reader.

The bulk of the material is from the two voyages previously mentioned. The 'interludes' are the shorter sections that happened in between and around the longer voyages. In each case, the vast majority of the poems were written on the spot. I carry writing materials with me, so when the spray of the paddlewheeler hit my face, I reached into my cargo pants and pulled out paper and pen and wrote it down. The poems occur in the order they were written, too, but not every poem made it in. Some of the poems in the log simply weren't very good and others were redundant.

The two long sequences, about the five day trip to Deal Island, and the second five day trip to Crisfield, had problems from an editorial point of view. The route is fundamentally the same, although we stopped in different places and approached things from a different angle, the weather varied, and the incidents were different. I had to pick poems that would weave together the commonalities while at the same time varying it enough to maintain the readers' interest.

The lighthouses serve as aids to navigation both on the water and in the poetry . . . . Turkey Point Light will always be 'almost home' to me, but Holland Island Bar Light is the place where the Chesapeake is widest and the world as landlubbers know it vanishes. Sharp Island Shoals Light is the place where an entire island has vanished, and it reminds us that global warming is affecting the Chesapeake Bay twice as fast as the average for the rest of the world. In 100 years, huge swaths of our past and present will be gone. The lighthouses are like nails, pinning the past to the present.



9. Of course, I wait until the end to ask this, but what does “M.” stand for in M Kei and why did you decide to shorten it when publishing your poems?

It doesn't stand for anything. 'M. Kei' is a pen name.


10. What, if anything, are you working on these days poetically and as a skipjack volunteer?

At the moment I have been enjoying writing nautical fiction for myself and my friends. I am a fan of the likes of Frank Mildmay, Horatio Hornblower, Jack Aubrey, and Lord Ramage, but I got tired of not having gay characters in the stories. We always hope to find a hero like ourselves in the tales we read, so I started writing a tale of a gay eighteenth century British officer for my own amusement. It grew into a novel, and my friends have enjoyed it. I queried a publisher and they have asked to see sample chapters. The draft is free online for anyone who cares to look at it: http://www.fictionpress.com/~mkei

My major poetic project of the moment is putting the finishing touches on the anthology I am editing, Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka. I and my editorial team have read over fourteen thousand poems to select the best from the field of tanka to publish in the anthology. It comes out at the end of April.

As for the skipjack, she's been hauled out and getting major repairs done. Her mast and bowsprit were removed to make way for repairs to her bow. She also needs a new suit of sails -- the five patches mentioned in the book have grown to six and more patches. She also needs to be completely re-rigged with new lines. Anyone who would like to see pictures of Martha or perhaps make a donation to support her can visit: http://skipjackmarthalewis.org/



M. Kei, thanks so much for allowing me to interview you, I am fond of your poems and your ability to express so much in short words and lines. Please let us know of any work you publish in the future so interested people such as myself can find it.


Thanks to everyone for reading, please stop by tomorrow for another featured site…

Poetry Tips: Succinct

In other words, how can you be “brief, concise, curt, short” in your poems? While some poems or prose do well to expand in their imagery and explanation, others benefit from some trimming. What if you were to turn your lengthier poems into haiku? Could you pare down a poem longer than ten lines into just three? What about a thirty lined poems cut in half to fifteen? The idea is that you can say quite a bit with a lot less.

Good luck to all of you who try being succinct, and please remember to drop in on Sunday for our first Featured Interview for National Poetry Month with M. Kei…

Caffeine Destiny Open Submissions

Send your previously unpublished poems to Caffeine Destiny to poetryeditor at caffeinedestiny dot com either as an attachment from Microsoft word, as an RTF file, or simply copy and paste into the body of the e-mail. Response time is around 4 to 6 weeks and please investigate the site and check out the guidelines in further detail by clicking the link below:

http://www.caffeinedestiny.com/guidelines.html

Good luck to all who submit, please stop in tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173994
“Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

http://caffeinedestiny.com/poetry/FALL2008/murdoch.html
“Sometimes” by Jim Murdoch

Happy April Fool’s Day and Happy National Poetry Month!

Bulletin: In honor of National Poetry Month I will be featuring interviews every Sunday with either poets or editors of small presses that publish Poetry so please be sure to drop in on Sundays as well!

Thanks for clicking in, please drop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

Raymond Sapienza's Political Prisoner

Raymond Sapienza’s collection, Political Prisoners, is part of the Pocket Protector Series from Alternating Current. Mr. Sapienza has the ability to create a rhythm in his poems while delivering his message in short and sweet lines which I am a fan of. Below are some of my favorites:


peace

peace is not passive.
it will not descend in clouds
nor slip by in streams.
peace requires action of heart,
of mind, of limbs, and of will.

Who can argue with this poem? It is simplistic and wise.



flies

as flies upon a carcass,
we jockey for a favored spot
to lay the eggs of our perspective,
of our particular political thought.

that our progeny might feast
upon the excremental woe,
the blood and sinew of fellow men,
descendent future to secure and bloat.

A rather importune argument for mankind but excellent nonetheless. These days with everyone so vehement in their political opinion I’d have to say this poem nails its message on the head.



wages

daily sold in the marketplace
a price on our time determined.
a penny a thought, a dime an action,
a dollar if done in combination.

I like the rhythm and subtle end rhyme in this one, don’t you?




I will leave you with this one to ponder on your own:

quicksand

anyone who watched old westerns
when they were young
knows about quicksand
and knows that the more you struggle
the faster you sink.

anyone who went to catholic school
knows that it works pretty much
the same way.


If you enjoy this small sample of poems, Political Prisoners is book #6 in the Pocket Protector Series and can be purchased for $3.00 from Propaganda Press and you will also receive a bonus chapbook from the archives! Please support the small press and remember that the poets published here receive royalties on their collections.

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

Emily Dickinson Museum

I have always wanted to visit the houses of famous authors and poets but have never done so. I did find a link to Emily Dickinson’s home and the museum dedicated to her and included the link below for you to explore as well and perhaps someday take a trip to visit:

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/mission.html

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

Poetry Tips: Prepare for National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month and lots of sites will be including special features, including myself, but what about you? What can you do to bring poetry to more people?
For myself, I’ll be posting poems at work in unexpected but easily accessed places for people to stumble onto. I’ll also be posting links to my blog on my Facebook page (Poet Hound itself doesn’t have a Facebook page but it’s on my personal page). I have other plans as well but you’ll just have to wait and see.

If you are looking for suggestions you can always join in the write-a-poem-a-day challenge as some blogs and sites challenge, post links to your favorite poems on your own web-sites, write short poems with sidewalk chalk on sidewalks and on not-so-busy streets. The possibilities are endless. If you have a unique idea please feel free to share it in the comments section to inspire others.

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

Apt Open Submissions

You can save a stamp because your poems are accepted via e-mail, but make sure it hasn’t been published before and no simultaneous submissions. You can send your poem(s) to submit(AT)aforementionedproductions(DOT)com along with a bio and details where any other work of yours may be found and your poems either typed into the body of the e-mail or included as an attachment (.doc or .rtf is acceptable).

Definitely check out the site to see what they produce and please click the link below for more details:

http://apt.aforementionedproductions.com/submit.htm

Good luck to all who submit, please drop in tomorrow for more Poetry Tips…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180566
“How Good Fortune Surprises Us” by Jackson Wheeler

http://www.blossombones.com/winter09/bruno_w09.html
“Garden Walking” by Elizabeth Bruno

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

Robin Schiff's Revolver

I found Robyn Schiff’s collection of poems, Revolver, at my local library. It was published in 2008 by the University of Iowa Press and the poems take cunning twists and turns throughout. Robyn Schiff has perfected the skill of taking items that to anyone else would seem random or be considered tangents and tying them all together in a thread of words that all relate to the poem. I am happy to share several of the poems below:


Luckily, you can click the link below where Poets & Writers have included the poem “Iron Door Knocker the Shape of a Man’s Face, by Freetham” below:
http://www.pw.org/content/revolver_robyn_schiff

What I love about this poem, and many of her other poems in the collection, is the absolute surprise in the pairings of images and concepts that somehow all relate together. From the idea that maggots should have overtaken the dead finch on her back porch to a door-knocker that has a man’s face as its shape and back to mayflies clinging to a screen door eventually opened by her grandmother to let the reader in, they all tie together. Some of the lines I love are: “I used to believe the wild/takes care of itself. I used to believe/maggots arise/like a spring of death/that need only be tapped,/but the flow of incarnation/is much too slow…” The word “incarnation” which implies divinity and is tied to maggots is a gruesome twist I appreciate. All the events in the poem take place concerning the door and back porch where “A swarm of mayflies clutching/the wire mesh on their only night on earth.” Again, seemingly unrelated things all tied to a particular theme which is the title of this poem. Well done!


Another poem I enjoy is titled “Eighty-blade Sportsman’s Knife, by Joseph Rodgers & Sons.” The counterbalance of comparisons is astounding and here is what I mean: “it arrives cold at the neck, a vampire knife/transforming in air from sheath/to edge and back again in a pulse like/the unaccountable translucent blades/of a helicopter;” Aren’t those lines terrific? To compare the sound of knife blades to that of a helicopter’s is a gratifying comparison you can hear for yourself while reading. In the poem it appears that she digresses but she always brings her train of thought back to her point: “Splayed it is/a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates. It/contains the bayonets piercing/the chain mail at the end of the mind. Screw/driver. Bottle opener. Isolation/wire cutter…When we use the/tool intended for the job/we are neutral.” This is a long poem and I couldn’t possible encompass all of its ingenuity but I hope that you will find a copy and read it for yourself.

Every poem in the collection is similar in its ingenious use of uncalculable twists and turns that always bring you back to Schiff’s original title and point. I hope you will find and pick up a copy of her book for yourself, it will keep you riveted.

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