Eau de Bad Poetry

Day 71 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Diane will soon be reading Swimming with a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle, poems by Freya Manfred, thanks to me and Garrison Keillor.

That is, I discovered Freya Manfred thanks to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, and Diane discovered her thanks to me reading one of her poems on Poetry Sunday at my church, in our annual celebration of National Poetry Month.

Oh! Or shall I say, "Eau!" This is not to suggest any badness in reference to Freya, though there is plenty of eau! She is swimming, after all, with a 100-year-old snapping turtle, and she is even swimming, with scuba apparatus, in her author photo in the back of the book, in the edition I have with an About the Author page added in August, 2009, by Red Dragonfly Press of Red Wing, Minnesota. (Have I mentioned I'm a Pisces? Have I mentioned my dream of swimming with dolphins? Have I mentioned my admiration for cephalopods? Including that playful octopus that stole the guy's video camera on my MSN homepage this morning! With song lyrics that include Jacques Cousteau, swimming with dolphins, and "I love you.")

I love Freya Manfred. I love her with the excruciating tenderness her poems generate in me.

As I told the congregation on Poetry Sunday, I feel about Freya the way Joan Didion's daughter felt about Georgia O'Keeffe when she saw the painting of clouds in the Art Insitute in Chicago. She said, "I need to talk to her." But, for now, I will listen to Freya, to her poems.

No, really, for now, I would like to discuss bad poetry. I am putting B is for Bad Poetry, by Pamela August Russell, on my Wish List at Amazon, awaiting that next coupon I get when I pay off my credit card bill. (I confess, that's how I got Freya Manfred, but now I will save up and actually buy her other books from Red Dragonfly Press!)

And this is the follow-up from yesterday, about Susan being troubled by finding only books by popular male poets, like Billy Collins (Ballistics), or immortal female poets (like Emily Dickinson), on the display endcap at Barnes & Noble during National Poetry Month. And, by the way, I handled one of the early printings of Final Harvest at work yesterday, right before the power went out and I went home, which is Thomas H. Johnson's edition of 575 of her 1775 poems.

Which does circle us back round to "bad poetry." That is, all of us poets have to write at least 1775 poems to get 575 good ones, or that's what it feels like, anyway. Surely even the great poets write plenty of bad and mediocre poems on the way to the good and great ones.

But what Russell has done is to celebrate the "bad" and "mediocre" impulse in all of us, humans or poets, in what must be actually very good poems, full of cleverness, craft, and probably downright genius. It takes a really good poet to write bad poetry, the kind that makes the reader cringe at the truth and laugh out loud, and that's what people are saying about B for Bad Poetry. Which is on the endcap at my local Barnes & Noble, for National Poetry Month!

And here is a bad poem I have written in honor of it, of her, and of bad poetry everywhere:

Today in Barnes & Noble

I saw a book of bad poetry
on the endcap.
I could have been making $$
at this all along.
I coulda beena contenda!

Instead
I Beano fartenda!

And now you know the horrible, embarrassing truth about me. (Although I was vaguely hoping you'd stopped reading this entry a little earlier....)

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth George

Day 17 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and the topic of mysteries has provoked the most discussion so far!

So, Happy Birthday, Elizabeth George, creator of the Inspector Lynley series of mysteries, as I learn from today's Writer's Almanac, to which I have linked you, thank Garrison Keillor very much! I love her daily writing schedule: lift weights, Today Show, read 15 minutes of great lit, write in a journal...all great warm-up activities...and then launch into the long writing workday!

This coincides with so much of the advice in Letters to a Fiction Writer, the book edited by Frederick Busch that gathers lots of advice and encouragement from many writers, many of whom say, in various ways, "write every day." (And I've been reading a letter a day in it, along with writing this daily blog!) A woman at the birthday party poetry reading event on Feb. 20 asked me, "Do you write every day?" and I was able to answer yes!--because I changed my life, as Rilke advised poets to do, and so did Elizabeth George!

Of course she writes the kind of book that lots of people like to read. I write the kind of book that lots of people like to avoid! You can, I am sure, pre-order George's newest book, This Body of Death, due out in April, now. (Yes, you can, so that's the link.)

Who is reading this series? Let me know in the comments!

And be sure to check out the fabulous comments on that previous mystery entry, as people are saying powerful, profound, and provocative things! Me, I'm saying goofy things, like, "Neatorino!"

And while we are at it, let's also celebrate crime writer Patricia Highsmith. (That's a link to Gretta Barclay's review of a biography, posted in Escape into Life, an online journal.)

Oh, but wait a minute! I did once write a murder-mystery sort of poem, and it is online in the archives of Oklahoma Review, so I will link you to that. Poetry usually makes people run screaming away, and this may do so for other reasons! I wrote it in response to a writing-prompt question, "How would you dispose of a dead body?" Of course, as I was writing, it turned into something else, but it's still creepy. You are well warned: "How to Dispose of a Dead Body."

But I also wanted to tell you that the train-to-Texas-guy came back! He bought 3 train books, and he will return! (He is the guy I was afraid I scared off in one of my suddenly intimate conversations somehow totally appropriate to the moment...unless I am wrong, and they are not. Appropriate. Anyway, he is indeed the nice guy I thought he was, and there were all these other people around, so I could not set him up with my ready-to-date friend. How's that for a sweet little comic mystery romance?!)

Oooh, but don't let him read my poem.

Sonneteers, Rattle

Day 16 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

I think Dick must be reading Rattle, a literary magazine that publishes Poetry for the 21st Century, because he gave me the Winter 2009 "Tribute to the Sonnet" issue as a birthday present at a party that was also a release reading for my little chapbook Broken Sonnets. (I told you I might tell you more about that, and here we go!)

Dick is a close friend of the party host, Michael, and both are great readers of Robert Frost, a favorite poet of many. I got to hear them read Frost and talk about him at some events many years ago, and Michael read some Frost for WGLT's Poetry Radio!

This issue of Rattle also has conversations with Alice Fulton and Molly Peacock, two poets I admire and got to hear when they read in the Chicago area. I have Molly Peacock's Original Love, Take Heart, and Cornucopia, and she taught me a lot about form, since she works with very tight rhyming forms in order to handle otherwise out-of-control emotion. This is something I have been able to recommend to other poets who are working with volatile personal material, and my little poetry workshop at Babbitt's requested to learn more about formal poems in a recent session.

Alice Fulton came to town (Chicago) to read, I think, at North Park College, or Northeastern (?), and also at DePaul, when I was at DePaul (but I attended the small college reading, conflict at the other time or something, or maybe she was reading to a particular class). We got to meet her artist husband, and I have an artist husband, so we had a very nice conversation with him. So I have her books Palladium and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. Palladium is organized in sections that begin with different definitions of the word "palladium," and I loved learning all this, as well as reading her poems. As Emily Dickinson said, "There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page..." and "palladium" is one of them!

Back to Rattle, which has skeletons on the cover, so we can rattle them bones, and sonnets, etc. I was delighted to find a sonnet by Ernest Hilbert in this issue. (Hilbert's recent book of sonnets is on my wishlist at Amazon!) His Rattle sonnet is called "Cover to Cover" and describes towers of books in "shoddy columns" that "slide onto the stove, under the fridge, / Into the tub," etc. (For non-poetry readers, that slash mark indicates a line break, which is also why "Into" is capitalized, as it begins a new line, though not all poets these days capitalize the first letter of every line!) So, essentially, in this poem about "the collector's passion" (in an opening quotation by Walter Benjamin), we see huge amounts of books, reminding me of my own home and my workplace!!

On the facing page is a sonnet by Carol Frith, who, with her husband, the poet Laverne Frith, is an editor of Ekphrasis, which has taken several of my poems in response to paintings! So that was a delightful surprise. Carol's poem, "Black Tights, Halter Top," looks closely at a woman who might be a prostitute, might be a runaway, waiting on a street corner "near a ragged sign that reads: / For sale." This is so evocative for me, as well as being a vivid and empathetic picture in itself. My husband once gave a ride to a streetwalker stuck out in the Chicago rain on a dreary corner, moved by her circumstance. And he has a gorgeous collage painting of a woman "On Sale," using strips of newspaper sale pages, a painting that now hangs in our bedroom, over my dresser, because I was lucky enough to receive it as a gift. (Other paintings I have loved are long gone, sold to those who admired them!)

I love these personal connections we make to poems, which are fine if we also look closely enough at the poem to see how we connect to what's really there, a sort of compare/contrast adventure. This poem looks closely at the woman, and makes me look outside myself into her situation, as well as inside to our connection as women together on this earth. And then as humans. But she's in a tough spot, on a corner there, possibly for sale, because that is a shared experience of women in history. The poem makes me love her and feel her vulnerability. It ends: "Persimmons, firm to the touch, and sweet."

So I have not told you about the party at all. That will have to wait, because now I want to tell you about Garrison Keillor, mentioned at the end of the previous entry, and his book of sonnets! 77 Love Sonnets came out this summer when I was proofreading my own little book, and I waited till the fall, when my book was safely out, to get it and read it. What a dear book, and what a fine variety of sonnets, both tight to the form, and looser, matching the subject matter. It tracks a love affair and praises the beloved in swift, sensual poems that bring us right into a fine intimacy. We care about this couple, and this man loving her so much! And there are fine delicate drawings. And there is a 12-sonnet cycle of the months!

Which reminds me!--back in Rattle there is a sonnet crown by Patricia Smith. A sonnet crown is a set of sonnets in which the next sonnet starts with the last line of the previous sonnet, and eventually circles back around to the first sonnet, creating a "crown," although poets do variations on this circling back. Smith's is called "Motown Crown" and weaves in lots of the music from her growing-up years. It's amazing!

I've read other sonnet crowns, heard some read aloud, and have written one myself, though mine breaks, the way my "broken sonnets" break...oh, someday I'll tell you more about that.