Posts filed under ‘Poetry’
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 5
It will earn its place on the shelf where you keep your most important books.
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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About this book:
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 5 collects three chapbooks in a single volume: Sarah Rebecca Warren’s Price of Admission, Derrick Weston Brown’s On All Fronts, and T.R. Hummer’s Dark Meter.
This is the fifth volume in the Floodgate Poetry Series, edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Chapbooks—short books under 40 pages—arose when printed books became affordable in the 16th century. The series is in the tradition of 18th and 19th century British and American literary annuals, and the Penguin Modern Poets Series of the 1960s and ’70s.
Sarah Rebecca Warren is a writer, educator, and musician. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma and teaches for Oklahoma State University. Sarah received scholarship to study at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2016, and her writing has appeared in Oklahoma Today, Gravel, Luna Luna, and other journals. Her poems “Anatomy of an Eating Disorder†and “Chimayó Mercado†won first place in the Arcturus Fall 2017 Poetry Contest, adjudicated by Ruben Quesada. Sarah is a regular contributor for World Literature Today.
Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in creative writing, from American University. He has studied poetry under Dr. Tony Medina at Howard University and Cornelius Eady at American University. He is a graduate of the Cave Canem and VONA Voices summer workshops. His work has appeared in such literary journals as The Little Patuxent Review, Mythium, The Tidal Basin Review, and Vinyl Online.
Terry Randolph Hummer is an American poet, critic, essayist, editor, and professor. His most recent books of poetry are After the Afterlife and the three linked volumes Ephemeron, Skandalon, and Eon.
Reviews:
What follows Price of Admission is a chapbook that pushes the boundaries between traditional poetic form and everyday minutia. If the speaker’s eyes in Price of Admission look everywhere all at once, monitoring the traditions of strangers and family alike, then the speaker’s eyes in On All Fronts look squarely in the mirror. On All Fronts concerns itself with investigating multiple types of fronts—or appearances—and relays varying definitions and quotes including the word “fronts” throughout. […] On All Fronts addresses prominent cultural issues crippling the black community, like in the poem “Meanwhile, at a black funeral home in Chicago, a mortician explains why he mourns, weeps at his expanding profit margin”, which reads, in full:
“We running out of coffins.”
[…] Two engines steer the narrative of T.R. Hummer’s Dark Meter: the speaker’s dexterous attention to and control of meter, and the tension that such discipline towards rule and form creates when situated within the current American political climate. […] Dark Meter is a haunting, lyrically agile collection, a fast-paced yet intimate read that veers between subtle political commentary and moments of unapologetic self-reflection.
—Abriana Jetté, “Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s Floodgate Poetry Series,” Stay Thirsty Magazine, July 2019
In this deeply embodied and emotionally powerful collection, Sarah Warren confronts the question of the Price of Admission. What are the costs of love, spirituality, personal and cultural acceptance and understanding? The poems suggest that the hidden costs may well outweigh the obvious ones—“We think there is nothing to undo but ourselves […] We live inside a dream/too compact to let the air in or the devils out.†This collection belies its status as a “first,†combining stunning imagery and metaphor with honesty and earned wisdom. It will earn its place on the shelf where you keep your most important books.
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, 2017-18 Oklahoma State Poet Laureate and Director of The Red Earth MFA
Derrick Weston Brown’s On All Fronts is a block party of emotions. Here, the mood shifts quickly from D’Angelo to Ghostface Killah. Brown’s speakers ride the green line, earhustling for round-the-way gossip. They also “…weep, at…black womanless streets.” To the elder throwing shade, they say, “ain’t no besting ‘these bars.'” These poems earned every damn “right to coat each tooth in” gold.
—Alan King, author of Drift and Point Blank
I am glad to have lived long enough to see and feel (and revisit like a much needed friend) Derrick Weston Brown’s “On All Fronts”. These poems are replete with originality (remember saxophonist Lester Young’s artistic credo “You got to be original, man!”) technical and emotional range, and—most importantly—feeling. They entrance the reader; and they make you rethink the world around (and inside) you. Read and re-read and re-read these poems. And recite them out loud. because they are also as musical as a kiss. Lucky us, world. Lucky us.
—Reuben Jackson, poet and author of Fingering The Keys
The twenty poems that make up TR Hummer’s Dark Meter present prosodic correlatives—dark meters—for the dark matter that grasps and warps the sanity and moral conscience of the body politic in the twenty-first century, rendering us helpless, unable or unwilling to define, much less correct, our collective psychosis. TR Hummer’s Dark Meter paradoxically illumines this baleful gravity and shapes it into works of art, as did Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud before him. There is no more essential task of the poet.
—Edison Jennings
Praise for our poets:
For T.R. Hummer:
Praised for its “startling imagery and lyrical descriptions†by Publisher’s Weekly, Hummer’s work is at once ironic, playful, and deadly serious. … Hummer’s own view suggests some of the bleak irony undergirding his recent work: “We are thrown into the world, from where we do not know,†he told the Rumpus. “And we are going somewhere, where we do not know. And all our human drama falls in between.â€
Stark, yes. Tough? Yes. But there’s humor in this voice, a sense of irony and slyness and – well, love for the entropic crap-storm that is our brief flicker on this brief flicker of a planet. This is a mind that sees horror and humor, beauty and cruelty, without needing to polarize them. They coexist, each playing in its own time signature and following its own rules.
—Amy Glynn Greacen, New York Quarterly, on his Ephemeron
For Derrick Weston Brown’s Wisdom Teeth:
Found here are playful experiments with the eintou, bop, and brownku, African American forms seldom approached with such mastery.
—Simone Jacobson, managing editor for Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture
Son of Langston, come on through.
—Ruth Forman, author of Prayers Like Shoes
Derrick Weston Brown ventures into the canon to echo the voices of Morrison’s Sweet Home Men, then bends his ear to the streets of DC to render the shouts and whispers of corner brawls and slapped down dominoes—all the while balancing the bridge between Ellington and the sacred tribes of hip-hop.
—Tyehimba Jess, author of Leadbelly
Full of wit and whimsy, Wisdom Teeth postulates a poetics of heart-whole appreciation and honesty—for love and life, for family and friends, for literature and history, for pop culture and the poet’s ever-cognizant powers of observation.
—Tony Medina, author of My Old Man Was always on the Lam
5 March 2019
FG4 release day!
Yaaayyy we have a new book out, the gorgeous and remarkable Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 4, including chaps by Regina DiPerna, Ryan Teitman, and Paisley Rekdal. And! Look at these two great new reviews, one of FG4 and the other of Sunvault:
| All three poets included in the series use prose and verse forms of poetry. But what they write about, the images and metaphors they use, are as individual as themselves and their themes. Kudos to the Floodgate series for bringing these collections together, providing examples of some of the beautiful poetry being written.
—Glynn Young, “The Floodgate Poetry Series: Three Chapbooks,” tweetspeak, 27 February 2018 |
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| The selection of short stories is as eclectic and diverse as the authors, drawing from multiple styles and languages. . . . The true genius of this work lies in its essence as a community project, as a labor of love by writers, artists and editors.
—Paul Daniel Ash, “Book Review: “Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation,” Hunger Mountain, 27 February 2018. |
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LIFE IS GOOD BIRDS ARE SINGING BUY OUR BOOKS YOU’RE AWESOME
- Floodgate 4: IndieBound, Powell’s, or, if you must, Amazon.
- Sunvault: IndieBound, Powell’s, or, if you must, Amazon.
27 February 2018
Two fathers use poems to teach their kids about growing up black in America
Psyched to see PBS Newshour featuring Floodgate poets Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown’s “What I Mean When I Say Harmony“!
13 February 2017
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3
“We like to say that we kind of beg, borrow and steal,” said Brown. “We beg one another to become better fathers, through the work and our conversations. We borrow from the things we are reading, and other people who are working with the same themes. And we steal from one another.”
—PBS Newshour
| Buy print (978-1-937794-81-1):
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About this book:
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 3 collects three chapbooks in a single volume: brothers Anders and Kai Carlson-Wee’s Northern Corn invites us on a trip across an America of dust, trains, poverty, dignity, and dreams; Begotten, co-written by Cave Canem fellows F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis, bravely and tenderly explores fatherhood in the era of Black Lives Matter; and Enid Shomer’s Driving through the Animal lovingly moves between unflinching witness of destruction and hope for the future.
It’s the third volume in the Floodgate Poetry Series, edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Chapbooks—short books under 40 pages—arose when printed books became affordable in the 16th century. The series is in the tradition of 18th and 19th century British and American literary annuals, and the Penguin Modern Poets Series of the 1960s and ’70s.
Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Competition (Bull City Press). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Narrative Magazine, AGNI, Poetry Daily, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Best New Poets, The Best American Nonrequired Reading series, and many other journals. The recipient of Ninth Letter‘s Poetry Award and New Delta Review‘s Editors’ Choice Prize, he was named runner up for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Anders lives in Minneapolis, where he is a 2016 McKnight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL, forthcoming from BOA Editions. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and his work has appeared in Narrative, Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, and The Missouri Review, which selected his poems for the 2013 Editor’s Prize. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine and his co-directed poetry film, Riding the Highline, received jury awards at the 2015 Napa Valley Film Festival and the 2016 Arizona International Film Festival. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and teaches poetry at Stanford University.
Together, they have coauthored two other chapbooks: Mercy Songs (Diode Editions) and Two-Headed Boy (Organic Weapon Arts), winner of the 2015 David Blair Memorial Chapbook Prize.
F. Douglas Brown is the author of Zero to Three (University of Georgia Press 2014), recipient of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith. Brown holds an MA in Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow. His poems have been published by The Academy of American Poets, The Chicago Quarterly (CQR), The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), The Sugar House Review, Cura Magazine, Vinyl Poetry and Prose Magazine, and Muzzle Magazine. Brown was featured in Poets & Writers Magazine as one of their Debut Poets of 2014 (Jan/Feb 2015).
He has been an educator for over twenty years, and teaches English at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. When he is not teaching, writing or with his two children, Isaiah and Olivia, he is busy DJing in the greater Los Angeles area.
Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published by The Academy of American Poets, Crazyhorse, The Greensboro Review, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, The New York Times Magazine, Nimrod, and Sycamore Review, among other places. Davis grew up in Tacoma, Washington—though he was raised by much more of the Pacific Northwest—and he teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Enid Shomer is the author of four previous books of poetry, two chapbooks, and three prize-winning books of fiction, most recently The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Parnassus, Boulevard, and many other magazines as well as more than sixty anthologies and textbooks. In 2013 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. Among her many poetry prizes are the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. She has twice been the subject of feature interviews on National Public Radio—on “All Things Considered” and “Sunday Edition.” A Visiting Writer at many colleges and universities, Shomer lives in Tampa, Florida. Her new full-length book of poetry, Shoreless, won the Vachel Lindsay Prize and is forthcoming in 2017 from Twelve Winters Press.
Reviews:
Begotten turns a poetic lens on fatherhood, examining how fathers and sons thrive, how they falter, how they learn.
—Christi Craig, Conversations in Poetry, Lessons in Life: Q&A (& Giveaway) with F. Douglas Brown and Geffrey Davis
When poets Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown first met at a poetry retreat in 2012, they instantly connected in discussing fatherhood and the poetry that sprang from that experience. Over time, that relationship grew, and they began writing poetry that came directly out of their conversations. Soon, they were even borrowing each other’s lines or writing stanzas or whole poems back and forth, as a kind of call and response. . . .
“We like to say that we kind of beg, borrow and steal,” said Brown. “We beg one another to become better fathers, through the work and our conversations. We borrow from the things we are reading, and other people who are working with the same themes. And we steal from one another.”
—Elizabeth Flock, “Two fathers use poems to teach their kids about growing up black in America,” PBS Newshour Poetry, February 13, 2017
Northern Corn invites us into a dream America is having about itself, wherein the voices are both the road and the kicked-up gravel dust, memory and the occasion for memory, the flame and its shadow. An entrancing investigation of place and self and other, a spell one never wants broken.
—Michael McGriff, on Northern Corn by Anders Carlson-Wee & Kai Carlson-Wee
The argument Northern Corn makes in poem after beautiful poem—the eyes are connected to the mouth is connected to the heart—is one I am glad is in the world.
—Ross Gay, on Northern Corn by Anders Carlson-Wee & Kai Carlson-Wee
The imagined and the unsaid collide head on with specifics so sensory they burn, they freeze, they illuminate, and they turn off the lights at once, leave you in a darkness where everything is at its brightest. These voices have kidnapped me.
—Laura Kasischke, on Northern Corn by Anders Carlson-Wee & Kai Carlson-Wee
Begotten captures the bliss, consternation and heart-thumping ruckus of being both parent and child. A wild and tender ride.
—Tracy K. Smith, on Begotten by F. Douglas Brown & Geffrey Davis
Brown and Davis riff off each other’s work, while embodying in their virtuoso poems a rich chorus of familial voices. Raw, tender, headlong, and scared, these poems about fathers and sons walk the knife’s edge of being a parent in the era of black lives matter. Complexity abounds—’the many sounds that can break a thought/into still sharper shards of thinking’—and despite the generational wounds, the single constant expressed so variously and valiantly in these musical poems is love. Begotten portrays fatherhood with dazzling originality. Don’t miss this book.
—Barbara Ras, on Begotten by F. Douglas Brown & Geffrey Davis
“Have I done anything right” ends one poem in this tough, concentrated collection of tender lyric and formal exploration, but the anxiety runs throughout. Brown and Davis trade flows like an Old School hip-hop duo even as the speakers here trade subjectivities—a son to a father, a father to a son. But that very fluidity rhymes with slipperiness—how precarious the inheritance of father to child when to be someone’s spitting image is to risk being worth the same as saliva on a street. How do dads of sons dance in their twin bodies with and for each other, mothers and daughters, wives and beautiful boys? In Begotten, the poets do the steps and missteps again and again to a rich music that buzzes with pops’s fragile cassette tapes, an old-timey tune cut to a fray of light on loop, the blood-blue pulse of sex, and a live feed from cell- and dash-cams. Make no mistake, these are love poems, maybe because they are fatherhood poems, but likely because the poets want desperately to get fatherhood right(ed) despite their own unstable footing.
—Douglas Kearney, on Begotten by F. Douglas Brown & Geffrey Davis
In Driving through the Animal, Enid Shomer writes of her landscape the way a lover describes the body of their beloved; attention to each freckle, cleft, and scar. With crisp formalism and exquisite detail that calls to mind the sea-worn odes of Seamus Heaney and bodily-fluid-soaked lyric of Kim Addonizio, Enid has crafted an erotic and sobering love song for our dying world, one that asks us to glimpse “the perfume hoarded all day by bees” and insists, “through radiance and filth, through blubbering grief and parabolas of rage,” that we not look away.
—Kendra DeColo, on Driving through the Animal by Enid Shomer
In Enid Shomer’s Driving through the Animal, she is, as she states, a “clear daughter of the tides,” which perhaps explains why her mind moves so deftly between inner and outer concerns, between music and silence, between plenty and scarcity, and between a hope for the future and a reckoning with death. Though her landscapes offer a “visual blessing,” they also wrestle with a frightening diminishment, sometimes ecological and sometimes personal. “It’s hard work to ponder one’s moral/failings,” she confesses; yet, like plovers burying eggs in beach sand—too often “reduced by the smallest foot to a yellow stain”—Shomer nudges her poems into place, trying to offer “a pure voice,” never more endangered than now.
—Jeff Hardin, on Driving through the Animal by Enid Shomer
Enid Shomer’s striking new chapbook, Driving through the Animal, takes the reader into timeless natural kingdoms and on to the immediacy of human relationship with the fluidity of water—back and forth, up and down we go. She gracefully exploits what language can accomplish and the way in which it bridges seemingly permanent distances. Many of these poems hang on the cusp of the temporal as in “a spangled globule on the oily feather of a bird.” Such exactly seen miniscule imagery holds ephemera in space thus extending and slowing the reader’s perceptive field. Delight in Enid Shomer as the record keeper of varied and shifting coastlines—those of vital literal and figurative substance.
—Katherine Soniat, on Driving through the Animal by Enid Shomer
2 comments 15 November 2016
Questions to Ask While Revising
Joanne Merriam, Upper Rubber Boot Books1
Grammar, Syntax, Usage:
- Is the grammar, punctuation, and spelling correct?
- Does wrong or non-standard syntax serve the purpose of the work?
- Does the diction [ornateness/simplicity] fit the meaning?
- Is there music? Is the music serving the work?
Serving the Reader:
- Is it true?
- Is it ethical?
- Does it go deep enough?
- Is it based on cultures I don’t belong to or don’t have a deep knowledge of? If so, have I run it past people who do belong to those cultures, and/or done extensive research to avoid misrepresentation and mistakes?
- Are there places that would be confusing to an outside reader or where I’ve assumed non-general knowledge or mind-reading?
Serving the Story:
- Is it predictable? Are there clichés in words, images, ideas, or plot? (Strange Horizons lists cliché plots: http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml; Teresa Nielsen Hayden lists dreadful phrases: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007425.html.)
- Can I strengthen the story by changing my world-building assumptions? (Charles Stross’ list: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/a-world-building-puzzler.html.)
- Are the transitions serving the work? Is every scene serving the work? Are the ideas and rhetorical gestures in the right order?
- Is it in the right voice [first person/second person/third person]?
- What does it actually say on the page (as opposed to in my mind)? Is it saying what it wants to say? Is it confused?
- Would saying less be stronger?
- Does it follow its own deepest impulses, rather than my initial idea?
- Do I know more than I did when I started writing it? Did I discover anything?
- Do characters follow their own goals and impulses, or have I forced them to act against their own character to fit the plot? Do they talk, act, and think authentically?
- Is there anything that doesn’t belong?
- Do any digressions serve the work?
- Is it self-satisfied/smug?
- Does it allow strangeness? Is the strangeness it allows accessible?
- Should it go out into the world or is it the seed for another story (or poem)?
1 Also includes questions from a talk given by poet Jane Hirshfield at Vanderbilt University, and from a workshop given by poet Sue MacLeod at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. Feel welcome to reproduce or excerpt this list, provided attribution and this notice are included.
21 March 2016
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 2
This is a great American poem.
—Adrienne Rich
| Buy print (978-1-937794-38-5):
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About this book:
This is the second volume in the Floodgate Poetry Series, an annual series of books collecting three chapbooks by three poets in a single volume, edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Chapbooks—short books under 40 pages—arose when printed books became affordable in the 16th century. The series is in the tradition of 18th and 19th century British and American literary annuals, and the Penguin Modern Poets Series of the 1960s and ’70s.
Kallie Falandays‘ debut collection of poetry, Tiny Openings Everywhere, distorts reality and the many ways we perceive it with a raucous, almost violent brand of play in poems more interested in questioning reality than nailing it down. At times breathtaking, others delightfully perplexing, these verses are as quixotic and witty as they are essential and damning. Falandays received her MFA from Wichita State University in 2015. She writes copy by day and runs a small editing business, telltellpoetry.com, by night from her home in Philadelphia.
Score for a Burning Bridge, Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs‘ debut collection of poems, examines politics, loneliness, and doubt in poems that startle the intellect and imagination. In these intimate meditations, Jorgensen-Briggs explores the modern world and searches (as so many of us do) for his place in it with a singular voice and vision. Jorgensen-Briggs received his MFA from New York University in 2007, spent two months in Palestine working with the International Solidarity Movement, and currently works with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and live in the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community.
Judy Jordan‘s Hunger chronicles Jordan’s time living in a greenhouse in Virginia that continues (and nearly concludes) the story she started in her first two books, Carolina Ghost Woods and 60¢ Coffee and a Quarter to Dance. Hunger cements Jordan’s status as an expert of the vertical narrative in lyrical style and is the first collection she’s published in eleven years. Jordan teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where she lives off the grid in the heart of the Shenandoah National Forest in an eco-friendly, earthbag house she built by hand.
Reviews:
Judy Jordan’s “Hunger” section was the one that struck deepest for me. It was keenly observed lack, hunger but also bills and illness, and yet not in a way that became a drumbeat of woe. It started with my favorite of the section, “These First Mornings Living in the Greenhouse,” and the entire section had the feel of a latter-day imperial fall in real daily terms—not what we imagine an imperial fall would be like, but what it actually was, dragged out, small, particular, personal ways. The greenhouse in the cold is vivid and rich and particular, and Jordan goes on from there to all the other particulars of a fall (not an autumn, a fall), the bulldozers, the algae-clogged ponds.
—Marissa Lingen, “Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 2, by Judy Jordan, Kallie Falandays, and Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs,” Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway, 29 September 2015
Welcome to the Kallieverse, which shares the everyday pleasures and perils of our world, but seems to obey slightly different laws of physics and tilts its language in new intriguing ways. It’s the twin of our cosmos, separated from ours at the Big Bang—and happily, Ms. Falandays has reunited them.
—Albert Goldbarth, on Kallie Falandays’ Tiny Openings Everywhere
There is a stillness and attentiveness in Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs’s Score for a Burning Bridge, an abiding quiet, as if the poems are trying not to scare something wild nearby. In this stillness you can hear “the purr of locusts” and “dusk, quiet / as a coat on a hook.” But as you travel deeper into this stunning collection to where “the map is lost / inside the act of folding”—you see, of course, that the poems are wild themselves.
—Maggie Smith, on Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs’s Score for a Burning Bridge
This is a great American poem. Jordan tells the truth of a life as split open by the world—by life on this earth with other kinds of beings, human and other, with dreams and ghosts, machinery, between the visible and invisible. The language is thick, allusive, rich, dense. She turns scalding materials into gorgeous art.
—Adrienne Rich, on Judy Jordan’s Hunger
1 comment 17 November 2015
“Poetry is hard, let’s…read more poetry.”
So I’m working today to get Floodgate Poetry Series​ Vol. 2 promo set up, and I search on Floodgate because I am looking for something else and up pops this really thoughtful review by Marissa Lingen​ that I missed when she published it, probably because I was packing for Kenya and so tremendously distracted by all of that—anyway, these particular chapbooks aren’t 100% her thing, but I am loving how thoughtful she is in her examination of this (“I think it was less ‘these are bad poems’ and more ‘these are not mostly the poems for me.'”) and I love what she has to say about Judy Jordan​’s chapbook:
Judy Jordan’s “Hunger†section was the one that struck deepest for me. It was keenly observed lack, hunger but also bills and illness, and yet not in a way that became a drumbeat of woe. It started with my favorite of the section, “These First Mornings Living in the Greenhouse,†and the entire section had the feel of a latter-day imperial fall in real daily terms–not what we imagine an imperial fall would be like, but what it actually was, dragged out, small, particular, personal ways. The greenhouse in the cold is vivid and rich and particular, and Jordan goes on from there to all the other particulars of a fall (not an autumn, a fall), the bulldozers, the algae-clogged ponds.
Thank you, Marissa. And everybody: go read her reviews! Not just of our books but all of her reviews, because they are always thoughtful and well-expressed, and we need this kind of literary conversation.
14 November 2015
Goodreads Giveaway of Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 2
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 2
by Judy Jordan
Giveaway ends November 17, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
10 November 2015
Kickstarter for Floodgate 2
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We’re currently running a Kickstarter campaign for Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 2.
This is the second in an annual series of books collecting three chapbooks by three poets in a single volume: in this volume, Kallie Falandays, Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs, and Judy Jordan. |
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Kallie Falandays‘ debut collection of collection, Tiny Openings Everywhere, distorts reality and the many ways we perceive it with a raucous, almost violent brand of play in poems more interested in questioning reality than nailing it down. At times breathtaking, others delightfully perplexing, these verses are as quixotic and witty as they are essential and damning. Falandays received her MFA from Wichita State University in 2015. She writes copy by day and runs a small editing business, telltellediting.com, by night from her home in Philadelphia.
Score for a Burning Bridge, Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs‘ debut collection of poems, examines politics, loneliness, and doubt in poems that startle the intellect and imagination. In these intimate meditations, Jorgensen-Briggs explores the modern world and searches (as so many of us do) for his place in it with a singular voice and vision. Jorgensen-Briggs received his MFA from New York University in 2007, spent two months in Palestine working with the International Solidarity Movement, and currently works with Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and live in the Des Moines Catholic Worker Community.
Judy Jordan‘s Hunger chronicles Jordan’s time living in a greenhouse in Virginia that continues (and nearly concludes) the story she started in her first two books, Carolina Ghost Woods and 60¢ Coffee and a Quarter to Dance. Hunger cements Jordan’s status as an expert of the vertical narrative in lyrical style and is the first collection she’s published in eleven years. Jordan teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where she lives off the grid in the heart of the Shenandoah National Forest in an eco-friendly, earthbag house she built by hand. Adrienne Rich said of Hunger, “This is a great American poem.”
Donate here for a copy of the book!
26 August 2015
Jane Hirshfield on Revising Poetry
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Today I attended a lecture on “Writing Poems, Writing Books” at Vanderbilt University by Jane Hirshfield, an American poet whose honors include election to Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012 and work in seven editions of Best American Poetry. Her most recent books are Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)1 and The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)2. |
Below are my notes on the questions she asks herself while revising (with some paraphrasing, and her copious explanatory comments left out since I can’t write that fast!).
Questions to Ask While Revising a Poem
- What does the poem actually say on the page? Is it saying what it wants to say? Is it confused?
- Does it follow its own deepest impulses, rather than my initial idea?
- Does it go deep enough?
- Would saying less be stronger?
- Does the poem know more than I did when I started writing it? Did I discover anything?
- Is there music? Does it need a more deeply living body of sound? Is the music helping its meaning?
- Does the visual shape of the poem [lines, line breaks, stanzas, etc.] serve its meaning?
- Is it true?
- Is it ethical?
- Does it feel?
- Is there anything that doesn’t belong?
- Do any digressions serve the poem?
- Are the poem’s awkwardnesses and smoothnesses in its own best service?
- Are there places that would be confusing to an outside reader or where I’ve assumed non-general knowledge or mind-reading?
- Are there any cliches in words, images or ideas?
- Is the poem self-satisfied?
- Is it predictable?
- Is it precise?
- Does it allow strangeness? Is the strangeness it allows accessible?
- Is the grammar correct? Does wrong or non-standard syntax serve the purpose of the poem?
- Are the transitions serving the poem? Are the ideas and rhetorical gestures in the right order?
- Does the diction [ornateness/simpleness] fit the meaning?
- Is it in the right voice [first person/second person/third person]?
- Do each of its moments move it forward?
- Should it go out into the world or is it the seed for another poem?
- Is it finished?
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1 Buy Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)1 from your local bookstore or online at Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Chapters Canada; IndieBound; or Powell’s.
2 Buy The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) from your local bookstore or online at Amazon; Barnes & Noble; Chapters Canada; IndieBound; or Powell’s. |
18 April 2015