In 2003, during one of my sproradic bouts of poetry writing, I decided to look for an online poetry forum. The only one I knew of back then was poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. I signed up, but then discovered the forums weren't active, and forgot all about poets.org — and poetry — for a couple of years. Then suddenly on May 23, 2005 — five years ago today — I received notice that the forums were active again.
There was a mad scramble as all the old members tried to post years of pent-up poems. I looked on with dismay, but the furor died down in a couple of months, and I timidly posted an old poem, which was thoroughly misunderstood. I went on posting old poems and gradually gained confidence. Then in the fall a weekly poem spark was instituted, which I faithfully participated in. One spark was a sestina, and I wrote a rambling one about how I would write a poem if I could find my pencil.
A short time later it occurred to me to try a sestina using the notes of the medieval Gregorian scale — do, re, mi, fa, sol, la — as end syllables in lieu of end words. It was such a departure for me that someone opined, when I posted it, that I must have been smoking pine needles again. Not only was it well received, it was one of three poems chosen to send to the monthly Interboard Poetry Competition — where it won first prize for December, 2005.
Gregorian Sestina was my first publication in a literary venue. The link will also take you to judge-of-the-month Ravi Shankar's comments, below the poem itself.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
My poetry archive: The New Verse News
The New Verse News publishes at least one poem each day related to the current news from a progressive standpoint. The editor, James Penha, is a New Yorker who has lived in Indonesia for the past eighteen years, and has taught English at the International High School in Jakarta. He has just published a chapbook collection of Indonesian folk tales, Snakes and Angels.
Of course in a zine such as The New Verse News, topicality has to trump craft. Still, I'm impressed by the consistently high quality of its verse; there's so much bad political poetry out there. If you need to vent about what is going on in the world, give it a try; if you're new to publishing poetry, it's a good place to get your feet wet. Responses usually come within a couple of weeks.
I found The New Verse News when I was just starting to submit poetry for publication. On October 30, 2006, I sent an angry poem which I obscurely felt had a Halloweenish feel to it. Within a few hours I got a response, something like this: "Trust me, we don't usually respond this fast, but once in a while we get a poem that is just when we need just when we need it." Sanctuary was posted on October 31. It's still my favorite of the poems of mine James has published. The others are listed below, latest first:
Tea Party with Walt
Paradelle: U.S. Congress and Copenhagen
Dissolute Sonnet
Noam Chomsky Vindicated
The Two Prophets
Plus Ultra
Same Old Story
Thanksgiving
Of course in a zine such as The New Verse News, topicality has to trump craft. Still, I'm impressed by the consistently high quality of its verse; there's so much bad political poetry out there. If you need to vent about what is going on in the world, give it a try; if you're new to publishing poetry, it's a good place to get your feet wet. Responses usually come within a couple of weeks.
I found The New Verse News when I was just starting to submit poetry for publication. On October 30, 2006, I sent an angry poem which I obscurely felt had a Halloweenish feel to it. Within a few hours I got a response, something like this: "Trust me, we don't usually respond this fast, but once in a while we get a poem that is just when we need just when we need it." Sanctuary was posted on October 31. It's still my favorite of the poems of mine James has published. The others are listed below, latest first:
Tea Party with Walt
Paradelle: U.S. Congress and Copenhagen
Dissolute Sonnet
Noam Chomsky Vindicated
The Two Prophets
Plus Ultra
Same Old Story
Thanksgiving
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
My poetry archive: Tilt-a-Whirl
As of this writing I've published 65 poems in sundry magazines. The majority are available online, a number of them in issues that are still current. My previous attempt to "archive" them on a website was axed by att, and I've been trying to figure out how best to provide access to them on this blog. I'd also like to voice appreciation for the magazines that have published them, and think I will essay a sort of narrative.
A fairly new magazine which has recently taken a couple of my poems is Tilt-a-Whirl: A Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms, a zine devoted to forms in which one or more lines or other elements are repeated. These include many French forms, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, etc; for a full list see the Cheat sheet on the site. (She adds new forms to the list as she finds them.) The zine is edited by Kate Bernadette Benedict and is a spinoff of her better-known zine, The Umbrella.
Issue 2, which is still current, contains my pantoum, Halo, as well as Arrgh poetica, a Treinte-sei. The latter is a 36-line form invented by John Ciardi, which I would never have dreamed of attempting had I not been experimenting with oddball forms while involved in a challenge. (Kate told me in accepting it that she had resolved not to publish poems about writing poems, but felt impelled to make an exception—partly, I suppose, because the form was new to her. It was new to me too, and poetry writing was the easiest subject to practice on.)
Back issues of Tilt-a-Whirl will be archived by form, rather than by issue; thus, when issue 3 comes along and the above links to my poems are outmoded, you can find them under the form in the archive.
A fairly new magazine which has recently taken a couple of my poems is Tilt-a-Whirl: A Poetry Sporadical of Repeating Forms, a zine devoted to forms in which one or more lines or other elements are repeated. These include many French forms, ghazal, pantoum, sestina, etc; for a full list see the Cheat sheet on the site. (She adds new forms to the list as she finds them.) The zine is edited by Kate Bernadette Benedict and is a spinoff of her better-known zine, The Umbrella.
Issue 2, which is still current, contains my pantoum, Halo, as well as Arrgh poetica, a Treinte-sei. The latter is a 36-line form invented by John Ciardi, which I would never have dreamed of attempting had I not been experimenting with oddball forms while involved in a challenge. (Kate told me in accepting it that she had resolved not to publish poems about writing poems, but felt impelled to make an exception—partly, I suppose, because the form was new to her. It was new to me too, and poetry writing was the easiest subject to practice on.)
Back issues of Tilt-a-Whirl will be archived by form, rather than by issue; thus, when issue 3 comes along and the above links to my poems are outmoded, you can find them under the form in the archive.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Looking Back on NaPoWriMo
This April was the fourth time I participated in National Poetry Writing Month, in which the challenge is to write a poem every day for the month of April. The first time, in 2007, I just plunged in. Each year since then I've stopped writing poetry sometime in March, and focused instead on making notes, gathering ideas for NaPo and experiencing varying degrees of trepidation.
It happens regularly that two or three times during NaPo I feel like giving up, but manage to keep going with small things, limericks, cinquains, fibs, triolets, surrealistic haiku, etc. In coping with the intensity of the roller-coaster ride that is NaPo, I've found that my most reliable sources of inspiration are:
1) forms. There are tried and true forms, such as the villanelle, which I can write in my sleep; and then there are exotic ones to experiment with (Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms, 3d.ed., and Robin Skelton's The Shapes of our Singing are good sources). When writing in forms I rarely worry about the content, which may be quite surrealistic; the results are sometimes happy, more often plodding, but if so it still gives me courage to try the form again later.
2) building on the work of other poets. I've kept a running list of ways to do this, which sort themselves into broad categories: a) starting with a borrowed title of phrase and going on from there, arguing with it, etc. b) using borrowed lines as the basis of a villanelle, rondel or other (usually) French form; c) playing with a longer chunk, or a whole poem— writing between the lines, doing paraphrases or "translations" such as homophonic, antonymic, Oulipo +7, etc.
3) This year I also got quite a bit of mileage from cannibalizing some of my old failed poems which in former years I didn't have enough distance to let go of.
In previous years I was so exhausted by the end of April that I wrote very little for the rest of the year. I wonder if that will be the case now. I ended on a high note, with a clear feeling that over the month I had learned something about structure. A few days into May I participated in a 7/7 challenge at The Waters. I have much more of a sense of direction this year, and hope to maintain enough momentum to participate in a 7/7 challenge every month or so.
Participating in NaPoWriMo or any other challenge involves commenting on the work of others. Not critique, but positive encouragement so that we can all keep going. I'm too introverted to be good at this, but appreciate the comments others make about my efforts, and admire people to whom such responses seem to come easily. A NaPo group with lots of participants is especially daunting; I start out with good intentions, but tend to fold midway through. With luck I will gain some practice while doing shorter challenges.
It happens regularly that two or three times during NaPo I feel like giving up, but manage to keep going with small things, limericks, cinquains, fibs, triolets, surrealistic haiku, etc. In coping with the intensity of the roller-coaster ride that is NaPo, I've found that my most reliable sources of inspiration are:
1) forms. There are tried and true forms, such as the villanelle, which I can write in my sleep; and then there are exotic ones to experiment with (Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms, 3d.ed., and Robin Skelton's The Shapes of our Singing are good sources). When writing in forms I rarely worry about the content, which may be quite surrealistic; the results are sometimes happy, more often plodding, but if so it still gives me courage to try the form again later.
2) building on the work of other poets. I've kept a running list of ways to do this, which sort themselves into broad categories: a) starting with a borrowed title of phrase and going on from there, arguing with it, etc. b) using borrowed lines as the basis of a villanelle, rondel or other (usually) French form; c) playing with a longer chunk, or a whole poem— writing between the lines, doing paraphrases or "translations" such as homophonic, antonymic, Oulipo +7, etc.
3) This year I also got quite a bit of mileage from cannibalizing some of my old failed poems which in former years I didn't have enough distance to let go of.
In previous years I was so exhausted by the end of April that I wrote very little for the rest of the year. I wonder if that will be the case now. I ended on a high note, with a clear feeling that over the month I had learned something about structure. A few days into May I participated in a 7/7 challenge at The Waters. I have much more of a sense of direction this year, and hope to maintain enough momentum to participate in a 7/7 challenge every month or so.
Participating in NaPoWriMo or any other challenge involves commenting on the work of others. Not critique, but positive encouragement so that we can all keep going. I'm too introverted to be good at this, but appreciate the comments others make about my efforts, and admire people to whom such responses seem to come easily. A NaPo group with lots of participants is especially daunting; I start out with good intentions, but tend to fold midway through. With luck I will gain some practice while doing shorter challenges.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
"Jens Bjørneboe in English" found
Yesterday a friend told me about the Wayback Machine, which has been archiving the web since 1996 or so to preserve sites that disappear. If you google Wayback Machine, you will find a link to a place where you can enter the URL of the site you're looking for. And voila! There were numerous versions of "Jens Bjørneboe in English", archived at different stages along the way. The latest link is:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080211204403rn_1/home.att.net/~emurer/
My other disappeared websites, including my poetry site, seem not to have been archived, but that's OK. This was the crucial one, an internationally known resource on an important Norwegian writer.
Thank you, Tony, for pointing me to this invaluable resource!
http://web.archive.org/web/20080211204403rn_1/home.att.net/~emurer/
My other disappeared websites, including my poetry site, seem not to have been archived, but that's OK. This was the crucial one, an internationally known resource on an important Norwegian writer.
Thank you, Tony, for pointing me to this invaluable resource!
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Cuz and "The Brewing of Soma"
People often ask me if I'm related to John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). The answer is that he was my 2d cousin 4 times removed, i.e. my great-great-grandfather's second cousin. According to my aunt Dorothy, the family genealogist, they had some sort of correspondence, but I don't think they were close—especially since my ancestor was not a Quaker.
I can't say that I've read much of Whittier. But there is one poem that I have tuned into, literally with a vengeance, because of my interest in Quaker attitudes toward the arts: "The Brewing of Soma" (1872), which is the source of the hymn "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind."
The poem begins with a long description of primitive peoples' religious use of hallucinogenic drugs. Excerpt:
"Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,
Forget your long annoy."
So sang the priests. From tent to tent
The Soma's sacred madness went,
A storm of drunken joy.
Then knew each rapt inebriate
A winged and glorious birth,
Soared upward, with strange joy elate,
Beat, with dazed head, Varuna's gate,
And sobered, sank to earth.
Then Whittier moves to a comparison with modern (19th-century) intoxicants:
As in the child-world's early year,
Each after age has striven
By music, incense, vigils drear,
And trance, to bring the skies more near,
Or lift men up to heaven!
.....
And yet the past comes round again,
And new doth old fulfill;
In sensual transports wild as vain
We brew in many a Christian fane
The heathen Soma still!
and concludes with a prayer that God will remove our need for such intoxicants and "reclothe us in our rightful mind" by restoring us to the true religion of service and silent waiting on the Lord:
Let sense be numb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm!
Frederick Charles Maker, a Congregational organist in Bristol, England, composed the familliar hymn tune REST to fit the concluding stanzas of "The Brewing of Soma" in 1887. Whittier—who, like most Friends of his time, regarded music as a particularly pernicious intoxicant—would have been eighty by then, and I have no idea whether he ever knew of what he surely would have regarded as a desecration of his poem. It is ironic that today it is this hymn for which he is primarily remembered. I daresay ol' Cuz has been spinning in his grave for lo these hundred years.
I can't say that I've read much of Whittier. But there is one poem that I have tuned into, literally with a vengeance, because of my interest in Quaker attitudes toward the arts: "The Brewing of Soma" (1872), which is the source of the hymn "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind."
The poem begins with a long description of primitive peoples' religious use of hallucinogenic drugs. Excerpt:
"Drink, mortals, what the gods have sent,
Forget your long annoy."
So sang the priests. From tent to tent
The Soma's sacred madness went,
A storm of drunken joy.
Then knew each rapt inebriate
A winged and glorious birth,
Soared upward, with strange joy elate,
Beat, with dazed head, Varuna's gate,
And sobered, sank to earth.
Then Whittier moves to a comparison with modern (19th-century) intoxicants:
As in the child-world's early year,
Each after age has striven
By music, incense, vigils drear,
And trance, to bring the skies more near,
Or lift men up to heaven!
.....
And yet the past comes round again,
And new doth old fulfill;
In sensual transports wild as vain
We brew in many a Christian fane
The heathen Soma still!
and concludes with a prayer that God will remove our need for such intoxicants and "reclothe us in our rightful mind" by restoring us to the true religion of service and silent waiting on the Lord:
Let sense be numb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm!
Frederick Charles Maker, a Congregational organist in Bristol, England, composed the familliar hymn tune REST to fit the concluding stanzas of "The Brewing of Soma" in 1887. Whittier—who, like most Friends of his time, regarded music as a particularly pernicious intoxicant—would have been eighty by then, and I have no idea whether he ever knew of what he surely would have regarded as a desecration of his poem. It is ironic that today it is this hymn for which he is primarily remembered. I daresay ol' Cuz has been spinning in his grave for lo these hundred years.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Thank you, Unsplendid!
I do like to try new forms now and then. When I'm participating in a challenge such as National Poetry Writing Month, trying a new form is an excellent point of departure. The results tend to be, well, form-driven, and are best put away for a few months or years until I have enough distance to discern if they're worth posting to a poetry board for critique.
Most journals devoted to poetry in forms to which I have submitted seem to favor a rather narrow range of forms; or maybe they just haven't thought my experiments in oddball forms were good enough.
In any case, I was delighted to find Unsplendid, "an online journal of received and nonce forms". The editors will consider any form included in Lewis Turco's Book of Forms, plus nonce forms which you invent yourself. When they accepted my rondel prime, Legacy, for their issue 2.2, I felt I'd found a friend.
And now they have published Unjubilee — a favorite child that I've had difficulty finding a home for.
This was a poem for NaPoWriMo 2007 which still mystifies me. It seems to be sort of an accentual-alliterative rondeau. In writing it, I don’t think I was consciously going for accentual-alliterative, and am not sure I even realized until now how much alliteration is there. But for some reason I felt it would be incomplete without the caesuras (indicated by spaces within the long lines).
The Bible has always been a source of inspiration, though my use of it is hardly traditional. "Unjubilee" builds on the idea of Jubilee described in Leviticus 27, which aimed to redress inequities in wealth every 50 years by canceling debts and returning land to its original owners. I conferred with Douglas Basford, an editor of Unsplendid, about adding a note with the biblical reference, but we both felt that the page as set up was so beautiful and clean that we couldn't want to clutter it.
Most journals devoted to poetry in forms to which I have submitted seem to favor a rather narrow range of forms; or maybe they just haven't thought my experiments in oddball forms were good enough.
In any case, I was delighted to find Unsplendid, "an online journal of received and nonce forms". The editors will consider any form included in Lewis Turco's Book of Forms, plus nonce forms which you invent yourself. When they accepted my rondel prime, Legacy, for their issue 2.2, I felt I'd found a friend.
And now they have published Unjubilee — a favorite child that I've had difficulty finding a home for.
This was a poem for NaPoWriMo 2007 which still mystifies me. It seems to be sort of an accentual-alliterative rondeau. In writing it, I don’t think I was consciously going for accentual-alliterative, and am not sure I even realized until now how much alliteration is there. But for some reason I felt it would be incomplete without the caesuras (indicated by spaces within the long lines).
The Bible has always been a source of inspiration, though my use of it is hardly traditional. "Unjubilee" builds on the idea of Jubilee described in Leviticus 27, which aimed to redress inequities in wealth every 50 years by canceling debts and returning land to its original owners. I conferred with Douglas Basford, an editor of Unsplendid, about adding a note with the biblical reference, but we both felt that the page as set up was so beautiful and clean that we couldn't want to clutter it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)