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What to read? Picking poems

November 15, 2011 in Writing poetry | 1 comment

I thought I knew exactly what I’d read this Sunday. I went through the book and attached little blue sticky notes. I was ready!

Then I began to read through the poems, and as I leafed through the pages in between, I began to second-guess. Wait, shouldn’t I read a couple of the Intermezzos? Is reading the title poem kind of expected? And of course I want to read the first poem and the last poem and the poem with the train whistles and leaving and the one that has the nurse’s night shoes. But what about some of the others–the one about daffodils or “The Dark Is Drawn in Scents of White”? What about the Venice poems?

I can’t read them all. I generally figure about one poem per two minutes of reading time (unless they are long poems). And maybe that’s even too much.

I want to invite people on a journey. Or I can think of picking poems as choosing a menu. I want to serve people a delicious poetry feast–without stuffing them!

I’ll take another look today, maybe shift some sticky notes around.

How do you choose poems for a reading? Do you plan ahead, make a list, use sticky notes? Or do you wing it?

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Reading to write better

August 18, 2011 in Writing poetry | No comments

How do you learn your craft, sharpen your skill, incite your imagination?

Yesterday, Cati Porter asked what books people would recommend for a beginning writer–specifically, a young fiction writer who hasn’t taken any creative writing classes or read any books on writing craft and might be crushed by rejection.

Lately I’ve been seeking out texts that can help me sharpen my skills and write better poems. While providing a broad sampling of poets and poems, they have also led me to explore particular poets’ works more deeply.

Here are a few of the books have been helpful.

Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient FormsEcstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms
This book presents the poet’s statement about their poem and their writing, along with the poem. Reading the statements helped me to think more about how I write and what directions I might want to explore. And Charles Wright’s poem “Bar Giamaica, 1959-60 inspired me to write Bar, 1999.

Other poets included are Heather McHugh, Ann Lauterbach, John Yau, and more.

Lyric PostmodernismsLyric Postmodernisms
For me, this book has been a gem and a turning point.

Reginald Shepherd collected multiple examples from each poet. It doesn’t rush, but lingers to give the reader a feeling of each poet’s range–and it’s a good source for exploring sequences. Again, each poet provides a statement about the way he or she is approaching work at that time. This book introduced me to sequences, especially those of Mei Mei Berssenbrugge and Cole Swenson. I’ve now working on sequences since last November.

(Amazon.com is out of stock, but I’ll bet you can get it at Open Books.)

The Verse Book of Interviews provides the poets’ insights without the poems. I miss the poems, but the book does offer a great diversity of aesthetics and approaches.

These three have been the most helpful to me, and I’ve returned to them many times–while reading lots of poetry. I remain convinced that one of the best ways to learn and get inspired is to read a wide variety of poems. Currently, I’m inside Patti Smith’s collection of William Blake. Next up? More Anne Carson and some John Ashbery.

What do you read to open new doors? If you’ve found some treasures, please tell us in the comments.

P.S.
Cati started the list with Bird by Bird and Writing Down the Bones. Many other people on Facebook added their suggestions. I proposed One Continuous Mistake. I also recommended reading tons of fiction, because I learn the most about poetry by reading poetry. And I thought that reading biographies or memoirs of well-known writers might be helpful, because most of those writers were rejected, too. Finally, I wished there was a comic book about rejection. I’ve got some ideas…

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Reading, writing & riding the bus

March 30, 2011 in Writing poetry | 5 comments

This morning, CNN aired a segment with Bill Nye the science guy on alternative energy. He highlighted the idea of efficiency and the role of science and research in making alternative energy more efficient. No argument here—but this conversation consistently omits two key features: public transportation and muscle-powered transportation.

My point: If you produce fabulously efficient electric cars and replace all the existing vehicles with those cars, you’ll still have a ton of traffic and spend three hours crawling home on a rainy Friday night. If you replace, say, 40 of those cars with a desirable bus, I think you’ll go faster, more efficiently, with less dependence on foreign oil, presumably less pollution, etcetera.

Desirable? The argument always goes that Americans don’t want to give up their cars. And my argument: Get over it. Move on, but move onto a bus. Or walk, if you can. Walking more can address energy and traffic and the nation’s problem with obesity that we hear so much about.

Not everyone can walk—because of a disability or safety issues. Not everyone can ride a bus—you might not have access or it might take so many connections and hours that it just isn’t feasible. Or it might be late at night (potentially another safety issue). I get that. And I get that I’m really lucky to have a reasonable bus route and an employer subsidy. That’s a lot of incentive. If more people had access and incentive, I think more people would find the bus desireable.

How does this relate to poetry?

Reading and writing. The bus takes more time, but it also provides more time. Almost all my reading time is on the bus. This morning, it was Heterotopia, by Lesley Wheeler, after I did some free writing.

Other things you can do on the bus:

  • Read the paper.
  • Books on tape, for those who experience motion sickness.
    Knitting.
  • Movies—I’ve seen people watch movies on the bus.
  • Write. (If you can’t read on the bus, you might be able to write on the bus. This guy wrote a novel on the bus. Yes, we can be extraordinarily jealous, and we can also say, “Hey, I can do that, too.”)
  • Plan dinner.

I was thinking about all of this when I got onto my bus this morning, and then a woman came by with a survey to fill out. Serendipity! A chance to weigh in on my route. (Yes, it would be better if buses ran more often.)

Do you ride the bus?

If not, what prevents you? What changes would it take?

If so, how do you spend your time on the bus?

I don’t know whether anyone will even find this blog in its new location, but if you do, I’d love to hear from you.

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Little Bee

July 22, 2010 in Uncategorized | 1 comment


I love that feeling when I open a book and know before the end of the first page that I’m in good hands. The hands of a storyteller, with life lines and heart lines. The hands that shape the air. The hands that speak with confidence. The hands and voice of someone who knows how to pull the poetry out of the language—without it all falling in a heap on the ground.

I get that feeling when I begin to read a novel by Margaret Atwood. She might frighten me for decades, but she will write a good story well. I trust her.

This week, I’ve had that same feeling reading Little Bee, by Chris Cleave.

I know right away the story will have sharp edges and horror. Say Nigerian girl refugee and it’s easy to know that dots will be connected. But Mr. Cleave opens the story with a narrator and a voice that tell me clearly I don’t know how those dots will touch.

The voice—so important—sounds like a real person. I can hear her speaking. And when he changes the point of view (No! Don’t change the point of view), this new narrator sounds just as authentic in her very different person.

Then we have the poetry—striking images that make the language bloom without turning purple, without suffocating either story or voice.

Here is one I can’t get out of my head, in which the narrator describes an Indian woman trying to make a telephone call from a detention center outside of London:

“She was whispering into it some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.”

Like butterflies drowning in honey.

When I read that, I want to write like that. When I read prose like that, I want to write poetry.

It’s such a gift to be able to write like that, and I feel lucky for the gift of reading it.

What books send you to writing?

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How cool is that?

August 14, 2009 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

How wonderful? How unexpected? I’m still a bit dizzy, giddy.

This evening, I read at the It’s About Time series in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood. It was a festive evening, with a lot of open mike readers and a writer’s craft talk. And the other featured reader was Joan Swift, with whom I read in 1995. So that was a kind of reunion.

But…

Before the reading began, I saw a really familiar woman arrive. She sat in front of me. I heard her first name. I wondered about her last name. When she stood up for open mike and introduced herself, I knew.

We hadn’t seen each other in more than 25 years, and she was here. I met Pat Hurshell the first night of my first Nelson Bentley poetry workshop. It was my first venture into a poetry class since the workshop disaster of the previous fall. She was working on her doctorate. A few months later, she brought a poem to class that enchanted me. I used it as the inspiration to choreograph my modern dance senior project, and she came to a performance.

Over the years, I often thought about Pat and about the dance, and I wondered what she was doing.

But I had moved to New York for a few years, and I lost contact with a lot of people, including Pat.

Until tonight. It was about time. And I got to hear her read a poem.

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