Writers-in-Progress

Two, Count 'Em, TWO Upcoming Poetry Festivals

It's an embarrassment of riches poets and poetry fans - here are two fabulous upcoming poetry festivals - both local, one planned by Yours Truly. Come on out and show your love for the art!

First Day Poetry Bash - Creative Alliance - Baltimore, MD

Creative Alliance celebrates the New Year with a wildly diverse day of words and music. Join Charm City Kitty Club stars Rahne Alexander and Lucky Baltimore, Underground Poetry Godfather Blaster Al Ackerman and literary luminaries Stan Plumly, Clarinda Harriss, Michael Salcman, and Linda Joy Burke. Throw in the Baltimore Improv Group, CA Resident Artist and beatbox master Shodekeh (and so many more fabulous people we can't list them here) and you've got one awesome creative community all gathered under the Patterson's roof for an epic day of poetry, in the spirit of the annual marathon festival at St. Mark's Church in NYC.

Big plus: It's all to benefit Creative Alliance's Arts Education programs.

DO NOT miss this incredibly cool start to 2008!!

Details: January 1, 2008, 11 am - 5 pm

Cost: $5 per person

www.creativealliance.org

Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness - Washington, DC

You are invited to our nation’s capital for a festival that celebrates our great tradition of poetry of witness and resistance.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, walking tours, and activism—a unique opportunity to hone our activist skills while we assess and debate the public role of the poet and the poem in this time of crisis.

As citizens and artists, our obligation has never been greater. We call on poets of conscience to move to the center of public life as we forge a visionary new arts movement for peace and justice.

Featured poets: Chris August, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Melissa Best (aka Princess of Controversy), Robert Bly, Kenneth Carroll, Grace Cavalieri, Lucille Clifton, Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade), Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Carolyn Forché, Brian Gilmore, Sam Hamill, Joy Harjo, Galway Kinnell, Stephen Kuusisto, Semezhdin Mehmedinovic, E. Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Alix Olson, Alicia Ostriker, Ishle Yi Park, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy, Pamela Uschuk, and Belle Waring.

www.splitthisrock.org

Scottish Poet Douglas Dunn at Hopkins

Because you have to be pyschic to know when poets and writers are giving readings at Johns Hopkins University (they don't publicize their calendar through email notifications/mailing lists) GRRR, I just found out that Scottish poet Prof. Douglas Dunn (from St. Andrews) is giving three readings at Hopkins. There's one tonight at Homewood - the Percy Graeme Turnball Memorial Lecture - 6 pm in Maryland 110 - that's the second. There was another last night. The third is Thursday, the 15th, at the School of Medicine near Hopkins Hospital, in Hurd Hall - 5 pm, if there are locals interested.

For those of you who can't make it - here are a few of his poems:

THE KALEIDOSCOPE

To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray,
Might be to find you pillowed with your books,
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope,
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by the open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.
__________________________________________

LOVE POEM

I live in you, you live in me;
We are two gardens haunted by each other.
Sometimes I cannot find you there,
There is only the swing creaking, that you have just left,
Or your favourite book beside the sundial.

A Little West Wind

Doing the old office calendar/newsletter - I'm the 'poetry correspondent' :) - and decided to insert this one for everyone to read. I try to sneak the classics in there when I can! I think we can all use a little reminder about how amazing Shelley is, so here's the opening section to "Ode to the West Wind":

Ode to the West Wind
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave,until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

Important Articles for Writers

You'll find everything from copywright to contracts, foreign rights, collaborating with other writers, etc.

http://www.ivanhoffman.com/helpful.html

Whitman's "Five Thousand Poems"

From November Boughs:

"I should like, for myself, to put on record my devout acknowledgment not only of the great masterpieces of the past, but of the benefit of all poets, past and present, and of all poetic utterance—in its entirety the dominant moral factor of humanity’s progress. In view of that progress, and of evolution, the religious and æsthetic elements, the distinctive and most important of any, seem to me more indebted to poetry than to all other means and influences combined. In a very profound sense religion is the poetry of humanity. Then the points of union and rapport among all the poems and poets of the world, however wide their separations of time and place and theme, are much more numerous and weighty than the points of contrast.

Without relation as they may seem at first sight, the whole earth’s poets and poetry—en masse—the Oriental, the Greek, and what there is of Roman—the oldest myths—the interminable ballad-romances of the Middle Ages—the hymns and psalms of worship—the epics, plays, swarms of lyrics of the British Islands, or the Teutonic old or new—or modern French—or what there is in America, Bryant’s, for instance, or Whittier’s or Longfellow’s—the verse of all tongues and ages, all forms, all subjects, from primitive times to our own day inclusive—really combine in one aggregate and electric globe or universe, with all its numberless parts and radiations held together by a common centre or verteber.

To repeat it, all poetry thus has (to the point of view comprehensive enough) more features of resemblance than difference, and becomes essentially, like the planetary globe itself, compact and orbic and whole. Nature seems to sow countless seeds—makes incessant crude attempts—thankful to get now and then, even at rare and long intervals, something approximately good."

God I love Whitman.

Workin' It - New Version of Kiss Poem

I keep thinking of how I'm not sharing much of my own work/process on this site, so y'all can see I'm writing (ie struggling) too! Here's a new version of a previously posted poem. It's much better. I was playing it too safe before. Probably still am, but we'll see. Note that you can read the second lines of each stanza all the way down as a second poem. The stanzas are 3 lines each - tercets - but they are long lines, so some will turn into 4 line stanzas, alas.

NEW KISS

His kiss is an opening, even as
it’s the last
brick in the wall that seals another’s off in airless

space. A second ending,
his new erases
the promised land of the other’s old, and I want to keep

them both. Hard to give up
the adopted country
of an ex-lover’s kiss, having lived with its doctrine

for so long you forget the wilds
you used to wish for.
Because the kiss feels unfinished—we never got

to the bottom of it, after all, after
all that searching
in the mouth’s dark, where somewhere there’s a mirror,

or a window, or a sky where,
if you find yourself
watching from the other side—as if you were the moon—

over the dreamer (also you),
then you’ll never have
to go that deep again, just hand over your heart and be done

with its care and feeding, just go
to sleep in a new cage.
Perhaps every year we should gather those we’ve kissed

and kiss them again to remind ourselves:
yes, the lie
continues, the way we meant to create it. Because you want

to burn, but only in small doses, the light
of real love
is too damn bright—even the earth turns away from the sun.

Christine Stewart. All Rights Reserved.