Poetry Month Celebration

Promised: one fresh, new original unpublished poem. Delivered:

Love’s Reality

There is nothing better than
To be
In love with the outdoors
Where sun beams spark
Between oak and sweet gum
Leaves in cool summer breezes
Being in the middle of nature
With its crazy squirrely antics
Tumbling, wrestling, barking
Nothing beats dining al fresco
Watching reality’s sitcoms play out
Through the neighbors' windows

Paige von Liber

Listen to this article

I Haiku You

It is National Poetry Month once more. I was happy to feature hometown (San Diego) poet, Rae Armentrout, last week. She's the most recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.  Soon I'll publish FOR THE FIRST TIME ANYWHERE an original poem by a dedicated -- and possibly unpublished except for DIY and community sites -- poet. Wait for it ... wait for it ...

In the meantime, here is my annual, perpetual spring haiku:

Faking It The California Way

Shall I sweep or blow
Drifting pear tree petals
Look like SoCal snow

Alrighty then, moving along:  you may have noticed the possibly cryptic previous message about something called "Posterous" (a preposterous name for a website/service, no?)  I'm trying it out hopefully as a method to keep this RSS stream active after Blogger axes FTP uploads at the end of the month. (Just can't let go ...) Please note the correct use of an adverb.

If no silly LOLcat posting appears on May 1 -- or is it May 2 (hard to tell what Blogger.com is really going to do) -- we'll know it isn't working. Maybe.

Isn't this exciting?

Listen to this article

Poetry Pulitzer Armentrout

Poetry is short-hand communication. I don't know why academics and other intellectuals (critics) invoke "deconstruction" to explore the meaning of literature. With poetry, analysis is a matter of reconstructing the poets' messages into whole sentences.

Take the controversial and cryptic verse from David Lynch's equally weird movie and TV series, Twin Peaks:

"Thru the darkness of Future Past
  the magician longs to see
  one chants out between two worlds
  Fire - walk with me." ~ lynchnet.com/tp/

I've been thinking about death this week, more specifically, about writing a personal essay and starting an Artist Trading Cards series on the topic. This poem(?) has enchanted me for years, and here's one meaning I've decrypted:

Magicians desire to know the hidden future (which will instantly become the past). A particular magician stands at the crack/line/surface/veil between life/good and death/evil and calls out to fire, the element of both underground heat/hell/death/evil and aboveground air/heaven/good/life. The magician believes fire will allow movement between both realms, enabling vision or knowledge of past events which were/are the future and future events which are/will be the past.

All the slashes indicate alternative words which occur to me. One may sing to you best. Other poetry dealing with death just won a poet a Pulitzer Prize.

Rae Armantrout, a name familiar to me for the last 25 years, is a well-known poet and professor at UCSD. She's also the 2010 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Versed, which also won the NBCC in March. It is her 10th published book.

Listen to this article

Why Editors Say No

Ring! Ring! "Hello, editing central."
"I can't find your rates anywhere on your website!"
"That's because it depends on the work, the complexity and length, and the kind of editing services desired."
I convinced the caller at the other end of the country to email her "short story" for me to look over.  It turned out to be a rather nice story poem, written in contemporary verse. I wrote back:

Hi REDACTED,

Your lovely story poem is something I would not edit. Poems are so personal and so much creative writing rather than something to convey information.  Although I might punctuate it differently, I wouldn't know if I were violating your intentions. In poetry, copyediting matters are as much the author's tool as rhyme and word selection.

 

I will offer this advice, however:  read the poem out loud, maybe even into a recorder, and listen for the places where you want the reader's voice to continue to the next line without a break, and where you want pauses or stops.  Take away any punctuation that causes a break where you don't want one, and add the appropriate marks where you want a pause or stop.

 

Punctuation ranges from "snatch a breath" (comma) to full stop (period).  Semicolons formally separate phrases that could stand alone as complete sentences; a colon indicates a medium pause but continuing in the same tone of voice because what follows is an explanation of what came before the colon.  Use ellipses and em dashes sparingly. An ellipse marks a place where the voice trails off and pauses before starting a new sentence, while an em dash is a pause like a comma, only longer and the voice continues in the same tone.  As Jay Leno says:  exactly the same, only different!

 

I see no capitalization problems, but have you seen poetry by ee cummings?  That is another poet's choice! 

 

My minimum fee for any service is two hours of my maximum charge, $70 per hour. So, if you still want me to edit it, that's what you'd have to pay.  I suspect you can tweak it yourself with the information above.

 

Please keep me in mind for your future editorial needs.

 

Yours truly,

 

Georganna Hancock
10725 Escobar Drive
San Diego CA 92124
858-571-5390
A Writer's Edge  http://www.writers-edge.info
Hancock Websites  http://www.hancockwebsites.com

 

Just yesterday, I had to explain why I would/could not help a woman with her novel--she wanted developmental editing (POV, pacing, plot) and only on a partially written manuscript.  If I could do that type of editing fiction, I told her, I would be writing novels myself! 

Quick! Somebody send some solid nonfiction so I can get all up in your words.

Listen to this article

Memorial Day for Writers

American "Decoration Day" has morphed into "Memorial Day." People once flocked to cemeteries to decorate the graves of loved ones with flowers, abundant at the end of May. We could not help but think then of our recent and long-gone family members and friends. Some people don't want to recall their roots. They have worked hard to overcome the influences of dysfunctional dynasties or just plain rot.

I suggest that they are still who you are. Members of your family of origin are the characters who people your fiction and color your views of facts gathered for nonfiction. It is those people through whom your feelings are filtered every time you pen a poem. It won't hurt the person you've become to pause a moment and think about where you became from, recall who you've evolved through.

Thinking over old family stories, even the painful ones, can spark your writing career and provide insight to ongoing personal struggles. It wasn't until my mother's death almost exactly three years ago, that I glimpsed a fuller view of my personality's genesis. These are elements that make us writers and form our writing, worthy of remembering, if only once a year.

Listen to this article

Kill My Poem, Kill Me

Remember the article about What Is An Editor? I checked back with Quiche Moraine to see what's happening with that group of writers and found Mike Haubrich's poignant Writing as a Release and a Chore. It contains a horrific (to me) foray into his experience with a spouse who destroyed his poems.

This is an act that is unthinkable for me. I had a spouse who was utterly indifferent to most of my creative efforts, but I never had a whiff of fear that he might ruin any of it. Of course, I never dreamed he would walk out on such a long term relationship, or that terrorists would fly planes into the Twin Towers, or all the other traumatizing events I've experienced. Life continues to surprise me, jaded and ancient as I am.

If your life partner was so jealous or whatever of your creative endeavors that he or she irrevocably vanished them, what would you do? My first reaction would be to find a heavy, blunt object and give into the searing, blind rage. Maybe others are more mature or less involved with their endeavors, but my writing is me. Is poetry a special case? I do seem to feel more strongly about that than any other of my endeavors.

Listen to this article

Anti-Tobacco Ad Mondegreen

Mondegreens, Answers.com tells us, is a "series of words that result from the mishearing or misinterpretation of a statement or song lyric. [After (Lady) Mondegreen, a misinterpretation of the line (hae laid) him on the green, from the song “The Bonny Earl of Murray”.] Children come up with some good ones when learning the Pledge of Allegiance or the Star Spangled Banner.

More on the mondegreen in a moment. Listening to advertising increasingly violates my intelligence. Yes, yes, the Mad Men are trying to cram the most into less time, now 10-second spots.

So, as I drowse through breaks in Days of Our Lives, I hear "Friskies wet indoor cat food". Two seconds later the phrase registers, stirs up all sorts of questions concerning wet cats and feeding cats outdoors. I don't hear any more of the advertising for the next 7.5 minutes because I'm trying to remember the humorous flap that made the rounds of Mensa newsletters many years ago. I think it was a campaign by 9 Lives brand cat food to collect can labels to trade for merchandise, as was once done with cigarette wrappers. But the 9 Lives people persisted in calling it the "9 Live Soft Moist Coupon Offer". Yeah, we said, but collecting those soft, moist coupons made such a mess.

Currently I listen to the latest TV spots aimed at preventing underage smoking. It's a hodge-podge of images and sounds that don't quite make sense, even when I try to think like an ad designer. The part that ties back to the beginning of this article comes as a singing voiceover at the beginning of the spot. A gentle mother's voice croons a familiar lullaby by Brahams, Lullaby and Goodnight. It has several verses, but most people know just the first:

Lullaby, and good night,
With pink roses bedight,
With lilies o'erspread,
Is my baby's sweet head.
Lay thee down now, and rest,
May thy slumber be blessed.
Lay thee down now, and rest,
May thy slumber be blessed.

However, the female voice sings the second line as "With pink roses bed light," The baby's bed or cradle is bedecked with lilies and roses, unlike my poor troll's baby buggy. Yes, it is insignificant, but how I spend the days of my life. Amused and sad.

Listen to this article

Mother's Day Poet's Birthday

• May 10
  • Arizona-born African-American jazz and performance poet Jayne Cortez (1936), whose poetry is concerned with racial injustice and political oppression

Listen to this article

Honor Poetry Month

Poetry writing can't be taught. Well, maybe you can learn strict rhyming limericks or doggerel (like I write) . The synthesis of metaphor and sound constituting lyrical, literary works is another matter. But perhaps we can learn from poets' lives and interpretations of their works.

Annenberg Media offers at Learner.org, a video instructional series on American poetry with one-hour video programs and coordinated books, dramatic readings, archival photographs, dance, performances, and interviews of 13 American poets.

The Voices & Visions multi-media program is for high school and adult learners. Although purchasing the series is expensive, it appears that if you register, you can have free access to video streaming media.

Listen to this article

2008 is Dead

At the year's end it seems fitting to observe THE DEAD by Billy Collins Poetry, American Poet Laureate


Discovered via The Wisest Possible Poetry Blog

Listen to this article