Day 9: Here Lies the Thing I Most Desire

This project has been an incredible journey so far.  What an amazing thing to get to dig and dig into the history of the community I grew up in!  At it's root history means to ask.  The fragility and disparity of history is easiest to see in local history because you are so close to the source.  What is history but a lot of people telling stories.  I guess the writers job is to unwind a few of those yarns and look at them more closely before they fall apart.  Today's prompt brought me on an interesting journey.  I was researching the immigrants who founded the apple industry here in Sebastopol and came across an interesting story of what happened to Japanese-Americans living in Sebastopol when they were interned during World War II.  We are lucky to have an incredible Buddhist Temple in town named Enmanji (which means garden of fulfillment).  The temple was built by the Manchurian Railroad and displayed at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.  After the fair the building was donated and shipped to our town.  There were many familys effected by the internment.  For some, neighbors harvested their fruit and paid the tax on their lands to keep them afloat (like the Furusho family), for others (like the original heirs of Fountaingrove the Nagasawa family) everything was lost.  For today's draft, I tried to think about what it would have been like being stuck at the desert internment camps, so far away, listening to stories of worries and fear and not knowing what to believe.

There Lies the Thing I Most Desire
            for the Furusho family

Dark oaks spun their crippled fingers over
the star-slurred sky the night our family left
our apple orchard for internment camp.
Now, we live in horse stalls where air is stiff
and void of fog.  I’ve paced these wooden planks
worrying futilely over the harvest
we left behind day and night but there is
no wind here strong enough to carry my
prayers back to our temple Enmanji.
Now its name, garden of fulfillment, stings,
like a face slap.  Letters from the Holte and
Williams boys promise to pick and sell our
fruit but trust is difficult to plow here
each stall where whispers root and spread their rot
wood to wood just as the oaks roots carry
fungus that left will kill your apple trees.

Day 8: Susurration

Today's prompt is the word susurration, which means to whisper. The word is from the Greek word for flute, which made me think of Ovid's account of Pan hearing the wind in the reeds then creating the flute to mimic this sound. It made me think about how tied to our water sources we are here in Sonoma County and how for early apple farmers ample water was what made their success possible. So I traced the path of one of our major creeks: Atascadero and found its source started at one of my favorite places in Sonoma County - English hill on Burnside road (also known as the three sisters by cyclists). From Burnside on a clear day you can see all the way to the ocean in one direction and all the way back to Sebastopol in the other. It's a beautiful perspective. Here is my draft of a poem for today:



Susurration

Tule sway in the wind carrying song
from creek bed to creek bed: Atascadero
born on English hill where the sea lingers
on the horizon like a forgotten
idea, flows back over Gold Ridge to town
then veers away toward Green Valley. And all
along that blue song moans, fog and limestone,
above then below the ground. From patchwork
hills the orchard leaves whisper reverently
back until there is a song spoken in
pale pink blossoms that rise from each trees’
green budded but dark, delicate fingers.

Day 7: Slightly Bereft

Today's prompt was: slightly bereft.  The word bereft comes from germanic roots meaning to rob (which is interesting given the history of the Gravenstein apple).  I spent most of the morning looking at photos of the Gravenstein Apple Show which took place in Sebastopol from 1910 - 1915. It was quite a grand affair and over 25,000 attended the show that first year.  The show featured sculptures of historic places (like Fort Ross) and apple growing scenes.  What I discovered was that the show was stopped in 191 due to the onset of World War I when Sebastopol began to ship off many of it's young men as well as supply the army with dried apples for soldiers overseas.  I began to think about how strange it must have been to ship out down the Petaluma river, following the same route of the apples your family had been sending out for years.  Here's my attempt at a poem for today's prompt:

After the 1915 Gravenstein Apple Show

“The Gravenstein Apple has, above all others, proved to be the money winner in Sonoma County.  It is a healthy vigorous tree.  It always bears a good crop, never over-bearing, as many varieties do; is of the best quality of all known apples”
      –Luther Burbank

After the logging, after the plowing,
the planting, the yield, most hills stood slightly
bereft but ever producing apples.
To celebrate the escalation of
apples sales, the Sebastopol Apple
Growers Union raised a tent across from
the train depot, began the Gravenstein
Apple Show in 1910.  Photos show
uniformed boys lined in neat rows, women
dressed in white floor-length dresses, entering
the sawdust floored tent.  Inside, the warm air
swelled with the tart picked apples arranged in
sculptures that set into form history
of the apple, the town.  Fictions or truths
built out of the bittersweet fruit yielded
gristmills, locomotives, a gold ridge farm.
even Gold, a Petaluma river
steamship that shipped the apples down the slough
to San Francisco Bay.  Until war closed
the fair and that same steamship was loaded
instead with the cargo of men and boys,
their arms still browned from the season’s harvest
their eyes looking back to the golden hills. 

Day 6: Your obvious homage to your grandmother

Since my project thus far has been to write about the Gravenstein apple and the history of Sebastopol, I found today's daily writing prompt hard.  My grandmother never lived in Sebastopol and her only connection to Sebastopol is through myself and my parents.  But, my Grandmother has an interesting past.  She came to California from Oklahoma as a young girl in the dust bowl (she always told me she didn't think Steinbeck got it right when he wrote The Grapes of Wrath).  She was always eager to retell things the way they really were.  When she ended up in California she worked long hours at a peach cannery in Atwater.  During the 1920s many women worked long hours in food production plants.  And it was this thought brought me back to Sebastopol.  (There is always a road back, isn't there?)  After the apple industry took off, there were 100,000s of delicate apples to pack and ship across the United States.  It was women (like my grandmother) who worked long hours in these packing house jobs.  Here is my (not so obvious) homage to my grandmother's work and a little story she told me about reciting poems to stave off the boredom of such repetitive work.

Tending the Gold Ridge, 1920

Each day a new field was plowed and planted.
Each season production would swell.  Each fruit
handpicked into wooden crates, delivered
by wagon or truck to the packinghouse.
Then, the small, red-striped globes were placed
into shipping crates.  How tiring to
stand ten hours a day sorting good from bad.
It was women’s work.  Closed-doored, but
checkered with sunlight brought from high windows.
A dull, quiet work that could open or
close that quiet wilderness of mind.

Decades later, when their bodies had grown
old, when their minds strobbed memories—
that wilderness (however conquered) would
return.  In a few lines by Tennyson
about an old king who traveled far and
couldn’t return home: but every hour is saved.
How those words illuminate the musty smell
of the packing house, the ache of feet,
but also the ballet of young hands, the hum
of low voices staving off silence with
by repeating the few poems they knew by heart

Day 5: The accidental poem

Today, I looked into Nathaniel Griffith (the man who planted the first commercial Gravenstein apple orchard in Sonoma County on his Laguna Road property).  He was good friends with Luther Burbank (hence the trip out to For Ross I mentioned yesterday) and they often met to discuss altering the Gravenstein to extend it's season.  I've seen cuttings of the Winterstein, one of these variations of the Gravenstein that never really took off at Burbank's experimental farm in Sebastopol.  While I was researching Griffith though, I came across my "accidental poem".  Turns out, Griffith had three daughters, all of whom were extremely artistic.  One of these daughters, Grace, was an incredible painter.  Here are a few of her paintings I was able to find online.  What's interesting is how after the orchard was gone, after the farmhouse had burned down and their father had died, the girls (who had all had pretty successful careers as artists) returned to live on the property in their old age.  And if you look Grace's work, it appears in her artistic mind she never left.  Here is attempt at a draft for today:

The Accidental Pull

Griffith brought Burbank to his orchard on
the flat Laguna.  From his home the trees
spelled across the wide expanse in straight rows. 
Already, they were good servants –yielding
a ton of fruit each.  But the season was
short.  Burbank had ideas for winter fruits:
the Winterstein, still bittersweet tasting,
but with tougher skin to withstand the frosts.

The three girls could see the men on the porch
as they sat in the skirt of soft grass surrounding
the willow.  Spring had covered the grass
between rows of apple trees in yellow
mustard.  They made a game of following
the strokes of color – the low freckle of mustard,
the high powdery acacia, to the
solitary exclamations of
yellow iris crowing the front yard.  Years
later, after Burbank’s experimental
trees had failed.  After their father had died
and the green wooden farmhouse had burned down.

They would remember this inventory:
how that day the golden lines had burned in
them a tether to this land.  And each day
after they would try to pull themselves back.

Day 4: The cottonwood I lived in as a child was a comfort when I found out I couldn't fly

Fort Ross was the first white settlement on the Sonoma Coast and it is celebrating it's 200th aniversary this year.  It's also where many (including Luther Burbank) found the oldest specimen of the Gravenstein Apple tree.  In the early 1900s, they discovered a tree there that they suspected was over 100 years old.  I've been haunted by this fact, and the state Fort Ross would have been in when they visited Fort Ross to find the tree.  The Russian settlers were by then long gone (they left in 1849) and the buildings must have been run down.  The fort has been set aside as state land, but little had been done to preserve it at that time. It was just a bunch of rundown buildings stuck in a huge cattle ranch right on the Sonoma Coast.  There was one old house where (I believe) the cattle rancher and his family lived.  Today's poem which is written off the prompt: The cottonwood I lived in as a child was a comfort when I found out I couldn't fly.  As you might have guessed, I switched the tree to apple.  Here is my attempt at a draft.

Upon Finding the First Gravenstein Apple Tree
--Fort Ross, CA, 1912

By the time the two horticulturalists
Griffith and Burbank discovered the tree
it had been bearing fruit one-hundred years.
These days, few lived at the decrepit fort.
Only the cattle farmer, his family,
and the Pomo servants who cleaned and cooked.

It was a willowy boy who emerged
from the white clapboard house on the steep cliff,
who led them reverently down the thin worn
path to the tree.  A few red, shriveled globes
still clung to its bare branches.  Immediately,
the men were sure it was the specimen
they had been looking for and went to work.

They began picking the shriveled globes, and breaking
off cuttings to bring back to Burbank’s farm. 
Without words the boy flung himself into
the tree’s wide crotch then shimmied his body
out to the edge where he could see the cold
deep waters that frothed the bay below. 

He became so much a part of the tree
the men, busy in their work, mindful of the long journey back
to town forgot he was there.  When he said,
“This is the tree where I learned to fly” His
breath folded, effortlessly into the
rough wind that flapped their canvas pants like sails.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Late breaking addition (thanks to Mari L'Esperance who graciuosly sent me the picture and made my day).  Here is an actual photo of a gravenstein apple tree at Fort Ross (the photo was taken in 2008).

Day 3: A Tiny Love Poem

The prompt for today was to write a tiny love poem.  I'm still stuck on the discovery I made yesterday -- that Gravenstein Apples (the apples that Sebastopol, the town I'm from and am currently writing about) are originally from Schleswig (what is now Northern Germany).  They were brought there from Italy by Prince Carl von Ahlefeldt then planted in orchards around the castle.  A century later, some of the Gravensteins were brought to Fort Ross (near Jenner) and were later introduced to the Sebastopol area where they took off as a crop.  So, my love poem is about apples and an old cemetery near where I live called Pleasant Hill.  Here is my draft.  This project is turning out to be so much fun.  I think it's going to be hard to doing else but write poems all month! 

Pleasant Hill Cemetery, Sebastopol, CA
The old gravestones are tiny granite-tongued
love poems covering the dead who now
mix with the soil they once plowed and planted.

And all around the air-bound apple blossoms
still powder the air with possibility.

The arthritic trees that surround in straight
dirt rows are still fruit bearing. These days
children steal their delicate branches with
little cost (no more beatings from farmers
who saw what each blossom would become).

The children pluck the tiny white blossoms, carry
them carefully in their palms to the creek
where the blossoms float: white, barren fairies
in the still, black limestone bedded pool.

Day 2: Facing NaPoWriMo with a Plan

This year I'm facing my thirty day writing stint with a plan.  It seems to help to have a topic to fall back on when you take on a long-term writing project.   I've taken on writing about the history of Sebastopol, the small town where I grew up and currently live.  My first poem was about the early history of Sebastopol.  My second, traced the history of the Gravenstein Apple.  If you are looking for a prompt for today, here is the one I wrote off of:

Day 2 Prompt: Ossuary - a place or receptacle for the bones of the dead.

Happy Writing!

Poem-a-day Begins Today

Happy National Poetry Month!

For the past two years I've written a poem a day throughout the month of April in celebration of National Poetry Month.  It's an amazing experience.  Today I'm writing a poem from a prompt given to me by Molly Fisk and Lisa Cihlar "How will I find you without a map?"  So, I better stop blogging and start writing!  If you are interested in joining us just post a comment with your contact information below and I'll email you the details.  Good luck! 

You can also sign up to receive a poem a day in your email inbox here.   It's a lovely way to read poetry every day even after National Poetry Month has ended.
And don't forget to leave a comment on my blog post about The Big Poetry Giveaway!  You can win a book by the poet Amy Lowell or an anthology my work was featured in called What Redwoods Know. 

The Big Poetry Giveaway Has Begun Again!

It's that time of year again - National Poetry Month.  A time when many of us poets get frenzied and start doing crazy things like writing a poem a day, handing out poems to random passersby and giving away books of poetry.  This year, I'll be doing all three!  More on the poem-a-day project and poem in your pocket efforts later.  Today's post is about The Big Poetry Giveaway.  Kelli Russell Agodon over at her blog The Book of Kells has been organizing this giveaway for the past three years.  Last year I gave away a copy of my chapbook Inheritance and a copy of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.  This year, I'll be giving away a copy of the wonderful anthology I'm a part of, What the Redwoods Know  along with a book of poems by Amy Lowell.  

As many of you know, Amy Lowell has been an important part of my journey to becoming a poet.  I wrote my dissertation on her influence on modern lyric poetry.  I'd be happy to give away a copy of Lowell's Selected poems edited by the lovely poet Honor Moore in hopes of getting more people to read Lowell.  In case you haven't read Amy Lowell's work, below is one of her short lyric poems from Two Speak Together.


July, Midnight
 
Fireflies flicker in the tops of trees,
Flicker in the lower branches,
Skim along the ground.
Over the moon-white lilies
Is a flashing and ceasing of small, lemon-green stars.
As you lean against me,
Moon-white,
The air all about you
Is slit, and pricked, and pointed with sparkles of lemon-green flame
Starting out of a background of vague, blue trees.

What Redwoods Know was an extraordinary book project I was a part of this past summer.  As many of you might know many of our state parks in California are facing permanent closure.  In response to this terrible threat, the Sonoma County poet Katherine Hastings organized hikes for poets in Annadel, Sugarloaf and Jack London State Park.  On these hikes we wrote and spoke about the places we were in.  This anthology is a result of the creative work that came out of these hikes.  Below is one of my poems which is included in the book.  It's about Jack London State Park -- the place where I discovered I was a writer on a six grade field trip many years ago. 

At Wolf House

This time, I walk directly to the back steps. 
No circuitous journey.  No wide gaze
accumulating the destruction of this place.
This time, in full light, I meet the gaze of your ghost.

And the world drops away leaving only
flies orbiting, a tether of bird song, distant, tenuous,
a heat that rises from the earth like a promise.

O fairy ring of Redwoods sprung from fiery tongue,
open the blue box of heaven you gate with green fingers. 

There are two wills at work here:
that which will destroy and that which will stubbornly remain. 
Stone ruins rise, half-shadowed and covered in moss. 
A few iron girders propped to hold up walls.

But the breath of wind, that velvet tongue, licks the place clean as bone. 
Spirit and story are what keep the fire-washed stones in place,
that keep the stones lifted off tongues.  What reflects back isn’t recordable:
it grows in you—seeds to places unknown. 

If you are interested in entering to win a copy of Amy Lowell's Selected Poems, or a copy of What the Redwoods Know, all you have to do is write a comment below that contains your contact information.  On April 30th, I'll randomly draw a name out of a hat and send the books to you!  Good luck!

Poetry Invades the State Capital

This past weekend, I attended the state championships of Poetry Out Loud.  Poetry Out Loud is a poetry recitation contest started by poet Dana Gioia when he was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.  Dana was at this years' state competition.  He inspired the students (and coaches and family) with both the history and vision of the program. 

Dana Gioia, Brynna Thigpen and myself

My student, Brynna Thigpen, won our Sonoma County competition and was representing our county in the state competition.  I've been a poet-coach in the Poetry Out Loud program for several years now, but I had never seen the competitions above the county level until this past weekend.  It was extraordinary.  Thirty-three county champions descended upon the state capital, reciting poetry in a competition to find a state champion.  Hearing 15-18 year-olds expertly recite poetry from poets as diverse as Shakespeare and Billy Collins in the Senate Chambers was phenomenal.  To compete at this level students must spend hours memorizing and close-reading the poems they recite.  It was such a joy to think in every state the same competition is occurring.  That across America, over 500,000 students have had the opportunity to choose a poem that speaks to them, to memorize it, to deeply understand it and to perform their poems in front of an audience.  My student didn't win the state finals, but she worked hard and did very well.  And in the end, she told me that through the process she had developed a love for poetry that she felt would last a lifetime.  What could be better than that?

California Poets in the Schools - French Garden Fundraiser April 21, 2:30 - 4:30

Many of you know that I've been teaching poetry in the schools for the past decade or so.  It's an amazing experience to say the least.  This year I taught Sapphic Fragments to students who were writing in English as a second language and was (as I always am) floored by how brilliantly my students wove their voices between ancient Greek fragments and their own modern words. 

Purple flowers divided in earth.
Salt sea, flowery fields, magical, magical world.
All stars.  Roses bloom.  Your tender heart.
Sweet apples on a tree.  Sweet apples on the boughs.
Dark purple-brown butterflies fly in the sunny-shiny sun.
---Estefania, 3rd grade

California Poets in the Schools is the organization that I work for.  And, as with just about everything else in California, the organization's funding has been drastically cut.  In order to allow us to continue to teach in schools that cannot afford to hire us as poet-teachers we've obtained some grant money, but are holding fundraisers in order to match that money.  Long story short, we are having a benefit at French Garden to raise money in order to support teacher poetry in the schools.  If you live in Sonoma County, please come join us!  Students, including our Sonoma County Poet Out Loud champion Brynna Thigpen, will be performing their poetry.  Delicious snacks will be served and there will be an excellent silent auction.

For those of you far away (who aren't struggling for funding yourselves) please consider sending in a tax deductible donation.  You can make checks payable to: California Poets in the Schools (CPITS) and send them to my attention at: 201 Wagnon Rd., Sebastopol, CA 95472

See below for a full description of the event.  Hope to see you there!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FRENCH GARDEN POETRY, VOICES OF YOUTH

Fundraiser for California Poets in the Schools 

On Saturday, April 21, French Garden Restaurant in Sebastopol presents poetry through the eyes and from the voices of youth. The program will last from 2:30 to 4:30, with hors d’oeuvres, coffee, sodas and sparkling water provided by the restaurant, and the entertainment by Sonoma County students, ranging from 2^nd grade through high school.

Among the student presenters will be finalists from the Sonoma County Poetry Out Loud Competitions. These students are the crème of their high school crop, having memorized some of the greatest poems written in English and won school-wide competitions in a spelling bee style contest.

Other student presenters will be elementary and middle school youngsters who have written outstanding poems of their own, with the assistance of their dedicated poet-teachers from California Poets in the Schools (CPITS.) CPITS is one of the oldest and largest artist-in-residence programs in the United States. With the guidance of the poet-teacher and the inspiration of great poems from the past, students often write work wise far beyond their years, as in this 2^ndgrader’s poem from Graton’s Oak Grove School:

The Great Bird

           

A bird, all life on the tips of its wings.

If it flaps its wings, a giant earthquake

cracks the earth in two.

Where is this great bird?

I will search in the sky and deep into the earth.

I pray this bird will soon be upon me.

I am old and gray from looking.

But I search for this wonderful bird

until the end of time.

I am still full of hope.

QUINN HORAK, 2^nd Grade

Oak Grove School, Sonoma County

Ellen Dougalss, Classroom Teacher

Phyllis Meshulam, Poet Teacher

The French Garden Restaurant is located at 8050 Bodega Ave., Sebastopol. For more information, call (707) 486-7450 to speak with Phyllis Meshulam, Sonoma County area coordinator of CPITS, or 707- 824-2030 to reach the restaurant.

            Come to Sebastopol for the Apple Blossom Parade, and stay to hear poetry!!

This event is free to the students, $5 for their parents, and for others, a recommended donation of $10 - $50. Sonoma County Poets in the Schools is the recipient of a competitive California Arts Council grant for $3,500, but it must be matched dollar for dollar with local money. 100% of all proceeds from the afternoon’s event will go to matching this grant.

A silent auction will be taking place concurrently.

New Review of my Book, Inheritance

One more quick post! Moira Richards reviewed my chapbook Inheritance over at the Fiddler Crab Review.  Check it out here:  http://fiddlercrabreview.blogspot.com/2012/03/inheritance-by-iris-jamahl-dunkle.html

Poems Written in Computer Code

I just found a call for work for code poems - or poems written in computer code.  As a former web developer, this type of writing fascinates me.  Computer code when you re-contextualize as a poetic tool, can be expansive, can open up new meaning to words.  When I think about the possibilities that exist in regards to using computer code (such as Perl, XML, HTML and Javascript) to expand language, I am reminded of what Gertrude Stein says she was thinking about when she wrote Tender Buttons.  She claims she was trying to give language back the elasticity and energy it had before the dictionary tied words down to direct meaning.  Perhaps, computer code will offer us another opening or opportunity to invigorate language?  I hope so!  Below, is a link to my attempt at a code poem.  It includes HTML, Perl, XML and Javascript. 
http://www.raftmagazineonline.com/Raft01/Dunkle/Dunkle.html

AWP 2012

You know you have been at AWP too long when you think you see Dinty Moore at the hotel bar – no, not the hotel bar where the conference hotel, but at another hotel bar on your long journey back home from the world where everyone is a writer to the real life you find yourself immersed in on a daily basis.  I, for one, thoroughly enjoy the emersion that AWP offers.  From the time I stepped off the plane in Chicago, I was braided up in situations and conversations with writers from across the US.  A travel writer guided me to the subway and we rolled slowly into Chicago from O’Hare.  Then, the windy city opened up before me.  I ate deep dish pizza, dodged winds that screeched like red tailed hawks., but otherwise was happily encased in the the Hilton hotel. 

What does it mean to be islanded in a sea of writers?  Today, just before I made the rash decision to bail out early and catch a cab to my airport hotel, I sat across the room from Alice Notely while she drank a cup of coffee.  Call me a stalker, but, sitting there exhausted, I was filled with glee just to be sitting across from one of my favorite poets.  Sure, I’d seen her panel and had her sign the new books I’d bought.  I’d blabbered like a groupie about how once, so many years ago, I’d been a 24 year-old grad student sitting across from her in her Paris apartment asking her questions for an interview I’d later publish in our school lit mag.  She graciously said she remembered, then smiled and turned to the next in line.  But, sitting there just a day later, I felt it all rushing back.  The joy and awe it is to be a young writer and to bump up against the humanity of your favorite writers.  And that's just what AWP offers.  That, and the laberinthian book fair. 

On Saturday, I had the distinct honor of being on a panel with three poets I admire:  Phyllis Meshulam, Gywnn O'Gara and Tobey Kaplan.  We spoke about the joy of teaching poetry recitation to high school students through Poetry Out Loud.  Later this month, we'll be heading to Sacramento to hear our county winner compete at the state level.  She'll be reciting "The Room" by Conrad Aiken, a difficult, but wonderful poem (see below).  My talk was on how teaching students the art of close reading enables them to better connect with and therefore recite their poems. 

One of the highlights of the conference was hearing my former teacher Jean Valentine speak about the recently deceased, Eleanor Ross Taylor.  Taylor was an extradinary poet and Jean was an extraordinary teacher.  (More on this panel later...)

Okay, now it's back to real life.  The laundry, picking up the kids from school, but isn't it lovely that always in the background I'll have memories of this past weekend reeling in my mind?

The Room By Conrad Aiken

Through that window — all else being extinct

Except itself and me — I saw the struggle

Of darkness against darkness. Within the room

It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw

How order might — if chaos wished — become:

And saw the darkness crush upon itself,

Contracting powerfully; it was as if

It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.

Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but pain.

What else, when chaos draws all forces inward

To shape a single leaf? . . .

For the leaf came,

Alone and shining in the empty room;

After a while the twig shot downward from it;

And from the twig a bough; and then the trunk,

Massive and coarse; and last the one black root.

The black root cracked the walls. Boughs burst the window:

The great tree took possession.

Tree of trees!

Remember (when time comes) how chaos died

To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have courage,

Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed

With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.

I will be watching then as I watch now.

I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.

National Novel Writing Month

As most of you know, this month is National Novel Writing Month (or Nanowrimo) and this year, I've decided to join in.  I know, I know.  I'm not a fiction writer.  I'm a poet.  But ever since I left Pennsylvania, I haven't been able to shake the story of the town of Pithole, an oil boom town from the late 1860s.  The history of the town and the characters who lived there have been under my skin for the past six months.  I've written endless poems about them (a whole book of them if you can believe) but still can't shake the characters.  So,  I'm trying to write myself out of Pithole with a novel.  Or, rather, something which will be more like a novella.  So far, I've written just under 5000 words and I'm still going strong. 

What Sappho and Online Learning Have in Common

Last week, I had the pleasure of teaching a f2f workshop on online learning in Clarion, PA.  The class was made up of about 20 professors who teach women's studies courses across Pennsylvania.  It was a great workshop!  One of the topics we spoke about what how when you teach online, you need to think like Sappho.  Don't be stifled by technology as it is.  Instead, reinvent it!  In one of Sappho's most famous fragments, fragment 31, she writes the following:
That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech

In this poem, she compares the man who gets to sit next to the women she loves to a god.  Now, in Greek poetry before Sappho (most famously in Homer) the only people who were compared to Gods were war heroes.  But, Sappho wasn't talking about war, she was talking about love and she needed a way to embody the emotion she was writing about it.  So, she thought differently and reinvented an existing motif.

When we think about how to use technology to enhance our online classes, we have to think the same way. Not, what is the technology and how is it best used.  Rather, how can I reinvent this technology in order to best use it in my class.

And the lucky winners are ...

Thanks to everyone who participated in my National Poetry Month free book give away.  I used the random number generator at random.org to choose a winner of the contest and the lucky winner is comment #5 O.P.W. Fredericks.  Congratulations! 

I'm happy to report that I wrote a poem a day throughout April.  Yeah!  Below are links to two of my new poems published on Thin Air magazine's blog: The Ring and Interrupted Geographies. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful National Poetry Month!

The Big Poetry Giveaway! 2011

This month, I will be participating in two wonderful events in honor of National Poetry Month -

• NaPoWriMo - where I will write a poem a day, every day for 30 days (more about this soon...) and,
• The Big Poetry Giveaway! 2011 - where I will give a copy of my chapbook Inheritance AND a copy of Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.  The Big Poetry Giveaway is organized by Kelli Russell Agodon (see http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2011/03/big-poetry-giveaway-2011.html for more information).
  
  If you would like me to send you a copy of both my book and Gertrude Stein's book (for free!) just post a comment on my blog with your name and contact information.  At the end of April, I will randomly choose one name and send off a copy of both books in the mail.  For more information about Gertrude Stein's book and my book, please see below. Good luck! 

Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms from 1914.  In this book Stein reinvigorates words. One of my all time favorite books of poetry
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My book, Inheritance was published by Finishing Line Press in June 2010. It is a sonnet sequence of American sonnets.

My Door Poem - a Spoof on the Greek/Roman Form, Paraclausithyron

I'm happy to say my new poem, "Door Poem Between the Self and the Heart" was just published on The Open Doors Poetry Zine.  My poem is a spoof of the Roman form where lovers were kept out of the bed chambers of their beloved and instead wrote poems to door that seperated them.  The Latin Love elegists were big on the Paraclausithyron which literally translated means, ""beside closed door".  My poem plays on this theme changing the conversation in the poem to be between a pre-discovered self and a another self on the other side of the door.