Friday, May 9, Poetry and Music at The Writer's Center

REMINDER: Get your weekend plans set now!

The Sound of Words: A Scheme to Rock the Writer's Center

Featuring: The Caribbean and 32 Poems Magazine

DATE: Friday, May 9, 2008
TIME: 8 PM
LOCATION: The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815

DESCRIPTION:
32 Poems Magazine, The Caribbean, and the Writer's Center join together to bring you outstanding poetry from Sandra Beasley and Bernadette Geyer and songs from The Caribbean.

Writer's Center http://www.writer.org/

32 Poems http://www.32poems.com/
BLOG: http://blog.32poems.com/

The Caribbean
WEBSITE: http://www.thecaribbeanisaband.com/
LISTEN: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=35735011

Pop-what?

I confess ... I google my name every so often. But this just goes to show you never know what you'll find when you do a search on your own name.

I am a character on Popmundo.

It is a strange coincidence to find someone using my name as a fictional character for an international online roleplaying game in which characters vie to become pop stars.

Apparently, I'm a backup singer for an awful pop band called TARKAN Tevetoglu, despite my "skills" being listed as superior for singing, stagediving, catwalking, and breakdancing. Oh, and I have a lover who wears leather chaps and is a terrible dancer (well, wearing leather chaps, what do you expect?). I've written three songs: "Mastic Bride", "Feel My Heart Bitch" and "Flyin Butterfly."

Damn, now I'm going to have to keep checking in at Popmundo to see how my namesake is doing...

May Day

I've updated the list at the right to reflect the final poem title added to my list of NaPoWriMo drafts. 36 poems in 30 days, not counting a handful of half-drafts. Whew. Thanks to all of you who stopped by throughout the month to offer encouragement.

Today, as a break from poem-ing, I wrote a book review during Frida's nap. The new issue of berniE-zine is a bit behind and I want to get that up and running within the week.

I feel really positive about a lot of the poems that came out of this month's creative fury. I look back at some of the titles and realize I don't even remember what the poem is about. During the course of the month I finished one notebook and started a brand new one.

I actually managed to be inspired 95 percent of the time with a subject from which to write. In cases where no subject leapt to mind, a couple of lists of "prompts" usually helped me shake some words loose from my pen.

May will involve a lot of typing out of drafts, sorting them into piles of which I want to deal with urgently, which have promise but need more work, and which have stealable lines or ideas that could best be handled by starting fresh.

But for now, it's back to reviewing...

Final Day of NaPoWriMo

So... today is the last day of NaPoWriMo. I will have 4 hours to myself this afternoon while Frida's grandmother plays with her. Yesterday's poems came out of the two in-class exercises I assigned a class of 5th graders I taught through Arlington County's Pick-a-Poet Program, which places poets in public schools to teach 1-hr workshops. Over the course of this spring, I taught 13 classes. Whew. But it was a lot of fun. The most challenging part of each class was the Q&A at the end when students asked the difficult questions like "What's the hardest part about being a poet?" or "How can you tell something is a poem?"

One of the exercises was to pick an object in the room and write from the viewpoint of the object. I like to do the exercises, too, and here's what I came up with. They gave me a standing ovation for this. Ah, so impressionable. This poem will self-destruct in 24-hours:


Said the Homeroom Globe

*poof*

NaPoWriMo -- The Home Stretch

I distributed my monthly newsletter for a client this morning, so now I can focus on the home stretch of NaPoWriMo. It's been a crazy month. I started off strong and then had to slack off a little this weekend while working on writing that actually puts food on the table and gas in the car.

Hope all you other NaPoWriMo-ites are still at it... Get ready to come up for air!

LOC Reading with Mark Strand and Charles Wright

Living in the exiles of suburbia, it's not often that I get a chance to attend poetry readings, but I pledged to go to at least one reading during National Poetry Month, and I sure picked a good one to go to.

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a reading at the Library of Congress. Charles Simic introduced his two long-time friends, the poets Mark Strand and Charles Wright. I enjoyed the fraternal banter, including Simic's remembrances of the publication of early books by both friends.

I had recently seen Strand read poems at the AWP conference in New York City and was glad for the opportunity to see him again. He has a very disarming manner and is quite charming in his introductions to poems as well as just general commentary. But it's hearing him read his own poems that is captivating. Strand uses touches of humor and surrealism to great effect and one can really tell that this is a man who loves words, who loves telling stories, and who truly enjoys the process of writing. I was especially glad to hear him read "The Dirty Hand," which I had included in a reading of my own at the Library of Congress on the theme of "obsessions". Poets who read in the Library of Congress' Poetry at Noon Series read three poems on the theme by other poets and two of their own poems. I distinctly remember how I read it, and I was very pleased to discover that my own reading of it was not far off Strand's own.

Seeing Charles Wright read was also a pleasure. I'd read two of his books but nothing really can compare to hearing that lovely southern inflection in his voice. Another disarming reader, Wright also incorporates humor in his poems to wonderful effect, even though he commented that he's not sure if anyone else finds humor in the poems he wrote to be humorous.

During the reception, I ran into so many friends and colleagues I had not seen in ages and returned home completely rejuvinated. Sigh. As NaPoWriMo winds down I am feeling good about what I've accomplished this month and look forward to the editing in months to come.

After a nice little creative break...

A Poem for Earth Day

Despite all the newspaper headlines proclaiming that Earth Day is dead and meaningless, I choose this day to celebrate the nature around me. And so, here is a poem by Dana Gioia, from the Bread Loaf Anthology Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini.


BECOMING A REDWOOD

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,

And all the other life too small to name.
First one, then another, until innumerable
they merge into the single voice of a summer hill.

Yes, it's hard to stand still , hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.

And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth's crust.

Unimaginable the redwoods on the far hill,
rooted for centuries, the living wood grown tall
and thickened with a hundred thousand days of light.

The old windmill creaks in perfect time
to the wind shaking the miles of pasture grass,
and the last farmhouse light goes off.

Something moves nearby. Coyotes hunt
these hills and packs of feral dogs.
But standing here at night accepts all that.

You are your own pale shadow in the quarter moon,
moving more slowly than the crippled stars,
part of themoonlight as the moonlight falls,

Part of the grass that answers the wind,
part of the midnight's watchfulness that knows
there is no silence but when danger comes.

Conversation While Eating Yogurt

"Mommy, I like your head."

"Well thank you!"

"Mommy, you like my head?"

"Yes, I like your head very much."

"I can't take my head off" (tries to lift head off neck) "It's stuck."

"Honey, you're not supposed to be able to take your head off. It's supposed to be there."

"I can't do it." (sulks, pouting)

"Maybe when you're older you'll be able to." (this is my response to most things she says she can't do...)

"Yeah. When I get older I take my head off. Mommy, when you get older, you take your head off?"

"Yes. When I get older I'll be able to take my head off."

This Week's NaPoWriMo Inspirations

It's been a rough week, what with Peter in Vegas on business until today. But, I've taken advantage of the time to really get some good NaPoWriMo drafts done. This week's inspirations:

• 24 hrs - inspired by how long it takes me to clean the house to my liking after Peter leaves for a trip
• Corpse Pose - inspired by a Yoga video I watched
• Sudden Memory series - inspired by a poem I read by Matthew Guenette called "Sudden Anthem" in a back issue of Passages North ... I was trying to see how tersely I could record a memory while still having the poem convey all the necessary information to the memory

What's inspiring you this month?