Finishing Black Crow Dress

Oh! I finished Roxane Beth Johnson's Black Crow Dress this morning (I try to start my day with poetry), and there are such beautiful images and lines, I must share them.

In "Clea, Living and Dying," a voice that we've heard throughout the book suddenly shares that she's had many lives, rather than just one. Describing her different lives, she tell us: "Once, a saint: my soul clung to God the way an egg grips its separate parts." I've had a lot of experience with eggs (having had laying chickens and ducks) but I don't think I'll ever look at an egg the same way again.

I didn't mention yesterday that some poems are in the voices of the slaveowning people, rather than the enslaved people themselves. In "Caroline Confronts Tobias Finch," we learn that Tobias, a slaveowner who loved, in his way (which is to say in a brutal, dominating, and demeaning way: is that love?), Caroline, ultimately leaves her to die in the snow. Beyond death, she won't forgive him, which denies both of them their rest. So there's a wonderful turnaround in this poem. Caroline says, "You follow me now, hollering through every season, saying Caroline, let me go." Oh! So smart. Beyond death, the ironic end--no, the eternity--he deserves! Who was it who said that art has something to do with justice? (The quote I'm thinking of but can't quite recall is Yeats, I think? Also, I think, many others have yoked the two together.)

The final poem, "Goodbye to My Favorite Ghost, Clea," is in the poet's voice. Listen to this: "Now, put your hands in the loam, pull damp moss from the earth's scalp--a pillow for your grave." The earth's scalp! Oh! I love images of the earth as a person, as a body. And using scalp is an inventive and different way of doing that because scalp as a word and a thing is not particularly beautiful--it's a harsh word with a history that echoes, at least for me. So perfect. So evocative.

The ending comes full circle, with the ghosts taking their leave and the poet saying goodbye to the ghosts who at the beginning were coming to haunt her. What a wonderful book of poems!

Checking in with Poetry and Roxane Beth Johnson's Black Crow Dress

I have been wanting to blog, mostly, I think, because I love another poet's blog and long to do something like it. I can't speak for her purposes, but for me, I'd like to make sure I check in with poetry regularly. While I used to write a little before I got down to work (editing), lately the feeling that I need to rush to get working asap and I don't have time to write or read or work on my own stuff has been reigning. (I know why this panic has set in, but knowing is no help. Deep breaths, deep breaths.) And I've noticed that as I've loosened the grip on my poetry goals (as I feel I've had to for the same reason), I feel some sense of grief. So today, when I'm totally sick with a cold, I thought I'd show up on the blog and tell a little story.

I live in a place that doesn't value poetry much. The bigger town east of here decorates their downtown street with paper leaves with poems on them arranged by a dedicated teacher or two in one of the schools during National Poetry Month. The city I used to work in west of here recently had a writer's conference with one workshop on poetry. (I went! It was super-interesting! I'm grateful!) I live about an hour and a half from a wonderful artistic city, but I have a full life here, and it's hard to get there. (Even, long ago, when I lived in Sacramento and went to Mills College in Oakland for my MFA, I still found it hard to drive the 1-1/2 hours one way to events. I missed a Li-Young Lee reading once that way. I missed a poetry reading of a friend of mine earlier this week, but I was sick--my whole family has been sick in the last week--so it is what it is.) Between these two more urban areas with their limited appreciation of poetry, I live in an area where people ask if we're into hunting or fishing or boating because that is what people do here. (No, we live here to get excited every time the sandhill crane comes to visit our pond, stalking the summer-loud frogs, and to marvel and wonder when it takes off, flapping its huge wings over the trees.)

All this makes it even more wonderful when I go to some of the little one-room libraries in the small towns and find wonderful books. My favorite library has few poetry books, mostly just classics. But I needed to go to another library one bright and wonderful Saturday to pick up an editing resource (the doorstop AMA style guide, which I was so grateful to find!) and found Roxane Beth Johnson's wonderful Black Crow Dress, a collection I'd consider a project book focusing on specific enslaved ancestors and their lives and deaths. The poems are wonderful, and I'd quote from them but poetry copyright online is very sticky (I've read), and I don't want to get in trouble. (Does a blog post count as a review, which obviously quotes? Oh, I'm too sick to think that one through.) Many of the poems are strictly in the voices of these enslaved (and some subsequently freed) people, but one thing I really love in this book is that she also speaks as herself haunted by these ancestor ghosts with her home full up with these ghosts and their voices and, sometimes, mischief. (I've often felt haunted by ghosts--for example, if I dream about someone, it's as if something of their essence is with me the whole next day. So I love that Johnson's literalized this in her poems in such rich and beautiful ways.Wow, her images!!!) The ghosts in her house give me a lot to think about as I work very slowly on my own project book that is partly about my dead grandparents, their actions, and our ancestors.

Must go. I'm needed.

Shalom Salaam Wordcloud Draft 2

So here's my wordcloud for draft 2 of my Israel/Palestine poem collection. I especially enjoy the word DRAFT up there because I do have a handful of poems still to draft. So the draft is not as complete as I'd like it to be. But hey, I've got a file with the entire collection so far in it! Celebrate!!!

Looking Back at 2018 and Ahead to 2019!!!

So it's the last day of 2018. On Jan 1, 2018 I blogged here about a couple resolutions: 1) getting really brave and going for 100 rejections; 2) blogging more, especially about othering.

I got 98 rejections and 4 acceptances this year. This isn't 100 rejections, but it's pretty close. And since the point wasn't to be rejected, but to be brave and put myself out there, I did that. I put my poems or myself out there 100 times, actually 102. This is way up from 34 from the year before. So that's awesome!!!

In reflecting on how this went, I have to say that I found the emphasis on rejections a bit counterproductive. Since the point was to be brave, the fact that I could only count my brave effort when I got some kind of response made me pretty obsessed with checking Submittable. Since I always sweat contest response dates anyway, this just fueled my obsessions. It also made me more dependent on others' responses when what I wanted to celebrate was my courage. So for 2019, I plan to go for 200 submissions! I include poetry submissions, but also grant submissions and other ways of putting myself out there when I can be rejected.

(Note: I count each poem as a submission, not each bundle or packet of poems. So 200 is not nearly as much as it sounds like. I thought of changing it to a set number of submission packets, but I haven't tracked that so well so I don't know what is a fair but challenging number. I plan to track all of it a lot better this year.)

About blogging: I started blogging Israel-Palestine poems, but then stopped because I was busy at work. (I've quit my job, but I don't think I'm going to go back to blogging Israel-Palestine poems.) I also blogged about how the psychology of genocide can help us address our own racism, prejudice, and othering on the blog on my website. I think those blogposts were very important because they helped me start to imagine the longer work I want to create on that content, but I'm not sure that blogging about it is the best way forward for that project. I stopped though when I needed to focus on the Holy Land Poems and found that creating those blogposts took a lot of dedicated time every week.

What I would very much like to do blogging-wise is to blog about the place I live and try to understand it better, make peace with it, even love it. I'm sick of fighting with winter and seeing the obvious drawbacks of where I live. There's a lot to love here but I don't name it very well. Blogging would help with this. Place has always been very important to me: my poems include a lot of focus on place, even winning the Phenomena of Place Poetry Award and most recently appearing in Scintilla's special issue on The Patterns of Place: Seeking Shelter; Finding Home; I was also the editor of Plains Song Review, a journal exploring a sense of place in the Great Plains.  And there are all sorts of things about this place I would like to explore, including the history of my land and Michigan-ness. I'd also like to blog about my garden and chickens and ducks, which is very tied to my sense of this place. And I need to make friends with real northern winter, making sure I have the right equipment. (Is it in Sweden they say there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong equipment?)

But I'm not making any promises about blogging, though, to myself or you today. Much of my energy will have to be focused on crafting myself a new career (or getting a job). Since I've done a fair amount of editing/proofreading in the past, I'm going to refresh my skills and build myself a freelance editing business. And for that with my introversion, I will need to be very very brave. 

Let's celebrate all our efforts and accomplishments in 2018! And have a great creative, blessed, and fun 2019! Happy New Year!!!!

Just because I love my garden and pond

Hi everyone! Over the weekend, my husband and I were doing long-overdue weeding of the garden, and I was just struck over how much I love working in the garden, even weeding on a sweaty day. I also love that we have all sorts of animals living on our property: snapping turtles, a family of muskrats, a groundhog we call Mr. Berryman. We also get lots of visitors in our pond. And I decided over the weekend that I would blog about the garden and the pond just because I love it. (The world can take a little joyful Joy, can't it?)

This morning, a rainy day when we're supposed to get thunderstorms all day (which means we can't go to the group playdate we were planning -- such is life in a place where it rains in summer -- since I love to be cozy in my house when it rains, I don't mind), we got this visitor in the pond.

It's hard to see. Is it a great blue heron or a sandhill crane? I'm not sure. Great blue herons, so I've read, have yellow bills and this one definitely has a black bill more like a sandhill crane. But sandhill cranes have red on their heads and when I zoomed on the photo, I couldn't see any red. But no matter the name of the bird, it's beautiful and stately and slow. I gratefully accept the blessing of this visitation! (This same bird, I'm pretty sure, visited us last week too, when I had potatoes to peel for cottage pie, something that often takes, for me, a long time. This visitor stayed slowly stalking the water at the water's edge the entire time it took me to peel and boil the potatoes! That was also a rainy stormy day, and she stayed with me the entire time.)

I love living in the country!

March Hiatus

As you can see, I've fallen down on the job of putting out Israeli and Palestinian poems each week. I've been very busy preparing new classes and now I'm sick. So I'm going to take a March hiatus so I can get well and then back to prepping these classes. See you in April!

"Meting Out Justification: A Military Judge's Testimony"

This week's poem is my own "Meting Out Justification: A Military Judge's Testimony" published today in Blotterature's Propaganda issue.  It's on page 12.

This poem is a found poem, so in a sense it's not really mine (so can I get away with using it as my weekly Israel-Palestine poem?). It comes from the documentary, The Law in These Parts, an examination of the system of military administration in place since the Six Day War in the Occupied Territories through interviews of Israeli judges, prosecutors, and military advisors. I highly recommend it if you're interested in human rights issues.

I've never had two poems published within a week of each other before! I feel very blessed!

And today it was nearly 60 degrees! Feels like spring!