Poets: Read Small Press Poetry

You could be reading
one of these!

I love small press poetry.

You will find me continuing to feature poems that I like from the small presses. I do this because I really enjoy the challenge of investigating a poem, and because I want you to know that poems are worth reading and should be read. I want to spread the love. Subscribe to a small press journal; if you can't, check them out in your local library. They're passionate about what they do and they're certainly not in it for the money.

Not me, but I like her style.

If you are are an aspiring poet, the number one thing you should do regularly from this point on is read poetry. There are a striking number of poets who want to be good at their craft who don't read poems. What is up with that? Can you imagine trying to write a novel and not reading novels? Believe me, there is something for everyone out there in the world of poetry. Just breeze through the archives of this blog and you'll figure that out pretty quickly.

If you want to write poetry, go to your bookstore and browse through the poetry section. Choose two or three poets who resonate with you and buy them. Take them home, skim the books, and put post-its on the poems that get your attention. It doesn't matter if you "get" the poem or not--it could be just a fantastic image that got your attention. Now choose three of those marked poems and study them. Read them; discover if there is a recognizable meter or rhyme scheme; notice where the poet places the line breaks; take note of how verbs and nouns are used, and how effective or necessary the adjectives are. Mark the spot where the poem turns and comes full circle, and think about why this is. Why do you connect with it? Why is it true? Why does it work?

This + poetry =
literary bliss

Something else to do, which works for anyone who wants to read poetry, is get a copy of Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things. At the end of the day, turn off your computer and TV, make yourself a nice cocktail or cup of tea, sitdown with this book, and read a few poems at random. This is my favorite collection and the choices are stunning. If you're looking for a starting point, this just might do it.

Discover what turns you on, then find a small press that does that for you. Then write something awesome and submit it. Become a part of this awesome and wondrous community of poetry.

Amy



Photos by Lucretious, arinas74, and turbidity

Interview with Bryce Ellicott, Part 1

Recently I featured a poem written by scientist and writer Bryce Ellicott, whose work was included in the anthology Life in Me Like Grass on Fire. Bryce kindly agreed to answer a few questions, and in Part 1 I've included Bryce's comments on the relationship between science and art.

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Amy: You have a Ph.D. in Planetary Science and have spent many years studying lunar crater formation. How does your formal education and work affect your writing? How do you feel about the relationship between science and art?

Bryce: Art and science have some aspects that are the same and some that are very different. "Doing" science and "appreciating" art require some of the same skills--observation, consideration, analysis, etc. They have to be approached with an open mind, limiting any preconceptions, in order to let as much of what there is come in unfettered by any of our filters.

Science is a process. The goal of that process is to be able to explain the workings of the cosmos as clearly and completely as possible. Let's take gravity. In studying gravity you might conduct experiments where you watch items fall, and time how fast they speed up. You learn that the acceleration of gravity on the earth's surface is about 9.8 m/s2. This is powerful. Knowing this is part of how we have learned to launch rockets to other worlds.

But science can't tell you how gravity feels. It can't tell you what it means to experience gravity as a human being. It can tell you how much bone loss you experience without it, but not what that might feel like, the truth of the phenomenon as a part of the human condition. That's what art does.

Here's an unpublished poem with a lot of science, humor, and just a peak at the idea of what it would mean to change the rules ... always an unsettling idea for a scientist.

Laboratory Philosophy

We have to clean
under the mass spectrometer
with liquid nitrogen.
The instrument
has been bolted to the floor
for years,
and besides, the magnet is
much too heavy to move
and would need to be retuned
if you did.
So whenever we get bored,
which is often,
we fill up tall dewars
with LN2
and sheet the boiling liquid
out beneath the equipment.
Then we run to the other side
to watch each bubbling,
dancing bead roll out
dust bunnies in front of it.
I say
“It’ll never work in zero G.”
You reply
“No gravity, no dust bunnies.”

Bryce Ellicott

I really did this - this is totally autobiographical, and shows you what scientists do for fun, and what their humor is like. I was trying to express here that idea of what we take for granted. Gravity. My comment was flip, and so was his.  And funny. But it made me think. Something as mundane as a dust bunny  requires gravity. Dust filters down through the air and lands on floors, it is then moved by air currents across the surface and into areas where it can collect. There is no 'down' in space. Dust would remain suspended, and would be circulated easily by the ventilation system, through the air and to vents, there
caught in the filter. Items might remain untouched for years, and no dust would ever build up on their surfaces. A minor but strangely unsettling twist. Dust means age. What if that simple and predictable marker were gone?

I could provide a number of other examples, since science has really sparked my interest in the strange and beautiful of the universe (or perhaps it was the other way around). Science and art inform one another, and work together. The only tension comes from people who want to use the process of science
to prove the unprovable - which by definition cannot be done. That is the realm of art and spirituality. Science can tell you how to build a clock. It can't help you if you set it wrong and miss a hot date. That's where poetry comes in.

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For more on poetry, science, and writing sci-fi, check out Bryce's excellent blog One Writer's Mind. 

"Officemate" by Bryce Ellicott, from the anthology Life in Me Like Grass on Fire

As promised, here is Bryce Ellicott's poem from the Maryland Writers' Association's latest publication.



Officemate

She was brown and sari-woven. Her chair
and mine rubbed backs and spoke in whispers.
The day came she pranced, ring flashing
in the halls. They moved to Norway faster
than you can drain a filing cabinet, inhale
a roomful of cake and goodbyes, and forget
to leave a forwarding address. Forlorn
in the way of office furniture left behind,
my chair is wounded to the very wheels.
It refuses even a squeak against the silence
once filled with vinyl-stroked confessions.

Bryce Ellicott
Life in Me Like Grass on Fire, p. 21
Used with permission of the author


We have a simple image of a woman, "brown and sari-woven," but all of the very sensual action between the speaker and her is portrayed through their chairs. They "rubbed backs and spoke in whispers"--already past tense, setting us up for something to break up this closeness. After the "sari-woven" subject departs, leaving no "forwarding address" and no chance of more communication with the speaker, we have common office imagery standing in for the inner life of the speaker: inhaled cake and goodbyes, a drained filing cabinet, forlorn furniture, a chair "wounded to the very wheels."

It's sad! This sad, sad chair! The poor chair is so devastated that it will not even squeak, where once it happily whispered. The brilliance of this metaphor is it allows the reader a depth of empathy for the speaker that I'm not sure we'd have if we actually saw the speaker. We get the lonely chair, the silence, the emptiness, and the wound. A metaphor shouldn't be just interesting or arresting imagery; it should facilitate an emotional connection between the reader and the experience of the poem. This does it for me.

I have a few other thoughts but I thought I'd throw them out as questions and see what you think. Why Norway, for example? What is the significance of the woman being "sari-woven?" What does this poem tell us about the experience of loss?

BTW--Check out Bryce Ellicott's fascinating blog about writing, sci-fi, astronomy, and other kinds of coolness