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It's time for the next gathering of Writing the Wheel of the Year: Beltane!

Head to my workshops page to learn more!

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Writing the Wheel of the Year: Winter Solstice (Yule)

It’s time for the third gathering of Writing the Wheel of the Year!

For the winter solstice (Yule), we’ll generate warmth and light by performing a release ritual, writing collaboratively, and settling into stillness.

We'll meet over Zoom on Saturday, December 21. More on my workshops page.

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Emily Crossen's Stories & My Poems

My friend Emily Crossen lovingly scolded me for not updating my website, so here's a link to some of her stories, and here are links to some poems of mine that have been published online in the last year or two:

"August 9" in Sixth Finch

Three poems in swamp pink

The Snow Queen blackout poems (ANMLY blog; see one below)

"The Hanger" in Drunken Boat

"Grace" in The Missouri Review Poem of the Week series

Three poems in Janus Head

"August 5," "August 11," and "August 21" in sporklet

All of the August poems are from my chapbook manuscript, Derecho Diary.

Thanks, editors! Thanks, Emily!

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Greetings from Bowling Green

My chapbook Greetings from Bowling Green is now available from The Magnificent Field!

Every day in April 2017, I composed a poem for a friend, typed it on a postcard fed into my Brother Compactronic 58 electric typewriter, and mailed it from Bowling Green, Ohio.

The chapbook includes most of those poems, slightly edited after I typed them up again on my laptop. Here's the postcard I sent to Gina Myers alongside her poem in the chapbook:

Photo by Gina Myers

And here's the chapbook in one of its natural environments, the NYC subway (I had just left New York after seven-plus years when I wrote the poems, and they seem to be set there as much as in Ohio):

Photo by Jenna Cardinale

Big thanks to Jen Tynes for choosing and laying out and printing and binding this chap. Name your price and order here!

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5 Poems Translated into Spanish

Thanks to Corinne Stanley and Marjha Paulino at Bilingual/Borderless for translating five poems of mine into Spanish:

"Fall Parties" -> "Fiestas de otoño" "The Woods" -> "El Bosque" "I is an island" -> "Yo es una isla" "Spell for a Headache" -> "Conjuro para el dolor de cabeza" "August 5" -> "5 de agosto"

Read them in English and Spanish here!

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Roseanna Alice Boswell on Ready for the World

Thank you, Roseanna, for writing about Ready for the World over at the Sundress Blog!

These poems are all from Ready for the World, which I read after the start of the pandemic and social distancing. It was such a comforting collection to read; it made me feel seen and understood during a time that felt incredibly lonely and isolating. And these three poems in particular have just stayed and stayed with me. I think great poems are kind of like music that way, they’ll just pop into your head from time to time and ride through your day with you. The poem “Reproductive Logic” is like that especially for me. “Last night, I pulled the death card for future and shuddered as I thought, It’s coming for us all; have your babies. I’ll raise this solitude like a foundling.” I mean, COME ON. How great is that? Maybe too because I’m approaching my thirties, and many of my friends and family are starting families, that one hits very close to home.

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Midwinter Constellation is here!

Midwinter Constellation, an homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day written via Google Docs by 32 poets on December 22, 2018, is now available from Black Lawrence Press!

We’re putting together a virtual launch for Thursday, February 17, at 8:30 ET / 5:30 PT. Register here to get the Zoom link. Attendees will receive a promo code for 30% off Midwinter Constellation and any other Black Lawrence title through the end of February. Hope to see you there!

To learn more about Midwinter Constellation, check out these essays by some of the authors at Post45, this review in Little Village, and the book’s page on the Black Lawrence Press site.

Last but not least, please consider donating to the Friends of Bernadette Mayer fund here: https://www.bernadettemayer.com/donate 

ABOUT

On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s writing of Midwinter Day, 32 women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer’s book, they composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. Midwinter Constellation is the result. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, the book hopes “to prove the day like the dream has everything in it,” as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday.

A radical experiment in collective writing, the book embroiders, echoes, and blurs the voices of poets across the U.S. and beyond. They wake up in bed together and spend the day writing while nursing babies, grading papers, driving home for the holidays, making meals, and gathering in bookstores and living rooms to read Midwinter Day aloud. While threads of identity can be traced through the repeated names of children, highways, books, and pets, Midwinter Constellation declines to identify who’s speaking when, exceeding the territory of authorship and rejecting the illusion that we are separate.

THE AUTHORS

Midwinter Constellation was written by Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You.

PRAISE

Challenging capitalism’s relationship to the world as one of objects for use or ownership, the collective of writers of Midwinter Constellation write in creative participation against forms of certainty, mastery, and possession. Boundaries collapse as new psychogeographies form in modes of response and reflection “for history to be like food / On the table of the window”. A welcomed space of unruly measure. A constellation of meetings, wild and wonderful. —Hoa Nguyen

“Bernadette Mayer is the mother of us all.” Overheard in Brooklyn. Midwinter Constellation, a luminous collaborative poem written on the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day, is a conversation between 32 women poets and the poet herself. This gathering of poet-daughters continues Mayer’s experiments with form and content to make a portrait of the possibilities of living within the shortest day of the year. Midwinter Constellation raises the bar of what can be written, captures the fullness, the sensuousness, even the tastiness of living with lovers and children. —Brenda Coultas

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I’m teaching a workshop through Iowa City Poetry in September! We're going to start with Audre Lorde's endlessly illuminating (and, I think, often misinterpreted) essay "Poetry is Not a Luxury," and branch out from its ideas toward the work of other poets & seekers (Diane di Prima, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Starhawk, among others), and toward some dreamwork and visionary practices. Head to Iowa City Poetry to read the full description! Tuition assistance is available.

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New poem in Air Talk

"While our community is spread out, we are not spread thin. We are connected by our practice, intention, and care. As Yoko Ono wrote in her poem Air Talk, 'No matter how far apart we are / the air links us.'"

Grateful to have my poem "The Opposite of Real Life" published in Air Talk, a collection of handwritten work by No, Dear past contributors, including Cathy Linh Che, Joey De Jesus, Lauren Hunter, Steven Karl, Jennifer Nelson, Ben Pease, & Bianca Stone.

Thanks to No, Dear editors Emily Brandt, Alex Cuff, Leila Ortiz, and t'ai freedom ford, and to Wendy's Subway for the web home!

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Review of Ready for the World in Little Village

Thanks to Arts Editor Genevieve Trainor for this review of Ready for the World in Little Village!

If I were a gambler, I’d bet that the magic infused throughout Becca Klaver’s poetry collection, Ready for the World, released in February 2020, made it prescient. The first dozen-plus poems are odes to connectivity, to a digital world, to finding the spaces between bits and bytes where the self seeps through.

Poems like “Anagnorisis,” “Sharing Settings” and “Like Machine” are deep dives into a world that must have seemed simultaneously crucial and tangential to Klaver as they were written, but which now make up the whole of our existence, as pandemic continues to keep us all, by and large, physically apart.

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This means so much to me because it shows that we’ve been together this whole time, across the social distances.  Thank you for reading, my friends, and I am so looking forward to the day when we can all gather IRL with poetry again!

PS. Ready for the World is 50% off all April at Black Lawrence Press with code NatPoMo50.

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Across the Social Distances is a pop-up journal for poetry in the time of the virus.

We are looking for:

1. Poems that address the current crises. (200 words or less.)

2. Microreviews, musings, notes, etc., on books of poetry published, or to be published, in the first half of 2020. (200 words or less.)

Please send in the body of an email to acrossthesocialdistances at gmail dot com

Across the Social Distances

We lost faith in the government 

that was not made for us

We lost faith in the schools 

closing too fast or too slow

We lost faith in the hospitals 

full of nurses with tied hands

We kept faith in the voices of friends 

timbres warming 

from across the social distances

We kept faith in the kindness of strangers 

landing at our doorsteps 

from across the social distances

with thanks to Tim Jones-Yelvington for the graphic

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I got to talk to the wonderful Athena Dixon of the New Books in Poetry podcast about Ready for the World. Here’s the episode!

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“Spell for Actualizing Art” https://www.instagram.com/p/B6UZQW5BLLP/?igshid=15t4uv6sbpb7w

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Ready for the World—now ready for preorder!

My new book, Ready for the World, is available for discounted preorder from Black Lawrence Press through January!

You can read some poems and spells from the book here, here, here, here, and here. 

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Here’s what some trusted poet-witches have to say about it:

Becca Klaver’s Ready for the World is a dazzling, brilliant spellbook for femmes, witches, and bad princesses, a survival guide for our gross misogynist times. Klaver’s spells and wishes give me permission, give me life. —Kate Durbin

Whether your own adolescence was blissfully full of besties who Ouija’ed yourselves out of the patriarchy or not, you can “get that teenage feeling back” with this tricked-out book. Call in the four elements and stand by for the headrush of magic. —Arielle Greenberg

 There’s something about the flow of it that reflects the movements of nature. Maybe that’s feminine attraction to digital flow. Yeah, I said flow... The witch melts and she’s reborn in the flow of knowledge. —Ana Božičević

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More background on the 21st-century bildungsroman-grimoire known as Ready for the World:

What does it take for a girl to get ready for the world, and is it ever possible to go back? Ready for the World is a book of poems, spells, performance scripts, and feminist fairytales that derives its magic from tarot and astrology, feminist artist foremothers, and virtual and IRL covens. In her update of the lyric “I” for the digital age, Klaver claims for poetry the trivialized tones of femininity, unwilling to give up on the possibility of an outside to patriarchy as she loops around in cyclical time to access a spirit of magic, play, friendship, and artmaking.

Written in the years Klaver was collaborating on feminist writing, performance, ritual, and activism in person and online in the form of the (G)IRL writing group, The Real Housewives of Bohemia podcast, the Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants website, the Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair & Makeup Party roving mob, and the Enough Is Enough proto-#MeToo activist collective, Ready for the World explores how alternative practices and communities can resist destructive forms of power and conjure other ways of being and knowing.

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Jenny Colville’s “White Ink and the Great American Macho”

I love this essay by Jenny Colville. In some ways it's a #MeToo essay about turn-of-the-millennium MFA culture, but it's also the kind of thing I started looking for as I was writing my dissertation, and am still in search of: essays that make the link between literary culture (inside or outside of the academy) and literary style, that show how institutional power reinforces not only whose stories get told, but *how* they get told—how the hierarchies of style and aesthetic value systems are intertwined with other hierarchies and systems. In this way, it reminds me of Kathleen Fraser's "The Tradition of Marginality," Rachel Blau DuPlessis's "For the Etruscans," and Diane Di Prima's Recollections of My Life as a Woman.

When I brought in stories that experimented with form, that engaged my womb, or modular, or crot ideas, Díaz didn’t read them. Once he said, “This story isn’t ready for workshop,” even though an earlier version had been thoughtfully workshopped in a previous class. The second time he said, “Sorry, I guess I’m not that smart.” And though I was disappointed, I forgave him. It was an admittance that it wasn’t his thing. It was an admittance I craved after being in workshop with Famous Old Boy, who had dismissed a piece of modernist writing I brought to show the class as an example of a story I admired. It was a story by the experimental writer Janet Kauffman. It had been published, yet Famous Old Boy claimed it “just wasn’t working.”

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Stardust Sessions at Iowa Writers’ House This Fall

If you’re in or near Iowa City, consider signing up for my monthly workshop this fall:

Stardust Sessions are workshops for anyone who believes that writing is a way to light up the magic in the mundane. Through an eclectic array of methods—guided meditations, visionary poetry, chance operations, Fluxus instructions, divination, spells, and more—you will to tap into your imaginative and writing capacities in a supportive and reverent environment. No previous experience with any of these practices is required; all you need is a spirit of openness and play. The registration fee for the workshop also includes a copy of the book The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley.

Practice, Ritual, and Community (October)

To the Underworld and Back: The Heroine’s Journey (November)

Old Divination for New Worlds (December)

Read more and register here. Individual session sign-up is now available!