#joyce peseroff

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of march

miki schumacher de / re / formation

craig arnold pitahaya

brian turner here, bullet: “what every soldier should know”

eileen myles not me: “peanut butter”

noor hindi breaking [news]

jane hirshfield my species

annesha mitha you are a tyrannosaurus rex

mary ruefle among the musk ox people: poems: “blood soup”

alice notley mysteries of small houses: “as good as anything”

nomi stone on world-making

k. silem mohammad poems about trees

franz wright the break

fred marchant the looking house: “night heron maybe”

carl phillips cortège: “domestic”

alexa luborsky connotations

bruce smith the other lover: “to the executive director of the actual”

nikky finney head off & split: “the aureole”

alice fulton personally engraved

amy beeder because our waiters are hopeless romantics

chiagoziem jideofor self-preservation

carol muske-dukes skylight: “the invention of cuisine”

joyce peseroff a dog in the lifeboat: “april to may”

rigoberto gonzalez other fugitives and other strangers: “other fugitives and other strangers”

toi derricotte the undertaker’s daughter: “my dad & sardines”

tarfia faizullah yr not exotic, but once ya wanted to be

jenny george the artist

jack spicer a second train song for gary

victor hernandez cruz maraca: new and selected poems 1966-2000: “red beans”

xi chuan power failure

jean valentine door in the mountain: new and collected poems, 1965-2003: “sanctuary”

duane niatum drawings of the song animals: new and collected poems: “consulting an elder poet on an anti-war poem”

kofi

[extollingtheeveryday]

Joyce Peseroff // excerpt from "April to May" [ID in alt text]

Full poem here

[nbula-rising]

Rock Records

Rock Records By Joyce Peseroff I'm selling my old rock records, the reggae and the Dead, the Beatles and bands no one heard after the Amazing Kathy Dalton became less so and Airto—busted for possession, his album's face behind ten fingers blacked with stationhouse ink— deported. A Stone retired, Mick past fifty, Van Morrison— composer of the world's best Celtic fuck music—gone spiritual, while "Peaceful Easy Feeling" sells Prozac, and the trippy paisley vinyl of Dave Mason's "Alone Together," Big Brother's funky R. Crumb cover (fat nipply Janis dragging that ball and chain) are quaint collectibles, like Fiestaware or bottles from defunct breweries; useful things no one uses anymore, worth money.

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Restless for Words: Poems by DeWitt Henry

PREORDER NOW: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/restless-for-words-poems-by-dewitt-henry/

Former Shakespeare teacher, novelist, memoirist, and founding editor of Ploughshares, DeWitt Henry in his first full collection of poems goes in varied and unexpected directions, from “mapping the heart” to meditating on the DNA of everyday words such as “candidate.” He delights in quick-witted, gymnastic free association, contrary directions of thought and argument, and freely negotiates between the colloquial and literary, the personal and the cultural, and mixes moral searching with a benign, self-depreciating humor. His favorite pronoun is “we.” A deeply lived, engaging, and original debut.

DeWitt Henry’s recent prose collection is ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS: FAMILY ESSAYS (MadHat Press, 2021). Poems have appeared in Constellations, Ibbetson Street, On the Seawall, Plume, American Journal of Poetry and others. He was the founding editor of Ploughshares and is Prof. Emeritus at Emerson College. Details at www.dewitthenry.com .

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Restless for Words: Poems by DeWitt Henry

DeWitt Henry’s lively riffs reveal how restless language can be as it shimmers and shifts from noun to verb, from history to headlines. Henry urges, like Sir Philip Sydney, to “look in thy heart and write,” as his chosen words, examined like life, fashion a bittersweet biography. These poems—each a collage of feeling and thought—are witty, satisfying, and always revealing.

–Joyce Peseroff, author of Petition

DeWitt Henry is best known and universally admired as the founder of Ploughshares and as an eloquent writer of fiction and non-fiction. So it should now come as no surprise that he’s reinvented a lost genre of poetry. These poems, on an astonishing array of subjects, are the wittiest, most verbally playful, most thoughtful and touching and personal essay-poems since Alexander Pope. DeWitt Henry has welcomed poets to his world for decades. It’s a great pleasure to welcome him to the world of poetry.

–Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems

Restless for Words is a huge gathering and sorting process by a writer who has thought deeply about a great many things. It’s a repository for the best answers he’s been able to come up with in a lifetime of inquiry and curiosity, guided by a commitment to clarity and to trying to see what’s the right thing to do…. My favorites are those that explore the etymological and let themselves riff on the resulting associations, a strategy that Henry used to great purpose in Sweet Marjoram. These poems are solid, and their complications stanza to stanza arise from wonder. Henry wastes no time on the mucker pose, the ‘Aw shucks gee whiz’ persona. He takes life—and writing—and learning—much too seriously for that. And I, for one, am grateful.

–Richard Hoffman, author of Noon Into Night

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

Our Vanishing --Joyce Peseroff

Thanks, no thanks, to eternal life. What pleasure watching my old house broken-beamed, grey

elephant brought to its knees? White ash��gone the way of trilobites and horsehair fern,

even the nuclear-proof cockroach in deep-freeze. Cueballs knock each other randomly; reverse.

the tape and movement looks the same, illustrating the end of time: things happen, but don't matter.

And if Lethe strips you like a swimmer from his trunks, where will "I" be? If Heaven

without you is Hell, how will I know? A forever of no-never-mind does not appeal, God's heart

a cold, contracting cinder. Give me the white light, the slit of split-second calm, and knowing over is over.

[thebopkabbalah]

April to May

by Joyce E. Peseroff

Issue no. 75 (Spring 1979), The Paris Review

1. It is cold enough for rain to coagulate & fall in heavy drops. Tonight a skin of ice will grow over the bones of the smallest bush,

making it droop like the wrist of someone carrying a heavy suitcase. This moving on, from season to season, is exhausting & violent, the break from the Berlin Wall

of winter especially. Like a frostbitten hand coming to life, I color first with warmth, then with pain. Thawing, letting

the great powers go their own way, in rivers & in flesh, frightens me, as this day warns me of an icy night.

2. Each year I am astonished at the havoc we have wrought on other lives: fathers made tiny by cancer, a mother

swollen around a bad heart “brought on by aggravation.” To suffer is to do something new yet always the same—

a change of life from the sexual dread. Some women wish they were men, some men wish they were dead; still,

there is coin in suffering. Suffering makes us rich as Croesus in his golden tears, & we are rarely hated for it.

This coin I store in a purse made of mother’s milk & flesh, which God says I must I use it to seek pleasure.

3. Walking around with this thing in me all day, this loving cup full of jelly, waiting for you to come home—seven o’clock,

eight o’clock, eight-thirty. What could be more important than love? I can’t imagine; you can. Not a good day, not about to get better.

4. The bird comes complete with heart, liver, & neck-bone wrapped chastely in white paper. Still half-frozen,

the legs are hard to separate. Inside, wax paper sticks to the ribs. I reach like a vet delivering pigs or a boy finger-fucking a virgin.

5. Air the same sweet temperature inside the house as outside the house. Stepping up from the cellar

with an armful of sheets I listen for the dirge of flies under the chittering birds, both painfully loud. There is a stridency

that’s stubborn in a life grown by inches: the fat little fingers of buds bursting, ugly ducklings, the slow war

of day against night. As I pin the swelling sheets with clothespins damp & too narrow at the mouth, I wonder how

flies know to come out to feed the birds, & feast themselves on the new stillborn, this stubborn great chain of being. . .

[largethingslargerthings]

Meditative Weekend of Poetry: Joyce Peseroff

Abandon the path, even once, if only to pee, and you’re lost.

First text, undelivered -- “Im in somm trouble.                                                   Call AMC.  Somewhere north of woods road” --

When I missed a blue marker the hour before sunset, I wasn’t                    afraid.  Our land, after all.  At worst, I could about-face and follow the waddle my snowshoes tracked.

Next day-- “Off trail 3 or 4 mi.  Call police” -- to her husband,                         never received.

But I kept searching.  Air whisked between polar fleece and bare skin.  I began to sweat.

In the woods, Pan rules.  Follow his pipes and wander in circles.

Two days later, when she missed an off-trail meet-up, game wardens stamped through the brush, blowing emergency whistles, calling her name.

Can I understand the pain of others only by suffering, which I hate?

After three weeks, in a sleeping bag -- dull with starvation, exposure -- I know she knew she was dying.

Or is suffering a thicket with a bird inside, every other singer competition for a mate?

Clouds covered the sun.  Ice pellets flung by my ski pole rolled and scribbled as they slid down a drift,  An oak rattled three leaves on a single stem.

“When you find my body, please call.” -- discovered on a Navy training base.

Sun dropped below the clouds.  A silver arrow glinted from a blue marker, lower on the oak than I expected, three feet of snow girding its trunk.

A moment of terror.  Ten minutes.  Nothing, but something.  Nothing.  Something.

--”my husband George and my daughter Kerry” -- notebook removed two years later, two miles west of the trail, inside her blue tent.

Photos of items placed outside the tent: a bandana, rosary, birthday candles, lighter, dental floss, a sewing kit, and two plastic water bottles, one half-full.

(”Missing Hiker Kept Journal of Her Ordeal”, Salamander #47)

(Suggestions: To me this poem is the quintessence of collage.  The title is the title of an article from the Boston Globe.  The poem is a list, but it is punctuated with quotes from the journal.  Furthermore, it is an inventory of items.  Furthermore, it is a narrative that takes plasce outside the subject of whom the structure of the poem is based (in terms of the subject’s journal, the organization of the poem is based on quotations from her journal).  The poem takes steps outside of this particular spatio-temporal context to offer omniscient details that she would never know, such as circumstances that take place after her death, how she is discovered.  The collage, then, is also a particular way of looking at time.  In one sense, it is a look at the present moment in excruciating detail.  In another, it is a removal of pathos from time.  A look at circumstance from a mountain top.  Although collage can often be a collection of many facets of the present moment, it is also (in some forms) a violation of this unwritten contract with the present moment that some collages seem to perform.  This happens especially in the final line where an inventory of the missing hiker’s effects is detailed as she laid them out (we assume).  In terms of all this, where is the center of the poem?  Try this: upon your own reading, pick a type of narration as a center and re-edit the poem in terms of this.  It is inventory?  Is it journal entries?  Is it the omniscient narration of the hiker’s fate?  What is lost by the removal of one type to the prejudice of another type from the poem?  Is anything lost?)

[tlhopkinson]

NO FEE Submission call + editor interview - Woven Tale Press, DEADLINE: Open year-round

NO FEE Submission call + editor interview – Woven Tale Press, DEADLINE: Open year-round

The Woven Tale Press is an online magazine founded by Editor-in-Chief Sandra Tyler. WTP is a free monthly magazine, is always open for submissions, and looking for a wide range of art and writing, including videos, press features, creative writing, and visual arts. They also run an annual contest that does require a fee and has a deadline of September 15, 2018. Scroll down on their Submittable…

[joncronshawauthor]

The Ray Bradbury Challenge: Day 405

The Ray Bradbury Challenge: Day 405

Short story: Krace is Not a Highway? by Scott Vaynur, from Strange Horizons, October 2017. Recommended.

Poem: Rock Records by Joyce Peseroff, listened to on the Poem of the Day podcast, from October 2017. Recommended.

Essay: Harem Wall Painting Fragments, listened to on the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. Highly Recommended.

What is the Ray Bradbury Challenge?

[barcimedia]

A Dog in the Lifeboat (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series) [paperback] Peseroff, Joyce https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887481140/ref=cx_skuctr_share?smid=A1J7ZDK32VF5IP

[llovelymoonn]

Hello, I hope you are well. Could I request the feeling of homesickness for a place you've never truly known?

lun lu spring longings at ch'ang-an \\ vincent van gogh the yellow house (1888) \\ marilyn nelson the homeplace: “the house on moscow street” \\ sj axelby \\ joyce peseroff eastern mountain time: “museum of childhood” \\ pierre bonnard interior (1913) \\ kwame davis ode to the clothesline \\ jennifer packer 

kofi

[bookofsarcasm]

Peseroff Prize- Breakwater Review

The Peseroff Prize honors Joyce Peseroff’s work as a poet, teacher, editor, innovator, and mentor. She helped found the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, served as its first director, and retired from teaching in 2014. Submit up to three poems and a $10 entry fee. There are no restrictions on content or form: “it’s all poetry.” Poems should be previously unpublished. We accept simultaneous submissions, but please notify Breakwater if submission is accepted elsewhere. 

[ap-apt]

Joyce Peseroff reviews HOW HER SPIRIT GOT OUT

Joyce Peseroff, author of five books of poetry, most recently Know Thyself (Carnegie Mellon, 2016), wrote a knockout review of How Her Spirit Got Out. Here’s a peek at the beginning, and then a bit from the end:

Krysten Hill’s chapbook is as fresh as today’s headlines. It calls out a culture where women continually risk abuse, invisibility, and soul-killing erasures, and where black women are particularly threatened….

Hill’s poems include allusions to foremothers like Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, and Zora Neale Hurston. Like Lorde, she responds to sexism, racism, and injustice with passion and perception. From Plath, she’s learned to figure the details of her life in images that are fierce and arresting. Hill understands the power of narrative and savor of vernacular speech, both loved by Hurston. The result is a voice that is beautiful and raw, intimate yet public, both confident and vulnerable.

We couldn’t agree more, and there’s no time like the present to head over to the Aforementioned shop and pick up your copy of How Her Spirit Got Out.

Joyce Peseroff reviews HOW HER SPIRIT GOT OUT was originally published on Aforementioned Productions

[finishinglinepress]

FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY:Car Poems by Maureen McElroy

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/car-poems-by-maureen-mcelroy/

RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

Maureen McElroy was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts as one of seven children in a close-knit Irish family. She attended Boston University and Emerson College, where she received an MFA under Joyce Peseroff and Bill Knott. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Mothers Always Write, Trampset, 10 Literary Journal, Literary Hatchet, and Fickle Muses. She taught English and Latin for a number of years before entering a career in real estate. She owns Jamaica Hill Realty in Boston, MA and currently lives in Milton with her husband and son.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Car Poems by Maureen McElroy

In Maureen McElroy’s chapbook Car Poems, the title poem signifies her playful, witty angle of vision, invoking such comparisons as “Cup holders and couplets” and “Stop signs and stanza breaks.” She has an imagination that comes alive in lines like this: “and I dreamt I was cheating/on my husband with my husband.” McElroy has a unique take on the quotidian experience of relationship pain: “1 just sit around naked/growing body hair.” That offbeat deflection is part of an emotional and aesthetic strategy that moves these poems into the music of language and resilience.

–Teresa Cader, author of History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, and Guests

McElroy’s journey in “Car Poems” is a courageous and hard-fought struggle to emerge whole at the end of a troubled relationship. In a voice witty and humorous, she warns “Some people have sex in cars/ . . . but I write poems . . .1 may be pulled over/for driving while writing poems.” The opposing pulls of sensuous longing and anger are teased out as each poem moves deeper into what was the marriage, and the reimagining of self that follows. With a keen eye for memory’s apt details, McElroy offers tender glimpses of childhood and parents. She works to celebrate her womanhood, finding in Ruth Bader Ginsburg an inspiring model. The distance traveled here is considerable, and love’s echoes reverberate throughout.

–Holly Guran, Author of River of Bones and Twilight Chorus

PREORDER YOUR COPY TODAY

https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/car-poems-by-maureen-mcelroy/#poets #poetry #poetrybooks #poems

[thegirlonthepage-blog]

Quoted

THE HARDNESS SCALE—by Joyce Peseroff

“Diamonds are forever so I gave you quartz which is #7 on the hardness scale and it’s hard enough to get to know anybody these days if only to scratch the surface and quartz will scratch six other mineral surfaces:

it will scratch glass it will scratch gold it will even scratch your eyes out one morning— you can’t be too careful.

Diamonds are industrial so I bought a ring of topaz which is #8 on the hardness scale. I wear it on my right hand, the way it was supposed to be, right? No tears and fewer regrets for reasons smooth and clear as glass.

Topaz will scratch glass, it will scratch your quartz, and all your radio crystals.

You’ll have to be silent the rest of your days not to mention your nights. Not to mention the night you ran away very drunk very very drunk and you tried to cross the border but couldn’t make it across the lake. Stirring up geysers with the oars you drove the red canoe in circles, tried to pole it but your left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. You fell asleep and let everyone know it when you woke up.

In a gin-soaked morning (hair of the dog) you went hunting for geese, shot three lake trout in violation of the game laws, told me to clean them and that my eyes were bright as sapphires which is #9 on the hardness scale.

A sapphire will cut a pearl it will cut stainless steel it will cut vinyl and mylar and will probably cut a record this fall to be released on an obscure label known only to aficionados.

I will buy a copy. I may buy you a copy depending on how your tastes have changed. I will buy copies for my friends we’ll get a new needle, a diamond needle,

which is #10 on the hardness scale and will cut anything. It will cut wood and mortar, plaster and iron, it will cut the sapphires in my eyes and I will bleed blind as 4 A.M. in the subways when even degenerates are dreaming, blind as the time you shot up the room with a new hunting rifle blind drunk as you were.

You were #11 on the hardness scale later that night apologetic as you worked your way up slowly from the knees and you worked your way down from the open-throated blouse.

Diamonds are forever so I give you softer things.”

[llovelymoonn]

Whats ur favorite poems or poets? Im trying to find more :D

mary oliver is my absolute favourite at the moment

banjo patterson (the man from snowy river)

shen (noodles)

ali cobby eckermann (thunder raining poison; black deaths in custody)

jeanette winterson

oodgeroo noonuccal (municipal gum)

ocean vuong (DetoNation)

henry kendall bell birds

richard siken (crush: "saying your names)

anne carson (glass, irony, and god: "the glass essay")

samuel wagan watson a one ended boomerang

anna akhmatova

les murray (the widower in the country; self and dream self)

louise glück (archaic fragment)

joyce peseroff (eastern mountain time: "ark in the field")

edward harrington (there's only the two of us here)

geoff page two signatures

kofi