#npm17

[nychealth]

September is National Preparedness Month!

Regardless of the type of emergency, it is important to make sure that you, your family, your workplace and your community are prepared. 

Given the recent destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey, we are once again reminded of the lifesaving importance of preparedness. NYC is currently in coastal storm season (August- October), and now is a great time to get prepared. Our thoughts are with all of those affected by the storm.

The theme for National Preparedness Month 2017 is "Disasters Don’t Plan Ahead. YOU CAN."

Learn more about available resources and guidance on how to make sure you’re prepared.

[frommybookbook]

“Late Spring,” by Mary Oliver.

It just seemed right to end the month with this.

[poetsorg]

Photo credit: Jenni Moody

Read today's National Poetry Month Event Spotlight on Eat Local :: Read Local.

[acehotel]

Joanne Kyger (1934–2017)

“The shape of the day, the words of the moment, what’s happening around me in the world of interior and exterior space — these are my writing concerns,” 

You never forget that there is a real human person writing these poems. Joanne Kyger is deeply missed. 

[hmhbooks]

“Invocation” from FINDING MY ELEGY by Ursula K. Le Guin

A poem about silence to end National Poetry Month. Hope you enjoyed all the poems we shared!

[utlibraries]

“i want to apologize to all the women

i have called pretty

before i’ve called them intelligent or brave.”

PCL Desk Supervisor Stephanie Lopez reads a powerful selection from Rupi Kaur’s book “Milk and Honey.” We have two copies at the PCL - one for check out and one permanently at the UT Poetry Center: http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b9280247~S29

[hiromisuzukimicrojournal]

properties and sacrifices 1

properties and sacrifices 2

properties and sacrifices 3

properties and sacrifices 4

properties and sacrifices 5

properties and sacrifices 6

properties and sacrifices 7

properties and sacrifices 8

◆

‘properties and sacrifices’

© visual poetry by hiromi suzuki, 2017

“properties and sacrifices 7” was published on NationalPoetryMonth.ca 2017: A Celebration of Women, 17 April 2017

[urbnvision]

[nebula61]

Thirty West Publishing House produces hand-bound chaplets and chapbooks.  As I previously posted, they recently chose my poem "The Surest Poison" as winner of their sonnet challenge (part of their celebration of National Poetry Month) and now editor Josh Dale is publishing a chaplet of all the weekly challenge winners!  It will include work from four different writers and four different genres/forms, and will include my winning sonnet as well as a second sonnet "Blood Pacts."  Many thanks to TWPH for their support of poetry and writers!  I would like to learn to make hand-bound chaps like these!  In Josh's picture, you see some of the tools he uses and the resulting chapbooks.

P.S. If you look closely at the second picture, you will see that my two poems happened to fall in the middle pages of the chaplet!

[hidingunderchairs]

I hate that phrase so much. #haiku #poemaday #npm17

[cobanionsmith]

There Is Nothing New Under the Sun

What has been will be again, except me–I am a new creation.

PAD Day 14 (common saying)

[blogwritetheworld]

April Spotlight: Reading Like a Poet

by Lisa Hiton

Poetry is different than other literary forms. Where we are used to talking about paragraphs, sentences, and chapters, poems resist for stranger dogmas and techniques: stanzas, lines, rhymes, meters, verses. Where we are used to reading prose and dialogue, the poem presents us with stranger shapes—sestina, sonnet, villanelle, free verse, blank verse. Poetry can feel as old as these forms or as new as the future. Poetry can, in one couplet, go from vastness of beauty in the world to the most intimate secret of the heart.

When you read a poem, you take the position of speaker and become part of the poem itself. One of America’s most quoted and celebrated poems is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. The poem begins with the following stanza:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Without explaining it to the reader, the reader has already become the speaker. To read this poem, the reader is now imagining two roads diverging in a wood. The reader is instantly the “I” who could not travel both roads and will have to contemplate which one to take. The poet has presented this question to the reader and you have entered the contemplation together.

Becoming the speaker makes the readers expand their capacity for sympathy and empathy. Sometimes, when we love a poem, it’s because the poem understands something we know and didn’t know how to say. Take “First Memory” by Louise Glück:

FIRST MEMORY

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was-- for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

I encountered this poem when I was in high school. It spoke directly to me—to my relationship with my own father, especially in the new-normal of my parents divorce. I had always felt, at that time, a sense of sadness that I couldn’t name. The pain between me and my father sometimes felt, indeed, like “I was not loved.” But “it meant I loved.” Reading the poem taught me about my own predicament. In turn, it modeled sympathy. A stranger who I didn’t know could write something that understood my inner life. And that is something I wanted to give to others too.

Unlike reading prose, poetry requires a slowness. We have to retrain our eye and ear to pause, even if only for a moment, at each line break. “First Memory”is made of three sentences. If they were written as such, we would read them quickly and perhaps move on. But because the poem happens in lines, we are forced to slow down these sentences and feel the same pain the speaker of the poem feels.

And what of empathy? Empathy is harder. It requires understanding others and situations that might not relate at all to your life. Perhaps you have a wonderful relationship with your father. How might this poem still be of value to you? How might this poem, more importantly, speak to a larger human condition? It can be very liberating to care less about whether you like a book or not and more about the kind of questions and work the text raises for you and your community. Reading poems is about that generosity—that gift of one’s most intimate feelings and ideas to you in imaginative and potent new forms. And your reading of them is a return of that generosity by listening to the speakers of the poems and letting them expand your capacities for thinking and feeling.

In order to love poems, one only need to hear them read aloud. This art form was first an oral tradition going all the way back to ancient times. Homer’s The Odyssey is one of humanity’s most long-living long poems. It’s full of imagery, narrative, and the voices of the gods. Perhaps our longstanding expression for love comes in the form of the sonnet mastered by none other than Shakespeare. We read poems at weddings and funerals. We take kernels of poems and put them on public buildings. Poetry is the original lyric. And in order to write more music, we can learn the history of how poems are made and use old rules to make new ones.

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook introduces those curious about the reading and writing of poetry in a humbled and clear way. While poetry can perform all kinds of tricks with heightened language, complex meter, and insular language constellations, Oliver breaks poetry down into its basic foundations. The first chapters present the reader with “Getting Ready” and “Reading Poems”. Before any technical language is introduced, Oliver invites those curious about poetry to first do the good work of encountering and reading poems. This set-up encourages readers and budding writers to find and understand emotional freedom before any other rules enter the conversation.

The handbook moves on to break down the elements of poetry. Sound and sound devices. Lines. Forms. Free Verse. These are big ideas that rule poetry. Especially for newcomers to the reading and writing of poetry, understanding what lines are, what motivates a poet to break them, and how they collectively bring a reader into a poem are foundational components to understanding this craft. As the handbook breaks poetry into its parts, it moves on to diction, tone, voice, imagery, and revision. These ideas are equally important to understand as readers of poetry as it is for those of us who are learning how to write it.

Oliver nears the end of the book with an important chapter on “Workshop and Solitude”. Poetry, like many written forms, wavers between community and solitude. While workshop is an important space to discuss and encounter the work of your peers and to work toward revision, reading, writing, and thinking are all achieved alone. The book dedicates pages to these elements because they are of great importance to the process of living a poetic life—perhaps even more than the technical dogmas of lines and meters.

About Lisa

Lisa Hiton is an editorial associate at Write the World. She writes two series on our blog: The Write Place where she comments on life as a writer, and Reading like a Writer where she recommends books about writing in different genres. She’s also the interviews editor of Cosmonauts Avenue and the poetry editor of the Adroit Journal.

[acehotel]

A poem by Akosua Afiriyie-Hwedie from The Felt, a journal publishing poetry and prose that is the tender-hearted making of new knowledge. 

Part of our month-long sharing of poets, poems and presses we read all year round.

[hmhbooks]

“From the Garden” from THE COMPLETE POEMS OF ANNE SEXTON

A lighter, springier poem from one of our favorite writers.

[utlibraries]

“I choose to love      this time      for once

with all my intelligence.”

“Splittings” by Adrienne Rich, read by Justina Moloney, PCL Graduate Research Assistant and UT grad student at the School of Information.

Find more by Adrienne Rich at the PCL!