Bits & Pieces of This & That

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Since I've been posting features of poets for the past month, I've fallen behind in the bragging department. Time to catch up. Here's what got me excited and made me happy recently.

First, The Crafty Poet received two more nice reviews. As the book is zeroing in on its second birthday, I am very happy that it continues to attract attention and praise. The first review is by Philip Chase and appears in the 2015 issue of the Journal of New Jersey Poets. As that is a print journal, I scanned the review and posted it on my website. I am very fond of this opening sentence: "With plenty of practical advice, insightful interviews, useful exercise, and original poems from an array of voices and styles, Diane Lockward's aptly titled The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop is an invaluable tool for anyone looking to delve into the craft of creating poetry." The entire review can be found HERE.

The second review is by Linda Simone and appears online in Writer's Relief. This reviews begins with this nice sentence: "If you’re looking for the magic bullet to combat writer’s (or poet’s) block, The Crafty Poet, A Portable Workshop by poet Diane Lockward may be the book for you." Read the entire review HERE.

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I'm also happy to report that The Crafty Poet E-Book is doing nicely. On the generous recommendation of Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, co-editors of Wingbeats and Wingbeats II, I used the services of eBookIt for the conversion. I have been extremely pleased with their service and recommend them to anyone looking to convert a print book into an ebook. While I had not expected them to do any editing, they did and my editor did a really great job. Then my rather complicated table of contents required manual inputting which they did for a very reasonable fee. I especially appreciated the open line of communication. Any questions I had were quickly answered. The cost of this service was recovered in less than the first two months of the book's availability. For each of the three months that the ebook has been available, it has been a bestseller. As a result, it has been given a fancy badge on its page. The Crafty Poet ebook is available at eBookIt, Amazon, B&N, and elsewhere.

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Then I had the great happiness and honor of having a poem featured by Garrison Keillor at The Writer's Almanac on Monday, June 22. Linguini was read by Keillor on his broadcast that goes out daily on 600 radio stations. The poem also went out via Keillor's daily newsletter. First published in Poet Lore, the poem later appeared in my second poetry book, What Feeds Us.

In the poem publication department, my poem "Thinking Like a Buddhist" appears in the current issue of Driftless Review.

Then I also have two poems, "We Were Such a Fine Plum Pudding" and "The Gift of a Rat" in the current issue of Compose Journal. This is a beautiful online journal that includes poetry, fiction, and art. The editors also do a great job of promoting the journal and the authors via social media.

My bad news is some nasty poison ivy on my arms which has me dousing my limbs in rubbing alcohol and spreading on copious coats of Wal-dryl. No more weeding for me.

A Giveaway and Sundry News Items

Right now there is a week-long Goodreads Giveaway of one copy of The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. Click on the link below and sign up. Even if you already have the book, you could use a second one as a gift. Please note that the Giveaway will end midnight on Friday, February 21. You must enter by then in order to be eligible.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Crafty Poet

by Diane Lockward

Giveaway ends February 21, 2014.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop received a very nice review from Erika Dreifus in "The Practicing Writer," a monthly newsletter which is the companion to Erika’s blog of the same name. In both her newsletter and her blog, Erika provides all kinds of useful information for writers. For example, she regularly includes lists of paying markets.

Erika begins the review with this disclosure: "I’ve known Diane Lockward for quite some time. Earlier in her career, she taught English at the New Jersey high school I attended (in fact, she was one of my sister’s English teachers)." The high school referred to is Millburn High School, same one Ann Hathaway attended. Sadly, I did not have the privilege of having both Dreifus sisters as my students, but I am happy to have Erika now as my reviewer. Read the rest of the review HERE. You can also sign up for the newsletter at the same site.

I was also happy to find this in Erika’s newsletter:

FEATURED RESOURCE: DIANE LOCKWARD’S POETRY NEWSLETTER.

Another nice piece of news is that I was recently invited to be the Featured Poet in the Poetry Spotlight at Cultural Weekly.  My three poems are "Invective Against the Bumblebee," "Organic Fruit," and "Linguini." All three are from my book, What Feeds Us. Cultural Weekly is an online newspaper with several columns, including Film, Art, Architecture, Music, and Dance. Each issue is also distributed via email. You can sign up at the site if you want to receive the weekly newsletter. (Bottom of the screen, right side)

I was also recently invited to become part of the "This Is Poetry" project that will result in eight volumes of poetry, each devoted to a different theme. The first volume will focus on women in the small presses. I'll be part of that first print volume. In the meantime, the woman behind the project is posting the poems as she selects them on Tumblr. My poems are Pyromania and The Best Words. Both poems are from my book, What Feeds Us.

Poetry: An Introduction

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When I was a high school English teacher teaching poetry, it was a fantasy of mine that one day some other high school teacher would be teaching my poems. That's a fantasy that has happily come true several times. But I'm moving on and up to college now. My poem, Linguini, has been included in Poetry: An Introduction, a new college-level textbook from Bedford / St. Martin's.

At 864 pages, Poetry: An Introduction is a big book. Edited by Michael Meyer, this is the 7th edition of this book. It includes three different tables of contents: Brief Contents; Contents, which is much more extensive and includes poem titles and authors; and Thematic Contents for those who want to study poetry in thematic units. There is a wide range of poems, classic and contemporary.

The elements of poetry and forms and free verse are covered in the first eleven chapters. These are followed by close studies of four poets; a study of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; a case study of the Harlem Renaissance; and five thematic case study chapters.

The book covers how to critically read and write about poetry and includes a detailed section on how to write a poetry research paper and document it using MLA guidelines.

Poems are included throughout the book, along with follow-up questions, assignments, and prompts. There is also An Anthology of Poems.

New to this edition is an expanded number of online resources for both students and teachers, including access to video interviews with writers. Scattered throughout the book are brief pieces of advice from the poets whose poems are included. This new feature should be especially appealing to students.

Everything a teacher needs to teach poetry is contained in Poetry: An Introduction. In fact, there's enough to last several semesters.

Linguini: The Movie

A few months ago poet, teacher, and blogger Martha Silano let me know that three of her students were doing their class poetry project on my poem "Linguini." This would take place at Bellevue College in Washington, obviously much too far away for me to be there. But several weeks later Martha sent me the Power Point project they'd created. I knew immediately that I wanted to transform their work into a video. I wanted to use Garrison Keillor's reading of the poem as the soundtrack, but when I added the project to iMovie, it went so fast that the reading could not keep pace. Even though Keillor reads the poem fast (I suppose to keep to his time limit), the power point went much faster. I had to somehow slow it down. So I figured out how to save it as slides. I then turned those into jpegs and added them into a movie project. Then I dragged in the sound track and spent a ridiculous amount of time coordinating the reading with the slides. But I finally got it. So with a huge shout-out of gratitude to Martha and her fabulous students, here's the result.