Good News Department

Spring has brought some nice news for me. Last week I told you that fellow poets and bloggers, Dave Bonta and Kristin Berkey-Abbott, would be blogging about four different poetry books throughout April, one per week, and that Temptation by Water would be the week of April 4. Dave did his "live blog" yesterday. That term can be both a noun and a verb. What does it mean? It apparently means that the blogger will simultaneously read the poems and post about them to his or her blog. The benefit of such an approach is that the responses are very immediate, spontaneous. As you read the post, you feel that you are watching Dave read and react. You almost imagine facial expressions. It's very exciting to read the responses, but, for the poet, a bit frightening as well. What if Dave hits a poem he hates? But, thankfully, he didn't. In fact, he gave my book a very thorough and generous reading.

Dave devoted a good part of his day to the book. He indicated time so the reader can see that he read the book in three sittings, beginning early morning and going into evening. As he read, he also made observations about what was going on outside his porch—and sometimes drew connections between his observations and the poems.

Here's a snippet of Dave's post:
Next up is “My Mother Turns Her Back.” Wow, I like this one! “The snake on my mother’s / back thickens, a python/ bulging with rats.”
 
Is that a flicker calling from the corner of the field? Sure sounds like it.
 
The heat effect from my morning shower has almost entirely worn off, and the cold and damp are beginning to get to me. But listen: “I watch my mother // grow down, as if she carries / a burden of basket, as if / already greeting the earth.” Simply a magnificent poem.

2:45 p.m. Well, it’s up to 56 degrees. I’ll take it! One rain shower just past, the air smells of ozone and wet soil. Two, or possibly three, wood frogs are quacking in the teacup-sized pond down in the boggy corner of the field.
 
“If Only Humpty Dumpty Had Been a Cookie”: I’m not even that crazy about cookies, but this poem has me salivating. Damn.
 
And then there’s “Learning to Live Alone,” something I know a little about. “Trees that capitulate to nothing, // and speckled sparrows that light on the lawn.” Yep, companionship is where you find it. (Helps to be drunk, though. Then every beetle is like a brother.)
 
A chipmunk’s alarm call. The sun won’t quite come out.

You can read the entire Live Blog here.
Dave, by the way, is the creator and editor of qarrtsiluni, an innovative online journal. He is doing all kinds of amazing tech things to find new ways to get poetry out into the world. Check out his poetry video anthology, Moving Poems.

Then my book has also recently had two very nice reviews. One appears in Verse Wisconsin and is by Moira Richards who lives in South Africa. Here's a snippet: "The poetry in the collection, like the currents of the sea, pulls the reader one way and then another; first we’re tugged towards gusty desires, greedy indulgences, and next we’re pulled up against reminders of broken dreams and the emptiness of loss."

Read the entire review Here.

Then since good things come in threes, along came another review, this one by Sally Rosen Kindred for Connotation Press. Here's a snippet: "It’s hard not to open Diane Lockward’s fourth poetry book, Temptation by Water, without the feeling of wading in, wondering if the water’s warm. The wave cresting over the supine profile on the cover promises something that the book delivers: a submersion that is as complete as it is deliciously complicated. These poems play across the tender spectrum of temptation, from the pleasures of birds 'looping and soaring, cradled by air,' and 'a bowl of mushroom barley soup to slurp' and 'the sea/ like liquid emeralds,' to 'the hard shell” of grief.'"

Read the entire review Here.

As if all that weren't enough, Rattle featured a poem of mine from way back in 2001. I know that makes four good things. As I said, it's been a good spring so far. Check out The Study of Nature.

Surprise Review of What Feeds Us

I didn't expect to get any more reviews of my second book, What Feeds Us, so it was just delightful to learn that Sheila Bender had reviewed the book in her magazine, Writing It Real. This is a subscription only online publication, but occasionally there's an issue that includes non-subscribers. The review appears in one of those issues.

Sheila gives a generous overview of the collection, then zeroes in on three poems: "Love Test: A Ghazal," "Blueberry," and "Idiosyncrasies of the Body." Since Writing It Real is a newsletter that goes to writers, the review is followed by three prompts, one based on each of the three poems. There's also a blog where people can leave comments. 

Here's a bit from the Introduction:
"A 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize winner, the volume is as witty as it is heartbreaking. Diane's poems draw her readers in as they transform visits to the hair dresser, eating pickles as a child, wanting more out of a marriage as a husband brings in cold pizza on a snowy night, being stung by a bee and tended to lovingly, looking at blueberries in her kitchen, noticing an announcement about a coming test, or having an MRI and dreading the results into moments of revelation and introspection. Diane's gift for melding observations of food she prepares, activities in her life, and notions of her own and others with her deepest longings and fears reaches fully into the heart." 

You can read the entire review here. I love this review! 

You might be interested in subscribing to Writing It Real. It costs $30 per year. Sheila is an experienced poet, prose writer, editor, and teacher.
Here are some of the Subscriber Benefits:

• Links to each new article emailed every Thursday
• Access over five years of weekly articles in our archives
• Read any article online or download the print version
• Receive updated publishing and writing resource information each week 
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• $20 discount on all Writing It Real online workshops

Read some Free sample articles. 

Consider treating some writer you know to a subscription. Consider treating yourself to a subscription.

Good News

I was delighted yesterday to find that a review of my new book, Temptation by Water, has appeared online in Rattle. To tempt you to read the review, here's the Introduction: "Temptation by Water, Diane Lockward’s fourth volume of poetry, is both fierce and funny. This lively new collection piercingly depicts loss but balances it with wit and genial good humor. Some of Lockward’s poems confront difficult but necessary truths but others are sexy, irreverent and amusing. Despite the heart-wrenching loss of a husband or lover, the poet never feels sorry for herself. Her poems are a pleasure to read, and her talent for the unexpected keeps readers turning the pages." Click here to read the rest of the review by Barb Daniels.

I was also pleased this past week to have a poem, Gender Issue, recorded by Nic Sebastian for Whale Sound. I love these new ways of spreading the word about poetry. I'm particularly interested in the various ways that poets make their work available to readers / listeners. Certainly, Nic's project is a wonderful contribution. At her site poets and poetry lovers can have the pleasure of hearing contemporary poems beautifully read by Nic whose voice and pacing enhance each and every poem she chooses to read. There's an Index and each poet's poem is accompanied by a bio and a link to the text of the poem. Visit the site often. You might also want to sign up for the email notification.

Whales and water. I like that.


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Do Unto Other Poets

In the March/April issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Chapman Hood Frazier has an excellent interview with Gregory Orr. There's something in the interview that keeps circling around in my head. Frazier asks Orr how the poets he had as teachers influenced him as a poet, specifically, "how did their work itself influence you and your writing?" He wants to know not just what poet-teachers such as Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand taught Orr about the craft but also what influence their poetry had on his poetry.

Interesting question, but what interested me most was this part of Orr's response: "Reading their (Kunitz's and Strand's) poems was also a way for them to teach me indirectly through their writing. And it's very important to know your teacher's work. I sometimes have students working with me, and they've studied with me two or three years, and I realize they've never read anything I've written. That seems crazy, because why would you listen to somebody's opinion of your work if you don't know what they've written?"

It's that last part that has stayed with me. I keep thinking of a college student who came to a reading I gave several years ago. After the reading she came up to me and offered some lovely compliments. She moved closer to me and indicated that she wanted to touch me for "inspiration." She seemed to think that she could magically acquire what I knew by literally rubbing shoulders with me. I suggested that the best poetry teacher and the best source of inspiration is a poetry book. But she went home empty-handed. Now I understand that college kids often don't have the money for poetry books, but I sure hope they don't really believe that proximity to a poet is how one learns how to write poetry.

I've also been asked several times by other poets to write a review of their latest book. I write several reviews each year—it's kind of a mission of mine, a way of supporting poets, and it allows me to hope for the same kind of support—but these requests sometimes come from poets who I'm sure haven't bought or read any of my books. They might, at best, have read a few of my poems in journals. I'm not inclined to say Yes to the request.

Likewise with blurbs. I generally feel honored to be asked to write a blurb for a forthcoming book—but only when it comes from someone who I know has supported my work. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. I've been asked to write blurbs for people who clearly have virtually no knowledge of my work beyond having read a poem or two online. And I have to wonder, as Orr wondered, why they'd want words of praise from someone whose work they don't know very well? And why they would expect my support when they haven't given me theirs?

One more thing that puzzles me: Why do poets with forthcoming books or chapbooks ask me to pre-order and pay for their collections when they've never bought one of my books already in print? I receive these requests fairly often as there are several presses which require their poets to solicit advance sales. The number of advance sales then determines the print run. Although I do not like this business model at all, if the request comes from a poet who I know has supported my work, then I pre-order. But sometimes the request comes from a poet who I'm quite sure has not availed himself of my work. I'm not sure why some people would ask or expect me to pay for the publication cost of their work when they haven't offered me their support.

Most poets I know are generous, and I hope that I am too, but, at the risk of sounding cranky, I want to suggest that people asking for services or favors or time need to remember to be generous too. They need to remember The Golden Rule of Poetry.


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Chapbook Spotlight: Narcissus

This one's a beauty. Winner of Tupelo Press' 2006 Snowbound Chapbook Award and published in 2008, Cecilia Woloch's collection is a perfectly contained and controlled collection.

In spite of the collection's title, there is only one overt reference to Narcissus and that occurs in the epigraph that introduces the first of two sections: "Didn't I stand there once? / Didn't I choose to go back?" (from "Narcissus," by Patricia Hooper). Woloch then borrows not the story of Narcissus but the ideas contained in the story and with the most subtle of touches weaves those ideas throughout the collection. "Anniversary," the collection's first poem, engages the first line of the epigraph as its first line and thus introduces the nostalgia that pervades the twenty poems.

Just as Narcissus returned to the pond again and again, Woloch returns again and again to the past and with the same mixture of longing and regret. In "Postcard to Kim from the Cafe Les Philosophes," one of several poems that masquerade as postcards, the speaker revisits a marriage that once was blissful, then wasn't: "We were husband and wife in that house / because that's what we'd been pronounced . . . / Something / I thought had gone wrong with the language, with the meaning we make of / breath."

Just as Narcissus gazed at his own image, Woloch's speaker scrutinizes the person she once was. In "Girl in a Truck, Kentucky Highway 245," the speaker returns to her girlhood home: ". . . I almost wave, now, at the girl standing up in the bed of the truck in / the yard I pass. I remember myself at that age, remember the longing, almost / like rage, to touch and be touched, and my innocence. / . . . / I've come back to save what can still be saved of the girl who believed / —who goes on believing, shattered and shimmering, driving too fast—that the / beloved, oh beloved, all bright tenderness, will come."

This longing to return home, to have a home, is underscored by references to houses, hotels, and rooms that never feel like home. "Every room was a / borrowed room," concludes the speaker in "Postcard Beginning with a Quote from Mark C., Avenue de l'Opera." Similarly, the search for home is underscored by references to different geographical places—Kentucky, Georgia, Paris, the Carpathians—and by references to modes of transportation—train, truck, metro.

The idea of Narcissus' pursuit of love is carried out in images of water and its various manifestations: a river, the sea, rain, tears. Even the image of the mirror, what the water was to Narcissus, makes several appearances in the poems. And so, too, images of shining, shimmering, and shattering.

Even the numerous epigraphs and borrowed lines and the few ekphrastic poems imply a return to the past, to what came before, and they suggest as well another way of gazing at what we hunger for.

Here are two poems, the first from Section I, the second from Section II, that represent this collection's motifs and also display Woloch's simple but elegant language and her exquisite figures and images.


Anniversary

Didn’t I stand there once,
white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper,
swearing I’d never go back?
And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth?
And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid,
knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire
into the further room of love?
And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?


Grace

When I think of how you move—
when you enter a room, how the room
enters you; when you step out
into the night, how the night sky
falls into your hair—

when I think of how you stand
as if with nothing in your hands
and I have nothing to offer you now
save my own wild emptiness—

when I think of how you leave
the air untouched and how you came
into the world my grief had wrecked
and made it shine again by simply
walking slowly through the dark

toward me—love, I think
the body is a miracle, that animal
whose graceful shadow
lies between us, calmed.




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New Orleans Review: Review of Martha Silano's Blue Positive

At last my review of Martha Silano's amazing collection, Blue Positive, has appeared in the New Orleans Review. I say "at last" because it seems like I waited forever. Due to some strange internal errors, the review was omitted from the issue for which it was scheduled to appear. Then through yet another such error, it was omitted from the next issue. Then came the delays at the printer. But at last, yes, at last, it arrived, and it's a lovely journal, my first time in it. Wonderful poetry, an interview, very interesting black and white photography, and a number of book reviews. I'm proud to be part of the issue.

But I'm even happier to give some much deserved attention to Silano's book, published by Steel Toe Books. I was immediately captivated by the cover. Who could resist these brown eyes?

The poems are every bit as appealing. The dominant theme is motherhood. Silano looks at the subject from all possible angles. There's the excitement of pregnancy and the thrill of having a baby, but there's also the hard reality of postpartum depression. Silano gives us a close and painful view of the dark side of motherhood. Not just being tired or in a bad mood, but descending into real psychosis.

Other aspects of a woman's life are included: relationships with relatives, love and love-making, food. Silano has a masterful touch with sensuous details. When she sets the table in a poem, you feel as if you are right there, breathing in the aromas.

But that is just one of many gifts. Silano is wonderfully inventive and playful, and she employs engaging diction. Here's a poet who revels in form and language, deals comfortably in contradiction, and consistently surprises and delights the reader.

Here's one of my favorites from the collection. This poem first appeared in Poetry Northwest and was later featured on Poetry Daily.


Getting Kicked by a Fetus

Like right before you reach your floor, just
before the door of an elevator opens.
Like the almost imperceptible
springs you waded through
in Iroquois Lake.
Carbonation.
Twitch.

Sometimes high and jabby near the ribs;
sometimes low and fizzy like a pie
releasing steam, like beans
on the stovetop—slow
simmer,

like the shimmer of incoming tide—hot, soft sand
meeting waves, slosh bringing sand crabs
that wriggle invisibly in.

And sometimes a school of herring
pushing through surf,
or a single herring

caught from a pier like a sliver of moon rising in the west;
sometimes a tadpole stuck in a pond growing smaller
and smaller, a puddle of mud, squirmy like worms—
now your left, now your right. Sometimes

neon flickering, like that Texaco sign near Riddle, Oregon—
from a distance it read TACO, but up close
the faintest glow, an occasional E or X,
like an ember re-igniting.

Like seeing your heartbeat through the thinnest part
of your foot, sunken well between ankle and heel,
reminder of a world beneath your skin, world
of which your know little,

and the pond growing smaller and smaller, soon the rolling waves
like the ones you dove into at Bradley Beach, at Barneget,
growing less frequent, your giant ocean
drying up, your little swimmer

sinking, giving way
to the waves
of his birth.


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Reviews

A nice piece of news: A lovely new review of my book, What Feeds Us, now appears online at Rattle. The reviewer, Karla Huston, did a terrific job and I am very appreciative! I also say three cheers for Rattle which regularly runs reviews on their website. As all poets know, without some reviews it's difficult to get the word out about our books. I therefore often encourage poets to be reviewers themselves. It just makes sense that if we want to receive reviews we need to be willing to write them. If we don't, then who will?

I've been writing reviews of poetry books for several years. It's a bit time-consuming and it's challenging, but I always feel that it enriches me as a poet. I learn something about poetry from each review I write. And I find that I read much more carefully when I'm writing a review of the book in hand. The close and repeated readings usually make me more appreciative of what the poet has accomplished. I pick up a lot that I missed on the first reading.

If you've been avoiding writing reviews because of time, keep in mind that there are many journals that take very short reviews; you don't have to spend weeks on the review. Some such print journals that come to mind: Mid-American Review, Boston Review, Cider Press Review, and New Letters; and some online journals: Poemeleon, Rain Taxi, Rougarou. In addition to what you'll learn while doing the review, you'll be providing an important service and you'll gain some nice publication credits. Everybody wins; everybody gets a prize.

Another journal I want to mention is Review Revue. This journal has been around for maybe three years. It's a tabloid format, easy to fold up and tuck in your pocket. Easy to read on the train. The journal, which comes out three times a year, is devoted entirely to essays, reviews, and interviews—all about poetry. It's one of the best bargains around at only $12 a year per subscription; even better at $20 for a two-year subscription.

The most recent issue, which arrived just yesterday, contains an interview with Fleda Brown, former poet laureate of Delaware; a review of Brown's new book, Reunion; an essay about Georgia O'Keefe by poet Christopher Buckley; an essay about Mark Strand; a review of two collections from Iris Press by poet Phebe Davidson; and an article of tribute to Jean Pedrick by poet Sebastian Matthews. And there's more. (Notice, please, that several of these articles / reviews are by poets!)

I want to encourage you to support this journal. But I must also encourage the editors to make a strong commitment to getting issues out on time. I know that's a persistent problem that many journals suffer from for a variety of reasons. But RR is always late. Hey, there's even part of an editorial about it in this latest issue. This issue, by the way, is dated December 2007. It's now the end of March. (Also, Editors, if you're going to advise readers at the end of a page "continued on page 8" or "continued on page 19," you really should number the pages!) I'm hopeful that the editor's apology means improvement in the meeting deadlines department. This journal is worth keeping around.