One of the many things poetry does well is help create a sense of community, even among people who may not know very much about each other except that they share an interest in this old, peculiar, enduring form of communication. That is worth doing right about now, when so many fractures are taking place in the society, and several states are enacting anti-Other measures to keep their communities from becoming multi-everything—or multi-anything.

Here in Newburyport, Debbie Szabo is an imaginative, dynamic English teacher who directs the local high school’s very successful creative writing group, Poetry Soup. She has established cultural connections between her students and those of like-minded teachers in neighboring Lawrence and Haverhill. Yearly reciprocal bus trips between the paired high schools of each city are arranged by the teachers involved and locally funded by the Commission for Diversity and Tolerance. Those exchanges allow youngsters from very different cultures to spend two days a year exploring each other’s environments. They share each other’s backgrounds, lives, languages, ideas and lunches, under the supervision of a teacher from each school. Together they produce poems that then form part of a chapbook containing student poetry and photos.

The success of the program—both literary and human—has been such that the poems constitute a record of how “community” happens. It forms through frank and open learning and the substitution of living faces and real voices for the stereotypes that sometimes obscure the view between cultures. It would be wonderful to see such efforts duplicated elsewhere.

Author Note: Rhina P. Espaillat has published poems, essays, short stories and translations in numerous magazines and over fifty anthologies, in both English and her native Spanish, as well as three chapbooks and eight full-length books, including three in bilingual format. Her most recent are a poetry collection in English, Her Place in These Designs (Truman State University Press, Kirksville, 2008), and a bilingual collection of her short stories, El olor de la memoria/The Scent of Memory (Ediciones CEDIBIL, Santo Domingo, D. R., 2007).  Her honors include the Wilbur Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Award for Translation, the May Sarton Award, a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Salem State College, and several prizes from the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture.

Finch is a poet, translator, librettist, editor and critic. She is currently is  the Director of the  Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. 

What made you decide to write this book?

 I felt I had something unique to offer.  I have an unusually broad experience and understanding of many different aspects of poetry, from feminism and multiculturalism through meter and form, and I wanted to share it all in an approachable way.

Who is the primary audience for the book — teachers, poets on their own, critics?

Poets, and poetry lovers, of all backgrounds and in all situations.  A Poet’s Craft is suitable for poets on their own and in peer writing groups, and also for teachers and students of poetry from advanced high school through graduate school, and for the general reader who loves poetry.

In a few sentences, would you please describe your book?

A Poet’s Craft is a comprehensive book on writing poetry from inspiration through publication.  It includes chapters on the Muse, imagery, language and diction, revision, giving a poetry reading—and also perhaps the most thorough introduction to writing in meter, rhyme, and form available anywhere today. It includes hundreds of classic and contemporary poems as well as numerous quotes on poetry.

What does this book offer that other books on writing poetry don’t?

 A Poet’s Craft is far more comprehensive than any other book on writing poetry out there.   It’s like an introduction to writing poetry, a history of poetry, a poetry anthology, a form handbook, and a poet’s reflections on poetry all rolled into one. The deep and thorough section on form may be the most unique aspect; there are thorough discussions here on everything from blues to rap to sapphics to amphibrachs and six varieties of free verse.

In what ways does this book reflect your unique experience as a poet? 

I’ve had the unusual experience of being exposed to many wildly different corners of the poetry world. I’ve performed in poetry slams in New York, studied meter and form in the Ivy League, workshopped in a free-verse centered graduate program, and argued theory with experimental and language poets.  I also grew up with a tradition of sharing classic popular poetry aloud.  All of these perspectives come into A Poet’s Craft.

What do you think readers will like best about the book?

There is really something for everyone.  Many readers have commented on the approachable tone and the great range of poems included. Personally, I love all the quotes on different aspects of poetry, which I spent a lifetime collecting.

]]> http://masspoetry.org/2012/05/07/new-poetry-craft-book-by-annie-finch/feed/ 0 http://masspoetry.org/2012/05/04/cant-get-enough/ http://masspoetry.org/2012/05/04/cant-get-enough/#comments Fri, 04 May 2012 16:22:35 +0000 Molly http://masspoetry.org/?p=5132 It’s been two weeks since the poetry festival and I can feel the withdrawal setting in. Sure there was initial relief, that satisfaction that comes when you sit down and allow yourself the sigh of stress relief. Another festival down, just fifty weeks until the next one.

In the interim we’ll have to relive some highlights of this year’s festival.

Montserrat student making fresh screen press bags.

Free silk screen tote bags, wet off the presses!

Countless workshops full of inspiration.

Literary magazine and small press fair.

Literary magazine and small press fair in Museum Place Mall

Amazing readings by seasoned poets and new.

This slam performance which still has me laughing.

Yet reliving is not enough.

I want to walk around and feel the infectious energy that pulses through the poetry community. Doubtless many festival attendees feel the same way. So I’ll let you in on a not-so-secret secret: the festival begins before it event starts. That might sound like some weird metaphysical philosophy, but in all seriousness, the things you like about the festival really begin with its planning. How many organizations start their scheduled meetings with poetry readings? How often do you get to look around a table and know that everyone there is really dedicated to poetry and spreading the love and appreciation for it? Now you may have people who will tolerate your love, there might be some people who feel the same way. If what you love is being surrounded by the community spirit why not get involved in the festival?

Watch this video of the students from four schools who came together as finalists for the first Louder than a Bomb slam contest  in Massachusetts.  The program is sponsored by Mass Poetry.

If you were lucky enough, you heard Almond’s presentation in the PEM Atrium — a presentation that tempted many museum goers, who came to see art exhibits, but stayed in the large space and enjoyed an hilarious presentation.

Almond was the judge for the MPF contest, honoring four “bad” poets and reading their work, while the authors sat in the audience and enjoyed the audacity of their own badness.

Here is a segment from the presentation, honoring the poet Jade Sylvan.

Have you met Adrienne Rich? people would ask me when they learned I had published a book about her poetry, The Aesthetics of Power (U Georgia Press).  Yes, I’d reply and tried to convey the pleasure of that meeting, sometime in the late eighties in Salem,Massachusetts.   I had invited her to read at the Writers’ Series at (then) Salem State College.   As part of that invitation, I asked her if she’d have dinner with a small group of faculty and students at the Hawthorne Hotel, where she was staying.   She graciously agreed.

Of course, I was familiar with her as a public person.  I had attended readings by Adrienne Rich in Cambridge and in Amherst when I was in graduate school.   At that time, she was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and walked haltingly onto stage with a cane.   Once she opened her mouth, any weakness disappeared.  Never had I heard such a powerful voice come from a diminutive female body.   By powerful I mean in command of herself, perfectly attuned to her role as a poet and to the dynamic between poet and audience.  When I heard Nikki Finney read inSalemat the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, I recognized a similar power.   It’s not just voice; it’s the conviction behind the voice.

Rich’s poems were engraved on my soul in lines like these from “Transcendental Etude”:

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,

make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history

or music, that we should begin

with the simple exercises first

and slowly go on trying

the hard ones, practicing till strength

and accuracy became one with the daring

to leap into transcendence . . . .

So, yes, I’d met Adrienne Rich as reader and audience member, even having the audacity to bring a male friend to a reading when I knew she had a reputation for excluding men.   That night, she didn’t, but Rich could be ferocious when it came to women and women’s issues.  Was she an angry feminist?  You bet, but she also had a visionary power beyond anything I’d ever encountered.

Imagine my anticipation when I called up to her room at the Hawthorne Hotel to tell her that the dinner party had assembled.  I’ll meet you at the elevator, I told her.  The door slid open and there she was, about five foot two to my five ten. I advanced towards her with my hand outstretched and introduced myself.   She took my hand and gave me a searching look.   Don’t I know you? she asked.   Oh yes, I wanted to say, I’m the woman you dared to study her life.  I’d like to think she recognized a kindred soul, someone, like her, who embraced feminism and had dedicated her professional life to women’s literature.  She made me feel recognized and important.  I’m sure that I’m not the only woman who felt this way about Adrienne Rich and her poetry.   She touched our lives; she changed our lives.

Claire Keyes is a poet, critic, and Professor Emerita at Salem State University. See her latest poem in Verse Wisconsin.

At least that’s what I thought, before I went to the Mass Poetry Festival.  As a junior writing major in college, it was time for me to start an internship, and Mass Poetry fell into my lap.  I knew I wasn’t great at poetry, but why not try it?  The first three months of my internship consisted of email on top of email and phone calls to strangers who hung up on me after 45 seconds.  I convinced myself that I was working towards something bigger.  I loved the ideals of the organization—poetry in schools, poetry in elderly homes, poetry in Massachusetts, poetry everywhere!  Maybe if someone had taught me when I was younger, I might actually be a poet today.  Two weeks before the festival, it was time to kick into gear (the non-poet in me enjoys clichés).  Beth Moore sent me spreadsheets filled with names and places I had never heard of, never been to, but it was up to me to piece them all together into something that would make sense to 100 volunteers coming to help the cause.

Thursday night, I drove the long Massachusetts turnpike for two hours from my school to my house, and tried to fall asleep.  The next morning, I awoke bright and early to drive another hour to Salem, coffee in hand, ready for work.  When I finally arrived, I walked Essex Street half a dozen times and called Beth three times, till I finally found the people in orange.

After an hour I was one of them.  I knew all of their names and already had inside jokes.  I wore my orange with pride and walked Essex Street a dozen more times—without getting lost.  I met a new person in orange everywhere I went, and smiled at the ones I didn’t know.  We were the worker bees of the poetry hive.  I worked from 8am to 9pm, and finally set myself free to hear some poetry.  I arrived at Victoria Station and walked towards the crowded room with the microphone.  Before I could find a seat, J.D caught me: “We need chairs.  And buttons!”  Here I was thinking I was done for the night.  I helped them move the chairs and gave them my own pass to the poetry universe, then contemplated switching my t-shirt.  But as a proud member of the worker bees, I left it on and snuck into a corner and listened to the poets of my generation.  I understood them and I felt a part of them.  Maybe I couldn’t write like them, or speak like them—but I was one of them

And that was only day one!

The winner of the night was Lizard Lounge slam champ (and veteran educator) Cole Rodriguez (third photo from the bottom).

Here are photos taken of the event.

Here’s where they are appearing locally:

Through a tapestry of spoken-word poetry, video projection, and movement choreography, “Hurricane Season” connects the issues that surfaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the “unnatural disasters” disenfranchised communities are experiencing nationwide and worldwide on a daily basis. Stirring images and stunning verse take audiences on a voyage of unthinkable tragedy and undeniable promise from the eye of a systemic storm.

If you need a further endorsement, here it is:

Contact Monica Hinojos at monica@3riversarts.com with questions or additional information.

Pushcart prize winner Jill McDonough’s first book is Habeas Corpus.  The recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and Stanford’s Stegner program, she teaches in prisons for Boston University. Her work appears in Slate,The Nation, and The Threepenny Review, and is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2011. She directs 24PearlStreet, the online writing program at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Here’s what I think about AWP. I understand it’s important, but it feels like wading through need. Like I’m in that scene in Terminator, the first one, where Schwarzenegger walks in naked, analyzing everyone in the bar. Except everyone at AWP is doing those calculations in their heads about everyone else, analyzing status and role and blech. Sometimes it’s awful because I’m beneath notice. Sometimes it’s awful because people want something from me. When I’m done, I need to take a bath. And stare into the eyes of someone who loves me.

Here’s what I think about this year’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Shining pedestrian walkways filled with poetry, poets, people who love poetry. Colleen Michaels put poems everywhere from coasters to a shower curtain. Stephen Dunn on basketball! Peabody Essex Museum’s endlessly gorgeous galleries for all the events! Everybody happy and kind!

Tyehimba Jess, Lloyd Schwartz, Afaa Michael Weaver and I did a panel that Danielle Jones-Pruett invented, about form. Tyehimba went first. He asked the audience for a number. When he got “13!” he started reading his crazy DNA-spiral, Mobius-strip, Tyehimba-invented formal poem at line 13. Going forward and backward, up, down, and diagonal on the page. Making new kinds of sense with each shift, with each repetition. And I had to follow that. Thanks a lot, Tyehimba!

Richard Cambridge, Kazi Toure, Danielle Georges, Kathi Aguero and I talked to an audience filled with people who care about people in prisons. Lots of them wanted to know how they can get involved. I have been teaching in prisons since 1999. Do you know how often it happens that people in an audience want to help? Probably you can guess.

My panel with Erin and Sumita and K. E. Duffin and John Hodgen—so charming and funny and generous!—was interrupted by a tour guide. But who could blame her? We were right under the Cetology sculpture, that whale skeleton made of lawn chairs. So we just laughed and raised our voices and the audience stuck with us.

I heard a lady call my name on the street. I recognized her because she was one of those people in the audience, sticking with me and K. E. and John at the Agni panel. Her name was Minerva. (Hi, Minerva!) She and her partner were sitting in the sun outside a café with their dogs, drinking champagne. They offered me champagne. I don’t turn down champagne. So I joined them for a while, talking about poetry and magnolias. Then James, Shannon, Liz, and Alexandra showed up, folks I know from California. And they introduced me to their friends Stacy and Tanya. Also Henry, the James-and-Shannon baby, who wasn’t born the last time I saw them. We all drank in the sunshine and played with Henry and the dogs before the reception.

I got to tease Michael Ansara and Christopher Lydon. I got to hug Jan O’Neill, always unflappable, always elegant, real. I got to hear Nikky Finney blow everybody away. I got to tell volunteers they were doing an awesome job. But I didn’t get to everybody. Did you volunteer? Thank you! You did an awesome job!

Tyehimba Jess, genius, was staying with me in Boston, and we headed back around midnight. You may not know that there is a liquor store in Salem called Bunghole Liquors. I had heard of it. But when I saw it I screeched to a halt and pulled in the parking lot. And Tyehimba and I laughed until my stomach hurt. We took pictures. It was a perfect day.