Can you Write in Coffee Shops? (via Occupation: Writer)

This week I read a post from the Atlantic called Working Best at Coffee Shops that got me thinking about writing in coffee shops. I have yet to master the art of writing in coffee shops. It sounds glamourous – I know so many excellent writers did it, or do it (Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Malcom Gladwell to name a … Read More

via Occupation: Writer

Review of Ghost in a REd Hat by Rosanna Warren

reviewed by Hannah K. Jones

Offering reflections on a collection of themes—including, but not limited to nature, death, and the writing process—Rosanna Warren’s newly published book, Ghost in a Red Hat draws inspiration from her own life, history, and the works of other famous artists.  Impacted heavily by nature, many of the poems follow a format in which the scene is set with introductory lines dedicated to detailing the specific birdcall wafting through the air, the flora cascading before the poet’s eyes, and any other distinct natural features present while the poem was written.  Poems such as “Mistral I,” “Mistral II,” and “Fear” illustrate a pattern of compositional self-awareness and struggle, as the breeze rearranges the words upon the page, blowing poor quality ones into the afternoon air.  Many of the poems read like historical fiction, their topics ranging from the ancient Greece of Homer in the prose poem “Odyssey,” to the American Civil War.  As the poems “Water Damage” and “D Minor” show, there is also a consistent fascination with the composer Robert Schumann.  

Personally, I found the first poem, “Mediterranean,” to be my favorite.  It reveals the moment in which a haunting, thirty-eight year-old memory of Warren’s deceased mother striding confidently ahead on a path overlaps with the less-substantial vision of her mother’s ghost walking ahead of her on the same stones, only to suddenly vanish.

My only criticism would be that some of the poems felt like an inside joke—their meaning so personal, so hidden, that I could neither tease it out nor relate to the contents.  For example, the poems “From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine, VI” and “VII” were about an imaginary poet, while the historical poem “Earthworks” revolved so specifically around a Civil-war era family that I became lost in the list of referenced names, embedded quotes, and dates.  Nevertheless, every poem within the book is artistically worded and constructs a rhythm as engulfing as the current of the Charles River, making it impossible for a reader to escape.

Writing Prompt Wednesday

In my search for fun poetry prompts, I found this one:

Body Exercise

Make a list of fifteen physical experiences that you’ve had, such as falling out of a tree, riding a roller coaster, or jumping on a trampoline. Choose one from your list and use images to create a lyric poem about the experience.

(by Jay Klokker, from The Practice of Poetry, Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, eds.) (http://www.poetryresourcepage.com/teach/pex.html).

I thought it was an interesting idea and would like to see what you can come up with.

Have fun and don’t forget to post your progress here.

Jane Cassady’s Adventures of a Lazy Polyamorist

Reviewed by Courtney K. Bambrick

The cover image of Jane Cassady’s chapbook, Adventures of a Lazy Polyamorist (Turtle Ink Press, 2010) is a painting of an empty couch in a colorful print that makes me think of a thrift store Lilly Pulitzer.  The emptiness of the couch made me think of adolescence – a time before the bed when the couch was the only option.  The colors and print of the couch are happy.  The emptiness of the couch is sad. 

Jane’s poems have similarly multifaceted moods.  The poems rarely assert themselves, but approach the way Jane herself does:  with a hard-won vulnerability, a vulnerability that is both weakness and strength.  In my exchanges with Jane I feel as though any pretense of “cool” that I attempt is immediately challenged, but in a nice way.  Her vulnerability seeks itself in others.  She writes in “Fortune Cookie Poem,” a love poem to her wife: 

As I walked home

….

I forgot to tense my shoulders,
 to walk with purpose.

Neither of us has died yet

from inattention.

Jane recognizes the risk necessary to love anyone or anything as well as the risk taken in admitting that love to others. 

In poems that celebrate (and repurpose) the hits of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, she risks the hipster cold-shoulder.  In those poems (“In Praise of Friend Crushes” and “Beyonce Is Better at Having Feelings than I Am”), she cuts and pastes the lyrics of the pop songs in order to express personal truths.  Such poems remind me of the kind of obsessive study of Weekly Top 40 lyrics I engaged in as a preteen:  keeping a cassette at the ready as Casey Kasem or Shadoe Stevens called out the rank and title of favorite songs, rewinding the tape again and again as I copied out the lyrics by hand.  On the bus in fourth or fifth grade, I was complimented by a much cooler girl for knowing all of the words to all of the songs the radio played.  [Not relevant, but not unrelated:  One of my favorite middle school memories was a bus erupting in “Lean on Me” on a chorus trip. Jane’s poem “Philadelphia Mix Tape (Or Why It Was My 2009 New Years Resolution to Be More Like Beyonce)” brought that moment back to me powerfully.]  When we are young people, we reach for meaning; and when we hear pop profundities, we bend them to fit our understanding.  I studied song lyrics so that I could sing on the bus and impress girls of higher social strata, but also to know what feelings I should have had that I didn’t. 

In “Bi-Girl Blues,” Jane writes:  “I can’t unzip this body and crawl to the past / where my teenage self waits brazenly / at the edges of basketball courts.”  The shaky hope and trust that Jane illustrates in her poems is not the same as bold teenage postures of desire:  we cannot return to former selves.  We may never have so much to risk again as we did then,  but Jane cannot “hush [her] stupid voice” –  she cultivates vulnerability and keeps the risk risky.  In “Dear Philadelphia,” she writes: 

Philadelphia, I will learn not to feel threatened.
Let me make it up to you,

I will save every ticket stub,
fortune and petal.

Not feeling threatened is a state to which we aspire, and one which we may remember

from our brazen youths – before heartbreak, loss, worry, and the other adult concerns clipped our wings and limited our reach.

Jane Cassady’s Adventures… is neither childish nor girly – it desperately wants to be something so simple, but it knows too much.  In “Dear Orange County, 2000-2001” she writes,  “Adulthood suits you, / and we’ve learned so much since then / about bodies.”  Jane beautifully balances hope with nostalgia:  we might have felt free once, and that might have been great, if dangerous.  Now, she tells us, we must risk danger if we hope to come close to that freedom again.  We’ve learned so much about bodies, but we will learn not to feel threatened, but to become unguarded and brazen.

Confined (via Small Press Reviews)

In Confined, Mariana Dietl adopts an array of voices to tell the story of a woman named Elena Reyes de Basagalupo, who is locked away in a windowless room by her husband in Argentina circa 1979. The setting corresponds with the height Argentina's "Dirty War," which saw over 30,000 people become "disappeared" as the country's military dictatorship attempted to suppress communist uprisings. Given the grim nature of the subject matter, it's no surpr … Read More

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