NEWER LIES (Essential Poets Series)

The narrator may be nobody but she makes herself somebody with that capital N. Here is another poem about notoriety and the public eye. This is one that appealed hugely to me as a child for its cheekiness and for that unexpected frog. This is my favourite Emily Dickinson poem. Its warmth and positivity speak to my gut every time.

Was she qualifying hope in some private way? This is a poem I studied at school at about the age of ten. Dickinson valued the musicality of words and she loved a hymnal beat. I distinctly remember reciting this poem to my four sisters while acting out the part of the bird: Read this one to your young friends. This may be tied in with the notion that because Dickinson was reclusive, she was also angsty and nun-like. It may also be linked to a general fascination with those who beat their own path, particularly if they seem to do it alone.

The grim reaper in this poem is a civil gentleman who takes the narrator — already ghostlike in gossamer and tulle — gently towards death. The poem is cryptic — it may be about the afterlife, or it may be about an actual lover; it may be a meditation on anger, helplessness and power. One reading holds that it is a Dickinson backlash against having to write her poetry in secret — gun as language, waiting to go off. Interestingly Lyndall Gordon adapted the first line for the title of her book about the Dickinson family feuds to Lives Like Loaded Guns.

Emily Dickinson loved riddles and this poem has an element of that playfulness. Francisco at The Boiler. Her certainty made me smile then and her confident answers to my questions since have drawn me in and made me want to hear more. In our chat, she covered important ground, discussing the way that good poems pursue you, the volumes that can be packed into two lines, desire, the sonnet, Black women, the patriarchy, and so much more.

I will always, always, always choose Clifton. She has become a poet-mother to me, speaking to me through the page, and, thankfully, through videos of her reading and discussing her work. I feel like I am, simultaneously, seen and instructed. I like to linger on a poem and return and return and return.

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Sorrow is an emotion many of us know well, but the way Clifton describes it opens it anew. The conceit is that sorrows are like dark angels, leeching onto mortals, falling in love with us. The difference, according to Clifton, between sorrow and desire or a desire to be desired, even by sorrow is so slight, we can barely recognize it. That take on sorrow is the most accurate, I think. It is true that to be sad is a deep a commitment, at least in my life, as it is to be in love or loved by someone. It tells an entire history of Black womanhood in America in just sixteen lines.

Black women are expected, required, to be Strong and Dependable and Able To Nurse An Entire Nation of Men, but we are not, have not, been valued as sexual not sexualized—we have been overly sexualized, our sexuality has been and is still misunderstood and misnamed or as delicate or as worthy of affection. It began during slavery—we had to make ourselves undesirable to the masters who raped and raped.

All of this, for survival in a country in which we were never meant to survive. Would you open it up for us, discuss it a little? This line, and the line that follows: Yes, those things are true. But that distinction as heroine leaves little room for nuance. Harriet Tubman, for example, is hailed rightly so as one of the great American Heroes of all time. She was strong, smart, brave, and a lover of her people. Nowhere in that story is there room for her to be soft, fragile, vulnerable, desirable and capable of desire.

Yes, we learn that she was married but when we look at how people think of her today, it is never in terms of her whole personhood. This is part of the reason I decided to write about her in my new collection—I wanted her to become more than just that one side we see in history books. Not wives—again, a heroine is a heroine.

Mammy is an example of this. She saved the Good Missus from having to deal with wailing, writhing white babies. She was the best cook this side of heave—-working away in the Big House on dinners her family could only dream about. She was utterly unsexual—nothing but jolly darkness lived beneath her skirts. No rouge for her cheeks. No curls in her hair, just a headscarf and a big, friendly smile.

Although we are neither Tubman nor Mammy now, this expectation for Strong Black Womanhood still exists. Our strength is depended upon, even on a statewide scale—they tell us Black women saved the election between Doug Jones and Roy Moore here in my home state of Alabama. But so many of us face this issue of not being seen as potential romantic partners.

All of that in just two lines! Clifton at her best.

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I aspire to her brevity and precision, and although I am far from mastering it, I think I draw closer each time I take to the page. I also aspire to her powerful vulnerability. She is showing the nuance, the complexity of Black womanhood in each piece she writes. The new collection started as a study of Gwendolyn Brooks—her formal poems spoke to me, and her ability to write such biting critiques of American society in an often neat and tidy package here, I mean form, rhyme, and the sometimes sugary nature of her language was so appealing that I had to try it for myself!

It has a nursery rhyme feel, but it explores the horrors of American life for a Black family. This poem disarms through the neat packaging but delivers its alarming punch in the content. What can a sonnet or near-sonnet hold that it has not held before? Our second festival is slated for April , and we are working working working on securing grant funding to create an even bigger festival than we had last year. Lucille Clifton was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.



Clifton served as a chancellor on the board of the Academy of American Poets in addition to teaching at several universities including UC Santa Cruz, St. In Clifton was a fellow at Dartmouth. From Clifton served as the Poet Laureate of Maryland. Remembering Clifton, in the New Yorker. Jones at The Rumpus. Three Poems by Ashley M. Jones at Scoundrel Time.

Then we got to sit down and chat and she spoke about grief, distance, transitions, her personal mantra, and the word she writes on herself. Reading Aracelis is like wading into dark water. Declarative statements evolve in increments and that creates a sense of estrangement. She uses these slight shifts of perspective—tiny kaleidoscopic degrees, fly-vision—that relay a steady and relentless sense of seeing.

Her poems are wound tight—there is as much communicated in the blank spaces as in the words themselves. I have a difficult time with transitions and this year has been wave after wave. It says a lot about you—how you respond to pain—your threshold, and if you prefer to go through it alone or if you seek the comfort of others.

The clock is ticking really fucking loud. So, I have a stack of poetry books on my beside table and they are my routine, in-lieu-of-morning-prayer readings. When I wrote the poems included in Matria Black Lawrence Press, my gaze was oriented outward and because I was writing in El Salvador the murder capital of the world mortality is front and center. Just listing all that makes my shoulders ache.

So, what am I really working on right now?

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Learning to let go! I would never get a tattoo—I have enough scars from a car accident when I was 21—but if I were to get one now it is the word Relinquenda. So, Relinquenda is not a tattoo, but a word I constantly write on my palm, my wrist, my fingers. For more info visit: Aracelis Girmay at the Poetry Foundation.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose and a longtime reader of Maureen Seaton. I think there are poets each of us have needed for many years before we find them, and when their poems appear before us at last, the experience is almost mystical—a feeling of having known someone before you knew them, of being deeply affirmed by the epiphany of their presence in the world.

Maureen Seaton is just such a mystical, epiphanous, much-needed poet for me. I went to high school and college in the s, at a time when Maureen was coming out as queer and coming into her own as a poet who worked as diligently in form sonnets, villanelles, et al. Years later, I had the privilege of meeting and coming to know both of these poets, long-time friends and collaborators, in real life, and I was audacious enough to ask them to bless my own book-length project, a collection of poems called When I Was Straight.

Not only did they bless it—they blurbed it, collaboratively! Then, I started looking at other aspects of the poem, particularly the diction and the juxtapositions. I wanted to showcase something different.



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Instead of a tightrope, this poem is the circus tent, a canopy she opens over the whole world of her knowing and longing and wondering. If this poem were a horoscope, it would describe something essential about every Zodiac sign. This is a winding long-poem with a lot of great turns. What about it do you want to call particular attention to? Through all my years as a student, there was an incongruity—really a snobbishness—that I never understood in the realm of literary theory.

We could deconstruct and post-structuralize. So how can I ask my students not to cross the threshold of reader response, which I value not only as a doorway to meaningful analysis but also as a doorway to meaningful emulation? Which is to say: It also speaks to me as a poet who is always studying the possibilities of poetic form and the elasticity of poetry as a genre. It speaks to me as a teacher of poetry for similar reasons—the thrilling range of invitations and permissions the text offers to fellow and future writers.

This poem further addresses me as a person with multi-genre and hybrid-text infatuations and commitments. I wonder whether poem is really only one name this text might answer to. Is it a micro-lyric-essay, too?

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Some or all of the above? The words are alive. They can lose cells and run temperatures. Maureen does it here, seamlessly: She validates so many ways of knowing simultaneously. She rejects high horses. Her work is full of dark horses and wild horses. I would follow her anywhere because she has never used her intellect as a weapon or crafted her rigorous, expansive poems with only an elite readership in mind.

If she takes her readers into a swamp, she supplies the waders. She also grows and tends the orchids we are destined to find there. Perhaps more than any other poet, Maureen has taught me that you can write as and from all your varied versions of self, including the most seemingly contradictory. I think her poems are deeply fluid, within and across every book project and sometimes even within a single poem. And this fact alone has given me tremendous permissions in my own approach to writing. Instead of the poem or lyric essay, or hybrid form as art object, I want to learn how to make the most porous and anti-static kinds of creations.

If the poem is likened to a painting on the wall—vivid and imagistic—let it also be a painting where the eyes move, where the frame slants, where it is never the same painting twice that the viewer looks upon. How visceral and invigorating and absolutely true! With every poem and hybrid form, Maureen is teaching me how to write my way beyond those initial strictures of conventional beauty, contrived happiness, and religious dogma.

At a certain point in time, I realized that I have stories I tell and stories I write, and it occurred to me that some of the stories I tell—which are often the most absurd glimpses of my childhood, darkly humorous but also intimidatingly sad—might have another kind of life on the page. The title is a reference, in the most literal sense, to being regular customers at the Old Spaghetti Factory every Sunday, my parents and I, but also to the relentless quest for normalcy—or at least to be perceived as normal and consequently likable, admirable, and good—that governed my upbringing.

That project might also subsume some or all of the poems from When I Was Straight, which illustrates the before-and-after experiences of someone, essentially the same someone, who was first perceived as heterosexual and trying very hard to tow many tacit heterosexual lines, and then who, in the second half of the project, reckons with all the new ways people respond to her as an out lesbian, a woman marked by sexual difference.

And eventually, I plan to write a collection of poems that mirrors the question-and-answer clues on Jeopardy! Seaton has received multiple awards and recognitions for her work. Her most recent collection, Fisher was published by Black Lawrence Press in Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures , Small Fires: Essays , Postage Due: A Novella in Poems , and the forthcoming The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose , co-authored with Denise Duhamel. The Rumpus Interviews Maureen Seaton. Julie Marie Wade at Tupelo Quarterly.

Sarah Clark works in some of the most important areas of our industry. I swear they are busier than most anyone I know and yet she took the time to visit us here at LE with poems by Michael Wasson. We were able to talk about the colonializing of bodies in literature, discomfort, tropes, and so much more. What made you select these particular poems? This is the question that I have been avoiding for weeks. There are so many extremely talented Native, First Nations writers not to mention the many more indigenous writers across the American landmasses who are, and have been, producing extraordinary work for decades.

Ai was the first Native writer I encountered in college who was unashamed to be mixed and unashamed to be queer. At this point in my life, certain Native or Native-themed literature had been passed my way. There was something different about the way Ai wrote. It was like seeing a familiar face. It was like something unspoken—hope in a body of literature that I could relate to.

A few years ago, I was hoping to work on a project, concerning a museum that had been selling postcards and displaying the remains of members of my tribe. I fell into a research hole, reading archaeological accounts of the dig sites where they gathered the bones, as well as the objects buried alongside these people. There were detailed descriptions of their bones. I had to give up the project. My partner was driving me to the museum. I was going to see them. Who had been seen so intimately by strangers. I kept going back to one section of one anthropological journal.

There was such dizzying detail. Every femur, every tooth, all quantified and numbered. I felt outside of my body, outside of what felt like this entire planet. That a thin line separated who I am from bone trivia. The foremost of which is space. Any indigenous people reading know what I mean. Embodied seems like too soft a word for the way they resonate in the flesh. Is there a connection in this way to your own work? All of my work deals with the body in one way or another. Do poems grant us passage in the body of another? The Poem Is You: Each poem is introduced by an essay sketching out how it works, why it matters, how it speaks to the wider worlds of art and culture.

If only a publisher with antennae tuned to the nuances of the current UK poetry boom were brave enough to commission an equivalent. Over the years, the much imitated initiative has saved tens of thousands of frazzled travellers from seething fury. Topics Books Top 10s. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded.