Poetry

Sunday, 21 April 2013

National Poetry Month 2013: What We're Doing to Celebrate

It's National Poetry Month and we're celebrating! Check out what we're doing by clicking on one of the links below. And friends, please do share with us what you're up to for Poetry Month!

Nancy Chen Long

I suspect more than a few of you feel, as I do, that every month is Poetry Month! There's lots going on, folks, and I hope that you are able to partake in some capacity, either on-line or in your community.

Some of you might know that I'm part of the 2013 Pulitzer Remix Project, sponsored by The Found Poetry Review. There are 85 of us across 7 countries, and each poet has been creating found poetry from one of the 85 Pulitzer Prize winners. 85 poets, a poem a day, 30 days. What abundance! My book is GUARD OF HONOR, the 1949 Pulitzer winner by James Gould Cozzens.

To create the poems, we use various techniques such as:
* collage, or taking words and phrases from the text and rearranging them to form new meaning. For a deeper discussion, see "COLLAGE AND POETRY” by Marjorie Perloff.

* erasure, also called black-out or white-out poetry, in which words and letters are blocked out or erased from the text to form new words and meaning. The Believer had a splendid article on erasure by Jeannie Vanasco, "Absent Things As If They Are Present." (Click here for the article if you want to read it.) One interesting note from the article is that "Wordsworth borrowed descriptions of daffodils from his sister Dorothy’s diary when writing his famous poem 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,' and even credited its two best lines to his wife, Mary: “They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”

* remix, a combination of collage and erasure. Kirby Ferguson has a good TED Talk on remix here.

If you want to know more about the Pulitzer Remix, here's a link to the project: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/about/. And here's a link to all of the poems for the day: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/(Simply click on a book title for the day's poem.) If you wander around, you'll see some poets are merging visual art and poetry, creating actual collages or coupling their poetry with photos or paintings. And if you want to check on how I'm doing, I'm remixing here: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/category/guard-of-honor

Another thing that I'm doing for Poety Month is sponsoring poet Kristin LaTour, who is writing a poem a day to raise funds for The Bullycide Project, a Michigan-based theater group that presents stories from victims of bullying and their friends and family. It's a treat to read to open my email and read Kristin's poem for the day. Those of you on Facebook who are interested can learn more about the fundraiser here.

And, of course, there are READINGS! April's First-Sundays Readings and Open-Mic, sponsored by the Writers Guild at Bloomington and hosted by Boxcar Books, included a reading by poet Frank Montesonti. Frank, a Hoosier native who completed his undergraduate degree at IU, currently teaches creative writing at National University. He read from his poetry collection Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope, winner of the 2011 Barrow Street Book Prize chosen by D.A. Powell.

Another reading took place on April 19: Local poets Joseph Kerschbaum and Eric Rensberger read at the Lemonstone Reading Series, sponsored, again Writers Guild at Bloomington, and hosted a Sweet Claire's Bakery. (Local folks: Check out the Springerles at Sweet Claire's if you haven't yet.) Joseph tested the waters with some newly penned work, as well as poems from his books, including his recent book Ken, A Man for All Seasons, which is about Barbie's other half. Eric read recent poems as well as some of his classics. Eric's poetry centers on place and his appreciation of the geography and people of the area is palpable. It was a splendid night of poetry!

Another reading I'm excited about features IU MFA graduates Marcus Wicker and Ryan Teitman, reading at Boxcar Books toward the end of the month. I interviewed Ryan last month for Poetry Matters, as well as reviewed his recent book Litany for the City, 2012 winner of the A. Pouling, Jr. Poetry Prize, published by BOA Editions. So check out those links if you want to know more about him or his most recent book! Marcus' first book Maybe the Saddest Thing was selected by DA Powell for the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Harper Perennial in October. He's an assistant professor of English at University of Southern Indiana and the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review.

The last thing I'll be doing for National Poetry Month is a workshop on ekprastic poetry as a part of a collaboration between the Monroe County Public Library and the Writers Guild at Bloomington. We'll be exploring several poems by well-known poets based upon art, as well as trying our hand at creating one of our own. One of the poems we'll be looking at is a favorite of mine, "American Flamingo" by Greg Pape written in response to John James Audubon’s Greater Flamingo.

National Poetry Month is a busy time for me, but I am grateful for the flourishing writing and poetry community in the Bloomington area, as well as online.

Barbara Sabol

Opening the Door

I wish I could say that I’m celebrating National Poetry Month by writing daily, even just jotting flashes of inspiration for new poems as they occur in a Moleskine notebook snugged in my back pocket. Wish that I were routinely poised at the edge of my writerly seat, cracking my knuckles. I can say that inspiration is a constant knock , yet I often respond with an inconstant opening wide the door. Maybe a crack, enough to glance a figure on the threshold – a risky, mysterious, or exuberant or poignant or quirky figure, one that could be shaped into stellar poetic matter. On the odd day, I swing the door open and invite the figure right into my study, settle her beside me and off we go.

So, how to celebrate National Poetry Month without doldrumming about lost literary opportunities? Maybe celebrating the happy fact that stimulation is ubiquitous, to the point of distraction– the junk yard I pass daily on my way to work, crumpled chrome winking in the early morning sun; the weathered canoe that hasn’t been moved off cinder blocks in a neighbor’s back yard in years; startling images of a bomb blast, the improbable glass curve of a Chihuly wild poppy . . . I could go on, and so could you. And in some ideal world we’d refine a multitude of raw sensations into satisfying lineated creatures. Daily. The challenge, I believe, and a way of reconciling the unwritteness of a poem, lies in savoring the stimulus: winking back at the beat-up fender. Someday it may be restored via a poem; if not, at least it knocked my writer’s instincts into gear─a related and wholly bona fide sort of satisfaction. Cheers!

Karen George

I don’t know who decided April would be National Poetry Month, but I doubt it was an accident they picked the month that spring gets underway. So many of the things I do to celebrate Poetry also coincide with my celebration of spring.

The first week of April I visited Cincinnati’s Krohn Conservatory in Eden Park for their spring floral show called “The Enchanted Forest,” which featured blooming hyacinths, tulips, violas and daffodils, hundreds of white lilies, flowering shrubs and miniature elf houses constructed out of natural elements, all set up as rolling woodlands. Besides the visual delights there were the equally amazing scents of some of the flowers, plus the damp soil and preponderance of leaves, the fragrance of the waterfall over rocks in the palm house, the sand in the desert house, and the streams throughout the tropical house. And I can never leave without visiting the bonsai and the orchid displays. There’s nothing like immersing myself in all that growth, paying attention to the unbelievable diversity of the plant world, to keep my poetry “muscles” fit.

In keeping with the idea of growth, on the first Saturday in April I participated in a “Writing as Healing” workshop with poet/nurse Jeanne Bryner at Grailville Retreat Center in Loveland Ohio. Through the varied writing exercises, which explored the connection between writing and healing, I came away with the start of several poems as well as notes for many other future poems.

I’m also attending as many as I can of the “Poetry in the Garden” events every Tuesday in April at the downtown Cincinnati Public Library, which include readings by local poets, open mics, and readings by the winners of the poetry contest the library sponsors. For the first event on April 2^nd, I read two of my latest poems. I was also scheduled to read along with poets Donelle Dreese and Vickie Cimprich for the First Friday Poetry Reading Series, but there was a mix up which caused us to postpone the reading until May 3^rd. But I enjoyed reading through my body of work to select the poems to read, organizing them into related groups, and the practice of reading them. And as often happens, I found a few revisions I wanted to make to the poems.

For a week in mid-April, I’m accompanying three women to Massanutten, Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Shenandoah National Park. Two of the women are poets, fellow members of the Cincinnati Writers Project’s poetry critique group. I will bring along a few books of poetry, ones I’ve bought recently but haven’t had time to read yet, such as Leave Here Knowing by Elizabeth Oakes, Stand in the Stillness of Woods by Matthew Haughton, and the chapbooks Antidote by Stacia M. Fleegal, and Burden of Solace by Teneice Durrant Delgado which was recently reviewed by Barbara Sabol on this Poetry Matters website. I envision reading some of the poetry aloud as part of our evenings. I’m hoping to get some time in the woods, which never fails to clear my mind, ground me, and inspire a poem or two. I plan to bring along some poems to revise from a collection I’m working on which centers around my husband, Richard, and an Alaskan cruise we took a few months before he died. I’ve found that a change of scenery often gives me new insights into poems I’m working on.

On this mountain vacation I’ll also bring along a folder of poems I want to revisit—close to forty poems I learned by heart in the past few years—poems by Rumi, James Wright, Pablo Neruda, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Charles Simic, Jane Hirshfield, and Naomi Shihab Nye. I may speak them aloud to my poet friends or whisper them as I walk through the woods. After reading poet Allison Luterman’s interview with Kim Rosen in the December 2010 issue of The Sun, I bought Kim Rosen’s book, Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words, in which she writes about how through the process of speaking a poem out loud that you love, the poem becomes integrated into your being. How learning it by heart and speaking it aloud changes you on a deep level. I lost track of the poems I had originally learned by heart, so for National Poetry Month, I'm reacquainting myself with them. And as Rosen promises in her book, once you say them aloud a few times, they quickly return to you. Especially if you say them before you go to bed and when you first wake the next morning.

Another thing I'm doing for National Poetry Month is to attend the annual Power of Poetry Festival in the Hocking Hills area, Logan, Ohio on April 19^th and 20th, which will feature poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Rosemerry Trommer along with Celtic storyteller Will Hornyak. Each evening’s poetry readings will be preceded by a half hour of music performed by Evie Adelman and Marge Seeley, piano, and Gert Young, flute. Poet Alan Cohen organizes the Power of Poetry festival, funding it through the Ohio Arts Council and what he calls “grassroots funding”—donations from people “in the community who have attended the festival events and who wish to have such cultural programs available.” The festival also offers a poetry contest with free entry, and a free Saturday workshop with one of the featured poets. The poetry contest winners will receive cash prizes and read their winning poems as part of the Saturday evening poetry event, along with performances by some of the students who participated in the national Poetry Outloud Competition. Learn more about the Power of Poetry Festival on the website: http://powerofpoetry.org/home.htm.

I also look forward to National Poetry Month because every day in April I receive an email from poet friend Susan B. Glassmeyer which contains what she calls her “April Gifts”—a poem she has carefully chosen along with notes about the poet and quotes from their interviews. Sometimes they are poets I’m familiar with; other times I’m introduced to poets new to me, ones I'm happy to learn about. Susan has been emailing her April Gifts since 2007, and keeps an archive of them on The Little Pocket Poetry’s website at http://www.littlepocketpoetry.org/april_gifts_archives.

Towards the end of April, I will accompany a friend to a blue heron nesting site along Ohio’s Little Miami River. My friend tells me I need to wear old clothes and shoes and be prepared to get wet and muddy. We’ll make our way through the woods, along a not very well-marked path, and slide down a long hill on our bottoms, the same hill we’ll climb back up on our hands and knees. But we’ll get to see adult blue herons and their chicks. My friend has visited this nesting site for years, but this is my first time. We connected with herons close to seven years ago, when I read an essay she’d written about herons and how much they meant to her, how one would always show up just when she needed one. At the time my husband was nearing the end of his life after a six-month struggle with lung cancer. My friend was experiencing her own battle with breast cancer, and half-jokingly said she’d send me over her blue heron. The next morning, when I was driving past the lake at the condo where I lived, a blue heron stood at the shore, twenty feet away. I often carry my digital camera in the car, so I grabbed it, and took a few pictures before the heron flew away. I couldn’t wait to tell my friend that her heron had arrived, and to describe the amazing bird and show the photos to my husband. I’ve never seen a blue heron on the condo lake before or after that day. And, being a poet, I was compelled to celebrate the sighting in a poem I called “Grace.”

I hope you enjoy National Poetry Month as much as I do. I can’t imagine my life without poetry. As poet William Carlos Williams said, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Caroline LeBlanc

Albuquerque is brimming with poetry events for National Poetry Month. In addition to the usual readings—one each week—there are 3 new book launches and several launch continuations, a My Favorite Poet program sponsored by the UNM MFA program, a spring poetry reading at a branch of the public library that actually has parking, a elementary school children’s poetry project sponsored by the Albuquerque Poetry Society which also plans to launch its members’ anthology, POETRY FROM THE OTHER SIDE at the April meeting. Many thanks to Chandra Bales, the chapter president, who hatched the plan, organized extra writing workshops and did the bulk of the editing work. I helped with proofreading and categorizing poems into the anthologies various sections and contributed four poems.

In June, Albuquerque and the NM Poetry Society are hosting the annual convention of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies ( http://nmpoetry.com/convention-nfsps.shtml ) and members are busy with preparations. Special room rates are available at the Hotel Albuquerque through May 22 if anyone wants to enjoy poetry workshops and readings in the Land of Enchantment.

I’d like to say that I will be attending each and every poetry celebration in town but, unfortunately, they come at a time when health concerns have slowed me down and family related travel through May and June is in the offing so I am taking it easy in order to charge my batteries for future wanderings. The best I can do is track all the possibilities through the email announcements that arrive with regularity. I note each of the events on my computer calendar (which automatically syncs to my cell phone and I Pad) just in case, one of these evenings, I have the energy to show up at a reading.

In the meantime, I am an “armchair traveler” like many of my ancestral Acadian and Quebecois poets. In addition to rereading selections in anthologies such as THE POETRY OF FRENCH CANADA IN TRANSLATION, UNFINISHED DREAMS: Contemporary Poetry of Acadie and FRENCH CONNECTIONS: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets, I am enjoying reading THE ARTEMESIA BOOK: Poems Selected and New by Colleen Thibaudeau, whose writing I discovered only recently. Thibaudeau (1925-2012), of Acadian descent, was born in Toronto and lived most of her adult life in London, Ontario where I also spent a good bit of time while studying with Marion Woodman, another great Canadian woman of letters who continues to reside in London. The GLOBE AND MAIL eulogy article quotes Spalding’s Molly Peacock as referring to Thibaudeau as “Canada’s ‘secret national treasure.” Thibaudeau wrote about “the extraordinary nature of ordinary life by combining the everyday with the otherworldly.” Her themes include domestic scenes, household objects, change, creativity, memory and memories. She is well known for the title poem, My Grandaughters Are Combing Out Their Long Hair, a poem which memorializes and mourns the wanderings of the Acadian diaspora.

my granddaughters are combing out their long hair sitting at night

on the rocks in Venezuela they have watched their babes

falling like white birds from the last of the treetop cradles

they have buried them in their hearts where they will never forget

to keep on singing them the old songs

brought down to earth they use twigs, flint scrapers acadian

their laughter underground makes the thyme flower in darkness

my granddaughters are thin as fishbones & hornfooted but they are

always beautiful under the stars: like little asian paperthings

they seem to open outward into their own waterbowl

mornings they waken to Light’s chink ricocheting

off an old Black’s Harbour sardinecan.

Reduce them the last evangelines make them part of the stars.

my granddaughters are coming out by night combing their burr

coloured hair by the rocks and streamtrickle in Venezuela

they are burnt out as falling stars but they laugh

and keep on singing them the old songs.

Lastly, I continue to lead a writing workshop for women veterans. Many things, including my own service as an Army Nurse, my husband’s and son’s military careers, my father’s World War II service, and perhaps even my Acadian ancestors deportation from Canada in 1755, draw me to write and help others write about war and its traumas. And so, on April 1, the deadline for proposals for Fall workshops through the OSHER Center at the University of New Mexico Continuing Education Department, I submitted a proposal for a three workshop series entitled, WE ALSO SERVED: WOMEN WRITING ABOUT WAR WORKSHOP SERIES. Each writing workshop can stand alone or any combination can be taken in a series. We will examine poetry, memoir and fiction by women written during and/or about WW I, WW II and the Vietnam War. All this rest and recuperation time is good for banging around period writings searching for the right pieces to enliven discussion and stimulate the participants’ writing. When the material gets too heavy, I wander out into the New Mexico sunshine and check on the budding or the iris and daylilies I brought from New York that are now breaking through the hard desert soil.

Wednesday, 20 March 2013

LITANY FOR THE CITY by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman
Litany for the City

BOA Editions
http://www.boaeditions.org/

By the numbers
ISBN 9781934414804
Publication: 2012
Total pages: 80
Number of poems: 21

__________

I first met Ryan Teitman in 2009 when he was a student attending Indiana University’s MFA program. I'm an admirer of his poetry and when I saw that he had published his first book (a prize-winner no less), I jumped at the chance to share it with you. Fortunately, he also agreed to an interview, so click here to read the interview and learn more about this talented poet. He’s definitely one to watch.

—Nancy Chen Long

__________

Ryan Teitman’s first book of poetry Litany for the City was selected by Jane Hirshfield as the 2012 winner of the A. Pouling, Jr. Poetry Prize, published by BOA Editions. Litany for the City is a meditation on place, the importance of place, the embodiment of place, the conflation of place and body. Teitman provides structure for the reader through the theme of city / place / location—from consideration of a city such as Philedelphia, to a place like that of a dry wheat field (“Ephesians”), to the tender location on the body, a “patch of jawbone hidden by the earlobe” (“Vespers”). In addition, Teitman also provides structure through a number of motifs, most notably that of religion: the title of the book, the title of poems, in diction, and through images.

As counterpoints to such grounding structure, Teitman offers delightful surprises with his images and juxtapositions. For example, we find the jarring image of a syphilitic eye compared to the domestic image of a fig on a breakfast plate (“The Cabinet of Things Swallowed”); there’s the rusted belly of a stove disintegrating into death-cinders right next to birds teeming with life as they build their nests in a copper bowl, the rust-red matte of the stove-belly next to the copper-red shine of the bowl-womb (“Ars Poetica”).

Litany for the City opens with the poem “Philadelphia, 1976,” an ode of sorts, filled with kaleidoscopic bursts of memory-images, personal, poignant. The title of the poem locates us not only in a geographic place, but also a point-in-time—the bicentennial of the U.S. The title brings with it the historical importance of the Declaration of Independence adopted on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, perhaps establishing a comparison of what the city is now in light of its auspicious beginnings, or perhaps suggesting that change is inevitable in the expanse of time, changes to city, analogous changes to self. What one is in light of what one could be.

“Philadelphia, 1976,” is a list, a litany, of images, each one inviting the reader to linger. The poem is emblematic of the detailed imagery that courses through the poem. In the first stanza, the reader is seduced with sound:

A still night has its own cruel music:

the catch of bridge cables plucked

by stone-scented wind; the low, bent

hum of the Delaware, rippling like a singing saw.

The images turn more personal, when the speaker tells us, perhaps speaking of himself:

Those are the nights

when any boy would drop

Pabst empties off the Tacony-Palmyra

Bridge, then watch the stars

strip off their summer dresses and dive naked

…

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker addresses the reader directly, asking the question “what’s our city made of?” Use of the pronoun “our” brings the reader into the speaker’s intimate circle. The speaker continues his active engagement with the reader, inviting the reader to go with him to the bridge, watch the fireworks, and then, in a sacramental gesture, “let // the spent flakes of soot settle on our eyelids / like wafers of host dropped onto tongues.” Surely, the poem is an ode. It is a meditation. It is a prayer for a beloved city that seems to form a portion of the speaker's sense of self.

The second poem of the collection, “Vespers,” is a narrow poem in couplets, a sensual poem, with its images that linger on the body. The poem opens with an evocative image—the smell of orange: “Peel an orange, set / a candle in the rind.” This first stanza, with its use of the imperative, coaxes the reader into feeling as if s/he were peeling the orange, feeling the press of the wax candle into waxy rind. And, as with the preceding poem, Teitman increases the intimacy with the reader through the first-person plural of “we” when speaking of the moment just before death, and juxtaposing that moment next to the waking moment with lover:

Before we die,

we taste almonds;

we wake to a lover

slipping a tongue

in our ear;

“Vespers” commingles the sacred and the corporeal with “drops of sweat // that slide like rosary beads” and the ending observation that “[f]aith // is tasting flesh / through all coverings,” even “through our thin skin that keeps / all we are from spilling out.” The poem is faithful to its title, befitting a prayer at sunset.

Teitman repeats certain words in "Vespers," e.g., "oil" and "lover." Such repetition of words, images, and motifs is one of the many strengths of this collection and is found not only in a single poem, but throughout the book. For example, let’s look at the first of three “Dear Doctor Franklin” epistolary poems, specifically attending to the repetition of work/traveling to work, sight/light, the imperfections of the body, and the word "press." The poem opens with the speaker writing to Benjamin Franklin, not surprisingly, of invention:

Everything is an invention,

I’ve come to learn. The way we press

into each other on the morning train—

that brush of cloth and wool

that seeps into us like a benediction,

or how the old woman

…

From the image of the morning train and its implied travel to work, the poem returns to the motif of traveling to work, as the old woman waits for a bus, pressing a newspaper “to her face when she thinks no one / is watching,” reminiscing about the smell of the newsprint, how it brings back memories of her work at the printing plant. In fear of stating the obvious, I’ll point out that the pressing of people into the train in the first stanzas becomes the pressing of the newspaper to the old woman’s face as she recalls working at a printing press.

After an image of her work-weary, (ink) “dye-purpled hands”, the poem immediately returns to the motif of watching mentioned above: “I see eyeglasses / on everyone nowadays,” and extends the idea of everyone having a bodily flaw (i.e, everyone needing glasses to see):

It comforts me to know that light

visits us all differently,

that the imprecisions of our bodies

can work on us …

The morning train, which opened the poem reappears: “these mornings—I watch [the city] rattle // in the hand-printed windows / of the train.” And invention resurfaces, again bridging back to the opening stanza: “I want to find the line // where the city becomes the city, / where invention becomes instrument.” Work and train and travel and seeing and light and shadow and city, they checker through the poem, finally ending on sight: “… I see how fragile our eyes will become.”

Like the "Dear Doctor Franklin" poems, "Ephesians" is another epistolary poem. It's also one of a number of prose poems in the collection and is a prime example of Teitman’s careful attention to detail in the flow of images that he crafts. The poem is addressed to “Beloved” and opens with an imperative to “remember what we used to know” followed by a series of startling images: an owl in a barn, perched on a rafter, a kitten in its beak; the speaker and the beloved walking through a field, weathered wheat brittle beneath their feet, and their hands coated with ice-cream; the beloved hatcheting at hives in an apiary, screaming “I am the Lord God of all creation!” That night, after being stung by a hive full of angry bees, the beloved’s father reads fables to (presumably) her, as a doctor wraps honey-dipped bandages around her welts. The speaker then shares an even more startling image:

… You opened your mouth and let the doctor reach in with pliers, let him pull out one bee after another from under your swollen tongue, and let him hold each corpse—glistened with spit—up to the windowpane, before dropping it in a jar by your bedside. You carried that jar with you always, half-filled with their dried bodies, like kernels of corn.

The poem has religious overtones, the title itself bringing into context the Epistle to the Ephesians, a book from the Second Testament. The poem shares a number of characteristics with Epistle to the Ephesians. Of course, both are epistles. In addition, bees feature prominently in the poem, which echoes the importance of bees to the Ephesians. The Ephesians were once devotees of the Greek goddess Artemis, her temple at Ephesus being one of the ‘seven wonders of the ancient world.’ Bees were one of her trademarks: They were included on statues of her, her priestess’ were called bees, and Ephesian coins at one time were stamped with the image of a bee.

In addition, the beloved in the poem repeats a verse from Epistle to the Ephesians, “wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead”(5:14), which is in a section where Paul directs the Ephesians to renounce their pagan ways, to renounce fornication, impurity, and idolatry. The speaker hears the beloved say this verse while she's dreaming, after they'd fallen asleep in the hayloft. When they awake, it appears that the beloved and the speaker have eaten the bees: “In the morning the jar was empty, and our eyes were the color of nectar.” It's an eerie image that suggests the two have taken on the characteristics of what they have consumed. This is perhaps a nod to transubstantiation, the Catholic doctrine that underlies the Eucharist. As one Catholic explains: “Ordinary food is consumed and becomes that which consumes it. In the Eucharist, we consume God and become that which we consume.” What a fascinating possible reading—that the beloved and the speaker have consumed the bees and have either become bee-like or become in the likeness of Artemis.

Along with “Ephesians,” there are a number of other prose poems in the collection, including an ambitious prose-poem sequence called “Metropolitan Suite,” which is in the last section of the book. “Metropolitan Suite” is comprised of fourteen prose-poems, all dealing with “city.” Each prose-poem section contains treatment of specific details, as well as elements that thread throughout the sequence. Take for example the first prose poem in the sequence (which can be read here in the first paragraph.) In this poem, the specific details concern music. The poem opens with a command to “Sing!” A woman plays a mandolin. Men chant. The rousing music of a carousel is at full tilt and the speaker admonishes us to lilt “Yes! Thank God you found it, my treasure, my prize, my jewel of the Americas” when we receive a black umbrella. The poem ends with us hearing the woman, as she sings for days “city, my love.” And in this poem, one of the elements that connects it to other poems is the presence of a museum, “People from across the world came to reclaim their losses from the museum.” The museum here echoes other poems in the book (e.g., “The Cabinet of Things Swallowed”), as well as other poems in the prose-poem sequence (e.g., “The museum and its wall of eyes” in the third poem of the sequence.)

However, in this first prose-poem in “Metropolitan Suite,” the cherry-on-top for this reader is the surreal feel as we expand from that of a particular city into that of a mythic, universal city: “A woman sits on a statue of Lenin” the speaker tells us, and we think a city in Russia perhaps, or maybe Seattle or possibly Las Vegas or New York City, each with a statue of Lenin. “This is Brotherly Love” the speaker says, and we feel an aspect of Philadelphia enter our understanding. Oh, “[t]his is the City of the Big Shoulders,” the speaker continues, and we weave in the energy of Chicago, and maybe even factor in Carl Sandberg’s poem of the same name, in which the speaker of that poem calls Chicago the "City of the Big Shoulders." A single city setting—a woman sitting on a statue, men chanting from the square, a city with a museum, a river, a city filled with people who have a love of umbrellas. One city that is at the same time a litany of cities that is at the same time the universal city that transcends all cities.

“Metropolitan Suite” is a gift of image and language. And that is how it is with each poem in Teitman’s debut book Litany for the City. Each poem offers something tangible and memorable. Teitman's mindful and creative use of detail, juxtaposition, anaphora, the theme of city, and numerous motifs, creates an engaging world. Filled with finely-chiseled poems that lean toward the lyric, Litany for the City is a compelling read that engages the reader from beginning to end.

*******************

[a poem from Litany for the City]

The City That Swallowed the Sea

I want to forget the city that swallowed the sea,

where the churches unbreak bread and send old men

onto their hymnaled knees, where the streets sing

like handbells and the night cracks like a broken bottle

crushed under the heel of a priest taking confessions,

where the newsmen huddle on a street corner

under evening editions while the rain skins

their stubbled chins and the creeping asphalt

licks at the face of the shoreline still,

sipping at the sea, sipping at the salt

that steams up from the waves each sweaty night

and blankets the shoreline in a tight knit

of creamy silt, and I remember the prayers I said,

with my knees cupped in sand,

how I prayed to the saints for an intercession,

how it came like a punch to the blood,

wrapped its fingers around the throat of my blood,

squeezed the ribs of my blood until I could feel

the nicked edges of broken-blood ribs tickling

my blood's tiny lungs, those neat, unfurled sails tacking up

and down my veins, and I remember the saint

of th e city, our patron and the patron of bookkeepers,

the patron against lead poisoning, the patron of shims

and tambourines, the patron of hiccups and tin whistles,

patron of pandemics and against pandemics,

of ironworkers and against ironworkers, and I want to forget

when I was five, and our teacher told us to draw

a picture of ourselves, and I drew the skyline above the sea,

said I was changing my name to "The City,"

and she leaned in close and said that I would never be

the city that swallowed the sea, and my face

turned warm, and her breath was the dry hush

of the sea as it slides each day from the city,

and we rope it and haul it back like a brindle calf

with three legs tied, and we drink it a little

each day, and the censusman knocks every morning

to measure how much we drank,

and I want to forget our duty to be the city

that swallowed the sea, to be the saints of the c ity

that swallowed the sea, and I want to forget those streets

that ribboned and choked and split my bones,

that sea that skipped down the avenues of my nerves

and planted a kiss on the tin y bronze bell

that hangs—unpolished—from the stem of my brain.

“The City That Swallowed the Sea” was first published in Pleiades.

Nancy Chen Long lives with her woodsman husband and blue-eyed dog in a small cedar cabin in the forested hills of south-central Indiana. She volunteers with the local Writers Guild, offering free poetry workshops, facilitating creative writing and feedback groups, and assisting with two reading series’—one for prose writers and another for poets. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in RHINO, The Louisville Review, Roanoke Review, Found Poetry Review, and Adanna Literary Journal.

An Interview with Poet Ryan Teitman

Every clock in our house
had unfinished business.
Every note my father
struck in the dark
before he left for work
was another life waiting—

-from “Hard Light Through Hemlock,” by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman, a 2004 graduate of Penn State’s English Department, is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City. This, his first book, won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize and is published by BOA Editions. Teitman, formerly the Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journal Award in poetry, the winner of the Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, and a finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, and many other journals. Teitman worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia before earning an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English at Indiana University. He currently works as the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

* * *

Ryan and I met in 2009 at Indiana University. He was a student in IU’s MFA program and I had the wonderful good fortune to read a few of his
early drafts, drafts so finely honed and beautiful that they were more like polished gems. I approached Ryan for this interview when I decided to review his debut book Litany for the City. (You can read the review here.) To give you a flavor of his poetry before we get into the interview, here’s a quick overview of the book:

Litany for the City is a slim volume of richly-textured poems, full of exquisitely detailed and surprising images. As the title suggests, the theme of the city is a primary impulse in the book, be it a specific city such as Philadelphia or London, or the hazed impression of a generic city, or the repetition of the word “city.” Also weaving in and out to bind the collection together are religious elements, evident simply by glancing at the title of the book and the title of the poems in the table of contents, e.g., “Vespers,” “Cathedrals,” “A Sunday Box.” Litany for the City is an impressive debut with its thought-provoking, sensory-filled, and sometimes fascinatingly strange, details. Before continuing with the interview, I’ll leave you with an example of such detail, a snippet from a section of the prose-poem sequence "Metropolitan Suite":

Sunday morning in Jackson Heights, the street vendors cook their tamales—the ripe green smell of peppers roasting black on burners, the subway station rattling overhead like a misshapen music box. On Market, the Chinese food cart sells fresh cuttlefish; men and women wedge their briefcases under their arms and hold their order with both hands, letting the tentacles dangle loosely over the plate’s edge. (64)

—Nancy Chen Long

(This interview was conducted via email in March 2013.)

Some say that one of the primary difficulties a poet may have with a first manuscript is shaping it into a book, as opposed to a collection of disparate poems. Litany for the City coheres strongly around place/physicality, the theme of city/body. Was that something that you set out to do, or something that unfolded as you went along, or perhaps a last minute epiphany? Please share how you shaped the manuscript.

RT: I believe that—consciously or subconsciously—we write about our obsessions. I was writing the book when I lived in Indiana, and most of the poems dealt with Philadelphia, the city I had just left. Slowly, as I continued writing, I realized I wasn’t just writing about one place, but the nature of place itself, especially the idea of cities. The final section, “Metropolitan Suite,” came to the book late. I thought it was a separate project, but I realized it was the idea that my manuscript had been leading to the whole time. Once I made that change, the book went from getting no interest from publishers to being a semi-finalist and finalist in several contests before winning the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions.

Religious references and allusions are woven throughout the book: the title of the book itself, titles of poems (e.g., “A Sunday Box, “Ephesians”), imagery and diction (e.g. “leaving / baskets of baby fish / at the doors of every church,” “wafers of host,” repeated references to hemlock, fish, chant, prayer.) How does religion/faith factor into your writing?

RT: I was raised Catholic and it influenced the way I think about language. The poetic devices I tend to gravitate to (litany, anaphora, repetition) are the ones I heard on Sundays at Mass. As a poet, I believe that language has power, and the first place I learned that was in the church. In the Mass, the priest turns bread and wine into flesh and blood through prayer—through language. And one of the core beliefs of Catholicism is that the transformation is not metaphorical. It’s literal. Seeing words have that kind of power had a profound impact on me.

Have you been involved in promoting the book? If so, please tell us little about that process.

RT: I try to do as many readings as I can. It’s difficult since I teach full-time, but I believe that getting out there and giving readings is one of the best ways to spread the word about the book.

The poems in Litany for the City are beautifully detailed, imagistic. One of my favorites is “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning.” Can you tell us a little about how that poem came to be? When did you first draft it? How did it start? Was it heavily revised, or was it one of those born fully formed?

RT: “Ode to a Hawk with Wings Burning” came from two separate places. One was watching the hawks in the field across the street from my apartment in Indiana. The other was a story I heard about a boy trying to fill a water balloon with gasoline and having the balloon explode in his face. (The boy was okay.) Neither had anything to do with the other, but by some strange accident, the two images became conflated and I got the visual of a hawk on fire flying through the air. It stuck. The poem happened pretty quickly after that. I remember a particularly frustrating round of revision regarding the poem’s ending, but the rest came pretty fully formed.

The poems in the book lean toward the lyric. Do you write narrative poetry?

RT: The poems in Litany for the City were mostly lyric, but the poems in my new manuscript have a much stronger tendency toward narrative, which I’m interested in exploring—especially the stories from my family.

Tell us a little about your writing process, e.g. do you write daily? do you prefer to write in silence, or while walking? What inspires you?

RT: I wish I wrote daily. But I’m just not like that—I go through spurts; I’ll write furiously for a few weeks, then not write anything for a month. I tend to write better in the mornings. I’m useless, creatively, after about 8 p.m.

When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?

RT: It sounds incredibly self-centered, but my ideal reader is me. Let me explain that: I love reading and I love poetry. I know the feeling of reading a poem that you absolutely love, a poem that makes you want to tell someone about it. I once stopped a conversation and made an entire room listen to a poem I had read in a literary journal. That’s the kind of poem that I strive to write—a poem that I, as a reader, would want to share with others.

Generally speaking, how do you approach revision? Do you use a checklist or have any tried-and-true practices?

RT: I peck away at poems for a long time. I seem to do my best revising when I walk away and let the poem sit in the back of my brain for a while. I get ideas for revision in the shower or while I’m doing something completely unrelated to writing. When I let my mind wander, I’ll find I’ve rewritten a line or image in my head. One thing that’s always important is reading a poem out loud. If my poem doesn’t sound right out loud, that means it’s not right on the page.

When do you remember first being interested in poetry. Was there a mentor who encouraged you? How did you decide pursue poetry academically?

RT: My first poetry teacher was Jeffrey Morgan, a terrific poet who was teaching at Penn State when I was an undergraduate there. He turned me on to so many good poets: Thomas Lux, D.A. Powell, Matthea Harvey.

In graduate school I had many terrific teachers, but my mentor was the poet Ross Gay. He taught me how to write poems out of love. Even a poem of anger should come, fundamentally, out of a place of love. He taught me how to organize a collection of poems. And he taught me a few moves on the basketball court too.

You teach creative writing. There are those who would argue that creative writing can’t be taught. And there are those who say that MFA programs squash creativity and result in cookie-cutter writing. What are your thoughts on these issues?

RT: I live in a house that shares a wall with my neighbors. Their son is learning to play the trumpet. I can hear him playing “Jingle Bells” now. He’s getting better, week by week. I’m sure he has a teacher. I was taught creative writing. I teach creative writing. I see my students become better writers by the end of the semester. So I can see that it’s possible to teach writing. And poetry today is anything but cookie-cutter. It’s all over the place, which is a beautiful thing. But I also think there are worthwhile discussions to be had about how writing is taught. I worry that we focus too much on craft and not enough on play, imagination, and creativity, which are equally important to great writing. An MFA program may not be right for everyone, but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of all of them. An MFA was certainly the right choice for me.

Some poets eschew writing prompts, while others consider them useful. What do you think of writing prompts? Do you use them in your own work?

RT: I’m a huge fan of imitation. When I read a poem that I love, I try to write my own version of it. I wrote “The City That Swallowed the Sea” after reading the long, winding, one-sentence poems of Steve Scafidi’s terrific For Love of Common Words. Creating my own voice as a poet has been a long process of incorporating little bits of the writers I love into something my own.

Who are you reading now? Do you have a favorite poet or poets?

RT: I’ve been writing book reviews lately so I’m reading a lot of contemporary work. Right now I’m reading L. Annette Binder’s short story collection, Rise; Natalie Diaz’s debut poetry book, When My Brother Was an Aztec; and Amy Leach’s book of essays, Things That Are. My first instinct is to name a string of favorite poets instead of just one but I’m going to be bold instead. Favorite poet: Adam Zagajewski.

What are you working on now?

RT: I’m working on my second collection of poems, tentatively titled The Dream Protects the Dreamer.

Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

RT: Read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. Be generous. Carry a pen at all times. My pen of choice is the Uniball Vision Rollerball: Fine Point.

A sampling of Ryan’s poems on-line: