I hope you'll consider following me there. I won't be posting here much anymore.

http://memali.tumblr.com/

Taylor documented my 400th dive, which occurred in Palau on February 22nd, 2012. Enjoy!

Link to video here.

Taylor and I just returned from a fantastic trip diving in Yap and Palau. Such a range of things to see, big and small. Just gorgeous.

Check out the whole album here.

One of my favorite experiences in Palau was interacting with three large napoleon wrasses at Blue Corner. They are like puppy dogs, allowing the dive masters to hug them, zooming at the camera, and generally following us around the site. Since one of the them likes to bite I took pictures instead of trying to hug them, and was thrilled with this one:

And Palau's Jellyfish Lake was a sublime experience. It's filled with thousands of pulsating golden jellies that don't sting. I came out in tears, overwhelmed. Hard to put into words, really. Here's a photo:

And now back to poetry-world, specifically, flying to AWP in Chicago on Wednesday. What a way to re-enter civilization. Or some semblance of it. I'm looking forward to seeing friends I don't often get to see. Apparently this year 10, 000 people have registered for the conference. Wow. Let the madness begin!

Taylor and I have spent the last three days diving in Yap before we head to Palau for the next week. Yap is known for mantas and for good reason. There's a shallow cleaning station where they congregate. We visited it three times, and even though the visibility was down due to recent torrential rains it was incredible to see these giants' gentle movements through the water.

We also did a fantastic shark dive and a dusk dive that featured mandarin fish mating. They are small, stunning creatures. All in all a fantastic three days!

I'm thrilled to be visiting London for the first time and doing some readings there. Tate Modern, here I come! Anywhere else I just have to see?

I'm also visiting Kingston University to do a reading and speak to a class, at the generous invitation of Todd Swift. Looking forward to meeting the students and talking poetry.

Click here to download:

Mali_in_London.docx.pdf (505 KB)

In the January/February 2012 issue of American Poetry Review, Kwame Dawes is interviewed by Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar. It’s a great interview, filled with wide-ranging thoughts, depth, and humor. I highly recommend picking up the issue if you haven’t already read it. One of Kwame’s answers touches on a topic that he and I have talked about before, and his perspective struck me as deeply this time as it did then. Here is an excerpt: 

“I believe when I look at my poetry dispassionately and from a position of distance, I can identify a number of interesting preoccupations and themes. It appears to me that one of the most dominant themes would be the quest for home—a quest marked by my constantly feeling both at home and away from home at all times in my life. It has, I would argue, become an asset for me as a writer, because I believe that the art of empathy (which I regard as essential for writing) is found in one’s capacity to be fully inside a moment and yet outside of that moment at the same time. Being inside and out is the condition of the writer—or at least, it can be. When I was a child in Ghana I always had the sense that “home,” as it were, was where my father was from, namely Jamaica . . . Of course, I did not think for a moment that Ghana was not my home. But I also knew that there was another place that defined me and a place that informed my imaginative sense of home . . . Then we arrived in Jamaica. And quite quickly, my alien status in Jamaica, my foreignness, if you will, became a source of dislocation and discovery. I was now, not a Jamaican, but a Ghanaian—an African. Yet in all of these places I was tasked with the business of trying to find home in these locales . . . My solution was simple: It was all mine. All of it. I owned the past, and I owned the present . . . In this sense, my poetry is about finding home. And it is always about finding home in the midst of dislocation, uprooting, and planting and rooting.” 

Just as when he and I spoke about this issue a couple of years ago, I’m struck again by his choice—despite growing up in this liminal space between and within multiple cultures—to find wholeness within the dislocation, to claim all of it, rather than focus on the flip side: the lack of belonging, the fragmentation that can occur within a self not rooted in a firm sense of place and home. For much of my life I chose the opposite. As a person who grew up between New York, Caracas, and Stockholm, fitting in everywhere and nowhere, adept at observing and blending but unseen at the same time, I focused on how parts of me felt unmet because some of my “home” was elsewhere. I focused more on how I didn't fit in fully anywhere, instead of embracing everywhere as mine. Kwame’s thinking on this has helped me understand and find gratitude for this sense I’ve long had of being inside and outside every moment, this life that quite possibly turned me into a writer and certainly turned me into a seeker. I’m sure it led to my becoming a healing professional, what I did for thirteen years before going back to school for poetry, a profession for which that kind of empathy Kwame mentions, an ability to tune into others from a less “fixed” inner place was essential. I’m grateful to Kwame for reminding me to choose wholeness instead of fragmentation, to continue the work of owning my past and present, the work to root in myself what I find so challenging to experience fully on the outside.

One of Kwame’s poems in the issue really spoke to me, too. Here it is:

In Residence 

For JM

After a while one tires of the talk:
the timing of the square drive—
when must the bat meet the ball?
or the fierce square cut—
does one lean in or out of the shot?
A poet tells of a fat man laid
out on his back holding on
to a guitar like a piece of wreckage
keeping him afloat, and I think
why do I bother with this business
of making songs, this art thing,
when I can’t seem to come
up with something as precisely
true as that. And I spend
the rest of the day jealous
of the poet, while I pretend
to know what it takes to keep
at it, to cut and tuck, to make
my songs glow like worms
in the dark. But I don’t.
Mostly, I am tired of talking.
I want to walk slowly
to my room, turn off the light,
lay on my back, hoping to sleep,
hoping for my beloved’s call to distract
me from the crowding of my failures
thick in the air, but there are
no calls. So I stare out,
into the empty parking lot.
There is a moon tonight,
so I go walking in the dead village,
heart praying for a song
to come to me. It is cold,
then it rains, clouds crowding
the moon. I pray softly,
leaning forward to be heard,
scared to pull back:
my truest song is desperation,
the fear of not being heard.

 —Kwame Dawes
from American Poetry Review, Vo. 41/No. 1, January/February 2012

Kwame Dawes is the author of thirteen books of poetry and many books of fiction, non-fiction and drama.  His collection, Hope’s Hospice (Peepal Tree), was released in May 2009. Until July 2011, Dawes was Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina. He has recently taken on the Glenna Luschei Editorship of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska, where he is a Chancellor's Professor of English. He is also a faculty member of Cave Canem and a teacher in Pacific University's Low-Residency MFA Program in Oregon. He continues to serve as the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival that takes place each May in Jamaica.

As is my practice from time to time, I've interviewed Traci Brimhall about her first book, Rookery, which won the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award, and was one of my favorite books that I read in 2011. Without further ado, here's the interview, conducted via email:

Let’s start with first book questions: Did this book go through many versions before it found its current form? About what percentage of it comes out of your MFA thesis? Did you enter it in many contests before winning the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award?

Like many people who go to graduate school for writing, my thesis was the backbone for my first book. I’d say roughly half of my thesis ended up in my first book, which according to a lot of other writers I’ve talked to is a lot. Sometimes I look at the poems in the first book and feel embarrassed—it’s like my middle school yearbooks are open to the public. I can see how hard I was working in each poem. I hope it’s not as painfully evident to readers.

I double-checked my Excel spreadsheet and I’d entered Rookery in 16 contests before it won the Crab Orchard prize. I’m glad that it won when it did because I’d been considering only sending the manuscript to one more round of contests before retiring it to a drawer.

Please talk about the title, Rookery, and the way each section opens with a different definition of the word that is a prose poem all its own. How did you come to that title for this collection of poems? And the definitions that add so much?

The title Rookery came from a building in Chicago by the same name. I saw it on an architectural tour, and I was enthralled by it. I loved the tension of rough red granite exterior and light, airy, even whimsical interior. I love any good contradiction.

Originally the three sections were divided conventionally with numbers. I tried using a fragment of a line from within a poem to title each section. One of my thesis committee members didn’t like it, so I looked up the definition of the word rookery, and there they were, three definitions that seemed to encapsulate my obsessions—family, love, and violence. The definition poems came about because I was trying to challenge myself to break away from my strong narrative impulses and leap. The freedom of the lyric is often frightening to me. Exhilarating, too.

 There’s a series of aubades, a poem traditionally written to a lover before parting in the morning, that subvert the form in terrific ways, illuminating the speaker’s betrayal by her lover.  Please talk about your use of that form.

I kept returning to the aubade because I was forced to—not because my obsessions led me (because I was certainly afraid of that) but because a friend told me I had to.  I’d been scolded kindly for writing poems without risk. A friend of mine had me return to my most vulnerable poem (originally called “Aubade” and became “Aubade with a Fox and a Birthmark”) and keep rewriting until I’d said everything I was scared of. I think form provides a kind of safety, a set of rules I can play inside that helps me feel contained.  I need to feel safe enough to risk, and form often provides that for me.

  I’m fascinated when poets write an ars poetica. Please discuss yours, and what the writing of an ars poetica means to you.

One of my friends approaches her reading of almost every poem as an ars poetica. I wonder how much of that is true—how the every struggle in every poem is also the struggle to shape it into something beautiful, honest and controllable.

When I lived in Madison, WI, my apartment overlooked a busy street. The day this poem was written, I heard an accident. A car had come up onto the sidewalk and struck a lamppost. It sounded sharp, loud, terribly real. People had already run up to the vehicle and begun trying to help those inside. The sirens started. I watched, but there was nothing left for me to do. I was a witness with no responsibility, and it was awful. I feel that often, that terrible powerlessness. I want to be worthy of the life I’ve been given, and sometimes all I can do is acknowledge the suffering before me.

Here is the poem:

Ars Poetica

It happens as we set down one story
and take up another. We see it—the car,

the skid, the panic, the woman’s body, a stain
on snow like blood in a dancer’s shoe.

People bend over, afraid to touch her
in case she might rise, a bird startled to find

there wasn’t more light on the other side
of the window. The body in so much pain

the soul can no longer keep it. This is how
it happens—something in the earth awakens

and summons us. You feel fingers on your neck
and say, Take me to the snow, and it takes you.

 Please talk about how gender figures in Rookery, the way love and power intersect in relationships within and across gender lines.

I’ll admit I love strong women (who doesn’t?). While I’ve loved several men very deeply, my relationships with women have been one of the great joys of my life. I’m not totally sure how explicitly that love and those relationships (with men or women) inform the book. I do know that last fall when I was doing a class visit at a local college a young man told me that the gaze of the speaker in the poems made him uncomfortable because of the female speaker’s sensual view of the male subject(s) within the poems. He said it made him realize how uncomfortable women must be under the male erotic gaze. That wasn’t an intention I had when writing the poems, but it is a pretty satisfying result.

Some of the poems in Rookery seem to point toward the direction your work heads in your forthcoming book, Our Lady of the Ruins, which features a chorus of female speakers wandering an apocalyptic landscape looking for something, or someone, to worship. Lines from Rookery like, “God is a ghost / we inherit. God, hanging from a beam in the attic.” from the poem “Restoration of the Saints,” and “All I know of heaven is the fragile heat between / two bodies.” from the poem, “Requiem with Coal, Butterflies and Terrible Angels” and even some of the titles, like “Fiat Lux” and “Discipline with Lines from First Corinthians” all point to this tension between an apocalyptic view and the reach toward the divine in some form. Please talk about the movement of your work from book one to book two, the connections and differences between them.

I’m really fond of using relationship metaphors when talking about creative work and often say that I broke up with my first book but my second broke up with me. I knew I was tired of my first book. I spread all the poems out on the floor, put them in three sections, and then broke up with each section by writing a break up poem. I tried to have it out with my obsessions, and the final poem in each section is my break up poem with the ideas in each section.

I knew I was onto the second book when the way I was writing felt different. It felt different the way a new love feels different—mysterious, new, exciting. Of course my obsessions followed me, even though in many ways I tried to consciously move away from them. I knew it was over with book #2 when I couldn’t write the poems anymore. I tried. I loved writing those poems. It was awful to feel shut out of that imaginative space I’d written from for a couple of years, but just like the fate of love sometimes, the spark was gone.

 What are you working on now?

Since I finished Our Lady of the Ruins, I’ve tried a handful of things (you know, dated around lyrically), looking for what sparked next. I think I know when I’m onto something new when I find an imaginative space—questions, speakers, language—that are compelling to me, that resist me a little, that make me excited and a little afraid to sit down and write again. Lately, the poems I’ve been writing have taken place in or near Puraquequara, Brazil, where my mother was born. My obsessions are there in the river, there in the jungle, there in the animals, food, myths and language. I don’t know what it will amount to—if anything—but for now I’m enjoying making a big, thrilling mess.

Thank you so much for doing this interview with me, Traci. It’s such a pleasure to feature your book here at Frontal Junkyard and I can’t wait for Our Lady of the Ruins to come out in the spring! 

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, forthcoming), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (SIU Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, VQR, New England Review,and elsewhere.  A former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she’s currently a doctoral candidate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow  at Western Michigan University. 

What a wonderful New Year's gift! I got my advance copy of Villanelles yesterday, shortly after learning that it's already available for pre-order on Amazon.

What a journey, from reading over 500 villanelles in the spring of 2009, while I was completing my thesis for my MFA program (I graduated in May, 2009), reading another hundred more between 2009 and 2011, to holding this gorgeous book in my hands. 

Thank you, Annie Finch, co-editor. Thank you, contributors. Thank you, Diana Secker Tesdell, editor at Everyman's Library who took it and shepherded the book through its final stages.

Here's the jacket copy:

The first of its kind--a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku.
 
With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago. Many well-known poets in the past have tried their hands at the villanelle, and the form is enjoying a revival among poets writing today. The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," and Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song." Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Sherman Alexie, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and many others whose poems demonstrate the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single, strict form. 

Here's the link to pre-order: Amazon

In the last Page Meets Stage of the year, veteran Page Meets Stage reader Jeffrey McDaniel meets Amber Tamblyn. We can't wait for this pairing! 

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, $12/$6 students. Starts at 8 pm sharp.

Thank you to all our supporters and readers for another amazing year of poetry. We will resume on January 18th with Afaa Michael Weaver and Willie Perdomo!

The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Endarkenment, published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Although he is no stranger to poetry slams in the mid to late 90s, he is one of the few slam poets to have successfully “transitioned” into the academy.  He teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Amber Tamblyn may be best known as the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-nominated actress of “Joan of Arcadia” and such films as “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” but she also has an established career as a performance poet. Tamblyn is the author of Bang Ditto (Manic D Press) and has self-published two chapbooks of poetry, Of the Dawn and Plenty of Ships.