Four Poems in Radar Poetry Issue 28 -- Finalist for the 2020 Coniston Prize

It's been quite a year. A couple of years, really. At some point, I'll say more about how my husband and I ended up, pre-pandemic, in Bloomington, Indiana, after nine years in Germany. And how pandemic-curtailed living has changed our assumptions about "just getting on a plane" to see family in Europe.

One measure of settling in to a new place could be achieving a new publication. I've let this blog rest for some time, and I'm reviving it to share the good news that I have four poems appearing in Issue 28 of Radar Poetry. I was selected as a finalist for the 2020 Coniston Prize, and the delightful concept of this contest is that all finalists appear together with the winner in an issue. I had been drawn to Radar Poetry by past Coniston winners' work, and I felt it would be a good place for my own themed poetry about my son Simon. The annual contest accepts work from women poets who submit a group of 3-6 poems that are "intentionally cohesive."

I submitted four poems that I call "birthday poems," although "birthday elegy" is more precise. Simon died the summer of 2004, two months after celebrating his 7th birthday. Over the years, I have looked for ways to live with the arrival and passing of May 17th each year. Perhaps it's not surprising that my writing, which has developed mostly since Simon died, has turned to the question of his birthday. In the last five or so years, I have found my way toward a new poem each May. As past posts on this bog attest, Simon's birthday is a long-running theme.

The pleasure of seeing these poems in Radar Poetry's beautiful format is multiplied by the opportunity to collaborate with my dear friend, Rebecca Cross, whose intricate, colorful, meditative artwork is paired with my poems.

Mary Craig (L) and Rebecca Cross at the opening of Rebecca Cross -- Ephemera at BayArts on October 9, 2020. With Equisetum Catiblecum, Cathie’s Horsetail, 2019. Mixed Media. 

Rebecca Cross -- Ephemera at BayArts in Bay Village, Ohio. Through November 3, 2020.

Many thanks to Radar editors Rachel Marie Patterson and Dara-Lyn Shrager for inspiring work by offering this contest and running it in an attentive and affirming way.

Most of the poems in this set emerged as responses to exercises in online workshops I've taken at the Poetry Barn. Since 2016, as an emerging poet, I've learned foundational skills in meter and form, as well as wide-ranging exposure to compositional concerns, free verse, and reading (women) poets with Joshua Davis. In 2020, I took two generative courses with Amie Whittemore. In between, there have been many courses with a range of instructors, including the Poetry Barn's tireless director, Lissa Kiernan. I am grateful for the encouragement, caring, and expertise shared so generously in this community of poets.

Every poem has an underbelly of where it came from, what soil it drew nourishment from. I learned the gigan form, used in "Dendrochronology" and "Simon's Piñata," in Josh Davis' course called "Rattling the Cage: Forms and Repetition." American poet Ruth Ellen Kocher created the form, and I was drawn both to its manner of containment (16 lines, with a set pattern of couplets and tercets: 2-3-2-2-2-3-2) and its use of repetition that turbo-charges the repeated elements by bringing them together. With room for slight variation, line 1 becomes line 11, and line 6 directly follows it as line 12.

"Dendrochronology" is preoccupied with the return of prolific life in the spring against the stark absence of the child. I wrote the poem during a workshop on meter, using the amphibrach (da-DA-da) counter to its common sing-song in forms like the limerick, and casting it as a breathless heartbeat in two metrical feet per line. The gigan's groupings and repetition contain difficult emotion and confront the inescapability of loss.

Although I wrote the poem many years later, "Simon's Piñata" came out of the very real juxtaposition of Simon's 6th birthday with our travels to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City for treatment on a monoclonal antibody trial in 2003. Again, the gigan form offered a means of holding these contrasting events together.

I wrote "Endurance" as a challenge I proposed to the Poetry Barn community in 2018, having seen Brenda Hillman's intriguing, formula-based poem "Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work." The formula: 24 lines, 6 syllables per line. Again, the form presents a means of redirecting my mind as I work, leading to discoveries and choices I might never have found without the "requirement" to seek words that "fit."

"Perigee" is this year's poem, drafted in May during a workshop with Amie Whittemore and revised in August during a second workshop with Amie, where we attended to Gregory Orr's taxonomy of Naming, Singing, Saying, Imagining as ways of "making words come alive." The event that triggered the poem remained vibrant, and the poem evolved through time and attention and insightful input from workshop members.

Before sending my set of poems to Radar Poetry for consideration, I took advantage of the Poetry Barn's newest offering: mentoring. Josh Davis, whose depth of knowledge, support and friendship is deeper than I can swim, offered wise guidance on narrowing the set, believing in the language, and letting the poems go.

A publication surprise

On the last day of 2018, a prompt came through in my writing community at the Poetry Barn, and I grabbed the chance to play the game of "exquisite corpse" with Judith Roney. We met as co-students during my first course at the Poetry Barn in 2015 (The Lyric Essay, with Molly Sutton-Kiefer). Later, Judith taught a course in contemporary love poems (February 2017), and I was her student. We even met briefly in person at the 2018 AWP* conference in Tampa. Such are online writing friendships!

I'd observed exquisite corpse games from the sidelines (and Judith is a prolific participant), but I'd never followed the bait before. Something about:

Last Day of 2018 

Unsettled and feeling strangely weepy, I may tattoo Per Aspera ad Astra to the inner wrist for “through hardship to the stars,”

called out to me, and I gave this reply:

a gift of tender wrist to inky needle. My starry tears

Click over to the published poem to see where we went from there (ours is the third of three poems Judith published with Burning House Press, selected by February 2019 guest editor Adrianna Robertson). The collaboration continues for a total of 11 turns, giving the instigator the final word.

I enjoyed the sense of finality when submitting my contributions to the poem. In the game, there's no chance to edit once you press send. Your turn is finished, and your partner has the next move. I felt myself planning differently, weighing options more fully, seeking less obvious moves to make. Doubling back to make references to words Judith used added texture to the poem, and I could feel her doing the same with my words. We both enjoyed leaving things hanging to see what the other would do next. After several turns, Judith suggested a slight reformatting of the opening, which set us on a trajectory of three-line stanzas. As we progressed, we maintained the tercet stanza. Sometimes we wrote a full stanza; sometimes we left the stanza open for the other to carry forward. (Tip for others playing the game: we maintained a ghost copy in the comments section to determine our desired formatting. For anyone who's not a member of the Poetry Barn community but wants to give this a try, all you have to do is take a poetry class, and you're in the community going forward.)

Fascinating process. I'm grateful to Judith for the experience and also for the publication. I hadn't thought of the work as more than an exercise (we finished about a week ago), and she took the chance of sending it in with some of her other poems. The acceptance of her collection was nearly instantaneous. In fact, she was only able to tell me about t it after it went live. Judith is right; Adrianna Robertson is right: it's a good poem.

Note to self: send more poems to editors.


*Associated Writers and Writing Programs (annual conference of 10,000+ writers, academics, publishing professionals)