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)

A poem published today

I'm pleased to share news that my friends at the Poetry Barn noticed a poem I'd recently revised and asked me if I'd like to submit it for publication in their community zine, the Poetry Distillery. Of course!

I've taken online poetry classes there for nearly three years now, exploring form, meter, elegy, image, revision, women poets, the ode. This particular poem, Dear Hope, Although, emerged in response to a comunnity-wide prompt: write a letter to hope. The circumstance described in the poem had just occurred, and so did the poem.

When I had another look at my original stanzas, I found the poem "explainy". I cut away extraneous bits and reduced the stanza from quatrain to tercet. Now I have a poem where my practice with compression, image, line breaks, rhythm, and sound comes to bear.

I haven't posted much since my attention has turned to poetry. One reason is that I've taken the conversation "underground" into my coursework. Another is that many publishers refuse poems that have appeared on the internet in any prior form. To avoid that conundrum, I'm keeping my unpublished work off my blog.

That said, someone might be interested in this poem's evolution. Here's the original draft I wrote and shared "in the moment" late in 2015. The revised poem sheds 61 of these words while keeping the poem's spark. Comparison of the two is a good measure of how much I've been reading and writing to find my way into poetry.

Again, the published version is Dear Hope, Although.

For fun, here's the original (not terrible) draft:

[Dear Hope, although]

Dear Hope, although
you and I have become
estranged, I write with
something of an inkling.

Picture this: in early light
I wake up with my left hand
on my right breast, scratching.
As consciousness returns,

the burn of insect travels
from nerve to brain.
On my nipple?
Fear of vulnerable tissue

hardening into a welt
stills my hand. Instead
my nails discover a trail
of bites--mosquito? in December?

After supping on my arm,
it must have walked, pausingly,
across my upper back, rounding
my collarbone to crawl under.

On thread legs, the invader
stumbles tipsy across my nipple's
cobbled surface, leaving
a tiny chemical pebble

I can feel but cannot see.
I scratch the other sites
bloody but find forbearance
to leave my breast alone.

And that is why, Hope,
as December ends
I return to you. If I can
not scratch that bite

of deepest invasion,
what else might I hope
to accomplish in a
brand new year?

A published poem! (Barcelona Notebook #4)

Happy Valentine's Day! I've had a poem published in Vox Mom (Mom Egg Review) in a collection on the theme: LOVE OF IDENTITY/IDENTITY OF LOVE, curated by Sharon Dolin. If you would like to see the poem without further introduction, head right here (mine is number three).

My poem, Face card: Queen of Shadows, is a Barcelona poem from June 2015. On day eight of the workshop, we went to the Museu Picasso to see Picasso - Dalí   Dalí - Picasso, which paired works by the two artists at various stages of their careers. Sharon Dolin had sent us off with the suggestion to write a poem in a form. She offered the cinquain as a starting point. Five-line stanzas with the following syllable counts: 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. Here's a self-explanatory cinquain.

Syllable Game

first two

then double that

another pair makes six

now stretch the line way out to eight

and back

I was taken by an early Dalí portrait, paired with a somewhat earlier one by Picasso. Dalí reworked his portrait after meeting Picasso for the first time in 1926. To see the effect of Picasso on Dalí, follow this link and scroll in EXHIBITION until you find a page that looks like this:

There you will see Dalí's Portrait of My Sister (1923) on the right, as I saw it in the museum in June, paired with Picasso's neoclasical Portrait of Olga (1917).

The primary gesture of the poem "wrote itself" as I stood in the gallery, making notes and sketches. I turned it into a cinquain. My poem has four stanzas of five lines and follows the syllable pattern (with one change inspired by the portrait's shape).

Dalí's painting is owned by The Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg (Florida). Interestingly, this museum presents the painting on its website the other way around, with the "older" face on top. While the frustration of the mentee/mentor relationship between the two artists may be at the heart of the aggression I sense in the painting, it may also come from tension between the two siblings, as the St. Petersburg site suggests.

I've learned a bit more about the cinquain. The originator of the 22-syllable stanza was Adeleide Crapsey (1878-1914). Her cinquains are one stanza long and have a quality of the tanka or haiku. My poem is its own version of the cinquain, an enjoyable syllable game.

Flash poem

Where the rainbow is

It isn't where the rainbow is
that matters
it's where you are

because it's your eyes that make
a rainbow
isn't it?

Hear rain rumble the glass rooftop
like scampering hooves
then stop.

Evening sunshine burns hot enough
to trigger auto-blinds. What's the angle?
Where's the rainbow stage?

Follow the shadow line of a tree
it should point the way, but
no rainbow.

Start a poem. Look one more time
there!
Chalky pastels draw an arc

then fade

Being present (flash post)

Keeping to my own rules for a flash post (write it fast, almost no editing), I came home needing to write a little scene. I jotted it down by hand because I had a pot of soup to start, and then I came to my computer to blog. And here's what happens: I start to wonder if I need to break the lines. Is this supposed to be a poem?

Today's result is two poems. The first is a prose poem. The second, a lined poem. Each form, of course, drives different choices. Editing today is a particularly astute process because I've re-read Strunk and White's Elements of Style for an article I'm writing. Still not done, but this is a flash post! Since there are two versions of the "same thing," your are welcome to vote on your favorite!

I.

Walking away from the small town supermarket this evening, past the outdoor fruit display, past the cluster of middle-aged cyclists paused in front of Town Hall, weaving aside for pedestrians, I saw a lady walking toward and past me. She smiled warmly as as she said, "See you soon," into her phone, and I wondered if I'm ever that genuinely pleased. Certainly not on the phone, because I dislike talking on the phone. But ever in my life? Do I inhabit a moment with such generous appreciation? I grasped at my bike helmet to open the strap and rounded the corner toward where I had left my bike. And in the moment of asking do-I-ever a radiant field of magenta burst into view--a flower box plump with petunias hanging from a window of the old Rathaus. Sensory pleasure filled the air like the chimes of shimmering bells.

II.

Walking away this evening
from the small town supermarket
past an outdoor fruit display
side-stepping pedestrians
past a cluster of cyclists

I saw a lady walking toward
and past me who smiled warmly
as as she said, "See you soon,"
into her phone, and I wondered
if I'm ever that genuinely pleased.

Certainly not on the phone
because I dislike talking on the phone
but ever in my life?

Can I feel a moment like that?

My fingers undid my bike helmet strap
I turned a corner
and my eyes filled

with radiant magenta--
an effusion of petunias
hanging from a window
in the old Rathaus

like bells chiming shimmery tones in every
molecule of the air.

Learning to break

I'm trying to learn how to break
a line and how long to let a line be 

one of poetry's puzzles
enjambment
along with assonance
consonant consonance
stanza length
meter 

I'm on the outside of a cabin
built of rough-hewn slats
looking in through the gaps
catching glimpses of fire

and sometimes a word
a line
an image
takes over 

and I believe the poem has its own way to be 

the learning is learning
how to follow

I wrote most of this poem yesterday while walking past the fields near my home. My phone battery was nearly dead, or I might have voice-recorded or typed the phrases that came to mind. Instead, I saved my last 3% for a possible incredible photo. I checked in my mind. The opening lines stayed with me. Aha! I thought. Perhaps that's one way to know I'm building a poem. I wrote the lines in a notebook when I got home and made small changes today.

Harvested field with hay bales, July 2015

Harvested field with geese, July 2015

In 2008 I enrolled in my first semester-long writing course at the University of Utah: Intro to Creative Writing (English 2500). The instructor was Timothy O'Keefe, a PhD student at the time and now on faculty at Piedmont College in Athens, Georgia. Tim is a poet, and although we read and wrote fiction as well, our class got a solid dose of poetry writing. When you hear me say fiction, you have to  assume my prose was usually memoir/nonfiction instead. Interestingly, we don't hold poetry to the same split between fiction and non.

Tim was the person speaking to my adult ears about poetic devices like "enjambment", which I would have sworn I had never heard of before. In fact, when I cleared out my high school notebooks from my parents' attic last year (class of 1981), I found plenty of proof that poetry had been taught to me previously. Still, I often think of Tim when I wonder about how and when to break a line. I've just thumbed through my binder from his class, impressively well organized by both Tim and me. I was looking for the notes I'd taken the day he put a poem on the board to help us comprehend what a good line break can do.

I can't find the note. I see how I marked the margins for "pity" and "tragedy" in Nabakov. How we analyzed Jack Gilbert and Luise Glück. How I wrote my first ekphrastic poem about Warhol's silkscreen of Mao. But apparently I wrote nothing down about the line break on the board that made me gasp and finally "get" something about the possibilities of meaning through breakage.

Fortunately, I have remembered the lines well enough to locate the poem. It's James Wright's "A Blessing". I expect the particular moment will be clear to you if you follow this link and read it.

The kind of heat (flash post)

We're back in the kind of heat
that bakes the days and leaves
the air trembling even after
the sun has fallen to the west.

Every action, every thought superseded
by little tasks to keep the heat
out--window open, window closed
blinds down, awning out

stumbling around the darkened rooms
working in the computer's glow
with lights off all day. Along
with the heat I have banished

circadian rhythm in a trade for
air that moment by moment
loses the cool we coax inside
in the hours around dawn.

Outside, when I dare, fries my skin. Precious
shade is indispensable also for my car,
which suddenly I love--my one and only
possession that can blow cool air.

Poetry experiment

Here's a follow-up on yesterday's semi-poem. I call myself a prose writer, but every now and then something with shorter lines or a poetic gesture emerges. For example, I took a walk to the bakery on Sunday morning and made this Facebook posting when I got back.

Frozen morning: crunching opaque ice membranes stretched over ruts in the path is fun like popping bubble wrap only entirely more musical.

Several friends clicked "like" and commented. Amy Sheon saw the haiku potential here, which I, too, had noticed during another walk late afternoon. A haiku's brief 17 syllables seemed a challenge; I had a lot more words. So, I looked for "that other" Japanese short syllabic poetry form that I vaguely recalled. I searched on "haiku and" with immediate results: Haiku and Tanka courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Japanese Arts presented by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

You can follow the link yourself to find a charming presentation about the forms, but here's the basic information. Haiku is three lines, syllable pattern 5-7-5 (a total of 17 syllables). Tanka has five lines with the syllable pattern 5-7-5-7-7 (31 syllables). I have written one of each, essentially simultaneously, taking off from my original observation and wording. I have allowed myself a 4-syllable title, and I don't know if that's breaking form or not.

I imagine that writing syllabic poetry in Japanese feels quite different from English. The Japanese equivalent to an alphabet is a "syllabary." It's a system of syllables ordered by initial consonant, each ending in one of five vowels. The exception is final "n", which also counts as a syllable. For example, the word "haiku" counts as three syllables: ha-i-ku. "Tanka" is the same: ta-nn-ka. English pronounces both words in two syllables.

Soundwise, Japanese reminds me of Italian, with all those words ending in vowels (a fact that appears to make rhyme schemes in Italian ever so much simpler). I look at a lengthy one-syllable English word like "stretched" and imagine syllables in Japanese to be more obvious, more like breathing. I need my tapping fingers. (That's a 7-syllable sentence right there.)

Tanka

Frozen morning

crunching opaque ice

membranes stretched in rutted path

is fun like popping

bursting sheets of bubble wrap

ethereal chimes in ice

Haiku

Frozen morning

crunching opaque ice

rutted path of bubble wrap

joyful winter chimes

A previous winter moment prompted my other recent haiku. Now there are three of these poems. I believe I may be working my way toward a page of poetry on this blog.

Snow haiku, December 7, 2012

snow tumbling through air

downward halting plunging spread

outside my warm room

From another frozen morning during a horse-driven sleigh ride with Austrian relatives, January 2011. (c) Mary Craig