Information and Inspiration for your poetic journey
May 2009
In This Issue
Minding Words
The Write Direction
Poets To Know
Catching Voices
Featured Poem
Creating Space for Writing
The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman
Discover New Poetry Markets and Get Published
The Poetics of Community
The Writing Life
Writing the Life Poetic Zine
2009 MASTHEAD


Publisher & Editor:
Sage Cohen

Columnists:

Brittany Baldwin

Dale Favier

Sara Guest

Jenn Lalime

Christopher Luna

M

Toni Partington

Shawn Sorensen

Steve Williams

COLUMNIST BIOS
For your  bookshelf

WTLP cover with link

Like the Heart cover with link

The Writer Mama

The Writer Mama

Queries

The Darkened Temple


Community News
Join Our Mailing List
Greetings!

Welcome to the brand new Writing the Life Poetic Zine! Every month, ten fabulous poets and writers will help you get informed, get inspired--then get those poems on the page!

We'll invite you to tune into the poetry of your life with writing prompts, interviews, publishing tips and markets, guidance in cultivating a poetry practice, wisdom about the poetic life, tips about cultivating poetic community and more.

Like all of the great pleasures of life, we believe that poetry is even better when shared. That's why these columns will also appear throughout the month on the Writing the Life Poetic blog where you can ask questions, give feedback and post your own poems. Simply use the comments function to join the conversation.

We look forward to learning with you.

The word is the way,

Sage Cohen
Publisher & Editor

 
Minding Words
Give Up Being a Poet
By Dale Favier

Kalu Rinpoche, a Buddhist meditation master, was once asked, "will I have to give up being a Christian in order to achieve enlightenment?"

He was famous for his inclusive, ecumenical bent.  So it surprised and dismayed his Western audience when he firmly said: "Yes."

After a pause, he added, "Of course, you will also have to give up being a Buddhist."

I would urge you, in the same vein, to give up being a poet. Ambitions to write are ordinarily marbled with all kinds of fantasies about what sort of person you'll be when you succeed at it. You'll be wise, attractive, free of convention. You'll be interesting. You'll get respect, maybe not from the general public, but from a secret coterie of people who live passionately and authentically.

Nothing, nothing will kill your writing faster than these fantasies. Don't hope for your poetry to make you a different person (one that's worthwhile, this time.) Writing poetry doesn't do that. It doesn't change you from an ordinary person into a special one. Don't look for it to change your circumstances. It doesn't do that either. Don't let it get tangled up in all that.

Resolve at once: poetry is going to live in a different place. It's going to have a different cupboard in your mind. It's not going to get jumbled in with the stuff in the career anxiety drawer, along with ideas of going for a master's in electrical engineering or getting certified in Thai massage. It's not going into broom closet of defunct tools for finding the love of your life, along with speed dating and subscribing to match.com. It's not going to join the exercise bicycle and the yoga mat down in the basement of self-improvement equipment.

Poetry is going to be perfectly useless. It's going to be nothing but fun. It's going into the cupboard of forbidden delights, along with the chocolate. You're not going to "be a poet." You're going to indulge in poetry. Poetry is going to be your secret vice. You're going to grow sleek and fat on poetry. You're going to have online dalliances with other poets. You're going to put their words in your mouth, without fretting for a moment about where else they might have been, and you're going to pop your own words in their mouths, wantonly and unexpectedly.

And resolve: you are not going to be good poet. You're not going to be a dignified poet. You're not going to be a disciplined poet. You're not going to win the National Book Award.

Pick a person to write to. No, no, not your high school English teacher. Not someone you want to impress. Someone who's impressed by you.  Someone who hangs on your every word. Someone who wants to know what you mean, no matter how long it takes, who wants to whisper your words over and over and get all of the juice out of them.  Someone who always gets it and who never wants you to be anything but you.  

(Well, all right, sure, we're talking about an imaginary friend here.  Didn't I say this was going to be an indulgence?)

And now, if you've really done that -- have you really done that? -- write a poem. Write a bad poem. Make it maudlin, ridiculous, ornate, politically incorrect. Make it incomprehensible. Make it obvious. Take all the cheap shots.  

It's going to be a fabulous poem. Or not. Who cares?

* * * * *

Dale Favier has taught poetry, chopped vegetables, and written software for a living. Currently he works half-time as a massage therapist and half-time running a database for a non-profit in Portland, Oregon. He is a Buddhist, in the Tibetan tradition. He writes about meditation and poetry, and whatever ever else he may be interested in at the moment, at Mole.

He has an M.Phil. in English Literature from Yale, but he never wrote much poetry until he began blogging, a few years ago, and fell in with bad companions. With them he eventually brought out an anthology, Brilliant Coroners. His poems have also appeared in Qarrtsiluni and The Ouroborus Review. His first chapbook, Opening the World, will be coming out next year from Pindrop Press.


 
The Write Direction
May Poetry Prompt
By M and Steve Williams

We were browsing through the Portland Urban Pages some weeks ago and noticed a tendency of business owners in the Portland, Oregon area to give their restaurants, hotels, bars and other establishments very witty, unusual names. Which led us on a search to find poems on this theme. We found a terrific book entitled Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Bars, edited by Kurt Brown and Laure-Anne Bosselaar. It is a compilation of 125 of the best contemporary poets as they roam from greasy spoon diners to the swankiest hotels. Here is an excerpt from the back cover of the book:

"They are places where we meet to celebrate, to be alone, to seduce, to argue, to get loaded, to get away, to get happy. Be they burger joints, bistros, cheap motels, or resorts, they are the quintessential American hangouts, and in Night Out our best contemporary voices celebrate our homes away from home . . . Collectively, these voices create a look at ourselves in places where, as Gerald Stern says in his introduction, 'ordinary events -- ordering a meal, spilling a little wine -- take on a significance that can only be called mythical.' Surprising, hilarious, and touching, Night Out is often less about places themselves than about who we become in unguarded moments of joy, sadness, or comfort."

Here is a poem from the Night Out collection:

At the Waterloo Hotel
by Peter E. Murphy

Here dreams are interrupted by a woman
who screams so loudly she cracks open your death-like sleep,
yet fails to ruffle security or the front desk
which never answers the telephone, never responds.
So you bang on that awful door that wails Stop it.
You're hurting me! Stop! and it finally stops.

Later when sleep is again broken by the persistent tapping
on your door, you pull on your pants and look through the peephole
at the nightgowned woman who startles when you crack it open,
is confused when you say Yes? She doesn't realize
she's walked in her sleep in a hotel known for its exotic obscurity,
its Victorian sense of loss, its love-thin doors and walls.

As she stumbles toward other rooms
you close your door and wonder if hers were the screams
that had earlier awakened you.

You wonder if she moves toward abuse or toward love
that doesn't bruise, love that sleeps in a lost room
unaware she is searching among all the locked doors.

You return to your bed so exhausted you hurt
and lie there for hours in stubborn wakefulness,
practicing over and over how to close your eyes,
how to keep them closed, practicing until you finally turn
away from the stony light into the rising darkness
of your own rooms.

* * * * *
Now it's your turn!

Here's our list of very unusual establishment names from the greater Portland Metro area:

Reel M Inn
Vicious Cycle Motor Scooters
The Brazen Bean Coffee Bar
Flying Elephants Delicatessen
Ugly Mug
Prima Diva Hotel
The Low Brow Lounge
Cruise in Deli
Hot Lips Pizza
Sacred Grounds Espresso
Naughty Naughty Cakes
Shrunken Head Massage
What the Wind Blew In Motel
What's Up Stairs Boutique
Dr. Skin's Tattoo Parlor
Outlaws Nightclub
Piece of Cake Bakery
Be Zinful Wines
Wild Abandon Roadhouse
The Gilt Club
Wok N Roll
The Bitter End Pub
Rice Junkies Eatery
Rock Bottom Brewery
Curl Up and Dye Salon
Who's On First Sports Bar
Skinnidip Ice Cream Parlor
Bad Monkey Music
Olive or Twist Martini Bar
The Boom Boom Room
Dancin' Bear Saloon
Anna Bananas Coffee Shop
Howl-i-day Inn
Voodoo Doughnuts
Daddy Mojo's Diner
A Painted Lady Guest House
Typhoon Thai Food
Dirty Little Secret Salon
Optic Nerve Art Gallery
Dog Day Afternoon Grooming
Food Fight Grocery

This month's prompt is to use one of the establishment names we've provided (or one of your own) and write a poem that uses your selection in the title, i.e., At the Waterloo Hotel, or some variation. As to the content of your poem, attempt to capture, as Murphy did in the example poem, the flavor, mood, and atmosphere of this establishment. You can do so by exploring the place itself or you can choose to concentrate on its patrons.

The poem can be serious or humorous, or a little of both -- just because the name of the business is a bit wacky, don't assume the content of the poem must be. A serious poem can be written with a humorous title or vice versa; this contrast is unexpected, and can be used to your advantage. Remember what Stern said about the poems in the book -- that they are often less about places themselves than about who we become in unguarded moments of joy, sadness, or comfort.

* * * * *
M has served as Associate Poetry Editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection for the past one hundred years or so. More than a few editors have found her poems acceptable, and included them in their journals. She received her B.A. in literature so long ago, she's pretty certain her diploma has crumbled to dust. She also serves as an administrator of on online poetry workshop called Wild Poetry Forum. If you cannot find her (she never answers her cell phone), call Powell's Books. The employees there know exactly what room she's in. And most importantly, she is very grateful for the enormous amount of love in her life.

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.
Poets to Know
An Interview with Paulann Petersen
By Sage Cohen

Paulann PetersenIf ever there were a patron saint of poetry, Paulann Petersen would be the woman for the job. A remarkable poet, an inviting and invigorating teacher and a uniquely generous supporter of poets, Paulann Petersen is the kind of person who simultaneously puts you completely at ease while your spine becomes electric with admiration. I'm honored to share Paulann Petersen's wisdom with you here. I hope that each and every one of you will have the opportunity to hold her poems in your hands, to hear her resonant delivery of those poems and to spend at least a day learning with her.

* * * * *
What brought you to poetry? When did you start writing and why?

Poetry brought me to poetry. I'd written verse as a child. I'd tried a few imagistic poems in high school, and won a prize for Portland high school poets (from Northwest Review or maybe Portland Review).  But--as much as I'd read since the moment I'd learned how to read--I'd read very little contemporary poetry until I was a young adult, a housewife with small children living in Klamath Falls. Then I began to discover the poems published weekly in the Saturday Review. Poems in The New Yorker. I was smitten. I began to haunt the poetry shelf (yes, one shelf) at the Klamath County Library. I was in love with what I found there.

J.D. Salinger says to decide what you most want to read and then write it. At that point, I don't think I'd encountered this bit of wisdom from him. But I had found some of the poetry that was spinning out of the poets of the day, of the moment--so fresh its ink was barely dry. I guess the desire to be a writer was there, inside me, waiting. A strong desire. I'd found what took my breath away, what I most wanted to read, to hear. And I began to write it.

It was a late start, a fairly solitary start.  But I stole time from the Five-Acres-and-Independence life style I was following. I began, in earnest, to write poems. I wrote for the love of the words and their music. I wrote for escape. I wrote for exhilaration. I wrote for the giddy focus that writing poetry gave me.

Even so, for a number of years, writing was catch-as-catch-can for me. And it still gets that way when I allow other responsibilities to take precedence.

Is there a typical process, or writing ritual, by which your poems take shape?

I don't have a daily writing practice. I tend to write in spurts. For me, poems usually begin with a bit of language. Then I begin to riff, letting the language take me wherever it will. I let sound take over, if I can. I figure meaning will catch up soon enough.

You are the greatest champion of poetry I know and an awe-inspiring community builder. What is your philosophy about cultivating community and how this has made an impact on your life--and your writing?

These are very kind and generous words.  And I thank you for them.  

We have an extraordinary community of readers and writers in our area. And I like to support and contribute to it whenever I can. I believe in inclusiveness. I believe in open doors. I believe in a wide, wide embrace. Poetry is often criticized as being elitist. And that, to me, is about as wrong-headed as you can get. There are, certainly, writers and readers of poetry who are elitists. But that has very little to do with the nature of poetry itself.  

I gave a basic poetry writing workshop at Central Library recently called "Anyone's Domain." In the description of the workshop, I said, "Poetry is not the domain of just a few. It's as natural and accessible as heartbeat and breath. Writing poetry requires nothing more than a love of words and a willingness to let your pen move across a page, following language wherever it takes you."

Poetry is the domain of each and every one of us. It's ours to read, ours to write.

This sense of, insistence on inclusiveness has had an impact on my writing. I'd like--without sacrificing music or mystery or quirkiness or risk--for my poems to be as accessible as they can be. I'd like as many people as possible to read one of my poems and feel welcome reading it. I don't expect my poems to be accessible to all readers, but I don't want them to be inhospitable. That's a matter of tone, and I want an inclusive tone.

What do you believe about revising poems?

I do not believe in what I call "the myth of divine delivery," that idea that poems are delivered to us by the muse and must remain exactly in the form in which they landed on the page.  

Yes, yes, true, true: a few poems do arrive in virtually finished form.  Maybe the slightest bit of fine-tuning, and they're done. But that, for most of us, is a rare occurrence. When it does happen, the poet should get down on her knees and give thanks.

For most of us, revision is a wonderful and large part of the process.  A gritty, delicious part of the process. Just think about the word itself: revision. It means to see again. We have the opportunity to practice second sight! What a boon.

How has teaching influenced your relationship with poetry over the  years?

Teaching teaches me--continually, constantly, repeatedly--about poetry's depth and breadth, its huge and buoying embrace.

What poetry are you reading these days and what about it delights you?

This is another of teaching's gifts: I'm reading widely, browsing here and there and there to find poems I want to bring into my workshops, to use as springboards. So I rediscover poets I love. Neruda. Garcia Lorca. I find poems by people I don't know well enough. Eavan Boland. Linda Pastan.

You serve on the board of Friends of William Stafford and have been  organizing the annual January Stafford Birthday Events for many years now. What does this work mean to you and why do you do it?

To celebrate William Stafford's work is to celebrate a whole world-view. His life and his poems were/are seamless. Every word he wrote, every action he took, bore witness to his profound spirituality, to his belief in the non-violent resolution of conflict.

Would you be willing to share a poem of yours here with readers and tell us a bit about your experience conceiving, writing and polishing it?

I was in Turkey with my husband. We were staying in a tiny pine cabin in Adrasan, on the Mediterranean Sea. I'd been reading Rumi. We'd just come from Antalya, where the museum houses all the treasures from Perge. The dress of the famous marble Aphrodite of Perge (she of the multitude of breasts) is adorned with honeybees carved in relief. When I stood staring at this fabulous statue, I was at first surprised to see that bees decorated her gown. And then I realized how apt that was. I remembered reading in a natural history magazine, years before, that the world as we know it would not exist without water and pollen. And the bees, the bees, helping to move that pollen from blossom to blossom. How essential. How beautifully necessary. I began writing the poem that follows. And as it moved itself onto the page, I could feel that it was assuming a life as an ars poetica.

A SACRAMENT

Become that high priest,
the bee. Drone your way
from one fragrant
temple to another, nosing
into each altar. Drink
what's divine--
and while you're there,
let some of the sacred
cling to your limbs.
Wherever you go
leave a small trail
of its golden crumbs.

In your wake
the world unfolds
its rapture, the fruit
of its blooming.
Rooms in your house
fill with that sweetness
your body both
makes and eats.


How would you recommend that writers new to poetry might step into  this way of perceiving and writing?

Read poetry. Read and read and read. One poet will lead you to another and another and another. Keep a journal. Let anything and everything into it. Some of what finds its way into that journal will begin to shape itself, with a certain amount of help from you, into poems. Browse through books such as Sage's Writing the Life Poetic.  You can find wonderful ideas to help launch you towards poems.

How has poetry changed your life?

For the better.  For nothing but the better.

* * * * *

Paulann Petersen's books of poetry are The Wild Awake (Confluence Press), Blood-Silk (Quiet Lion Press), and A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A fourth collection, Kindle, is just out from Mountains and Rivers Press. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts, she serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual January Stafford Birthday Events.

* * * * *

Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writer's Digest Books, March 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. She writes four monthly columns about the craft and business of writing and serves as poetry editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Co-curator of a reading series at Barnes & Noble, Sage teaches the online class Poetry for the People. Her son Theo is the most glorious poem that's ever come through her. Learn more at sagesaidso.com and writingthelifepoetic.com.
Catching Voices
The Concept of Community Publishing Behind VoiceCatcher
By Jenn Lalime and Sara Guest

VoiceCatcher is an anthology of Portland women's writing. It exists because a collective of women -- editors, authors, artists, poets and teachers -- who love to read and write wanted to collect the voices of local women and offer them to the community. This column chronicles the vision behind VoiceCatcher and the cultivation of that vision by two key leaders in the editorial collective.

Like local sustainable agriculture, we see community publishing as an opportunity to cultivate local, sustainable writing. For us, community publishing means of, by and for a particular community. As Michael Pollen tells us thou shalt know your farmer, we decided readers should get to know their local writers, publishers, and editors. Of course not every publication can, or should, operate this way. But ours does.  

In our case, we mean the very-very-wildly-magnificently-fruited creative community in the greater Portland, Oregon where since the fall of 2005 we've helped manage a local, non-profit, women's-only anthology called VoiceCatcher generated once-a-year by and for our peers.

We produce the anthology using a collective model. Ten volunteers, part of a rotating collective, work together as readers, editors, copyeditors, publishers, marketers and event-planners to honor and support the incredible women writers in our community--some known to us, many more met along the way. Authors become collective-members; collective-members take lead roles as editors; former-editors run the board. Our current editor, Jenn Springsteen, calls working on the project the best MFA she never paid for.

We've called it a labor of love, and so it is. It's also an act of empowerment. We've dug a publishing space and publication model--our own little garden plot--that seeks inclusion and support as core premises. Though we produce a book of high quality, we also engage extensively with every piece submitted.

For those who share their work with us but are not selected for publication, we provide a personalized feedback letter that speaks to what's working and not working in their individual manuscript. For those authors we publish, we launch the book with an authors-only party to say, Hey! Look at all the other people publishing great shit in this town. The voices in the book, after all, are attached to lives and practices and bodies of work. We also provide space at the microphone, hosting several readings each year, which gives most of our authors an opportunity to read in public.

When we first got started, these were just ideas hatched in a dream-space by women who'd been writing together and impressing each other. Why isn't what's available to me over the counter as vibrant, emotional and risky as the stuff I'm hearing every week in workshop? Why are so many of my friends demoralized when they try to put their work into the world?

Our first website had pithy little taglines like Release your work into our stream and Our nets are out--our mission was to literally catch some voices and to treat each writer who answered the call with respect and a high degree of nurturing. This continues to be how we approach what we do conceptually--as a receiving space where everyone's work, regardless of where she is in her development as writer--can swim.

More about VoiceCatcher at www.voicecatcher.org.

* * * * *
Sara Guest, a native mid-westerner, has been tripping the light wowtastic in Portland, Oregon since 2004. A longtime producer and editor, Sara works as a program coordinator for Write Around Portland and volunteers with Literary Arts and VoiceCatcher (currently as board chair). She writes poetry and fiction and is a voracious reader and lover of Powell's City of Books.

Jenn LalimeJenn Lalime is a northwest native, a writer and editor, a mother and a wife. She's lucky to work with the following organizations to bring the words of fellow writers out into the world: Portland Women Writers, VoiceCatcher, and Tin House Books. She thanks the universe every day for President Obama whose presence in the White House gives her the peace of mind to stay focused on her first and true love: reading great fiction.


Featured Poem
Nagoone Berries
By Sage Cohen

The thornbush holds her secrets
low to the ground.
In the privacy of rain
we kneel together,
heads bent to the berries.
Lush with leaf and hush
our voices settle like fog
among the unspoken
as we stain and bruise ourselves
with the fruit's surrender.
The earth drinks and drinks
until it spills open and raw
like a prayerbook saturated
with God's desire for humanity.
We are a rhythm of choosing, crawling
along the bloated field through
necklaces of vine. The berries fall
wide-eyed into our collecting cup.
You carry that tender burden
of severed fruit home.
You stand over the stove,
cooking sacrifice
down to sugar.



 
Creating Space for Writing 
Claim Your Physical Space
By Toni Partington

How does a poet secure physical space to write when everything else demands attention? It starts when we decide to value the poet in us.  Following are a range of suggested strategies for claiming and customizing a physical space. If there's one thing here that resonates with you, give it a try and let it grow.

Inventory today's writing space
Where is your writing stuff right now (books, papers, files, inspiring mementos)? Where do your usually write (office, car, bed, couch, patio, kitchen table)? Where do you feel most creative (home, bookstore, nature, coffeehouse)? Answer these questions in detail.

Imagine what could be possible tomorrow
Imagine a setting that would inspire you to create poems -- to let them flow onto the page. Draw or sketch this setting. Add detail and color, bring it alive and don't worry about artistic quality. Then, set it aside for 24 hours. When you pull it out ask, is it complete? Is this the place where I can and will create? If you have doubts, start over or add to it. If yes, I see myself creating here, study it closely. Where is it (outside/inside, home, elsewhere)? Is it portable/permanent? Is there inspiration (art, photos, books, music, plants)? Is it formal/informal? Do you need order, quiet, privacy? Is it accessible each day?   

Make a plan for getting there
Now that you've imagined the setting, make a list of what's needed to make it a reality. When finished, identify items available right now. Sometimes these things are available if we ask around. Make another list of items not readily available. Begin gathering items you have or can obtain easily. Here's an example. My client Lynn sketched her ideal space as a meadow with a comfortable chair, lap desk for notebook/laptop, cooler for water/snacks, and a wool blanket.

After making the list, the items she lacked were a lap desk and quality folding chair. She solved this by requesting these as presents for her upcoming birthday. Then, she listed places where the natural environment fuels her poetry. Within a few weeks she had the items placed securely in the trunk of her car and a plan to follow. Now, she has her writing space with her every day.

Don't let circumstances limit you
Your setting may take more planning or resources. But don't let that limit you today. Sometimes we think that unless we have it together, perfectly, we can't get started. It's important to pull together what we do have and get going. Experiencing a sense of doing is inspiring in itself. The act of writing a poem, getting lines on paper can be enough to fuel us.

Often writers say they'll begin once the office is clean, organized, or they've found more hours in the day. I say start now by writing a line or two. Afterwards, get started on creating your poetry place and a plan with a timeline to secure the items.  Make a space that will support your daily writing.

Settle in and enjoy!
For me, there are two spaces for my two poetry moods -- one is my cushy red sofa wrapped in a favorite blanket, lap desk, paisley covered notebook and Joni Mitchell's Blue album softly in the background. The other is propped up in bed, pillows all around, the dog curled on my legs, and silence except for my breathing mixed with the dog's snoring. What's yours?

* * * * *
 
Toni Partington lives and works in Vancouver, WA. Her poetry has appeared in the NW Women's Journal, the Anthology of the River Poets' Society, VoiceCatcher 3, the Cascade Journal, and others. Toni's other work includes career/life coaching, editing services for new and emerging writers, and grant writing. This winter she joined the editorial collective for VoiceCatcher 4. She holds a BA in Social Work and an MA focused on Literature and Literary Editing.  Before that, Toni was a high-school drop out, pregnant and then married at age 16 whose life came faster than it should have and toughened her into a self-described survivor. Today, her circle includes family, friends, dogs and poets, not in any particular order.
Blog: www.poettone.blogspot.com
Email: [email protected]

The Cook, The Writer, The Gardener, The Business Woman
My Hands
By Brittany Baldwin

The Writer MamaMany poets write poetry for love and do other types of work for money. This column explores the interplay of multiple identities as one poet works and lives and writes a poetic life.

Right where my arm meets my body, between the bones in the front there is a pinch. Sometimes it grows in lumps of knots up my neck to my ear. Sometimes it tingles down into my elbow, a numb tingling in my pinky finger. Hours clutching a pen, a knife, a shovel, a calculator.

In the grocery store I stretch while they check my groceries. I stand square lifting the bags with my left hand. Inside homes I unwrap my knives and set out the vegetables. For hours my knife conducts the kitchen into steam, fire and dishes to be washed. All the while I am writing in my head, quietly listening to my headphones.

During the commute I keep a cassette recorder in the seat next to me, writing while I drive. When I get home after cooking all day I cook for myself, feed my pets, then the businesswoman gets the hands. She climbs up to the office and emails, returns calls, fills the calendar, writes menus and adds numbers against bills, projections and budgets.

In the summer there's an hour in the garden watering and pulling the next days' order. I weed the rows and spray down the aphids and ants. Then after the dog has been walked, the computer shut down and the grocery list written, the cook, the gardener and the businesswoman let the writer have the hands.

I tell myself balance. I pull out a blank calendar and draw up a schedule. This day I will have two hours to write and revise. This afternoon I will send out submissions. This night I will go to a reading. These are the hours to read, to study. Winter affords more time for the writer to take classes, go to readings and take the hands on vacation to the coast. Each dances their creative service in seasons, winter at the coast writing, summer in the garden weeding.

In the meantime the poet draws pictures inside, adding extra color to stuffed peppers, adding poems to chicken lined up in the meat case. For a moment just before I blink the chickens are rocking back and forth. It's like in the Fisher King when all the people are dancing in the train station. We all dance in the grocery store. There is a man juggling organic tangelos. But then I blink and the businesswoman orders five boneless skinless chicken thighs, a pound of salmon and a shoulder roast.

The poet listens for winter, for Saturday afternoons, for balance.

* * * * *

Brittany Baldwin runs a small catering and personal chef company that maintains its own organic garden. She has written poetry in Portland for eight years while starting her own business and self publishing her own poetry collection, Broken Knuckles Against Knives, Cutting The Food To Feed Me Through This (2005). In 2002 she received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. Her poetry has appeared in the poetry collections Ephemeris and Broken Word: Alberta Street Anthology Volume 1 and 2. She has appeared on KBOO's Talking Earth,  won an honorable mention in the Oregon State Poetry Associations fall 06 contest and was featured in the 2006 and 2007 Silverton Poetry Festival.

Discover New Poetry Markets and Get Published
By Shawn Sorensen

Jenn LalimeGetting published is not the be all and end all reason to write poetry.  However, submitting work to journals and contests can sure motivate you to write more and improve your craft. This column can help you have fun submitting work and have more fun celebrating the occasional publication or award.

Each month I'll recommend three publishing opportunities for writers of all levels: a print journal (lots of prestige), on-line journal (accessible to all) and contest (where you tend to get a quicker response--and maybe even earn some cash and/or status). Following are some guidelines that can help maximize your chances of submission (and publication) success:
  • Try to read at least a handful of poems from the publication you'd like to submit to. Nothing impresses an editor like seeing that you've done your homework by submitting poems that are a stylistic or aesthetic fit.
  • Submit at least three polished, final poems to demonstrate that you're legit. Read: not two good ones and something you wrote five minutes ago. My personal rule is to send poems that at least three people have looked at -- and have therefore been revised at least three times.
  • Remember that the more you submit, the more likely you are to get published! Every rejection takes you one step closer to publication.
Print Journal: Memoir (and)  
Memoir (and) is a colorful and beautifully rendered journal that has it all: accessible work, a built-in contest for the best submissions, and a growing audience. As the title indicates, they want your poems to illuminate snippets and impressionable experiences from your life. Their current submission period is May 1st through Aug. 15th.  www.memoirjournal.com has all the details about submitting, as well as all the poems from their current edition ("Spr + Sum 2009") so you can see if your poems would be a good fit.      

Online Journal: STRIDE MAGAZINE  
A trip to www.stridemagazine.co.uk says it all. This interesting on-line magazine appreciates poetry from writers of all skill levels who believe in their own unique literary voice. Like, say, yours.

Contest: Tom Howard/John H. Read Poetry Contest  
This is one of the most fun, most accessible, highly funded (over $5,000 in awards to at least 15 winners) contests of the year. Plus it's featured on a great website: www.winningwriters.com, which has lots of other free opportunities.
 
Get submitting! You'll thank yourself for it. Wishing you the best of luck, with a healthy dose of fun.

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Shawn Sorensen is a published, award-winning poet whose work can be viewed at mannequinenvy.wordpress.com, Winter 2008 edition.  His poetry submission goal is to send something in at least every other week and get published/recognized a few times per year.  He's written dozens of complete book reviews, including sixteen poetry titles, on goodreads.com and braves a perilous river crossing to be the Community Relations Manager at Barnes & Noble Vancouver. After getting dry and attending to numerous shark bites, he plans and hosts an every-2nd-Wednesday Poetry Group event that's always at 7 pm, always features the area's best poets, and always has a great open mic.
The Poetics of Community
The Importance of Gathering with Likeminded People
By Christopher Luna

The Writer MamaA column dedicated to Stan Brakhage and Allen Ginsberg, poetic elders whose generosity gave others permission to explore and blossom.  

How does one find community--and why is it necessary to a poet? Where does it begin? The poet is both an observer and a participant; writers are social beings, and their work exists in a particular socio-cultural context. We need other writers with whom to share ideas.

If you spend every waking moment pondering how you can achieve the sublime by capturing the perfect image, if you're addicted to the beauty of the language, if you're willing to study hard and share what you've learned, welcome to the community. Poetry-and the people who depend on it as you do--will sustain you through your darkest hours.

Growing up on Long Island, I sometimes felt completely alone. It seemed highly unlikely that there were others who shared my interest in the arts, and less likely that I would meet anyone else who had chosen the same path I had, the path that had chosen me: writing. But slowly, over time, it happened. In my twenties, I worked in a head shop, where I came into contact with the first of many musicians with whom I would collaborate. Because the store attracted members of various subcultures, I had daily opportunities to converse with likeminded people.

Later, I became part of the community of writers associated with the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, two poets who spent decades publishing, performing, teaching, and community-building.

For nearly twenty years since my first collaborations, I have engaged in the alchemy of community. When I found myself in the Northwest several years ago, many miles from home and feeling melancholy, I was reminded of the refrain that I knew to be true: "find my tribe." In 2004 I founded an open mic reading in Vancouver in order to create a safe, supportive, fun environment in which writers could gather, share information, and try out new work. Then I started sending out a monthly email newsletter and blogging to inform poets about events in Portland and Vancouver.

There is a glorious anarchy in coming together with other poets. I am continually awed by the talent, wisdom, and luminous intelligence of my fellow seekers. We have so much to learn from one another. Many of our poetic elders are first recommended by friends, for example, and many publishing and educational opportunities are passed on by others. Why not find a local reading event or writer's group and give it a try? Just talking to or listening to the poetry of one other poet could take your life and your writing in a new direction. And if you can't find such an event in your community, you can do what I did: start one.

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Christopher Luna is a poet, editor, artist, teacher, and graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Publications include Cadillac Cicatrix, eye-rhyme, Exquisite Corpse, and the @tached document. Chapbooks include tributes and ruminations, On the Beam (with David Madgalene), and Sketches for a Paranoid Picture Book on Memory. GHOST TOWN, USA, which features poems and observations of Vancouver, WA, is available through Cover to Cover Books and Angst Gallery, or from the author.

Email: [email protected]
Blog: www.christopherluna-poetry.blogspot.com
The Writing Life
Keeping Your Wilderness Alive
By Sage Cohen
Jenn Lalime"Solitude is the sense of space as nourishing. What usually happens with solitude is that people equate it with loneliness, which frightens them . . . There is a way in which we treat our relationships almost like a colonial expedition: we want to colonize the space, all the territory in between, until there is no wilderness left. Most couples who have deadened in each other's presence have colonized their space this way. They have domesticated each other beyond recognition." -- John O'Donohue

On a Saturday morning, Jon dropped me off at yoga class at ten A.M. and kept right on driving with the dogs to Forest Park where they galloped six muddy miles of trail together in the deep womb of urban wilderness. I had dressed for the walk home, and was warm and relaxed as I headed out from class into the mild gloom of a March afternoon. Digging around in my purse to no avail, it struck me that we had used my keys in the car, and that the car-and keys-were with Jon; I'd be locked out until he got home. Jon didn't have his phone with him, and I had no idea when he would be home.

With destination erased from my trajectory, I felt like a balloon cut free, floating purposeless and weightless down Clinton Street. I remembered seeing a caf� on my way to class and walked east another three blocks to Broder, a Scandinavian caf�. The caf� was long and narrow, about the size of a train car, and had been polished with care to a modern minimalist sheen.

The patrons had clearly emerged from a Portland other than the one I inhabit: one of high-style, where darkly framed, dramatic eyegear and strangely proportioned clothes in shades of black and brown slung over heroin-chic bony bodies. The waiters and chefs were waify, underweight young men smattered with tattoos and too-tight black pants with a slick of aloofness greasing down the errant eagerness beneath their cool fa�ades. In my sloppy stretch pants, bunched-down wool socks, fleece jacket, and unwashed hair flopping around in a loose clip, I was blissfully out of place. In an urban environment, not looking the part is as close to invisible as you get, and I love being invisible.

I took a seat at the bar, retrieved a small pile of index cards and a pen from my purse, and started writing. Card after card, the ideas kept coming through me, through the pen. A practice established over the course of twenty years, my body needed only assume the position to turn on its free writing tap. As I wrote, a glorious mug of fragrant decaf coffee arrived with a smart glass jar of sugar cubes and a silver carafe of half and half. Then came the large, frothy orange juice. And then three aebleskivers, quarter-size Danish pancakes dusted in powdered sugar and circled in dollops of lingonberry jam, maple syrup, and lemon curd. Compliments of the chef. I had fallen through the rabbit hold to a Swedish heaven.

As I wrote, my baked scramble with wild mushrooms and caramelized onions materialized on the counter steaming in its square, cast-iron baking dish, aligned with a square white plate with a perfectly spiced potato pancake accompanied by a fan of triangular slices of walnut bread. I tasted, marveled, and wrote some more. And as I did, I was transported to the life and times of Sage of yesteryear. This Sage had free time. With little income and minimal expenses, she lived for the indulgence of her weekend caf� breakfasts. With no car but plenty of notebooks and one divine poetry book at a time, she'd ride the streetcar and listen and look and feel and write and weep. This old Sage was spontaneous. Not yet the precariously over-committed and over-scheduled adult she would grow up to be, this young woman had room for surprises.

For a brief hour of homelessness and exquisite food, I returned to this lost wilderness of my early twenties: the Sage of open spaces. I carried her home like a pressed flower-fragile and old and new. In a flash of lucidity, I could see how I had colonized myself into my own prison of responsibility and purpose and civic duty as year after year I cut back the rich, fertile thrill of my precious solitude to cultivate a more groomed and professional version of myself. When really all I wanted was something big and impossible and gloriously alive to get lost in.

Poetry does not survive the suburbs we make of our minds. It withers in the cage of constant accomplishment. Poetry needs the wilderness of solitude to call itself up out of the verdant ashes. It needs the darkness and the light to recognize its wholeness. How have you colonized your creativity and domesticated that wildflower of your imagination that once billowed in the wind? How will you recover your lost wilderness? No matter what work you do, what relationship you have, or how busy you are, inch-by-inch it can be done. You can have your suburbs and your wilderness. Your poetry depends on it.

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Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writer's Digest Books, March 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. She writes three monthly columns about the craft and business of writing and serves as poetry editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Co-curator of a reading series at Barnes & Noble, Sage teaches the online class Poetry for the People. Her son Theo is the most glorious poem that's ever come through her. Learn more at sagesaidso.com and writingthelifepoetic.com.