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dumbfoundry

Poetry news, poetry blogs, poetry magazines, poetry journals, poetry sites, poetry links, etc.

Poems on posters since 1982

Thursday, August 28, 2014
Jim Wilson:
I was delighted to get a Hone Tuwhare poem poster right opposite the main gates of Parchman Farm (The Mississippi Federal Penitentiary) in Mississippi. You aren’t allowed to stop on that road for a mile or so either side of the main gates, but I did and the screws came running.

Call for poems

Monday, June 30, 2014
from The Emma Press

Galatea Resurrects no.22

Friday, June 06, 2014
...is fresh.

Call for theme Australian Dreams

Monday, May 12, 2014
in Southerly. Deadline 1 Sept 2014

My stop on The Writing Process Blog Tour

Saturday, April 12, 2014
The Writing Process Blog Tour is a great way to introduce you to new writers through their writing process. Thanks to an invitation from Carole Burns, author of The Missing Woman (forthcoming next year from Parthian Books), I get to join in on the fun and bring other writers with me! (Their bios are below.)

Okay, to the questions!



What am I working on?

It's April, so it must be NaPoWriMo (short for National Poetry Writing Month)! I'm not writing towards a book or anything, just enjoying playing around and experimenting and not making sense. It's liberating! Like releasing the stays in one's corset and breathing out.

Writing a poem a day on anything I want feels incredibly luxurious, especially after working so fixedly on Disturbance, my second poetry collection. That was dark -- and this is play. So, yes, luxurious, and a little bit naughty, like I'm getting away with something...



How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My life, education, experiences, what I read, consume and digest, where I've travelled and lived: all these things inform my writing. Since these elements are unique, what I write is unique.

Oh, and I try to challenge myself to take risks with my writing. Hopefully this pays off in more intriguing poems!



Why do I write what I do?

Because it's my oxygen.



How does my writing process work?

I gather my materials together: triggers (random words, titles) and strictures (forms, rhymes) from my computer, my pen, my notebook. Then I shut the computer, take my pen, open a page and start jotting things down. I write and write, look up, look down, and write and write and cross out and write until I cannot take the poem any further on its paper journey.

Then I open the computer up again and transcribe my scribblings, maybe edit as I go. Add. Subtract. Read it again and again, and then once more for sense, for sound. And then I think, yes, that must be it. Or, that's as far as it goes for today. Or, what is it? Or, I'll come back for it another time.  I get to the end and it might not be the end.

This is part of the training: to be a good listener to the poem, to train one's ear, to refine one's aesthetic discernment as to what works.

Ivy



Up next:

Benjamin Dodds is a Sydney-based poet whose work appears in a variety of journals and magazines. His first collection of poetry, Regulator, has just been published by Puncher & Wattmann. His Writing Process Blog post will appear April 21 on http://benjamindodds.wordpress.com

Clare Carlin's first book, Excursions, was shortlisted for the 2012 Australian/Vogel's Literary Award and won the 2008 Jim Hamilton Award. She has been a journalist for 15 years, and has published short fiction. Her Writing Process Blog post will appear April 21 on her website, Pieced Work. http://www.piecedwork.com/journal

Will Ford: Performance poet/MC of poetry events, story writer, script writer, director of short films and humorist. His Writing Process Blog post may or may not appear April 21 on http://willdeanford.wordpress.com

Plus, check out Carole Burns's Writing Process Blog post: http://offthepagebook.blogspot.co.uk
and Susie Wild's answers: http://susiewild.blogspot.co.uk

On Launching My First Book: Tess Taylor

Monday, October 07, 2013
Tess Taylor writes:
'I asked a fellow writer, dear friend and Guggenheim winner Michael Lukas, how his book tour had gone. “Well,” he said, “a book tour is the service you do to the person who wrote your book.” I loved that sentence—its sense of allowing distance between the writer I was when crafting these poems and the person I am now as I talk about having once been the person who crafted them. It’s all right, then, that even that as I launch this book and talk about it that the person talking warmly about these poems is not the same soul who wrote them. The woman who wrote this book was a recluse, single-mindedly at work on a mysterious collage, hunched over traces, in the thrall of historical absence. The woman who is on a book tour now is doing a service to that introvert, that craftsperson.'

Disturbance, my second poetry collection

Sunday, October 06, 2013
I am pleased to share the news that my second poetry collection, Disturbance, launches next month at the Dylan Thomas Festival.
 

Collaboration and remix in poetry

Thursday, October 03, 2013
Rachel Barenblat: "Remix, transformative work, videos which build on poetry, composers who borrow our lines for their music, poems inspired by other poems -- these are my idea of a good time."

Electric language: an interview by Clare Carlin

Hiraeth, glaireous and marmoreal:
"No cameras. Make sure you don’t make eye contact with anyone… You might start off WWIII! I only wanted to read a poem!"

Plagiarism and poetry

Monday, September 16, 2013
Justin Clemens: "These current scandals in poetry confirm that people worldwide still desperately care about poetry…"

Original and Unoriginal

Sunday, September 08, 2013
Matthew Welton on Plagiarism

Poems that come free with a London Underground tube ticket

Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Part of the 150th anniversary celebrations of London Underground

The Volta

Monday, September 02, 2013
…is fresh.

"Letter to Neruda"

Saturday, August 31, 2013
Poem by Samuel Peralta

Mapping Poetic Emergence in Wales

Thursday, August 29, 2013
Stages of Emergence, Bands of Emergence, and Stages of Emergence: Other Relevant Factors

Passing the baton between poets

Friday, August 16, 2013
Scintilla Poets in Conversation

Sinead Morrissey appointed Belfast's first Poet Laureate

Thursday, August 15, 2013
"Belfast is a city with an extraordinary literary tradition, especially in relation to poetry," Dr Morrissey said.

The Substation Love Letters Project

Tuesday, August 06, 2013
…is fresh.

"Short, dense poems can expand your mind in every direction..."

Thursday, August 01, 2013
Richard Skinner: Interviewed by Clare Carlin
For me, poetry is the highest, deepest form of expression in the English language and so the most difficult form of writing to do well. In the right circumstances, a poem can be read once and never forgotten. A lot of people find poetry difficult but I have come to realise that a poem isn’t something to ‘understood’, as though it were a code to be ‘cracked’, only after which it gives up its meaning, but rather something to be felt. It is much more fruitful to experience a poem than to hanker after its meaning. I revisit The Wasteland all the time but still have no idea what some bits of it mean.

What You Leave Behind When You Are Becoming

Monday, July 29, 2013
"Lucky poet, that Cherryl Cooley! She gets to inherit all the hard work of Cherryl Floyd-Miller, whose art reminds her of who she is NOW."

How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers

Monday, July 15, 2013
Sarah Manguso: "Stay healthy; sickness is a waste of time and money."

"…poetry’s impracticality may be its strength."

Sunday, July 14, 2013
Patients Need Poetry: And so do doctors.

“I would like to request an attorney be present for the rest of our interview,” I said.

Monday, June 17, 2013
"And why would someone write like this?": Cryptogams & the NSA

"I don’t believe all profit-making businesses are spawns of Satan."

Monday, May 27, 2013
Paul Mitchell, Reconciling creativity with copy

New anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets launching soon

Sunday, May 12, 2013
'The book will be launched by Professor Nicholas Jose in conversation with the editors at the Sydney Writers’ Festival 24 May 2.30pm, the Richard Wherrett Studio.'

A gender audit of the big five poetry publishers in the UK

Thursday, May 09, 2013
Fiona Moore: "I was shocked that the percentages of women are so low for Faber and Cape — under one-quarter."

"If the poets don’t assert the value of their words, who will?"

Wednesday, May 01, 2013
Sandra Beasley on plagiarism

"Brilliant Coroners" resurrected

Monday, April 29, 2013
…for National Poetry Month.

"For the man who called me for advice about how to get published"

Saturday, April 27, 2013
Cathy Day explains [via Mary Biddinger]

PoetsArtists is fresh.

Friday, April 26, 2013
Come get some.

An interview with a nanopress publication team

‘Diagnostic Impressions’

Putting a poetry pamphlet together

Friday, April 19, 2013
Fiona Moore: "Lying awake the other night I decided it’s like being a character in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, putting out branches or growing scales or feathers."

The Electronic Monsoon

Tuesday, April 16, 2013
...is fresh.

Unexpected pleasures of National Poetry Month

Thursday, April 11, 2013
"Just now, an email came through my inbox venting about NaPoWriMo and its relatives. The writer feels that marathons like this 'trivialize' poetry. And I think that anything may be made trivial by someone who does it trivially — but the exercise of thinking about poetry every day is never trivial by nature.

A poet's thoughts on knitting and Elizabeth Zimmermann

Thursday, April 04, 2013
AE Stallings: "For much of what she says, I can substitute 'poetry' for 'knitting'..."

Why I’m Writing Poetry: The Diversity of NaPoWriMo

Saturday, March 30, 2013
by Maureen Thorson

Samuel Beckett Reads Two Poems

Wednesday, March 27, 2013
…from his novel Watt

Call for poems that respond to incidence of rape, violence and oppression against women

Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Deadline 15 June 2013

Thoughts on the long poem

Monday, March 04, 2013
Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Because I had this grant, because I had this room, I had all day long."

BIRDFEAST

Tuesday, February 26, 2013
...is fresh.

"Sometimes literature can catch the lyric of a place..."

Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Mark Tredinnick, interview

"I recall saris blowing in the wind, tied to a bridge."

Thursday, February 07, 2013
Poet Kathryn Gray travels to Santiniketan, West Bengal

Dusie

Monday, February 04, 2013
... is fresh.

"I wouldn’t change a thing about the publication path The Sounding Machine took."

Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Patty Paine

On Plagiarism: An Open Letter to Christian Ward

Friday, January 18, 2013
Paisley Rekdal: "When I first heard about this from the kind and extremely scrupulous editors at Anon, where you’d published my poem as yours, my curiosity was briefly, possibly academically, piqued; I thought that perhaps you were a conceptual poet."

Gillie Harries, Poet in the Pool writer-in-residence

Wednesday, January 16, 2013
"Gillie will be writing a monthly Lido-inspired poem during her year’s residency..."

"Making a living by writing seemed far from living a so-called happy life, in a secular sense, so I ran away from literature in horror."

Monday, January 14, 2013
"Accessing a Limitless Vein of Words": An Interview with Jeongrye Choi by Ruth Williams

Call for Writing: Paris Lit Up Magazine

Friday, January 11, 2013
Deadline 28 February 2013

Does writing about pain distance it or bring it closer?

Sunday, January 06, 2013
Does poetry, once finished, become about someone else?

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Saturday, January 05, 2013
Megan Harlan:
Yes. Like any art form, poetry can make sense of the world, do our paraphrase-defying experience of it some justice -- if only for the length of a page. That, for me, is change on the order of a miracle.

Navigate Melbourne by poem

Friday, January 04, 2013
...using the Melbourne Poetry Map.

Ex-Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson to launch new poetry journal

Friday, December 21, 2012
The first issue of POEM magazine, described as an international English language quarterly, is due on 24 January.

"…this engine swung and one piece nudged another"

Airfix by Jacqui Rowe

Educating the Shih: A Filipina Poetics

Thursday, December 13, 2012
Eileen R. Tabios:
"From my recent work, an example is my newest book, 5 Shades of Gray — the collection's 30 poems were all written in a two-hour rush or energy. I hadn’t intended to write these poems. They just surfaced one afternoon. To do my job as a poet, I knew to heed their call and not be distracted away from sitting down on the table with pad and pen to write them out from the energy I had not willed but was suddenly feeling. I later would edit the collection but most of the poems remain untouched from their first drafts."

The Next Big Thing

Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Juan Luna's Revolver
Poet Luisa Igloria, whose latest book is Juan Luna's Revolver, invited me to participate in this self-interview blog meme called The Next Big Thing, where I get to share a little more about my next big thing, my second book.

Writers participating get to answer 8-10 questions (about their book/blog/their writing), and then tag 5 other writer friends to post their own "next big thing" the following Wednesday. Luisa's instructions were for me to post by or before Wednesday, 12 December.

Rather daringly, I've re-arranged the order of the questions from how it appears on Luisa's post.

*

What is the title of your book?
Disturbance

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Disturbance is about a man who kills his wife, son and then himself, leaving a daughter as the sole survivor.


What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry / verse novel / narrative-in-verse / what-have-you

Where did the idea come from for the book?
This kind of violent crime, of the complete annihilation of a family is, sadly, an all-too-common phenomenon. A friend once pointed out it has also only become more visible because of newspapers and the media.

For this book, I had a cast of characters affected by the crime: everybody from estate agents and the police, to relatives of the criminal and his victims. The tragedy touches everyone in its path.

I was obsessed with the idea of writing about this crime from multiple perspectives. You know that line from the film Amadeus? "With music, you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!" I wanted to know if I could do the same with poetry.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I first got the idea in 2004 and thought, "This is going to take me about five years to write." An underestimation. I finished writing it in early 2011. The book comes out in late 2013.

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 
A lot of silence surrounds this kind of crime. Victims are silenced. Those who are traumatised are busy trying to survive it. Those who have to deal with the aftermath are busy trying to fix it. But I desperately wanted to hear what they had to say. So I let them speak.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Disturbance will be published by Seren Books in 2013.

What other works would you compare this book to within your genre?
These works were my touchstones:
  • Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask
  • Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
  • Sylvia Plath's "The Detective"
  • Ai's "The Good Shepherd"
Of course, I can only dream of my book being compared to these amazing works.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
This is such a good question. Apart from the main characters, there would be quite a few other roles to fill, too. There's a mistress, a priest, a police surgeon and several police officers, friends, grandparents and neighbours, a journalist... It'd be fantastic to have an international cast.

Still, I'm not sure who would play which character. Maybe once the book is out, readers would have more of an idea.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
As part of my independent research for writing sections of the book, I read up on ballistics and homicide investigation procedures, and enrolled in a short taster course for Forensic Science at the local university.

My site.
 *

For more of The Next Big Thing, these shining stars will give their answers by 19 December 2012:
  1. Jeannine Hall Gailey, with a third collection, Unexplained Fevers, forthcoming from New Binary Press.
  2. Collin Kelley, with his latest collection, Render, soon to be released by Sibling Rivalry Press.
  3. Emma Bolden, whose first collection, Maleficae, is coming soon from Gen Pop Books.
  4. Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor, author of Pause Mid-Flight (Arkipelago Books).
  5. Ashley Capes, with his latest collection Between Giants (Ginninderra Press) out now.
  6. David Prater, author of We Will Disappear (Papertiger Media), gives his answers.

  *
Should you wish to participate, answer the questions on your blog and leave your link in a comment.

Birdfeast

Sunday, November 25, 2012
…is fresh.

Keats the heart-throb and the ‘tender-taken breath’

Saturday, November 24, 2012
Katy Evans-Bush writes:
"This point of view is emphasised in the scene where they first kiss, in a glade, and something rather radical happens: instead of being behind his head, lingering on her lips coming in, the camera stays behind her, and it’s his mouth we’re seeing. It’s the girl’s-eye view of the kiss. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before and it taught me something right there, even at my advanced age, about the Male Gaze. So this is where the rest of the huskness comes in, because even while the film was flaying my feelings, it was making me think."

"...not just run-of-the-mill surrealism."

Friday, November 23, 2012
Lantern Review interviews Brenda Hillman on translating Choi Jeongrye's Instances
LR: Did you notice any particular differences in the cultural transformation of bringing a contemporary Korean poet to an American audience?

BH: There’s a bringing forth of a feminist, politically motivated and more populist poetry that speaks to everyday experience and that’s also considered more linguistically radical. I think she fits into that too. There’s an effort that might be in keeping with some of what has gone on in American avant-garde poetry, a continuance of the engagements with modernist fragmentary forms, and also with the psychological and with women’s issues.

She’s a very precise writer. I found it really interesting because I had two different experiences with translating in a span of two years. The first was with Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Asher Etwebi, a collection of work from a Libyan poet that I co-translated with Diallah Haidar. My experience with Jeongrye had to do more with discussions of how literal to be with the Korean because it’s really hard to be literal when the grammatical structures are so different, even in the way the sentence is maintained.

Offending Frequencies

Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Bernardine Evaristo writes: "Out of 46 poets I have included 25 women poets, 21 poets of colour* and several ‘queer’ poems that explore, amongst other things, sexuality."

"Two of the most important things I’ve learned from my daily writing practice over the last two years…"

Luisa A Igloria, on writing a poem a day

Haiku on street windows, post-flood in Hebden Bridge

Sunday, November 18, 2012
'Reflected Lines' Haiku Trail for Hebden Bridge

Book Ends podcast

Wednesday, November 14, 2012
A weekly podcast for writers and book lovers

"'Prolific' sounds very similar to promiscuous...'

Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Q and A with Christine Hamm

"I once wrote a love poem to my thesaurus."

An Ode to the King of Writerly Tools

Marjorie Evasco explores "a musical configuration"

Saturday, November 10, 2012
"As a translator of poetry from English into Cebuano, and lately from Spanish to English or Cebuano, I have deepened my respect for the intrinsic untranslatability of a poem’s musical body."

UK Poetry Awards and Gender

Thursday, November 08, 2012
Rob A Mackenzie: "There are various conclusions we might draw from these statistics."

What was the process like assembling the book?

Christopher Hennessey:
"In more than one case, he asked me to push a poem beyond where I had ended it. I did. Those poems now end with lines that are some of the most successful lines (if I can say that!) in the book."

Kim Hyesoon's poetry

Wednesday, November 07, 2012
Pam Brown writes, "Her poems are not ironic. They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic."

Poetry the new tool of soft diplomacy

Friday, October 26, 2012
"...redefining poetry as the new people-to-people contact between India and the world."

Anonymity and selection

Thursday, October 18, 2012
Jon Stone: "Of course, anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean that the playing field is level."