My husband, Jim Zarzana, has started a new website (www.jamesazarzana.com) with The Eclectic Blog, laced with literary and political insights, and a page with excerpts from his science fiction manuscript, The Marsco Saga. I encourage you to check it out and share it with others you think might be interested. Jim has written a compelling and complex character-driven story of vivid speculative fiction that will hook readers and take them on an amazing ride. Of course, I'm just slightly biased.
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"My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything."
-Joseph Conrad A task at once so simple and so complex. The images and pictures that come to us, that we shape into poems, stories, and essays "come out of some hugeness," as John Steinbeck writes, "and sometimes they have startled me." May you also be startled by the images and pictures that arrive with a sense of urgency and come out of some hugeness needing to be captured on paper and shaped by your pen. Today's poem on The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor (below) is by Marjorie Saiser, an award-winning poet from Lincoln, Nebraska, from her new book, Beside You at the Stoplight. Saiser conjures a whole world of drama and tension using the deft brush strokes of a few telling, vivid details. Click here to listen to her recent reading at Creighton University.
Hilda Raz, also a writer from Lincoln, Nebraska said, “Marge Saiser's brilliant poems are gifts of her vision. Packed with sensory detail and the multiple perspectives of the accomplished artist, Saiser's poems take as their subject all aspects of family life. Through generations on the farm and in town, these poems everywhere meet and match the predations of despair, poverty, violence and indifference with the assurance of love. Saiser counsels risk in the face of danger, faith in the natural world. She is the real thing, a poet working for us.” Her Kid Brother Ran Beside the Car by Marjorie Saiser After phoning her father she caught a ride from the depot. Her kid brother waited at the bridge and then ran, grinning, beside the car all the way to the house. He was taller and bonier than the day she left, bib overalls hanging on his shirtless shoulders, thick dark hair shaking with his running. He clammed up and backed off when she got out. She held her squirming baby and stood at the driver's window to thank the neighbor who had given her a ride, a long thanks protocol called for. Neither father nor mother came to the door, one reading the county paper and one peeling an extra potato, and it was her kid brother who reached for the suitcase and ran ahead over the cedar needles to open the heavy door. "Her Kid Brother Ran Beside the Car" by Marjorie Saiser, from Beside You at the Stoplight. © The Backwaters Press, 2010. Reprinted with permission. These two quotes remind me that, as a writer, my job is to pay attention, to keep my eyes and ears open, to be a keen observer. "Nature, which gave us two eyes to see and two ears to hear, has given us but one tongue to speak." -Jonathan Swift "Be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost." - William James Great reading tonight at SMSU by award-winning writer Dana Yost from his new book of poems and essays, The Right Place. In his poems, Dana takes a brief encounter between two men outside a hardware store on Main Street in Cottonwood, Minnesota, or an afternoon working on fences to expand a cow pen, and we see these scenes in a sharp new light. The quote below describes well the "magic" that Dana creates in his writing about life in southwest Minnesota.
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it." - Anais Nin As writers, we know that the magic happens through hard work, through craft. Dana is a hard-working writer at the top of his craft--making magic happen. Last night he was up against the Harlem Globetrotters at SMSU. He could go toe to toe with them as far as artistry--just in a different craft. Dana is currently at work on a book about the history of the highly successful SMSU Women's Tennis Team from 1979 to 1992 under the leadership of Head Coach Hugh Curtler, professor emeritus of philosophy at SMSU and former Director of the Honors Program. Today I received this press release (below) by email from the Poetry Foundation. I like subscribing (free) to their email newsletter and keeping up to date on news in the poetry world. I've been a subscriber to Poetry magazine for a long time and always look forward to seeing it arrive in my mailbox in its clear plastic envelope. CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is proud to announce that the magazine is a finalist for a National Magazine Award in the category of “General Excellence, Print.” Poetry shares distinguished company with fellow finalists Lapham’s Quarterly, The Paris Review, The Sun, and Virginia Quarterly Review in the “Literary, Political and Professional Magazines” category. This is the third Ellie nomination for the Poetry Foundation, but the first for the print magazine—the Chicago Poetry Tour and Poetry Magazine podcast were nominated for Digital Ellies in 2010 and 2011, respectively, and the Poetry Magazine podcast won the National Magazine Award for Digital Media in the “Podcasting” category in March 2011. The American Society of Magazine Editors’ awards for print journalism have been presented each year since 1966. The awards, sponsored by ASME in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, are regarded as the “most prestigious in the magazine industry,” according to the New York Times. “It’s a great honor to be recognized for our work in print, especially so soon after ASME awarded our efforts in digital media,” said magazine editor Christian Wiman. “Poetry will be turning 100 next year, and with each issue the magazine has stayed true to its original mission to discover and celebrate the best poetry. We’re so grateful for this nomination and proud to be included in such fine company.” Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Poetry’s editorial mission is to discover new voices, present new work by internationally recognized poets, and enliven discussion about and readership for contemporary poetry. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H. D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In recent years, more than a third of the authors published in the magazine have been writers appearing for the first time. By showcasing both established and emerging poets alongside provocative reviews, essays, and criticism, Poetry sparks conversation and brings new readers to the art form. And it does so in innovative ways. The April and December issues featured questions and answers with both established poets—2010 Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout, H.L. Hix, and Jane Hirshfield—and newer talents—Sina Queyras, Cathy Park Hong, and Spencer Reece. The September issue presented new work by Wisława Szymborska and Yusef Komunyakaa. And the October issue offered a collection of poems from 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner Eleanor Ross Taylor and the late Rachel Wetzsteon, a conversation between critic Ange Mlinko and Iain McGilchrist about poetry and neuroscience, and Fanny Howe’s look at an unearthed poetry manuscript from the Holocaust. “A month at a time, for a century now, Poetry magazine has made a home for the best in poetry and criticism,” said Poetry Foundation. American Life in Poetry: Column 315
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE We who teach creative writing have been known to tell our students that there is no subject so common and ordinary that it can’t be addressed in a poem, and this one, by Michael McFee, who lives in North Carolina, is a good example of that. Spitwads Little paper cuds we made by ripping the corners or edges from homework and class notes then ruminating them into balls we’d flick from our fingertips or catapult with pencils or (sometimes after lunch) launch through striped straws like deadly projectiles toward the necks of enemies and any other target where they’d stick with the tiniest splat, I hope you’re still there, stuck to unreachable ceilings like the beginnings of nests by generations of wasps too ignorant to finish them or under desktops with blunt stalactites of chewing gum, little white words we learned to shape and hold in our mouths while waiting to let them fly, our most tenacious utterance. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2005 by Michael McFee, whose most recent book of poetry is The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from Shinemaster, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2006, by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. Dana Yost, former award-winning editor of the Marshall Independent, will read from his new book of essays and poems, The Right Place, at Southwest Minnesota State University on Wed., April 6, at 7-8 p.m. in CH 201. Please join us.
Dana's first book, Grace, a collection of poems, was published in 2008 by Spoon River Poetry Press. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to The Right Place: "Read separately, the essays and poems may seem unconnected, stand-alone images or studies of a person, place, event or period of time--a glimpse into what someone thinks, into how a decision affected a community or family. But read together, I hope, the works of this book add up to a broader understanding of the rural prairie and southwest Minnesota in particular." Here's a sample poem from the book: "Fence Work" We hammer and haul the long steel rods, once used to bore for oil--make-shifted now for cattle fencing. It is August, sweaty summer afternoon, the four of us lugging the rods, drilling clamps into place, my wrist bone bruised from rapping it against stubborn steel. Piece by piece, the fence takes shape: a pen, giving the cattle a few extra hundred square feet to pace, chew, rub their foreheads to relieve the itch. The work is hard, good, almost feels unfamiliar: we are actually building something. You can't outsource a job that demands boots in the dirt, gauging metal by feel and fit, pounding posts with a loader. I sweat, and the leather work gloves --"genuine elk skin"--stick to my hands, but I leave satisfied, the growing stiffness in my lower back proof of something done. -Dana Yost Brilliant spring day in Marshall--sunny, 50-ish, bright blue sky with wisps of cirrus high above, the smell of the earth waking up. First, I attended a great anusara yoga class taught by Kristin Knight at Prairie Yoga, then later took a long walk with my husband Jim on the bike trail with our dog Maya. The Redwood River beside us, high, fast-moving. No wind today, no mosquitoes yet. A hawk hovering above, circling lazily. We didn't see any geese overhead today, but just as I was walking into work one morning last week I stared up at a spectacular set of interlocking V-formations, the honking calls described in one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, "Wild Geese." Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- over and over announcing your place in the family of things. |
AuthorI love to play with words. To capture moments on the page. To explore the physical and spiritual geography of what I call "fly-over country." I write from imagination, observation and my own experience of wandering in fly-over country--the literal, physical spaces of my life on the Minnesota prairie and the inner territory of the soul. Archives
December 2019
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