Poetry Friday--Bookstock Literary Festival

Back in July I traveled to Vermont for the Bookstock Literary Festival held in Woodstock. I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and perhaps my favorite session was the appearance of Charles Simic. His was the only one in which I took notes. If you get the opportunity to hear him speak, take it! Here are some of my scribblings. I hope I have quoted him correctly:

"It's nice to be quoted, especially things you don't remember saying."

"Somebody annoyed me. Somebody asked me, Why do you have so many dogs in your poems? It's like asking Robert Frost, Mr. Frost, why do have so many trees?"

On love poems: "Everything you come up with is a cliché."

"I write short poems, but some of them are ridiculously short."

On the poem, "1938": "The first poem I wrote with the help of Google."

This video is Simic reading "1938" in 2010:



Here's a Simic love poem that is short, but not ridiculously so, and is definitely not a cliché:

Love Flea

He took a flea
From her armpit
To keep

And cherish
In a matchbox,
Even pricking his finger

From time to time
To feed it
Drops of blood.

From A Wedding in Hell [1994] and New and Selected Poems: 1962-2012 [2013].

I received an email notification from the Bookstock Literary Festival about two weeks ago. It had a link to videos of many of the poets and writers who read and spoke. I really appreciated receiving the link because there were some tough choices made about which workshops I would attend. You know how it goes, there are almost always two things you want to go to that are scheduled at the exact same time. One poet I missed was Martin Espada. I had seen him at the Dodge Festival a few years ago, and wanted to hear him again, so I'm happy the video is available.

[If you're in a book discussion group, you may have come across the novels of Roland Merullo such as Breakfast With Buddha or The Talk-Funny Girl. If so, I'd highly recommend watching his presentation; I was a fan before the festival--I'm an even bigger one now!]

For the Poetry Friday Round-Up, please visit Jama's Alphabet Soup where something wonderful is always cookin'!

Haiku Sticky #273

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Happy Haiga Day!

Click on the image to enlarge for easier reading. © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Poetry Friday--Another Ku-do to Emily

This cover has changed about a dozen times, and it'll probably change again before I decide which version I like the best!

Now that I've basically completed the Sketchbook Project poems, I'm getting back to another of my projects, Ku-dos to Emily. Read more about it here.

This project is slow going because I have to put together an illustration to go with either the original poem, or the response haiku, or both. It's not easy! So, there's only one pairing for today. (I'm taking a few days of R & R--maybe I'll be able to cobble together a few more for next time.)

Click on the image to enlarge for easier reading. Poem by Emily Dickinson, haiku and haiga © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

[A little aside: I'm reading Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian, which I'm enjoying. (The premise, however, is deeply disturbing, a nuclear meltdown at a power plant in Vermont!) The main character, Emily Shepard, is a big Emily Dickinson fan. At one point, she tells the reader that many Dickinson poems can be sung to the tune of "Gilligan's Island."

Do you know how hard it is going to be to read the poems now, without trying to sing them? Damn you Chris Bohjalian!]

Laura Salas is the Round-Up hostess this week at Writing the World For Kids.

Haiku Sticky #272

I have no idea what business the crow had being up at barely the crack of dawn, but there was obviously something of interest to him/her!

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Happy Haiga Day!

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Poetry Friday--"Almost"

This may be the last poem in my Sketchbook Project series. I hope I have captured the voices of those children who, in the first two decades of the 20th century, were forced by circumstance to work at an age when they should have been playing or attending school.

We take too much for granted nowadays, including child labor and workplace safety laws. Not to get political, but, there are some people who think the government should be limited in its oversight of business and labor. If a country without governmental regulation were to evolve, how long do you think it would take before children were back at work in the factories, fields, tenements, or on the street? (In case anyone has forgotten, in the debates leading up to the 2012 presidential election, there was one candidate who thought children should/could replace janitors in schools.)

Caption: A "Reader" in cigar factory, Tampa, Fla. He reads books and newspapers at top of his voice all day long. This is all the education many of these workers receive. He is paid by them and they select what he shall read. Location: Tampa, Florida. Date: January 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

Almost

We have a man
here who reads
to us all day long.

It's almost like being
in school, or maybe
like being in a show.

It's mostly the news:
murder, shipwrecks,
investigations, fraud,

disappearances, crop
failure, bankruptcy,
scandals, disaster,

train wrecks, jail
breaks, disease...
It's almost like being

out in the real world
except sometimes
here we get poetry.

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

I have been using my imagination to fill in the stories untold by Hine's photographs, there's a man in Massachusetts who has been piecing together the stories in another way. Click here for a short video.

The Poem Farm is where you should head for this week's Round-Up.