Motherland on What Rough Beast

A poem about the family politics has been up on Indolent Books' What Rough Beast for a while. When I say "family politics," I mean mother's politics, and the poem is called "Motherland." I don't think she'd have survived the last few years. I'm awfully hard on her here, as I often was. No doubt that's why it took me so long to post. It's linked here and begins:

Motherland

Mother was a party girl—volunteered
for Dems, loved her U.S. history—and
I’m sort of a party girl, and yesterday
at a get-out-the-vote phone bank
I spotted her across the room for a split—
just a quick—the old ugliness dropped
away. She must’ve rotted by now, the witch,
but this year friends bring her up. How
she drew us near to argue, debate,
to rap on her principles, her America.
But any fine idea can veer off the path,
a child astray, blue-white disappointment....

Lyn Hejinian on workshops and being "better than I am" and not falling back

Listen to Lyn Hejinian giving a Harvard Woodberry Lecture called Reinventing the Workshop. This occurred in 2014, and she clarifies that she isn't interested in workshops for the poet who speaks from his or her heart, though "profound experience" and "astute observation" are favorably mentioned. In contrast, she spends a lot of time on so-called procedural methods of making poems. These are poems in which the author function gets pushed out of primacy. (My heart!) (We are late to all the parties.) 

On Harvard's site, she is quoted on this philosophy of a communal poesis--or the questioning of authorship--that constitutes the reinvention of the workshop in her lecture. Somewhere else, apparently, she has written,

"The elements of expertise and inspiration that writers seek, whether in solitude or in the contexts of a workshop, are largely assumed to be requisite tools of an individual who can acquire and use them: the author. This workshop will query that assumption, and offer terms for imagining modes of composition in which authorship becomes a dubious proposition, and the grounds for establishing an aesthetic event become communal."

In the lecture, she says about the same thing, but differently. 

After she has run through the Jackson Mac Low, Clark Coolidge and Caroline Bergvall work and created a group assignment for the audience--all recommended--the audience wants to pin her down to her own work. How does she, Lyn Hejinian, "establish" "an aesthetic event"?

Naturally she is most interesting here. A little hemming and hawing. A discussion of one collaboration (with a visual artist) that didn't work, and of one with a poet that did. Finally she says (admits), "I have various ways of pushing myself out of the way in order to make work that's better than I am."

A student asks the million-dollar question: what is her "criteria" for recognizing that betterness?

A brief glance heavenward, then: "That I don't fall back on motifs where I'm just repeating myself or echoing what I was raised to think of like mellifluous sounds." 

Aha. Of course, it's hard not to fall back on the old sounds, our ideas of sounds, not to mention our ideas of ideas.  But okay. 

Stephanie Strickland's collection "How the Universe Is Made"

After a lot of reading, a lot of researching, and a lot of googling, I wrote a review of Stephanie Strickland's How the Universe Is Made: Poems new and selected 1985-2019. The more I learned about the poems, the more impressed I grew with the entire project, which I construe as hyper-feminist. Though Stephanie is also a digital writer/artist, and though she often says that a work that is in book form and electronic form thereby contains both--that is, the one or the other is not the entire work of art--this book is a fantastic stand-alone piece.

In a style that is often witty and always humblingly erudite, Stephanie Strickland pits poetry against the wave patterns of our world. She battles our mental, physical and spiritual incarceration in culture—the “ferocious / self-completing / sentences / exerting control.”

My review, "On Slipping Code," is up at Heavy Feather Review. 

Carte du Tendre

A love-map, called Carte du Tendre, on the Poetry Project's e-zine, “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping.

(P.S. This is the truth about marriage.)

Review of Sarah Sarai's Book: That Strapless Bra in Heaven

I loved reviewing Sarah Sarai's new book, That Strapless Bra in Heaven. The review is on Heavy Feather Review and you can buy the book here. 

"Delphi" recorded for the magicians at Missing Witches.

I sent my old poem "Delphi," about Vestal Virgins, to Risa and Amy at Missing Witches and they clapped it on the end of their Beltane May Day episode. (That's the very very very end.) Nice to have it in a magic feminist realm, though it was published long ago on a poetry site.... The poetry site seems to have disappeared my poem, sadly. Check out the episode here--and visit the podcasters' fantastic back catalog. Missing Witches are definitely doing the goddess' work.