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Closure
By Alan Perry
for Kate Spade
I could never do that—
wear notions to be toted
and adorned in public
or name my own leather to rest
on someone else's shoulder.
No crossbody bags for me
or I'll lose my private place
in the express line, waiting
for debits to pile up.
Though I'm not immune
to the allure of rest.
Every day I weightlift
the quiet grief that stuffs
a briefcase I carry
from this place to the next—
not sharing its contents
with those who can't see
me drifting away.
And if I get lost
in that room with no light,
I might take blue from a scarf
and close the door—
like the snap of a purse
that can't be opened
from the inside.
Cloud formations over Carolina
By R. Bremner
Cloud formations over Carolina;
scratchy lines which Paul Klee
would have been proud to stroke;
Colors which would have shat-
tered his dynamic sensibilities;
Forms which might have re-
defined his mad contexts,
brought madness to his sane
world.
(First published in Turbulence Magazine, December 2013)
Clumping
By Carol Smallwood
Stars form when cosmic dust clumps together
making solar systems now as billions of years ago.
The common dust bunny gathers altogether
like particles joining in space make stars grow.
Making solar systems now as billions of years ago,
mysterious dark energy pushes galaxies apart
like particles joining in space make stars grow—
our solar system has over 300 moons a la carte.
Mysterious dark energy pushes galaxies apart:
there's a galaxy sixty times bigger than our own—
our solar system has over 300 moons a la carte
in a universe only beginning to be less unknown.
There's a galaxy sixty times bigger than our own:
the common dust bunny gathers altogether
in a universe only beginning to be less unknown;
stars form when cosmic dust clumps together.
Coal Country
I.
What I can't remember, and what I can:
my mother washing coal dust from the necks
of Mason jars filled with last summer's jams
and vegetables, their lids and rings black
with grit, contents obscured then visible
beneath the touch of a damp flannel rag
she wiped across hand-printed labels,
then dipped again into an enamel pan
where gray water settled from suds to silt.
Those cloths were always discarded, never
used for dishes again, deemed unfit
for the kitchen. Fifty years are over
now: I've known sullied cloth and family:
how some stains never wash out completely.
II.
Some stains never wash out completely,
but my mother's mother, Mary, would scrub
worn work camisas for the soiled but neatly
oiled and pompadoured Mexican railroad-
tie men who came to coal country laying
the wooden ties two thousand to the mile.
Boiled in lye, bleach in the wash and bluing
in the rinse, the shirts emerged starkly white
and innocent as angels. But these iron horsemen
of the Apocalypse, bearing spikes and crosses
for coal and cattle, carried pestilence
with them in that Spring of early losses—
my grandfather dead of flu in '17—
not knowing the damage that would be done.
III.
Not knowing the damage that could be done
we swam in the bright green lake of caustic
water. We thought it daring fun to plunge
beneath the foamy surface, opalescent
with chemicals that oozed unseen from dull
slag heaps: gray hillocks of thick detritus
left from the processing of newly-mined coal.
Knox County was blessed with bituminous
veins, cursed with the scars of its retrieval.
By the sixties, production had slowed down
to a handful of mines that were viable:
the older underground shafts abandoned,
while strip mining left the once-lush landscape stark,
rusted hoppers spilled coal beside old tracks.
IV.
Railroad hoppers spilled coal beside new tracks
as my mother, at ten, scurried along
the crisply graveled rail bed, packing sacks
of burlap with the fuel that had fallen
from overfilled cars. On her lucky days,
the bags grew heavy quickly and no snow
fell across the hills or, ankle-deep, lay
filling up the trackside ditches below,
where the tiny tank town of Appleton,
Illinois, lay crammed into the valley.
And sometimes, when the weak winter sun
grew thin as gruel from a caboose galley,
kind wind-burned men climbed atop the coal cars
and the black heat was gently handed down to her.
V.
This was how the black heat was handled: First,
the topsoil was peeled back by bulldozers
and piled aside for reclamation. Burst
through with draglines, the veins lying closer
to the surface were fractured, making it
easy to scoop the coal from the ground.
Crushed and separated, refined for what-
ever use it was destined: fine powder
for the power plant at Havana, coke
for steel, stoker coal for industry, egg and lump
for the furnaces of homes. Shale, sandstone,
pyrite—impurities—were hauled away and dumped
like wasted lives: what helps and what hinders
and what remains: dead ash and cold cinders.
VI.
And this is what remained: dead ash and cold cinders,
carried in an old coal hod to the driveway,
dumped in the low places. Rusty clinkers
of stony matter fused together by
the great heat of what warmed our little home
on sharp winter mornings. And in summer
the sunlight spiked off the marcasite nodes:
jewels that scraped and stung, lodging under
the skin of my shins and knees when I fell
from my bike to the cinders and gravel.
White scars remain to remind and foretell:
the last delivery truck of T.O. Miles;
shadows filling empty corners of the coal
room: one small, high window like a square halo.
VII.
One small, high window with a square halo
of light around the ill-fitting metal door:
coal lumps heaped up the walls. Dust billowed
through the air, covering the worn brick floor,
my father's tools stored inside for the winter,
and the many shelves of calming jars, contours
soft beneath a veil of dull black. Heat sent
rising through the grates above and the roar
of the ancient furnace were a living
pulse to which we pressed our ears and bodies,
until the natural gas lines reached us, ending
our affair with coal. But like lost love's memories
swept clean, damp days a dark stench still rises and chokes
with what I can remember, and what I won't.
Copyright 2006 by Christina Lovin
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
This month in Critique Corner we continue our discussion of how best to use poetry's most powerful device: repetition, with a closer examination of the most common type, that is, rhyme. Now, most poets would say that they know what rhyme is: a repetition of the terminal sounds or syllables of words. That is not wrong. On the other hand, that is not all.
To demonstrate the full potential of rhyme, I have broken from the usual procedure of commenting on a poem submitted by a contributor for revision, and invited a special guest, Christina Lovin. Ms. Lovin is a highly accomplished and awarded poet, and her poem featured here, "Coal Country", has no need for revision. In fact, it has already earned half a dozen significant awards, including the 2007 "Best of the Best" from Triplopia, for which I served as judge. The prize included a critical appreciation and interview, which are reprinted below this critique.
Before we begin, a brief explanation of the poem's form: it is called a sonnet crown, or corona, a linked sequence of seven sonnets that transits from section to section via a repetition in the last and subsequent first lines. Within a sonnet, there are many rules to consider, if not always to follow. These rules, and the reasons why and why not to adhere to them, will be discussed in more detail in the next Critique Corner. This month we will limit our discussion to the use of rhyme.
Lovin has chosen traditional English or "Shakespearean" sonnets. Therefore, her end rhyme scheme will be a/b/a/b/—c/d/c/d—e/f/e/f—gg. Scan the right-hand column of "Coal Country" with that in mind. You will find pairings such as "rag" and "pan" from sonnet I, or "down/abandoned" from sonnet III. How can these be said to rhyme?
Consider this definition of rhyme taken from Wikepedia: "Have or end with a sound that corresponds to another." Have or end. A rhyme, then, may be considered to be two or more words that have one or more sounds in common. That's all. They do not need to share the same final syllable, nor the same vowel, nor the same final consonant.
Why is this important? For better or worse, poetry—perhaps more than any other type of writing—is subject to fashion. The simple fact is that, today, poetry with relentless hard end rhymes, especially last-syllable rhymes, signals "light" poetry—more so when tightly metered. You'd have to be a pretty big grump to dislike "light" poetry of the type published in journals like Lighten Up Online and Light Quarterly. Nothing could have more charm or wit. The intent of these poems, however, is charm and wit. The style of rhyme explored in our critique is more appropriate for contemporary poetry of serious intent.
"Stark" and "tracks" from sonnet III make an excellent example of contemporary rhyme. Notice how both words appear to have all their sounds in common. However, the inversion of the order of the sounds, as well as the "r controlled" vowel in "stark," soften the rhyme and prevent it from becoming overbearing.
A similar strategy is at work in this sequence of end words from sonnet II: "laying/mile/bluing/white". If the exact ending syllable is used, Lovin chooses different vowels. If the exact vowel sound is used, then the final consonant is varied. Both of these techniques combine in "ground/powder" from sonnet V, which share several consonants and in which the vowels make a hard, though internal, rhyme. The result is much more nuanced—much less noticeable to the ear—than say, "ground/found" or "powder/chowder".
In her interview with me, Lovin spoke of "suggesting" rhymes. "For instance," she said, "'pestilence' and 'horses'...really don't rhyme on the page, but the sibilance makes the ear hear them as a sort of rhyme...so that when the poem is read it doesn't sound as if it rhymes, but rather the reader feels the rhyme."
This effect is strengthened by the frequency of internal rhymes. There is at least one in every sonnet. Take "unfit/for the kitchen. Fifty" from sonnet I. "Fit" and "kit" make a hard rhyme—an exact correspondence. "Fif" from "fifty" is a slightly slant rhyme. The phrase begins with "un" and ends with "en"—a kind of cadence. Oddly, by using more rhyme, by allowing the sound correspondences to occur more organically, the poem is less dominated by adherence to repetition.
Lovin further subverts the potential dominance of end rhyme with some very creative multi-word pairings, such as "Mary, would scrub" set against "Mexican railroad" from sonnet II. Both phrases have two "r's" apiece, both have a "c" and an "m", and the "x" in "Mexican" mimics the "s" in "scrub." With this in mind, look again at the startling final couplet from the same sonnet: "'17-/be done". Though a fairly radical choice at first glance, the pair share a long "e" and an "n" in common.
Ultimately, of course, the purpose of any poetic device is not to be clever. Rather it is to be expressive. In "Coal Country", the end sound scheme increasingly tightens as the reign of coal increasingly constricts the lives of the poem's characters. In sonnets IV and V—which contain the most exact rhymes—the supremacy of coal is at its apex. As the subject of the poem moves to the beginning of the end of that reign in sonnet VI, the end rhymes loosen once again.
In that same sonnet one can see the most expressive application of rhyme in the entire poem:
the skin of my shins and knees when I fell
from my bike to the cinders and gravel.
White scars remain to remind and foretell:
the last delivery truck of T.O. Miles;
"Miles" against "gravel" seems too loose, leaving not quite enough for the ear to connect. The rhyme scheme is broken, morphing in this single instance from a/b/a/b to a/a/a/b. Lovin is not getting lazy here, not trying to get away with something. If she was, she would not have given us the sound echoes of "white/Miles" and "to/T.O." On the contrary, Lovin is actually calling attention to her break in pattern by choosing three hard repetitions of the "ell" sound in a row. She breaks her scheme and deliberately emphasizes that break to express that something has broken: it is the end of the era of coal. The ear perceives an end, a sonic underscoring of the poem's meaning.
This is the true function of any poetic device—to support meaning. The device is not the point of the poem, and meaning must not become subordinate to it. Take care not to wrangle your syntax to support a rhyme. Take care to slant some rhymes lest you become predictable and soon dull. Rhyme is powerful stuff. As with other forms of repetition, it can easily run away with your poem.
Where might a poem like "Coal Country" be submitted? Honors won by Lovin's poem include:
2007 Nominated for Pushcart Prize (Triplopia)
2007 "Best of the Best" (Triplopia)*
2006 Passager Poetry Contest for Writers Over 50 (Passager)
2005 Betty Gabehart Poetry Award (Women Writers of KY)
2006 Oliver Browning Poetry Award, Poesia*
2006 Finalist, Rita Dove Poetry Award (Salem College Center for Women Writers)
2006 High Distinction, Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (Tom Howard Books assisted by Winning Writers)
(*contest discontinued)
In addition to these awards, the following contests with upcoming deadlines may be of interest:
New Letters Literary Awards
See website for contest deadlines
Prestigious, competitive awards of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, and essays, from the literary journal of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Poetry London Competition
Entries must be received by June 1
Top prize of 1,000 pounds and publication in Poetry London magazine in this contest that welcomes both emerging and established poets; fees in pounds sterling only
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
This long-running $1,000 prize is sponsored by Southern Poetry Review, a fine journal that favors rich, imagistic work
Keats-Shelley Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
This award seeks poetry on a Romantic theme and essays on any topic relating to Byron, Keats, or the Shelleys; 5,000 pounds is divided among the winners and runners-up in each genre
Betty Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing
Postmark Deadline: July 1
This contest for poetry, short fiction and essays by women writers offers prizes of $200 plus free tuition and opportunity to read your work at a festival in Lexington, KY in September
Narrative Magazine Annual Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by July 15; don't enter before May 22
Prizes up to $1,500 for unpublished narrative poems of any length, from a high-profile print and online journal; enter online only
****
BONUS FEATURE: Tracy Koretsky's Essay and Interview with Christina Lovin
The Best of the Best was a competition sponsored by the now-discontinued online magazine Triplopia. To be eligible, a poem had to have won first place in a previous competition. In 2007 the prize was awarded to Christina Lovin for her poem "Coal Country" by contest judge Tracy Koretsky. As part of the prize, Triplopia published a critical appreciation written by Koretsky as well as an extensive author interview. These are reprinted here.
Clothed in the Palette of Mourning: An Appreciation of Christina Lovin's "Coal Country"
The irony of a name: Appleton, Illinois. Were a ton of apples ever grown there? Not on any highway, not even near one, Appleton is on a railroad line, though, as best as I can tell, it no longer has a station. In fact, it is entirely possible that Appleton, Illinois no longer officially exists, and yet, for its time, it was the veritable navel of our nation, its belly plundered to warm a country still too young to contemplate mortality.
Seen from the air today, 233 km southwest of Chicago, on a green plain surrounded by young forest, there seems no place the sun won't reach, but during the years rendered by Christina Lovin in "Coal Country", the atmosphere of Appleton, Illinois, was a bit more opaque.
"What first got our attention was the way form and subject came together—telling the story of living in this hard, industrial, dirty world—using a form that is historically associated with elegance, courtliness, and love—surprised us," wrote the editors of Passager Journal, Kendra Kopelke, Mary Azrael and Christina Gay, who awarded Lovin their 2006 Poet of the Year award for "Coal Country".
That form which Geoffrey Oelsner, who gave the poem first place in the Fourth Annual Oliver W. Browning Poetry Competition for Poesia Magazine in 2007, described as "seven English (Shakespearean) sonnets, each one as packed with specific memories and stories, multiple meanings and musics, as the mason jars its narrator recalls in its first and last capping sequences."
Linked, these seven sonnets complete a sonnet crown, or corona, a sequence that morphs from sonnet to sonnet via a repetition in the last and subsequent first lines, thereby moving the poem to a new facet of its subject.
It is doubtlessly a stunning choice of vehicle for Lovin's subject—and I promise to defend that later—but first I feel the need to consider just what that subject actually is.
Ostensibly, it's coal. To test that theory I suggest you play "Where's Waldo" with coal in the poem by locating it within every sonnet.
The result is a poem in itself: It's in the food mother gives you; it's in the water in which you immerse yourself, beneath the ground you walk on, in the sacks that mother carries—the economy of the town, handed down from "kind wind-burned men". It's in the low places, and beneath the wounds and scrapes, in the shadows filling the corners of the now vacant coal room. But in the good old days, it was heaped up the wall of the active coal room, back when it was in the air and covering the floor, the pulse of the body in which we lived.
Man, I wish I'd written that!
And then, indeed, I would have written a poem about coal. Christina Lovin, on the other hand, didn't. "Coal" is not the subject of "Coal Country". No, it is only its trope.
Exploiting the form brilliantly, Lovin has framed her poem with a first and final line that intimate its true subject: family secrets that like "sullied cloth and family"—a phrase strategically placed as the volta of the first stanza— "never wash out completely."
I would be remiss not to spend a few words here admiring some of the other ways that Lovin has exploited the form to superb effect. Yet, frankly, I am frustrated to do so. There are so many.
If I may, for example, challenge you to a second round of "Where's Waldo", I would invite you to scout out the internal rhymes. Hint: you will find at least one in every sonnet.
Notice the way the rhyme scheme functions overall to subtly tighten and release the tension of the poem's reading. In sonnet one you are informed that a scheme is definitely in operation, but in sonnet two, which, for instance, positions "horsemen" against "pestilence", you are told not to take it too seriously. The end-sound scheme then becomes increasingly exact, and the internal rhyming more frequent, until, in sonnet four, it is ratcheted up to its tautest achievement, sailing past "egg and lump", and then onward toward the poem's most resounding internal cadence: the perfectly rhymed end couplet of stanza five.
There we discover a colon, the punctuation of declamation. Tucked tightly into the poem's "just the facts, Ma'am" section, like a coda, it is the poem's only other allusion to its true subject. An allusion, by the way, constructed through simile ("like wasted lives"). Lovin never elucidates, no more than the air over Appleton ever completely clears.
Beneath this beats the meter, consistently evident throughout, suggesting pentameter without strictly enforcing it. Some of the best effect of this adherence is realized in the descriptive passages, like this one from sonnet four:
from ov / er filled /cars. On /her lu/cky days,
the bags /grew hea/vy quick/ ly and /no snow
fell a/cross the/ hills or, /ankle-/deep, lay
filling/ up the /trackside/ ditches/ below,
where the/ tiny/ tank town/ of Ap/ pleton,
Illi/nois, lay/ crammed in/to the /valley.
To see how the imposition of conscious meter is affecting the poet's choices here, imagine the lines were free to be of any length, long or short. Meter is not simply economy, after all, it requires grammar and syntax.
And, when handled by a talented poet, meter can be expressive. In this section from sonnet three:
...We thought/ it dar/ing fun/ to plunge
beneath/ the foam/y sur/face, o/ palescent
with chem/i cals/ that oozed/unseen/ from dull
slag heaps: ...
we are lulled with the iambs until we hit "opalescent/with chemicals" which jar the steady meter, underscoring the unsettling content of the words.
Then there are the words themselves—the onomatopoeia of "rusty clinkers/of stony matter" (sonnet six), and "crisply graveled rail bed, packing sacks/ of burlap" (sonnet four). Words as textured as the materials they describe, and so many materials: enamel, wood, iron, cotton, marcasite, not to mention stone, gravel, silt, grit.
Language which accretively piles the image so completely that the reader is trapped within its walls, and yet it is language that never becomes self-conscious, except perhaps, exactly where it ought to become so—at the end.
...But like lost love's memories
swept clean, damp days a dark stench still rises and chokes
with what I can remember, and what I won't.
Man, I wish I'd written that!
Tara Elliott, editor of Triplopia, who nominated "Coal Country" for inclusion in the Pushcart Anthology, wrote of these ending lines, "they sear the poem, in all of its darkness and all of its light, far into the reader's mind. Notice the penultimate line with its jolt of synesthesia, insisting we awaken to the fact that, should any equivocation still remain, memory and its refusal are the real subjects of this poem."
Or are they?
Jorie Graham has written, "In a poem, one is always given, I would argue, a sense of a place that matters—a place one suffered the loss of, a place one longs for—a stage upon which the urgent act of mind of this particular lyric occasion (be it memory, description, meditation, fractured recollection of self, or even further disintegration of self under the pressure of history, for example) 'takes place'. And although it is, most traditionally, a literal place—Roethke's greenhouse, Frost's woods, Bishop's shorelines—often, too, a historical 'moment'— especially the very conflagatory 'now' of one's historical-yet-subjective existence—is felt as a location that compels action, reaction, and the sort of re-equilibration which a poem seeks."
Again Lovin crafts the form to support the content skillfully, using both voltas and the sense of suspension—of delayed quasi-couplet—inherent in the development of the last line/first line repetition, to transit those "fractured recollections".
Except that in "Coal Country", the poet seems to long for a place where, as it happens, she has never been. And, more importantly to the reader, the poem's historical moment encompasses an era.
And that is why, perhaps selfishly, for this reader, "Coal Country" is more than a poem piquing one's curiosity about subterranean family scandal. Rather, it is first and foremost an elegy.
Clothed in the palette of mourning, the words gray, black, white and laundry bluing collectively are used nine times in the poem. Only the jewel-toned toxic lake offers any hint of spectrum.
And like the best elegies, "Coal Country" does not lament one person or one sullied family with their basement of veiled calming jars, but all of us—any of us who heat a home, drive a car, or clean our teeth with imported paste on an imported brush. Here is an elegy for the people who will be used in order that we may continue to do so, and for the land which will be irreparably used up.
Once upon a time, there was a town within a nation "blessed with bituminous/veins cursed with the scars of its retrieval." "Coal Country" is its eulogy and epitaph.
Interview with Christina Lovin, Author of "Coal Country"
Christina Lovin is the author of two chapbooks of poetry from Finishing Line Press: What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee and multi-award winner whose writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Southern Women Writers named Lovin their 2007 Emerging Poet. Having served as Writer-in-Residence at Devil's Tower National Monument and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Central Oregon, in 2010 she served as inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Connemara, the North Carolina home of the late poet Carl Sandburg. Lovin has been a resident fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Orcas Island Artsmith Residency at Kangaroo House, and Footpaths House to Creativity in the Azores. Her work has been supported with grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She resides with four dogs in rural central Kentucky, where she is currently a lecturer at Eastern Kentucky University.
TK: As I was trying to learn a little something about you, I noticed that you had a poem in the 2000 Harvard Summer Review and that it said in your bio there that you were completing your undergrad degree. But since I already knew that "Coal Country" had won the 2006 Passager Poet of the Year Award, and that Passager is famous for being, to use their language, "a national journal devoted to finding older writers and making public the passions and creativity that ignites during the later years"...well, being the Google sleuth that I am, I concluded "older student"? Am I right?
CL: Ah, Google. I love the ease of locating information, but am always wary of what I find. For instance, there is a Christina Lovin who is from North Carolina and is a blonde, blue-eyed college student. I am neither, but ironically, I did live in Chapel Hill for a couple of years.
Although I didn't graduate from Harvard, I did attend the summer writing sessions there in 2000 and 2001. I guess I was something of a late bloomer: I turned fifty-five the month I graduated from the poetry program at New England College in 2004, which made me very eligible for the Passager Poet of the Year Award two years later. My sister didn't begin college until she was fifty-five; she received a M.S. in Park and Recreation Management the year she turned sixty-one, I believe. Our mother once made the statement that her girls decided to get "smart" after they turned fifty. For me, it was more a case of familial and economic constraints that kept me from getting a terminal degree in writing until the age when many people are beginning to retire. As a result, I am new to teaching college classes and still feel fresh and have a lot of fun, while some professors my age seem burned out and ready to leave the classroom behind.
TK: Ah, so you "grew up" writing then?
CL: Actually, I grew up singing—my brothers and father were all singers—so that when I write, a bit of that sense of melody remains, I guess. I've been exposed to (and love) all sorts of music: jazz, blues, classical, country, even hip-hop and rap. I used to struggle with writing that was too staid and formal. I had quite a number of poems published in the 70's and 80's, but they were what would be considered very bad poetry by literary standards (although I was paid for each and every one). All these poems were rhymed and rather "light". I had written free verse when I was younger, but was influenced by reading Shakespeare's sonnets, hymns that my mother sang, and probably Hallmark cards! Until I was exposed to what would be considered literary poetry, and could see the difference between what I was writing and what true poets were writing, I thought I was doing pretty well.
I read my poems aloud over and over, sometimes memorizing a poem so that I recite it when I am driving, particularly when it is a new poem and may need revision. Often, the subtle musical changes occur when I am reciting a poem to myself. I firmly believe that poems should "sound" like poems, as well as be poems on the page.
That's what drives my style, regardless of the form or lack of form. When I read a poem aloud and it doesn't flow for me, I know there is something wrong. If I stumble over a phrase or line and it doesn't sound "musical" to me, I will usually change the poem until it feels right. That's not to suggest that every line of every poem pleases me—there are some poems that I still cringe over when I read them. Perhaps they are the patterns of speech of a Midwesterner that have infused my writing with what could be considered "colloquialism". I've noticed that, since I live in Kentucky now, my speech patterns have shifted slightly. Who knows what that will do to my writing?
TK: Do you find Kentucky that much different from Appleton, Illinois?
CL: If I'm counting correctly, since I left home for college in January of 1967 (I graduated high school early), I have lived in eighteen different homes in six states.
But I love Kentucky. Although things are changing quickly here, as they are in most of the US, the area where I live reminds me very much of the way towns were when I grew up in the 1950's. My town's population is less than 4,000; and the population of Garrard County is only around 20,000. So, it is very rural and quite lovely with rolling hills, stone walls, and tobacco barns. Perhaps my affinity for central Kentucky comes from the resemblance of the countryside to the prettiest areas of Knox County, where Appleton was located.
It is my understanding, by the way, that the town of Appleton, Illinois, no longer exists as it did when my mother lived there and would pick up coal beside the railroad track that bisects the town. I believe that the townspeople were forced to evacuate or, at least, move some distance away, due to repeated flooding resulting from the damming of a nearby river.
As for me, the last time I drove through there was when I was about sixteen years old, on my way to somewhere else. By the time I was born, we had no relatives living there, so no reason to visit. Appleton was where my mother was born nearly a hundred years ago. After her father died, my grandmother moved her family in to the "big town" of Galesburg, where my mother later married and raised a family, including me.
TK: So what was the "big town" like?
CL: Galesburg is a very historic town. It was a site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1859. Knox College is located there, as are several railroad lines. Carl Sandburg was born there, as well (Galesburg was a destination spot for immigrant Swedes for decades). My father was Swedish. My mother had some Ulster Scot roots on her father's side— Scots Irish who came to this country in the mid-1700's. On my maternal grandmother's side, we can trace our American roots back to the 1650's, when some Danes came to this country.
TK: And eighteen moves later, here you are! Do you think all those moves have contributed to making you a writer?
CL: I would have to say that all those moves have contributed to my writing. I feel very rich to have experienced so many places—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, and now, Kentucky. Each place I have lived has provided a new perspective. I've heard that poets who no longer live where they grew up often write most vividly about that place when they live away from it. I felt that way about Illinois when I moved to the East Coast—although I loved the ocean and the literary vibe I found in Maine, I missed the openness of the prairies. When I moved back to Illinois, then on to North Carolina, I yearned for Maine. There are still times when I see a coastal scene on film that I can almost feel the way the light falls near the ocean in Maine; I can hear the surf, and smell that peculiar ocean mix of seaweed, salt, and decomposing sea life. What's odd is that, to me, it is not unpleasant. Now that I've been away from North Carolina for four years, I don't believe that any sky could be more blue anywhere else and I miss much about the area around Chapel Hill. I sometimes believe that we humans discount that part of our animal instincts which is our internal compass, our homing instinct.
Much of my poetry started out as a simple nature poem and then made an unplanned, uncharted turn into loss and longing: my own losses and a longing for a home that no longer exists (and perhaps never did). And just maybe that's what drives many poets—that search for something (someone, somewhere) that is just out of reach, that may never have really existed except in the poet's memory. Or perhaps it is just the human condition to yearn.
TK: Would you say that was the impulse that led you to write "Coal Country"?
CL: To be honest, "Coal Country" came about from a writing prompt. My friend and mentor, Cecilia Woloch, suggested writing about something that happened before I was born. I started thinking about the stories my mother had told about her mother, Mary; the stories about my grandparents in sonnet two and my mother in sonnet four. The story about the men giving mother the coal is true, although sometimes they simply kicked the coal off the hoppers. You can imagine the sight of a skinny little girl (most little girls were skinny in 1918) gathering coal along the tracks and how that might have touched the hearts of those rough railroad men.
When I wrote "Coal Country" I was going through a very painful, drawn-out separation that ultimately ended in divorce from a person I care very much about (and vice versa). The poem is definitely not just about my family, even if that is what I intended when I wrote it. Everything I wrote then (and often what I write now) is colored by what I was experiencing emotionally in my life. So when I said earlier that the search for something unattainable is what drives many poets, perhaps what I was trying to get at is that those yearnings are feelings that anyone can relate to; they are universal, so the poems come alive to many readers (or most readers). Speaking for myself, the poems that mean the most to me are those that have a sense of longing. I guess it may be my age, that I am looking back now at so many things that might have turned out differently, if not better.
Every lost town, every lost loved one, every dead animal (and there seem to be many in my poems) has meaning beyond the image. In The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo makes a statement that the fact that our physical surroundings are changing so quickly (the shopping mall where the old farm used to be, the loss of some old country roads, and so on) may be why so many people are turning to poetry.
TK: I find it interesting that it came from a prompt about a subject. I mean, it wasn't a prompt to write a sonnet.
CL: I was honored to work with Joan Larkin when I was studying for my MFA in Creative Writing. She is definitely the inspiration for "Coal Country". Joan wrote a fabulous sonnet crown, "The Blackout Sonnets". I was blown away the first time I heard her read that particular piece. She is a wonderful poet (and playwright), but her teaching methods are even more impressive. She is tough, but tender, if that's possible. I learned a lot when I worked with her. Another inspiration was Marilyn Nelson. She read "A Wreath for Emmett Till" at a faculty reading when I was studying at New England College. "A Wreath for Emmett Till" is an heroic sonnet crown, meaning that it's not seven interconnecting sonnets, but fifteen. As in the shorter sonnet crown, the first line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next. However, in an heroic crown of sonnets, the fifteenth sonnet is comprised of the first lines of the previous fourteen! Wow. I remember that Marilyn got a standing ovation after that reading—something that had not happened for those readings up to that time.
As for "Coal Country", when I began writing it was not at all in any form, let alone a sonnet crown. I have the original draft of the poem: just broken lines mostly. I began free writing about all I remembered about coal and how it affected the lives of my family and the area in which I grew up.
After doodling around and writing a few phrases, some lines began to develop, but basically everything was just images—my mother as a girl, her mother washing the railroad men's shirts, the scars of strip mining, and the coal bin, which I can still see in my mind's eye: dark, not only from the lack of illumination, but also from the coal and the dust that went everywhere. But there was that little bit of light around the metal coal door. I still see that.
A few of those lines made it into the completed sonnet series, but when I started to include myself, the whole poem changed and that first line, "What I can't remember and what I can..." left me the room to write about things I didn't know firsthand, but that had been handed down through oral history.
TK: Oral history and memory. I would have guessed "researched".
CL: Well, I do admit to some research. I tend to be a stickler for the right term or definition. When I began to write "Coal Country", I realized immediately that I would need to do some fact checking. For instance, I wouldn't have known the different names for coal ("egg" and "lump" for instance) or when underground mining was abandoned for strip mining. I knew those names existed, I knew that mining had changed, but not when. Most of my research was done online; some things I asked my mother, who has since passed away. I must say, however, that although I didn't know some of the hard facts about coal, I did have feelings about coal. My memory is filled with that blackness—the coal bin, the coal yard where great piles of coal fill what now seems to have been a city block, the mile-long freight trains with hopper cars overflowing with coal, and the visible results of strip mining that just seemed natural when I was a child because they were scattered about Knox County. My father was a game warden for the state of Illinois. I often accompanied him on his trips around the county, so saw a lot of the scars of strip mining, as well as the reclamation that was beginning even during my childhood. I believe that, even with poetic license (which I do claim sometimes), it's important to be as accurate about dates and times as one can be and still serve the poem.
TK: Important or not, one thing's for sure: it's difficult to do work in dates and times artfully. I started to look at all the techniques you use to manipulate time in "Coal Country" and I was amazed by the number of them. For instance, you frequently evoke seasons, always winters and summers—nothing so benign as spring or fall. You also very effectively use character to relocate the reader in an era. In sonnet two we're with your grandmother, Mary, in three with you as a child, in four with your mother as a child. Back and forth, weaving through time, and not at all seamlessly. Rather the seams appear to be a subject themselves. For example, you sometimes just go ahead and expose them with expository statements like "Fifty years are over/now" in sonnet one, or "By the sixties" in sonnet three. Although these may be simple and declarative at first sight, I've noticed how the first is enjambed in a way that enables you to segue from one time to another as well as to compare them though proximity. Also, because both phrases operate as their sonnet's volta, you've exploited the possibilities of the form. By that same token, and perhaps most interestingly of all, is how you've used the crown structure of the last line/first line repetition as a transition. Moving from sonnet three to sonnet four you replace the word "old" with "new". Likewise, between sonnets two and three you've managed the relocation with a single letter!
I found myself wondering, did the form lend itself naturally to managing time transitions?
CL: Once I began writing in sonnet form and decided to proceed with a crown of sonnets, it was not too difficult to write fourteen lines about my mother and myself, then my grandmother, then my mother, and so on. At one point in an early draft, I had labeled each section with the year: "1955", "1917", "1965", etc., but I decided that by beginning the poem with one sonnet that includes my mother and myself, then shifting to my grandmother, then to myself as a girl, the reader is already aware that the sequences are not linear or chronological. I think that sonnet crowns are just another way to create space and time in a poem, much like free verse poems that have numbered sections. With a sonnet crown, however, there is that delicious last line/first line connection that is so much fun to work with.
TK: I've really been curious about that. My sense is that the last line/first line repetition transformation suggests the narrative structure and the poet follows it.
CL: I don't know if changing the words slightly from the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next is a common element, but I do know that it is used. I mean, I'm not the first to do it. It wasn't my experience that these changes dictate the narrative structure. In the case of "Coal Country", I knew where the next sonnet would go; it was just a case of creating an adequate transition. Of course, there is that one glaring case in the transition between sonnet four and sonnet five. I knew that, at some point, I wanted to write a bit about coal mining in general. I didn't know when or where, but I had found what I thought to be interesting facts about coal mining. If I remember correctly, the last line had been something different, not "black heat". When I chose to write about the coal-mining industry at that point, I changed those words in the last line of the one sonnet to match the first line of the next.
As far as the very first and last lines of the sequence, someone (a rather famous poet whose name I won't mention) suggested that I begin and end with a different set of sonnets. He felt that "What I can't remember, and what I can" was too heavy-handed. In fact, I probably submitted the poem with that change at some point. I just really liked making that significant, decisive move with the last line by changing the "can't" to "won't". The meaning is totally changed, isn't it? I've heard that a poem should either be like a box clicking shut or being opened. In this case, I feel that the poem is opened up to more meanings than simply repeating the first line verbatim.
TK: Oh, the meaning is totally changed, Christina, yes. My feeling is that framing it as you have changes the true subject of the poem, which seems upon a first reading to be "coal", to actually be some deep family secret. A secret, by the way, that the poem never directly addresses. But perhaps the poet would?
CL: If I tell, it won't be a secret. That's a flip answer, I know. What can I say? All families have skeletons in the closet. I just think we had more than most. I am the youngest of seven children; by the time I came along most of the drama was in the past, or was kept from me. Now all but three of us children are gone, including both my parents. I struggle with the ethics of telling tales on the dead and my desire to be the storyteller for my family.
For now, I'll save my divulgences for future work. I am currently at work on a project about growing up female in the 1950's and 60's. Many of the skeletons are rattling, wanting to get out. In "Echo I", one of the two title poems (both sestinas) for my new work, Echo, I write:
And she can hear the whispered secrets
across the empty spaces
of the midnight house. Names
she can make out—the girl's
brothers, their many girlish
wives, dozens of children. Bad marriages: talk
of divorce, abuse, prison. Murderous secrets
to be hauled out and interrogated through the night
in those vacant spaces
between dusk and dawn.
I haven't yet decided how much I will tell. But for now, let this suffice.
TK: All right, fair enough. You were saying that, time-wise, you knew where you were going with your progression, but were there other ways in which you felt the poem led you?
CL: Form poetry is very much about being led into and through the poem. I never decide, however, to sit down and write a sonnet or villanelle or sestina. And, although I often write in form (but definitely not exclusively), it is the poem that dictates the form. If the meaning would be changed greatly by strictly adhering to a syllabic- or meter-driven form, I'll lean toward what will best serve the poem. That strict adherence to meter and rhyme is what many contemporary poets (and readers) object to. Even Shakespeare aimed for a natural speech rhythm in his plays, although they were written in rhyme. I like to think of a drummer in the background, banging away at a steady pace, with a blues guitarist or jazz musician doing what they want with riffs and small improvisations that always come back to the beat. Besides, sonnets are not required to have iambic pentameter or even fourteen lines to be sonnets. For instance, Gerald Stern's American Sonnets often have as many as twenty or more lines, but because they are still "little songs" (the original meaning of the word sonnet), they are definitely sonnets. Marilyn Hacker is a great sonneteer, but her sonnets often have erratic rhyming schemes that help the poem become stronger.
I find that I am always more surprised with the destination when I write in form than when I write in free or blank verse. So, perhaps the poem does have more control, at least in line length, meter, and end rhyme. But how creatively those rhymes are made and what falls between them is still anybody's guess until the poem is finished. I mean, the entire meaning of a line can change (and must change) if a different word is used. And honestly, sometimes, the poem insists on going where it will.
TK: Do you have a "rule" for rhyming? A method? Those are two different things, of course.
CL: As someone who tends to break the rules of form, I would have to say that I do the same with rhyme. I purposefully try not to have a lot of hard rhymes, but rather will search for slant rhymes.
And I do think about the rhymes and try very hard to present rhymes that are creative and perhaps unexpected, so that when the poem is read it doesn't sound as if it rhymes, but rather the reader feels the rhyme. For instance, "pestilence" and "horses", which really don't rhyme on the page, but the sibilance makes the ear hear them as a sort of rhyme. Of course the couplets are very difficult to do this with because two rhymed lines fall together. I am sometimes unhappy with how the couplets turn out.
I do use a rhyming dictionary at times, but not in the way most people would use one. I also use the brainstorming method at times, as well, by just writing out all the words that might work where sonics are concerned, but with a softer rhyme than "moon/June/spoon". I would more likely use "moon/bun/long", relying on the end sound to suggest a rhyme. I sometimes use a thesaurus as a rhyming dictionary—searching the lists of words that have similar meanings, but different sounds. There have been times when I've gone back and changed the first rhyme to better fit the second or third rhyming word. I have a rather analytical mind, so writing in form, particularly with rhyme, is like solving an intricate puzzle.
TK: Yes it is. And one you obviously enjoy playing. I've noticed on the Internet that you've done a few other sonnet crowns since.
CL: Yes, one sonnet crown, "Clear Cut", was written following my residency at the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. Oregon State University has a wonderful program in which writers are put together with scientists. The Spring Creek Project has had some illustrious writers, most notably Allison Hawthorne Deming and Pattiann Rogers.
"Event Horizon" was written about eight months after my mother passed away. I had many unresolved issues with her death because I was ill the entire time she was either hospitalized or in a nursing home. I was hospitalized myself when she died; the family had to hold the funeral off for a few extra days until I was well enough to travel from Kentucky to Illinois. The really sad thing is that my mother, who was still living alone at age 97, had fallen and died as a result of that fall, but only after a month of pain and suffering. I just couldn't deal with the thought that I hadn't been able to tell her good-bye. I was back in Illinois visiting my daughter's family when I witnessed a young deer being hit by that truck ahead of us. No one was hurt, but the deer had four broken legs and kept trying to run. I immediately thought of my mother and her broken bones, and her lying on the floor for hours before anyone found her. It's all still hard for me to write about, even now, nearly two years since I lost my mother.
TK: That sounds very difficult, to be sure. Was there something about the crown form that helped you take on this difficult subject?
CL: As with most of my work, what begins to be a certain form (or lack thereof) often takes on a life of its own and changes as it develops into a poem. I do remember that, when I saw the deer hit, then flying through the air, I thought of physics and Newton's laws. From that catalyst, I began thinking more about the laws of physics. I did a bit of exploring and found that many of the laws applied directly to what I was feeling about my mother and the deer. The crown form was just a natural way for me to write about all three subjects effectively: my mother's death, the deer, and physics. And perhaps the knowledge that I wouldn't have to stay with my mother's pain (or that of the deer) for more than fourteen lines at a time was appealing.
TK: I also wonder, have these done as well as Coal Country, prize-wise, that is.
CL: Well, no, not quite as well. Both poems, however, have been recognized. "Event Horizon" has been a finalist a few times, and I'm told that's the poem that netted me the Emerging Poet Award from the Southern Women Writers Conference. "Clear Cut" was a finalist just once.
TK: In light of that, why do you believe that Coal Country has received more notice?
CL: I think it was just synchronicity or serendipity or some other force that makes things turn out the way they do. The first contest I won did not entail any publication. The Passager prize did include publication. I was lucky, perhaps, that the poem did not win a couple of contests, but rather, simply placed. Then, the last two contests did not state in their guidelines that the poems could not have been previously published, so I was able to enter.
A rather odd thing is that "Coal Country" won honorable mention in another contest, The Spoon River Review Editor's Choice Award. I received a letter from the editors, telling me I had won Honorable Mention. Unfortunately, my letter withdrawing the poem from their contest (due to the Passager award) was either not read or was lost. When I alerted the editors of their oversight, I never heard another word from them and my name was not mentioned anywhere. I still have the letter, though.
But, in answer to your initial question, I think it was just the chronology of the contests.
TK: So tell me—and I mean this in all sincerity—have any of these prizes changed your life?
CL: I can't say any prizes have changed my life, but as I've told many people in the past: "It looks good on a resume." And, to be honest, I don't think it hurts at all to have some extra lines on one's C.V. "Coal Country" has won over $1,000, which is pretty remarkable when you consider that most poems don't make any money for the poet. I am still surprised at any recognition my poetry gets. I am, after all, still an emerging poet. At 58. Go figure. I think Amy Clampitt must be my guardian angel...
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Coffee House to Go
ESC! Magazine's monthly podcast for writers and the small press community offers readings of poetry, short fiction, interviews and reviews as well as featured music from independent bands and musicians.
coLAB Arts
Based in New Jersey, coLAB Arts facilitates collaborations between artists and local communities to address issues of justice and representation. Some of their projects include #150YearsIsEnough, an exhibit of art and writing by youth in the criminal justice system; Banished, an oral history project documenting the harms of the sex offender registry; and Trueselves, a documentary theater series that shares the stories of NJ's transgender community.
Cold Turkey
Thistle-stubble thirst clanks
like an old town clock on
the hour of death through
putrid, clinging, sweaty fog
clay-coated doorstop tongue pants
outrage at the relentless tinny
dong, dong, donging
cracked lips like wayside prunes lick
no relief from this parched hell
no spit to float an ant
kill for a dewdrop, just
a dewdrop, who’d know?
nothing soft!
thirsty! don’t you hear?
something charmed
green-gold
no ice, no mix
something to thrill swollen smouldering
burnt rubbery mouth
away from garish deformity
something to numb excruciating hollow
something to beat off glowering
foul breath demons
some
pretty please
thing
to stop the goddamned shaking so
hands can hold the paddles long enough
to row to the next heave
salty, scorched-sand searing thirst
like that crusty old clock
obsessive in the worship of time
Copyright 2006 by Susan Tearoe
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Cold Turkey" by Susan Tearoe, takes the reader inside the mind of an alcoholic trying to quit drinking. The struggle feels excruciatingly real, precisely because the speaker's mental world is so surreal and nightmarish. Bracketed by the images of the slow-moving old clock, the poem seems to take place within a single moment that lasts an eternity.
I was reminded of Salvador Dali's painting "The Persistence of Memory", that endless barren vista populated by melted watches and mutating organic forms—a dreamscape whose eerie stillness and hyper-clarity contains intimations of disaster. Just so, in Tearoe's poem, the simultaneous frozenness and endlessness of time heightens the tension of each moment's battle for sobriety.
"Cold Turkey" also resembles some of Sylvia Plath's later poems, such as "Tulips" and "Fever 103°", in depicting how a fevered mind seizes on small details of sensation and blows them up to an unbearable intensity. The narrator of Tearoe's poem is so consumed by her withdrawal symptoms that there is no longer any boundary between herself and the world. She is the world. The clock tolling in the fog and the doorbell ringing could be real-life sounds that agitate her, or could exist only in her head.
The bargaining that goes on in the middle of the poem definitely rings true: "kill for a dewdrop, just/a dewdrop, who'd know?" The reader feels grateful for this oasis of refreshing, pretty images ("something charmed/green-gold"), which fuels the necessary descent back into the "swollen smouldering/burnt rubbery mouth" of thirst. Back and forth goes the internal debate, like the little rowboat she imagines plunging up and down on the waves, hoping for the strength to "row to the next heave".
Tearoe mixes metaphors of wet and dry, but in a way that feels right. Addiction is like a tempting, dangerous ocean, and also barren and gritty as a desert. The thirst is worse because the imagined liquid feels as real as her current dryness.
This well-paced poem uses varied sounds and textures to enhance the meaning. Lines like "Thistle-stubble thirst clanks" and "salty, scorched-sand searing thirst" are spiky mouthfuls that slow the reader's progress, like clearing a path through brambles. This creates a feeling that time is dragged out and resistant. I liked the similar sounds of "lips" and "lick" in line eight, though I wasn't sure what "wayside" meant as a modifier for prunes. Phrases such as "garish deformity" and "glowering/foul breath demons" verged on being overwrought and Gothic in an unoriginal way. It might have been more effective to continue with the technique of ordinary objects and situations turned monstrous (e.g. the clock, the rowboat). As a whole, however, the poem has enough true-life detail that the reader cannot fail to be moved and, perhaps, recognize one of his or her own battles against temptation.
Where could a poem like "Cold Turkey" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Strong Medicine Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: October 31
$2,500 and publication in MARGIE Review, an eclectic journal with a social conscience
CBC Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: November 1
Canadian authors can win up to C$6,000 for unpublished poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, in French or English; no simultaneous submissions
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by November 1 (extended from October 1)
UK-based writers' resource site offers prizes up to 500 pounds for published or unpublished poems up to 30 lines; good for emerging writers
New Millennium Writings Awards
Postmark Deadline: November 17
Prestigious $1,000 awards for unpublished poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from a journal with a magical-realism flavor
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2006 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
College Consensus Ultimate Campus Guide for LGBTQ Students
While not a literary website, this guide to thriving as an LGBTQ college student merited a link at Winning Writers because it is comprehensive and clear about what an affirming academic environment should look like. Links include grants for queer students, free art therapy, and how to protect your civil rights. College Consensus is a resource site that ranks colleges on various metrics and can be used to search for the top degree programs in different academic fields.
Colma
This chapbook from FutureCycle Press is named for a necropolis outside San Francisco, a city of cemeteries where the dead outnumber the living by 800 to 1. Yet Laue's poems are anything but morbid. Like the Biblical writer Ecclesiastes, this poet cannot erase his awareness of mortality by means of religious rituals or hopeful platitudes, but finally finds a precarious peace in appreciation of the present moment, and a substitute for immortality in the cycles of nature.
Colorado Independent Publishers Association
CIPA offers book awards, sponsors literacy programs, and helps promote members' books at literary conferences and trade shows.
Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference
Unique conference designed to set poets with a manuscript-in-process on a path towards publication. Led by award-winning poets Joan Houlihan and Fred Marchant. Includes meetings with editors from leading poetry presses such as Tupelo Press and BOA Editions. The conferences are held several times a year in Harvard, Mass., and Colrain, a town in Western Massachusetts. Visit the Concord Poetry Center website for news of upcoming readings, seminars, workshops and conferences.
COMBAT Magazine
The Literary Expression of Battlefield Touchstones. This magazine launched online in January 2003. Authors are invited to submit their work via email.
Comics Experience: Scripts Archive
Comics Experience bills itself as "the world's most effective online comics school". This archive on their site was established by Tim Simmons to give aspiring comics writers a guide to the conventions of the genre. It includes a script template and many examples, including some by notable authors like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison.
Comma
By Harris Gardner
"A woman once said to Flaubert, I wrote
twenty thousand words today, what did you do?"
Flaubert replied: I removed the comma that I put in last week."
A comma tiptoes into all our lives.
We pause as we pursue our sentence.
No comma burrows within the bones.
A comma constricts the breath
When winter's hand grips the throat.
A comma fish hooks your gut
When the burden snags you in the net.
A comma slow motions your dreams
That drip through intravenous tubes.
A comma gnaws through the ropes after death.
The voice of the bell peals, then pauses.
Common Carnage
His ninth book of life absurd, and fascinating... "Two barn owls discuss Descartes as they/disembowel a field mouse without the help/of knife or fork. They are friends and/share even the tastiest bits. For instance,/each gets one lung. Sum, says one. Ergo/cogito, says the other. Then they chuckle./The night is cold; the fields are white...."
Compfight
Compfight is a search engine to locate Creative Commons (public domain) images on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Use it to illustrate your literary blogs, book covers, or promotional materials.
Complete Works of Shakespeare at MIT Online
Hosted by the student newspaper The Tech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1993, this website offers free HTML versions of William Shakespeare's complete plays and poems.
Computer Software at Amazon
We rely on Amazon for low prices on authentic software.
Comstock Review: The Poet’s Handbook
Detailed guidance for poets from the Comstock Writers' Group. Make your poetry submissions look professional. See poetry as an editor sees it. All poets should read this before actively submitting to contests and journals.
Concerto of Snow and Pelagic Zone
CONCERTO OF SNOW by Ryan Sauers
the symphony of a falling snowflake
plays like a lone violist
secluded in a moment
one single flake
drifts back and forth
in a soft rhythm
heard only in my head
a soft melody of snow crystals
unfolds within me like
an ageless hymn
of quietude and tranquility
a night sky nearly blank
adds to the serenity
like canvas to an artist
here at this street corner's
lonely stoop I focus upon
one single crystalline fleck
with even smooth strokes
through tree tops the little white
sparkle somehow misses every branch
hovering in a crisp night's breath
like soft notes in a gentle chord
only to land upon a snowman's nose
this humble moment blanketed
with a warm and tender silence
one opus ends for another to begin
as a second crystal descends
Copyright 2010 by Ryan Sauers
PELAGIC ZONE by Joan L. Cannon
In the deeps, where memory's the record keeper,
All our truths are subjects now of sea-change—
Wrought by tides of time and waves of green experience.
Where grey grotesques reveal their nacre only after cleavage,
Rosy anemones disguise the moray's lair
And lure to numbing extinction all the small unwary.
Relics huge and impotent, bedecked with useless trinkets,
Are duned by the million million sifting grains of everyday details,
Their bulk and history sleeping, forever obscured by trivia.
In these mermaid caves, where lurk the myths? Where's the real?
Echoes reflect in patterns peacocked with iridescent hues;
Facts ephemeral as the uttered word, now ambered in silence—
Prism'd entities that mirror endlessly the mind's compounded masquerade.
Copyright 2011 by Joan L. Cannon
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
In the October 2010 Critique Corner, I highlighted how two poets conveyed meaning in their poems by using extended metaphors. This month I will demonstrate, in a very practical way, just how that's done, with the help of two poems: Ryan Sauers' "Concerto of Snow" and Joan L. Cannon's "Pelagic Zone".
Let's begin with "Concerto". In this poem, it is easy to see how a metaphor can be extended by using a diction family—words that are related. Here, the predominant family is, of course, music: both its forms, such as concerto, symphony, hymn, and opus, and its qualities, like melody, rhythm and chords.
The repetition of the word "soft" might raise a flag for the poet interested in revision. In this case, however, the poet has used the repetition to bring the words "rhythm" and "melody" into parallel. Notice, too, how Sauers has underscored his metaphor by selecting a second diction family of words that communicate music's opposite: silence. Indeed, he has utilized space throughout the piece to emphasize its pauses. I wonder if you can't identify a third diction family? Words that conjure aloneness: secluded, lone, only in my head, etc.
By interweaving these several families, Sauers complicates his poem and adds interest. In fact, the poem's weakest section is where he digresses from these three main diction families with:
a night sky nearly blank
adds to the serenity
like canvas to an artist
These lines introduce a new diction family which the rest of the poem does not ultimately support.
Not only does the use of diction families unify the poem, but also, in the end, they provide something that every poet needs: a way out. Beginning with his third repetition of "soft" in "soft notes", Sauers gathers words from his various diction families: "chord", "silence", "one", and "opus", thereby creating a pleasing cadence.
With Joan Cannon's "Pelagic Zone", with its lush and consistently interesting language, we see a somewhat more challenging example of the same principle. Ms. Cannon writes, "I want metaphor to carry the message, and most of the time I have message in mind."
I don't know about you, but if I am going to understand the first thing about this poem, I will need to look up the phrase "pelagic zone", which turns out to be any water in a sea or lake that is not close to the bottom or near to the shore. If a reader must look up words to enter a poem, does that make its diction obscure? No. Rather it makes it specific. Obscure diction is actually just the opposite: words selected to make their true meaning harder to discern. There is a place for intentionally obscure diction in poetry, but this poem is not an example of it.
To the contrary, Cannon tells us unequivocally in her first two lines that memory and truth are the subject of her poem, the subject about which the pelagic zone will act as metaphor. Meanwhile, also in those first lines, she establishes that she intends to continue borrowing from the diction family of oceanography to extend that metaphor.
Take, for example, her use of the word "deeps" (as opposed to "depths"). As the third word of a poem, this unusual, though specific, choice is something of a risk. After all, she has not yet earned the reader's trust or respect. Now, risk within a poem is not a bad thing; often it is something to be admired. However, presented in a poem with a grammatical inversion in line two, it might give the impression of someone less than comfortable with English.
To repair this, Cannon need not deviate from her carefully selected diction. Instead a simple repair of the inversion in line two:
All our truths are now subjects of sea-change
resolves the issue without altering her meaning in any way. Read in the light of the title, the reader is now alerted to the particularity of the diction we are to expect in the remainder of the poem, words like "nacre" and the skillful use of metonymy with the word "moray". By exploiting the diction family of oceanography, Cannon extends her metaphor to take us beneath "tides" and "waves". See how the colors of the sea become a small family of diction in themselves? At last she brings us to the treasure—that message she has always had in mind—the effect of memory and truth buried in the sands.
Notice how, beginning with the last two lines of the first stanza and then throughout the rest of the poem, Cannon takes nouns, turns them into verbs and presents them in the past tense: dune'd, peacocked, ambered, prism'd. This uncommon construction creates another sort of diction family and unifies the poem's second half.
This is a formal poem—the sort of poem where the tone supports esoteric language and atypical grammar. To recognize this at first glance, one only need note the use of capital letters at the beginning of each line. Identifying the poem as such offers perspectives for its revision. I see that it is built in unrhymed couplets, each pair containing a complete idea. The one exception is the final line of the first stanza. I question the line. Does it provide new information? For the first time in this poem I feel as if I am being told as opposed to shown.
Formal poetry, like every other type of poetry, is, quite frankly, subject to fashion. Though this may seem frivolous, a freshening of its presentation will probably help its reception without a single revision to its text. Cannon might take a look at online journals such as Mezzo Cammin, Able Muse, or The Barefoot Muse, and study how lines are broken and stanzas shaped in contemporary formal poetry.
Extending metaphors is perhaps the most essential skill every poet must master. It is poetry's logic, the way it operates. Even more than repetition, rhythm, or rhyme, it is metaphor that distinguishes poetry from every other type of writing. Fortunately, as this month's poets have shown us, using diction families make it easy to do.
Where could a poem like "Concerto of Snow" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
The University of Derby's literary festival sponsors this contest with prizes up to 300 pounds in adult category, or book tokens (gift certificates) in youth categories
Tiferet Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 1
Prizes up to $500 for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from ecumenical journal of spirituality and the arts; enter online only
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 2
Competitive award from national writers' magazine offers $3,000 for best entry across all genres, plus prizes up to $1,000 in several poetry and prose genres
Dancing Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Artists Embassy International offers prizes up to $100 plus opportunity to have your poem presented as an interpretive dance at festival in San Francisco
New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by May 31
Prizes up to NZ$500 for poems in various genres and age categories; open to international entries; no simultaneous submissions
Where could a poem like "Pelagic Zone" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Writers' resource site offers prizes up to $500 and online publication for unpublished poems up to 40 lines
These poems and critique appeared in the March 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Concrete Poetry
Concrete poetry physically arranges words and letters on a page to create an effect that adds meaning to a poem. Explore Michael Garofalo's collection of weblinks to concrete poems and William Delamar's discussion at Werd Trix.
Conscious Style Guide
A project of Karen Yin, the writer/editor behind the popular "AP vs. Chicago" copyeditors' website, Conscious Style Guide is a simple and accessible community resource for anyone curious or serious about conscious language. In one place, you can access style guides covering terminology for various communities and find links to key articles debating usage. Categories include ability/disability, gender, age, appearance, ethnicity, and more.
Consequence Magazine
Consequence is a Massachusetts-based literary magazine, published annually, focusing on the culture of war in America. They accept short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, interviews, and artwork, and offer an annual poetry prize.
Constant Critic
Sophisticated poetry reviews sponsored by Fence magazine. Any site that appreciates Gabriel Gudding's A Defense of Poetry gets our approval. Sign up for the mailing list to be notified of new reviews.
Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute
The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute is an online community dedicated to developing a visual lexicon of consumer ephemera from the 1970s until now. Whether you're adding descriptive details to your historical fiction or looking for the exact vibe for your book cover, you and your design team can benefit from CARI's classification of style differences that we usually only recognize intuitively.
Contemporary American Poetry Archive
This free electronic archive makes out-of-print volumes of poetry available online. Books from commercial, university and small presses are eligible, but not self-published work. Authors present include Pamela Alexander (Yale Series of Younger Poets) and Philip Levine (winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize).
Contemporary Irish Literature Resource Network
The Contemporary Irish Literature Resource Network brings together Irish writers and academics to increase critical study of new Irish literature. Their blog features reviews of notable new books.
Contemporary Native American Poetry Essentials
At the blog of the literary journal Ploughshares, Dean Rader offers a syllabus for becoming educated about the heritage and future of Native American poetry. The essay includes links to significant poets, presses, and anthologies. Rader writes, "Reading work by Native writers and poets is important for a number of reasons, but at the very least we should be reading Native writing because it helps tell the stories of America’s original selves."
Contemporary Poetry Review
Literary news, reviews and interviews help you take the pulse of the art without getting bogged down in jargon or ideology. Good links to work in other journals as well, such as this article on Classical Arabic Poetry.
Contracts for Creatives: A Glossary
At the Alliance of Independent Authors' self-publishing advice site, this guest column by intellectual property lawyer Kathryn Goldman breaks down the meanings of common terms in a publishing contract.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit's email marketing service can help you send out professional-looking author newsletters. Service is free if you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers.
Copper Nickel: A Journal of Art and Literature
Their submission period is August 15-April 15. They also offer an annual fiction and poetry contest. Recent contributors include Sandra Beasley, Noah Eli Gordon, Bob Hicok, Wayne Miller, Margot Schilpp, and G.C. Waldrep. This market seems most appropriate for intermediate to advanced writers.
Copy Write Consultants
Copy Write Consultants assists with market research for shopping your book project to editors and agents. If you have a query letter and synopsis ready to go, they will generate a list of publishing professionals who are seeking work in that category.
Corona Virus WTF Blog
Journalist Jenna Orkin created this forum for sharing our real-time reactions to the 2020 pandemic. Orkin's published works include The Moron's Guide to Global Collapse. She is also the co-founder of the World Trade Center Environmental Organization.
Corporal Works
By Lynn Domina. This now widely published author's debut collection from Four Way Books enters into the mysteries of love, work, and death, through small but pivotal moments between parents and children, husbands and wives. Although it moves like a family history with flashbacks, the scenes have a timeless quality because the relationship of the characters from one poem to the next is left undefined. The woman speaking in first-person could be the author, the daughter of the farming couple with the strained marriage who appear in some of the other poems, or an invented character.
Corpus Christi
I did not wipe my feet dear parson of the midway when
I entered your holy sanctuary
homeless
for there was nothing I could place
in your offering places except tears and blood
borrowed from some other ancient astronaut
that lent them to me when it snowed in the desert
and rained in the sunlight
yes I could not wipe my feet dear deacon
for they were tied down with barbed wire and railroad
nails those giant steel points that kept my feet crossed
at the ankles
and your church members silent
hiding behind that false certainty that i was not welcome
in your holy place
because i was naked
around the waist
and my intestines
were showing at the benediction
song
and I smelled of burnt flesh burnt
by clansmen on a joy ride with the other deacons
gone to barbecue
only the poor could see me there
only the unsaved wept for me there
only the lost could find my way home there
and my head was beaten a thousand million times
blunt and sharpness it did not matter to them
for no one of influence came to my rescue
when i entered your sanctuary today
hoping for some chicken soup and wine
and a sponge to stop the bleeding
nary a shroud to cover my corpse
dripping sadness and outcast
on your expensive carpet i ruined
on your empty cross so sad
this was the perfect place for me perhaps
but I could not audition
there
for i was in the wrong place at the wrong
time
deacon could you spare me a dime?
Copyright 2007 by William "Wild Bill" Taylor
Critique by Jendi Reiter
This month's critique poem, "Corpus Christi" by William "Wild Bill" Taylor, follows the prophetic tradition of scathing critique from within. In the words of Jeremiah, or Jesus, we can find a more searing indictment of religious hypocrisy than anything from the pen of Richard Dawkins. The reformers' anger burns brightest because they love the spiritual truths that their leaders are perverting, and the people who are being led astray.
The sins that Taylor's poem addresses have not changed much from Biblical times: greed, prejudice, unkindness, pride. Elements of dark humor and absurdity mostly rescue the poem from becoming maudlin, though there are some moments of overstatement. This Passion play is littered with prosaic modern inventions (barbed wire, chicken soup, astronauts) that make it uncomfortably real. Christ has been plucked out of his safe stained-glass window. Now he's that strange-smelling guy staggering down the aisle, asking you for a handout. What are you going to do?
The many allusions contained in the title "Corpus Christi" gives us clues to the poem's layers of meaning. In literal terms, it's Latin for "the body of Christ". And it's the body that the Christians in this poem have the most trouble accepting. They can't handle the grossness of the speaker's real wounds. They refuse to see his material needs for food, shelter and medical care. Perhaps he belongs to a different ethnic group (as the reference to "clansmen" would suggest). They may consider him unchaste ("naked/ around the waist") or disapprove of his sexual orientation. Whatever the reasons for their disdain, the central failing of religious community in Taylor's poem is that they don't embody their faith; they treat it like a pretty ritual that sets them apart from the world they should be serving.
In medieval Europe, Corpus Christi was the feast day on which the churches would put on plays re-enacting Biblical scenes. This was the beginning of modern drama. Taylor's poem stages a present-day Passion play, where Christ (concealed in the person of this social outcast) is again persecuted by the Pharisees of our day. Taylor depicts a crucifixion with railroad spikes and barbed wire—a populist image worthy of William Jennings Bryan—and continues the theme with references to the sponge, the wine and the shroud.
That barbed wire, and the line "my head was beaten a thousand million times", reminded me of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay youth who was beaten and tied to a barbed-wire fence and left to die. Later that same year, playwright Terrence McNally premiered his controversial play "Corpus Christi", recasting Christ and his disciples as homosexuals confronting bigotry. I don't know if Taylor intended these references, but nonetheless the poem may resonate in a special way with those whose churches are struggling with this issue.
Taylor makes effective use of sarcasm and exaggeration to help his narrator retain his prophetic edge, instead of becoming merely a sentimental victim. The opening mock-salutation, "dear parson of the midway", conjures up the familiar figure of the huckster-evangelist, the Elmer Gantry, whose preaching is mere carnival patter. The "deacons gone to barbecue" reinforce the same folklore depiction of the greedy, ridiculous preacher. The churchgoers are fussy and snobbish, primarily concerned with their clean carpets and conducting the service in an orderly, tasteful way ("my intestines were showing/at the benediction/song"—what a faux pas).
The incongruous image of the astronaut functions as a messenger from another realm who has come to turn the congregation's assumptions upside-down. The place where "it snowed in the desert/and rained in the sunlight" may be a place where miracles are real, or it may stand for the inversion of the moral order that he perceives in his listeners. Either way, he is coming from a place where all sorts of things happen that don't fit their tidy theories about how the world works.
Because the poem's message, however creatively presented, is not new (more shame to us!), I felt it could have been a little shorter without losing its impact. I might cut the lines from "this was the perfect place" to "wrong time" towards the end of the poem, and possibly the stanza before that ("dripping sadness and outcast"), though I do like its repetitive rhythm. Overall, Taylor has contributed a worthy addition to the literature of protest.
Where could a poem like "Corpus Christi" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: Feb 1
Competitive award from the prestigious Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College offers $2,000 and a reading in Paterson Historic District in NJ; judges say, "Please do not submit poems that imitate Allen Ginsberg's work"
Dylan Days Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 23
Free contest from singer-songwriter Bob Dylan's hometown of Hibbing, MN offers prizes up to $100 for poems and short stories in both open and student categories; enter by email only
Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Highly competitive award of $2,000 from the journal Nimrod
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2007 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution
This extraordinary collection of personal essays by inmates of a maximum-security women's prison in Connecticut was edited by bestselling novelist Wally Lamb, who teaches a writing class there. Poignant, humorous, lively and unique, these narratives challenge us to reform a system that treats the authors as less than human.
CountWordsFree
Traditional word-processing software will count the words in your document, but this functionality is harder to find for PDFs and other electronic document formats. CountWordsFree is an online program that fills this gap.
Cowboy Poetry
Folksy rhymes set in the rural West, great for reading aloud. Site contains large archive of classic and contemporary cowboy poetry, articles on the genre, and news about upcoming poetry festivals and programs.
Cozy Classics
Cozy Classics adapts great literature for beginning readers. Each board book by Jack and Holman Wang condenses a classic novel to 12 child-friendly words, illustrated with images of needle-felted dolls in period costume and scenery. By introducing words in the context of a narrative, these books encourage deeper involvement than the vocabulary-list format of the typical infant primer. Parents who are familiar with the original book can elaborate on the story as they read aloud to their child, or use the words and images as prompts for inventing new stories. Quotations, synopsis, and cast of characters for each book are available on the website. The first titles in the series are 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Moby-Dick'.
Craft Capsule: The End
In this installment in the Craft Capsules essay series at Poets & Writers, Cameron Awkward-Rich, a Lambda Literary Award poetry finalist and professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, talks about his revision process. Any elements of the poem that he can re-create from memory are essential, he has found. "What I like about using memorization as a diagnostic is that it says nothing about the “quality” of a poem, so it discourages thinking about revision as 'fixing.' Instead, what determines whether a poem is finished is the relationship between us, the poem and I."
CRAFT Literary Magazine
CRAFT is an online literary journal exploring the art of fiction. They publish contemporary short stories accompanied by the author's notes on technique. Other features include book reviews, writing exercises, and a summer conference. CRAFT is open to submissions of flash fiction (1,000 words maximum) and short fiction (7,000 words maximum) year-round, and also offers contests on occasion.
Crazy Love
This poetry collection is enlivened by twin passions for social justice and the beauties of the Colorado landscape. In these poems, nature always provides a restorative place of peace and abundance when the wartime news becomes overwhelming. Uschuk is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Cutthroat.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons indexes over 300 million public domain and stock photo images available for licensing for your website, book cover, or marketing materials. Searches can be filtered by the type of permitted use and licensing regime.
Creative Forces: Healing the Invisible Wounds of War
Creative Forces is an interactive online exhibit of writing and art by military service members and veterans who participated in the NEA Military Healing Arts Network. The artists also contributed short video clips discussing their process and the impact of art-making on their recovery from combat trauma.
Creative Writers Opportunities List
Allison Joseph, award-winning poet and moderator of the late Conpo list, is back. Get well-screened notices about literary contests, calls for submissions from literary journals and anthologies, and opportunities such as residencies and fellowships. Listings are posted without comment. Join free. Formerly a Yahoo group, switched to blog format in 2019.
Creative Writing Contests Blog
Frequently updated blog maintained by Oliver Abrahim Khan posts listings of literary contests, fellowships, residencies, and calls for submissions. Site is searchable by category.
Creature Conserve
Creature Conserve is a nonprofit founded in 2015 by zoologist Dr. Lucy Spelman to bring together scientists, artists, and creative writers to create compelling stories about protecting endangered animals and habitats. Read an article about them in the July/August 2021 issue of Poets & Writers. They offer writing scholarships, workshops, and other programs dedicated to collaboration between science and storytelling.
Cricket
"Publishes only the highest quality fiction and classic literature and nonfiction stories on culture, history, science, and the arts. Each 48-page issue includes a story, poetry, or art contest, as well as the signature cast of rambunctious bug characters who offer humorous commentary on the stories."
