Dear Friend,
I hope the pandemic is easing on out of wherever you live. We're doing better in NJ. And I hope you've managed to stay healthy.
Terrapin Books is now open for submissions of full-length poetry manuscripts and will remain open thru February 28. Please note that we publish only poets living in the US. Check our Guidelines and our FAQs. Then send us something wonderful. Please don't wait until the last minute!
Today's newsletter includes information about two reviews for The Strategic Poet, an excerpt from a Craft Talk by Diane Seuss, a model poem and prompt, and a video. In the video the estimable Trish Hopkinson interviews me. We chat about the press, how I put The Strategic Poet together, and how I go about selecting manuscripts. Get a snack and enjoy! It's 25 minutes.
Diane Lockward
Ebook and Print for The Strategic Poet book. Both Available from
Amazon
Reviews for The Strategic Poet
The Strategic Poet has received two wonderful reviews in the past month. Please check them out and feel free to share them.
[Lockward is] teaching us how to let every poem we read teach us the thematic, rhetorical, and musical moves a poet can make.
—Deborah Bacharach
Heavy Feather Review—read the full review here
If you are going to read just one craft book on poetry, The Strategic Poet is the most thorough and easiest to follow that I’ve read.
--Lara Lillibridge
Mom Egg Review—read the full review here
Craft Talk
The Strategic Poet has thirteen sections, each of which begins with a craft talk by a very accomplished poet. Section XII is devoted to the Sonnet. Poet Diane Seuss provided the following wonderful talk for the section. She covers significant ground in her piece.
Bead on a String
—Diane Seuss
A lethal impediment to a writer’s continued evolution is self-imitation. I think of certain musicians who make a fortune singing of poverty and who continue to sing of poverty long after they got rich singing of poverty. It is a difficult balance, holding to what is essential to your nature while challenging yourself to make it new. How does one build a body of work over a lifetime without writing the same poem over and over again? I have some thoughts, based on what has sometimes worked for me. I say sometimes because nothing is guaranteed. A writing life is hopefully long, and it is not particularly comfortable unless you sit yourself into the cozy chair of a particular style, tone, approach, form, and relationship to your subject and your reader, and stay there. But we don’t want to sit in that chair, do we? We want to suffer for our art. Here’s how I recommend optimal suffering for optimal benefit:
Take it in through the senses: To have seen/tasted/smelled/touched is not enough. One must ignite the senses daily, experience the out there with freshness, specificity, and—the hard part—with a degree of objectivity. Experience what? Whatever is in your vicinity. There is the panoply of natural things, arriving, waning, retreating. There is the human-made. Bicycles, buildings, Botticelli. The danger is in naming any of it beautiful (or ugly). Details, inhaled dispassionately, stock your image pond. Images, over time, gain the capacity to vibrate, levitate into metaphor. Metaphor, now and then, if we’re lucky, extends its feelers into archetype.
Life is but a dream: Pay special attention to dreams, portents, psychics, tarot cards, and strange animals that show up in your vicinity. For instance, I woke with a start from a dream of sorts with the words still life emblazoned on the inside of my forehead. I love visual art, but I had no particular connection to still life painting. Still, I took the hint and did some research, which turned into the conceptual frame of my book Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. I was born into a town with a two-headed lamb as a mascot, so I’ve always been open to this sort of thing. If you’re not, if you’re one of those rationalists, just treat the gifts from the other side as randomness exercises. No telling where they will lead you, but you can be certain they will offer you a pathway out of the habitual. . .
[Read the rest of Diane's piece in The Strategic Poet, starting on page 241. And yes, Seuss includes some discussion of formal verse, particularly the sonnet.]
Ebook and Print for The Strategic Poet book. Both Available from
Amazon
Poem and Prompt
To make up for the tease I gave you in the above section, I'm offering you one of the model poems and prompts from Section XII. Poem and prompt in their entirety. Write a sonnet!
Freeblown
No seams at all, not shaped by any mold
or machine, this bottle two hundred years old,
this pale-blue globe of thinnest glass made with
only a pipe, the glassblower’s skill and breath,
and something else, something inside him—yes,
some yearning for light and air, for weightlessness,
desire to hold the afternoon sky, a long
disdain for corners, love of fluid song
as he worked his shift in the factory’s heat,
the burns on his hands, his face lacquered with sweat,
the constant dust of his shoes, the shards that lay
beneath each step, their staccato crack all day,
that dark pitched ceiling, the brick furnaces, those
birds so far and faint through the few high windows.
—Elise Hempel
The poet gives us a nonce sonnet, i.e., one that consists of fourteen lines but does not follow the established rhyme scheme or stanza form of either a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet. Hempel's sonnet consists of three quatrains and one closing couplet and has a rhyme scheme of aabb ccdd eeff gg. The poet does not slavishly use iambic pentameter, but lines are ten to twelve syllables.
The poet meditates on a glass blown bottle and then on the glassblower who made the bottle. The first quatrain includes descriptive details about the bottle. The second quatrain includes images pertaining to the glassblower’s art and artistic desires. In the third quatrain the speaker imagines the glassblower at work in the factory.
The subject of this poem is this bottle two hundred years old, but notice that there is no verb to complete the sentence. Instead we have a string of modifying phrases. The entire poem consists of a single incomplete sentence that’s sustained across the stanzas. This strategy makes the poem flow smoothly and seamlessly from idea to idea and place to place.
*******
Every once in a while it’s good for our souls to undertake a sonnet. For your own sonnet, choose a single handmade object, perhaps one that represents a lost art or one that continues but is rare. You might, for example, choose a piece of hand-crafted lace, a needlepoint tapestry, or a wood carving, but make it a specific object rather than a general one.
You might want to do a bit of research before you begin drafting. As you read, jot down some details for your poem.
Meditate on your object. Jot down some notes, some descriptive details. Then move to thinking about the maker of the object, again jotting down some notes. Then move to the place where you visualize the object having been made. See it, feel it, hear it. Write down those images.
Now draft your material into a sonnet form of your choosing. Strive to get in the rhyme scheme. You may have strict rhymes or near rhymes—or a mixture.
As you revise, strive for ten to twelve syllables per line. Doing so will compel you to tighten your lines and carefully consider word choices.
Work on the single incomplete sentence structure. This strategy will compel your mind to take leaps and find connections.
Interview Series with Terrapin Books
I recently invited my Terrapin poets to interview another Terrapin poet, one whose book had come out during the Pandenic and who had lost out on in-person readings. I'm thrilled to say that 15 of my poets volunteered to do an interview. I asked the poets to limit the questions to just 5. The interviews are posted at my blog, Blogalicious. Here are links to the first two. Pay them a visit; they are well worth the trip.
Yvonne Zipter interviews Heather Swan about her book A Kinship with Ash.
Christine Stewart-Nunez interviews Emily Franklin about her book Tell Me How You Got Here.
Video
Trish Hopkinson interviews me for her Tell Tell video series.
Click the image to watch the video.
New Craft Book
Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers
Reader Comments:
"This is one I will return to again and again for the poems, commentaries, prompts and craft talks. Outstanding." (SF)
"It's a book for every lover and teacher of poetry. I highly recommend it." (GD)
"The latest, and best, of editor Diane Lockward's series of excellent craft books. Carefully organized, clear, and chock full of wonderful example poems, craft essays, & prompts. Any poet can find something inspirational here." (DG)
Click Cover for Amazon
The book is organized into thirteen sections, each devoted to a poetry strategy:
I. Descriptive Details
II. Diction
III. Imagery
IV. Sound Devices
V. Repetition
VI. Figurative Language: Simile
VII. Figurative Language: Metaphor
VIII. Figurative Language: Personification
IX. Figurative Language: Hyperbole
X. Figurative Language: Apostrophe
XI. Syntax
XII. Sonnet
XIII. Odd Forms
114 fabulous poets contributed to this book, poets such as Ellen Bass, Jan Beatty, Diane Seuss, Dean Young, and George Bilgere. The book includes Craft Talks, Model Poems, Commentaries, and Prompts. It is suitable for use by poets working independently, by poets in writing groups, and by teachers in the classroom.
Ebook and Print for The Strategic Poet book. Both Available from
Amazon
Previous Craft Books
Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers
Organized into ten sections, each devoted to a poetic concept. Begins with "Discovering New Material," "Finding the Best Words," "Making Music," "Working with Sentences and Line Breaks," "Crafting Surprise," and "Achieving Tone." Concepts become progressively more sophisticated, moving on to "Dealing with Feelings," "Transforming Your Poems," "Rethinking and Revising," and "Publishing Your Book," covers manuscript organization, book promotion, and presentation of a good public reading. Includes thirty brief craft essays, each followed by a model poem, analysis of the poem's craft, and a prompt based on the poem. Ten recyclable bonus prompts and Ten Top Tips lists.
(click cover for Amazon)
Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers
All ten sections include three craft tips, each provided by an experienced, accomplished poet. Each of these thirty craft tips is followed by a Model poem and a Prompt based on the poem. Each model poem is used as a mentor, again expressing the underlying philosophy of the first book that the best teacher of poetry is a good poem. Each section includes a Poet on the Poem Q&A about the craft elements in one of the featured poet's poems. Each section concludes with a Bonus Prompt, each of which provides a stimulus on those days when you just can't get your engine started.
(click cover for Amazon)
Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets & Writers
A poetry tutorial to inform and inspire poets. Includes model poems and prompts, writing tips, and interviews contributed by 56 of our nation’s finest poets, including 13 former and current state Poets Laureate. An additional 45 accomplished poets contributed sample poems inspired by the prompts in this book. Ideal for use in the classroom, this book has been adopted by colleges and universities across the country. It is equally ideal for individual use at home or for group use in workshops. Guaranteed to break through any writer's block.This revised edition contains a full Table of Contents and an Index.
(click cover for Amazon)
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