"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category

Monday Must Read! Remica Bingham-Risher: What We Ask of Flesh

Remica-Bingham-FInalRemica L. Bingham-Risher earned an MFA from Bennington College, is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Her first book, Conversion (Lotus Press, 2006), won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and was published by Lotus Press. Her second book, What We Ask of Flesh, was published by Etruscan Press in February 2013. She is the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. She is currently finalizing a book of interviews entitled Blood on the Page—African-American Poets from the Black Arts Movement to the Neo-Urban Modernist Movement: Interviews, Essays and Poems.

For more information on her work and upcoming events, please visit: www.remicalbingham.com.

Buy Remica’s beautiful books!

http://www.remicalbingham.com/publications.htm

Reviews and Praise for What We ask of Flesh

“She sees with a brave eye and hears the music of all our languages, validating each. Her story is the human story; her sharing it an act of great generosity.”  – Lucille Clifton

Remica L. Bingham addresses a woman’s sense of body graced with spirituality in its most powerful or most vulnerable moments in the collection…From the opening poem drawn, from the distant past, to the final three elegiac poems, which beautifully anchor the book to the present, Bingham pursues the female body in all its fierce beauty…with eloquence and urgency in a bitter sweet salute to those women who have paved the way for us all.  – Colleen J. McElroy

What We Ask of Flesh, like the flesh itself, is full of honey and fire. It’s impossible not to feel called by these poems, summoned by their rich sound and vatic voice. Remica Bingham-Risher reckons with the big stuff: the complexities of womanhood, the problem of suffering, family, and childhood’s darker aspects. Every poem is uttered with fervor and a timeless sense of gravity and rapture. – Amy Gerstler

http://www.poetsquarterly.com/2013/10/what-we-ask-of-flesh-by-remica-l-bingham.html

http://etruscanpress.tumblr.com/post/81709836371/flesh-contemplates-social-issues-of-womanhood

http://www.rattle.com/what-we-ask-of-flesh-by-remica-l-bingham/

https://mosaicmagazine.org/2013/07/15/what-we-ask-of-flesh-review/

Read More From Remica Online

http://danmurano.com/poetry/remica-l-bingham-risher

http://etruscanpress.tumblr.com/post/100861154416/remica-l-bingham-risher

http://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/february-2011/727-remica-l-bingham-poetry

http://danmurano.com/poetry/remica-l-bingham-risher

http://therumpus.net/author/remica-bingham-risher/

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

 

Category:

Art, Bless the Day, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

Tagged with:

Friday Call for Submissions Love! Sliver of Stone

Friday Call for Submissions Love! 

Sliver of Stone Magazine
DEADLINE: July 15, 2016

Sliver of Stone’s 12th issue is now available online.

A bi-annual, online literary magazine dedicated to the publication of work from both emerging and established poets, writers, and visual artists from all parts of the globe.

Authors featured in this issue include Richard Godwin, Gilbert King, Conor McCreery, Laura McDermott, and Will Viharo. Visual Art by Andrés Pruna and Terry Wright.

Check out past contributors, such as Lynne Barrett, Kim Barnes, John Dufresne, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, Allison Joseph, J. Michael Lennon, Dinty W. Moore, Matthew Sharpe, and many talented others. Past interviews with Paul D. Brazill, Janet Burroway, Edwidge Danticat, Beverly Donofrio, Dean Koontz, K.A. Laity, Susan Orlean, Les Standiford, José Ignacio Valenzuela, and Mark Vonnegut.

They’re now looking for submissions for the 13th issue!
Website: www.sliverofstonemagazine.com

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, Love, nonfiction, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Friday Call for Submissions Love! Sonder Review

The Sonder Review Seeks Submissions of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Art

Submissions accepted year-round.

 

“The Sonder Review is currently seeking submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, and art. We believe in prose that strikes and sparks. Words raw and shuddering and unabashed. Language both spare and piercing, delicately and deliberately crafted. We believe in storytelling that is innovative and daring, precise and oddly angled. Writing which shows us the bizarre and magical and profound; which shows us a self we have never seen and truth we have never known. But above all, we want fresh and ringing voices. Words that must be heard.”

Please visit their website for our submissions guidelines and past issues. www.sonderreview.com

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 Making the Song We Sing

Happy National Poetry Month!

My late husband John Little Bear Eaton loved Stevens, especially this poem. When I read it now, I still hear his beautiful voice reciting it, that deep Georgia drawl. 

The Idea of Order at Key West

by Wallace Stevens

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.   
The water never formed to mind or voice,   
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion   
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,   
That was not ours although we understood,   
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.   
The song and water were not medleyed sound   
Even if what she sang was what she heard,   
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred   
The grinding water and the gasping wind;   
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.   
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.   
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew   
It was the spirit that we sought and knew   
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea   
That rose, or even colored by many waves;   
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,   
However clear, it would have been deep air,   
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound   
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,   
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,   
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped   
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres   
Of sky and sea.
                           It was her voice that made   
The sky acutest at its vanishing.   
She measured to the hour its solitude.   
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,   
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,   
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her   
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,   
Why, when the singing ended and we turned   
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,   
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,   
As the night descended, tilting in the air,   
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,   
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,   
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,   
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,   
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,   
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

 

Make art about being the maker of your own song. 

 

idea of order

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, Gratitude, Love, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Special Call for Submissions Love! Blink-Ink Wants Your Magic!

Yep, magic seems just about right right now 🙂 

Blink-Ink Call for Submissions “Magic Issue”

Deadline: May 15, 2016

 Do you speak Dragon? Have you been known to pull bunnies from within your silk top hat? Ancient magic buried deep, long predating mankind. The Fae with their magics and the enchantment of the glimmer, an uncle who pulls a coin from behind you ear (yet again). From the smallest magic of a kitchen witch or tomten, to the shifting of realms and the haunting of worlds by great powers unseen. In fifty words or so tell your magical story. Please send in the body of an email to: blinkinkinfo@gmail. Up to three pieces, no attachments or bios please.www.blink-ink.org

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 Celebrating, "Between Starshine and Clay"

Happy National Poetry Month! No way we could celebrate poetry without Lucille Clifton!

won’t you celebrate with me

by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
 
Make art about celebration. Or survival. 
 
lucilleclifton

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Monday Must Read! Russell Dillon: Eternal Patrol

 

russell dillonThis week’s Must Read author is Russell Dillon, is co-editor of Big Bell and author of the the full collection Eternal Patrol, and the chapbook, Secret Damage. His work has also been included in collaboratives and pamphlets, including Hail Satan, Group Show Anthology, CS13 Gallery Press, and Local News, in collaboration with poet Jason Morris and artist Jason Grabowski, Push Press. Russell is a poet, writer, editor, and educator who divides his time between San Francisco and New York.

Russell’s Website

http://www.russelldillon.com

Buy Russell’s Books

Eternal Patrol

http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=eternal-patrol

Secret Damage

http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=secretdamage

Praise for Eternal Patrol

If I were a sailor lost at sea, Eternal Patrol would be my lullaby, my dreamed-of rescue. I’d listen to Russell Dillon’s warning: “Living terrified of the sea, I had no way to keep / myself from drowning inland, truncated,” and I’d know that if I weren’t lost at sea, I’d be lost somewhere else instead. These poems ask us, according to myriad adventures, Who are we/you/I/they? But answering this question would be like pinning a butterfly to a museum wall, real morbid. So, in Dillon’s world, we’re shifters—­monster images cast upon ourselves, the empty box living in “somethingtude,” holding congress with the mighty wind.—Alexis Orgera

The difference between being lost and wandering is what you find, and what these elegant, heart-rending, fuckall funny and smart poems find again and again is deep shining truths and their own stellar vitality. Russell Dillon is a perpetually wandering poet with a keen eye for local glories and an ear for strange outbursts of song, a tender guide through the terrors, lurches, and sudden exultations of life.—Dean Young

“remember: / you are not in charge,” writes Russell Dillon in his gorgeous debut collection, where every line sutures the romance of recklessness with the fragility of glass. These poems feel like the deep-pile lining of a secret hideout—feathers, twine, glittering detritus in the tree’s highest, most improbable branch. This is what gets said after the breakdown has diffused, after the rash act has been committed, when the speaker finds himself in the afterglow, almost alone, advancing a kind of perpetual exchange. Eternal Patrol welcomes the reader into the charged dilation between fight and flight—a heavy, soaring, totalizing space that is not the answer to anything, but is thrilling, magnetic, and relentlessly beautiful.—Mary Austin Speaker

From Publisher’s Weekly

This sincere, winding, and attentive debut collection from Dillon explores a strange landscape in which our highly-attuned guide reminds himself, “Sometimes, I forget that you don’t see everything I see.” He invites his readers to shed reservations and engage with the universe at large: “The gods are half the myth,/ the other half is the believing.” With the poems’ urgency subtly underscoring their own necessity, Dillon’s music is part staccato, part crescendo, and totally operatic; but the notion of vocation is described in visceral terms: “You never wanted to sing/ before they wired the mouth shut,/ but after that, the desire was terrible.” We share in Dillon’s discovery of simultaneous beauty and hideousness—perhaps his greatest accomplishment here—and we’re implored to “Remember: the poison and its antidote/ are both synthesized from one mother venom. We can’t deny/ that.” These poems operate in the space of impossibility; we need look no further than his summarization of history’s every love letter: “What is it you’re unable to surrender, and please/ may I have that.” An intolerable vivacity lends the appearance of unquenchability, as if the poems continue to tick even with the book closed, and perhaps it’s best to consider each one representative of “a work in progress, like undressing/ an angel.”

Read More From Russell Dillon Online

http://www.interrupture.com/archives/feb_2011/russell_dillon/

http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/tag/russell-dillon/

http://coldfrontmag.com/the-naming-and-the-codes-things-outside-of-poetry-where-i-most-found-a-poetics-or-standing-up-for-falling-down-by-russell- 

Hear Russell Read

http://www.russelldillon.com/media/

 

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, One Love, poetry, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 What Work Is

Happy National Poetry Month! Another favorite poem from a favorite poet 🙂 And a Prompt at the end!

What Work Is

by Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Make art about what work is. 

Philip-Levine’s-Poetry-of-the-Working-Man

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Gratitude, Love, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Friday Call For Submissions Love! Mainstreet Rag

M. Scott Douglas has been rocking the lit world since 1996, still and always producing beautiful publications filled with really amazing work. Check out their guidelines, but also peruse and purchase in their bookstore. You won’t be disappointed. 

Here’s their current call: 

Publishing Opportunities at Main Street Rag

Deadline: Rolling

 

If you’re a writer looking for opportunities, Main Street Rag Publishing Company is the place. It starts with The Main Street Rag, our quarterly independent literary magazine which features poetry, fiction, reviews, interviews, and more and has been publishing uninterrupted since 1996. We also publish themed anthologies, poetry books and chapbooks, short story collections, novellas, and novels. Visit our website and take a tour of our publishing options. Visit the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore and sample some of the books we’ve already published. Main Street Rag Publishing Company, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001, www.MainStreetRag.com, , 704-573-2516.

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 What We Love

 

Happy National Poetry Month! Another favorite poet, the amazing Amy Tudor. 🙂 ❤ 

What We Love

Amy Tudor
I walk my old dog down a street called Holiday,
past trees whose white bark is trimmed with silver
in the light rain of early Spring. The dog’s small heart
is failing and the vet’s said he shouldn’t be out,
but if we walk slowly he can go four or five squares 
of sidewalk, then I let him stop and rest. 

He puts his nose up into the cool air, the wind ruffling 
his black and white coat and the gray on his ears, 
the wind smoothing over him. When he can’t go 
any further (halfway past that lovely ocre-colored house 
in my neighborhood, the one that’s half-hidden by linden 
and guarded by an iron gate), I carry him against my chest.

One day a black lab stood at a driveway gate
and barked at us as we passed.  My old dog 
looked from beneath half-lidded eyes and didn’t answer, 
and finally the other dog’s owner, an older man,
came out the screen door and called the dog to come back.  
The dog rose from where he sat, a hind leg dragging 
and his right-front hitched as he moved toward the house.  
I watched it go.  The man looked at me holding 
my old dog against my chest.  The man smiled.  
He raised a hand, half-greeting, half-regret.

I should say here that I know the rules I’m breaking.
I was told years ago that poets shouldn’t waste 
their time on trivial  things like dying pets. 
“It’s been done, and done, and done to death,”
a friend once said.  And it has, sure 
as death’s been done and done and done to death. 

So I’ll make a deal with you– forget 
what I’ve said about my dog in my arms, 
his nose in the air, the wind like hands.  And forget 
the man and his black lab that limped up 
those brick back steps.  I won’t write about any of that.  
I’ll write a poem about what we love instead. 

What we love is a night and a house 
wreathed with linden, the dark kept outside 
a circle of light over an iron gate.  It’s fine 
as silver paper or the wind of early Spring.  
What we love is a tree that grows outside our window 
as we grow inside its panes, a small good thing 
we bring home – or that follows us there — one day.  
Then it’s a friend that walks with us, gentle 
and welcome as rain.  It’s what we call to us to come 
when darkness is coming, and it’s what tends us, 
and what we tend. And finally it’s what we carry 
close against us, feeling blessed as we hold it 
and joy for what it gives and has given, 
for the comfort it’s been through hard, heavy days, 
forgiving every burden it’s been, grateful 
for even the grief we must carry when it’s gone, 
that soft, warm, impossible weight.

Make art about what you love.

tenderness

Category:

2016 Prompts, animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, Gratitude, Love, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud