19 March 2020
The jonquils in my yard have emerged, blooming like glory. I was struck while outside this morning, this first day of spring, with a kind of surreal awe at the beautiful constancy of this mother planet.
Even as we’re surrounded with fear or panic, which as a species we’ve seen again and again over millennia–famine, war, plague 😦 — even in the darkest days, there is the arrival of beauty.
Make art about what’s emerging.
18 March 2020
Nourish the body. Feed the soul.
Thinking on all the things that fed me these last few days. Yes, the meals shared with my son, but also my brother-man Eric in West Virginia, with his guitar, serenading the world with an Irish song, the silly memes my sister Adaire and I sent back and forth to each other, my young alum Katlyn and her friend selflessly working to collect donations for families and kids in need in quarantine, my current students excitedly discussing their short stories and poems in our online class, my friend Brigid writing a new comic who shared the pages with me, the sound of my friend Lynne’s laughter through the phone, my old dog sleeping on his purple pillow, my silly cat Moco biting my elbow because I was ignoring him, the humming of the bees across the burgeoning green in my yard, the multitude of good people out there doing good work teaching, sharing, cooking, donating–coping, all of them, in beautiful, humane, and community-minded ways.
So much, in the midst of this fear, to feed the soul.
Make art about one thing recently that fed your soul.
17 March 2020
Often we’re too busy to notice the view right in front of us. One of my students, when I asked about what they missed being away from home, softly described the view of the city at night from his bedroom window in what he called ‘the projects where I live.’
“At night,” he said, “the lights go on forever, and every light, I think, is a soul.”
Make art about seeing the world through your window.
16 March 2020
This is an in-class exercise I do with my Baby Poets, an attempt to get them to understand the emotional and emblematic power of every day objects.
Make art about one object that represents “possibility” for you.
We’re so excited and honored to share with you the amazing work in K’in, Issue 4!
Helen Vitoria is an award winning poet and an artist living in Pennsylvania. Her poems and photographs appear widely online and in print. She is the author of nine poetry chapbooks, a poetry pamphlet, a full length poetry collection and a collaborative ekphrastic poetry/photography collection. Her poems have been nominated thrice for Best New Poets & several Pushcart Prizes.
Corn Exchange (Wild Chestnut Press. 2013), her first full length collection of poetry won the 2014 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) SILVER MEDAL for Poetry, the 2014 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Poetry, an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Book Award, in addition to having placed as a finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award & the 2014 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, and recently been nominated for the 2015 Tufts Discovery Award.
Cover photo : The Cornfield by Kathy Harcom , http://www.kathyharcom.com
Praise for Corn Exchange
“Invoking Anne Sexton’s brand of highly personal, confessional verse, Vitoria’s tragically intimate collection fearlessly attempts to reconcile ideas such as fear, suicide, family, commitment, pornography, memory, and experience through the binary elements of sight and touch. Vitoria shows a clear understanding of the safety existing in the eyes, in the act of seeing and observing, and in its inherent physical distance that the hands cannot and do not carry. Not until there exists a trust able to reconcile that physical distance and, as Vitoria explains, “spread the body, [using] thumb and palm and say: here, be happy.”– Hoffer Award judges had to say to the US Review of Books
Corn Exchange has been taught in MFA courses in Umbria, Italy, and her poem, We Were Horses, taught in various Creative Writing MFA classes throughout the US.
She is the Founding Editor & Editor in Chief of the award winning, Thrush Poetry Journal & Thrush Press. She also served as a Poetry Editor for Poets & Artists Magazine. She teaches a free monthly poetry workshop in her community and will be teaching poetry to inmates in Pennsylvania Corrections Facilities. She is working on her second full length collection of poetry, NEBRASKA. Visit her listing on Poets & Writers here.
8 September 2019
Make art about what frees you, about what makes you feel most free.
27 August 2019
“Not all who wander are lost.”–Tolkien
Make art about where you wandered.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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