The Writing Path Blog

Been thinking about this topic again, ekphrastic art — art about art. In the current issue of Kaleidowhirl (guest-edited by moi) Jeanine Hall Gailey has a poem that continue to intrigue me: “Ode to Jeffrey Koons.” It’s the opening stanza I keep re-reading, pondering how it manages so well to evoke a painting I’m not even familiar with: O commodities traderwith hallucinating toddler soul,you coax monstrous floral puppiesto romp through museums,space-age rabbits to eatsilver carrots…

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Our fickle West Coast weather has done another stunning turn, from snow and hail and lots of rain into sun and Bay Area warmth. Who knows what the next few days will bring, but at least we’re getting the cosmic nod for now! A lot of thin people rushing around … everyone quietly sparkling. I’m still hunting for poems about kindness, generosity and self-sacrifice. Anyone know of such? I did find Naomi Shihab Nye’s stunning…

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I expect to see a number of my East Coast friends shortly. Lots of poetry, music and drama in the week ahead! Now if we can just get the weather to cooperate. It’s been behaving like East Coast weather, with snow on the mountain and fifteen-degrees-below-normal daily highs (“Chill out” — not so nice an expression this week). I’ve been reading Alison Lurie’s nonfiction book Boys and Girls Forever. It sent me back to some…

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I’m very excited to have had three great reviews of my book, Femme au chapeau. The first one, by Terry Brown-Davidson, was published at The Pedestal. She called it “thrilling, one-of-a-kind poetry” and compared it to Wallace Stevens. I guess I thought it was a fluke of the kind the cosmos visits on you right before you take a giant pratfall. Such has been my Chicken-Little upbringing. Then Barbara Crooker wrote a glowing and detailed…

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They’re billed as “fragments”. If someone sent through my old notebooks after I expired and hauled out bits and pieces and called them poems, I’d be haunting them. When it’s a poem, I’ll let you know — that’s my philosophy of writing. Until then, it’s just material. It’s the putting together that makes it. Edgar Allan Poe and the Jukebox has just been released. Publishers Weekly says of it, “This book is as much Alice…

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In the Writers section of The Well, Jane Hirshfield is being interviewed. You can post comments and questions via email to this week-long discussion. *** NEA poetry fellowship applications are due (postmarked) March 1. I must say, they have made the online PDF application form extraordinarily difficult to fill out. I kept trying to use a backspace to delete and being bumped out of my non-saved page. The form won’t let you save it as…

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I started off the year by publicly complaining about not having won anything — not a Pushcart, not nothing — and wondering why it felt so bad, even though I don’t highly think literary contest wins are the be-all-end-all of achievement. Lo and behold, my near-stoicism is put to the test by the news that came in the email today. My short story “Fog: Launch Scrubbed” placed sixth in the annual Writer’s Digest short story…

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Alice Oswald. The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile. River Dart. Am I one of the few who is becoming passionate about this poet’s merit? Why don’t we hear more of her on this side of the pond, I wonder. She’s a poet who memorizes her work as she composes because she’s a professional gardener and spends her days far from pen and paper or computer, and the work shows the kind of compression and depth…

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The subject of recognition having come up — with such wonderful responses! — I find myself thinking about this category of poets. I’ve read some interesting ideas on Silliman’s Blog, and on a women’s poetry listserv I belong to, there’s an ongoing discussion of “Foremothers” — a specific category of neglected poet. The idea intrigues me, as poetry fads roll by like waves on a beach. I’ve been finding my poetry bearings for about the…

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Do you get caught up in this nonsense, too? Another year, I say to myself as the new digit 6 flips into place, and no Pushcart, NEA, Guggenheim — or even a spot in Poetry magazine. I’m adept at making myself crazy as I flip through the pages of Poets & Writers and their announcements of awards won. “I didn’t win that one . . . or that one . . . or even that…

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