Review: Let the Body Beg by Tara Shea Burke

Disclaimer: I know the poet.

On to the important bit:

I’m always hungry. My dreams show blood

– from “Imagined Farms”

These poems, as the title of the collection telegraphs, are about hunger. Real, raw, human hunger felt deep in the chest and body. This is not the hunger of “oh, I’m a little late for lunch,” or “where’s the waiter with that food.” This is the hunger of first heartbreak, of a fist nailing the solar plexus sweet like a perfect tennis swing. This is the hunger of loneliness and desire, hunger that is hard to hear and beautiful to hold.

In the same poem quoted above, Burke writes, “The dreams are open wounds, talking / heads.” This is a protest poem, and though it protests about the self, it protests against ourselves as a nation as well. The factory farms and the endless wars in counterpoint to each other: in profit through blood. And, still, the love and the hunger. This is also, at it’s heart, a love poem. It’s about a lover who is

…a cool

clean cucumber vine…

and I have let her wrap vines around my hungry

heart

and a yearning to both grow and keep safe the lover. You’ll have to read the poem to get more, though.

This is a short volume, 25 pages and 16 poems, but each and every entry pulls it’s weighty hunger into the forefront. It is difficult to select just a few examples.

“The Hungry Girls of America” is dense with metaphor and “starving, then eating, then starving, then eating,” and succeeds by being about more than an individual, more than complaint, by being plain-spoken and forceful and honest. This might be the anthem for every one of us who feels like they can’t get ahead.

“The Harness” has long been one of my favorite poems by Burke. It has evolved in my acquaintance, and here it presents a tenderness and wholeness in a relationship. That ever-present hunger is softened here, attenuated. 

I don’t want to give away too many of these poems. As a whole, you should know that this is a forceful collection that is very clearly feminist and queer in its sensibilities. It connects though. As a reader, you will be satisfied with this collection, but it will leave you feeling a hunger. For more of Burke’s poetry, for human connection, and for awareness to the world around you. Be open to that hunger.

You can get a copy at ELJ Publications: http://eljpublications.com/available-titles/let-the-body-beg/

Results of Our Poll about Literary Magazines, Part 1

Literary Magazine Poll Results
Poll Results

About ten days ago, I put this poll up on the blog here. While not a great number of responses, I am pleased with the number of people who took the minute or so to offer their opinions on the state of contemporary literary magazines.

One of the things I wrote in that original post was

We know that there are more literary magazines than there are readers, but not as many as there are writers,

and this is a problem. Another problem writers come across is that there is little payment available out there for accepted works. That is a discussion outside of this one.

Continue reading “Results of Our Poll about Literary Magazines, Part 1”

Style? No Style? What’s Wrong with Letters?

Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know.

So, interesting thoughts in this article over at The New York Review of Books, written by Tim Parks.

Something to read, reread, ponder, think about, reread, and then maybe write on…

Revision and Creation: 1 – Close Attention pt. 1

The initial post introducing the ideas here occurred over on Poetry Thesis Musings, a blog about it being self-defining. Go ahead and take a minute to read that; it’s short, I promise.

Now that you’ve read the initial post, walk along this exploration with me. The beginning of this journey is about the act of close attention. As just about any poet will tell you, close attention is one of the primary aspects of writing poetry. Another way to say this is that poems do not unveil themselves without your hard work of paying attention to the world around you.

But what does this have to do with revision?

Good question, you! Where ecstatic creation in the face of the results of close attention (a good example is found among the Beat Poets) may result in much earnest poetry–and even very good poetry–the act of revision asks for close attention to the poem, the poet, and the subject of the poem. Revision forces the poet to decide, to act, to reflect, to unveil, and to question.

Continue reading “Revision and Creation: 1 – Close Attention pt. 1”

Literary Magazines and Your Ideas – Poll

Hi Beautiful Readers! As writers, literary hangers-on, and readers, we all know that the esteemed literary magazine is the pillar, the bulwark, of the literary scene. We know that there are more literary magazines than there are readers, but not as many as there are writers. We know that literary magazines have problems and solutions in this day and age of digital accessibility.

I want to run a quick poll about your ideas of the current Lit Mag landscape. I have my own opinions, and I will be posting on that when this poll is over in a week.

Thanks for participating!

Ha Ha! I’m Back!

Over the past year, most of my posts appeared either here or here. But now, I think, it is time to return to Poetic Idealism.

I would like to revisit the purpose behind Poetic Idealism. As I write on the about page,

 criticism, reflection, and etc. about reading and writing poetry; sometimes social commentary creeps in; and every once in a while, I’ll post a (or part of a) poem here

and I think that covers the major purposes. Maybe I’ll begin posting rants here…

Continue reading “Ha Ha! I’m Back!”

Faith and Writing – pt. 1

Passion for truth is an idea with more than one face. It includes the determination to look closely and long, to be unsatisfied with the secondhand and assumption. It includes the emotions and the body…the writer’s whole being is the instrument of perception, not only the mind…only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality—the fear of self-revelation.
Jane Hirshfield, “The Question of Originality,” Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry.

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.

…one reason a poet [writes is] to become a better person…a lifetime of writing [is] a slow, accumulative way of accepting one’s life as valid.
Richard Hugo, “Statements of Faith,” The Triggering Town.

The above statements lead me to this thought: the act of writing—in my case poems, but writing creatively in general—is an act of faith, and not necessarily in the religious sense. At some point during the last three years, I made the transition from thinking of myself as wanting to be a poet to having faith that I am into the beginning of this journey of being a poet. Continue reading “Faith and Writing – pt. 1”