poetry – Page 8 – YAWB – Yet Another Writing Blog

Oliver de la Paz’s collection, Requiem for the Orchard, relies on two organizing threads throughout. Those are the “Requiem” poems, which originally appeared as one extended poem in Guernica Magazine, and the “Self-Portrait” poems which appeared in various places. De la Paz confronts the construction and obfuscation of identity and self through these two threads of interrogation, and it is important that the collection resolves with the two threads together. Continue reading “Reflection on Oliver de la Paz’s Requiem for the Orchard”

November 29, 2011

Reflection on Into These Knots

An Important Announcement

How does one write poetry about grief, or heartache? Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” and “Kaddish” might be one approach, but it is a rare poet who can operate in the verse-libre and still convey the absolute misery without devolving into melodrama. Many poets resort to form, which forces a constraint upon poems. In the case of Ashley Anna McHugh, the constraint of form has allowed her to explore loss in great detail. Continue reading “Reflection on Into These Knots”

November 22, 2011

Reflection on Ching-In Chen’s The Heart’s Traffic

As other second–generation immigrant writers, Chin-In Chen addresses the American experience from a position of both belonging and not-belonging, which is clearly evident in her collection The Heart’s Traffic. The collection crosses embodies boundary-crossing beyond the typical use of plot (though that is present as well), and results in a comingled impression of life from the perspective of an immigrant and her family. As with many poetry collections, the evidence of the collection’s conceptual identity (in this case, border-crossing and existing in multiple realities concurrently) presents initially with the cover of the book. However, the reader will notice quickly that Chen’s collection follows through with these concepts in nearly every poem. Continue reading “Reflection on Ching-In Chen’s The Heart’s Traffic”

November 20, 2011

What Makes for a Successful Literary Submission?

So many submissions come in to the literary magazine I help staff – a relatively new literary magazine – that examining the framework of a “successful submission” becomes a lesson in self-reflection. From my experience working on various literary journals, the submissions that find a way through the editorial process have similar characteristics, even though the journal, the editors, and the submissions may be vastly different. For the most part, this framework can relate across different literary journals with different scopes as well. At the broadest level, I see the framework resting upon awareness. Continue reading “What Makes for a Successful Literary Submission?”

November 6, 2011

A Short Reflection on Laura Kasischke’s “Space, in Chains”

Even the cover reflects the contents of Kasischke’s poetry collection. Both the title – Space, in Chains – and the Rothko abstraction on the front point at the nearly ungraspable poems in between the covers. But the reasoning behind the ungraspable-ness may be the ungraspable subjects and themes Kasischke meditates on through these poems. That is, the poet approaches and interrogates the unknowable, and attempts to enlighten through the medium of abstracted understanding. Continue reading “A Short Reflection on Laura Kasischke’s “Space, in Chains””

September 21, 2011

The Burn of Seeing

It’s a Sisyphean task, taking the responsibility to convey all the movement and humanity that Cynthia Marie Hoffman attempts in Sightseer. There are so many things one must choose to leave out, and it is the left out which compels in her collection. How many collections worth of material was she able to mine from these excursions, to bring back to us in the new history side of the world? And will she find herself written into a corner if she keeps exploiting them, or like a responsible miner, shut the mineshaft down? Despite all of what was left out, the keen gaze Hoffman exerts on her chosen subjects, many of them religious artifacts, asks the reader to step past the gate and down to the below surface as in the poem “On the Western Coast of Anglesey, the Tourists” (59-60) while at the same time requesting the assertion of gaze at those two women on the beach in their hiking boots.

Continue reading “The Burn of Seeing”

September 21, 2011

Reflection Through the Stonecutter’s Window

Indigo Moor’s collection, for an eighty-page group, feels as though he has written several separate collections. All four sections read easily on their own, almost as if a chapbook, and this makes me question the poet’s decision to present them as a cohesive unit, as opposed to collected chapbooks. For example, the section “Daybreak” focuses on long (two to three page), slender poems with some creative indentation, and what must be a variety of ekphrasis, although the dedications and other ephemera do not always provide clarity to this. “Midday,” on the other hand, offers a series of ekphrastic poems in response to one painting, and which offer an equal split between controlled couplets and more free-formed poems as in “Daybreak.” The final section in Moor’s collection, “Dusk,” contains a series of longer poems which border on stream-of-consciousness, though they are more controlled than that. From this wide perspective, as a reader, I am left confused as to the reasoning of these seemingly arbitrary delineations.

Continue reading “Reflection Through the Stonecutter’s Window”

September 20, 2011

Reading the Writing of Love

Kim Addonizio’s What is this Thing Called Love reaches through the looking glass.

If that is not clear enough, where a confessional poet’s version of these poems might harp on the “woe is me” shtick, Addonizio manages to allow the reader to experience these poems as though they come from inside, and not from the page. So, not that we are reading a memoir, but experiencing all the love offered to us. Even reminding the reader in a subtle way of other personal experiences. Sometimes, I can almost imagine being the speaker. Whether that is a fault of Addonizio’s writing, or my own empathy, I do not know; but I have an understanding, a connaissance, that is drawn out by the poems in this collection.

Continue reading “Reading the Writing of Love”

September 7, 2011

A New Draft (an excerpt)

Disclaimer: I don’t normally post poems here, because I feel that they have a much better chance at legitimacy if they live a long revision life and see the light of publication in a real venue, not my own blog… However, because of the nature of this poem and my slight intoxication, I have decided to request feedback over the internets, which are known for their fair and balanced opinions.

Written tonight, this draft is rant-y, and liberal. I post because I want feedback, but I’m not entirely sure about the politics…

**edit: if it seems cut-off, it is. This is the first third (about) of the poem**

See for yourself after the jump.

Continue reading “A New Draft (an excerpt)”

April 9, 2011

On the Control of Movement through Image, pt. 4

Although Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Basho’s haiku, and Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” may be a-logical, each of these is still afforded a movement down the page. These movements are governed by and served by the creation of a networked dialectical space through linked comparisons of image. This space allows for Pound’s “intellectual-emotional complex” to generate intuitive comprehension in a reader at some level.

Continue reading “On the Control of Movement through Image, pt. 4”