An Introduction on "Social Media Day"

Today (June 30) is celebrated internationally as “Social Media Day,” designed for recognizing the various venues (blogs, facebook, twitter, etc.) established on the Internet or other web-based technologies that have contributed to flourishing cyber communities. The occasion is also dedicated to spreading word about online sites that have opened communication for all, democratizing sources for information or entertainment. As the organizers calling for this official day have stated: “Social media has changed our lives. It has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we connect with one another.”

Consequently, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to add another connection and to introduce a new blog recently created by my wife Pam. Visitors will discover One Autism Mom’s Notes presents prose observations and commentaries that are complementary to the topics or details viewed in many of my works of poetry, especially those contained in the new sequence, Autism: A Poem, an ongoing experiment of a work in progress, which I have been sharing with readers in a number of recent posts.

Indeed, the current entry at Pam’s blog, “Storing” serves as an excellent example of the associations one might find between her engaging prose and some of the subject matter included among the poetry in Autism: A Poem, particularly those pieces describing the importance of memory and reading, such as “The Art of Memory,” “Night Terrors,” “Hyperlexia,” or others.

Although Pam’s appealing blog is an independent endeavor in prose designed for somewhat different purposes than my poems, I am sure readers will discover the informal and informative nature of One Autism Mom’s Notes often offers brief narratives filled with specifics about a variety of situations or conditions in which one might also indirectly witness explanations, even explications, for some of the poetry in my series of pieces developed to examine issues involving autism or family.

In addition, Pam’s vast knowledge and understanding of scholarship (as well as medical or nutritional practices) regarding autism, combined with her obvious concern and care as a mother, are displayed in the blog’s accessible entries, which I believe visitors will deem entertaining and enlightening. Therefore, I am pleased to welcome One Autism Mom’s Notes to the community of bloggers, and I am proud to recommend it to readers as a new site to explore on this “Social Media Day.”

Poem of the Week: "Pentecost: 30 June 1993" by John Knox

The VPR Poem of the Week is John Knox’s “Pentecost: 30 June 1993,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

In addition to writing poetry, John Knox has authored a number of books about meteorology. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and formerly taught meteorology at Valparaiso University. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Geography Department at the University of Georgia.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an exceptional work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

"Basketball with Alex"

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently created a separate blog site as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures. The contents represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poem tentatively and simply titled Autism.

The poem will grow as sections are added. The individual pieces are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

I have now posted a new section, “Basketball with Alex.”

Readers are asked to regard Autism as a work in progress, a partial draft rather than a finished product (even if a few selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various revisions—edits, emendations, or expansion—may be made to the posts at any time in the future.

Gregory Orr on Romanticism and the Personal Lyric

AN ELEGANT EPIGRAPH: GREGORY ORR

“Inspired by Rousseau, the Romantics took lyric back from the Overculture. Returning it to its ancient and honorable identity as personal lyric, they used it according to its primordial function of ordering individual lives around emotionally charged experiences and restabilizing the self in a chaotic time.

“It is in the context of the personal lyric and its subset, the transformative lyric, that certain figures emerge; poets who, coping with their own crises and traumas, seized the opportunity to create new selves and new meanings through the making of poems. These poets became poet-heroes by disclosing visionary possibilities that went far beyond their own private situations and revealed hopes and meanings that were broadly useful to others, both contemporaries and those of us who came after. They fulfilled Keats’s dream of being ‘physician to all men.’ Of course, the term ‘all men’ is hyperbolic and, to our postfeminist ears, restrictively sexist. It would be more accurate and thus more complimentary to say that these visionary poets were physicians to broad spectrums of the population who identified with their sense of trauma and confusion and their need for self-transformation.

“Romanticism and its aftermath gave us hero after hero of spiritual renewal through the personal lyric.”—Gregory Orr

—From Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr (University of Georgia Press, 2002)

Visitors are also invited to read my essay review of Gregory Orr, “The Transformative Lyric: Gregory Orr’s The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, Poetry as Survival, and The Blessing,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2003 issue: Volume IV, Number 2 of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

Poem of the Week: "At Stes. Maries de la Mer, Summer 1977" by Margaret Perry

The VPR Poem of the Week is Margaret Perry’s “At Stes. Maries de la Mer, Summer 1977,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue (Volume II, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Margaret Perry’s poetry and short stories have appeared in many journals, including Arts Alive, Forum, Obsidian II, Panache, Phylon, Short Story International, and Willow Review. Her books include A Bio-Bibliography of Countee P. Cullen, 1903-1946, Silence of the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, and The Short Fiction of Rudolph Fisher, all published by Greenwood Press. She has taught Afro-American Literature at the University of Rochester and worked as a librarian in the New York Public Library, as well as for the U.S. Army at West Point. She retired as director of Valparaiso University's Moellering Library in 1993.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

"The Art of Memory"

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently created a separate blog site as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures. The contents represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poem tentatively and simply titled Autism.

The poem will grow as sections are added. The individual pieces are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

I have now posted a new section, “The Art of Memory.”

Readers are asked to regard Autism as a work in progress, a partial draft rather than a finished product (even if a few selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various revisions—edits, emendations, or expansion—may be made to the posts at any time in the future.

Poem for Father's Day

On this Father’s Day I am once again reminded of various scenes shared with my father that continue as images in my mind and frequently are included among the vivid reflections filling lines of my poems. Indeed, one of my volumes of poetry, Tidal Air, presents a book-length poem in the form of a diptych with each half containing a dozen sections about father-son relationships: the first part, “Whole Notes and Half Tones” (described as “Songs for My Son”), regards my relationship with my son beginning with his birth; the second portion, “Cormorants in Morning Light” (labeled “Memoirs for My Father”), presents some significant moments associated with specific elegiac recollections of my father that have arisen since his death.

As a sample from that segment, I offer today “Winter Coast,” the ninth piece of the twelve cantos concerning my father.

WINTER COAST

In summer this coarse stretch of beach is covered
. . . . . by sun-bleached stones and shells shimmering

like ice shavings beneath a noonday glare,
. . . . . but today only a few odd boulders show ghostlike

through snowfall, and a lone pin oak, its bare
. . . . . branches stretching beside the water’s edge,

now merely seems no more than an etching
. . . . . against this stale gray sky. Despite the low light

of winter, I am still able to notice the ocean’s
. . . . . slow, subtle motion—rocking back and forth

the way a hammock may sway under influence
. . . . . of warm August winds—and I know how quickly

that nightly high tide can reclaim some more
. . . . . of this shore before me. Throughout the years,

I’ve returned, as if also brought back by the tidal
. . . . . pull of a full moon, to this place where I would

walk with my father when he explained causes
. . . . . for that coastal erosion we saw all around us:

large blocks of rocks tumbling from sea
. . . . . cliffs forming this terrace platform underwater,

and the shoreline current drifting ceaselessly
. . . . . toward the north, lifting with it what it could.

Often, I’ve thought about the doubt I harbored
. . . . . those days when he spoke of the cost of such

a loss. Yet, here, in the din of this oceanside
. . . . . murmur—as I again can hear his soft voice

which had been weakened by age and, at times,
. . . . . was nearly drowned out by the sea’s persistent

pulse—I’ve come to understand those words.
. . . . . Each evening, whether under dense cloud cover

or the lacework of constellations, when
. . . . . even the least bits of sediment and other debris

have been swept away in this sea wash—
. . . . . which I believe is as important as those forces

of ancient glaciers against the earth’s surface
. . . . . and the gradual scarring begun by the shift

of slow-moving masses over uneven ground—
. . . . . a little less remains of the world we once knew.

. . . . . —Edward Byrne

For those interested in reading the complete sequence of poetry in Tidal Air, I invite you to check the sidebar about ordering a copy in the "Summer Reading Sale.”

In addition, since this weekend coincides with the U.S. Open Golf Championship, scheduled every year for the final round to fall on Father’s Day, watching the event once again evokes other more pleasant memories of those many fine times shared with my father on a golf course. Indeed, in a previous post at “One Poet’s Notes”—titled “Golfing with My Father” after a poem by W.D. Ehrhart that appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review and is reprinted in the article—I have written in prose about assorted impressions of my father that are tied to the sport, and I recommend readers revisit that commentary as well.

Hila Ratzabi Review: BEHIND MY EYES by Li-Young Lee

In the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review (Spring/Summer 2010: Volume XI, Number 2) Hila Ratzabi reviews Li-Young Lee’s latest collection of poetry, Behind My Eyes.


BAREFOOT VOICE: THE INSECURITY OF LANGUAGE IN LI-YOUNG LEE’S BEHIND MY EYES


Li-Young Lee’s lustrous fourth book of poetry, Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2009), flickers, like fading lamplight, at the limits of language. The spiritual center of the book hinges on two axes: the horizontal (the body’s experience of, and in, time) and the vertical (the mind’s unbounded access to the realm of dream and, therefore, timelessness). At the point of their convergence, language attempts to give voice to the impossible duality of being. Lee is not only one of our best contemporary poets of the sacred; he is an authentic mystic, in the classical sense of the mystic who uses language to access a realm beyond language. Lee does not merely peer at the edge of the unknown; he enters it, as though it were a familiar room in a childhood home, and returns to report. Confounding dichotomy, Lee calls into question the division between beginning/end, birth/death, past/future, man/woman, body/mind. Borders melt; language opens. These poems approach the very edge of the ineffable, that which cannot be articulated.

Though the speaker in one poem claims, aphoristically, “Thinking is good. / But living is better,” these are thinking poems, and the preceding lines serve more as a reminder than a statement of fact. Surreal, dreamlike, anti-logical, the poems in this collection are suspicious of flesh, and seem to spring out of a disembodied mind. In “Immigrant Blues,” the speaker, “confused about the flesh and the soul,” in conversation with his lover over the phone, asks: “Am I inside you?” This confusion, and subsequent conflation of body/soul, presumes that speaking to the lover is synonymous with physical intimacy.

Dialogue between lovers dramatizes the constraints of speaking. A “he said/she said” motif drives many of the poems, deeply embedded in a Lacanian framework, in which gender difference symbolizes the tension between (male) speech and (female) speechlessness. “Sweet Peace in Time” enacts this difficultly. The male, obsessed with language’s precariousness, continually asks the female: “What if by … you mean … but I mean …” The dialogue reads like two simultaneous monologues in which the lovers talk at each other, unable to find a common language. The male does not trust language, stating: “To speak is to err. / Words name nothing. / There are no words,” and later, “We should give up / trying to speak or to be understood. / It’s too late in the world for dialogue.” Yet the female never questions language; she declares faithfully: “Home, speech is the living purchase / of our nights and days.” Speech, to her, relates to home and time—to being at peace with the physical world. The male, on the other hand, emphasizes the instability of speech. It reminds him of the power of death, characterized as a muting force: “Death creates a blind spot,” i.e., death instigates a temporary forgetting which negates the requirement to speak and muffles the voice that in life is bound to the body. Only in death will the man be freed from having to speak. Then, in the most Lacanian formulation in the book, the male states: “Man is a secret, blind to himself. / And Woman … Woman is …” The man associates Woman with pure being; this explains why she has no need, like the man does, to question language. She speaks out of true self-knowledge of her physicality; while the man, “blind to himself,” can never get past his awareness of death, and consequentially, focuses on the faultiness of speech.

Enamored with the lure of language—its tease of meaning—the speaker in Lee’s poems sees language everywhere. This rapture with words figures most prominently in “Lake Effect,” where nature is equated with language. The “he said/she said” refrain from earlier poems morphs into the more personal “She said/I said.” The male and female speakers pile on metaphors: “She said ‘The lake is like an open book, / day like the steady gaze of a reader.’ // I said, ‘The day is a book we open between us, / the lake a sentence we read together …’ ” The male flips the female’s metaphors (transferring “book” from “lake” to “day”), extending and unfolding meaning. “Book” later becomes “voice,” and “The lake keeps changing its mind” (the lake a stand-in for the speaker). This changing mind ripples throughout the poem like shifting light on water: everything is a potential metaphor for something else; meaning is never stable.

The tenuousness of communication embodied by male/female dialogue also comes into play in Lee’s depiction of mother/father figures. His formulation of an origin myth underlies his conception of the human being’s place in the world. Central to Lee’s personal genesis story, his portrayal of mother/father archetypes picks up on a trope from his previous collection, Book of My Nights (2001). The parental figures in Book of My Nights take on primordial significance, and they reappear in Behind My Eyes as part of a group of thickly layered symbols and metaphors of the speaker’s inner life. Like the male/female lovers, the parents signify a breakdown in meaning . . .


[Visitors are invited to read the rest of Hila Ratzabi’s review of Behind My Eyes and urged to examine all of the works in the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

Poem of the Week: "On Three Hats of My Father's" by Donald Stinson

The VPR Poem of the Week is Donald Stinson’s “On Three Hats of My Father’s,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2004-2005 issue (Volume VI, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Donald Stinson has had poems published in Briar Cliff Review, Loonfeather, Southwestern American Literature, and Verve. He teaches writing, literature, and humanities at Northern Oklahoma College.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

For My Sister . . .

My sister Barbara celebrates her birthday today; therefore, I offer her love and all my best wishes for a great day! In addition, I thought this would be an appropriate time to post a poem I wrote for her last year, “For My Sister After Her Surgery.” I’m pleased to note the poem was published earlier this spring in Tidal Basin Review, and it also will appear in my forthcoming collection of poetry, Tinted Distances, which is scheduled for release in 2011.

FOR MY SISTER AFTER HER SURGERY

. . . . . —for Barbara


Late May morning in Indiana,
. . . . . muted music plays on a neighbor’s

radio, birds murmur nearby, fill
. . . . . a willow at the edge of the meadow.

Somewhere from vast farmland
. . . . . beyond, corridors of cloud dust drift

and dissipate in a tractor’s wake.
. . . . . We await afternoon’s promised rain;

yet, for now, nothing but a flat
. . . . . backdrop of blue. Even the pair of tall

evergreens beside the yard barn
. . . . . remain still. Their stiff thin shadows

begin to recede into themselves,
. . . . . withdrawing under a bright windless

sky, all dark giving way to light
. . . . . on this day, as if driven into exile.

AUTISM: An Experiment of Poetry Composition

In recent weeks, Nic Sebastian has been publishing at her blog, Very Like a Whale, a series of intriguing interviews with poets and editors about the relationship contemporary authors have with technology in their “capacity as a poet.” Specifically, Sebastian has asked about how the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, websites, iPad, iPod, YouTube, or podcasts are being employed by poets.

As I examined the current informative interview with editor and poet Cati Porter that was posted June 9, I began to consider the possibility of opening online the process for composing and organizing one of my works in progress. At any given time, my office desk displays a number of folders containing typescript pages of ongoing projects in various stages of production: a few manuscripts of new poetry, essays of literary criticism, a gathering of published memoirs, paperwork for an anthology of poems, a selection of film commentaries, etc.

Consequently, I have decided to start an experiment with the material from one folder which holds numerous pieces linked as a sequence of poetry concerning the topic of autism. I have initiated a blog where segments from this work in progress will be available for visitors to read and, if they wish, to offer responses or suggestions. As I state in the introductory project description near the top of the blog:

This blog has been created as an open experiment of poetry composition, perhaps a glimpse at an emerging manuscript as it matures.

I have placed below some of the pages from an isolated venture in one of my typescript loose-leaf folders. The contents here represent portions of an ongoing personal project with a particularly narrow focus intended to eventually develop toward a book-length poem tentatively and simply titled Autism.

The poem will grow as new sections are added. The individual posts are designed so that they may be viewed as independent items; however, I have consciously carried themes, images, and language through the extended sequence with the hope that connectivity and continuity will be preserved among numerous sections of the long poem.

Readers are asked to regard this piece as a work in progress, a partial draft rather than a finished product (even if a few selected segments previously may have appeared in print), and I request everyone realize various revisions—edits, emendations, or expansion—may be made to the posts at any time in the future.

Therefore, I invite visitors to become followers of the blog by clicking the link in the sidebar, as well as to follow on Twitter for updates. Indeed, a significant part of this experiment involves a certain amount of transparency that includes the possibility for readers to communicate responses and offer constructive suggestions, both of which I welcome through post comments or e-mail messages.

Also, I advise that the order of the numbered sections is not meant to be at all definitive since the long poem’s sequence will certainly be reorganized at some point as the work in this temporary format starts to resemble a completed manuscript and begins to assume a more formal shape.

I invite anyone interested to visit the blog, and I encourage readers to sign on as followers in order to chart the development of this work in progress.

An Elegant Epigraph: Randall Jarrell on Qualities of a Critic

“Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares—by a being, not a brain. But they are read just so, judged just so; and some great lack in human qualities is as fatal to the critic as it is to the novelist. Someone asked Eliot about critical method, and he replied: ‘The only method is to be very intelligent.’ And this is of course only a beginning: there have been many very intelligent people, but few good critics—far fewer than there have been good artists, as any history of the arts will tell you. ‘Principles’ or ‘standards’ of excellence are either specifically harmful or generally useless; the critic has nothing to go by except his experience as a human being and a reader, and is the personification of empiricism. A Greek geometer said that there is no royal road to geometry—there is no royal, or systematic, or impersonal, or rational, or safe, or sure road to criticism. Most people understand that a poet is a good poet because he does well some of the time; this is true of critics—if we are critics we can see this right away for everybody except ourselves, and everybody except ourselves can see it right away about us.” —Randall Jarrell

—From “The Age of Criticism” in Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell (Vintage, 1959)

[“An Elegant Epigraph” serves as the recurring title for a continuing series of posts with entries containing brief but engaging, eloquent, and elegant excerpts of prose commentary introducing subjects particularly appropriate to discussion of literature, creative writing, or other relevant matters addressing complementary forms of art and music. These apposite extracts usually concern topics specifically relating to poetry or poetics. Each piece is accompanied by a recommendation that readers seek out the original publication to obtain further information and to become familiar with the complete context in which the chosen quotation appeared as well as other views presented by its author.]

Poem of the Week: "Cold June" by Joel Long

The VPR Poem of the Week is Joel Long’s “Cold June,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 issue (Volume V, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Joel Long’s book, Winged Insects, was the winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 1999. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, including Bellingham Review, Cape Rock, Chattahoochee Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Seattle Review, Sonora Review, Sou’wester, Willow Springs, and Wisconsin Review. His poems also have been anthologized in American Poetry: The Next Generation, Essential Love, and Fresh Water.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

New Poem in RIO GRANDE REVIEW

I am pleased to note that one of my new poems, “Autism in Autumn,” is included among the various works released in the Spring 2010 issue (Number 35) of Rio Grande Review, published by the University of Texas, El Paso.

The editors for this literary journal describe it as one devoted to publishing “quality work and daring texts that experiment with form. We are striving to forge an identity as a cutting edge review that exists as space for diverse voices: writers who may be multilingual, cross-genre, or experimenting with narrative and poetic form.” The current issue also is dedicated to works focusing upon the themes of obsession and aversion.

Readers are invited to visit the home page for Rio Grande Review and to examine excerpts from the poetry or fiction within the latest issue.

Poem of the Week: "Spring Loaded" by James Cervantes

The VPR Poem of the Week is James Cervantes’s “Spring Loaded,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 1999-2000 issue (Volume I, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

James Cervantes has had work in many literary journals. He is also the author of various collections of poetry, including Temporary Meaning (Hamilton Stone Editions), Changing the Subject (Red Hen Press), The Fires in Oil Drums (San Pedro Press), The Year Is Approaching Snow (W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons), and The Headlong Future (New Rivers Press), which won The Capricorn Poetry Prize. Cervantes is the editor of Salt River Review.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.