Poem of the Week: “A Writer’s Life” by Sherod Santos

The VPR Poem of the Week is Sherod Santos’s “A Writer’s Life,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue (Volume V, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Santos will be presenting his poetry this Thursday, September 30 at 6:30 p.m., in the Christ College Refectory of Mueller Hall at Valparaiso University. This event is free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow the reading.

Sherod Santos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems. A previous collection of poems, The Pilot Star Elegies, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and The New Yorker Book Award. His other honors include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the B.F. Connors Long Poem Prize from Paris Review, and the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Prize. His book of essays on poetry and poetics, A Poetry of Two Minds, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. A book of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry, won the Umhoefer Prize.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent 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.

Sherod Santos Poetry Reading: Valparaiso University, Sept. 30

Santos exhibits in this work how his poetry skillfully blends
elements of landscape with human emotion, employing
evocative images that are surrounded by profound meditative
language, while engaging nature in the manner of the Romantic
tradition to attain a reflection of the self, especially through use
of memory to reconcile the past and the present.

—from “The Fundamental Desire to Sing: Two Decades of Poetry by Sherod Santos” (Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Volume V, Number 1: Fall/Winter 2003-2004 Issue)

I am pleased to note that Sherod Santos will be reading his poetry this Thursday, September 30 at 6:30 p.m., in the Christ College Refectory of Mueller Hall at Valparaiso University. This presentation is part of the fall schedule of symposia by Christ College, Valparaiso University’s honors college. Santos’s appearance is co-sponsored by the Wordfest program and the Valparaiso University Department of English.

Sherod Santos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems. A previous collection of poems, The Pilot Star Elegies, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and The New Yorker Book Award. His other honors include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the B.F. Connors Long Poem Prize from Paris Review, and the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Prize. His book of essays on poetry and poetics, A Poetry of Two Minds, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. A book of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry, won the Umhoefer Prize.

Santos is a past “featured poet” in Valparaiso Poetry Review, and readers are invited to examine the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue of VPR, which contains three of his poems, plus an interview with the poet and an extended commentary on his work.

Perhaps it’s possible that the way poetry can “make something happen” is quite different from the way we’ve come to expect. And perhaps insufficient notice has been taken of this simple but unassailable truth: that however awkward and maladept, however grand and uplifting, it isn’t just a matter of what we sing, or how well we sing, it’s the quite remarkable fact that, in a century like ours, we’ve somehow managed to save from extinction that deep-down, fundamental desire to sing.

—Sherod Santos, “In a Glass, Darkly” from A Poetry of Two Minds

Santos’s most recent book, The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems, was published earlier this year by W.W. Norton.

About The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems

The Intricated Soul gathers poems from five previous books. Sherod Santos’s identity as a poet is based on his courageous resolve to take on the most difficult subjects. Whether writing about love, madness, or genocide, he engages “the most moving truths we can know about our shared humanity” (Washington Post).

"Sherod Santos is a contemporary master of the lyric poem. Here, in The Intricated Soul, we witness the astonishing effects of his powerful, restless poetic imagination in its fullest palette of modes—from miniature portraits to lavish landscapes, from intensely compressed lyrics to extended speculations on suicide and marriage, grieving and loving, residence and erasure. Santos is musician and thinker, architect and bard, theorist and witness, and we are the lucky recipients of the singular, radiant gift of The Intricated Soul, a book for our rejoicing."
—David Baker, author of Never-Ending Birds

"The passing, elusive, just-beyond-earshot adjustments of heart that seem, later on, to have sealed our fate. The earthly traces left by epic savagery. The god-shaped empty space from which the gods have now departed. This and more: and Sherod Santos is their laureate. Contriving the intricate riches of The Intricated Soul is a fierceness worthy of Donne and a tenderness worthy of Herbert."
—Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North

This event is free and open to the public. Copies of books by Sherod Santos will be available for purchase. A reception and book signing will follow the reading.

A Major Achievement of Wallace Stevens: An Elegant Epigraph

“There is an abstract feature to much of Stevens’s poetry that distinguishes it from that of most other poets. Modern lyric poets, for example, usually write about more tangible topics, often using the first-person singular. One thinks of the speaker contrasting his neighbor’s view of walls with his own in Robert Frost’s ‘Mending Wall,’ or the persona’s sudden reversal of perspective toward a rather ugly, lice-infested fish in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish,’ or even the paralyzing insecurity of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, dreading a social encounter (‘In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo’). Each of these poems has a well-defined speaker and a clear setting. Each invites the reader to identify with or relate to the principal human figure in the poem.

“By contrast, Stevens’s poems frequently seem bizarre, theoretical, and detached. What is one to make of lines such as ‘The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream’; or ‘A. A violent order is disorder; and / B. A great disorder is an order’; or ‘There it was, word for word, / The poem that took the place of a mountain’? In addition, Stevens often employs strange characters, such as the mountain-minded Hoon, Professor Eucalyptus, and Canon Aspirin. He seldom uses the first-person form in his poetry, and when he does, it is likely to be in the plural form of ‘we.’ Although he occasionally chooses the second-person ‘you,’ he usually resorts to an anonymous third-person ‘he’ or ‘she,’ or to the even more remote ‘one.’

“How then do we explain Stevens’s subject and elucidate his greatness as a poet? The answer is simple: His major achievement is the expression of the self in all its amplitude and, in fact, teasingly beyond it. In this respect, he writes in the grand tradition of romantic poetry. Ironically his strategies of distancing—his use of odd characters, his opening philosophical gambits, his impersonal voice—serve to objectify and make authentic deeply personal sources of feeling and thought. To borrow Eliot’s phrase, Stevens’s poems become objective correlatives of various states within the reader, not only of heart and mind but also of being.” —From the “Introduction” to Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems (Knopf, 2009), edited by John N. Serio

[“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: “Autumn” by Barry Ballard

The VPR Poem of the Week is Barry Ballard’s “Autumn,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Barry Ballard’s poetry has been published in American Literary Review, Chariton Review, Connecticut Review, Florida Review, Margie, Midwest Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. His collections of poems include Green Tombs to Jupiter (Snail’s Pace Press), A Time to Reinvent (Creative Ash Press), Plowing to the End of the Road (Finishing Line Press), and A Body Speaks Through Fence Lines (Pudding House Press).

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent 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.

VPR "Best of the Net 2010" Nominations

Sundress Publications is again accepting nominations of poems published in online journals (between July 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010) for its annual “Best of the Net” anthology. As I have observed in the past, the editors of Sundress deserve praise for continuing to draw greater recognition to the presence of quality writing online.

In previous posts to “One Poet’s Notes,” I have expressed my high regard for every poem among those listed in the table of contents for each issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in VPR, many of whom I have come to know well and have admired over the years. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge and accept occasions that allow some of VPR’s deserving poets an opportunity to reach a larger audience through special recognition or possible inclusion in an anthology.

Therefore, I have decided once more to adhere to the process I followed when making past nominations, which includes noting the numerous comments (concerning poems appearing in VPR’s pair of recent issues) that I have received in correspondence from readers or submitting poets throughout the past twelve months. In this manner, I obtained a sense of readers’ response to the poetry in the two issues of Volume XI (Fall/Winter 2009-20010 and Spring/Summer 2010), which are eligible for the upcoming 2010 edition of the Sundress “Best of the Net” anthology.

Aided by those observations from VPR’s readers, I offer the editors of Sundress six poems for consideration selected from the two issues in Volume XI of Valparaiso Poetry Review, and I am pleased to announce the following nominations:

Claudia Emerson: “Vacancy”
T.R. Hummer: “Evening Report”
David Kirby: “Joe Louis in Idaho”
Dorianne Laux: “Mine Own Phil Levine”
Brian Turner: “Al'A'imma Bridge”
Charles Wright: “Road Warriors”

I offer my congratulations to the nominated poets. At the same time I express my appreciation to all the contributors whose works have appeared in VPR this last year, as well as in past years. I also hope this post encourages readers to continue communicating their feedback on writings in the journal, commentary I always enjoy receiving. Indeed, I am grateful for all the ongoing support Valparaiso Poetry Review has received from contributors and readers.

New Review of SEEDED LIGHT

I am happy to report that The Adirondack Review has published a review by Lesley Wheeler of my current collection of poems, Seeded Light. The commentary includes a number of observations that I appreciate, but I am especially pleased by the following statement offered by Wheeler: “The liveliness of any art, Byrne implicitly and convincingly argues, depends on union of emotion and intellect, design and accident.” I believe this evaluation gets to the heart of many works included in Seeded Light, as well as much of my poetry published elsewhere.

I am also grateful for Wheeler’s focus on three specific representative poems as presenting “the beauty of equilibrium,” bringing readers’ attention to a balancing of opposing elements or emotions examined throughout the volume, which was an intended aspect of the poems in this collection.

I am thankful for this perceptive look at Seeded Light, and I recommend the review to readers.

“Balloon Launch”

In a few recent posts, I have commented that visitors to One Autism Mom’s Notes, a blog written by my wife Pam, would discover that it presents clear, concise prose observations and commentaries frequently complementary to the matters or details viewed in many of my works of poetry. Indeed, Pam’s observations and perceptive points of view especially seem to mirror those pieces of poetry contained in the new sequence, Autism: A Poem, an ongoing experiment of a work in progress that I have been sharing with readers.

Pam nicely describes in her current blog entry, “Balloons,” a visit to watch hot air balloons that has become a family event every early September during an annual festival in Valparaiso, and this activity has always been something particularly anticipated as a bright moment by our son Alex, who has attended each year since his birth.

As Pam mentions, we most often attend the nighttime balloon glows because of their beauty and because gusty wind currents are unpredictable in northern Indiana, making actual daylight launches less frequent occasions and increasing the possibility of disappointment. However, on the rare days when winds are nearly calm, we’ve witnessed the balloons launch, float over the countryside, diminish in the distance, and disappear beyond the horizon.

Coincidentally, Pam has not been aware that a current poem I have been composing, “Balloon Launch,” also features this pleasant family tradition, reflecting tranquil moments of hope and illumination represented by those brightly colored balloons we’ve sometimes seen soar directly over our heads. Therefore, I invite her and everyone else to read this poem as a companion piece to her splendid prose entry.

Poem of the Week: “Will Come Back” by Susan Elbe

The VPR Poem of the Week is Susan Elbe’s “Will Come Back,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue (Volume X, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press), which received Honorable Mention for the Posner Poetry Book Prize, and Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press), a chapbook. Her poems also have appeared in many journals, including Ascent, Blackbird, Calyx, diode, MARGIE, North American Review, Salt Hill, and Smartish Pace. Among her awards and honors are the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, the Calyx Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, and a Rowland Foundation residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

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.

William Stafford video: "Every War Has Two Losers"

As I observed newspapers and network broadcasts in the last week reporting about the withdrawal of American combat forces from Iraq, I also received information about the release of Every War Has Two Losers, a video concerning William Stafford’s views on war, as well as his poetry, principles, and practice of pacifism, which he maintained even in the difficult time during World War Two, regarded by most of his fellow citizens as a necessary war.

The documentary is directed by Haydn Reiss, who also produced William Stafford & Robert Bly: A Literary Friendship. The film includes commentary by a number of authors, including Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Meade, W.S. Merwin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kim Stafford, and Alice Walker. Narration is supplied by Academy Award-winner Linda Hunt, and actor Peter Coyote lends his marvelously distinctive voice for the words of William Stafford.

A promotional piece for the production comments that Every War Has Two Losers is “based on the journals of William Stafford, a conscientious objector in World War Two and National Book Award winner. Despite being told that war is inevitable, Stafford disagreed. He saw war as a choice—a human choice—and only one of the ways nations can respond to conflict.

“Using Stafford’s eloquent poetry and prose, the film invites the viewer to reflect on their own ideas regarding war and how individual witness can contribute to a more peaceful world.”

Many PBS stations will be airing this documentary in markets throughout the country on Wednesday, September 29, and a schedule of broadcasts is available for reference.


[Readers are also invited to visit another post on “One Poet’s Notes” that contains an essay, “William Stafford: Genius in Camouflage,” written by Jonathan Holden and previously published in Valparaiso Poetry Review.]

Poem of the Week: “‘The Morning America Changed’” by Stanley Plumly

The VPR Poem of the Week is Stanley Plumly’s “‘The Morning America Changed,’” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2002-2003 issue (Volume IV, Number 1) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Stanley Plumly is the author of various books of poetry, essays, and criticism, including Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000. His recent publication is Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. Plumly’s work has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Plumly is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland.

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.

God Bless the Working Man and Woman

All week long making a living.
Life keeps taking. He keeps giving.
Behind the scene, below the grade,
Hardly noticed, but part of everything.

An Alan Jackson song, “Hard Hat and a Hammer,” with some appropriate lyrics to help begin celebration on this Labor Day weekend.

“Insomnia”

As I have mentioned previously, I have 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, “Insomnia.”

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.