David Romero's Diamond Bars: The Street Version (plus a free download!!!!!!)

As my struggle continues, as I battle with everyday life and the unexpected events that have changed my course, I am beginning to see the need for stretching my poetic muscles as I get back to writing. I am not just going to be able to compose a masterpiece poem right off the bat just as I can’t go run a marathon before building up to it; I need to warm up- stretching and conditioning- for the big race. It may be a bit of a corny metaphor, but it fits.

Part of the stretching is of course attending great readings, like Murray Thomas’ reading at the Barnes and Noble in Long Beach, or reading great books like David Romero’s Diamond Bars The Street Version. I have been fortunate enough to do both and to write a review for Diamond Bars. For this, David has been gracious enough to give me over 3 months to overcome life’s little potholes and speed bumps in order to write this.

Diamond Bars attempts to give “street cred” back to the suburban kid and shows the world that art can come from suburbia too. Romero asserts “There’s art everywhere! The place is an exhibit.” In essence, Romero defies the common criticism of neighborhoods with “Blue skies/ Wide streets/ Green, clean-cut grass.” He point-blankly refutes the opposition’s idea of where poetry comes from and allows the wide streets of his childhood to create the spaces for each of his poems- each poem sprawls across the page, does jumping jacks on the driveways, skips across the manicured lawns until they have written their words in chalk across the entire sidewalk of LA, washing all the asphalt in their color. No margin of the page is off limits, no style untouched, and no language is off limits, which seems only fitting. The language of the streets and not the scholar finds its home on the pages of Romero’s collection. Each experience feels real and each finds beauty in the “nine to five,” the simple joy of drinking a fountain soda, or the endless traffic of southern California -“Silhouette smiles of the rising sun/ In my rearview” can bring back the fondest of memories. Political, passionate, and proud, David Romero’s collection brings poetry to people that may have thought they didn’t like poetry, and no poet will dispute the power in that.

So now you can’t wait to read it, right! Well you are in luck! David is offering a 1 day, free download at:

http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/diamond-bars-the-street-version/15910163

Don’t miss this!

Dorothy Barresi and her "Cathedral of expletives"

Last Thursday, as I continue on with my exploration of this post-grad slump and clamor my way up the walls out of the poetry barren ditch I have fallen into, I attended another reading at my alma mater and listened to the fabulous Dorothy Barresi. Now I realize that by only attending readings in my safety zone, I may not seem as though I am actually clamoring up any walls at all, but rather staying in a place of comfort and familiarity. I argue that when in a post-grad slump, you find any way you can to claw, dig, fight your way out of it. My brilliant artist for a cousin, Phyllis Ginter, tried to post the following on the blog, (but it didn't like her that day). She wrote, "You'll hit those slumps from time to time. The tedious tasks of life, like pesky day jobs, laundry and grocery lists can pull your focus away from your art, but you can pull it back. You've already started. Go listen to good poets. Listen to bad poets. Jiggle your brain cells by checking out the best of other art forms. Go someplace you have never been before. An unfamiliar place. It doesn't have to be exotic, it can be really ordinary. What are the stories in that place, what is the feeling? You know what I mean?" And many dear poetry friends have given similar advice, so I say, attend whatever reading you can, no matter where it is, as long as it gets you back out there.

So, Dororty Barresi... well, she's absolutely fabulous. She seamlessly roves from humorous, imaginative poetry to lyrical stylings that touch on all the realms of life. Death and mysticism, questioning the world, playful, smart, witty, from Religion to being a mother and even connecting "Grendel's Mother" in with it all; it seems there is no subject, no feeling she can't conquer. I am in the process of reading her latest book, American Fanatics, and have heard only fabulous things from people regarding it. It's not often that every person I talk to about a single book all give it rave reviews, so I am eager to soak it all in.

What was so perfect about me attending this reading were some of the things Dorothy talked about after during the question and answer period. She talked about when she first sits down to write and how it always begins with "the terror of the blank page." Being a full-time teacher and mother, she knows all too well about finding time to write. She usually only finds time in the "off-season" of teaching. To keep her writing brain going, she keeps a language journal. When she said this, I was elated! I've done this for years and just felt like a word geek. But she uses hers to "shop around for a cool idea [so she] can begin hacking something out." It is a place where all the language she loves can come together whether it be a word from the Bible or an expletive that she loves so, they inspire her to begin to writing again, to help her get over that terror.

Dorothy also talked about the revision process, vital as we all know, and apparently she is never happy. She endlessly revises, moves commas and lines, words, anything. She calls it an "ugly process." Ironically though, she writes in lines, not full sentences later broken. She also says " it is emotionally healthy to share your work," but she herself opts not to do so. Instead she finds "pleasure in burrowing in there [the place of solitude where she writes]."

So as I continue my "quest," I find that I am not so alone and that even fabulous, successful writers like Barresi, they too get lost sometimes in the real world. We just have to find inspiration wherever we can, whether like Barresi who is continuously inspired by her students, or listening to any poets we can find, shopping through a language journal, or exploring a new place and figuring out it's story; it's all a process, and I guess this is just all part of mine.

Thanks for all of the response and please continue to follow. Look for the upcoming review of David Romero's Diamond Bars The Street Version.

How do you get out of a post grad slump? A dose of Webb and Koertge twice before bedtime.

Last night, nearly nine months after graduating with my MFA in Poetry, I returned to my alma mater, Cal State Long Beach, and attended my first poetry reading since graduating. It was a long time to go with no poetry in my life, but I knew if I wanted to get inspired, this was the reading to attend: the HIP Poetics hosted reading featuring two Southern California greats Ron Koertge and Charles Harper Webb. Each time I see them read, I am reminded why they have successful careers, dozens of books between them, and a slue of admirers nation-wide – they are creatively brilliant and have imaginations that dwarf my own to the size of a microscopic bacteria.

The vision of Webb and Koertge show us that creativity is found in so many crevices of life, even “The Three Stooges,” “Superman,” and classic fairy tales of trolls and billy-goats Gruff. Humor and enjoyment can be extracted from anything and turned into a poem that reaches beyond surface laughter. Webb and Koertge’s poems transport us into another realm of depth, sarcasm, religion, and mysticism where dark truths can be unexpectedly found in the act of moving, Vikings, and Lois Lane’s Diary and all the while, I chuckle along.

During the reading, Webb addressed a question he had been asked earlier in the evening: What makes writing fun? His answer wasn’t an idea I had forgotten entirely, he had taught it to me when I first began seriously writing, but it had seemed to have sunken down into the moldy corners of my brain. To paraphrase, he said the fun is in discovering something new, something that you weren’t expecting- a combination of words, language, and sounds that surprise you.

For a writer trying to re-find her mojo, her muse, her Duende, no words could mean more and as I write this, I find myself rediscovering the pure enjoyment of getting thoughts and words down onto paper, however ineloquent they may be. How could I have forgotten the feeling of something I preach to my composition students everyday- writing is fun. Discovering a recipe of words and syllabics that make my tongue work, the waft of language in the air that makes the ear yearn to hear more is as gratifying as finding the mythic comfortable strapless bra (all of the ladies reading this are agreeing with me right now; it’s a myth).

So if writing is so great, how do we get ourselves into this post grad slump?

After the reading, I got to chatting with a fellow Long Beach MFA grad, Eric Morago, (who recently published his debut collection What We Ache For- Go Buy It!), and he told me that I should get back onto the proverbial writing horse, bring back Formaldehyde, attend a reading at least once a month, something. I told him I doubted anyone would care about the rantings of a frustrated writer, but he encouraged me that I am not alone, that there are numbers of us out there trying to balance everyday life with the act of writing outside of mandated workshop deadlines. So in the midst of paying back student loans and maintaining the multiple jobs it takes to do so, I ask you, how do you get out of a post-grad slump? Advice encouraged.

Denise Duhamel Interview

1. Your work often varies between the traditional poem utilizing line breaks and stanzas and he prose poem, which focuses more on the use of the sentence. What guides you in choosing the format for the piece? You seem to write more in prose format. You’ve called yourself a hybrid poet. Can you explain what that means to those who may be unfamiliar with the concept?

DD: When I know what I am setting out to say, I tend to write in prose or narrative (sentences with line breaks). I may not wind up saying what I thought I was going to say, but if I do have a “story” of some sort, that’s the way it goes. There are many kinds of prose poems, including meditative, surrealist, fabulist etc. I like the form because it is so inclusive. If I am in more unfamiliar territory, subject-wise (that is, what seems to me unfamiliar), I like to work in forms, traditional and those I make up. In other words, I give myself a project.

2. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo American writers?

DD: Marjorie Agosin, Pablo Neruda, Ocatavio Paz, Ioana Ieronim, Wisława Szymborska

Any new writers that you are watching to see where they go?

DD: Stacey Waite is absolutely fantastic! She has a couple of chapbooks out and I can’t wait for her first book.

3. How does feminist criticism influence your poetry?

DD: Tremendously. I am a child of the Women’s Movement…It was actually COOL to be a feminist when I was in 6^th grade—that is, in 1973. So I embrace the movement and read a lot of feminist criticism and theory.

To elaborate on this, you have called yourself a feminist poet. What does that mean to you?

DD: I want to make women the subjects, not the objects, of my poems.

4. A two-part question:

It has been said that you push the “proverbial envelope.” You yourself have said that you like to break taboos in your work. With strong feminine voices like yourself discussing the role of gender, sex, money, etc do you feel there are still taboos out there to be broken?

DD: Yes!

Funny females were once taboo, think Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl. But you have been called witty, freewheeling, a writer with zany humor. I personally have been brought to tears by your hilarious humor. Do you find the world of poetry less accepting of funny female writers than male writers? What do you feel is humor’s role in poetry today and to come?

DD: As an undergrad, I was told that only “ugly” women can be funny. That is, women who don’t fit into the dominant culture have more to work with. Think fat, loud, etc. When I was in my twenties, I was intimidated by that statement. I didn’t want to have to exaggerate what was “wrong” with me, what was culturally unacceptable. But now I think that idea is changing—with people like Chelsea Lately who fits the norm of who is “pretty” and also hilarious. I think she’s opened up who can get a laugh. In poetry, we are not “seen” exactly on the page. But still, I think the idea of humor’s role in poetry is quite large, especially in terms of socio-political poetry. Satire and absurdity are important.

5. Your poetry so often speaks to bigger picture discussions like in Kinky and the poems Hispanic Barbie and Black Barbie History, in $600,000 from Ka-Ching!, and Why on a Bad Day I can Relate to the Manatee. Do you consider yourself a political poet? What do you see as poetry’s role in American politics, in creating change in American society?

DD: Yes. I do see myself as a political poet. Why not? I think poets should write about everything they want to write about. I think poetry is about making readers see the world differently and opening it up. Having said that, I don’t have an inflated idea of what poetry can “do.” I’m a realist.

6. Your work is candidly honest from relationship poems in Star Spangled Banner and especially in Ka-Ching where you discuss the tragic accident your parents were involved in when an escalator collapsed in 2003. I believe this seemingly open access into your life is why your work is so easy for readers to connect to. What influenced you to be so open with your readers especially in a world today when we are encouraged to be distant in order to protect ourselves?

DD: I was open and honest in my work from the beginning because, in all seriousness, I never thought anyone would really read it. I certainly never thought I’d be published. So now that people have read what I’ve written and no one throws tomatoes or boos, I feel emboldened to continue on that path.

7. In your interview with Karla Huston you discussed that at one point you had to get away from the “I poems.” In much of your latest book, Ka-Ching!, you revert back to the “I perspective.” What brought you back to this “personal narrative” as you called it like that in Smile and Star Spangled Banner?

DD: It was simply time, I think. I don’t think one way of writing is better than the other. I think it’s just a process—you reach the end of one road and turn down another. Then you make two lefts and you are back where you started.

8. After you received your MFA at Sarah Lawrence you have said that you decided that you were “in poetry” for the long haul. Do you think you will ever stop writing? What keeps you going?

DD: I love writing—I love the act of sitting down with a pad of paper or a journal or a laptop. It’s a way for me to connect with myself and with the world. I’ll stop, I suppose when I’m dead. Unless the dead are able to write.

9. Many of your books have a theme to them like with Kinky being about Barbie, (which I love by the way), Ka-Ching! focusing on money and your parents’ accident. Do you find that this way of compiling a book makes it easier to focus on the material or does it jut happen that way because of whatever is going on in your life or society at the time?

DD: I write a lot of poems and when I put a book together, I look back and see the themes—or try to see the themes. I didn’t set out to write a book about money, but when putting together Ka-Ching! I could see that had been an obsession. I knew I was going to write a book of Barbie poems at some point—I guess when I had twenty or so and wanted to keep going.

10. Many of the blog’s readers are active writers always looking for new ways to find inspiration. As a teacher of poetry and a successful writer with 10 books under her belt, would you mind sharing one or more of your favorite exercises to get those juices flowing?

DD: Get your hands on a copy of Joe Brainard’s I Remember and write your own list of “I remembers….” It almost always works

11. The final and toughest question: Would you mind sharing a poem or two with Formaldehyde’s readers?

DD: Sure! As you may know, I’m a big proponent of collaboration. Here is a poem my friend Haya Pomrenze http://www.hayapomrenze.com/author.php

and I just finished. Coincidentally, it’s called HYBRID.

HYBRID

The day we napped, I felt like a letter in an envelope—

an old-fashioned letter, pre text messages and the pillows

were not too hard, not too soft—just right.

The sleep lines on our faces made us look like lions

and tigers and bears chased our dreams

right through the snooze button. We woke up hungry,

clawed at the oranges we’d packed, the pith

of which reminded us of childhood when

it stuck in our teeth as we didn't know when to stop.

Oh bitter seeds of adulthood. We had two choices—

to believe in the tooth fairy and Santa

or Frank Sinatra and his throaty oath

though he wore a bowtie to hide his huge Adam's apple.

In kindergarten I relished naptime, the sticky plastic mat

smelled of juice, Crayolas and Sister Anne's breath.

In college your lumpy futon held you as you fantasized

about the Italian exchange student with suspenders, fiddled

with a yellow dildo you found on a rack at the Goodwill.

It was fruitless, reminding you of Ken who went

into the priesthood to avoid coming out. What I needed

was a guy who wrestled but romanced me with love letters

and garden vegetables he grew in his backyard. What did I know

then of ripe love, the kind when two people share a worn blanket

and post coital drool? You have slept in 276 beds (counting hotels)

and not once have you forgotten to say the Shema prayer, your hands

clicking rosary beads. You became to be a religious hybrid

when your housekeeper took you to Church of God on Palm Sunday, waving

her dusters like pompoms. In the pew, you read the forbidden missal

but there was no Amazing Grace or food after services.

I drew two triangles to make a Star of David, two lines to make a cross,

thought of Tiger Woods and his Buddhist roots.

Your paternal great-grandmother, you’re told, lived in Thailand

where she sold curried Challah, opened the first fusion

synagogue for Friday night meditation and matzo balls,

light as nirvana, personified. My maternal great-grandfather practiced voodoo

in Kenya poking dolls of his mother-in-law, a moled witch

known for her sour love potions of tree bark and umeboshi plums

she had long ago placed in her vagina for birth control.

The men in the village scorned her for her prunes of deceit, but the women

deified Mamachia. They came to her thatched home bearing gifts

of seashells that foretold the future. The women in our families have always napped,

with eyes wide open or wide shut. They summoned ancestral spirits

through feathers or foam, Craftmatic, Lazy Boys, hammocks—

their fingers brailing wisdom, like a Pillow Book.

John Murillo's Up Jump the Boogie

“And the Cap/Don’t really tell what’s inside the can. Kinda like the soul,/Que no?

~Santayana, The Muralist from Up Jump the Boogie, John Murillo

Up Jump the Boogie, John Murillo’s first collection of poetry, is a musical exploration of memory, childhood, and of all the drumbeats we hear along the way. His poetry takes the heart and soul of Los Angeles and composes his own symphony of the rhythms around him: the hissing of low-riders as they let out their air bags, the thump of bass, mariachis, the enmeshing of one language into another. Murillo’s orchestration of language, not just as words, but as rhythm, brings the music of the line to an entirely new plain. He creates his own musical California landscape by mixing the rolling drumbeats of our hills, the snare drums of our waves, the bass of a ball bouncing on the court, and booming it over the loudspeakers of the page. To feel the emotion in not only his narratives, but in the sounds he creates telling them makes this collection a unique exploration of what poetry can do on and off the page. The lines are his records, the page his turntable, and the readers, just his humble listeners to the mixes he compiles.

“Between breakbeats and bad breaks, broken homes

And flat broke, caught but never crushed. The stars

We knew we were, who recognized the shine

Despite the shade. We renegade in rhyme…”

-from Renegades of Funk, VII

Denise Duhamel Bio and Question Forum

I am excited to announce that the question forum is now open for one of my all time favorite poets, Denise Duhamel. She is an extraordinary poet, sincere and vulnerable with an uncanny ability to make her reader laugh out loud one minute and be in literal tears the next, or at least that is the affect she has on this poet. With every poem, I feel like I am sitting down in her living room chatting over a glass of wine. There is no distance between her and her reader. She is right there, opening the door into her life.

Her bio is as follows from www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/33 Here you can also find links to her poetry. 2 poems follow her bio. Post your questions for Denise as a comment to this blog and look for the answers to come from the poetess herself!!!

Denise Duhamel was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, in 1961. She received a B.F.A. degree from Emerson College and a M.F.A. degree from Sarah Lawrence College.

She is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, most recentlyKa-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (2005), and Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005).

Her other books currently in print areQueen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2001),The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999); Kinky (1997); Girl Soldier(1996); and How the Sky Fell (1996). Duhamel has also collaborated with Maureen Seaton on three volumes: Little Novels (Pearl Editions, 2002), Oyl (2000), and Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press, 1997).

In response to Duhamel's collection Smile!, Edward Field says, "More than any other poet I know, Denise Duhamel, for all the witty, polished surface of her poems, communicates the ache of human existence."

A winner of an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry (2000, 1998, 1994, and 1993).

Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida.

From Kinky

Buddhist Barbie

In the 5th century B.C. 

an Indian philosopher

Gautama teaches "All is emptiness"

and "There is no self."

In the 20th century A.D.

Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man

with such a belly could pose,

smiling, and without a shirt.

Why, On a Bad Day, I Can Relate to the Manatee
The manatee tries a diet of only sea grass, but still stays fat.
Mistaking her for a mermaid from afar,
sailors of long ago lost interest when they got too close,
openly making fun of her chubbiness. She knows Rodney Dangerfield
would write jokes about her if she were more popular.
She's ashamed of her crooked teeth, her two big molars
that leave her sucking and grinding
with bad table manners. She swims towards danger
over and over, scars from motor boats on her back
reminders of her slow stupidness. She resents being
called a sea-cow. She hopes her whiskers don't show
in the light. She is the mammal who knows
about low self-esteem. I first met her on my honeymoon
in southern Florida. I was on a cruise in my one piece bathing suit.
The women in bikinis squealed and pointed to the nearby dolphins,
clapping so their sleek gray backs would come to the water's surface.
In the shadow of her prettier ocean sister, the manatee swam by also.
No one but I paid her much attention. I wanted to lend her
my make-up, massage her spine, lend a girlfriend-ear
and listen to her underwater troubles. I dreamt of her
as I slept in the warmth of my new husband. I dreamt of her
as he slept in the warmth of me. On a good day, too,
I can relate to the manatee, who knows
on some level that she is endangered
and believes in mating for life.
copied from and where more Denise Duhamel poems can be found:  http://capa.conncoll.edu/duhamel.smile.html#55

Anthony Seidman's Where Thirsts Intersect

Anthony Seidman’s Where Thirsts Intersect published by Bitter Oleander Press, is not a book meant to be strolled through lightly with a margarita in hand and the ocean waves lapping at your feet. This is a collection meant to be taken seriously, each word acknowledged with consideration. Seidman’s complex diction and sprawling narratives spin the reader into new worlds with each new poem. He does not hand over his images on a silver platter, but instead asks his reader to put the same effort into each poem as he has put into writing them. By doing so there becomes a mutual respect of effort from both writer and reader alike. Seidman utilizes sound and language to explore belonging and place as he transports his readers to new realms. In For Ti Jean, For Kerouac this attention to sound becomes acutely prevalent as I find myself in the car of a train, the rhythm of the line chugging and gaining momentum as the poem progresses drifting off into the morning “dew.” In Cabal, Seidman carries us to another world as he does in so much of his work. In the end, I feel as though I am in a place beyond my own existence, “raincoat dripping on mat, fist offering a coin to the cupped hands of another man praying?”