It was a gloriously damp weekend for much of the start of ArtWeek, which meant good visibility for the Emily Dickinson Museum’s installation of rain poetry in downtown Amherst. Below are some of the poems that I spotted walking around town (including mine!)
“To see the Summer Sky Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie True Poems flee” by Emily Dickinson“A man leaves his path written across the snow But more elegant and modest: silver tracings left by snails.” by Manuel Becera
“Not that I have forgotten robins, playgrounds, the crocus’ imperial glow, nor breeze-tousled pondweed– still my camera catalogs the evidence: item: one budding branch; item: one lawn, indifferent green– to prove unto the jury of myself the truth of spring.” by Meg Winikates
Florence Poetry Carnival
Up the road from where I live, the neighborhood of Florence hosted their first ever “Poetry Carnival” on Saturday afternoon, which was fairly well attended despite the chill and damp. A number of local institutions sent representatives, including the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Forbes Library, the Freckled Fox Cafe, Poems2Go, and Perugia Press. There were writing activities and poetry-inspired crafts, an open mic session, and a discussion/reading between the outgoing and incoming Florence Poets Laureate. Though it was small, in the absence this year of the statewide MassPoetry Festival, it was lovely to spend an afternoon among other poetry readers, writers, and enthusiasts.
This was my favorite activity brought by the Emily Dickinson Museum, which plays with Dickinson’s habit of using variants in her poetry (lines where there are options for more than one word to fill out the thought), and invites attendees to add their own variants to her poem “Water is taught by thirst.” I added “the return of dawn” as a variant to “Birds, by the….”Blackout poem by Meg Winikates, from a recycled book page provided by Northampton’s Forbes Library. The librarians were collecting the poems created that day for the library’s zine club to turn into a zine commemorating the day, so I left mine behind to participate. I also found out the library has a massive poetry collection, which I’m looking forward to exploring.
A few weeks ago, when the Emily Dickinson Museum posted a call for short poems for potential inclusion in their #ArtofRainPoetry event for ArtWeek, I got very excited. I’ve enjoyed the many photos I’ve seen from MassPoetry’s previous rain poetry installations, and I’m always in favor of projects that get poetry out into public view. Last fall I had a haiku, “Robin and Rabbit,” selected to be part of the Minuteman Bikeway Public Art project, though sadly I never managed to get a good picture of it in situ, as the chalk paint was laid down one day and the next four days were heavy wind and rain, so many of the poems were obscured by wet leaves.
This spring, however, I can look forward to a rainy day, as my poem “If Spring (Recalcitrance)” was one of five selected from over 80 submissions to be part of the Dickinson Museum’s installation on the sidewalks of Amherst.
Starting this weekend, you can find my poem and 5 others, on the sidewalks of Amherst. We’re due for rain both Saturday and Sunday, so keep your eyes peeled! (Bonus: my poem is going to be located only a block from Bart’s, so you can grab some ice cream at the same time!)
I love the opportunities which present themselves for my creative life and my work life to collide. Today I had the chance to present a webinar for my day job at the New England Museum Association, on bringing a poetry mindset to the world of writing exhibit labels (or using poetry to interact with your visitors through your exhibit labels).
“Hack This Label: National Poetry Month Edition” was a free webinar, the video and slides of which you can now access through NEMA here.
Or, you can watch or download them straight from this blog here:
And if you’re looking for other ways to think about creative writing in museum spaces, you can check out last year’s webinar, “Recharge, Reimagine, and Write.”
Writing that is strongly situated in its setting has always appealed to me, as a place-based writer. So when I saw the call for submissions for “landscapes” from all the sins, I had a lot of fun looking through my ‘ready for sending’ folder and hit ‘submit’ faster than the Flash on a sugar rush. To my great glee, one of my personal favorite poems also caught the editors’ eyes, and is now published in Issue 5 of all the sins: contemporary landscapes.
Guillaume Vogels, De vijver in de winter, 1885, oil on canvas. Currently owned by Stedelijke Musea Sint-Niklaas, used with creative commons permission.
I wrote “Belgian Skylight” when I was living abroad, teaching kindergarten in Brussels. It was a phenomenal year in which I learned a lot and traveled a lot and spent a lot of time watching the light change out my window in my garret bedroom at the top of the house I shared with two other teachers. There’s a kind of light in a Brussels winter that was especially conducive to writing, probably because it was the kind of blank white that was reminiscent of a page waiting for words, both promising and melancholy. As we head into the cold season (finally!) here in New England, it’s lovely timing for this piece to come to life.
I highly recommend the whole of issue 5; there are some gorgeous pieces of art within, both visual and literary, so do go check it out!
Building off some of the same ideas I worked into my recent essays on using museums for inspiration, I did a free webinar for museum professionals yesterday encouraging them to look at their workplaces as spurs to their own creative habits. It was great to see so many folks willing to share their proto-poems through the chat feature; online writing prompts could have been chancy, but I was super proud of all the participants!
You can watch the recording here or through the New England Museum Association website, as linked below.
If you missed my webinar yesterday on creative writing for museum professionals, you can catch up now with the recording and download a pdf of the slides, available for free on the NEMA website. You can also watch it directly below, or just have a look at the slideshow without my narration.
The second workshop I led for MassPoetry Festival 2017 was “Solarpunk Serenades,” which was an introduction to the world of eco-conscious, optimistic, near-future science fiction that is now termed solarpunk. Arguably, there are moments in poetry, publishing, and popular culture which have fit this bill in the last hundred years at least, but now it has a name, and an opportunity to make its mark in sci-fi literature, aesthetics, design, and imagination the same way cyberpunk or steampunk have.
The slides below contain links to and names of most of the resources I mentioned in my presentation, for both the context and history of solarpunk, and places to find inspiration to write your own. There are also three themed writing prompts with visual cues. You can find most of those visuals and links to their originals on my Pinterest board. It was fabulous to see such a packed room of optimistic geeky poets, and I was really impressed with the breadth of imagination and vivid imagery that people who chose to share their poem drafts demonstrated. Thanks for inspiring me in return, poetpunks!
You can also download the handout from this workshop, with examples of poems both new and classic that use some solarpunk ideas and ideals here: SolarpunkSerenades workshop handout.
In my sixth year of attending the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, I once again listened to amazing poets that were new to me, reconnected with friends and colleagues, and came away with several pages of thoughts on poems I want to write (even a few scribbled draftlets!).
I also led two workshops on Sunday morning of the festival, the first of which was “On Beyond Giggles: Writing Children’s Poetry.”
Several of the folks in the room currently write poetry for children, others were interested in getting into writing for a younger audience, and all of us spent a little time thinking about who we were as children to get in the right mindset for the rest of the workshop.
Who were you when you were five years old? What did five year old you like to play? Who were your friends? Did you have a favorite toy or hideout or joke? Did you have siblings to play with, fight with, or play jokes on?
Who were you when you were seven? Did you have the same friends or new ones? The same fights? The same favorite color?
Who were you when you were ten? Were you out exploring your neighborhood? Getting into reading or sports or board games? Who were your friends? What were you afraid of? What made you laugh?
After calling our kid-selves back to the surface, we looked at some examples of great and effective children’s poetry, and talked about the poems we remembered from childhood ourselves, or from our kids’ favorites. Then we wrote, inspired by several prompts from one of my favorite kids’ poets, Jack Prelutsky. People came up with some fantastic verse, rhyming and free verse, inventive and imaginative, silly and sweet (and bittersweet too).
The slides from the workshop are here below. Thanks to all the hardy folks who attended on an early Sunday morning to talk and write playful poetry with me!
It’s spring, and I celebrated “Aprille with his shoures soote” by heading to England for a dose of literary pilgrimage, much in the spirit of my third and latest essay for all the sins, “And I must follow, if I can.” (Issue 3 is up in its entirety, and it’s great, go check it out!)
We hit London, Bath, Lyme Regis, Portsmouth, and Brighton in 6 days (whew!). Literary moments included seeing the musical of Matilda (Roald Dahl), a walking tour of literary London in Bloomsbury (Virginia Woolf and her cohort, Dorothy Sayers, Randolph Caldecott, TS Eliot, and more), saying hi to Shakespeare and Austen in the National Portrait Gallery, more Shakespeare, not to mention Beatles lyrics and more in the British Library, and that was just in the first two days. We also visited the Jane Austen Centre, the Assembly Rooms, and the Circus and Crescent in Bath, strolled the Cobb in Lyme Regis, and said “A little seabathing would set me up forever!” at least twice in Brighton. And I had a lot of Horatio Hornblower (CS Forester) feels at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. We also drank a lot of tea, and ate a lot of scones and Welsh rarebit. It was a stupendous trip.
Here are a handful of snapshots of some of the gorgeous, inspiring, hilarious, and memorable moments from my whirlwind Jane-Austen-inspired vacation:
…And signups are now available for my two workshops, among many other fantastic looking offerings, here. As always, there’s a great diversity of poets, styles, forms, and ideas represented in the schedule, and I’m really looking forward to attending this year, as well as leading the two workshops on Sunday morning.
Solarpunk, the optimistic, eco-conscious, sci-fi of the near future, is a great fit for the imagination and whimsy of a poet. We’ll look at some examples of poems old and new that reflect the solarpunk ideals, and experiment with writing prompts. Bring your futurist dreams of conversing with whales, living in a treehouse, and using solar sails to reach Mars to this workshop.
What makes a poem for children successful? Does it have to rhyme? Use short words? Feature at least one thing to gross you out? We’ll look at examples from a number of poets who write for younger audiences, and try out some of their techniques with a selection of writing prompts. Feel free to bring an example of one of your favorite poems for kids to add to the discussion!
Page from Red Sings from Treetops, written by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski
Apparently, “Bualadh Bos” is a phrase in Irish that means applause, and there was plenty of cause for cheers at the recent Irish Literary Festival, held for the first time at the Harvard Club in downtown Boston and arranged by a whole bunch of clever cultural ambassadors from the Irish Writers’ Centre, Poetry Ireland, and the Consul General of Ireland to Boston, Fionnuala Quinlan (@IrelandBoston). (My companion and I had a lovely conversation with Ms. Quinlan during the reception on Friday, and she’s delightful. I hope she has reason to remain posted in Boston and help arrange many such events in the future.)
Kevin Barry, Lisa McInerney, and Fionnuala Quinlan in conversation during Friday’s opening event.
Barry read a section of one of his short stories, and McInerney from her recent award-winning novel, The Glorious Heresies. Both authors were excellent readers of their own work; funny, dramatic, and engaged with both the text and the audience, which meant that my companion and I both left the evening more interested in reading more of their work, rather than less, which can be the case with less skillful presenters.
From right, Tara Bergin, Nick Laird, and Stephen Sexton in conversation with Maureen Kennelly of Poetry Ireland.
The next day we got to hear readings of some fantastic poetry from Tara Bergin, Nick Laird, and Stephen Sexton. Bergin’s poetry is lyrical, with an element of folklore-sound to it without ever directly referencing specific legends. You can read a review of her debut book, This is Yarrow, here. Laird’s poetry was sharp and wound round itself like an ammonite, and frequently referenced current events and recent scientific thought. You can read his article “Why Poetry is the perfect weapon to fight Donald Trump” here. Sexton’s poetry was often, though not solely, humorous; he noted as he began that when picking his poems for the event he discovered “[he had] a lot of hobbies for about three weeks,” which was long enough to work them into a poem or two before going on to something new. You can read one of the poems he read that day here: “The Curfew.”
Though my companion and I bought several books at the event, which I am reading with great pleasure, I also went and found more of their poetry after the event. My current favorite is Bergin’s “Appointment with Jane Austen,” especially appropriate as I shall shortly be undertaking a literary pilgrimage to Austen’s country myself.
Paul Howard and Kevin Cullen
The last event of the weekend was Boston Globe columnist and journalist Kevin Cullen interviewing journalist and novelist Paul Howard. They spoke of everything from sports journalism and doping scandals to the success of Howard’s satirical main character, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, in whose Homer-Simpson-esque adventures and foibles Howard keeps a running commentary on current events in Dublin and to a lesser extent, the wider world.
Overall it was a fascinating weekend, and I was only sorry that it seemed the event had not been widely enough publicized, as the room was moderately full but deserved to be more so on each of the two days. As it seemed many in the audience, like myself, were being introduced to most of these writers for the first time, the event definitely succeeded in its stated purpose to use Ireland’s literary offerings as a bridge to new audiences and new opportunities, and Boston was a perfect place to hold such a gathering. I will be keeping my eyes out for announcements of next year’s Irish Literary Festival, for sure.
This was my favorite activity brought by the Emily Dickinson Museum, which plays with Dickinson’s habit of using variants in her poetry (lines where there are options for more than one word to fill out the thought), and invites attendees to add their own variants to her poem “Water is taught by thirst.” I added “the return of dawn” as a variant to “Birds, by the….”
Sea Dreams and Time Machines 