I’m happy to have had three new poems published this past week, two in The Guardian for an article curated by Amy King and Jane Spencer, and one in Rise Up Review, published by Sonia Greenfield.
The two in The Guardian, “I Lift My Lamp” and “Mother of Exile,”were written in response to Trump’s support of a “merit”-based immigration policy and Jim Acosta’s question regarding whether or not the plan violated the spirit of the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
The other poets of the New Colossus project are: Bob Hicok, Amy King, Rita Dove, Jane Hirshfield, Shane McCrae, Lynn Melnick, Stephanie (Stephen) Burt, Bhanu Kapil, Srikanth Reddy, John Yau, Patricia Smith, Craig Santos Perez, Cornelius Eady, Muriel Leung, Kaveh Akbar, Paul Guest, Matthew Zapruder, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Carmen Gimenez Smith, and Hanif Abdurraqib.
The Guardian also invites their readers to submit poems on the topic and will publish a selection of their favorite reader-submitted poems. You can read more about how to enter here.
The poem in Rise Up Review, “Bell” was written for the “#Writers Resist / Houston: ‘We Too Sing America’” reading sponsored by PEN America, Calypso Editions, and Librotraficante, and hosted by then Houston Poet Laureate Robin Davidson. I was happy to see it find a home on the net with Rise Up Review.
Usually I’m afraid to watch myself on film, but because these two clips my friend and former student, Jeremy Birkline, posted after AWP 2017 are short, I watched them. And I didn’t die from it! So, I’m taking the next bravery step and posting them here.
I like being put on a feminist list. I like it even more when my list mates are awesome.
Here’s “8 Feminist Poems To Inspire You When The World Is Just Too Much,” with Trace Peterson, Cecilia Llompart, Judy Grahn, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Monica McClure, Rebecca Seiferle, & Morgan Parker. By JOANNA NOVAK.
JT: Melissa, I hugely enjoyed your poetry collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, which seemed to me original, strange and often sublime. At the same time, your neo-Romanticism is also accompanied by an eye for the beauty of the everyday – so that the sublime mixes with the mundane (“Washing clothes … is an act of prayer,” you say in one poem, and another is entitled “Starry Night, with Socks”). For me, I would say this was one of the hallmarks of your style – but do tell me if I’m wrong. How would you describe your style?
MS: I love that assessment, Jonathan – especially that you called I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast “strange.” In pointing out the commingling of the mundane and sublime, you nailed not only my style, but also how I experience the world. I grew up in a secular home. My father is agnostic, and my mother is spiritual with a deep curiosity about supernatural mysteries. We didn’t go to church, but I would sit at the top of the jungle gym in my back yard and talk to god. I believed and still believe that god is in my backyard. That’s part of it. Also, there’s something a monk said to me years ago when I was learning Buddhist meditation. He said, “When you learn to relax inside your mind, you can be on permanent vacation, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.” You don’t need to go anywhere or seek anything. The beach, the flower, the mountain – they are all inside you. So, yes, I carry them with me when I vacuum and put on socks. Then I realize that vacuum cleaners and socks are sublime too. So, I think I would describe my style as you have, except to also possibly add that I think figuratively. I’m sure I have driven people crazy with my constant metaphors and analogies in everyday conversation, but if I want to understand or explain something, my mind almost always reaches for a comparison.
JT: Clearly, there’s a lot of cosmic and creation imagery in the collection. What themes and ideas were you exploring in this respect?
MS: I was exploring a feminine, cyclical conception of god, time, and the universe. Rather than fashioning my poetic god in man’s image, I fashioned her in woman’s image. It was important to me that she be god and not the diminutive or adjunct “goddess.” I wanted to convey her as the origin and the all powerful, but I also wanted her to be present in the whole of everything. So, in I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, most everything is pretty much a microcosm of the divine and the all. That’s why a pancake is creation flattened out. It’s all interconnected, all divine. As well, I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast plays with ideas of reincarnation, god birthing the universe, and god attempting to parent the world.
In this episode of VIDA Voices and Views, Melissa Studdard interviews poet and memoirist, Gregory Pardlo, who reads from his Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, Digest, and discusses topics ranging from adapting the slave narrative form for his celebrated poem “Written by Himself” to his family fining him for missed meals.
About Gregory Pardlo:
Known for his intellectual rigor, gorgeous musicality, and socially and politically engaged writing, Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collection, Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Digest was also shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. As poet Campbell McGrath says, “These are poems that delight the ear, encourage the heart, and nourish the brain.” Pardlo’s other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. As well, his first poetry collection, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. Pardlo is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays forthcoming from Knopf, and he is a faculty member of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden.
Gregory Pardlo Quotes from This Episode of VIDA Voices & Views:
“When the Pulitzer came along, I thought, well this is a clear mandate if ever there was one—this is a call to open doors for women and people of color and to campaign for a broader sense of aesthetics.”
“I do hear lines, but they aren’t necessarily the lines I open with. I use those musical inspirations as stakes—ways to stake down the poem—so I can have a sense of where it is spatially and how it’s operating. By the end of the drafting process, those lines are very rarely still present in the poem.”
“It’s only since I got sober that I even was able to write this book, Digest, and the whole idea of service then became something that I saw not as an obligation or onerous responsibility, but I saw it as something that is thrilling and an honor and a privilege.”
“So many problems in the world and in history can be boiled down to the simple—no, not simple at all—to the singular—idea of paternalism, of patriarchy, and how deeply that is rooted throughout so many isms and ills.”
“In the back of MAD Magazine, they had these fold over images. There’s an image that looks like one thing; you fold it over and it becomes something completely different. At some point in the last year, I was talking about my work, and I realized that is precisely the way I imagine the poems.”
“So, I get this text message saying, ‘Congratulations on your Pulitzer,’ and it’s from a former student, so I say, ‘this person is terribly confused.’”
“I don’t expect other writers to be activists or to approach their work in an activist way, but I do advocate for a kind of self-awareness . . . be aware of what you’re putting on the page. Be aware of the narratives that you’re playing into, and if those are the narratives you genuinely want to explore, do it responsibly.”
“I was thinking about sex work as the struggle over who owns labor and the kinds of labor that men profess to own and how that influences my understanding of myself as a father—and trying to struggle against that in a culture where that is the central kind of operating system.”
Here is a screenshot of one of three poems just up at Cultural Weekly. Many thanks to the immensely talented Alexis Rhone Fancher for asking for these. “The Sudden Violence of Light” is about a lot of things, but especially my powerful grandmothers, who somehow got fused into one person here, as sometimes happens in poems.
To celebrate hosting the Super Bowl this year, among other lovely happenings, Houston is getting all dressed up in POETRY. I’m thrilled that some of my lines were selected and are now on banners across the city. What a great project. What a great city. Below are a couple of articles about The Houston Banner Project and Figurative Poetics. One of them is by Miah Mary Arnold, curator of the project, and the other is by Clifford Pugh, Editor-in-Chief at CultureMap.
Here are a couple of paragraphs (from Miah’s article in the Houston Chronicle) that tell about the beautiful intent of the project:
“The project is the brainwork of Alan Krathaus and Fiona McGettigan of Core Design Studio. The Houston Downtown Management District wanted to create something bold and inspiring with the new banners they were going to hang, and asked Core for ideas. Their answer — ‘Figurative Poetics’ — was adventurous from the get-go: Whereas most downtowns have banners with simple promotional slogans, McGettigan and Krathaus wondered, what it would be like if Houston’s banners could reveal the city like the complex and unlikely character that it is?
What if walking down the street could be like having a conversation? What if each new path through the city created a new narrative, and each story was as dynamic as the city itself? What if Houston could sing its innumerable voices?”
I’ll share pictures of the banners with my lines when I find them.
Here’s a fun new podcast hosted by Paul Harrison. I was delighted to be on the first episode, along with Shaindel Beers. Below are Paul’s notes about the show and a link to the Fiction Earth website.
Fiction Earth Podcast 1: With Melissa Studdard And Shaindel Beers.
Welcome to the Fiction Earth podcast.
In this first podcast I had the pleasure of chatting with poet, authors and teachers Melissa Studdard and Shaindel Beers.
In this first podcast we discuss poetry, writing, creativity, personal inspiration, and also throw in a little bit of fun and nerdy entertainment.
On the podcast
Shaindel, Melissa and myself had a fantastic chat and covered everything from spirituality to Star Trek, as well as looking at personal inspirations and motivations.
