Creative Work, Social Action, Mindful Engagement
Even with pandemic restrictions loosening, I’m still inclined to take precautions regarding large events. Most of the poets I know are still hosting readings online, and I’m not about to be the first one to push the status quo. But now that the spring semester is over, I’m getting that usual burst of creative energy, and I wanted to host an event. It’s definitely been a while.
I also wanted to collaborate with Zoe Fay-Stindt again. We edited the 2020 Texas Poetry Calendar together, and since then she’s spent time in Europe, and then returned to the USA to pursue her MFA at Iowa State University. When the idea for a virtual poetry road trip between Texas and Iowa popped into my head, I immediately messaged her, and then, it was on!
The Virtual Poetry Road Trip takes place on Friday, May 21st from 6:00-7:30 pm CST. This event is by donation, and you can still join even if you can’t contribute financially. We’re asking all attendees to register via Eventbrite. If you are unable to make a donation and have trouble registering, please contact me directly! We will work it out!
If you want to know more about our featured poets, read on! Otherwise, head over to our Eventbrite page to attend. And bring your own road trip snacks! (I’ll have two kinds of potato chips.)
Featured Poets
Cindy Huyser’s (TX) poems have received Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, and appear in many journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems, was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest, and her first full-length collection, Cartography, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press. She has edited or co-edited a number of anthologies, including Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016) and several editions of the Texas Poetry Calendar. Cindy has been a juried performer for the Houston Poetry Fest, Houston’s Public Poetry series, and the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, and lives in Austin, Texas, where she hosts the monthly BookWoman 2nd Thursday Poetry Reading and Open Mic series.
Ken Hada (OK) lives in rural Pottawatomie County in Oklahoma. He has published eight volumes of poetry, including his latest, Sunlight & Cedar (VACPoetry, 2020). Ken’s poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and his work has been awarded by The Western Writers of America, The National Western Heritage Museum, SCMLA and The Oklahoma Center for the Book. Information available at kenhada.org.
Dottie Joslyn (MO) is a writer and poet living in Southwest Missouri. She is a retired Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator in the field of Poetry Therapy, Certified Journal Facilitator, and Journal to the Self® Instructor. Her poems have appeared in: American Tanka, Buffalo Bones, Poetry from the Trail Ridge Writers, Wellness & Writing Connections Newsletter, Beginning Again: Creative Responses to Poetry of Presence, and Gyroscope Review. She also has a poetry book, Just Show Up, published in late 2018. Her website, http://www.joslynpoems.com has more information and includes an interactive blog.
Jennifer L. Knox’s (IA) sixth book of poems, Crushing It, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Publisher’s Weekly’s review called Crushing It, “Darkly inventive…This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words.” Knox’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeney’s,five times in the Best American Poetry series, and the 2022 Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. She received an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship for her crowdsourced poetry project, Iowa Bird of Mouth. Over 750 people from around the world contributed to the project; the code is open source and free to use in noncommercial projects.
I met Laura Van Prooyen at Poetry at Round Top when she was promoting Our House Was on Fire. I still remember seeing her cast in the warm stage lights of the Round Top concert hall, reading these poems about uncertainty, illness, and motherhood. Her new collection, Frances of the Wider Field, was released in March. While I was sad that we couldn’t celebrate her new release in person at Round Top this year, I did enjoy the online workshop I took with her in the online version of the festival. I’m excited to share this interview that we conducted via email over the past few months, while dealing with the Texas freeze, teaching duties, family responsibilities, and the work that goes into a book launch. That we wrote our questions and responses amidst the hustle and bustle of daily life reflects something that I admire about Laura’s poetry: our other work, our obligations, do not take us away from poetry. They are the stuff of which poetry is made.
[AW] My favorite lines in “Against Nostalgia” are “What defines me is constancy
of place, / and my urge against it.” Like you, I’m from the Midwest, and have made a life in Texas. I find that the longer I am away from Ohio, the more the tension of being a native of one place but choosing to live in another comes through with more intensity in my poems. Has being of a particular place but then making your life in another place influenced your poetry in a particular way?
[LVP] Thanks for this question. It is hard to be away from home, but when I visit my parents it is also hard. So, yes, that inherent paradox informs my poems. I grew up in a house my grandfather literally built. I never met him, but I have a picture of him with a crew digging the basement. My grandmother lived next door to us, and my great-grandmother next to her. My mom has never moved in her life. She’s still there now, at 81 years old and with dementia. Our roots are deep. I opted for sun, warmth, and new experiences, a choice I don’t regret but wrestle with all the same. I feel torn a lot, wishing to be in multiple locations at once. That tension fuels a lot of the poems in Frances of the Wider Field.
As I read through Frances of the Wider Field, I think of my own grandmothers, one who died suddenly 30 years ago, and one who died 17 years ago from Parkinson’s. I often feel that I never really got to know them, and that is its own kind of grief. I see your poems as a way to stay in conversation with people you cannot converse with anymore, at least not in the way you once did. Do you feel there is something special about poetry as a genre that allows for these conversations to happen?
I hadn’t really thought about it like this before, but yes. Poetry allows for all kinds of unexpected turns as opposed to, say, a mode that has some expectation of linearity. It seems to me that poems are not only a way to stay in conversation with people we can no longer access, but that writing into the unknown allows us to converse with mysteries. The Frances poems originated with that energy, of being open to conversations with people I never met, with places that existed before me, with lineage, with ghosts, with concepts of god. The energy was at first an impulse to write toward a very specific absence, but the poems turned into presence–Frances began permeating the landscape, the dailiness of past, present and maybe even future. I’m interested in the continuum of time and memory and how we move long through different planes of experience, sometimes all at once.
Speaking of lineage, I love the ways in which that theme shows up in this collection. One of my fascinations is with the idea of a writer’s lineage, and the ways in which creative lineage can be expansive. We have our family lineage, and we also have the poets/writers we read over and over. We have the teachers that have taught us about craft, or form, or topics that had nothing to do with writing, but nonetheless had a profound influence. Anne Sexton and Natalie Goldberg are part of my creative lineage; so are the Austin poets who have been both mentors and friends over the past 13 years. Finally, that list includes my 9th grade geography teacher (who taught kindness as much as she taught geography), my aunt, and my grandmothers. How do you trace your own creative lineage? What are the different threads or spokes that have come together to help make you the poet that you are today?
One pivotal moment in my life was my first semester at the university. I was a first generation college student. My first semester I took a seminar called “Creating Selves.” I have no idea if we had choices for these seminars, but somehow I lucked into this class taught by a professor who had us read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, and Helen Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road. She required that we keep a journal, a mix of personal insights mixed with responses to the texts. I have been keeping a journal since that class, since I was 18 years old. I still have my marked up copy of Letters to a Young Poet, and I’m actually still in touch with that professor. She came to my virtual book release just last week. I hold close poems from Louise Gluck, Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Vievee Francis, John Donne, Adelia Prado and Olena Kalytiak Davis among many others, too. I’m also a fan of Lynda Barry. I wanted to be a visual artist before I ever thought about being a writer. I suppose there’s still time.
I love the way you depict work in these poems, specifically, the work Frances performs. “Avenue F” is the most striking example: the work of wringing and hanging laundry, of polishing the baby’s shoes. In “Lilacs Full of Bees,” Frances has cleaned gutters, polished the car, and soaked her feet after a long day. I’d love to hear more about your approach to depicting those daily tasks. Did you have a specific approach to incorporating them? I think some poets are hesitant to bring dailiness into their poems because they worry it comes across as boring. How did you incorporate Frances’ daily, domestic work in a way that made the poems come alive?
It’s wonderful to hear that for you the poems came alive. Dailiness is life. I’m interested in specificity, and if I had a particular approach, I suppose it was to write toward the specifics. I also had to make choices. I had ideas and things popping up, like polishing the car and cleaning the white walled tires with a toothbrush. Not every daily task made the final cut. When I really get into revision, I read my work aloud. What stays is what sounds right. As in, sonically. I ask myself (consciously or intuitively) how the sounds of words play off each other, how can the poem create a sonic landscape that works in relation to the details.
Finally, is there anything you never get asked about your work that you’ve always wanted to talk about?
I love your final question, but I cannot think of anything in particular that I’ve never been asked. I love talking about the creative process and hearing from other makers what they do, what they’re reading, what art they’ve seen or music they’d listened to. I like to talk to people who are curious, because staying curious feels right to me. Learning new things. Being open. That’s part of the work.
Thanks to Laura for participating in this interview. I hope you enjoyed learning more about this engaging collection. You can buy Frances of the Wider Field from Laura’s website (the most direct way to help a poet get paid!), Lily Poetry Review Books, Bookshop.org, major book retailers, or your local independent bookstore.
Maybe you tried to write a poem a day during National Poetry Month, and now you’re feeling a little tapped out. When I want to create but don’t feel I have anything to say, I like to turn to blackout poetry. If you’re unfamiliar you can check out “The History of Blackout Poetry” and “Erasure and Blackout Poems: Poetic Forms.”
This month, create an erasure or blackout poem. If you’re struggling to choose a source text, consider a long-form newspaper or magazine article. You can draw over a hard copy source text, or use your word processing software to black out original material.
You can send your poem as a Word or PDF file; I will also accept .jpg and .png files if it makes more sense to send your poem that way. Please also include the name and author of the source text in your submission.
Email your poem to allyson@allysonwhipple.com by 11:59 pm on May 20th. The winner will receive a gift certificate to the independent bookstore of their choice, or I will make a donation in their honor to a nonprofit.
View past contest winners here.
I’m excited for the four poetry events I have in place for May. (There might be a fifth, but details are still in the works, so it’s too early to post about.) Scroll down to find out about my two workshop offerings, as well as two opportunities for collaborative poetry writing. As we are still dealing with COVID-19, all May events will take place on Zoom.
Hawks Don’t Circle: Accuracy and Expansiveness in Nature Poetry
May 26th, June 2nd, June 9th, and June 16th
7:00-8:30 pm Central time
Tuition: $233 early bird until Sunday, May 16th 2021; $333 standard rate
Register at the course page.
Description: This workshop is designed to help poets both create more accurate, precise images in nature poetry. In the first two sessions, we will study the ways in which errors in naturalistic descriptions can compromise a poem, and also look at ways in which to employ skillful depictions of nature. We will also draft our own poems in relation to course topics. In the latter two sessions, we will study poems that go beyond images of nature to make broader cultural, social, or political statements. We will take time to research and refine our drafts from class, workshop with peers, and experiment with expanding our depictions of nature into a wider context. There are weekly reading assignments and exploratory exercises between class sessions.
Haiku Beyond 5-7-5
May 29th, 2021
1:00-5:00 pm Central time
Tuition: $100
Register at the Year of Forms page
Description: Spend an afternoon studying and developing kireji (cutting word) and kigo (seasonal reference) in your haiku. Upon registration, you will receive two craft essays, one focused on kireji and one focused on kigo, to read before our workshop. You will also receive a series of haiku to read in advance. In addition to discussing the readings, we will have a workshop in which we practice improving our use of kireji, as well as incorporating kigo in an authentic way.
Renga Happy Hour
Thursday, May 20th
5:30-6:30 pm Central Time
Free Event
Register at Eventbrite for Zoom link
Description: Renga is a form of poetry that originated in Japan. It’s meant to be written collaboratively. Let’s socialize on Zoom and write renga together! The hour will start with a brief introduction to the conventions of the form, and then we’ll have plenty of time to write. All levels of poetry experience welcome.
Exquisite Corpse Lunch Break
Tuesday, May 25th
12:15-12:45 pm Central Time
Free Event
Register at Eventbrite for Zoom link
Description: The exquisite corpse is a poetry form in which every person contributes a line. Let’s take some time in the early afternoon to stretch our creative muscles and write a collaborative poem! This is a great way to connect with other poets even at a distance. All levels of poetry experience welcome.
Another month, another surprising entry in my monthly poetry contest! In April, the winner of the contest is not an individual, but a SurvivalWolves, a creative collective.
The collective asked that the $25 donation be made directly to Kaze Shadow, the leader of their team. You can read their poem below.
It is my time
For the ones who are unaware, it is my time
I have come from a position that is a far
In my forgotten spirit, I’ll become greatly divine
For the words within the book of me will evolve from its line
Ignite more flames of passion than the bright stars
For the ones who are unaware, it is my time
I was lost, so lost that all I could find
Pushing me forward was my hatred and scars
In my forgotten spirit, I’ll become greatly divine
I soon found more within me, more within life
Something beyond the smoke and blinding bars
For the ones who are unaware, it is my time
Now I move quick, quicker than a piercing knife
Empujando obstáculos, con fuego para ganar
In my forgotten spirit, I’ll become greatly divine
For the people who believed that I wouldn’t strive
Now beyond the clouds, I fly on heaven’s radar
For the ones who are unaware, it is my time
In my forgotten spirit, I’ll become greatly divine
Poetry and Practice