Poetic Profile: James Arthur

Please join us on Saturday, November 17th, at 5:00pm, for a reading with James Arthur and Rahul Mehta. This event is co-sponsored by Apiary Magazine.

1) How would you describe your poetry?
For me, rhythm is important. I use a lot of rhyme and assonance, and many of my poems contain meter -- but my poems usually are not metered throughout; within one poem I might switch back and forth between iambs, anapests, and very irregular free verse. I love the power, beauty, and precision of metered poetry, but I think of many of the traditional forms (the Spenserian sonnet, for example) as being expressions of order, and most of the time I'm more interested in expressing what I think of as disorder and the uncontainable. I create rhythmical patterns mainly for the sake of disrupting them.

When performing, I recite my poems from memory. The rhythmical drive behind my poems makes them easy to memorize -- and also, I hope, makes my poems accessible to audiences. My dream reader would be somebody who reads my poems aloud, so that he or she is hearing the words, not just seeing them.

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?
I try to write every day. Some days I fall short of that goal. For me, poetry is a way of processing and understanding experience -- so when an idea or event somehow disturbs my equilibrium, I write about it. The more settled and calm my life becomes, the more I need to look outside myself to find sources of disturbance.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?
I seem to fixate on particular poets for years at a time, trying to learn as much from them as I can -- and the poet who I've fixated on longer than any other is Auden.

Auden's writing has all the dynamism that I love in poetry -- his poems can swerve from thought to thought, impression to impression, taking in a huge amount of territory, going places that I'd never expect -- but at the same time, Auden's poems are intellectually coherent. I never feel that he's exploring tangents just for the sake of bombarding the reader with more and more stimulus; in the Auden poems I love best, every line has purpose. Look at these lines, for example, from The Sea and the Mirror:

But now all these heavy books are no more use to me any more, for
Where I go, words carry no weight; it is best,
Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel
To the silent dissolution of the sea
Which misuses nothing because it values nothing;
Whereas man overvalues everything
Yet, when he learns the price is pegged to his valuation,
Complains bitterly he is being ruined which, of course, he is,
So kings find it odd that they should have a million subjects
Yet share in the thoughts of none, and seducers
Are sincerely puzzled at being unable to love
What they are able to possess ...

Amazing! I wish I'd written that passage. Each line seems to develop and enlarge the implications of the previous lines. Other poets whose work has been important to me are W.S. Merwin, Philip Levine, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.B. Yeats, E.E. Cummings, and James Wright. I'm not sure who my next fixation will be. Maybe Amy Clampitt, Elizabeth Bishop, or Frank O'Hara.

4) How does your current neighborhood or community play a part in your poetry?
I do a lot of walking. Walking gets me away from my theories and fixed ways of thinking, because as my feet wander, my thoughts wander, too. Most of my poems begin as words or phrases that come to me when I'm walking, so my physical environment always seeps into my poetry: a firetruck here, a weathervane there. I don't feel that I'm documenting my environment -- many of my poems contain details that are completely imagined -- but my poems definitely reflect my environment, or at least they reflect my feelings about wherever I am.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.
I have a toddler, so some of the books I've read mostly recently are The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Susan Marie Swanson's The House in the Night -- a truly beautiful book -- and Diggers. I grew up on Beatrix Potter and I can't wait until my son is old enough to enjoy The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher.

A couple of days ago, a friend lent me Bucolics by Maurice Manning, and that's what I'm reading right now. The poems in Bucolics are short, unpunctuated lyrics addressed to God, or to a God-like entity named "Boss." They're philosophically ambitious, but they're also funny and disarming. Here's a passage:

you toss the stars like clover seed
you sling them through the sky you must
be glad to be a sower Boss
you sow so many things besides
the sky you sow the seed of dew
the seed of night you let it grow
until the morning overgrows
the night ...

I love it when poems direct my thoughts toward real questions, and at the same time, are so free of pomp and self-regard that they seem effortless. They're not effortless, of course! It's extremely difficult to write about serious topics in a serious way without taking yourself too seriously. But Manning succeeds at it, I think.

James Arthur was born in Connecticut and grew up in Canada. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, a residency at the Amy Clampitt House, a Discovery/The Nation Prize and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. His fiery debut collection Charms Against Lightning is available from Copper Canyon Press. He’ll be reading with Rahul Mehta at Big Blue Marble Bookstore on Saturday, November 17th at 5:00pm. This event is co-sponsored by Apiary Magazine.

Poetic Profile: Bonnie MacAllister

Bonnie MacAllister will be teaching a Collaborative Multimedia Poetry Workshop this Saturday, August 4th from 2:00-4:00pm. For further details or to register, please email events@bigbluemarblebooks.com.

The following interview with Bonnie is reposted from the very first post in our Poetic Profile series!

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Another new Big Blue Marble blog series! Poetic Profiles will be asking local poets and writers five questions about writing, life, and books. We're starting the series with the multidisciplinary and very talented Bonnie MacAllister.

1) How would you describe your poetry?

Examining sound and syntax through uncommon combinations, my verse thrives on a chopping constructs and forms often four or five line stanzas: rarely rhymed, strictly metered, intensely syllabic, occasionally crafted sestinas, a deconstructed breath verse.

I publish small editioned chapbooks including SOME WORDS ARE NO LONGER WORDS and PAID IN GOATS and collaborate to produce poetic films. The chapbooks are in permanent collections including the Zine Library at Barnard College, the Utopian Library in Viareggio, Italy, Concentrated Experimental Poetry, and la Galería del MEC, Montevideo, Uruguay. My book, IN THE AFTERMATH, currently in production will become part of the new Brooklyn Art Library, formerly Art House Co-op in Atlanta, Georgia.

My work has appeared in venues such as Helix, Parlour, Black Robert Journal, nth Position (UK), Dead Drunk Dublin and Other Imaginal Spaces…(Ireland), Turtle Ink Press (Pushcart Prize Nomination 2007), the Feminist Journal, and Paper Tiger Media (Brisbane).

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

As an educator, I have taught urban youth populations from 5th -12th grades in language arts, reading, mural arts, performance poetry, breath verse, zine creation and theatre through schools and non-profit organizations such as the Mural Arts Program, and the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival. I conducted workshops at Shaw Middle School’s Sonia Sanchez Literacy Night and at Temple University for Central High School’s Philadelphia Immigration and Culture Conference. I have only taught in high need schools in urban settings so I understand the necessity of instilling hope and optimism in this youth through the work.

As a teacher of British and World Literature and French Language at the new Arise Academy Charter High School for students who have been in the foster care system, I am also the academic advisor for the Arise SUNRISE, the student art and literary magazine with a staff of seventeen students. These students came to me with piles of poetry and sketchbooks filled with art so our group fills a definite need for them.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?

My English and French students read poetry in my classes including some personal favorites such as Edmund Spenser, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal), Dr. Tanure Ojaide (Nigeria), and Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria).

My preferred poets have been the same since I was a teen: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Marge Piercy, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and Sylvia Plath. Antonin Artaud and Haruki Murakami have also become obsessions for me over the last two decades.

My favorite local poets are Beth Boettcher, Jane Cassady, Monica Pace, Dr. Niama Williams, Gabrielle Casella, Michelle Wilson, and Lora Bloom. Fortunately, I can call all of these talented ladies dear friends.

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

I have hosted poetry events at the Wilma Theatre, the Highwire Gallery, and October Gallery. As an active member of the Women’s Caucus for Art Philadelphia, I hosted a 2009 women’s poetry reading at the Plastic Club. I performed on the curated Nexus Radio Project for a show of zinester artists. In Philadelphia, I have upcoming performances at the Rotunda for Gabrielle Casella’s Poet-tree In Motion for Women’s Her-story Month on March 3rd at 7 p.m., Radio Eris’ Temple of Eris in West Philadelphia on March 13th, and July 1st for the Lights of Unity Association Festival of the Friends of the Free Library. I love to collaborate with Lora Bloom on the Temple of Eris stage.

My previous background was in poetry slams in the United States and in France, but I no longer perform in those and prefer multimedia collaborations in film, art, and sound installations. I attempt to render moments through a variety of media. Often pieces are multi-genre, fusing painting, photography, slide installations, spoken word, video, and performance. I have shown visual art in Italy, Uruguay, Belgium, France and various university galleries in the United States.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

Lately I’ve been reading a bit of Ethiopian poetry in preparation to teach the work in the spring. Last summer, I was fortunate to be awarded a 2009 Fulbright-Hays award to travel to Ethiopia to study history, culture, and migration. I am still digging through the suitcase of books I brought back. Two favorites are certainly Asafa Tefera Dibaba: Decorous Decorum and Lulit Kebede and Wossen Mulatu: Ribbon of the Heart.

Dibaba is an Oromo national (one of Ethiopia’s 80 different ethnic groups) who writes in English punctuated by the Oromo language. His work examines the idea of nationality and country through both gorgeous and sometimes bawdy, controversial poetry. He now teaches Literature and Folklore in the College of Education, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia where he is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature.

Lulit Kebede and Wossen Mulatu are two young college educated women writers living in the capital, Addis Ababa, whose artistic and poetic collaboration, Ribbon of the Heart tackles important issues such as HIV, street prostitution, women’s roles, and foreign corporate infiltration of a country so fiercely proud of its independent status in Africa as a country never colonized.

Bonnie MacAllister is an artist, author, and educator. She is a 2009 Fulbright-Hays awardee to Ethiopia, a 2007 Pushcart Prize Nominee and five time slam poetry champion in the United States and France. Publication credits include Black Robert Journal, Paper Tiger Media, Dead Drunk Dublin and Other Imaginal Spaces, and nth Position. MacAllister has most recently exhibited at the Utopian Library in Viareggio, Italy and in la Galería del MEC, Montevideo, Uruguay.

She is an active member of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art and fundraises for Girls Gotta Run Foundation which sponsors Ethiopian girls' running teams. Bonnie teaches French and British Literature at the new Arise Academy Charter High School for foster children in Center City. She is the webmaster for the Fulbright-Hays Ethiopia outreach website which offers teacher resources on Ethiopia.

Poetic Profile: Jane Cassady

Join us this Friday, August 3rd, at 7:00pm as Jane Cassady reads from her newly released collection of poems For the Comfort of Automated Phrases.

1) How would you describe your poetry?

Romantic, surreal, silly, self-conscious, prone to magical thinking. I talk about flowers a lot. Social justice works its way in. I love pop culture references and words and phrases that might soon be obsolete. Right now I'm a little fixated on the general wildness of the world and how anyone manages to build a nest, make a home. Current muses include Demetri Martin, David Lynch, and Felder Rushing, The Gestalt Gardener.

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

Having recently left almost two years of AmeriCorps service in Philly schools, my life is enjoying a lovely lacuna-- poetry is my everyday life. Every morning before I do anything else, I write three pages of anything that comes to mind, then affirmations, then a list of what I'm grateful for. Right now I'm writing a poem a day for National Poetry Month, so I spend a lot of time online reading friends' daily poems.

When I'm not writing, I'm dawdling around looking at stuff in thrift stores, libraries, art galleries, or walking the Wissahickon feeling lucky to live here. I spend time preparing lessons and helping organize events. I book and promote The Fuse at InFusion,The Philadelphia Poetry Slam, alongside the wonderful and charming Sherod Smallman and the Fuze Collective.

Also, I really enjoy television.

3) What poets and authors inspire you?

First and foremost, my students and colleagues, whose work reassures me that the writing process is really kind of a reliable thing. My favorite poets are all contemporary ladies: Patricia Smith, Rachel McKibbens, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, and Tara Betts. My first muse was Brendan Constantine, out in LA, and my favorite mentor/co-conspiritor is Daniel McGinn, also in the LA area. The poets I started out with 10 years ago in Orange County remain the standard by which I judge all poetry...

I mostly read prose, though. I love Chuck Klosterman, Douglas Coupland, Sarah Vowell, and pretty much any memoir where someone does something weird for a year. (Beth Lisick's Helping Me Help Myself, about her adventures following twelve different self-help gurus, is my favorite of these.)

I highly highly recommend What It Is by Lynda Barry and Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio-- both are bottomless sources of writing ideas. And for the past 10 years, I've been following Julia Cameron's advice in The Artist's Way.

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

Last Christmas, my brother gave us a 36 spice spice rack that came with endless refills. It came with a subscription: if one of the spices runs out (usually rosemary) they just send us more. The Philadelephia art and poetry community seems that endless and varied. I love that there are so many different scenes here: Poetry Aloud and Alive, The Lyrical Playground, Harvest, of course The Fuze just to name a very few.

The variety of artists, audiences, and images gives me such a nice feeling of abundance, like I'll never run out. For example, last weekend we went to an art show dedicated, for whatever reason, to Twin Peaks. Just knowing there's people around who came up with an idea like that just sort of fills me with hope.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community about it.

I just finished reading The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture. The author, Nathan Rabin, is the head writer for The Onion's A.V Club section. Pop culture memoirs are my favorite thing in the universe. Each chapter is characterized by a different, movie, song, or T.V episode. Rabin talks about going from a mental hospital to a group home, to a crazy co-op in Madsion, to the Onion staff, to a cancelled movie review TV show, all the while overcoming depression (which he refers to as Vice Admiral Phineas T. Cummerbund) and using A LOT of Simpsons references. Heaven.

Jane Cassady is the booking maven for the Philadelphia Poetry Slam. She has appeared in The November 3rd Club, The Comstock Review, Valley of the Contemporary Poets, and other journals. She has performed at such venues as LouderArts in New York City, Valley Contemporary Poets in Los Angeles, and The Encyclopedia Show in Chicago. She has taught poetry to all ages from pre-K to adult, and believes in coaxing out everyone's unique poet voice.

Deep Cuts: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan's Writing Profile

We are re-posting our February 2010 interview with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan in honor of her reading here with us tomorrow!  Join us this Friday, May 11, from 7-9 pm for our Nor'easter Open Mic, featuring Sullivan and Nathan Long, with an hour of open mic to follow!  For more information, you can visit our site or the Nor'easter blog. 

Writing Profile: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
February 22, 2010

1) How would you describe your writing?

I write fiction that is propelled by characters and their language. I’m always interested in people—who they are and how they’ve become that way, what they do and why they do it, how their decisions change their world, what experiences change them and force them to grow. I really enjoy walking for a while in characters’ heads and lives, figuring out how they think and how they speak. In many ways, I think our voices reflect the depths of who we are and what we’ve experienced. So as a lover of character-driven fiction, voice is really important to me, as well.

2) How does writing fit into your everyday life?

When writing isn’t a part of my day, I definitely notice its absence. Which doesn’t mean that I get to write fiction every day, of course. There are lots of days when I don’t write more than a to-do-list and a couple of belabored emails. I think it’s important for writers to acknowledge all of the different kinds of writing we do. I once took a course on print culture from the Renaissance era onward, where the professor drew our attention to all the various kinds of print we take in every day— the text on sugar packets, five billion kinds of street signs, the logos on the bottoms of our boots. I think writing is sort of the same way. We collage and troubleshoot words in so many ways, and spend lots of hidden time putting words together. I have good friends who treat nearly every email they send like a confection, kneading and pinching and frosting it until they feel it’s done.

Right now, I’m doing a lot of critical writing for my Ph.D., which is definitely different from my fiction. In many ways, though, it works the same muscle; almost any kind of writing gives us the chance to conjure up thoughts and images, then lasso them into being with words. Letters, journal entries, even to-do-lists, even business memos, I imagine, can offer moments of play. On days when I don’t get to write fiction, I try to really enjoy the creative aspects of whatever I am writing. But I make a note of it, and my day does feels a little different. I feel best when I’m creating things with words.

3) What authors and/or poets and writers inspire you?

Oh, there are so many. I am a huge, huge fan of Toni Morrison. I recently rediscovered her short story “Recetatif,” and sort of fell tragically and beautifully in awe all over again. I admire her for so many reasons, and talking about her always feels to me like trying to talk about love, to anatomize it. Her narrators are always completely authoritative and yet infinitely supple—they let you know that they have an important story to tell and that they are in control of that story, but they somehow also charm you into listening, settling in, going along for the ride, no matter how challenging and even painful it may be. I have similar feelings about Virginia Woolf, especially in To The Lighthouse, and Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. Jamaica Kincaid’s narrative voices always make me itch for a pen. As does Gayl Jones’s imagination, and James Joyce’s, too.

And there are lots of younger contemporary writers whose work inspires me. Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Sapphire stand out as models of folks who explore multiple worlds and multiple experiences—hip-hop culture, immigrant culture, issues of sexuality and gender, exile and alienation, all kinds of fusions and fractures—on a contemporary urban stage that my generation can relate to. I grew up in Harlem in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and I think I’ll always be drawn to stories rooted in that kind of time and place. The voices of rappers like Queen Latifah, Sugar Hill Gang, and the Notorious B.I.G. loom about as large for me as a lot of these authors I’ve mentioned. So I admire writers who’ve been able to tap into the urgency and complexity of young, urban voices and bring them to other parts of the world.

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your writing?

Philly has always felt like a home away from home for me. My mother was born and raised in North Philly, and that side of my family is still here. On a basic level, Philly and writing have always gone together for me. Throughout elementary school, I would come and spend a week or two of my summer vacation with my grandmother, and I’d always do a lot of writing. Every morning she’d clip the Cryptogram word puzzle from the Inquirer for me, and I’d do the puzzle and then write little stories based on whatever the quote turned out to be.

Now, Philly’s writing community is a sort of home-base for me. Most of the stories that I’ve published were written here, on the slanted stoops of buildings in the Art Museum area, or on the bus en route to West Philly, or in coffee shops downtown. Art in general is really alive in a special way in Philly. Community art is such an important part of the culture here, with the Mural Arts program, for example, which makes a walk through this city like a trip through Wonderland for anyone who loves art. And there are so many talented writers here—communities like Big Blue Marble, the Chapter and Verse series, the Light of Unity series, Moles not Molar, Running Wild Writers, and the Kelly Writers House all bring rich, interesting new fiction and poetry within close reach. Then, too, the legacy of writers like Sonia Sanchez, John Edgar Wideman, and W.E.B. Dubois is definitely an inspiration in itself.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

This is a tough one. I suppose that would be Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter. It’s a really stunning book about the life of a seemingly unremarkable Antiguan man, told from the point of view of his daughter. As in all of Kincaid’s work, the narrator taps into this unrelenting first-person voice that hooks you immediately, and makes you crave her when she’s gone. The book follows the narrator as she imagines and reconstruct her father’s life, thinking through how forces like colonialism, poverty, racism and classism, infidelity and love have shaped him, and, in turn, shape her. It’s one of Kincaid’s more recent novels, and I think it reflects everything that I admire about her work, and everything I try to do in my own. It makes you fall in love with the characters even through their missteps and cruelty, makes you root yourself in her fictional world, even with its real-world treacheries and flaws.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is from Harlem, New York. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming internationally in publications including Callaloo, American Fiction, Best New Writing, Crab Orchard Review, Bloom, Lumina, Amistad, The Minnesota Review, 2010 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, American Visions and GLQ. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the William Gunn Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, as well as honors from Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, American Short Fiction, Best New Writing, Philadelphia Stories, the Boston Fiction Festival, Sol Books, Temple University, Del Sol Press, the NAACP, and others. She is the recipient of scholarships, fellowships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, the Center for Fiction, and Williams College. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.  She recently completed her dissertation on voice and difference in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora.

Poetic Profile: Monica A. Hand

Join us for an evening of poetry with Monica A. Hand who will be reading from her collection, me and Nina, at Big Blue Marble, Friday, March 30th at 7 pm. 

1) How would you describe your poetry?

I write in many different forms, some traditional, some homegrown. One of my favorite forms are zuihitsu and haibun because they mix prose and verse. I like the narrative poem but not necessarily a linear treatment of the narrative.  I also like writing persona poems.  I identify with what the poet Saeed Jones calls a queer poetics – “queer” according to Jones, “implies a slipperiness, a subversion of expectations and conventions, and inability to sit still, a refusal to obey.”

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life? 

Poetry is how I sustain my life in the everyday, every day.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you? 

My legacy poets are Langston Hughes and Lucille Clifton. I enjoy many modern and contemporary poets and who I am inspired by changes.  Currently  I am inspired by the work of Toi Derricotte, Bhanu Kapil, Kimiko Hahn, Terrance Hayes, and Garcia Lorca.

 

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry? 

From 1971 – 1975, I attended Beaver College, now known as Arcadia, in Glenside, PA.  After college I settled in Philadelphia for several years and was active with Alexandria Bookstore, Hera Feminist newspaper and Rites of Women Theatre Collective.  I served briefly as poetry editor for Hera and I wrote material performed by Rites of Women.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it. 

The last book I have read that I really enjoyed is Toi Derricotte’s, “The Undertaker’s Daughter.” This is an amazing collection of poems that are honest, soul searing, complex and brave.  It is part memoir and reminds me of Lucille Clifton’s “The Good Woman” in that the first part of the book let’s us look inside of Derricotte and get a glimpse of what she is made of.  We come to know her demons and her overcoming.  Some of the poems are whimsical and playful and in reading this work we get to witness a true master at work. 

Check out Hand performing "Everything Must Change" here:

EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE from David Flores on Vimeo.

Monica A. Hand is a poet and book artist currently living in Harlem, USA.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aunt Chloe, Black Renaissance Noire, The Sow’s Ear, Drunken Boat, Beyond the Frontier, African-American Poetry for the 21st Century, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade and elsewhere.  She holds a MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation from Drew University, and is a founding member of Poets for Ayiti.

Poetic Profile: Quincy Scott Jones

1) How would you describe your poetry?

It’s hard to describe one’s own work, but after reading my work, one of my most respected mentors described me as “one odd dude.”

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

I know it sounds cliché, but poetry is life. You breathe it, you hear it, you wear it on your skin. Poetry sends you text messages, e-mail alerts, and somehow gets invited to Sunday night dinner.

The only problem is finding a way for poetry to pay the bills.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?

The Usual Suspects:

Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Askia M. Toure, Lewis Carroll, Lamont B. Steptoe, Zora Neal Hurston, Gil Scot Heron, Sherman Alexie, Alan Moore, Philip K. Dick (need to read more), Fran Ross, Richard Pryor, Saul Williams, Tracy Morris, Robert Hayden, Nella Larsen, Larry Neal, Biggie – Tupac – Kafka – Whoopi, Robin Williams, William F Van Wert (Bill), Bill Withers, Richard Wright, Steven Wright.

Oh, and the author of the alphabet: whoever wrote that song wrote everything (old Steven Wright joke).

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

For all her conflicts, few mention how Philadelphia, much like America, is a community of communities: the blues of Olde City echo in the rhythm of West Philly, in the funk of South Philly, all while the satellite communities like Arcadia and 69^th Street dance along. Philadelphia is a city of cities, a new discovery every day.

Of course, I was raised in Jersey, so maybe it’s just new to me.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

I’m looking forward to reading this new book, Old News. I forgot the author’s name, but I hear it’s really good.

Quincy Scott Jones earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master’s degree from Temple University, and $100 once working as a supermarket clown. His work has been or is forthcoming in African American Review, Journal of Pan African Studies, Water~Stone Review, California Quarterly, Let Loose on the World: Celebrating Amiri Baraka at 75, and the anthology From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth. Since 2006 he has taught “Poetry on Page and Stage,” a course exploring the idea of poetry as live performance as well as a performance on the page. With Nina Sharma Jones, he co-created the Nor’easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading series. His first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by Whirlwind Press in 2009.

Quincy Scott Jones and Ryan Eckes will be reading this Saturday, February 18th at 5pm. Please come check them out!

Poetic Profile: Ryan Eckes

1) How would you describe your poetry?

Hard to say since the form’s always changing—quickly in mind, slowly on paper—but in general so far it’s been a poetry of place: Philadelphia, how bodies move through it and what they say. There’s a lot of found/overheard language I try to respond to and hear myself through a mess of, toward some truth. I’ve described my poems before as “motion machines,” like songs you can step into and go for a ride if you want, but that’s not always the case anymore.

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

It’s always on my mind, and I read some every day.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?

Most immediately those I meet up with most often: Frank Sherlock, Steve Dolph, Stan Mir, Ian Davisson, Carlos Soto Román, CAConrad. Many in Philadelphia. Many others from a distance, alive and dead. Lately an old standby is Ted Berrigan.

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

Of the many communities in Philadelphia, there’s a poetry one that plays a large part because I’m reading and hearing their work a lot. There’s also my neighbors, past and present, students, all kinds of friends—anyone I’ve ever really listened to moves through me and into the poetry. And sometimes it’s just the sounds of the machinery making me go.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

Well, I just read a bunch all at once over the last month, and it was a great experience. These are all sort of swirling together:

Clearview/Lie by Ted Greenwald

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

Mercury by Ariana Reines

“neither wit nor gold” (from then) by Ammiel Alcalay

Hughson’s Tavern by Fred Moten

Where Art Belongs by Chris Kraus

Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum

Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey

Scared Text by Eric Baus

Any combination of those’ll work for you, I bet, if you want meaningful criticism of this country we live in, and to see better, if not feel, and serious beauty.

Ryan Eckes was born in Philadelphia in 1979. He's the author of Old News (Furniture Press 2011) and when i come here (Plan B Press 2007). More of his poetry can be found on his blog and in various magazines.

Ryan Eckes and Quincy Scott Jones will be reading this Saturday, February 18th at 5:00pm. Please come check them out!

Poetic Profile: Harriet Levin Millan

 1) How would you describe your poetry?

My poetry is hard to describe because it varies from book to book. I wrote my first book after grad school, (University of Iowa Writers Workshop) so I guess I was responding to what I learned there and trying to subvert that in some way. My second book was written also as subversion, largely as a response to a reviewer of my first book, who said I should stop looking out through the "lens of rape." At first I was horrified when I read this statement. I thought, "Oh yeah, right, I do that too much." Then I thought, "No, no, I don't do it enough."
 
2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?


 My poetry is my everyday. I think about poetry all day long. Instead of calling the book of my life PROZAC NATION, I would call it POETRY NATION, because I'm always carrying around lines in my head. Even though I write sitting down at a table or desk, I often take walks or walk with my dog and keep writing the poem as I'm going. I'm very interested in not just describing the physical world but entering it. The poetry I like best is what I call "inside-out," meaning that their is not longer a separation between the writer and her subject. The following lines that I wrote recently illustrate this concept: "Hopeful the artist wasn't/and on my bike ride amid cars I hear/the screeching that is not confined to the road/but surrounds art/especially when the artist enters/the cluttered shade of her garage/where her first brush/was a kiss..." These lines are from a poem about the artist Eva Hesse called "Eight Legs," which was the title of the final sculpture she made as she was dying from a brain tumor. The reason I think these lines illustrate the "inside-out" concept is because it's hard to tell from them where the subject of the poem starts and the object of the poem begins. In other words, is this poem about Eva Hesse or the speaker of the poem? A preoccupation of mine, since I was a teenager has always been how to get two people to take up the same space in terms of absolute understanding, and I think all of the poems I write seek to resolve this proposition.
 
 3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?  

The poets who inspire me are contemporaries, because I like to read what's fresh and new, but probably to go back to less contemporary voices, Elizabeth Bishop more than anyone else, because I love poems that are very physical yet are completely subjective in the way I've explained above and Bishop is a pro at this.
 


4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

The community in Philadelphia takes up my head space and since I live in Philadelphia, it's the place I write about. If I lived elsewhere, I'd be writing about that place. I don't usually write a lot when I travel. I need to have a long-standing relationship with a place.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

 The last book that I enjoyed was Martha Silano's THE LITTLE OFFICE OF IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. It's published by Saturnalia Press and I'm on the Board of Saturnalia so I helped read the manuscripts that became the finalists for the Saturnalia Book Prize, Martha's book among them. Her poems achieve the "inside-out" idea that I've talked about above in really cool ways, such as the final poem in the book which is an Ode to Gravy. Garrison Keillor chose "Ode to Gravy" for inclusion in his Poetry Almanac, so see, it is really good.

Prize winning poet Harriet Levin Millan is the author of two books of poetry.  Her debut collection, The Christmas Show, was chosen by Eavan Boland for a Barnard New Women Poet’s Prize. That book also won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.  The Philadelphia Inquirer named it a Notable Book of the Year. Her second book, Girl in Cap and Gown was a 2009 National Poetry Series Finalist. A PEW Fellowship in the Arts Winner in Poetry and a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she co-directs the Program in Writing and Publishing at Drexel University.

 

Poetic Profile: Iain Haley Pollock

1) How would you describe your poetry?

In general, I’m interested in poetry that acts as a witness and either tells a story that needs to be told or in the lyric mode, captures a feeling or mood that helps me understand what it is to be human in this time and place.

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

Most days I have a chance to teach, write or read poetry.  But even on the odd day when that doesn’t happen, I find that poetry often pervades my idle thoughts.  I’ll find myself playing with poetic lines in my head or evaluating experiences to see if I can mine them for poetic purposes.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you? 

My parents gave me a poetry anthology, I Am the Darker Brother,  when I was young and those poets continue to inspire me: Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and especially Robert Hayden.  In graduate school my professors introduced me to Elizabeth Bishop and Hayden Carruth.  And some of the faculty from the Cave Canem workshop remain strong influences on my work: Elizabeth Alexander, Cornelius Eady, and Carl Phillips.

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

Philly is a great poet’s town, and not only because it’s cheaper than it’s East Coast cousins. All the brick & rust could easily be construed as decay, but I find something beautiful, in an almost nostalgic sense, about the Philadelphia landscape and how the people here constantly reinvent different spaces.  But I’m most interested in human stories, and the (often eccentric) sights, sounds and stories of my neighbors move me to write.  My poems are littered with pit bulls, washing machines abandoned in lots, the exclamations of my fellow Philadelphians, cobblestone streets, folks riding the 32 bus, wasps nests, gunfire & sirens in the night.  On some level I want readers, now and in the future, to know the experiences and emotions of living in Philadelphia during the uncertainty of the early 21st century.

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.
I recently finished Robinson Jeffers’ Selected Poems.  This summer while on vacation, my wife and I happened to stay around the corner from Jeffer’s old place, Tor House, in Carmel, California.  Some of the language in his poems seems antiquated now – he was writing in the early to mid-20th century but purposefully evokes an earlier time – but when his poems worked for me, their awe at the power and permanence of nature humbled me and gave me a renewed sense of the brevity of human life.


Iain Haley Pollock lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy. His first collection of poems, Spit Back a Boy (University of Georgia, 2011), won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Pollock earned a bachelor's degree in English from Haverford College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. He is a Cave Canem Fellow.

Poetic Profile: Dilruba Ahmed

1) How would you describe your poetry?
 
That's a tough question!  Many of the poems in my first book deal with a familial and cultural history marked by rifts in place and time.  Some are narrative, some are more lyrical.  I write in free verse and use given forms at times, too.

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?
 
The way that poetry fits into my everyday life varies from week to week--reading and writing poetry is essential, of course, and I try to do as much of that as possible!  I also enjoy attending readings and talking shop with friends who are writers.  I also recently began teaching a poetry workshop, which has been fantastic and is teaching me ways to read my work and that of others more deeply.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?
 
There are many to name!  Agha Shahid Ali, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Theodore Roethke....

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?
 
I'm relatively new to the area, so it's been fun getting know the city.  My parents, who are from Bangladesh, lived in Philadelphia for many years when they first moved to the U.S., so we have a good deal of family history here.  I grew up in other parts of the state and in Ohio, but because of that history (and the fact that I was born here!), Philadelphia feels like a place with important roots for me. 

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.
 
I recently read WAIT by Alison Stine, which is a wonderful book--dark and powerful, disturbing and lovely.  Stine's poems build mystery by revealing and withholding--by complicating a story while telling it.  Her collection was the winner of the 2011 Brittingham Prize run by the University of Wisconsin Press.


Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, July 2011), winner of the 2010 Bakeless Literary Prize for poetry, selected by Arthur Sze and awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Ahmed’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, and The Normal School. Her work also appears in Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. A writer, editor, and educator with roots in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Bangladesh, Ahmed holds BPhil and MAT degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.

Dilruba Ahmed and Bonnie MacAllister will be reading this Friday, September 9, 2011, at 7:00pm. Please come check them out!

Poetic Profile: Leonard Gontarek

1) How would you describe your poetry?

I am a surrealist, by way of Zen, with East European ancestry. There is
no such school of poetry, but I show up to class every day, nevertheless.



2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

There was a point, after much practice and commitment, I knew I had become a poet.
And so, poetry fits into my life thoroughly. Before that, I wondered a good deal
what place the poet had. I became, I suppose, an inhabitant of earth who wrote poetry.



3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?

It is always, of course, difficult to narrow down such a list. I’ll make it a top-ten:

Ten: Kenneth Koch
Nine: Charles Wright
Eight: Jean Follain
Seven: Carole Maso
Six: Alice Fulton
Five: W. S. Merwin
Four: Yves Bonnefoy
Three: Evan S. Connell
Two: Shunryu Suzuki
One: … Julio Cortazar


4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?


I have organized poetry readings in the Philadelphia area for twenty years.
I judged a City Paper poetry contest. I co-edited a Philadelphia supplement
of The American Poetry Review. I have published local poets. I conduct poetry
workshops. I edit manuscripts of local poets. Hard not to feel part of an extended
Philadelphia poetry family. I’ll add this about Philly poets: they are brilliant,
visionary, honest and awfully talented. The other part of the community – the cafes,
galleries, bookstores, and the Philadelphia audience – all have been gracious and
supportive of poetry. I moved here from Vermont. In the first year, mountains still
appeared in my poems. Now I think I write Philadelphia poems. And that is how it
should be. Philadelphia is a terrific city. A beautiful cityscape. Home to me.



5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.


Winter’s Journey by Stephen Dobyns. A book of only fourteen poems. Here are some
of the titles of poems, to give you an idea: Mourning Doves, Rabbits, Balance, Werewolf, Looking for the Dog, Chainsaws, Spring, Lost. Each are like small novellas. Meditations really. A man taking a walk talking to the dark, himself, God, and we are close behind and able to listen in. What distinguishes it from other prose-poetry is the intimacy of the voice (the poems seem like they are being spoken to you) and the immediacy of its content – what it is like to be alive in the twenty-first century, today, in the falling snow here, while the bombs fall there. They are poems of beauty, revelation, big and small truths, and good humor. But I’ll let Stephen Dobyns pitch his own poems.
Here is the conclusion to Looking for the Dog:

But thoughts like these, if I don’t bring them to a halt,
make my doubts pile up, and the world looks so brief,
so fragile that I start poking my finger through its walls,
its seeming substantiality, as if through a wet tissue;
and if I don’t repair my fabric of opinion and belief,
my illusion of truth, I’ll drop like a rock from a roof,
falling, falling till I come to an abrupt stop. Like this.




Leonard Gontarek is the author of St. Genevieve Watching

Over Paris, Van Morrison Can’t Find His Feet,

Zen For Beginners, and Déjà Vu Diner.

His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,

Fence, Field, Pool, Poetry Northwest, Verse, Hanging Loose.


His work appears in the anthologies The Best American Poetry,

Joyful Noise! American Spiritual Poetry, The Working Poet,

Dwarf Stars Science Fiction Poetry Anthology.

He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize

and twice received Poetry Fellowships from the Pennsylvania

Council On The Arts. He has been a cabdriver, movie- projectionist,

teacher and bookseller. He coordinates The Green Line Poetry Series

and teaches poetry workshops at the Moonstone Arts Center.

Poetic Profile: Saida Agostini

1.)How would you describe your poetry?

It’s like me, an intensely goofy, emotional and loving thick brown woman with big hair, tons of flaws and a huge heart (I know that sounds like a country song, but its true).



ritual

I never knew what it took to die
if no one closes your lids, your
eyes are scotch taped closed
if your mouth is left open, someone
will come and break your jaw put
your body back together so that
your family can come and see something
they know. the white hot violence it
takes to break your body into something
familiar hide the bed sores hide the shit
anything to pretend the work of dying
never existed shuffled off into a patchwork
of bodies twisted broken and turned into
the humans we wanted them to be. maybe
that’s why no one says much
when bodies of trans women are found
carved all over dark cities chopped into
arms legs and limbs that can’t be made
whole or familiar, but instead strange
leaving only teeth to identify whole
lives by, picking out fillings and extractions
to separate their blood from others
how did they say goodbye? what is
left to bring back home to a cemetery
or resting place—who can close their eyes
hold the body and remember what is familiar
in battle

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

It’s how I stay sane, and remember to breathe. I have gone without writing for a year, and I would never do it again. Working within lgbt and homeless populations, I live with a lot of naked strength, grief, hope, and brutality. Poetry has become a way for me to find what is human, what connects me with everyone else, and remember how to hold on to the world that I dream of. I think poetry has always been a healing force for me, and one that I use in my political and therapeutic work.



3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?

The top list would be Jan Beatty, Yusef Komunyakaa, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Kalisha Buchanon, Sapphire,William Shakespeare (so clichéd I know), and Wanda Coleman.


4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

I love Philly! I think that the community is incredibly supportive of the arts, especially in honoring voices of folks not typically heard within the mainstream. In September 2010, I co-produced a queer gender variant production of For Colored Girls, which was sold out, I was overwhelmed by the support and excitement of the community, not only for the production, but the cause itself (the majority of the proceeds went to fund scholarships for LGBT youth). Last year, I was awarded an Arts and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, which I am using to develop a therapeutic group grounded in the arts. The energetic reception I have received from community organizations and other artists is deeply affirming of the reality that Philadelphia is committed to utilizing art as a means of social change. (also I really love cheese steaks, and the iced tea that you can get from the Chinese restaurants).

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

So I just finished re-reading The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton, a re-telling of old Black folktales. It is one of the most beautiful and magical books I remember from my childhood.

M. Saida Agostini is a Black queer love centered poet, social worker and activist. A featured performer at the Big Blue Marble Bookstore, Philly Queer Lit Festival, More than Words and GenderCrash, her work bridges worlds all at once joyfully erotic, raw and unapologetically present. Wild Witness, her first chapbook was released in 2007, and will release her second chapbook Hunger in
2011.

Poetic Profile: Dr. Niama L. Williams

1) How would you describe your poetry?

Like a running river that is full of glass, shards, lilies, roses, carnations--all things bright and beautiful and remnants of what has broken our souls. Our lives are often like that: we are made up of what has nearly broken us and what has solidified the weak parts. I bring both together in poetry and prose, my prose particularly, that runs the path of stream of consciousness. A good friend once said she would not buy my book if she found it in the bookstore. I laughingly queried, why? "Cause I had to work too damn hard!" she exclaimed. "I was lookin' shit up in the dictionary, reachin' for the thesaurus; I was workin' too damn hard! One minute you sound like Fifth and Central; the next like a Ph.D.!" I had to agree, and yet my friend in Tennessee's mother read THE JOURNEY and loved it--she with an eighth grade education.

2) How does poetry fit into your everyday life?

It keeps me sane and breathing calmly. Without poetry I would stumble at understanding and comprehending my world. The difficult things don't make sense if I cannot think about them and then sit down and write what God says about them and sends over the transom. For me, poetry and prose are about listening; picking up the pen, or sending out a message, "I want to write about x" and waiting for God to send the words. When He does, whatever I am struggling with begins to make sense and ceases to terrify or humiliate. That is something for which I thank the heavens daily, and the angels routinely.

3) What poets and/or authors inspire you?

An easy one!!!! Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison (THE BLUEST EYE is THE perfect novel just as BELOVED is THE best film), Alice Walker (whom I routinely refer to as "Auntie Alice" her work hits so close to the bone!), Andre Dubus's House of Sand and Fog (the book, not the film), John Edgar Wideman, especially his DAMBALLAH; T. S. Eliot and his Prufrock, also The Wasteland (hard as hell to read, but oh the joy in deciphering!); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes; for fun, Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware novels and Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone and Spenser novels.

4) How does the community of Philadelphia play a part in your poetry?

Where else would I read??? :-) My first venues were in Philadelphia and I am determined to make it here. That is not easy. I am devoted to Panoramic Poetry; Crucial and Lamar and the Redcrosses have done so much to help poets and artists. Yet making it as a poet in this city is no easy thing. Takes money, time, and effort; I am determined to do all three differently in 2011. 2012 will not find me scraping the bottom of the barrel to survive; not if I and the Lord have anything to say about it!

5) What is the last book you have read that you enjoyed? Tell our Big Blue Marble community a little about it.

Andre Dubus' HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG was a stunner. Every page I turned I THOUGHT I knew what was coming next, and every time I turned that page I was shocked out of my shoes. This man, this writer, had me pulling FOR the former Iranian general and AGAINST the blond white woman! I found this novel astounding for those two reasons; I never anticipated one plot point and I became firmer and firmer in my desire for the Iranian general to just destroy this woman and make short work of it too. He had me going against everything that represented the American dream, and happily too. Masterful.


Dr. Niama L. Williams is the guiding force behind Blowing Up Barriers Enterprises, a company that specializes in leading you to the life you have dreamed of living but can't quite seem to get to on your own. She is the author of 11 books, each describing her survival of trauma and celebrating those who have assisted her as she's walked her path. Dr. Ni also facilitates two workshop series, "Affirming the Fully Imagined Life" and "It"s Okay To Want: Eroticism and the Survival of Sexual Trauma" and interviews authors on "Poetry & Prose & Anything Goes with Dr. Ni" under the auspices of BlogTalkRadio.com. Review her credentials, publications and workshop descriptions at her website: http://drnisnotesandnibbles.blogspot.com/ or peruse one of her books for yourself at her Lulu.com storefront: http://stores.lulu.com/drni.