Another Saturday Night

Here's a poem I drafted with my Tuesday morning Poetry Writing class after the September 17 explosion on 23rd Street (and unexploded device found on 27th Street). Dan Shefelman heard me read it at FIT's Academic Open Mic, and we ended up having some of our words included in the ChalkFIT exhibit.

Another Saturday Night

and I got nobody never

never no how no way

no day do I wake up 

in the green of a Sunday

next to a body that is not me.

No, sirree, I'm F-R-E-E

and blowin' in the wind

no sin    no ramifications

of our stepping out, stepping in

with someone who may or may not

have our best interests at heart

no tart horning in, no spin

no twisting to look thin

no morning-breath grin

and gee-willikers it's been

a mighty long time since

the lane was clear for me to pass,

keep sass, and break the fast

in the L-A-S-T gasp of a blast--

Ahem. That was it, the time we had

no alternative but had to walk past

the site, the fright of shrapnel, and we might

glaze over it's been so long

since we felt safe—

we are never safe, never safe 

never safe wind up for the throw

and place your javelin dart,

arrow, expert archery will

get you nowhere, whether or no

and I solemnly swear I will    I will

I will    I will    I will care

every time I see another news

report of the dead, stripping us bare

and elemental it’s elementary

welcome to the Twenty-First

Century where everything happens twice—

in real time and online and over

and over and over and over

it rhymes these men    these men

and boys these guns used like toys

these cries not tears of joy and when was

the last time you heard a politician

who was not a ploy? The brazen brazier

of the plain plaisir another Saturday night

and the ladies are feeling right,

the car gave us an awful fright,

the first responders are outta sight

and that is what and where and when we

must begin and end

the ever-loving better-living fight.

Poetry Jump-Starts (for my classes and whoever else needs them)

It's Wednesday, which means that Mary Biddinger is tweeting a new Summer Poetry Prompt, as she is doing every Wednesday this summer. I thought I would post the prompts I give to my FIT students here, too.

Poetry Jump-Starts

Here are some prompts to get you started on a poem! 

·      Write a poem in the voice of another person, a creature, or an object, using first person (dramatic monologue).

·      Write a letter in verse form to a famous person.

·      Write a verse letter to someone you know very well.

·      Is there a piece of art or music that you admire, or even dislike?  Write about it—describe it, but try to say something beyond the mere description.

·      Look out your window at the scene you see every day.  Observe it for some length of time.  Try to imagine you’re seeing it for the first time.  Do you see anything new?  Use your imagination.  Then write.

·      Go somewhere you’ve never been before, and write about what you see there.

·      Write about an image from a dream. Describe it as specifically as possible, just as you remember it, without interpreting or explaining it.

·      Write about a specific, detailed memory.  Using sensory detail and/or figurative language, try to “show” the significance of that memory to your reader, rather than “telling” it. (Try to use all five senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste)

·      Take two lines from poems by someone else.  Write one at the top of the page, and one at the bottom. Write your way from the first line to the last.

NaPoWriMo: Lost My Mojo

This year for the first time I thought I'd try NaPoWriMo--National Poetry Writing Month, writing a poem a day and posting on my blog. That lasted until the 15th, at which time I took the weekend off (busy with kids and such) and then never got back to it. Maybe I went to too many poetry readings--this National Poetry Month was a killer! I focused too much on the online class I'm teaching now (yes, while on sabbatical) and the 3 I'll be teaching during the summer session (argh). Bobby needed attention, Stella's IEP meeting happened, and life intervened. In short, one thing led to another, I got out of the habit of lowering my standards and steeling myself to draft and post a poem every day. I kind of started to forget what it felt like.

On the plus side, I'm happy with having drafted 15 poems so far, and I think I'll try to eke out a couple more before May is upon us. Anything that gets me stringing words together is a good thing. Stay tuned, folks!

NaPoWriMo Day 13

Ohio Steel

     Floyd O. Lemmon 1912-1982

He didn't need college to be a success,

started in the foundry, moved up to foreman
and then got into sales, traveling with a suit and tie
a smart hat and an expense account
a crystal paperweight a medal a retirement prize

*   *   *

Started in wartime
fires kept burning
dehumidify the ore
hollow casting
war again
wartime contracts
cold war defense
mosaic of parts
and fabrications

*   *   *

He roamed the property
in search of arrowheads
protean bones and stones
fields with feed corn   seed corn
straw and hay fodder for the cows
creekbed always moving

*   *   *

When the company was sold
they moved his job to Pennsylvania
but he stayed on his land
traveling man
restaurants and homey motels
amateur shutterbug
photos and photos
a slideshow every weekend

*   *   *

Foundry Craft Grillery       historic Lebanon Steel Foundry
     sounds of metal on metal       heat of fire     dedicated workers
successful player         industries                simplicity        
old world           grilleries and butcheries
fire forged the iron and steel         past               eight foot custom wood-fired grill
 leaders and laborers           private dining space               founded City      1750s

*   *   *

Steel the company that kept him

Steel the blade that cut the lawn 

and chopped down weeds in the meadow
Steel the wheel that ground the meat for Gran's ham salad
Steel with copper bottoms the pots and pans where supper cooked
the lid rattling beef and noodles
All those dinners she had to eat alone
after he was gone

Amy Lemmon

April 13, 2016

NaPoWriMo Day 11

Signs for C. S. Lewis

It's just not that simple, Jack,
you can't pop in and out of large
furniture and expect to be transformed.
You know the grubby hub of life
(though perhaps I'm mixing you up
with Wystan) and you've known grief,
God knows, but really your life is too contained,
sequestered, for your insights to mean much
to me now. Caught as I am in this city,
rubbing hips and elbows with a variety
of my fellow humans, hustling in the bustle
grist ground in this public transport mill
the rapture surely will be televised
or at least YouTubed. Stand clear of the closing
doors, we won't be spirited away to Heaven
on holiday. Hoping that Hell has all the fire
of a defunct pizza oven. You got right
that any good intentions go to light,
any bad to dark. The problem of pain
is the fear of it, merely wise, merely human,
merely seeking the everlasting truth.

Amy Lemmon

April 11, 2016

NaPoWriMo Day 6

Ablutions

The nights I wash my face are the good nights
when I feel pure and virtuous and calm
the children both in bed, the dishes draining
no sleeping on the couch, the teevee blaring
after an endless binge-watch marathon.
Even if I've downed a glass or two of pinot
or snuck a half-pint of Haagen-Dazs
the cleansing ritual somehow unstains me
enough like saying prayers in bed, the call
of pillows, flannel sheets and layered blankets
the lure of dreams that could bring some relief
or close encounters with my movie idol--
it's all fair game before the old alarm
wakes me, alone again, yet clean at least.

Amy Lemmon

April 6, 2016

We Don't String Popcorn Necklaces, but We Do Have Creativity Resources!

On Saturday, April 2nd, at 9am,  I'll be presenting on a panel at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, "We Don’t String Popcorn Necklaces Here: Brain Science and Assessment Beyond Craft." 

The panel moderator, Laura Valeri, has created a Google doc with a list of resources about creativity, brain science, and more, gathered by Laura, Brendan Constantine, and me. Go here to view the document!

It's National Poetry Month--and NaPoWriMo Starts Today!

Image from http://www.wildviolet.net/

Today for the first time I'm participating in NaPoWriMo, a month-long challenge for poets to write a poem every day for the month of April (National Poetry Month). I'll be posting my daily poem here, then probably deleting it, so keep checking back if you want to see what I'm up to!

Also check out the Bloof Books blog, where Shanna Compton is posting a selection of NaPoWriMo work.

Join me, and wish me luck!

The Cave of Making and Making the Most of Time

I haven't been much of a blogger for a very long while, so when Superstition Review asked me to write a guest post on their blog leading up to the AWP Conference in Los Angeles, I jumped at the chance to force myself to write prose. And force myself I did, pushing past all levels of procrastination and distraction to send the post to the editor, only a few days after I had originally promised.

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

The title comes from the phrase that started rolling around in my head while I was working on poems, and poems were working on/in me. I ended up talking a bit about my writing process and the image of the cave for creativity (borrowed, I discovered, from dear Uncle Wystan--I am on sabbatical, so I am actually writing for the first time in a very long time--and also about the panel I'm on with Laura Valeri, Brendan Constantine, D. Gilson, and Zohra Saed.
Go here to read it!

I love the image at left, which I found by Googling "cave" and "creativity." According to this article in the Smithsonian, experts now believe that most cave art was made by women, based on the measurements of the handprints and stencils like these.

#NeverForget: My 9/11 Poem

A few days late, I know, but I feel like sharing. On 9/11/01 I was 8 months pregnant and teaching a 9am English Composition class at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Before class, my students and I could see the towers from a hallway window--black smoke coming from one of them. We'd heard a plane had crashed into it--pictured a small plane, an accident. Numbly, I gathered the students in for class. On our break an hour later, one young man went outside and ran back in: "They're GONE!" The classroom next door had the TV tuned to CNN with the diptych of the WTC site and the Pentagon. We were told to go to the main lobby of campus. First, I went to my office, called my husband, sent emails to my family.

I've written more about that morning here. What I think about now is my students, all of them freshmen, most of them new to FIT and NYC. I think of the young man whose cousin "went missing in the towers," according to an email. He disappeared and dropped out of class. A couple others, from my honors writing class, left FIT and went home at their parents' insistence. The city seemed suddenly too dangerous for them.

A few years later, I drafted this poem based on a prompt given by George Bilgere at the Antioch Writers' Workshop. I worked on it from time to time, and recently it was selected by Kathleen Ossip  for the "Child" issue of WSQ.  Never forget.

Flashback to 2009: An Interview from Southeast Review

Five years ago, Samuel Lloyd, then a B.A. candidate in English/Creative Writing at Florida State University, interviewed me for The Southeast Review. The page has since been deleted from their archives (WAH!), so I thought I would reprint it again here.

What happened when I tried to follow the link. Bummer.

Since then, it appears that young Samuel has completed a master's degree in English education and is pursuing a second one, in Instructional Systems. He currently works at FSU as a Senior College Life Coach, which sounds like a really cool way of saying "career counselor," but perhaps means much more.

I'm still jealous of Brendan Constantine, but for different reasons. :-)

1) Where do you like to be when you write?

As a single working mother with a very hectic schedule I’ve had to learn to write wherever and whenever I can. Nowadays, that is usually either on the subway while I’m commuting (when I can get a seat) or in class, during a journal exercise with my students. My all-time favorite place to write was a “workspace for writers” in Manhattan called Paragraph. During a sabbatical in the fall of 2007 I became a member and was able to take advantage of their “quiet space,” which has a variety of relatively private carrels for members to use. There was something about writing in a space where others are also working that I found especially motivating and inspiring. Other favorite spots are a rock in Central Park (I have several I go to when I can), my gym (they have a table and chairs in one area, but a bench in the locker room will do in a pinch), and my bed (propped up by pillows).

2) How do you usually begin/end a piece you're working on?

Most pieces, prose and poetry, start in one of my notebooks—either the rambling “morning pages” cheap spiral-bound, or if I’m feeling ambitious, the hardbacked composition books I use for drafting. Very occasionally, a poem or prose piece will start out as a blog entry. At some point I will type it up then usually I print it out and make markings on the page.  Ending? I’m not sure if you mean the process—which is really never over, even when a piece is published—or an individual piece. Endings can take awhile, in either case, and it has sometimes taken me years to feel that final “snap” and know something is finished, or close enough.

3) If you like to listen to music while you write (by the way, I saw the Decemberists reference on your blog , isn't "The Crane Wife" great?) what kind of music helps the most?

As I have written elsewhere, music is my life. I was equally interested in music and literature all the way through graduate school—I played violin in a contra dance band and for a community production of Carousel while getting my degrees in creative writing. And I usually have music on while I’m working—when I need to concentrate, Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach do the trick—but for writing poems I don’t usually listen to anything in particular, unless the poem itself is connected to a musical piece (such as “Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra”). But I can be inspired by a piece to write—either in the moment or later.

The following can be answered in a word, a phrase, a sentence . . .

1) Name a writer who is currently making you jealous.

Brendan Constantine. I’ve been reading his collection Letters to Guns and have been ranting about it to everyone who will listen. What he does with voice, with humor, with pathos, with the sheer music and drama of the poem, is flabbergasting. And the way he reads his work—well, it’s just not fair.

2) What kind of child were you?

Sensitive. Tough. Silly. Serious. Lazy. Ambitious. Sheltered. Curious. Wise. Foolish. Scared. Relentless.

3) What is your relationship with rejection like?

Probably as bumpy as anyone else’s. Who likes rejection of any kind? And is it really possible to become so thick-skinned that you really don’t mind all those fat envelopes (or standardized emails) returning one after another? It helps, sometimes, to hear well-known writers like Kim Addonizio talk about their rejections—in her book Ordinary Genius she actually reprints some of the rejection letters she has received from the finest publications in North America. There was a point at which I stopped sending blind submissions and only submitted work to places where I had some sort of “connection,” however tangential. For years I spent so much time, energy, and money sending out my book and chapbook manuscripts that I just couldn’t send to magazines. As a result, I went into submission frenzy when the manuscripts were accepted, trying to get the previously unpublished poems out there before the chapbook or book came out! I did manage to place a couple more, but I wish I had been more diligent earlier on.

4) What book did you suffer for the most, and why?

Well, since Saint Nobody is my first full-length collection, this is a no-brainer. I like to tell everyone that this has been eighteen years in the making (dating back to 1990, when I started graduate school), it really has taken my whole life up to this point. There is a quote attributed to Elvis Costello (and several other rock musicians), something like, “You get your whole life to make your first record, and two weeks to make your second.” I’m taking a little longer than that for the next one, but it does feel strange to be generating new work for a developing collection, rather than continually winnowing out and using most new pieces to fill an existing one.

5) What was the greatest surprise for you in your most recent writing?

I wrote a poem in two days for the blog Starting Today, co-edited by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg, which resulted in a book published by University of Iowa Press. One hundred poets were each assigned a day to write a poem, one for each of the first hundred days of the Obama administration. Mine was day 61, March 21st, and I had conveniently forgotten that I would be traveling to Ohio that weekend for my sister’s wedding. Between work, taking care of my kids, packing, picking up the rental car, driving, etc….I knew that the only way I could accomplish this was to give myself a sort of exercise. I came up with the idea of an acrostic, using the phrase “HOPING FOR CHANGE.” I called it “Audacious: An Acrostic,” and I literally finished it an hour before I had to send it to Rachel, on the computer in my dad’s office, which doubles as a guest room. My niece Mary was reading one of Kipling’s Just-So Stories to my daughter and her cousin. The phrase “Best beloved” ended up in the last line of my poem.

6) What writerly habit would you most like to break?

Procrastination, procrastination, procrastination. Although is it really procrastination when you literally have no time? Hm.

Lastly . . . (one random fact to top it off)

7) What did you have for lunch today?

Today was Sunday, and not only did I go to church but it was my confirmation. (I recently became a member of a wonderful liberal Episcopalian church, St. Bart’s on Park Avenue.) They had a little reception for us after the service, and I had two pieces of this delicious lemon cake with yellow candy butterflies. Then I got a falafel pita and a diet Boylan’s root beer and headed to my office to look over my creative writing students’ manuscripts! So much for a day of rest.