Dear Readers,

I haven’t had the opportunity to post on maybesopoetry in quite some time. My apologies to those who have inquired about book reviews. I hope to start up again in the future (perhaps the summer of 2016), but unfortunately, I can’t commit to writing reviews at this time.

If you’re interested in writing a post as a guest blogger, send me an email (Christina@christinaveladotapoetry.com). I’d love to add new voices to maybesopoetry. Keep in mind that I’m still considering submissions to The Homeless Poem Project. Click here to read the guidelines.

I also have some news to announce! My chapbook, Clutch & Brood, has just been released by Aldrich Press (an imprint of Kelsay Books). I have a new website up and running, if you’re interested in checking it out: http://www.christinaveladotapoetry.com/.

I wish happiness and love to all in 2016!

Christina

Photo (see above): Maybe, the blog’s muse

Freecycle Poem

If you have a hole in your body somewhere, I have a piece of metal for it.

Size fourteen pants, oil stained, good for mowing the grass.

Rhubarb starts, enough to fill a bucket.

I have telepathic vision. Double jointed thumbs.

One yellow dog, sometimes good, sometimes bad.

Wanted: a chocolate cake that says happy birthday.

Free: 16 bricks made in Glouster.

Waffle Maker with busted cord.

Three screw top pickle jars.

Wanted: a man who can balance his checkbook.

Wanted: a list of things to do while sober.

I have a song stuck in my head and will gladly share it.

Grief, that doesn’t sweeten.

Bread that won’t rise, country that doesn’t exist.

Wanted: the swell of music just before the lights come up.

First melt of the season, all that mud and promise.

My office is food storage, laundry, and office.

Of “Freecycle Poem,” Melissa Tuckey says,

I live in a town that is fiercely committed to reuse, recycle, and not buying new things. This is compounded by living in an eco-village. I even have neighbors who will comment on things “improperly” thrown in the dumpster. It reaches a level of absurd both in the things we try to save and the things we throw away. This poem is inspired by all this. Poetically, there isn’t much to say– except that I had fun writing this. It started with the first line, which came to me as I was browsing Freecycle, and soon I was imagining my own version of Freecycle.

More About the Poet:

Melissa Tuckey is author of two collections of poetry: Tenuous Chapel, chosen by Charles Simic for the ABZ First Book Prize in 2013; and Rope as Witness, a chapbook, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007. Her work has been recognized with support from a Fine Arts Work Center winter fellowship in Provincetown and artist fellowships from Ohio Arts Council and DC Commission on Arts and Humanities as well as a residency at Blue Mountain Center. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Missouri Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in such works as Fire and Ink: Social Action Writing (University of Arizonia Press), Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press), Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights), Poets for Palestine, and DC Poets Against the War Anthology.

Tuckey lives in Ithaca, New York, where she works as a writing instructor and editor.  She’s co-founder of Split This Rock, a national poetry organization dedicated to poetry of witness and provocation based in Washington, DC.  She’s editor of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, forthcoming with University of Georgia Press, 2016. Tuckey holds an MA in literature and creative writing from Ohio University and an MFA from George Mason University.

View from my favorite writing chair.

Photos (see above): Melissa Tuckey’s writing space

Interested in submitting to The Homeless Poem Project? Click here for the guidelines.

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet. The Greenhouse. Durham, NC: Bull City Press, 2014. 44 pages. $14, paper.

When my daughter, now 11, was a few months old, I began to feel the restlessness of not writing, the longing to get back to my poet self, my self self. One afternoon, I carried her up to my bed, and she lay on her back like a starfish, her head turned toward me while I read Elizabeth Bishop aloud to her wide and wondering eyes. After an unplanned C-section, more than a week in the hospital fighting off infections and a massive hematoma, and a long period of recovery, I hadn’t given poetry or writing much thought. I was focused on my health and on my beautiful daughter who was oblivious to what I’d gone through to bring her into the world. I now felt ready to begin the journey – not back to whom I was as a writer and a woman but toward whom I would become as a writer, woman, and also, a mother.

I offer this anecdote, because I’ve recently read Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s gorgeous chapbook, The Greenhouse, and I can’t stop thinking about this period of my life. Stonestreet constructs her poems into a narrative of motherhood that span the early years, when a mother’s self is newly woven to accommodate a child. The experience of reading this book is not unlike peeking into a personal journal written by someone who half expects it to be discovered tucked inside a desk drawer. The voice is deeply intimate and honest. “It’s only beginning to recede, that time, that milk-dream of a year,” the speaker says in “Flowers, Doggies, the Moon.” We become hypnotized by the rhythms of “the long hours in the rocking chair,” and “the mommy memoirs: nurse, bathe, dress, change, sleep, fail to sleep; feel about it.” The speaker reveals all at once her love for her child and her impatience with maternal rituals that tether her to another human being. What mother can’t relate to this feeling, this sense that we are always “calling up the masks of patience, again”? Stonestreet renders beautifully the inner conflict many new mothers feel, which is often complicated by how we’re told we’re “supposed to feel.”

In the essay, “Language and the Gaze at the Other,” the poet Gillian Conoley writes,

Surely the mother experiences a heightened sense of other, for she has quite literally, physically, produced one. For the mother who is an artist, this other, this experience of the other, comes very much into play in one’s aesthetics. I think one of the most interesting questions becomes the question of who is the “other” when the artist who is a mother creates. Who gets shut out? Who remains?

The Greenhouse is an acknowledgement of this complex relationship between mother and child. In “Chimera,” for example, Stonestreet uses as her central metaphor microchimerism, which is, as the epigraph reads, “the persistent presence of a few genetically distinct cells in an organism… cells containing the male Y chromosome were found circulating in the blood of women after pregnancy.” Stonestreet writes,

I want them out. I want
to be myself, my self
again. My old untethered,

young untied. I lie: I want

nothing more—or want
no more the point.
Dendritic, en-

twined, signed on
for the duration. Bright
tangle, snaking line

of fire. The crucible

does not ask
for want. Is. Tied in,
shot through. Fired.

This poem is an expression of the other about which Conoley writes. The speaker resists this other, but accepts that she too has “signed on / for the duration.”

Stonestreet’s language enacts the mystery that is motherhood, and in her case, it’s a mystery particular to a poet. In “What I Taught Him,” the speaker tries to read a book while her son sits eating in his highchair. The book is a “life-raft” and she obsesses over “the book the book the book,” which causes her to only half-hear what’s going on around her. In “After Dropping My Son Off at Preschool,” someone asks her Are you writing again? She is a mother who loves her boy, her anchor, but she yearns for her literary self at every turn. Gillian Conoley notes,

There is no doubt in my mind the extreme extent to which motherhood acts on identity. The formulation of identity, the slip and slide of language in bespeaking identity, the narratives ‘identity’ constructs, the presence of spirit, of grand mystery, the way all of this can come together in a single phrase – these are consistent concerns in the writing. To understand how motherhood affects the writing is like trying to glimpse the impossible…

In The Greenhouse, Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet endeavors to glimpse the impossible as she examines the life of a poet who is also a mother.

The first poem I attempted and failed after the birth of my daughter incorporated a doubling: the speaker was both a mother inside her home, and a young, carefree woman sprawled outside in the hammock, catching a beer buzz in the late afternoon. I missed my youth, but that time of my life was not unlike what Stonestreet describes in the final poem, “Anchor,” when she writes, “I used to worry I would float straight up / off the earth, snap my tether, fear and relief, I was 20, it was all meaningful / weather: flame & snow.” This is the paradox of maternal longing: to want what we no longer want.

More about this poet:

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse was awarded the 2014 Frost Place Prize and published by Bull City Press in September 2014. Her first book, Tulips, Water, Ash, was selected for the Morse Poetry Prize and published by University Press of New England. Her poems have been awarded a Javits fellowship and a Phelan Award, and have appeared in journals including The Kenyon Review, Cream City Review, At Length, Quarterly West, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, 32 Poems, and Third Coast and in the anthologies Best New Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She writes, edits, and teaches in Oakland, California. (www.lisagluskinstonestreet.com)

Thanks to everyone who has taken time to read my blog. I’ve been absent for several weeks, but I’m back (for now!) and will continue my mission of reviewing and promoting the work of women writers.

Here’s what’s ahead on maybesopoetry:

I currently have two book reviews in the works and hope to post them in the next few weeks:

• The Greenhouse, by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (Bull City Press, 2014)

• The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, by Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2013)

These books make excellent holiday gifts. I highly recommend them both.

I also hope to publish one or two poems through The Homeless Poet Project (take a look at the guidelines and submit if you’re interested!), and if all goes well, I’ll also post another interview. This plan is perhaps overly ambitious, but I’ve missed working on my blog, so we’ll see how it goes over my holiday break.

I began my blog on July 12^th of this year. In this short time, I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing the work of some amazing women writers. I’d like to thank the following poets who have graced the virtual pages of maybesopoetry:

• Erica Goss, Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets (PushPen Press, 2014)

• Jessica Goodfellow, Insomniac’s Weather Report (Isobar Press, 2014)

• Donora Hillard, The Aphasia Poems (Gold Wake Press, 2012)

• Samantha Duncan, One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014)

• Julie Platt, In the Kingdom of My Familiar (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014)

• Sarah Marcus, Backcountry (Finishing Line Press, 2013)

• Karen Skolfield, Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press, 2013)

Please consider purchasing one or more of these books for your personal library, or as gifts for family and friends.

I’d also like to acknowledge the following poets I featured in The Homeless Poem Project:

• Sheila Black

• Jean Voneman Mikhail

• Laura Davis (who also shared her Poetic Postcards)

Please stay tuned to maybesopoetry! There’s more to come!

Photo (above): Maybe

As someone who writes poetry, I’ve encountered many people who don’t consider it an art form, who think that poets don’t engage in craft like “real” artists who paint, draw, or sculpt. That visual art and the written word are two very different forms of expression goes without saying, and our approach to our work is necessarily dictated by the art we’re attempting to create. All of us, however, know what it means to make something new, something that never existed before we thought it and brought it to life. We also know what it means to create only to rework, or revise, or even destroy the very thing we worked so hard to produce. Our impulse—whether with a canvas, or a notebook and pen—is truly not all that different. Never has this been clearer to me than at the Poetry in Art exhibition at the Riverside Artists Gallery in Marietta, OH, last evening.

The gallery is an intimate, homey space located at 219 Second Street. When I arrived, poets and artists were already mingling, sipping wine, and chatting casually about their work. On walls and pedestals, the poems were displayed alongside the visual art, which included photography, woodwork, glass, ceramics, as well as sculpture and collage.

At 7 p.m., the poetry reading began. Many poetry readings consist of only one or two poets, but because this project included many regional writers, each contributing one or two poems, the reading took on a unique energy with a vast array of voices and perspectives. Each poet said a few words about his or her work before reading the poem, and when finished, the artist who took inspiration from the poem also spoke about what he or she created and why.

Jean Mikhail, for example, who has been featured on this blog, read a beautiful poem titled “In Threes.” The artist, Jennifer Lasko, created three small black trays, and on the edge of each tray she placed a single, tall, ceramic cup. In white lettering, she transcribed Mikhail’s poem directly onto the trays. The following photo of the artwork is by Jean Mikhail.

I was equally happy with the artwork inspired by my poems. Jen McKenna was tasked with creating something for the poem “The Threshold of Can We Do This Now.” The quirkiness of the Goth kids in her painting matches the quirkiness of the grammar I use in the poem. Below is my daughter, Sophie, taking a picture of McKenna’s work.

Bonnie Proudfoot’s glass creation is the featured image on this blog post (photo by the artist). I’ve known Proudfoot for many years, and when I learned she was creating something based on my poem “A Brief Novel with No Interior Doors” (which I include below), I was delighted, because I’ve always admired her work. She told me that at first she wasn’t sure on which image or idea from the poem she should focus, but she settled on the concept of fracturing, because it seemed central to my piece. Below, Sophie takes a photo of Proudfoot’s art.

Overall, my experience with Poetry in Art was an exciting one. Judging from the camaraderie among the artists and poets, many of whom met each other for the first time last night, the project was a big success.

The exhibit will be up until October 31^st, so if you find yourself in the southeast Ohio area, please check it out.

[Note: I don’t usually post my own poetry on this blog, but I do so today, so you can see where Bonnie Proudfoot found images for her artwork. “A Brief Novel with No Interior Doors” was originally published in Bellingham Review.]

A Brief Novel with No Interior Doors

I admit I was stuck in the passionate kiss of leaving. My honesty was two hands inside two other hands. Sometimes there were breaks in things & the sky held the lightning’s visible fracture for days. Maybe I should’ve heard the barking as soliloquy to the saddest part of wounding. Maybe I should’ve read disaster in the buzzards’ funnel cloud over the far field. Hooves on the midnight gravel said deer but meant the slow stamp of the horse escaping. My daughter was inside my body then, flourishing her fine hair. What else could I do but hoist her with me into the dismantled night? When the pup was hit & killed, two of his siblings bowed their heads to me, while the other stayed alone in the grass across the road, savoring a deer carcass to bone.

Karen Skolfield. Frost in the Low Areas. Clarksville, TN: Zone 3 Press, 2013. 96 pages. $14, paper.

Karen Skolfield is an optimist without being a Pollyanna, a cynic without being a misanthrope. Her narrative poems have the tone of actual conversation; we feel as if we’re listening to a good friend tell us something she’s never before revealed about herself. In Frost in the Low Areas, Skolfield’s remarkable first collection, her poems tackle such issues as motherhood, marriage, death, and what it means to be the product of a dysfunctional family.

The optimist in Skolfield doesn’t want to dwell too long on negative details. In “Ode to a Fan,” for example, the speaker makes a passing comment about her father’s abuse. She confesses to stealing his favorite fan after he kicks her out, her dad “telling me I was no longer welcome there / how he hated my life, maybe because / I’d never slept with him.” She quickly changes the subject, attempting to divert our attention. “But this,” she says, “is about the fan, the green fan / that I hid under blankets in the back / of my lover’s gigantic truck.” Later in the poem, she again mentions a trauma, when she says, “I didn’t speak to my family for a long time / until the cancer thing,” and again she refuses to dwell on this piece of information. We don’t mind not learning more about the cancer thing, though. The story she tells us is amusing, and we enjoy the bit of revenge she has on her father, as she pretends to have no idea about the fan’s whereabouts. Her voice is clear and honest and her wit is sharp. “I like to think I’m contributing to his nightmares,” she tells us, and we like to think so, too.

This tactic of diverting her audience is even more apparent in “Rumors of Her Death have been Greatly Exaggerated,” when offhand she mentions death to her young children. “Mistake one: driving by two cemeteries when the kids / are tired,” she says. “Mistake two: saying only some people get / buried. Where are the others, my son asks.” She then finds herself trying to sidetrack them with thoughts of Christmas, snow, and stray dogs, though her kids are now stuck in their worry about their parents dying. Her children, unlike her readers, refuse to be distracted by her artful diversions.

Skolfield’s poems are steeped in strange and lovely metaphors, particularly when discussing motherhood. In the opening poem “Where Babies Come From,” for example, she writes,

I thought they were handing me a baby,
but it’s a star in my arms, a very small one,
just born. Whoever said they twinkle has never
held one. It’s blue and not very warm,
and though I don’t know a thing about stars,
I start to worry. I give a tickle, blow on it,
sing a little song, all my tricks. The star
perks up, then settles into me, like it belongs.

In “Second House, Careful in the Drive,” she says, “It seems as if everyone but me was born / knowing to hold a child by the wrist instead / of their small, slippery fingers. The distance / from any sidewalk to the whir of cars is exactly one / Emily long.” Those of us who are mothers recognize in these poems the fear that we are always a little inadequate for the job.

Karen Skolfield’s ease with narrative and extended metaphor occasionally brings to mind the poet Elizabeth Bishop. * In “Lost Mountain,” for example, Skolfield writes, “I hate when I misplace entire geographical features.” She continues,

Next the savannah, or really just a portion
of the savannah, I don’t want my muddle-
headedness out of proportion, yes it was large
enough for two lion prides and their prey,
but it wasn’t the whole thing. Slipped behind
the couch, as savannahs sometimes do,
and it wasn’t until the vultures started circling
that I knew, and what a shock then to find
the savannah, which honestly no one had missed,
instead of the ice cap, which we talked about
every day.

These lines recall Bishop’s villanelle, “One Art,” in which the poet states, “I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.” Of course, Bishop isn’t overly concerned about losing these places. Skolfield’s slightly defensive tone – “The salt flat was not my fault” – betrays her sense of guilt over what she’s lost.

Elizabeth Bishop once said, “If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I’m sure it’s a good one.” The world still looks like much of Karen Skolfield’s Frost in the Low Areas. She reminds us in “Other People Fantasize about Big Boats,” that whatever our dysfunctions and whomever we’ve lost, family is like paper stapled together, “attached firmly, forever, to each other.”

More about this poet:

Karen Skolfield’s book Frost in the Low Areas (2013) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry and the First Book Award from Zone 3 Press, and is a Massachusetts “Must Read” selection for 2014. She is a 2014 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow and winner of the 2014 Split This Rock poetry prize. Skolfield is the poetry editor for Amherst Live and a contributing editor at the literary magazines Tupelo Quarterly and Stirring. She teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts. Find her online at http://www.karenskolfield.blogspot.com/.

* I never read other reviews of the books I write about for my blog, because I want to draft reviews free from other people’s opinions. After writing this review, however, I stumbled upon this article about Elizabeth Bishop’s influence on Karen Skolfield’s book. Athena Kierkegard sees Elizabeth Bishop as “a guiding spirit behind” Frost in the Low Areas.

I’m very excited to participate in Poetry in Art, an upcoming art and poetry exhibition at Riverside Artists Gallery in Marietta, OH. For this collaboration among regional artists and writers, each artist was asked to select a poem as inspiration for his or her art. The artwork and poetry will be on display at the gallery October 10th – 31st.

The opening is Friday, October 10th, 6 – 9, with a poetry reading that begins at 7 p.m.

The participating poets are Wilma Acree, Jann Adams, Peg Clifford, Chris Friend, Sally Pebler Hannan, Becca J.R. Lachman, Martha McGovern, Wendy McVicker, Jean Mikhail, Nellie Hufford Ruby, Lynne Bodry Schuman, Susan Sheppard, Scott H. Urban, Christina Veladota, and Kristine Williams.

The artists are Scott Bookman, Robin Brandjes, Thaddeus Brejwo, Betsy Cook, Debbie Dick, Ginny Killian, Marlene L’Abbe, Jennifer Lasko, George Longfellow, Jen McKenna, Akemi Matsumoto, Todd Morrow, Gwen Noe, Cathy Norosky, Anna Prince, Bonnie Proudfoot, Lynda Rhodes, Melissa Rohrer, Jane Ryals, and Geoff Shenkel.

Riverside Arts Gallery is located at 219 Second Street, Marietta, OH.

Occasions

the girl sleeps on her belly,
hands down her underpants. two fingers
   outside butterfly kick—one for each
   soft fold till
she catches the hem of sleep.

*
sometimes a pillow
against her pelvis—rocking hips
faster and faster.
  sleep comes.

*
at nine a friend shows her how
to squeeze a sock
  down her panties, rub
against the mattress.
she poses in front of the mirror
hands on her hips
    bulge on display.

*
in her mother’s back massager
   she finds what was missing—
the widest eyes, the taut
cords of pelvis.

*
in college she reads on the internet
how to use a faucet. she runs
   a warm bath
   legs against the wall.
she listens to the rush.
she lets her hands float.

*
she is a woman
   who knows
   her own body, prefers
the solace of cool sheets or
fluorescent water, this
  jar of bees
between her thighs.

Of  “Occasions,” Laura Davis says,

I wrote this poem for multiple reasons (I was in a long distance relationship at the time, so take that as you will…). I’ve always written about female sexuality and the body, and I use poems to examine my own history with my body. Female pleasure isn’t depicted enough in any medium, and when it is it’s considered explicit, or pornographic even. Why is that? As far as submitting this poem, I wrote it in 2011 and according to Duotrope it’s been rejected seven times, which is hardly anything. I sent this poem out less frequently because poems about sex are often relegated to themed issues or topical anthologies. Guess I was even censoring myself. That says something about how ingrained our attitudes toward female sexuality are.

More About the Poet:

Laura E. Davis is the author of the chapbook Braiding the Storm (Finishing Line, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Luna Luna, Toad, Corium, and others. The founding editor of Weave Magazine. Laura teaches for Poetry Inside Out, a K-12 a bilingual poetry program in San Francisco.

Photo (see above): Laura Davis’ writing space