This week we’re featuring three poems by Maryann Corbett. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips asked for her thoughts on the poems and on the writing life; she shares them here.  Please share your own thoughts about the poems in the comments section below.

“Art Song’s Chicken Wings” makes such a great conceit for “Stream.” How did the idea for the poem come to you?

Utter serendipity and plain fact. There really was, for many years, a billboard right near one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 94 that advertised for a local Asian restaurant whose proprietor’s name was Art Song. As a singer with some serious training, I have several basic books whose covers read “Arias and Art Songs.” Over many years in choruses, I’ve known many, many aspiring musicians who have had to give up their career dreams. Those streams of consciousness had a way of segueing one into the other.

You’ve used couplets of tetrameter to good effect in “Mean” as well as other poems, such as this one from Umbrella. The closeness—maybe I mean tightness, along with the really nice rhyme, make these poems the kind I want to pick up and hold, to see on a broadside (or a billboard,... more »

Brian Nicolet looks at Dunstan Thompson and Tamura Ryuichi, two masters left to collect dust in the basement of the 20th century until The Unsung Masters Series came along. more »

On Monday we featured three poems by Aneesa Davenport, “A Prayer Toward Sleep,” “Application for Remembrance,” and “Lover’s Complaint.” Here Aneesa talks about how she made them:

These poems came from a prompt given to me in school (either by Gabrielle Calvocoressi or Brian Teare) to write a poem reclaiming or repurposing language from your past, be it from church services, playground taunts, or a parent’s foreign tongue. Certain words, particularly in the first poem, such as “worrywart,” “backbiter,” and “watchword,” are terms I closely associate with my upbringing (in my family, two of the worst things you could do were worry needlessly and talk behind others’ backs), as is “sustainer,” which is from the grace we said nightly before dinner. Others, such as “tincture,” “toddy,” and “simple syrup,” remind me of the Southern influence my mother brought with her when she moved to California, where I was born.

I coupled the original prompt with two others: Write a prayer and Write a direct address, and from this combination a form naturally emerged which informed the other two poems. Self-imposed constraints like these—and those which arise simply by writing in series, or which are based on meter or rhyme or sound—are incredibly generative, because they... more »

This week, Fringe features poems by Aneesa Davenport. In “A Prayer Toward Sleep,” whose first line is quoted above, she writes, “You swell and gush, / you prompt, / you hush, / you lull, / you lust….”

God is not the only prompter here, though: on her blog, paragraphed.wordpress.com, Aneesa posts writing prompts and her own responses to them. It’s good reading, especially if you’re balanced at that spot where you could fall toward your writing or away from it into distraction, and wish to be tipped toward the desk.

Do survey these three poems, and check out Aneesa’s notes on how she made them.

A call for radical formatting: Put a well-loved poem on some nice cardstock and give it—or trade it, or sell it—to a friend. Fringe Editor Anna Lena Phillips, on why we need broadsides and other visual embodiments for poetry now more than ever. more »

The Publisher/Editor of Cooper Dillon Books talks about poetical collaborations, the underrated virtue of humility, and the need for community. more »

This week in Fringe, we’ve got three poems from Nathaniel Perry, from a longer series called “An Invitation to Rache.” Perry’s first book, Nine Acres, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Award, is just out from Copper Canyon Press. Here he answers some questions about both, starting with how he came upon the structure for the book.

My book, Nine Acres, came about through a chance encounter with an older, better, book.  I have been interested for quite some time in growing vegetables, canning, raising chickens, etc. Basically trying to take care of myself and my family by taking care of the place I live as best I can. Of course backyard homesteading and organic growing and local eating is all embarrassingly (and wonderfully, I suppose) hip these days, but it is nothing new. There was the back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s and 70s, which brought us the Nearings and their Good Life, the organic growing philosophies of Eliot Coleman, the Whole Earth Catalog, etc., and this was preceded by a similar “flight from the city” in the 1930s (and I might add that Gary Snyder has rightly pointed out that these sorts of movements, returns to the land, have occurred regularly... more »

This week in Vintage Fringe we’ve got a rerun of three poems by S. Asher Sund that originally appeared in March 2009, in issue 18. Here Asher talks about the poems and about the intersections between poetry and songwriting. And don’t miss the lightning Q&A round down at the bottom of the page.

These poems have changed a little since they first appeared in Fringe. We’ve posted the latest versions. Looking at them now, what are your thoughts?

“You Are Here” V02 feels a bit unwieldy to me, almost unmanageable, on the verge of a meltdown, but even so, or maybe exactly for these reasons, I like the changes I’ve made. “Hispanic Man Working a Weed-eater Against the Bank” is much more in the pocket for me than the previous version. “Sometimes a Mountain” I’ve looked at too many times. There’s still that one particular phrasing that resists my edits.

The poems are part of a full-length manuscript. Two of them represent a thread within it that positions the reader as a participant in what we might call office life, and asks her or him to comment on it. How would you describe the collection and the way these poems fit into it?

My constitution... more »

Jeannine Hall Gailey  received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant in 2007 and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review, writes book reviews, and teaches at National University’s MFA Program. To enjoy… more »

Waking up in a tent, bumming hot water for coffee from someone who brought a two-burner propane stove, drinking it down and immediately setting about playing tunes—if you’re an old-time musician, this is likely how you spend lots of your weekend mornings in the summer, at fiddler’s conventions in fields and ball parks across the southern United States.

I’ve missed every convention thus far this summer. I’m hoping to remedy that soon. (And maybe this year I’ll get my own stove.) Happily, in the meantime, we’re featuring three poems by poet and old-time banjo player and fiddler Molly Tenenbaum. I don’t know a lot of other poet old-time musicians, but it’s not unusual to have more than one artistic love. So I asked Molly about poetry and old-time—how these two presences act in her life. She writes:

I suspect that my creative self, back in infanthood, originated in music and poetry together: lullabies, nursery rhymes, songs, parents’ voices, singing, being read to—ballads, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare, Margaret Wise Brown. But later, as I got more involved in old-time music, the two lives began to separate: it might be almost accurate to say that music is my social world and poetry my private... more »

A map of a garden can be made before the garden itself exists or after everything’s been planted. Having tried both strategies, I can say that it’s easier to do the mapping beforehand; straightening out measurements and transferring them accurately to the page after the garden already exists can be a difficult task. But then, this is what descriptive cartographers do on much larger scales, for cities, landforms, landscapes.

This week’s poems take as their subject someone from the “before” camp: Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York City’s Central Park, among others. Olmstead wrote,

Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he has arranged for her shall realize his intentions.

We can forgive Olmsted, who died in 1903, the he’s and she’s. He’s right that whether they’re in a field returning to forest or a park just planted with roses and fruit trees, plants require time. (Fortunately for impatient gardeners, there exist annual plants, which grow happily and well on smaller timescales.)

Moriah L. Purdy, the author of the poems, is working on a manuscript that considers Olmsted’s work and borrows from his papers. About the quote, which serves as the epigraph for the manuscript, Moriah writes, ”I... more »

Franny Choi, author of “Body/Paragraph,” chats about graphics, charts, “walking pornos” and the Absurd.

People often complain that nothing ever happens in my fiction. It has something to do, I think, with having a background in poetry—it’s so much easier to sit in one place and just describe, describe, muse, muse, wordplay, wordplay. But actually moving bodies through space and time? As much as I love stories, I’ve always had trouble telling them without worrying that I was boring people to death. Especially in a culture that increasingly prefers to get its news in the form of graphics, timelines, interactive slideshows, sound bites, and bullet points, the thought of narrating action with big blocks of text can begin to seem archaic, a waste of time, even.

This isn’t me taking a dump on text. Long live text, and long live the rambling complex sentence! In fact, I prefer to think of the graphics in this story as complex sentences, just reorganized in a way that allows the reader to explore them at his/her own pace, from multiple entry points, and, above all, visually. If one is creating literature to be experienced visually, why not optimize that visual potential?

Naturally, thinking about graphic literature... more »

Maps and poetry have long been getting together (although I’m guessing their counterparts, cartographers and poets, have sat down together with less frequency). To be more accurate, poetry has long been engaged with cartographic language, subjects, and metaphors. Work by Elizabeth Bishop and Eavan Boland, to cite just two examples, deals with maps.

As does our featured poetry for this week: three poems from Sarah Sarai that engage with mapping in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Sarai plays with the idea of locating oneself in “We’re always in a room.”, and offers instructions for a sort of elusive treasure hunt in “A Territory of the Miracle.” Read them here.

And about that parenthetical in the first paragraph: I’m declaring the second half of March Take a Cartographer to Lunch Month. They’re nice folks, in my experience, deeply interested in the world and having all sorts of ideas one might not encounter in poetical circles. Hey, and if you do this, let us know–we’d love to hear how things go.

Have ideas about Sarah Sarai’s poems? About maps and poetry? Do tell (preferably here, in the comments section).