Big Poetry Giveaway

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Even though I seriously intended, long before poetry month began, to participate in the Great Poetry Giveaway commemorating National Poetry Month, I put off the communication necessary, and it’s now too late to be “official,” on Kelli Russell Agodon’s blog, Book of Kells. Even so, I have two give-aways to share. If you leave your name in the comments section below this post, you’ll be eligible for the drawing to win one of them. Be sure to leave me contact information.

If you don’t want to leave contact information on a public forum, email me at bethany.alchemy@gmail.com. You can still be in the drawing.

Here are the books:

1) Signed copies of my TWO books, Sparrow, published in 2012 by Big Pencil Press, and winner of the Gell Poetry Prize; AND The Coyotes and My Mom, published in 1989 by Bellowing Ark Press (and now out of print). If you already own my books, you’re still welcome to enter the drawing — you can give your new copies to a friend.

2) For my second giveaway, what if I gave away a WHOLE STACK of poetry books? I am, after all, buried in books, drowning in books. So (see the picture), that is what I will do. They begin with Jane Hirshfield’s Of Gravity and Angels (Wesleyan, 1988), a book I’ve read numerous times (it is a bit shopworn). The poem I used on the blog this month, “Woman in a Red Coat,” is included in this collection. THEN, should your name be drawn, you get these others, too, including Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order, in hardback! 

And all you have to do in order to be included in the drawing, is comment on this post.

Holly J. Hughes, “Desire Lines”

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I want to remind you again that I am reading — one of five readers — at Edmonds Bookshop this Thursday evening. To see more information, you can click on the “Upcoming Events” tab above.

Speaking of “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim” (Hopkins), I want to once again recommend Sailing by Ravens by Holly J. Hughes  for an immersion lesson into all things watery. (To see my review and links to others, click here.)

I was thinking of Holly’s book because I spent yesterday at a family party hosted by my sister and brother-in-law. My mom was there, holding court, as well as a few of her sisters and a few of our cousins. Lots of family stories. And Mom, of course, perpetually conversing with the people long dead. My sister brought out a family album and I started thinking that I could write a poem about my grandfather. So, to inspire me (surely an exercise right out of her book with Brenda Miller, The Pen and the Bell), here is Holly’s prose poem, “Desire Lines”:

DESIRE LINES

Desire lines: where people have walked, made their own paths

About her great-grandfather, the English sea captain, she knows less. As the family story goes, the ship he commanded set sail from London, a seventeen-year-old Spanish girl of noble blood aboard bound for finishing school in Cuba. When the ship docked in New Orleans, they eloped. So much the story doesn’t say. What were her first words to him, the stately captain? How many days out from port before he gazed into the vanishing horizon of her eyes? When did they stand at the bow, glimpse together a future glimmering? At what precise coordinate did they cross desire’s shimmering line? Where in the vast Atlantic, as the ship steamed south, did their bodies know they would not — could not — return to the lives they’d left behind?

By Thursday night, maybe I’ll have a logging poem for you about my grandfather.

Wendell Berry, “The Meadow”

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To read more about Wendell Berry, click on his name.

THE MEADOW

In the town’s graveyard the oldest plot now frees itself
of sorrow, the myrtle of the graves grown wild. The last
who knew the faces who had these names are dead,
and now the names fade, dumb on the stones, wild
as shadows in the grass, clear to the rabbit and the wren.
Ungrieved, the town’s ancestry fits the earth. They become
a meadow, their alien marble grown native as maple.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

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And here is another poem I would like to memorize. (I cannot get the indents to work!!! You’ll have to click on this link to see it in its original form.)

Who dares use the great Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as a model? You could keep it simple. Write a poem about dappled things, or about “gear and tackle and trim.” Write a poem about simple things.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

pied beauty