I admit, Everett Poetry Night keeps slipping away from me — but there it is, at Sister’s Cafe, every Thursday at 5 p.m. This week I’m the featured reader, and I would love to see you there.
And, on July 14, I’m trekking to Chimacum to help celebrate the third edition of The Madrona Project. It’s an awesome line-up of poets, and I’m excited to be one of them.
I love this quote, which I found over at The Poetry Department, so I’m sharing it with you. I’ve been working on a new book of poems, many of which touch on music in some way — a result, I’m certain, of taking piano lessons for the last several years and practicing daily. (No, I will not play for you.) I would love to write a blog post comparing playing music to writing poems, but I’ve never been able to hang onto the fleeting insights that sometimes come to me. Something about notes and rests and counting (also repetition!).
I know that being a complete newbie learner at something is very useful in understanding people’s process in learning anything. But, as I said, it’s a bit elusive; maybe that’s because I’m not trying to write music, only to play it. Garret Hongo says it better:
“As music isn’t just notes on a page or within an improvisatory passage, poems are not simply individual words on a page. They are collections and sequences of language that strike both familiarity — whether that be in meaning or a recognition of its form, its rhetorical scheme — and work a notable change or transformation of meaning and its scheme that defamiliarizes that which had been previously known, that makes it new, as Ezra Pound said poetry had to.”
Meanwhile, I have two fresh publications to share with you, and both are available on the Web. I have a poem, “Pear,” that just posted today at Rust and Moth, and I have an essay, “My Mother’s Birthday in Ireland,” at Chautauqua Journal.
https://www.bethanyareid.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/pexels-steve-johnson-860662-scaled.jpg17072560Bethanyhttps://www2.bethanyareid.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/reid-logo-161-300x125.gifBethany2022-06-01 02:04:042022-06-01 02:05:00As Music Isn't Just Notes on a Page
Cover art “Flamingo” by Leah Kosh
Featuring new work by thandiwe D. Watts-Jones, Kamal E. Kimball, Bethany Reid, Meredith Starr, and more
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CALYX Journal Vol. 33:1 has arrived and is overflowing with beautiful and empowering new poetry, prose, reviews, and full-color art from a wide range of women and non-binary artists and writers. From Sophia Stid’s award-winning poem “Prayer II” to Meredith Starr’s funny and poignant take on quarantine with her series of art pieces including “In 2020 We Throw Things,” this issue is challenging, relatable, reflective, and courageous.
Visit the CALYX website to order your copy and to read excerpts from the new issue, including a full short story, poem, and review. This issue, the sample short story is Anna Stacy’s “Mending,” a modern fantasy that weaves a spell of wit, camaraderie, acceptance, and self-love (and also actual spells!). The sample poem is Abigail Goodhart’s “Barber Shop,” full of such humor and braggadocio that it demands to be read by one and all. The sample review is Lois Rosen’s take on Stealing Flowers from the Neighbors, a book of heartfelt poetry by Sherri Levine.
2022 is our forty-sixth year of providing a platform for new, emerging, and underrepresented voices. Thank you for your support of CALYX.
Pre-order your copy of Vol. 32:3 at calyxpress.org. You can also subscribe to receive a full volume (three issues) for only $23 USD.
https://www.bethanyareid.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/32-3_Cover.jpg.jpg824648Bethanyhttps://www2.bethanyareid.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/reid-logo-161-300x125.gifBethany2022-05-18 04:16:142022-05-18 04:16:14New Issue of Calyx Journal
WADE IN THE WATER, Tracy K. Smith. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2019, 96 pages, $16 paper, www.graywolfpress.org.
For my last poet in #nationalpoetrymonth, this book is too perfect. Here’s Graywolf Press’s description:
In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection includes erasures of the Declaration of Independence and correspondence between slave owners, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.
—https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/wade-water
I lack words enough to describe this book. “Choral arrangement” helps (beginning with the gospel title). “Luminous” seems overused, but I knew when I found the audio version of Wade in the Water, that I would have to try to write about it. It captures both transcendence and terror, life itself. “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I will Tell You All About It,” one title promises us, and Smith delivers. I would love to know more about the process of writing these poems, or “creating” them, as some are erasures and others, collages of voices of slaves, and of Black Civil War soldiers and veterans. Smith brings it all to the page, and hearing her read this book aloud made my day.
Smith’s first book Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize; she served as U. S. Poet Laureate from 2017-2019. She is a must-read.
I found numerous recordings on the web, and felt this one–her thoughts on the history and witness of Black poetry, and a tribute to Amanda Gorman–was the perfect one to share.
https://www.bethanyareid.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/620028.jpg700700Bethanyhttps://www2.bethanyareid.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/reid-logo-161-300x125.gifBethany2022-04-30 17:46:372022-04-30 17:47:55Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water
And, on July 14, I’m trekking to Chimacum to help celebrate the third edition of The Madrona Project. It’s an awesome line-up of poets, and I’m excited to be one of them.
contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection includes erasures of the Declaration of Independence and correspondence between slave owners, a found poem composed of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.