Have Words Will Travel

Last night I attended the last of four Red Hen Press readings in New York, and it was outstanding.  (I went to the first reading as well–Friday night at KGB Bar–which was also wonderful.)  Being relatively new in town, I hadn’t yet been to the venue, The Cornelia Street Cafe, but it was charming.  I will definitely be back — they have stuff going on there every night, much of which is poetry-related or jazz, another favorite genre of mine, so it’s well worth the travel time for me.

All of the readers were excellent, but the one who stood out the most was Laure-Anne Boesselaar.  She knocked my socks off with the single, long poem she read, the name of which escapes me, but it was a poem that wove together a train ride to New Jersey from NYC and the speaker’s early childhood in a convent school and how much she longed for her mother.  The poem spoke to me in so many ways.  I believe it’s from her most recent book A New Hunger, which you can bet I’ll be acquiring posthaste.  I have the feeling I’m going to be very touched and inspired by her work.

We have returned from vacation, all three children are back in school, and today was my first day alone in my house with peace and quiet for writing and po-biz.  I worked for awhile on a flash fiction piece I’m writing for an anthology.  I read most of a collection called Sisters by Nickole Brown (look for a review in the coming days), which isn’t technically writing, but it does feed the pool from which my poetry comes.  And then a poet friend challenged me to write a poem about the Large Hadron Collider, which was fired up today in Geneva.  Physics is a particular passion of mine and I was very excited that they finally got the thing up and running.  So, although I know a lot about the LHC and what it’s supposed to do, I spent a couple of hours researching it, and wow is there a lot of natural poetry present in physics.  I’m dreaming of a whole collection of poems inspired by physics.  It’s a big task — it’s not easy to write about science in a way that’s accessible and evocative.  But I always enjoy a challenge.

I haven’t posted in a few days, but not for lack of poetry. I’ve actually been super busy finishing up the semester. As of Friday, I will have completed all my requirements to graduate. Woooo! The thesis is actually done and on its way to my advisor, but that was the easy part. Not that it was actually, easy. I don’t mean to sound flip, because two years of intense work went into it, but I don’t find writing poems to be psychologically wrenching the way writing reviews and critical essays is. And there is a review between me and the end of the semester, so I’m pecking away at it this week. I have to pull out all my tricks to get it done without too much agony — such as writing a page, then rewarding myself with an hour of reading or something. I know, suck it up and write the thing already!

I will say that the book I chose to review is actually a great pleasure, so that’s positive. I’m reviewing Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard, which won the Pulitzer, and it is a stunning book. I’m going to have a hard time finding anything critical to say. Actually, I take that back — I do have one suggestion that I think would have improved it, which has to do with the ordering of the poems and the division into sections, but you know it’s all so subjective anyway.

I must be off now to run a couple of miles on the treadmill (writing does involve a large amount of time sitting on one’s posterior, after all) but I’ve downloaded the first part of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to listen to on my iPhone while I run. I’ll report back as to whether it helps or hinders.