I confess to amusement with a poet’s wife. When her poet husband introduced her to me, she wrinkled her nose, looked off
into the distance, and said, “Deborah….” She wanted me to fill
in my last name. Why would she know me? I am not Mark Strand. I obliged and said my last name. She wrinkled her nose more, looked at me, and gently shook her head. Very odd! Meanwhile, I have no idea of her name. I only have the story.

I confess that I can’t change how people see the world. I can
only change how I see the world.

I confess that life gets better as I get older. I used to care more about unimportant matters. As I age and see people die, I have been able to discern the important matters from the unimportant ones. It helps if you answer these questions:

1. You’ve been told you’ll die in six months. What will you do with your life?

2. The doctor was wrong. You are going to die in two weeks. What do you do?

3. You are going to die tomorrow. What do you do? How do you spend your time?

Thanks to Kelli Agodon and January O’Neill for inspiration.

Berlin and LA are “bombed” with poetry.

Although August has not ended and we’re still having
90-degree days, it’s felt like September for several weeks
in terms of work load.

Recently, I finished a poetry interview for the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival. Next up, I’ll be packing to head south for the Decatur Book Festival where the wonderful Blue Elephant Books of Decatur, GA will sell books.

Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 11:15 am: Decatur Book Festival
Eddie’s Attic
Decatur, GA
Poetry reading with Sabrina Orah Mark and Ron Egatz

September 10, 2010: NPR interview airs
Baltimore NPR station
On radio and via internet webcast

Friday, September 24, 2010: Stain of Poetry
Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY 11221-3013
Readers: William Joseph Friend, Eric Amling, Sean Singer, Deborah Ager

October 1-3, 2010: Sotto Voce Poetry Festival
Shepherdstown, WV
Panel with Peter Stitt of Gettysburg Review
Poetry Reading

October 7-28, 2010: The Writer’s Center
508 Walsh Street
Bethesda, MD 20815
First Poetry Books Class
In this course, we’ll read and discuss four first poetry books in order to hone our critical eye while discovering what contributes to creating a cohesive poetry collection. We’ll spend one class period discussing each book. Books: Amy Lemmon’s Saint Nobody, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Miracle
Fruit, Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Becoming the Villainess, and Charles Jensen’s The First Risk.

Online Poetry Class
Take this poetry course from anywhere.
October, 2010

I’m digging this poem from Julie Carr.

Jessie Carty made it onto the poetry bestseller list.

Can you write a novel in three days?

The big secret about writing? You don’t need anything special.

I’m reading–for a second time–Dan Albergotti’s Boatloads. Yes.

A few weeks ago, I hiked to the top of the tallest peak in the Shenandoah National Park. The ascent takes you 700 feet up in a short period of time. On our way back down, we ran into two large bears. I threw my apple into the woods and waited. That apple was the one thing I could control. What else could be done? Running was out of the question since bears can run 35 mph.

I did think of my bear encounter when reading this man’s encounter with a whale:

“There’s something magical, something spiritual, at least for me, about being this close to a 50-foot sperm whale that chooses to tolerate you being there. Why? Because of some sort of affinity with other living things.”

When you see a bear that close—staring at you for what seems like hours—it gives you a different perspective on life. I stood 30 yards from the bear. The world was the bear, the fur, the waiting, the sweat, the hope none of the other people would do anything dumb. The six adult hikers staring at this bear were strangers yet dependent on one another not to enrage a wild animal. We waited. Our clothes became soaked in the 100-degree heat. Someone’s baby thankfully did not cry.

And the bear spared us. We were not as exciting as berries. Her baby had meandered up the mountain. The mother bear sniffed the air, paused, snacked, gazed at us, and walked away.

Bear in Shenandoah National Park

And so, did I have an epiphany? Will I get all “Araby, Araby” on you? Not really. I’m still figuring out how to put words around the experience.

Please share your favorites in the comments.

River Styx
Mid-American Review
North American Review
Ploughshares
Rattle
Barn Owl
Indiana Review
Hayden’s Ferry
Los Angeles Review
Pleiades
Iodine Poetry Journal
Poetry
Bellevue Literary Review
Diode
Diagram

Sign Up Today!

An online workshop’s convenience is hard to match. You can participate from home — whether there’s a blizzard, a child sleeping in the next room, or a looming work deadline. If you miss a week due to vacation, you can pick up where you left off.

Sign Up Today!

Participants are asked to submit one poem each Sunday of the workshop. I will comment on the poem you submit each week and ask that each participant comment on the work of two other poets in our group.

Once you sign up, you will be invited to join a private online group. We will use this group tool to post our poems, interact, and post critiques of other poems.

When I comment on your work each week, I will provide you with extensive written comments and, in some cases, line by line editing.

Workshops will remain small (no more than 12 students).

Who Are the Workshop Students?
In the past, I’ve taught people heading for MFA programs, retired people focusing on poetry, corporate executives, and college students. What everyone has in common is a desire to improve their poetry and the desire to receive feedback from the group.

How Do I Show Up for Class?
To show up, you log in to our private online group. You will receive the log-in information once your tuition is received. Posting a poem and commenting on the poems of others will be similar to sending an email.

Who is the Teacher?
Deborah Ager is founding editor of 32 Poems Magazine. Many poems first appearing in 32 Poems have been honored in the Best American Poetry and Best New Poets anthologies and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She’s taught at The University of Florida and The George Washington University.

Ager is author of the poetry collection Midnight Voices. Her writing appears in The Bloomsbury Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review, Quarterly West and New South. She’s received fellowships from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and she received a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Do We Have to Buy a Book?
In this course, we focus on generating new poems and revising existing ones. While I may ask you to read poems online, we do not use a book for this class.

Please reserve your space for the October – November course.

Details
DATES: October 26 – November 30, 2010
TIME: NA, online
COST: $297

Sign Up Today!

We’ve included links to poems, Twitter feeds, poet blogs, and more below if we were able to find such links relating to our contributors. That way, you can get to know a little more about them.

Chris Anderson is a professor of English at Oregon State University and a Catholic deacon. He has written a number of books, including a book of poems, and his poems are published widely. A new poetry collection, Consolations, will be published next year by Airlie Press.

Christopher Bakken´s recent poems appear in Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Subtropics. His two books are Goat Funeral (2006) and After Greece (2001).

Amy Fleury is the author of Beautiful Trouble (SIUP, 2004) and the 2009-10 Amy Clampitt Resident Poetry Fellow. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Michael Flatt lives in Denver where he teaches at Platt College. His poems have appeared most recently in Black Words on White Paper, Arsenic Lobster, and SpringGun Press. He’s on Twitter!

Sonja James is the author of two collections of poetry: Baiting the Hook (The Bunny & the Crocodile Press, 1999) and Children of the Moon (Argonne House Press, 2004). She resides in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

Luke Johnson (his blog) earned his MFA at Hollins University. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Greensboro Review, Passages North, Third Coast, and Best New Poets 2008.

Rose Kelleher grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Maryland. Her first book, Bundle o’ Tinder, won the 2007 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was published in 2008 by Waywiser Press.

Stacy Kidd’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, and WITNESS, among others. Her chapbooks About Birds and A man in a boat in the summer are forthcoming this year. She is founder and editor of intersectionsjournal.org.

Chris Locke has received 2006 and 2007 Dorothy Sargent Memorial Poetry Prize. His first poetry colletion, End of American Magic, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in September of 2010.

William Logan

Jennifer Militello

Tyler Mills received her MFA from the University of Maryland. Her poems recently appeared in AGNI, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and New Letters. She is a doctoral candidate at University of Illinois-Chicago.

Ander Monson lives in Arizona where he edits the magazine DIAGRAM (thediagram.com) and the New Michigan Press.

Darren Morris was born in 1969 in Kirkwood, Missouri. Another poem can be found in Blackbird.

Dan O’Brien’s play The Cherry Sisters Revisited premiered at the 2010 Humana Festival of New American Plays. His poems have appeared in Margie, Greensboro Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He was a Hodder Fellow playwright-in-residence at Princeton.

Saara Raappana has poems published or forthcoming in Cave Wall, Inkwell, Isotope, South Carolina Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Harvard Review Online, among others.

Jacques J. Rancourt was raised in rural Maine. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous journals, including Columbia, Cimarron Review, and Linebreak, and has been anthologized in Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2008. He’s poetry editor of Devil’s Lake.

David Roderick was awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and his first book, Blue Colonial, was the winner of the 2006 APR/Honickman Prize. He currently teaches in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Diana Smith graduated from the University of Florida MFA program in May 2009. She teaches community college in Del Rio, TX. Her poems have appeared in elimae and SALiT.

Erin Elizabeth Smith wrote The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and the chapbook The Chainsaw Bears (Dancing Girl Press 2010). Her poems have appeared poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, Third Coast, Crab Orchard, and Willow Springs among others.

Melissa Stein’s poetry collection Rough Honey won the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Best New Poets 2009, New England Review, and other journals.

Eric Torgersen is completing a book-length collection of ghazals to be called In Which We See Ourselves: American Ghazals. His most recent book is the novella The Man Who Loved Rilke.

Sidney Wade has published five collections of poems, the most recent of which is Stroke (Persea Books, 2008). She teaches poetry and translation workshops at the University of Florida.

Lesley Wheeler’s new book, Heterotopia, is winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Her other books include Heathen, Voicing American Poetry, and the anthology Letters to the World. She is professor of English at Washington and Lee University.

Cori A. Winrock’s poems have appeared in (or are waiting in the wings of) Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, Pool.