Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

Ignore Everybody

deborah — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:46:57 +0000

I joined a group of poets to write 30 poems in 30 days. Some of us have gathered together before — in a virtual way — to cheer each other on (threaten? cajole? prod? encourage? shame?) to write poetry.

In the old days, I used to think being a professor was the way to artistic happiness. I thought this because one had the summers off and, ideally, everyone would support the artistic work. This idea is also discussed in Ignore Everybody (that link will give you 25% of the book for free).

However, I’ve grown, matured, and wised up. Being a teacher is like any other job in that it has its ups and downs, challening people, fantastic people, headaches, and joys.

No matter what “work” we choose, there’s going to be that “money” side. The Ignore Everybod author points out even John Travolta has to make the cheesy movies so he has money to make the cool movies.

I will not tell anyone here “to shine.”

What I will do here is suggest you try this macaroni and cheese recipe made with carrots. I haven’t tried it, yet I will soon. If you get to it before me, let me know what you think.

Also, I will tell you to read that book up above.

Creative Nonfiction

deborah — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:59:59 +0000

I stumbled across the post below. The honesty or tongue-in-cheekness of the statement “I am in it to boose my fragile ego” charmed me. I wanted to share this with you.

This writer went on to publish a piece in The New York Times. Go ahead and set yourself some goals (if you haven’t already).

If I ain’t in it for the money, I am in it to boost my fragile ego (or at least earn some bragging rights). I am shooting for the best non-fiction publications, or at least the ones that will publish my work. This is where I could use the most help. When I asked my friend Gary Presley what he thought were some of the more prestigious non-fiction magazines, he offered some suggestions (links appear below my blogroll). One of my friends from the IWW suggested The Sun Magazine for a piece I recently submitted for critique.blockquote>

DC-area Poetry Series Accepting Applications

deborah — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:43:17 +0000

The Joaquin Miller Cabin Summer Poetry Series is taking applications now through March 31, 2010 (postmark) for the Summer Poetry reading series in June and July of 2010.

The Series is located in a lovely outdoor park setting in the Washington, D.C., with two readers selected (one local and one from another part of the country) for each of eight Tuesday evenings.

A very small honorarium is given.

If you would like to apply, please send five poems, a paragraph bio, and a letter-size SASE for reply to:

Rosemary Winslow
Department of English
Catholic Univesity of America
Washington, DC 20064.

Please, no repeats if you have read in the series in the past four years.

Moira Egan: An Interview With Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:00:53 +0000

Poet Moira Egan, published in 32 Poems

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

My father was a poet, so I guess I can say I was infused with the Muse through nature and nurture both. That didn’t make it any easier, and there have been years-long stretches when I didn’t even consider myself a poet, didn’t want to be a poet. But here I am.

And here means Rome, where I live with my husband, Damiano Abeni, who, when he is not being an epidemiologist, is (if I may say so) a very well respected translator of American poetry into Italian. He’s done books of poems by Mark Strand, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Simic, C.K Williams, and many others, and now I am happy to say that he translates my work as well. In fact, now he and I also work as a team on translations, going in both directions, but mostly from English into Italian. Together we worked on Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007, a substantial selection of poems by John Ashbery, which just won a Special Prize from the Premio Napoli. We have several translation projects on the front and back burners, and next summer we will spend a month at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, translating the “Italian” poems of Charles Wright.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

I think it’s sad that poetry is so divided up into camps. That said, I’m kind of old-school myself: most of the poetry that I really love would be considered “written” poetry, since most of the people who wrote it are dead and not here to perform it anymore. But I also think that the sonic qualities of a poem are very important. One of the great pleasures for me is hearing a poet whose work I like who also happens to be a good reader of his/her poetry. Even some good poets are not-so-great readers, as we know, and the flip side of that coin is someone who gets up there and rocks and rolls around the stage and “sounds” good, but then when you look at the poem on the page, it’s not so interesting. Old-school talking again here, I like reading poems on the page, but I do pay attention to the sound, and sometimes I read them out loud to the cat just for fun.

Part B of this question is huge. I’ve spent many years as a teacher. One of the best jobs I’ve had (though it had some rough days) was teaching creative writing at a high school just outside of Baltimore. The student population was very heterogeneous. In creative writing class, all the socioeconomic, ethnic, etc etc groups were represented, and of course, in a writing workshop, you often write about and then have to “share” things that are personal, and quite important to you. In the class, the kids were able to hear stories from students whose backgrounds were completely different from their own, and each student was expected to (and did) treat everyone else with respect. It was a great thing to see people from very different “walks of life” appreciating and understanding what was going on with others not like them. This, to me, embodies a great deal of hope as to what writing can do.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

They’re there in the poems.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I have found books by Julia Cameron to be very helpful, especially The Artist’s Way. I’ve gone in and out of that “practice,” depending on what I’m doing (and how I’m doing), for – oh my gosh – 13 years now.

Like many writers, I do have a couple of Masters degrees that involved workshops, and I confess that I took workshops now and then when I lived in NYC. These days I don’t belong to any writing groups (I don’t even know of any in Rome, at least not any in English). There’s a funny little phrase out there in pedagogy land: to self-edit. I think that the ultimate goal of workshops and groups is for them not to be needed anymore, to be able to look at a line you’ve written and say, “Oh, that is not very good at all,” and then figure out how to fix it. “To self-edit.” Now, it’s great if you happen to have a good first reader (my husband is mine, for example, and one dear girlfriend to whom I send stuff) but if you don’t, you can become your own good first reader.

And I don’t mean to sound grinchy about workshops and groups: they can of course be very helpful, especially when you’re starting out. My grinchiness is probably a side-effect of having taught them for so many years. Basta! for me.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I think that poets have an obligation to write the poems that they need to write. If a reader needs to go to the dictionary to look up a word, or to some other reference to figure out an allusion, then so be it. There’s nothing wrong with learning from literature.

If poetry is considered “inaccessible” by people who otherwise enjoy reading, that’s a different story, and it’s one that I fear goes back to a long history of teachers who were taught by teachers who were intimidated by poetry. I won’t name names (but if they’re reading this, I guess they know who they are) but some former colleagues of mine in an English department used to say things like “I hate poetry! I just don’t get it!” and “I hate drama! I hate teaching plays!” and they would say these things within earshot of students. OK, then, tell me again, why did you decide to teach English?

I’ve done a lot of work with teachers and teaching poetry. You don’t have to be a poet to be an effective teacher of poetry, not at all. You need to be able to break it down into meaningful elements in an affectionate way. After all, poetry is made up of the same parts as any other genre of writing: words (duh), sentences, figurative language, description, setting, character, plot, argument—things everyone is familiar with. Poems often include those “poetic” elements as well—rhyme, meter, repetition, traditional form—which make the language musical. Sometimes it is “right-brained” or elliptical—but it still bears meaning and makes sense, like any other set of sentences strung together (OK, I am not necessarily speaking about experimental or LANGUAGE poetry here). What’s so scary about sentences that come in blocks called stanzas and that sometimes have a regular sound pattern or a back-beat you can recognize?

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

Speaking of back-beat, I absolutely cannot listen to music that has lyrics when I write. No way. Sometimes I listen to Bach, but mostly I am looking for silence, because I’m trying to make the music happen in my head.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

I just did a quick statistical survey of my ten closest friends (see what happens when you are married to an epidemiologist) and 7 out of 10 are writers. And the three who are not writers are among my oldest friends (I mean, my most long-term friends): high school- and college-era friends. So we can infer that the newer friends have tended to be writers, yes. But isn’t this what happens in any (to use the term loosely) “career path,” you end up meeting people in your field, who categorically share common interests, whom you meet up with and have fun with at common events and activities (in our case, readings and conferences, etc.)?

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Living in the land of pasta, that’s a constant, uphill battle. I try to take a good long walk every day, and it’s true enough that crossing the street in Rome is an Extreme Sport: very aerobic, even if you didn’t mean it to be. I also enjoy yoga.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

Again, in Italy, food exists on a higher plane, so to list inspiring or favorite foods would take up many large chapters in a book I haven’t written yet. But I don’t think that there’s a direct correlation for me between a particular food and inspiration (though I do have poems that use grapefruit, chocolate, wine and coffee, respectively, as muses).

I also don’t think I get “writer’s block.” I’m either writing, or I’m not writing. During the writing times, which are exhilarating and kind of weird, I am distracted and everything seems to work itself into an image or a phrase or iambic pentameter. When I’m not writing, I think I act more like a “normal” person; I read a lot and listen to music and look at art, churches, buildings, nature. Then I start to “feel a poem coming on,” and I go back to distractamode.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

My writing space is the western half of a room that I share with my husband, who gets the eastern half. I have the books I use the most on shelves to my right, including the 1959 vintage Roget’s Thesaurus that was my father’s. I have my Mac laptop on a DAVE stand from Ikea, and just to the left of that, I have an antique, school-child’s desk with the lid that opens to a compartment underneath. On the wall in front of me, I have a somewhat tongue-in-cheek display of photos that I call “My Husband and Certain American Poets,” and there are pictures of Damiano with Mark Strand, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and with me (all poets whose work he has translated), and there’s a small print of a portrait painted by Minas Konsolas of my dear poet friend (he’s one of the ten included in the statistic above) Gary Blankenburg. I have a wooden statue of Saint Brigid that was carved by my grandfather, a Mama Brigitte voodoo doll that I bought in New Orleans, and a Lenox figurine of a black cat that was a gift from my mother and that was featured on top of our wedding cake, because Iris (our little black cat muse) couldn’t come over for the wedding. On the floor there is a kilim that I bought in Turkey, and on the back of the sofa is my grandmother’s old heathery-colored woolen throw from Ireland. Behind me on the wall are a Brigid’s cross from Ireland, a couple of those alter/niche things from Mexico that certainly look like the Day of the Dead, and various photos of Damiano and friends and me.

This is a very lovely space and I am grateful for it, but this past summer, I had the good fortune to be a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, and the wonderful people there put me up in the tower room. Yes, I was for six weeks a poet princess in a tower room. I looked out the windows onto the Umbrian hills and the town of Umbertide. The ceiling must have been 30 feet up. It’s an interesting feng shui sort of thing to work in a round room, and I wrote every day while I was there. In fact, my joke with myself (that is only funny because most of my writing was backed up) is that I wrote so much while I was there that I crashed my hard drive. But I’d be glad to go back to the tower room and crash another hard drive, any time.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I am a very superstitious poet, so I am not going to say what I am working on right now, but I can happily say that my chapbook, Bar Napkin Sonnets, has just been published by The Ledge (where it won the 2008 Chapbook Competition) and that SPIN, another full-length collection will be coming out from Entasis Press in spring 2010.

Here’s a poem from Moira Egan that appeared in 32 Poems:

Bar Napkin Sonnet #17

We pause in conversation and the air
around us stills. It feels as if a globe
of yellow light’s enveloped us, alone,
and everyone around has disappeared.
His callused hand is gentle in my hair.
He’s only twenty-five, yet somehow knows
to kiss me now: “It feels like we’re alone.”
(I halfway fall in love with him right there.)
He’s never been to Europe, so we drink
sangria made of white wine, brandy, pears
and apples. “It’s the sugar in the fruit
that gets you gone,” I tell him, as I think
tonight he’s going to travel. Then we share
an eau-de-vie, ephemeral as youth.

Quit Everything. Write.

deborah — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:27:38 +0000

If you are like most poets and writers, you probably have to work a job — academic or otherwise — and you probably have friends, some sort of family, bills to pay and perhaps an unfair traffic ticket to handle.

Whatever your issues, you have to find the time to write. Writers constantly wonder about this issue. We talk about it over coffee, over beer, over bourbon, over the swimming pool and under milky clouds.

You’ve got fight for writing.

When I graduated from graduate school, I thought time would come down out of the sky and present itself to me. I’d think I’d write at the end of the day, after Friday, after dinner, after, after, after.

It’s funny how after took a long time to arrive. I wish I’d realized I had to fight for it.

Now I sneak for it. I sneak out — not really but it’s fun to say so — in the wee hours. Did you know Starbuck’s opens at 6:30 a.m. on Sundays? I had no idea people were alive at 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday. They are. They even have the audacity to come into the coffee shop when I am there.

After my first early-morning jaunt on a Sunday, I was hooked. I had to have more. I can only imagine the feeling was like tasting an addictive drug. I had to get away the following weekend.

On the third weekend, my novel was shaping up well. I had more poems written. I felt alive. I looked forward to my pre-dawn excursions. The bitter cold did not stop me. Unfair traffic tickets did not stop me. I kept going. I asked my husband about heading out before work on weekdays.

Try it and see.

Kevin McFadden: An Interview With Serena Agusto-Cox

Serena — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:00:05 +0000

Poet Kevin McFadden, published in 32 Poems

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

If I were to meet such a crowd, the one ready to hang on every word, I would first warn them. Be careful, the words give. Like when a handhold gives, or a dam, or when a damn handhold gives. Love them, but don’t lean on them. Every few lines there is one word set to break into at least two–so I would be a bad steward of my poems if I didn’t offer a heads-up.

I don’t teach writing, which many poets do today. I work at a humanities council and I help coordinate programs meant to reach a broad public. In that sense I am a poet who has gotten to work with hundreds of poets and enjoy expanding the audience for poetry inclusive of academe but beyond academe as well. That informs my approach a great deal.

I really enjoy the way poetry appeals to our many intelligences, and there are valuable interactions whether you’re hearing a poem aloud or taking it from the page. I do like to read my poems out loud–so an audience can hear a poem the way I hear it in my head–and some say it improves their understanding of what may look dense on the page. But there are other poems I compose with the idea of a visual reader. I write a kind of poem, the anagram poem, which relies on a visual and material fact of language in letters. Every line must have the same letter count–Scrabble-tile style–and my job is to edit a pleasant or piquant ordering of the letters.

Can literature humanize us? Literature works, when it works, at a very basic yet profound level. Reading’s not a natural interaction–it must be reinforced to be a habit. But if we have the habit, we can then go to writing when we need it. We are looking for something there. We are blessed when we find it. Perhaps that moment of experiential recognition between individuals across time or distance, and in that moment or prolonged experience of recognition we see our own struggles reflected. When the experience is deeply painful, the recognition can comfort. When the experience is joyful, we have a sense joy will be preserved to be shared.

The experience is something we carry with us, like a dream memory, when can be helpful when a moment of crisis occurs. I think it reminds us to be human–that needs reinforcement too. I can’t speak for literature as a solution to humanity’s struggles; centuries of literature have not stopped intolerance. But I do believe this deep memory comes to life in our actions in the world, that literature creates an imagined internal encounter that helps us when the real encounters arrive.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Obsessions…well, puns. As if words didn’t have enough punch, freighted with their lively histories, there are moments when by dearth of available syllables words can sound or read like something very different. I love when the difference can be leveraged against the reason we so earnestly strive to defend. So many jokes–the great and the groaners alike–use puns. In poems, when used right, we get instant interdimensionality. We begin hearing double.

Many writers come down on the doctrinaire side of whether to use wordplay–that is to say “never”–a position which has persisted since classical times yet is uniformly resisted through the centuries when you probe literature a little deeper. I listed some of the pun’s supposed enemies in “It’s Tarmac,” the 20+ page chunk of prose smacked right into the middle of Hardscrabble. There’s little I could say here that I haven’t already said there. My obsession with wordplay has been fruitful in generating the poems I write. Sometimes those debts are not obvious, but they still are generative. I don’t think I’d write very much if word collision were discounted.

My first writing group was me and a monk. We looked at poems. Me setting them up, him knocking them down. I owe an unpayable debt to this Brother of the Holy Cross, Joseph Chvala, who took an interest in my work in high school. He was a grammarian. Vocabulary and usage. Shades of meaning. His class was feared. My brothers feared him. I feared him. I think by Americans standards, which are sadly declining for language studies, this man’s program was decades out of step. It was old school. He wanted to produce Olympic athletes of English…which means most people will wash out. You’re facing the English language–who doesn’t wash out? But he was a language coach with a deep love of precision and a hard disregard for mediocrity.

I took workshops during my undergrad years, and I went to the M.F.A. program at the University of Virginia. I was very grateful for the help of poets along the way, James Reiss, Rita Dove, Greg Orr, Charles Wright. Then for poets whose work taught me by reading it: Heather McHugh, Anne Carson. “Western Wind” by Frederick Nims was a textbook I liked, but those kind of books weren’t as much help as the people I read and who read and talk to me. I always got more from a reader (who reads me) than a reader (one reads).

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Well, “elitism” is the new “communism” as far as I’m concerned. I can’t use that word without suspicion…hurled by pundits with a fake populist agenda, it means too little now. Does poetry have a smaller audience than most mainstream endeavors? Undoubtedly. It is concerned with ultra-subtle notions and infra-human moments–there’s not a feature-length film’s worth in a sonnet–and, yes, there is the reality that you generally aren’t going to make a lot of money from writing it.

Poetry only requires attention. It is being produced for those who pay attention. Attention is one thing you can pay (along with homage and respect) without having to spend a dime. So, in the attention economy, where there is so much competition already, I do have a responsibility to warrant the notice of a reader in a poem. I also like to call attention to poets who reward those attentions. Readers who are paying attention find the poets they are looking for. I am completely at home with that arrangement. There is a kind of attention publicity generates, but that passes quickly. The better attention is the one good writing generates and keeps generating. It doesn’t need slogans or ads. No plans to put a chicken in every pot, and a poet in every kitchen. Pay it to whatever you like. Your attention is as free as you are.

I don’t work with music on. Especially music with lyrics. That’s because I pay attention to lyrics–it would be too distracting to hear the voice I need to hear.

One can get primed on some poets. Robert Lowell’s poetry is good mood music for my poetry; I can hear its rhythms without absorbing them. It’s a lot to recognize when you are imitating a poet. I’ve been careful, when I wrote a line rife with another poet’s style, to drop it.

It’s a hard balance to strike…to learn from the voices around you and yet silence the voices not your own. If you are very lucky, you come to realize that your voice is an arrangement of these voices…but it’s important not to let out a particular tenor or soprano over the chorus. It’s fine to contain multitudes–but you do have to contain them.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Currently, I trade work with a poet and friend I’ve known through all of the above–Terence Huber. And my most immediate and increasingly helpful reader is the person I spend every day with, my wife, the poet Angie Hogan. She’ll read it when I just want someone to view it, and also when I want it to be ripped up.

I have worked with and hope always to work with a lot of writers. But it’s odd, among writers, my wife and I don’t like to talk a lot about writing. We are more interested in whatever outside of writing is interesting them. Their book arts work. Their garden. The boat they’re building. Maybe it was the overload of a writing program, where you obsess about such matters, but plenty of my friends don’t write. Fine by us.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

My wife and I jog–that helps the writer. Mens sana in corpore sano, says Juvenal.

As far as writing exercises, I don’t do any exercise someone else prescribes. It’s like doing someone else’s chores. All of my challenges I take from some note I’ve made, mental or jotted, and I do quite often attempt a poem as a self-dare. There are usually restrictions, some I learn to add as I go. “Write three stanzas about Americans and their dogs, make the last line of each stanza the first of the next, and obliquely refer to the Proverb about a fool and his folly being like a dog returning to its vomit. Go.” Just by following up on my double-dog dares, I keep busy.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

My writing space is a desk made out of books. They are just ordinary books I’ve collected over the years, some that probably could be disposed of, and instead of doing that I have stacked them up and put a board over top of them. On top of that board, rows of Readers Digest Condensed Books (they’re all about the same size, and have their own patterned cover art, as I learned from the artist Terri Long). Sometimes I pull a reference book out of the stack–the whole thing is sturdy, doesn’t topple. I kind of need a little weird cave, my room isn’t well lit, and in that way it suits me. For all I know, it is my ideal writing space.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’m working on an essay about humor, reference books, the TV show M*A*S*H, and how my mind has not been quite at peace these years while we have been at war. It’s basically how I spent the Bush era, jotting notes here and there and deleting them, listening to a language groan under the weight of polarized discourse. My wife and I watched every episode of M*A*S*H straight through–a feat I’d probably done out of sequence, but it’s different to do it all together. It’s an all-time-great show. It left a mark on me and a lot of people as I grew up–and I’ve been trying to capture how and why. Long after I had started, in an unbelievable coincidence, I got to meet Mike Farrell and Alan Alda in a green room. I was to introduce Farrell. I thought immediately, as these old friends traded news and jokes, “Oh my god…I’m in the Swamp!” I still don’t know if this experience will work into the essay, but how can it not?

Here’s a selection from Kevin McFadden’s book, Hardscrabble, published by University of Georgia Press:

Hardscrabble by Kevin McFadden

A Fête

We wanted to be succored
and we were suckered:
gobsmack over goblets,
toe-holds where finger
sandwiches should be,
the beer sophisticated,
the talk domestic. Beauty,
like death, you never know
who gets it. She gets it.
A belle, I’m told.
A beau, he’s tied.
Sure, you can verb
(professor said) a noun
but not an adjective—
about which time
I blanked, the lights
shorted and a cow
in some proximity
lowed.

Nothing pressing tomorrow?
How about some pressing
tonight? Words were cheap,
and the least groped for.
Most, in the vernacular,
high. Wine came next
to felicitate conversation,
which it did: we ordered
white, all got red, all
got drinking stunk.
Some popped a cork
above the suds then
copped a pork below.
We wanted to be fêted
and we were fetid: souls
so gleefully at odds as most
would be at peace. Minds
in oneness this year,
next year in Tunis.

Thanks to No Tell Motel and Barn Owl Review

deborah — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:35:11 +0000

Thank you to No Tell Motel for the Pushcart nomination for my poem “Papoose.” Reb Livingston and Molly Arden are the brains behind this enterprise. Few magazines provide poetry 365 days per year.

Thanks also to Barn Owl Review for a Pushcart nomination for “Love Poem for Lamoni, Iowa.” Mary Biddinger informed me of this via a post to my Facebook wall, which is quite modern of her. Jay Robinson and Mary work together to make this a fantastic magazine. I was blown away by the poetry in their first issue.

Do You Like 32Ps Covers? Get a Gig Poster by the Artist.

deborah — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:33:12 +0000

You know the guy who does the 32 Poems magazine cover art? His name is Dirk Fowler, and he is one of the world’s great rock poster artists. Seriously, he is recognized world-wide. People are always lamenting that they can’t afford contemporary art. You can’t afford NOT to get a piece of Dirk’s art: real letter-press gig posters for a reasonable price. Check out his website, and see if you can’t find something with one of your favorite bands (Wilco, Merle Haggard, Lyle Lovett, The Books, The Swell Season, Modest Mouse). This is one of the most unique gifts that you could possibly give.

Dirk’s posters sell out very quickly, so don’t wait around. And there’s a buy 2 get 1 free promo going on right now, to boot!

VIDEO: 32 Poems Introduces Elizabeth J. Coleman

deborah — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:30:25 +0000

Perhaps we mentioned 32 Poems was invited — along with the magazines Salamander and Confrontation — to participate in the New York Public Library’s Periodically Reading Series.

I was thrilled to be invited, to have Elizabeth J. Coleman participate as our “emerging” poet, and to be in New York. Watch the video (28:32).

Although we did not realize it until part way through the program, Elizabeth and I first met at Sewanee. I remembered her as the woman with the beautiful scarves. We chatted at a cocktail party and went on our respective ways. I sat in on her poetry workshop with Claudia Emerson and Dave Smith. We both found it amusing to be reunited this way and to have passed many emails back and forth before our New York meeting without realizing we’d already met.

I spent the morning walking New York. I had no plans besides looking for a Good Sandwich at ‘WichWorks in Bryant Park. Somehow, I managed to visit two ice skating rinks. New York City is really the land of ice skating.

My journey took me on a small tour including: Bryant Park, the New York Public Library (to get the lay of the land before the reading), the MoMA store, the Folk Art Museum, the flat iron building, Madison Square Park, 6th Avenue, a restaurant called Les Halles for drinks with ML and AL, and Rockefeller Center.

So many friends attended the reading. I adore all who attended.

This was the line up:

Salamander editor Jenny Barber introduced fiction writer CD Collins. 32 Poems editor Deborah Ager introduced poet Elizabeth J. Coleman. Confrontation editor Martin Tucker introduced fiction writer Evander Lomke.

Watch 32 Poems introduce an emerging poet (28:32).

Buy a Subscription of 32 Poems and Get a Free Issue

deborah — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:45:39 +0000

Every year people wonder what gift at Christmas would be THE gift that is not your usual Tickle Me Elmo or Robot Hampster. It’s 32 Poems. Please give a gift subscription this year. It’s easy via Paypal on our website.

32 Poems has become known as the poetry magazine where you will always find poems you love, poems worth sharing, poems that are on the cutting edge of contemporary poets, whether they be sonnets, prose poems, or other lyric meditations.

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