POEM FRIDAY #6

I leave for my second residency at Bennington on Jan. 4 and will return on Jan. 14. I will have internet access, but I may or may not blog. Poem Fridays will be on hold until I return.

In the land of freezing & snow that is Vermont, here is the forecast for Jan.4-7: Thurs., Jan. 4: 42/33 ; Fri., Jan.5: 41/37; Sat., Jan. 6: 43/37; Sun., Jan. 7: 42/28.

Local Houston temp (currently): 73/59

I have my peacoat, I have my parka. I have my scarves, I have my gloves. Snowboots, check. Fleece shirts, check. Ready to make my first snowman ever, check.

I will be working this coming term with the poet April Bernard. Read an interview of her by Reb Livingston from Post Road here.

In the spirit of April Bernard, welcome to

POEM FRIDAY #6

Coffee & Dolls by April Bernard

It was a storefront for a small-time numbers runner,
pretending to be some sort of grocery. Coffeemakers
and Bustello cans populated the shelves, sparsely.
Who was fooled. The boxes bleached in the sun,
the old guys sat inside on summer lawn chairs,
watching tv. The applause from the talk shows and game shows
washed out the propped-open door like distant rain.

It closed for a few months. The slick sedan disappeared.
One spring day, it reopened, and this time a sign
decorated the window: COFFEE & DOLLS.
Yarn-haired, gingham-dressed floppy dolls
lolled among the coffee cans. A mastiff puppy,
the size and shape of a tipped-over fire hydrant,
guarded as the sedan and the old guys returned.

I don't know about you, but I've been looking
for a narrative in which suffering makes sense.
I mean, the high wail of the woman holding her dead child,
the wail that filled the street. I mean the sudden
fatal blooms on golden skin. I mean the crack deaths,
I mean the ice-cream truck that cruised the alphabets
and sold crack to the same deedle-dee-dee tune as fudgsicles.
I mean the raw scabs of the beaten mastiff, and many other
things.

(from Swan Electric)

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Look for exciting things to come from Pebble Lake Review in 2007, including a featured selection of poems from Bob Hicok in our Spring 2007 issue. PLR will be walking around AWP Atlanta (sans table as we've chosen to hobknob & plan to table at AWP NYC in 2008), so say hello & grab a copy for your very own.

PLR also has plans in the works for several Houston-area readings (TBA) and will take part in the CLMP fair (in Houston). More on this as details develop.

We are currently reading for the Spring 2007 issue, so get your best poems/short stories/nonfiction/reviews/graphic shorts together & send them over!

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I had dinner & drinks tonight with the lovely and exciting artist, Carrie Ann Baade. PLR has commissioned Carrie to do some covers for forthcoming issues, beginning with the Summer 2007 issue. Carrie received her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 and a Masters in Painting from the University of Delaware in 2003. Currently, Carrie is on faculty at the University of Delaware and a full time painter in Philadelphia accompanied by her singing, polydactyl cat.

Why I love Carrie's work:

(I plan to use this as the cover of my book in-progress).

New Pebble Lake Review!

The Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Pebble Lake Review is back from the printer!






In this issue: Nick Admussen, J.P Dancing Bear, Victoria Boynton, Shanna Compton, Melanie Dusseau, Anne Haines, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Christine Hamm, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonsis, Ron Mohring, Muriel Nelson, Steven Schroeder, Matt Siegel, Judith Skillman, Sarah E. Smith, Letitia Trent, Wendy Wisner, Kim Young, and many more.

Plus reviews of A Mnemonic for Desire by Steve Mueske, Talk Shows by Mónica de la Torre, Stubborn by Jean Gallagher, All This Could Be Yours by Laurie Blauner, The Pajamaist by Matthew Zapruder, and Uncontainable Noise by Steve Davenport.

Order your copy now before they sell out!

Note: The Web issue will be available by the end of this week.

POEM FRIDAY #5

I've been tagged by Angela Vogel (aka New Zoo Poet) for this poetry survey:

The first poem I remember reading was: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 8th grade (thanks to my English teacher older sister), but the first poem I ever read was probably something along the lines of Shel Silverstein.

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and. . .I'm thankful for each annoying minute of it. Back at UH, Matthea Harvey made us memorize poems for her poetry forms class and to this day I can still recite Anne Sexton's "Her Kind." That's talent, baby.

I read poetry because...I love it. It helps me as a writer and as a human being. I find that there are poems for every occassion, kind of like music. Pissed off or jilted? Read Plath. Involved in a tumultous pseudo love affair? Read Addonizio. Have a love/hate relationship with dear old dad? Read Olds.

A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem..."Your One Good Dress" by Brenda Shaughnessey, ""Not So Much Miniature As Far Away" by Matthea Harvey, "For the Stranger" by Carolyn Forche, or "Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell (yes, I can't pick one).

I write poetry, but...I'm not the cliched poetry writer. I'm not going to tell you that my desk is covered with pens, paper, open books, esoteric treatise from 14th century philosophers. I wear black, but no beanies, no bottles of absinthe, no bongo drums or moaning emo in the background. I like what I like and I'm not ashamed of it.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature...I go back to several poems again and again for reference or to relive the emotion/experience that I acquired from certain poems. Not so with fiction, though I have a great love for it, especially the short story. Poetry is like a love affair/religious experience for me. The only short story that comes close to this is Raymond Carver's "Call if you Need Me."

I find poetry...is an extension of our lovely, troubled minds.

The last time I heard poetry...was probably at my friend Matt Siegel's reading at Brazos. He's such a great presence. I love poetry readings, but they are not all created equal.

I think poems are like…an unbuttoned blouse and a glass of merlot. Ready and willing for the taking.

I'm tagging Shanna, Siobhan, Ken, Anna and Matt.

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POEM FRIDAY #5

What Was by Kim Addonizio

The streets fill with cabs and limos,
with the happy laughter of the very drunk;
the benches in Washington Square Park,
briefly occupied by lovers, have been reclaimed

by men who stretch out coughing under the Chronicle.
We’re sitting on the cold slab
of a cathedral step, and to keep myself
from kissing you I stare at the cartoony

blue neon face of a moose, set over the eponymous
restaurant, and decide on self-pity
as the best solution to this knot
of complicated feelings. So much, my love,

for love; our years together recede,
taillights in the fog that’s settled in. I breathe
your familiar smell—Tuscany Per Uomo,
Camel Lights, the sweet reek of alcohol—and keep

from looking at your face, knowing
I’m still a sucker for beauty. Nearby, a man decants
a few notes from his tenor sax, honking his way
through a tune meant to be melancholy. Soon

I’ll drive home alone, weeping and raging,
the radio twisted high as I can stand it—
or else I’ll lean toward you, and tell you
any lie I think will bring you back.

And if you’re reading this, it’s been years
since then, and everything’s too late
the way it always is in songs like this,
the way it always is.

(from what is this thing called love)

Review!

Thank you to Steve Schroeder, Tony Trigilio & The Eleventh Muse for the wonderful review of my chapbook, Light Under Skin.

If you haven't purchased a copy, there are still a few left over @ Finishing Line Press for $12 (under 2006 new releases, scroll to bottom).

You can read the review here, or here:

Light Under Skin, Amanda Auchter (Finishing Line Press, 2006) -- reviewed by Tony Trigilio

Conventional mind-body dualism has no place in Amanda Auchter's Light Under Skin, and this is the great allure of the book. The mind keeps itself alive in our skins; our bones are the very girders that support self-consciousness; the body is at once translucent and "heavy with words." Even in sleep, we are weighted by the physicality of memory and experience -- "the silent stirrings // of our slumber & nightmares." The body is revealed to be visionary at the same time it unravels into the ordinary. This necessary contradiction produces the mythic "light under the skin" of poems such as "Echoes from Mother," where the speaker-fetus hears the "call" of her mother's sleep as "echoes which drift and sway / as I lie awake, watching // the stars of our cells / splash and churn." In their confrontation with the mysteries of the ordinary, these important poems evoke Levertov's embodied questing, her "terrible joy" in the quotidian and its unguarded break and burn. Like Levertov, Auchter is earnest and exact as she experiences the elusive particulars of the everyday.

Her voices are swarming; they awake to possibility, reinventing themselves between the contemplative and the quotidian. They reconsider what Auden described, in his poem "Moon Landing," as the "phallic triumph" that masculinized cultures get from "huddling in gangs and knowing / the exact time." The people in Auchter's poems instead huddle collaboratively -- with no less deftness or care than the timekeeping gangs Auden skeptically renders -- and they make knowledge for the sake of deep familial bonds, not for anything conventionally utilitarian. Auchter inverts Auden's subject matter in her own "Moon Landing," one of the central poems of sight and knowledge in Light Under Skin. Here the moon itself "lands" on the horizon-line of the speaker's frame of reference. Auchter's moon is not a place for conquest, but instead a sublime "body of dust dangled from some fine cord." Her metaphor revels in self-referentiality -- the accomplished mythic artifice of her cord-dangled moon -- and in doing so, emphasizes that what we truly can know, what is tangible, in these moments is not "phallic triumph" but instead a breakthrough experience where the skin shifts and we rediscover how to navigate the "wild territory" of the body. In this way, the body becomes a place to exult in the intersection of the elegiac and the ordinary, and readers have a stake in making something out of the "unfinished paradise" of the body's transience.

If history is, as in Auden's poem, a tapestry of deeds "more facile / at courage than kindness," then it's tempting to join his call that "artists, / chiefs and saints may still appear to blithe it." But Auchter is one of those poets who cultivates an alternative history of the tactile and the vulnerable. In poems such as "Photograph, April 1956," which opens the collection, the most charged moments of our lives are at first obscured; history shoves us along seemingly predetermined tracks, yet the poem is sensitive to how stories emerge, disjunctive, from the random "scurry of thin air" of memory and experience. An expansive vision develops from the pressures of recollection and revision, as the poet speaks back to an old family photograph and, in doing so, mythologizes the past. Auchter intensifies the minute, anti-dramatic "slivers" of daily routines, the "quiet / existence of ordinary objects," and traces the process by which they become embodied as personal mythos. Too often our vocal registers are charted into either narrative epiphany or impersonal disjunction, as if our only choice as readers and writers is the experiential or the abstract. But Auchter bridges the earnest and playful, and Light Under Skin weaves a love of language with a belief that vision and sensation are untamable.

Space

Pebble Lake Review now has a MySpace. Go on, be its friend.

Marlboro

I recently found out that I was a finalist for the 2006 Marlboro Review Prize for Poetry! MR and Heather McHugh chose my poem, "Cast Out," to publish in their forthcoming issue.

This was based on the exorcism Jesus performed in the Bible. When he casts out the "devils" from the afflicted man in his cave, the devils possess the pigs who rush the small body of water and drown. This incident was also the basis of the last scene in "The Exorcist" in which the priest tells the demon to "come into me" and flings his possessed body out the window and down the flight of stairs. Scary stuff.

POEM FRIDAY #4

My packet is finished! My packet is finished! It's cold here (for Texas), but I'm trying to toughen up for the insane Vermont winter that I'm headed off for in a mere 3 weeks (is that all?) In the meantime, I'm hanging the tinsel, baking the cookies, and working on a few new poems & my collaboration project with L.

The Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Pebble Lake Review will be off to the printer's on Monday, so order your advanced copy before they all sell out!

Want to get the poet or writer in your life something special for Christmas? Try the great Pebble Lake Review items over Cafe Press. From t-shirts to totes, mugs to magnets, you'll be giving a great gift & supporting this small press that brings you the best in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews!

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POEM FRIDAY #4

fall to. 1. To begin (a physical activity) energetically. 2. To shut or move into place by itself. by Amy Newman

Is it exhaustion that lets the body wander,
and travel at infinite degree
toward wanting? Leashed to the myth
with what's remaindered:

feral planets of desire that punctuate,
like commas, the long phrases of our wanting.
Dreaming hurts at the ripped seams of it,
and I dream. Across the yard

the beautiful endures
in brutal, climacteric trees.
They loosen at the limbs, a loss of memory,
and as the things descend

they say a prayer about their fall.
And some leaves twitch like feeling at the light,
and close themselves against all touch,
this motor impulse I admire.

While I might open out, like tongue,
I'll snap to my within
as swift as touch, and red as underskin,
a darkened mouth, and wish the fill of it.

At night, the husband wanders,
carries in his arms like flowers his vast love,
and I begin a bloom for him —
with all my silly flesh, the rest of it,

in spite of, or because our human love
— the complicated body of dimension —
it's just too rich, we all but haul it up
in these electrical disturbances and shapes:

the braiding of our lungs, their candied net,
striated muscle, and little hearts
as soft as birds — these private,
bright assays against a calendar of myth and stain,

against the immaterial they also love. The body
is devout, and when we are entwined of limb,
we look like praying hands, we shape our faith,
we marvel in the imitated world.

(from Fall)

Pushcart Prize Nominations

Pebble Lake Review is proud to announce the following Pushcart Prize nominations:

Jane Rosenberg LaForge of New York, NY
for her story, "Rim of the World" (PLR, Summer 2006)

Sarah Sloat of Frankfurt, Germany
for her poem, "Humidity" (PLR, Summer 2006)

Rebecca Wadlinger of Austin, TX
for her poem, “Later, People Took On Qualities That Planets Usually Have" (PLR, Spring 2006)

Jordan Windholz of Boulder, CO
for his poem, "Pursuit of Sweetness and Light" (PLR, Fall/Winter 2006)

John Woods of North Merrick, NY
for his story, "Gargamel" (PLR, Spring 2006)

Kim Young of Reseda, CA
for her poem, "Abduction" (PLR, Fall/Winter 2006)

Poem Friday #3

I missed last week's poem Friday due to my overfill of turkey, dressing, and family drama (part of which involved my mother CUTTING OFF MY HAIR). How did the hair cutting incident come about you ask? My mother usually trims my hair (which is long, below bra-strap long) because most salons charge me double due to my long, curly, thick locks. On Fri., after depositing my sister back at my mom's house, I asked my mother to trim the one to one-half inch(s) of dead ends. What did she do then, you ask? She took the scissors & cut my hair to where it barely touches my shoulders. Goodbye, beautiful goddess hair. Hello soccer mom bob. Why did she do that you wonder? The words from her mouth: "I always thought you should wear your hair short."

Poetry tidbits: If you follow Matthea Harvey's poetry as much as I do, you'll love her new interview in the recent edition of Tarpulin Sky. Harvey talks about her "Future of Terror" series, as well as her writing process and current projects. The best news? Graywolf will publish her third collection of poems, Modern Life, in 2007. Soft Skull Press is also releasing her first children's book, The Little General and the Giant Snowflake, illustrated by Elizabeth Zechel.

POEM FRIDAY #3

Death, the last visit by Marie Howe

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.
It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and
it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long
as you ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you’ll smell mud and hair
and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me give it to me
until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever
come undone.
Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt
this good.

(from The Good Thief)

Read an interview with Marie Howe at AGNI Online.