Field Recordings

Greetings and salutations! May is half way through her course and I am half way through my writing marathon over at Tupelo Press. I'm raising money for the non-profit small press publisher by writing a new poem every day for the month of May. I have the pleasure of raising money so the independent publisher can continue to operate a Teen Writing Center near Charlottesville, and gather resources for teen outreach across the US, as well as publish a new translation of Pablo Neruda's Cantos , among other publishing projects. I have no ties to Tupelo Press, my little books and reviews make their homes elsewhere, so this is simply a way to try to give back to the community that I have participated in for the last twenty years. Most small presses struggle to make ends meet, which equates to jobs. Paying writers, paying poets, paying editors and paying graphic artists. Paying people. Your donations, no matter how small, will pay artists for equitable work, as well as he...

What a beautiful weekend! Today's poem is inspired by the small village I live in on the Eastern Shore of VA (pictured above).  One of the other 30/30 poets, Rachel Kubie, who wrote about Manning and Snowden yesterday, and both were knocking around in my head when I wrote today. Of course I wanted to think about how does privacy matter to me, in my little world? And of course, there is none, or nearly so. On a nightly walk one can learn so much about their neighbors, way more than what you could learn from a facebook status update, or an email.  The final line is both ironic and earnest, and funny at the same time, or as I read it. Lots of imagery of carnivals and small town fairs pop up at the end. A future edit would see a tightening up of the verse, and possible reworking of the food imagery. But I'm wiped. As my neighbors could tell you, I've been sneezing, and playing with kids at the Y all day. FYI: I probably won't blog too much this week. Lots of things happ...

I've long been interested in espionage and poetry. The French Resistance used poetry to throw off the Nazis in World War II, a subject I've explored before, in " Dinner Night At Henri's."   (My good friend Nate McFadden recorded the poem for his blog and podcast--click the link to enjoy)   Today's poem is inspired by masks used by Revolutionary spies, which I have recently re-discovered by watching TV. AMC's Turn has a bunch of cool spy techniques detailed on its paper-cut intro, and uses one of the mask techniques in a recent episode. The mask pictured here works best with handwritten work, so the poem I've worked on today is more of a code.  The poem is also inspired by harmonics, as was yesterday's poem. AP Psychology students had an ear full of me last week when we looked at perceptual illusions, including harmonic illusions and psycho-audio hallucinations. Go here f or a link about Diana Deutsch's audio illusions. So some of th...

On the way to school, NPR ran a story on the Nigerian kidnapping of 230 schoolgirls. It struck me as a parent and a writer about the story. Throughout the day it simmered.  On my lunch break I looked up some Yoruba words, and after school drafted the poem. The initial draft was a two pronged poem: a satire of Hollywood writers pitching a film about a father who goes after the kidnappers, and a poem about the sound of the grieving parents. I meant to show a harsh division of worlds and privilege, but one that shared a similar tonal sound--as in machinery, background noise, harmonics, etc. WESTERN/AFRICAN HARMONICS The tubes of this poem vibrate at 1093 hertz, the stir of womb memory. Scene: Lattes, milk galaxies. Three smart execs type out the pitch: a gaunt dark father hunts for his daughter a pretty mother, wasting with tears, gathers a protest. “For Cannes.” They nod and screen down. “We can shoot in South Africa. Cheap, plus local color” “How does it end?” O...

This May I will be giving my time to write 30 new poems for Tupelo Press, which is in the throes of raising money via crowd-sourcing for new projects. They are non profit. Grants remain at recession lows. So, this morning as I met with my graduating seniors during their one on one conference (we discuss plans for success, grades, papers, attendance, etc) I pulled up Common Core Apps while waiting for a senior to fetch his book for his book report. The app is Common Curriculum , a cool lesson plan and web posting service. For some reason the idea struck to adopt some of the standards for a United States of Poetry--which sounded dystopian and Orwellian to my ears. So I mashed up some made up standards with some urban decay riffs. The urban decay riffs will need tweaking as they don't really strike any new visual ground, but rather cull standard tropes together. The made-up Common Core riffs are meta, and will also need to be made consistent. There is obvious commentary about CC...