Bernadette K. Geyer's Blog

I'm currently reading A Celebration of Poets, edited by Don Cameron Allen, which is a collection of essays by nine poets. In May Sarton's essay, "The School of Babylon," she tackles the common question "When is a poem finished?"

The answer is, I think, when all the tensions it has posited are perfectly equilibrated, when the change of a single syllable would so affect the structure that the poem would fall like a house of cards under the shift.

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I don't often dream about my writing, but last night's was a doozy:

I traveled fairly far to read in a poetry series held in a bar/restaurant. I was the featured reader. My new book had not been published yet, so I had to read from my chapbook. I realized that I only had one copy of my chapbook with me to sell. I started my reading and I casually commented that it's been so long since my chapbook was published that I don't even recognize the poems anymore. After reading several poems, I realiz...

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I'm making lentil soup today -- raining, Sunday, football -- and came across this in the recipe I'm using from The German Cookbook, edited by Mimi Sheraton:

"Legumes that are absolutely untreated and need to be soaked make a much better
soup, but they are a little hard to find in this age of overimprovement."

I loved that sentence because, when you think about it, there are many things we tend to ruin simply by "overimprovement."

As a poet, I have a tendency to tinker with some of my poem drafts ...

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Yesterday, I swept leaves from our deck and patio. This morning, I looked out and saw that both were in the process of being covered once again by the maple leaves falling from the dozen trees in our back yard.

Today, I approached yet another Sisyphean task: submitting poems to journals. Send them out. Get them back. Send them out again.

What makes you feel like Sisyphus?

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Congrats to Robert Giron and Gival Press for its good news! Poetic Voices Without Borders 2 has won the 2009 National Best Book Award for Fiction & Literature: Anthology, from USA Book News.

Not only does this excite me because Gival Press is a great local publisher, but also because one of my poems happens to be in this issue alongside many other DC-area poets.

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Toiling away in anonymity here. Just a brief post because I couldn't resist the siren call of these red poppies.

Becky Mae Poppy Fields Necklace and Earring Set GUEST GIVEAWAY!!!!
http://grosgrainfabulous.blogspot.com/2009/10/becky-mae-poppy-fields-necklace-and.html

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The first half of October has been a whirlwind of organization around here. Garage. Landscaping. Cellar.

This week, I began rummaging through what I labeled as "Archive" boxes. I'm no Andy Warhol, but there's a lot of crap I've saved over my lifetime. Some of the items from my childhood, I've resurrected and given to my own daughter.

In my rummagings, I came across a pristine stack of about 20 bus posters featuring one of my poems, "The Rose Forgets Its Beauty," which were published through the...

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Is it inevitable that a poet should write about Penelope? Over the years, I have seen so many that I wonder if there's an anthology somewhere on the subject... I don't think I will ever write one about her. But I will write about gardens and insects. Flowers and fairy tales. More subjects that have probably been done to death by poets.

The challenge is to "make it new", whatever subject you choose. It's been done before. Here's Dorothy Parker's "Penelope":

Penelope

In the pathway of the sun,
In t...

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In case you haven't yet seen it, I have a review of John Dufresne's Is Life Like This? A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months, over at the blog of The Writer's Center. Here's a grab from it:

Reading this guide, I realized how many erroneous preconceptions I had of the novel-writing process. The method Dufresne lays out jettisons the idea of sitting down, starting at page one and plowing through page after chronological page until you get to the end.

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I was thinking about the concept of "finding the time to write" and how most successful writers say you have to commit to "making time to write".

And then there's also the saying in the business world that "time equals money."

Time really is a lot like money. You might "find" money, but never in great quantities. All I ever find are pennies and an occasional quarter. Once, I found $10 on the floor of a bar, but that's definitely not the norm. If you want lots of money, you have to "make" it.

Sam...

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