Bernadette K. Geyer's Blog

We're in the last week of National Poetry Writing Month and my energy is definitely slowing down. Thank goodness for last week's trip to Las Vegas, which helped me catch up on writing. Since I returned home, there's been little time to write poetry, but I've managed to get a few drafts jotted down in my notebook. Here's the update:

26. Scar II & III
27. Sleeping It Off
28. Odds
29. He Said

I guess I just need to get one more draft written by Thursday. Not too bad. Then I'll take a few weeks off writi

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I'm still here, though the month seems to have gotten away from me. Here goes the update, continued from where I left off last week:

13. When Pruning
14. Anxiety Is the Nub
15. Poker Face
16. I Knelt
17. Distraction in the Forest
18. The Rules Don't Apply
19. Dream Images
20. Bird Be My Witness
21. Scar 1
22. House Wins
23. Slots
24. In
25. Ode to the Stoplight

Now, maybe you'd call it cheating for me to count every single started draft as part of my NaPoWriMo tally... but for me, the important thing this mon

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When I was fourteen, my father was laid off from his job as a machinist for Westinghouse. I had two younger sisters. My mother had just started back to school to try to finish her degree to become a Licensed Practical Nurse.

My parents used the money they had been saving for my college fund to open a small store in my hometown. They sold coins and collectibles. Collecting had been a family hobby. My coin collection was part of the stock when the store opened. I worked there on weekends and over t

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Sandra Beasley has won the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo! Her 2nd collection of poetry, I Was the Jukebox, will be published by W.W. Norton & Company in 2010.

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We're nearing the halfway mark for the month. I've fallen just a teensy bit behind due to many many fun weekend activities. Here is the updated list of poem titles:

1. April's Fools
2. Blessing of the Owl
3. The Wind's Punishment Was Swift
4. When the Clouds Move Over Me
5. Forest Song
6. Tracing
7. Practice Remaining Very Very Still
8. How to Write with Blistered Fingertips
9. Carousel
10. The Things They Did to Forget
11. Falling in Love with the Stoplight
12. Give me

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We had an overgrown bush in the front yard that has been bugging me for the past 2 and a half years that we've lived in this house. Our original plan was to just remove the bush. However, as I began pruning it this spring, I realized the bush had a fantastic architecture to it's main branches.

I decided to go all "Niwaki" on it.

Before (imagine it without the playful young scalliwags):

And the after:

As I removed one dead branch, exposing another, it all just sort of came together. The only comparis

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Despite a fierce schedule, I may still be on track with NaPoWriMo. I'm not saying all the drafts have been birthed whole, as Athena from Zeus' head... in fact only one so far shows any potential.

But that's one poem that probably would still be stuck in my head if NaPoWriMo hadn't given me a kick in the pants to let it out.

The draft titles to date:

1. April's Fools
2. Blessing of the Owl
3. The Wind's Punishment Was Swift
4. When the Clouds Move Over Me
5. Forest Song
6. Tracing

Poem #6 was written this

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I am reading The Stones Remember: Native Israeli Poetry, edited by Moshe Dor, Barbara Goldberg and Giora Leshem and published by The Word Works in 1991. While I'm only on page 20, I have found these poems to be incredibly inspirational -- their rhythms and anaphora creating a near trance-like experience as I have been reading. But, the following poem so blew me away that I had to run to the computer and share it. The rhythm starts out slow and inviting, then builds, quickening to become infectio

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God help me I'm doing NaPoWriMo again - National Poetry Writing Month - attempting to write a poem draft every day. It was my most productive month last year. The drafts I wrote sustained me during the dry times. I went back to those drafts and edited and mined them and managed to get a few really great poems when all was said and done.

For those who don't realize it, April is National Poetry Month. And there are many web sites featuring poem-a-day celebrations, including:

Knopf is featuring a poe

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I picked up this copy of Measure, published by the University of Evansville, at the 2008 AWP conference I attended and am just now finishing it. Let's just say I'm a little behind in my reading.

Measure is an annual review of formal poetry, but according to its web site, the journal has recently moved to 2 issues each year because of how many quality poems they have been receiving. The 2007 issue tops out at 245 pages, including the contributors' notes. There are a few interviews and essays feat

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