Jeannine Atkins's Blog, page 44

Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place

We're on vacation in Maine: getting battered by waves and sand, taking calmer swims in a lake, eating fried clams or fish, doing lots of ocean staring.



Yesterday we took a break from water to visit the Portland Museum of Art http://www.portlandmuseum.org/ featuring Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place.



The small (ie. just the right size) show features work owned by the museum, and is part of a Homer celebration which will culminate in the restoration of his nearby studio. There's a girl sit...

Revision Thoughts

Sometimes a writer agrees to drive two and half hours to talk to teachers, and the sixteen promised are there. Sometimes a book she wrote will be on the display of "books we love" or even anywhere. Sometimes the person who invited her will stay to listen instead of bolting out after giving a one sentence intro.

But last week's talk was not one of these. I stood in front of five people with twelve pages of notes looking kind of miserable, until one of the teachers suggested, "Why don't you come...

Inspiration at the Carle: In the Auditorium and the Hallway

On Friday my husband and I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art http://www.carlemuseum.org/Home to hear its founder speak about his path through art. It seems to have begun with a first grade teacher in Syracuse, New York, who covered walls with his drawings and continues past recent celebrations of eighty years for him and forty years for the Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar. Eric Carle showed a slide of himself as a little boy dressed as a cowboy in titled hat and rakish bandanna alo...

Poetry Speaks Who I Am edited by Elise Paschen

I liked this anthology edited by poet Elise Paschen, with advisory editors Elizabeth Alexander, Joy Harjo, and Brad Leithauser, and each of these esteemed poets has work included. Most of the poems were written with an adult audience in mind, but were chosen for their probable appeal, as well, to pre-teens and teens. We begin with Jason Shinder's "Eternity" and Joy Harjo's "Perhaps the World Ends Here," and end with Richard Wilbur's poem "The Writer." We get Robert Frost's roads, Shelley's Oz...

Painter Emily Eveleth's Pretty Doughnuts

Shakespeare wrote "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," but of course the bard wrote a lot of things that contradict each other, and he knew better than anyone that what we call something can change it. Say the "evaporated cane juice" in a cracker my husband and I just ate, which I pointed out is sugar. Or various ways of saying doughnuts, which are the subject of paintings by Emily Eveleth http://www.emilyeveleth.com/ in a wonderful show called "Luscious" now at The Smith College...

Getting There: From Prose to Poems

I'm not saying that everyone should write a novel, tear it apart, and look for moments that might work for the centers or ends of poems. I'm not even saying I ever hope to do this again, though I won't swear I never will. But after spending much of June complaining about ripping apart sentences and chucking out paragraphs and pages, I want to say I'm now at peace with the process. I've found some images that might stand for two or three things, and have tried propping them up against each oth...

One Summer Day

As a late celebration of my birthday – yes, we drag this out for a month -- my friend Sue and our husbands went to see Richard III performed by the wonderful Shakespeare and Company http://www.shakespeare.org/. Thankfully this was abridged: three hours instead of five, Shakespeare's longest play. There were a lot of heads to fall. It's not his most famousplay, and not his best, but we did get to nod at the first familiar line, if few others. The acting was superb, and my husband was fascinat...

Keeping a Journal

Here on my blog, I keep some record of my writing life, which mostly is an interior place, lacking much drama. Sometimes my friends and family come in, and I can post a few pictures. I make a few typos, but I do check for them, and I revise, unlike in my journal. which is bulky, messy and rife with contradictions: if not quite as yellowed as the one in the picture, my penmanship is even worse. There I empty out worries, obsessions, and occasional delights or observations so that my mind is cl...

A Glimpse of a Person in Poems about Nature

The evening I returned from my west coast trip, I did my best to quell my fatigue and lead a library workshop about writing poems from nature. A woman there told how, though she's in her sixties, she often writes the sort of poems "I should have been writing as a teenager. But I don't want to seem self indulgent." Now there's a word few poets or people in general should bandy about. Yes, I've read poems that seem too deep in the grip of a single person, but that was the last thing this poet n...

California!

Sorry about being a bad blogger the past week or two. I was just having too much fun, and little internet access, on a family vacation. This was followed by catching up and making a wobbly way back into my writing routine, which, having spent the first half of July doing slash and burn, has become more about quietly adding and arranging.

Here's a quick recap with pictures my husband mostly took while visiting our daughter at her home in L.A. We loved seeing where Emily works, and enjoyed the ...