Beth Kephart's Blog, page 361

The Compulsive Reader reviews Nothing but Ghosts

This is just to say thank you (thank you!) to The Compulsive Reader, for her truly lovely review of Nothing but Ghosts, a post I didn't discover until just now, a full week past posting. Which says far too much about my own inadequacies out here in the blog world and not enough about TCR, who does terrific, trailblazing things on her site. My gratitude.[image error]

Zebra in the Garden

Working with a macro lens is like looking at life through a microscope—seeing what you would not see were you just passing through. So that yesterday, between rain bursts, I could be found crouching in my garden or braced above a vase of flowers, dialing in and out of temporal focus. I was catching the reflected crossbars on a puddled stamen and discovering the zebra stripes of iris. I was thinking how razor edged the lily is, how much like a skirt a blur of hydrangea seems, as photographed

Who Am I, Again?

I often think that I must be a most-confounding blogger—too language steeped, too introspective to transcend the razzle of internet exchange. White is my canvas. The marriage of photography and idea, image and suggestion, color and word is the challenge I assert myself against.

Not, as my friend and dance teacher Jean says, an exercise designed to draw the masses.

Dear Kelsey Boeckermann has noticed, of late, how vanilla my blog seems, how still in a swirl-swell of fast-rising waves. She though

Easy Doesn't Do It: The Madness of My Poetic Method

Okay, sure. I asked my husband to read one of my poems (a task I have learned, through the years, to but rarely impose on the visual artist to whom I'm married) and he said, in a quick green-tinted e-mail: "sounds nice and I have no idea what it means." I asked another friend; he said, "I tried to understand; I couldn't." I asked my son if he might read the poem I'd blogged for him today. He said, "Tomorrow, Mom, I will read it more closely. Today what I can tell is this: You are happy th

Happiness Business: Beth Kephart Poem

This happiness business of yours being
nearly complete, being
I’m not saying
swagger or stomp,
not claiming
the rogue refutation of what
(may we speak honestly?)
is still life as we know it—
which is to say steady on no feet,
and too lovely and perceptible
to save itself.

That is not what I said
or not what I would have said
had you not, again,
been heading out the door—
your cap gyroscoped back
on your head,
your assurances
nineteen years old
and clever,
your words tossed
over the sudden brawn
of your shoulder:
Don't

Ledge: Beth Kephart Poem

The strange knowing between us.
The thin line of nothing
that is the listen,
thigh to thigh.
The untelling of song and the sun
that falls shy.
I am not my age.
I am not who I have been,
or I should say:
Dance is hardly archeological.
It is now, then gone.
It is the hard, soft heart of remembering
when: I moved, I was moved
by the untelling of song.

Sun on the ledge.


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First-person Intimate

These instructive thoughts from Colm Toibin, in his New York Times Magazine (5/3/09) profile. The author of The Blackwater Lightship (one of my favorite books) and, newly, Brooklyn (on my list) avoids, he says, describing his protagonists, and this is why: "If you describe them physically, you actually remove them from the reader, you distance them. By not describing them, you begin to make their perception so intimately involved with the reader's perceptions that it allows the reader to ente

The Heart is Not a Size

Next March, my fourth YA novel will be released by HarperTeen. The Heart is not a Size was inspired by a trip that I took, along with my husband, son, and two dozen others, to a Juarez squatters' village called Anapra. It features a girl named Georgia (who just happens to be an anxiety-prone photographer) and her best friend, Riley. It asks the question, What difference can one person make?, while plumbing buried, dangerous secrets.

Today the cover for Heart was approved. I thank Jill Santopo

Undercover Poetry Contest Results, An Interview, and Some Guest Blogging

In Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, my memoir about the years I spent learning from a group of young writers, I made it clear that I do not believe in writing as a competitive sport.

I felt, therefore, as if I'd stepped onto hypocritical grounds these past two days as I tried to sort through the many glorious submissions to the Undercover poetry contest. The bloggers who visit here and the bloggers whom I visit are putting art out into the world. Thoughtful, pr

The Dance Lesson: Beth Kephart Poem

You will never be;
you won’t.
Your spine, your face, your hips
are implicated, wrong.
Your balance, meanwhile, is an obstruction to mine
and cricked to a shim.
You have snaggled you have shammed you have embargoed beauty.
You have yelped the discontinuous, and why
would you ever
(answer this)
heel the music
into breaking its own heart?

It was your suspicion of tension
that failed you.
It was your wanting
too much
that forced
the first elision.
The second
erupted from despair.
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