Tucker Lieberman's Blog, page 4

Poems read Jan-Mar 2020

Here’s some of the poems that have drifted my way, by the thoughtfulness of their sharers and by my good fortune to happen to see them, during the first three months of 2020. I am grateful for these.

John Ashbery, “The Chateau Hardware” in The Double Dream of Spring
Cameron Awkward-Rich, “Meditations in an Emergency”
Anna Akhmatova, “The Last Toast,” [“And here, in defiance of the fact”] (both translated by Judith Hemschemeyer)
Mary-Kim Arnold, “Q1: Who Are You Looking For?”
Mark Bibbins, “13th Balloon”
CL Bledsoe, “A Kind of Spring,” in Grief Bacon
Blake Butler, “Asphyxiation” in Folk Physics
Jennifer Chang, “The Winter’s Wife,” in Some Say the Lark
Lisa Ciccarello, in At Night
Lucille Clifton, “blessing the boats”
Kwame Dawes, “Before Winter”
Heather Derr-Smith, “At the Crossing”
Linh Dinh, “WHOAAAA!!!”
Lauris Edmond, “The lecture”
Laura Eve Engel, “Burden of Belonging”
Ross Gay, “Sorrow is Not My Name”
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, [“It was not a scorpion I asked for…”]
Lisa Matthews, “Of these, abandonment,” in The Eternally Packed Suitcase
Jamaal May, “In the Future You Will Be Your Own Therapist”
Alicia Mountain, “Almanac Traction”
C.D. Wright, “Questionnaire in January,” in The Poet, the Lion…”
Louise Glück, “Crater Lake”, “Reunion,” “March,” “Image”
Linda Gregg, “Heavy With Things and Flesh”
Jim Harrison, “Becoming”
Jane Hirshfield, “I wanted to be surprised”
Kasey Jueds, “Birthday”
Galway Kinnell, “Prayer”
Noelle Kocot, “Ligeti,” in Soul in Space
Ted Kooser, “At the Office Early”
Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses”
Audre Lorde, “October”
Osip Mandelstam, [“A body is given to me”] (trans. Robert Tracy)
Jeffrey McDaniel, “The Quiet World”
Lisel Mueller, “When I Am Asked,” “Snow”
Carl Phillips, “Dirt Being Dirt”
Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Deathbed”
William Bronk, “The feeling”, in The World, The Worldless (translated by Paol Keineg)
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
Vijay Seshadri, “Enlightenment”
Grace Paley, “Proverbs,” “Drowning (II)”
Luke Palmer, “Boy on the Beach”
Nathan Parker, “4”
Linda Pastan, “RSVP Regrets Only”
Carl Phillips, “Said the Horse to the Light”
Eugenia Leigh, “Selah”
Frank Lima, “On Poetry”
Mary Oliver, “A Thousand Mornings”
Adrienne Rich, “Final Notations”
Jaime Sabines, “La luna”
Stevens, “First Warmth”
Adam Tedesco, “Achenes”
Marina Tsvetaeva, “Prayer” [trans. Ilya Kaminsky & Jean Valentine], in Art in the Light of Conscience
Chase Twichell, “Vestibule”
Hannah VanderHart, “Heart: An Anatomy”
W. S. Merwin, “When the War Is Over,” [“I needed my mistakes”]
Mark Strand, “The Man in the Mirror”
Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”
Richard Siken, “Dirty Valentine”
Susan Stewart, “The Forest”
Trakl tr. Tapscott, “A Winter Evening”
Catherine Wing, “The Darker Sooner,” in 32 Poems
Franz Wright, “Petition”
Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”

Virtual Poetry Readings, March 2020

Participate as a reader, or listen in!

March 20, 2020 – 5:30 PM EST – Online Literary Happy Hour hosted by Matt Bell. Interactive Zoom is already at capacity; watch YouTube livestream.

March 27 – April 11, 2020 – The Stay-At-Home! festival, “a free and completely online literature festival designed to shine some light, joy, and connectivity.”

March 28, 2020 – 6 PM-midnight EST – #TweetSpeakLive (you must sign up in advance to read)

Performance Anxiety – a monthly reading series, organized through Twitter, archived on YouTube

Poets in Pajamas – a bi-monthly reading series, Sundays 7 PM ET

Poetry Circle – an ongoing tweet-thread of poetry videos, started by Tara Skurtu

Distāntia Remote Reading Series – Seeking video submissions by poets. All videos are captioned.

Poets of the Pandemic – Videos are being planned. Captions anticipated. Likely prerecorded.

Shelter in Place (Maris Kreizman, with Lit Hub) – Discussions with authors about new releases

Train/Car Reading – Instagram-based, videos archived online

[image error]Vintage Victorian style quill pen engraving. Original from the British Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel. Wikimedia Commons.

How to “loan” a Kindle book

Some titles for Amazon Kindle have “Lending” enabled. The product page for each title indicates whether this option is offered. When the owner of a Kindle book offers a book as a loan, the recipient will have 7 days to “accept” the loan. Upon accepting it, they’ll have 14 days to read the loaned book. At the end of those 14 days, the rights to the Kindle book automatically revert back to the original owner, and the owner can’t loan out that particular title again.

Shortcut

Create a URL that looks like this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/lend-creation/B07T3WCYQC/

Replace “B07T3WCYQC” with the ASIN of the book you’d like to lend. The ASIN can be found on the book’s Amazon product page and usually also in the URL of the Amazon product page.

If you don’t own the book corresponding to that ASIN or if the title can’t be loaned, the URL will redirect to the book’s product page. If it’s available for you to loan, however, the URL will bring you to a page that allows you to enter an email address for your recipient.

Navigation

If you’d rather navigate the Amazon site to find the lending page “organically,” here’s instructions and screenshots.

Once you’ve bought a Kindle book, go to “Account & Lists” -> “Your Content and Devices.” You’ll see a list of all your purchased books. Find the title you want to loan. Click the square button next to it. Click the link “Loan this title.” (The link isn’t offered when the title can’t be loaned.) You’ll be taken to a page where you need to input your recipient’s email address. You can add a personal note.

[image error]For each book title, under “Product details,” there’s a field called “Lending.” It will say either “Enabled” or “Not Enabled.”



[image error]When you are logged in, use Amazon’s main menu to click “Account & Lists” and then “Your Content and Devices.”



[image error]Next to each of your purchased book titles, there’s a square button with a three-dot icon. Click that. It will pop up a box with more information and options. If “lending” is enabled for the title, there will be an option to select “Loan this title.”



[image error]You will need to provide your recipient’s email address.

EBook giveaway: ‘Ten Past Noon’

After years of research, I’m ready to share this hybrid work: biography, history, philosophy, personal essay. Edward Cumming (1901–1940) planned to write about historical castrations, but my book, Ten Past Noon, is about much, much more than that. It’s about suicide, free will, and fortieth birthdays. If you like long, elaborate, experimental nonfiction, this is for you.

Check out the first giveaway for Ten Past Noon, my recently published book.

[image error]

Copies will be delivered as Kindle eBooks. Never read on Kindle? You don’t need to have a Kindle device! You can install the free Kindle app on any device, and you can even read without installing any app by using Amazon’s “cloud reader.”

100 free copies are available. Goodreads will randomly select the winners. You can enter through March 17, 2020.

(Psst — can’t wait, want to guarantee your copy, or prefer paperback? Buy your own copy today!)

.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px;
font-style: normal; background: white; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; }
.goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink {
display: inline-block;
color: #181818;
background-color: #F6F6EE;
border: 1px solid #9D8A78;
border-radius: 3px;
font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: none;
outline: none;
font-size: 13px;
padding: 8px 12px;
}
.goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover {
color: #181818;
background-color: #F7F2ED;
border: 1px solid #AFAFAF;
text-decoration: none;
}


Goodreads Book Giveaway








Ten Past Noon


by Tucker Lieberman

Giveaway ends March 17, 2020.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

‘The Bride Minaret’: Poems by Heather Derr-Smith

[image error] The Bride Minaret by Heather Derr-Smith

Heather Derr-Smith’s poetry collection The Bride Minaret (Akron Series in Poetry, 2008) is an intricate, heavy narrative, focusing in large part on the poet’s relation to her son and the specificity of places she’s visited or lived in.

Within this beautiful arrangement, three poems especially caught my attention.

‘Star Chamber’

In the book’s first section, “Portents,” I noticed the poem “Star Chamber.” Farm machinery would be strange to me, and this poem gives me such a clear image of what it might be like to encounter it.

“There are farm machines that look like spacecraft with spotlights
And drown out the stars above. You know what they are called,
The machines with names like pets and attachments.”

‘The Girl Named Tents, Tanf Refugee Camp’

In the book’s second section, “Prophecies,” the long poem “The Girl Named Tents, Tanf Refugee Camp” reads like a biography and a prayer. “She was supposed to be a boy, as all girls are”—thus begins her journey.

“She is nine years old and beginning to know.
But dreams continue to cudgel her, bit by bit, stone by stone,
Knocking her off balance.
The wind writes its calligraphy in invisible ink.”

This same form of silent messaging makes itself known to all the girl’s people:

“Alif by alif,
Every bone in the camp is bound together like the stitching on a codex.”

‘The Pelican’

In the book’s third section, “Histories,” the poem “The Pelican” tells a wildlife rescue story. The bird’s mouth-pouch was hooked on a fishing line, “an episiotomy / That birthed only fear.” The poet’s father had a sewing kit — “He was prepared for anything but fatherhood” — and he “crept low to the ground in a gesture of humility the bird recognized,” enabling him to save the bird, according to the story she was told.

What the world communicates to us

In these lines I’ve selected, the common theme seems to be how some information is conveyed not through language but through embodiment: that of objects, people, and animals.

Air rights to my ideas

The Star Market over the Massachusetts Turnpike today.
Photo credit: Edgar B Herwick III/WGBH News.

In the early 1960s, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, designing a highway between the western part of the state and Boston, wanted to build through the parking lot of an existing grocery store in Newtonville. In a Solomonic decision, the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Turnpike Authority could build the highway there and that the grocery store owners would have “air rights” to rebuild their store above the highway. The grocery store reopened in 1963. (This is explained in a delightful WGBH news story from 2017.)

It feels, to me, like the creative spirit doing battle with hegemonic powers. You may drive me into the ground, but did you know that I have air rights to my ideas?

Time to update the tagline!

As part of “personal branding,” some people use a motto or a tagline to briefly convey what they do. It’s like a mission statement that fits on a business card.

In 2016, I was straddling a variety of activities and wasn’t sure how to summarize what I did. I needed a provisional, transitional tagline that I could use for the coming year, mainly to inspire myself and self-direct to my next step. Working with a coach, I came up with “Identifying the good, amplifying the useful.” Vague, yes. But it accurately reflected my self-understanding at that time.

I strive to make the world a better place, so affirming my orientation toward anything “good” and “useful” referred to my ethical motivations and my desire to connect with others and deliver something of value to them. My typical strategies of “identifying” and “amplifying” relate to my habits as an avid reader and prolific writer.

Eventually, I added the Spanish version: “Identificar lo bueno, ampliar lo útil.”

Three years later, I felt that “identifying” and “amplifying” weren’t very clear ways to describe what I do all day, and it occurred to me that “GOOD AND USEFUL ENDEAVORS” might look cleaner on my website. Visually, it fit better under my name, “TUCKER LIEBERMAN,” as a subheading. But this shorter version of my tagline didn’t mean anything. Without the action verbs “identifying” and “amplifying,” my involvement in these mysterious endeavors was made even less clear.

[image error]Tucker Lieberman: Good and Useful Endeavors.

I remembered that it was time to entirely update the tagline. After all, I had initially only intended it to serve me for a year, but, since then, more than three years had passed.

What had I done during those three years? Why, I’d written and published books.

So, my new tagline is that I’m the author of my latest book. The book is, I hope, a good and useful endeavor. I hope readers will find that the book speaks for itself in that regard.

[image error]Tucker Lieberman: Author of ‘Ten Past Noon’

And my email signature? Does it still need to have the vague tagline that no longer motivates me or explains anything in addition to the far more useful list of my books? Indeed it does not. The tagline goes away. The books stay.

[image error]Tucker Lieberman (he/him) Author of…

I will remember to keep my tagline current. You, too, should feel permission to create, update, or remove your own tagline when it is time.

P.S. Want to be informed when my book, Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty, is available for sale in March 2020? Join my email list.

The process of finding out where we are going

It may be easy to think yourself a “good writer” from a young age. You form letters correctly, spell, and punctuate. You write a poem that pleases yourself and a couple friends. Your teacher pats you on the back. You compose a short essay that satisfies a standardized test. You win a student award. You get a degree in writing. The local newspaper publishes your “letter to the editor.” You formulate a clickbait headline followed by an article that is shared a dozen times on social media. Maybe you can write in a second language. You don’t suffer “writer’s block.” Your boss reads some of your emails.

Why, then, can you look back on something you’ve written only recently and be surprised at the memory of how difficult it was to communicate information that is so obvious to you now, just a few months later? If you were already a “good writer” then, how did you have room to progress so much in this particular area? Why does this keep happening to you with poem after poem? Were you really a “bad writer” all this time, fifty times over, until you learned to write those fifty poems?

Much of our life experience implies to us that it is simple to evaluate whether someone is a “good writer.” Either they can write something — anything — or they cannot. Either they can write to a particular specification or they cannot. Either they satisfy themselves or they don’t. Either they satisfy others or they don’t.

But all of that assumes that the benchmark is known in advance. What about everything we don’t know? Humanity knows a vanishingly tiny fraction of everything there is; each person knows a vanishingly tiny fraction of what is known to humanity; what an individual knows is always skewed by their perspective; an individual changes over time, acquiring new information, forgetting old information; what we want to believe is determined by our values; and what we can communicate, and what our audience can understand, is another matter.

So, yes, last year you had fifty hard-won personal insights and you challenged yourself to express them in fifty poems. You felt you were a “good writer” for being able to do this. This year, you read those fifty poems, and everything seems obvious to you. You no longer feel there was anything remarkable about that accomplishment. These poems are little more notable than your grocery shopping lists.

That’s because “good writing” is not just one thing. In this case, it was fifty different things. Last year, you didn’t know that you didn’t know them. This year, you know that you know them. Later in life, it’s possible you may forget them again. Maybe, at that time, you won’t need them anymore.

This year, there are, of course, many more things you still don’t know that you don’t know. This year, you’ll discover fifty new things that you don’t know, and then you’ll have an opening to work hard to learn them. There will always be an infinite amount more that can be learned. Part of our life’s work is to decide what it is that we want to be good at.

Cultivating writing skills, regardless of whether we already believe ourselves to be “good” or “bad,” is a process of finding out where we are going.

Unnamed feelings

For writers and artists, feelings play a big role in what motivates us to create, and they are also important for the characters we create. Many feelings are hard to spot and to name. Exploring them can yield rewards.

“Odd Emotions,” an article by Rebecca Webber (Psychology Today, Jan/Feb 2016), discusses the treasure trove of unnamed feelings. As the article explains, simply being aware of feelings gives us more insight into our perpetually changing inner lives, and naming them can help us feel that we are participating in a shared human experience and can empower us to respond appropriately.

One language or culture may have a name for a feeling that another language or culture does not. Feelings may be nameable in principle and, if they don’t have names, it may simply be that no one has named them yet or that the name is not yet widely known or translated. Webber gives the example of the Norwegian word vardogr that refers to “a premonitory sound or sight of a person before he or she arrives.” Finnish also has such a word, “but not English.”

Webber quotes Lisa Feldman Barrett, the author of How Emotions Are Made, as sharing her position that emotions are caused by the brain “categorizing sensations, making them meaningful so you know what they are and what you should do about them.” But emotions are not neatly divided even into primary types. From a brain science perspective, emotions are complex and overlapping.

 

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

 

Webber also refers to the work of writer and artist John Koenig whose long-term project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a portfolio of his invented names for feelings. It is a Tumblr blog, a YouTube, and a forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster. One person, reflecting on a work situation, remembered that “her stress was infinitesimally small in the context of all the time that had passed before she was born, and all that would go on long after her death.” For this feeling, Koenig coined the term “moriturism,” based on the Latin term memento mori (“remember to die”). Koenig has also come up with the name “exulansis” to describe “a sense of frustration when you realize that you are trying to talk about an important experience, but other people are unable to understand or relate to it, so you give up.”

Another woman quoted by Webber mentioned “a ‘deflated’ variation of schadenfreude, which she describes as when someone ‘finally comes around to your point of view or is served a very cold helping of karma, but sadly, you’ve matured past the point of really caring anymore.'”

[image error]Part of the original photo by Guzman, as laid out in the article “Odd Emotions” for Psychology Today.

Take a look at the article “Odd Emotions” and see what resonates with you. Is there a word for the special feeling of that resonation? What does it mean for your writing and art?

‘Painting Dragons’ on 99-cent Kindle promo!

Beginning this Saturday, 16 November 2019, at 4 a.m. Pacific time,

Painting Dragons
What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains

will be only 99 cents for Kindle!

Put the URL in your calendar so you don’t forget: https://amzn.to/2pU7lo1

The price goes up the longer you wait. For example, it will be $1.99 beginning Sunday morning at 8 a.m. Pacific, which is still a good deal, but you may as well move fast and get it Saturday! Thursday, 21 November is the final day of the discount.

[image error]Painting Dragons by Tucker Lieberman