Mary Carroll-Hackett's Blog, page 90

Daily Prompt <3 Learning to Fly

6 May 2016

Make art inspired by this, by wings. 

Daily Prompt Catch-Up :-) Tests, Stars, and Those Helping Hands

3 May 2016

Exam week, and it’s crazy here[image error] Make art about things that test us. 

 

4 May 2016

Star Wars Day[image error] Even as a little kid, I stared at the sky expecting to see a UFO zipping across those wide coastal skies every time I looked up :-) 

Make art about what you see in the stars. 

 

5 May 2016

I both gave and received help today. It was awesome. Make art about people helping people.

 

Newest Book Released! A Little Blood, A Little Rain

And it’s out!!!! So excited and thrilled to let y’all know that my newest book, A Little Blood, A little Rain, is now available from FutureCycle Press!!!!!

Thanks and so much Love to Diane Kistner, Robert S. King, and all the good folks at FutureCycle Press, and to Carmel Mawle and Jonathan Kevin Rice for their kind blurbage, and to all of you for inspirin me constantly the way you do!❤


 


I’ll be looking into setting up some readings once I survive exams LOL but for now, this crazy lil book of prose poems is available here!

http://www.futurecycle.org/index.php/en/catalog/item/233-mary-carroll-hackett

Woot!!

 
Be sure to check out the full catalog of titles at FutureCycle[image error] I’m humbled to be in such amazing company
 
 
 

 

Daily Prompt Em

2 May 2016

“It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”~Paulo Coehlo

Make art about knowing something has reached its end. 

 

Monday Must Read! D.M. Aderibigbe, In Praise of Our Absent Father

D.M. Aderibigbe was born in 1989 in Lagos, Nigeria. He holds a B.A in History and Strategic Studies from the University of Lagos. He’s the author of In Praise of Our Absent Father, selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series and is a recipient of 2015 honours from The Dickinson House and the Entrekin Foundation. His poems appear in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Normal School, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore, RATTLE, Spillway, Stand, among others, and have been featured on Verse Daily. His first full-length manuscript, My Mothers’ Songs and Other Similar Songs I Learnt received a special mention in the APBF/Prairie Schooner 2015 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. D.M. is a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee. He’s also co-editor of More Than a Number: Poems and Prose for Baga. His essays appear in B O D Y, Blueshift Journal and Rain Taxi. He lives in Boston where he’s studying for his MFA in Creative Writing at Boston University as a BU Fellow.

D.M.’s website: http://damilolapoetry.weebly.com/about.html

Where to Find D.M.’s Chapbook

http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/new-generation-african-poets-a-chapbook-box-set-tatu/

http://africanpoetrybf.unl.edu/?page_id=3372#

Praise for In Praise of Our Absent Father

“Here is a poet whose vision and empathy reach into the intimate corners of family history, bearing witness to generations of tenderness, violence, generosity, survival and imagination with rare precision. At the intersection of the public and the personal his politics emerge with integrity – if these stories emerge from the private world of his own family, their resonance and relevance, marked in the title’s naming of our absent father, call his readers to bear witness and join in imagining other possibilities.” Tsitsi Jaji

Read more from D.M. Online

http://www.rattle.com/the-origin-of-kindness-by-d-m-aderibigbe/

http://www.wordriot.org/archives/4730

http://bodyliterature.com/2013/09/02/d-m-aderibigbe/

http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/2485-d-m-aderibigbe-poetry

http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/two-poems–41

http://ampersandreview.com/2015/08/last-forever-by-d-m-aderibigbe/

http://thenormalschool.com/to-be-my-father-and-mirror-by-d-m-aderibigbe/

Interviews

https://waleowoade.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/aderibigbe/

http://www.theblueshiftjournal.com/#!Interview-with-DM-Aderibigbe/cltp/FF25B6CA-DB36-4157-A372-B59C8D787A78

Hear D.M. Read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSdpXPQoaU8

 

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

 

May Day! Daily Prompt! Late, But Then, Love Is Always On Time

Happy May Day! So in love with life today[image error] Love is Liberation. 

Make art about one of the ways you Love the world. 

Daily Prompt <3 Kindness, Peace, and Blessings

Happy Last Day of National Poetry Month 2016! Although, of course, I think every month is Poetry Month, and every day is Poetry Day[image error]

The prompts will continue[image error] But since I started with one of my top three favorite poems (Power by Adrienne Rich), I have to close out this month long celebration with the other two poems that fill out my top What-Poems-Would-You-Take-To-A-Deserted-Island three. 

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

 

And….what may be my favorite (if I have to pick) poem

A Blessing




James Wright, 1927 – 1980







Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Make art about kindness, blessings, peace. 

 

Gratitude to Emily Ramser and Laura Dowswell at Change Seven

Thrilled and humbled to be a Recommended Read at Change Seven Magazine, celebrating National Poetry Month! Honored to be in such amazing company! 

7 Reads We Recommend: National Poetry Month by Emily Ramser and Laurel Dowswell

 

Daily Prompt <3 Williams and Walls

Happy National Poetry Month! The first collected works I ever owned, my mama gave it to me for my twelfth birthday, was William Carlos Williams. The spare and earthshaking power of a single image–in his hand, it was miraculous. 

Between Walls
by William Carlos Williams

 

the back wings
of the

 

hospital where
nothing

 

will grow lie
cinders

 

in which shine
the broken

 

pieces of a green
bottle

 

Make art about walls. 

Friday Call for Submissions Love! The Collapsar

 

THE COLLAPSAR

a daily online literary and culture magazine, seeks original essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, creative criticism, and reviews. Past contributors include Amber Sparks, Cari Luna, Jill Talbot, Kathleen Rooney, Tobias Carroll, Elisa Gabbert, and Wendy C. Ortiz.

Their Guidelines

“What we want to read is work grounded in a very real sense of its own world, work that bristles with richness, deeply imagined and cunningly portrayed–whatever that might look like. We’re interested in high culture, low culture, and low-high culture, whatever that means. A generosity of spirit is what we want to present.

The best way to get an idea for what we publish is, of course, to read the magazine. We’ve published new writing by Amber Sparks, Elisa Gabbert, Wendy C. Ortiz, Michael J. Seidlinger, Robert Kloss, Kathleen Rooney, Cari Luna, Juliet Escoria, Tobias Carroll, Leesa Cross-Smith, Gabriel Blackwell, Jill Talbot, and a host of others since our inception in 2013. We’re thrilled to consider yours.

Head on over to our handy submissions manager, Submittable, where you can find genre-specific guidelines and send us things.”

Read it here: www.thecollapsar.com.