Mary Carroll-Hackett's Blog, page 91

Daily Prompt s Wisdom

Happy National Poetry Month! One of my favorite poets, and one of my favorite truths[image error] “A child’s wisdom is wisdom still.”~Jewish proverb

As Children Know
by JImmy Santiago Baca

 

Elm branches radiate green heat,
blackbirds stiffly strut across fields.
Beneath bedroom wood floor, I feel earth—
bread in an oven that slowly swells,
simmering my Navajo blanket thread-crust
as white-feathered and corn-tasseled
Corn Dancers rise in a line, follow my calf,
vanish in a rumple and surface at my knee-cliff,
chanting. Wearing shagged buffalo headgear,
Buffalo Dancer chases Deer Woman across
Sleeping Leg mountain. Branches of wild rose
trees rattle seeds. Deer Woman fades into hills
of beige background. Red Bird
of my heart thrashes wildly after her.
What a stupid man I have been!
How good to let imagination go,
step over worrisome events,
                               those hacked logs
                               tumbled about
                               in the driveway.
Let decisions go!
                               Let them blow
                               like school children’s papers
                               against the fence,
                               rattling in the afternoon wind.
This Red Bird
of my heart thrashes within the tidy appearance
I offer the world,
topples what I erect, snares what I set free,
dashes what I’ve put together,
indulges in things left unfinished,
and my world is left, as children know,
                               left as toys after dark in the sandbox.

 

Make art about what children know.

 

Daily Prompt <3 The Elders

 

Happy National Poetry Month!

Another of the poets who made me want to be a poet, one of the voices of my childhood. This poem still takes me to my Appalachian grandparents’ table.

The Bean Eaters
Gwendolyn Brooks
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

 

Make art about the old ones.

Old Couple by John Biggers

 

Daily Prompt <3 Finding That Way Out

 

Happy National Poetry Month!

I love this poem, its fierceness, its choice.

A Message from the Wanderer

by William Stafford

Today outside your prison I stand

and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;

you have relatives outside. And there are

thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago I bent my skill to keep my

cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies,

and shouted my plans to jailers;

but always new plans occured to me,

or the new heavy locks bent hinges off,

or some stupid jailer would forget

and leave the keys.

Inside, I dreamed of constellations—

those feeding creatures outlined by stars,

their skeletons a darkness between jewels,

heroes that exist only where they are not.

Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought,

just as—often, in light, on the open hills—

you can pass an antelope and not know

and look back, and then—even before you see—

there is something wrong about the grass.

And then you see.

That’s the way everything in the world is waiting.

Now—these few more words, and then I’m

gone: Tell everyone just to remember

their names, and remind others, later, when we 

find each other. Tell the little ones

to cry and then go to sleep, curled up

where they can. And if any of us get lost,

if any of us cannot come all the way—

remember: there will come a time when

all we have said and all we have hoped

will be all right.

There will be that form in the grass.

Make art about escape, the “thousands of ways to escape.”

Daily Prompt <3 Walking and Uncle Walt

 

 

Happy National Poetry Month! No way the month can pass without Walt Whitman❤ I still have the copy of Leaves of Grass my mama gave me when I was ten.

As I Walk These Broad Majestic Days

Walt Whitman

As I walk these broad majestic days of peace,

(For the war, the struggle of blood finish’d, wherein, O terrific Ideal,

Against vast odds erewhile having gloriously won,

Now thou stridest on, yet perhaps in time toward denser wars,

Perhaps to engage in time in still more dreadful contests, dangers,

Longer campaigns and crises, labors beyond all others,)

Around me I hear that eclat of the world, politics, produce,

The announcements of recognized things, science,

The approved growth of cities and the spread of inventions.

I see the ships, (they will last a few years,)

The vast factories with their foremen and workmen,

And hear the indorsement of all, and do not object to it.

But I too announce solid things,

Science, ships, politics, cities, factories, are not nothing,

Like a grand procession to music of distant bugles pouring,

triumphantly moving, and grander heaving in sight,

They stand for realities—all is as it should be.

Then my realities;

What else is so real as mine?

Libertad and the divine average, freedom to every slave on the face of the earth,

The rapt promises and luminé of seers, the spiritual world, these centuries-lasting songs,

And our visions, the visions of poets, the most solid announcements of any.

Make art about walking.

Monday Must Read! Remica Bingham-Risher: What We Ask of Flesh

Remica L. Bingham-Risher earned an MFA from Bennington College, is a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Affrilachian Poets. Her first book, Conversion (Lotus Press, 2006), won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award and was published by Lotus Press. Her second book, What We Ask of Flesh, was published by Etruscan Press in February 2013. She is the Director of Writing and Faculty Development at Old Dominion University and resides in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. She is currently finalizing a book of interviews entitled Blood on the Page—African-American Poets from the Black Arts Movement to the Neo-Urban Modernist Movement: Interviews, Essays and Poems.

For more information on her work and upcoming events, please visit: www.remicalbingham.com.

Buy Remica’s beautiful books!

http://www.remicalbingham.com/publications.htm

Reviews and Praise for What We ask of Flesh

“She sees with a brave eye and hears the music of all our languages, validating each. Her story is the human story; her sharing it an act of great generosity.”  – Lucille Clifton

Remica L. Bingham addresses a woman’s sense of body graced with spirituality in its most powerful or most vulnerable moments in the collection…From the opening poem drawn, from the distant past, to the final three elegiac poems, which beautifully anchor the book to the present, Bingham pursues the female body in all its fierce beauty…with eloquence and urgency in a bitter sweet salute to those women who have paved the way for us all.  – Colleen J. McElroy

What We Ask of Flesh, like the flesh itself, is full of honey and fire. It’s impossible not to feel called by these poems, summoned by their rich sound and vatic voice. Remica Bingham-Risher reckons with the big stuff: the complexities of womanhood, the problem of suffering, family, and childhood’s darker aspects. Every poem is uttered with fervor and a timeless sense of gravity and rapture. – Amy Gerstler

http://www.poetsquarterly.com/2013/10/what-we-ask-of-flesh-by-remica-l-bingham.html

http://etruscanpress.tumblr.com/post/81709836371/flesh-contemplates-social-issues-of-womanhood

http://www.rattle.com/what-we-ask-of-flesh-by-remica-l-bingham/

https://mosaicmagazine.org/2013/07/15/what-we-ask-of-flesh-review/

Read More From Remica Online

http://danmurano.com/poetry/remica-l-bingham-risher

http://etruscanpress.tumblr.com/post/100861154416/remica-l-bingham-risher

http://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/february-2011/727-remica-l-bingham-poetry

http://danmurano.com/poetry/remica-l-bingham-risher

http://therumpus.net/author/remica-bingham-risher/

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

 

Daily Prompt :-) Making and the Maker

Happy National Poetry Month! 

Spent this weekend making things with my hands, gifts for some of the children I’m blessed to have in my life[image error] I often tell my writing students, “Remember: you are now the maker. You have the magic of the maker.” Thinking on this a lot this weekend, on how the mystery of art emerges from our hands.

Making a Poem

by Paul B. Newman

You make a poem like a man

taking the measure of a sheet of copper;

first you cut it in the round

clipping the disc of dull soft metal,

then you take a hammer and pound

over all its surface on the small

iron hoof of the anvil,

forming a deepness within the curve

light within light reflecting

cool as the ripples in a well,

forming it on the resistance of the anvil

until it is so with texture, and with

usefulness a form and with delight a unity.



Make art about being a maker, about the act of making.

Blacksmith hammering red hot steel on a wooden surface that is catching on fire. Focus is on the hammer and glove.

Daily Prompt <3 Returning, and Kindness

Happy National Poetry Month!

When I was fourteen and scribbling poet-y words on every scrap of paper or napkin I put my hands on, Peter Makuck, who ran the Poetry Forum at East Carolina University, was so kind to me, encouraging me to “never stop writing.” That kindness followed me and made me brave, almost twenty years later, when, terrified, I reclaimed my poet self, and went back to college, in my early thirties. The only thing larger than Peter’s big loving heart—is his talent.

Après le Déluge, or How to Return

Peter Makuck

Forget French fads,

paradigms, Foucault and Sartre,

the eggistential toothpick, the semiotic egg,

and the text beyond which there is nothing

but eggheads.

Make the river your own. Rename it the Tar

after its shiny blackness and nothing will fall

routinely into place

like that dogwood, white and dying

for attention at your window.

Tell yourself a room’s the wrong place to receive.

Quit the house like a bad job.

Hand your dead brother the shovel,

shove off in a leaky canoe,

and follow that monarch, its orange flit

above the current.

Immensity will make a return

and every face will offer less

than the smooth cool face of the water.

Let the river teach you

how to steer toward subtle surprise.

Tell me, what even comes close

to this scented air you’ve noticed for the first time?

The sun falls,

anoints the surface with orange oil.

Dark lifts from the water faster than you think.

A meander brings

a soft snicker of owl wings close to your gunnels.

Around the bend, a lamp appears

with a Coleman hiss

and a hunched figure with his hook

pole-tossed in the current.

That’s it, that’s it.

Everything you need is beginning to find you.

Make art about returning. Or about someone whose kindness changed your life.

 

Friday Call for Submissions Love! Sliver of Stone

Friday Call for Submissions Love! 

Sliver of Stone Magazine

DEADLINE: July 15, 2016

Sliver of Stone’s 12th issue is now available online.

A bi-annual, online literary magazine dedicated to the publication of work from both emerging and established poets, writers, and visual artists from all parts of the globe.

Authors featured in this issue include Richard Godwin, Gilbert King, Conor McCreery, Laura McDermott, and Will Viharo. Visual Art by Andrés Pruna and Terry Wright.

Check out past contributors, such as Lynne Barrett, Kim Barnes, John Dufresne, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, Allison Joseph, J. Michael Lennon, Dinty W. Moore, Matthew Sharpe, and many talented others. Past interviews with Paul D. Brazill, Janet Burroway, Edwidge Danticat, Beverly Donofrio, Dean Koontz, K.A. Laity, Susan Orlean, Les Standiford, José Ignacio Valenzuela, and Mark Vonnegut.

They’re now looking for submissions for the 13th issue!

Website: www.sliverofstonemagazine.com

Daily Prompt :-) Will We Listen?

Happy National Poetry Month!

The Messenger

by Ann Stanford

I don’t deny that I believe in ghosts

Myself being one. No, not the ultimate last

Spirit, I mean, but this is a messenger.

Soft, soft, last night, falling into sleep

I rose like smoke up, curving past the window,

Floating, a grey cloud seaward, slow and pale.

And then, the wings!

Did you hear the birds piling against your window?

A snow of wings, crowding and gentle, crying

Over and over, each with a single errand

Light cannot bring, nor ever my tongue would say.

Archaic doves, rustling your sleep, and calling

Crowding upon you, drifting and crying love.

Make art about a messenger.

Daily Prompt :-( When Fans Cry

Can’t even voice the loss I feel at Prince walking on to the next life. His music has been one of the most consistent and most important soundtracks of my life. I just don’t even have words. 

Make art about the importance of music in your life.