Samantha Bryant's Blog, page 48

K is for Maxine Kumin: Seeking Connnection

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 600 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.
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I first found Maxine Kumin in her prose, in particular a collection of essays and stories called Women, Animals, and Vegetables which centers around her experience in transplanting her family from an urban to a rural setting. I felt a kinship with the woman I found in these pieces, a woman seeking a life of meaning, a woman drawn to nature, with an underlying whimsy in her thoughtfulness. Like me, she seeks connection.

A poem from that collection remains one of my favorites by Kumin. The Word. It describes an encounter with a doe while on a horse ride and captures some of that joy and longing that such an encounter can elicit, a feeling of awe intermixed with more complex emotions like jealousy and loss. A feeling of being lucky and wanting to be that lucky again.

My favorite lines are in the middle:


Part of why I read poetry is for that feeling of recognition, when a poet articulates something I have also felt but could not explain, even to myself, nearly so well.

J is for John Donne: Spiritual Matters

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.
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If you ever took a British Literature survey course, as many high school students of the United States have, then you've probably read some John Donne. A deeply serious poet, concerned with matters of the spirit and of morality, he has the distinction of having written one of poetry's oft-quoted lines: Death be not Proud. It comes from one of his Holy Sonnets:

It's a poem I've taken comfort in, when mortality is knocking louder than usual on my peace of mind. I also deeply admire Meditation 17, which includes the immortal lines "No man is an island" and "ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Meditation 17 is maybe not a traditional poem in structure, but in feel and sound, it certainly is poetic. 
But, what I love about Donne is the chance he gives me to contemplate G-d and spirituality, separated from politics and particular religions. He approaches these topics as an individual person, with passion and anger and seeking of peace. And in that, I find more connection than in the words of someone who no longer grapples with the big picture. 

I is for David Irwin: Nostalgia in Smells

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.


_____________________________________________When planning out my list of poets, I often had to choose between six or seven beloved poets for a single letter, but there were a few letters where I couldn't think of anyone. The Letter "I" was one of those. With a little research, I found a few: David Ignatow, Isaac Rosenberg, Holly Iglesias, Isaac Watts,  Ingrid Jonker. But the truth is, that none of these were poets I already knew and loved, not like the rest of the poets I'm writing about in this series. 
At first I was frustrated, but then I realized that I had just handed myself an excuse to read a bunch of new poets and find out who spoke to me. Turns out it was Mark Irwin. I've still only read a few of his poems, but I'll be seeking out more. 

This one is my favorite of what I've read so far: "My Father's Hats." 
It captures that feeling of your dad is someone epic and strong and large that some of us experienced as children. In that way, it reminds me of Theodore Roethke's poems about his father, in particular "My Papa's Waltz." I love the part about smelling the inner silk crowns of the hats. So intimate. And what the smell evoked for the speaker. 
Any other poets starting with "I" (first name or last) that I ought to check out? Let me know in the comments! 

H is for Langston Hughes: America Singing

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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I didn't find Langston Hughes until I was a teacher and in my early twenties. 
I discovered his work alongside my students through verses like "Dreams," "Theme for English B," "Mother to Son," and "I, Too." 
My students at the time were mostly Y'upik, and I'm a white woman from Kentucky, but we found that the struggles of race and place in the world spoke to all of us, even though we were years and miles away from the Harlem he knew and wrote in. 
Most of Hughes work is short and to the point and written in very accessible language, a real selling point when introducing poetry to people who don't normally read it. You don't have to untangle what Hughes is trying to say, but it is deeply affecting and will stick with you a long time. 
Just a couple of months ago, I was able to attend a multi-media show at the Carolina Theatre of the Langston Hughes project. The show, Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz,  combined live jazz performance with readings of Hughes's verses, against a backdrop of images of the time period. It reignited my interest in this poet and his work. 
In fact, I have a dream poetry anthology project that stems from Hughes poem, "I, Too." "I, Too" is a response to Walt Whitman's anthem "I Hear America Singing" pointing out the America that Whitman didn't hear singing back in the 1800s. 
I'd love to get other poets to write their own "I, Too" poems, elucidating the other songs Whitman didn't hear that make up our nation now. Maybe someday when I'm rich and famous, that's something I can fund. 

G is for Louise Glück: Detached Subjectivity

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Louise Glück was suggested to me by one of my college professors when I was taking a poetry writing class. I don't remember what my professor thought I would like about her work, just her saying, "You should check out Louise Glück."

The book I found was The Triumph of Achilles, 
published in 1985 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Thematically, the collection could maybe best be called "archetypal" in that it explores ancient Greek mythology, fairy tales, and Biblical themes alongside personal insights, often reinterpreting the stories you think you already know in a new light. It begins with a poem called "Mock Orange" and these lines:


My professor was right. I was going to like this poet. In fact, I followed her work for quite a long time, until poetry drifted out of my life for a few years. I see she's released more books since I last looked, so I'll be back to see where her words took her.

I loved and still love the dialogue feeling of this poem. Though we don't get any details about "you" in the poem, we do get the feeling of the relationship, the defensive antagonism, the "don't patronize me with your sympathy" anger in the speaker. I feel like I jumped into the middle of a circular argument, often tread by the people in this relationship. There's enough ambivalence that I'm not sure if the speaker is being gaslighted, or if there's something else entirely going on.

Reading her poems always makes me want to write, to fill in the details Glück chose not to, to imagine the surroundings of the moment, the backstories of the characters, to discover what happened afterwards. The writing feels intensely personal, and at the same time detached, like trying to describe emotional truths in intellectual language. In that way, they are participatory for me, evoking my own imagination and emotions and leaving me thinking deeply.

F is for Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Beat Poet

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one of the last of the uncensored, free-wheeling poets of the Beat movement, exemplified by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. (See how I snuck in the names of lots of other poets I admire?).

My favorite of Ferlinghetti's work is A Coney Island of the Mind. It includes my favorite of his poems: "I Am Waiting" which seems to some a rambling string of bon mots, some deeper than others. It puts me in the mind of what a conversation with Oscar Wilde might have been like:

"I am waiting for someone/ to really discover America
/and wail" isn't that different from "America never has been discovered...I myself would say that it had merely been detected."

And despite the extemporaneous feel, it's not without structure and the things Ferlinghetti is waiting for build on each other and join into thematic sections.

A lot of the Beat poetry plays better aloud than on the page, and "I Am Waiting" is at its very best performed aloud by an impassioned speaker, much like contemporary spoken word poetry.

It's very different than the careful, formal work of sonneteers, and speaks to a different shard of my soul. I'm glad to have such a variety of poetry in my life.

F is for Lawerence Ferlinghetti: Beat Poet

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one of the last of the uncensored, free-wheeling poets of the Beat movement, exemplified by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. (See how I snuck in the names of lots of other poets I admire?).

My favorite of Ferlinghetti's work is A Coney Island of the Mind. It includes my favorite of his poems: "I Am Waiting" which seems to some a rambling string of bon mots, some deeper than others. It puts me in the mind of what a conversation with Oscar Wilde might have been like:

"I am waiting for someone/ to really discover America
/and wail" isn't that different from "America never has been discovered...I myself would say that it had merely been detected."

And despite the extemporaneous feel, it's not without structure and the things Ferlinghetti is waiting for build on each other and join into thematic sections.

A lot of the Beat poetry plays better aloud than on the page, and "I Am Waiting" is at its very best performed aloud by an impassioned speaker, much like contemporary spoken word poetry.

It's very different than the careful, formal work of sonneteers, and speaks to a different shard of my soul. I'm glad to have such a variety of poetry in my life.

E is for Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibility

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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Emily Dickinson was the first poet I fell in love with, way back in first grade ("There is a solitude of space"). I turn to her again and again in my life when I need something thoughtful, challenging, and a bit odd. She speaks my heart more accurately and often than anyone else I read. (side note: if you're also a fan you should check out the White Heat project, exploring her work in historical context. I wrote a response for them recently)

Listing the poems of her that *don't* speak to me would be shorter than listing my favorites, but here's one I come back to again and again: "I dwell in possibility."

That opening line is gorgeous. A girl could go her life and never write anything that perfect. Dwell is perfect. Not live, not exist, but dwell with that combination of both “to live somewhere” and “to linger” or “to think about.”



Then picking up from possibility into windows. Quel metaphor! Possibility is all about seeing openings, views, horizons. Much better done through windows than doors.

And possibility becomes an actual house, a home. Cedars for rooms, guaranteeing privacy. Gambrels of the sky …a word that sent me to a the dictionary: “a roof with two sides, each of which has a shallower slope above a steeper one.” The sloping sky as a roof, nothing to block the view of possibility. Her visitors are “the fairest” which I read as people who also value openness.

That last line goes straight to the heart again. Emily, with her narrow hands-she was such a physically small woman-nonetheless reaching out to the wide world to bring in all that might mean paradise to her.

Obstinate, headstrong girl!

Welcome to the first Wednesday in April, or as I like to call it: confess your insecurities day! (at least the writing ones).  If you're not already familiar with this blog hop, I recommend checking it out, especially if you're a writer. 
The awesome co-hosts for the April 4 posting of the IWSG are Olga Godim,Chemist Ken, Renee Scattergood, and Tamara Narayan!

April 4 question - When your writing life is a bit cloudy or filled with rain, what do you do to dig down and keep on writing?
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I rely on my stubbornness. 
Honestly, that's true in a lot of aspects of my life. I'm intractable that way. Obstinate. Headstrong. Jo March is my spirit animal, or maybe Maureen O'Hara. 


I refuse to cede a battle with a manuscript. Oh, sure, it might have me on the ropes sometimes, but I'll come up swinging and eventually I will win. 
Sometimes this means a sneak attack, like coming in from an unusual angle, from a different point of view. I'm also willing to fight dirty, jumping ahead to the ending or another pivotal scene and just ignoring the slag pile of scraps of a scene in front of me until later. Fight smarter, not harder, right? 
I've also got a great support team of critique partner ninjas whose insight I value highly and will also consider deeply, even if it is painful. I'm not afraid of hard work. If something is important to me, I'll work for it. And writing is important to the core of me. 
So, it's not much of a secret really. I'm just too stubborn to let it go. 

D is for Rita Dove: Different Angles

It's April! Time for the AtoZ Blogging Challenge!

For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

This will be my 5th year participating.
In 2014, I wrote about evocative words. In 2015, I wrote about my publication journey and the release of my first novel. In 2016, I wrote about my favorite superheroes. In 2017, I wrote about the places of my heart. My theme this year is Poets I Love all about some of the poets whose work has touched me over the years.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too. Be sure to check out some of the other bloggers stretching their limits this month to share their passions with you, too. With over 400 participants, there is bound to be something you'd love to read.

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The thing I enjoy about Rita Dove's poetry is that sideways view, that stepping in from a different angle. Like in this one: "Heart to Heart" where she compares her actual heart, the organ, to decorative hearts and metaphorical hearts.

I especially like the ending stanza that plays with idioms about hearts: the key, the on the sleeve, the bottom of it.

In the end, all the hearts are offered to the listener: the muscle in the chest, the representation of romance, and the metaphorical center. But, she'd practical: you can't take the heart without taking the woman, too.