Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 39

A poem from my book, Gods of Water and Air

GODS OF WATER AND AIR - A NEW DISCOUNT!A prose poem from the book, which I'm again discounting to $11.00 through February, for all of you who didn't get one in December! Email me if you want one.
Wild Ranunculas. This is how you mend, ounce by floating ounce. Each petal lights on the eye, and the five-fingered yellow flowers nod. A moving cloud scars the field in March wind’s bitter tea. Walking through fields is an undoing. Eyes take off memories and stand where sun has fallen and sprouted into a thousand green buds. Within each opened cup, a tiny black and drunken fly. How have you come this far, you ask. To know the wild ranunculas graze on your trampling ankles. Go back! You tell the flowers. The world is not ready for your news of stars. The meadow’s ancient bulletins are thick with unearned light. You return bee-like, carrying.

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Published on February 12, 2014 09:07

Cheever's new bio of E. E. Cummings

I'm a huge fan of Cummings and his idiosyncratic experiments with feeling and language. Susan Cheever's new bio of E. E. Cummings looks wonderful, including as it does the intimacy of a personal connection through her father's friendship with him. Here's an excerpt. Cummings won me when I first started reading him in high school, as so many did, given the accessibility of his poetry. How could I not be won by a poet who could write:
here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart (The whole poem is here.) And here is a beautiful musical setting of that poem by Mischa Rutenberg, with art by Nadya Phillips.

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Published on February 11, 2014 17:24

Things I learned from my readers

Purchase Gods of Water and AirIn book reviews and personal responses to my poetry, readers have revealed to me more about how and why I write than I could have learned through introspection. They've also inspired me to write new work. That's a poem prompt I've seen nowhere: "Write a poem based on one reader's positive comment about your poetry; then revise it based on another reader's critique."

Here are some things I learned about my poetic method and content:

* WORK IN LAYERS: "Many of her poems ... unfold in delicate layers as one reads on, and with each successive theme she offers the gift of insight, “I toss away/ What I can for a journey into the fault. / But the ground coughs me up. / A shiver and I straighten, /and then again bow/ to all the gods of upheaval.” - Ami Kaye, Pirene's Fountain, a review of Gods of Water and Air.

* BE PAINTERLY: “In Gods of Water and Air, Rachel Dacus turns a painterly eye onto both the nooks and crannies of our world — ‘hints of rose madder in the cerulean,’ a palm tree’s ‘rigid, rattling arguments’ — and ‘the blue immensity’ that holds us all. — Molly Fisk, author of The More Difficult Beauty and Blow-Drying a Chicken.

* LET SPIRITUAL CONCERNS SHINE THROUGH: “One of the most full-breathed, transfiguring books I have partaken of for a long time.” — personal note from Naomi Shihab Nye after reading my book Earth Lessons.

I always thought I had successfully hidden my urge to transfigure, but it seems, no I didn't. So I might as well give myself the freedom to write as a spiritual being -- that is, someone interested in the life's layers and epiphanies and doubts informed by a core faith. I really can't help but write from it.

The biggest thing all reader responses have shown me is that there's nowhere to hide -- a freeing revelation! So thanks for the feedback, comments, and praise, and especially the reviews and critiques. And thanks very much for reading!

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Published on February 10, 2014 10:20

Back to Italy this morning

I've returned to working on my novel about Italy. Took a wonderful webinar from The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, and it was so full of great tips for editing your novel, that I was itching to open the last draft. Their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published , really is a must-have. It's on my Kindle. And the BEST PART: if you buy a copy, The Book Doctors will give you a free 20-minute consultation on a subject of your choice. So grab a copy today!

When last seen, my novel had become a play, written in order to clarify the plot. Then it become a table reading and got so interesting it took my energy away from the novel for a few months. But opening up my last draft after this seminar, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: cut, cut, cut, and add scenes from the play. So here, for those of you who have been following excerpts of The Renaissance Club, is a new first few pages. Would you keep reading?

 <div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in; text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chapter One.</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">A young woman’s body shakes as she stands at a hotel window, trembling on her first day in Rome not from passion but from a rolling temblor. Fortunately, she’s from San Francisco. Instead of panicking, she counts the seconds, figuring distance from the epicenter. It’s gentle, but surprising. Earthquakes in Rome? What May doesn’t feel, but which makes her sway even after the quake stops, is a shift in time that has opened a gap of possibilities.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span> <style> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It’s so pleasant a gap that May lolls in the breeze from the tall casement window, pushing it wider, letting in the city’s smoke, horns, and pastel colors. She knows she needs to get out there fast, before Darren. But the shower is still rattling, so she just twists her long, dark braid some more, letting the air ripple her cotton robe, lifting her left foot and placing it on her right knee, forming Tree Pose and meanding through the problems this trip won’t solve. But what it will do is submerge her in art and beauty. She does not notice having the same thought three times in a row as if time has hiccuped. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">In a few minutes she’s ready. She tears a page out of her notebook and scribbles with a pen that’s running out of ink to leave the note on Darren’s pillow:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone surfing. Start the Renaissance without me.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone surfing</i> was their code phrase for “Don’t wait for me—I want to be alone.” She dresses and escapes, dabbing on sunscreen, blush, and lipstick in the elevator, grabbing a fast cappuccino and a roll at the hotel buffet. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Roll in hand, she dashes outside to wait for the tour bus that will take the Renaissance Club on their first day’s tour in Italy. Out on the sidewalk, blinking in the sunlight, she nibbles the last of her roll and realizes that Darren will not find her note funny. But who cares, look at this amazing street, Baroque facades like elaborate wedding cakes, a seventeenth century church, a fountain with a leaping dolphin. A pungent, warm autumn morning honeying the city. Every building and piazza is going to amaze her, judging by the books, and this one view. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The poet in her wants to hear shouting street vendors and smell open-air markets over the ruins of a good meal. She wants passion and sunlight and architecture of the ages, and at the end, to write it all down in spare lines, as if beauty in art has never died. But between her and that pure day will be Norman’s fussy organizing and Darren's nudges and boring lectures from their art historian guide. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What if I had missed Rome for my whole life?</i> She hopes for a new life, something to happen. The hope of making a baby hasn’t faded either. Hope, beauty, a fresh morning, and a nice little shaker. She can surf this day. May adds the Roman earthquake to her Gratitude List, the one she keeps on her phone.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A passing, middle-aged man pinches her bottom, saying, “Bella!” </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She glares, and then smiles as he walks away. The Italian pinch, she has heard, is a salute to female beauty. It’s more than she got from Darren last night. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Hello,” says a tall man in a black coat. “You must be a member of The Renaissance Club. I’m George St. James, your guide.”</div><style> <div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He smiles. She had expected an Italian, but his accent is American. George St. James—odd name for an odd-looking man—must be over six feet tall. He makes her feel short though she’s five-eight. Olive-skinned, dark eyes set a little close together. Black, wavy hair, with a few gray streaks. Maybe, like her, he’s part Italian and part Jewish. But there’s also something Asian. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>George holds out his hand and they shake. She feels his long, tapering fingertips that bend back like the Chinese bodhisattva Manjushri in the Asian Art Museum. As she holds his hand, for a moment the bright street wavers, as if it’s underwater. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Are you always the first out?” he asks.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I must have been born five minutes early. I never adjust.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He laughs, gesturing toward the bus as it pulls up.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-hyphenate: none; tab-stops: -.5in;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Our bus is on time, remarkable in Rome! It must be you. Today, everything will be five minutes early.” </div>

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Published on February 01, 2014 09:42

Bolero and Gerald Stern's Big Prize

Gerald Stern won the Robert Frost Medal -- the top prize of the Poetry Society of America, awarded for for "distinguished lifetime service to American poetry." Here's Stern reading his lovely, joyous poem Bolero.

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Published on January 29, 2014 10:40

Telecommunications and my dad

Digging back into the old memoir, Rocket Lessons (forthcoming from who-knows-where, who-knows-when) to rehab some of the chapters as short essays to submit here and there, I discovered one about my father's biggest project, the launch of the world's first telecommunications satellite, Relay I. As it turned out, it was by five months the world's second telecommunications satellite, but as my father always liked to point out, "It's still up there and Telstar died in a matter of months." As I wrote, I researched and learned something thrilling: John F. Kennedy had made a speech about global peace being enabled by the promise of global communications. Talk about prescient.

Remember the days before you could telephone another continent? Yeah, neither do I, but that was a mere fifty years ago. Remember before the Internet? I do, and that was only forty years ago. There's a woman alive who remembers before you could realistically take a plane to Europe. Back when the oceans made us very separate from other places. It's hard to envision global anything without the ability to phone anywhere you want, or for the president to.

So thanks, Dad. We sat up all night waiting for you to make the first intercontinental, satellite-deflected phone call to us from the tracking station in Argentina. The fact that it never came to us, but awakened someone in England instead, due to a little bump in the satellite's orbit, doesn't matter as much as it did when I was twelve. Thanks to you, and all those other slide-rule wielding rocket engineers, I can write this and have it reach friends in India or Europe immediately. Who knows if that promotes peace, but it sure can't hurt.

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Published on January 25, 2014 16:23

Bloghopping - Lynn Domina's Poetry Book Review-a-Week & The Crafty Poet

Gods of Water and Air Lynn Domina, a poet with three published collections (so she should understand the value of a book review), undertakes a blogging goal that leaves me breathless: reviewing a poetry book every week. Since I can barely make it through reading a book a week, I'm in awe. Not only her productivity, but her eloquence and insight are impressive. These aren't fluff reviews; they're the real deal. Lynn's reviews offer analysis and comment, and are delivered through such finely close reading as to delight any poet intrigued by craft. (What poet isn't?) She pays close attention form, whether received or nonce, authoritatively analyzing its structure and bringing her own tastes subtly into her analysis. I will be following her weekly reviews.

Because of Lynn Domina's attention to craft and form, it's a natural that she should review Diane Lockward's recent meaty and thought-provoking craft/prompt book, The Crafty Poet. I've given this book to poet friends because I believe it to be uniquely suited to stimulate and support the writing of poetry. The prompts in it go deeper than free association, with ideas not just for inspiring but also for shaping the poem. Each craft tip invites the poet to use several devices, with a range of choices in each device. Diane includes sample poems that were written in response to the prompt. I've never seen a craft book structured as an anthology.

Disclaimer: I have a poem in the book, so you have to take my rave review with that grain of salt. It was written in response to Diane's "Craft Tip #26: When the Poem Won't Show Up." The tip/prompt makes use of an initial phrase, chosen by you or a group leader, after which you free write for twenty minutes without stopping. Here's my poem:

Worst
In a back-and-forth wind, the showers hit different places on the walls and skylights, make different plinks and raps, like an instrument of wood struck by wood.
Caroling, the finches descant.
You go away. I come close to the perilous edge. Down there the rocks are far and hard, the waves a million drummers marching in all directions.
The finches trill their whirst, whirst, whirst! They detonate decibels, tiny firecrackers in the watery air. Worst is their trill today.
You come back. The silence grows small shoots on the walls of the well my heart became. Rain falls deeply in, musical.
I step back miles from the cliffs, listening to singular notes, suddenly tall enough to send out my own from where I had tucked them back inside.

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Published on January 20, 2014 09:39

New video trailer for Gods of Water and Air!

Aldrich Press has created a beautiful new trailer for my book! It's my reading of "Flight," the first poem in my book. It's on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KaXVkL8cac&feature=youtu.be

I looked at an interesting array of poetry book trailers, and was most taken with Sandra Beasley's single poem videos, so I decided on a single poem reading. It was fun to make, finding images and music from royalty-free sources. If I were trying to decide whether to buy a poetry book from a trailer, I'd want a good sample of what I would get. And if I just want to enjoy poetry, a single poem trailer gives me that experience for free. Hope you enjoy this one.

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Published on January 15, 2014 08:56

Chopin Reigns

A rain dance poem from Gods of Water and Air.

Rain can be like Chopin, all piano stringsand syncopated pauses, geometry
of blings under wheels and rubber heels.
Sudden baptism from branches.
Drooled harmonies. On your neck, wet
strings slithering like kisses. Rings
around drops that plop into pools: ting,
ting, ting, ting. Scriabin zithering
loss up your edges, a musical soul-cling,that cold feathering.

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Published on January 04, 2014 09:25

The Daily, Prompted Poet Writes!

I received a great literary Christmas gift among many this year. This one was an offer to include in my daily writing practice an idea suggested by someone else, a launching pass (appropriate for a rocket kid). So today, having a minor stomach bug and needing to rest, I decided to try one and challenge a friend to join me.

This is the prompt for December 26:
You can see everything in the universe in one tangerine (Thich Nhat HanH). Choose a type of fruit and write a poem about how the universe does and doesn't resemble the cosmos.

The Universe, Like Tangerines
Every year they sell cuties in mesh bagsand I think of the fishnet stockinged legthat formed a lamp set in the windowin A Christmas Story, which always occupiestwo hours of my every Christmas. The universe is a lot like a fishnet calfmade into a lamp that illuminatesyour bad taste to the neighborhood,in that the universe too is full of bad taste,bitter with sweet, olives with double pits,and the fact that butterflies only live for a day.Fishnet because, as we know, matter is mostly porous,and we are mostly air, and there is no air in space.So there. And because some butterflies are the color of tangerines, this universe seems less fair than a universe of concentric circleswhere love radiates outward from every actin perfect echoes like rings from a dropped stoneand water would, ideally, be the color orange.Oh wait—maybe the universe is like that.But not like tangerines.

Rachel Dacus12-26-13

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Published on December 26, 2013 23:47