Advice to a Moon Child

I am looking through Negative Capability journals of yesteryear and though that some of the poems should be reprinted here.  This poem is from the late Vivian Smallwood of Chickasaw, Alabama.  We used to think of her as Alabama's Emily Dickinson. Negative Capability Press was fortunate enough to publish her book: And Finding No Mouse There.

Advice To A Moon Child

Vivian Smallwood

Listen, little Moon-child, never trust a stranger.
Never take a walk with one beside the dusty seas.
Once there was a stranger came plunging down the sky-road
All wrapped about with earth-shine, and handsome as you please.
I should have fled before him to the shelter of the mountains.
I should have ducked behind a rock or burrowed in the sand,
But I watched him from the shadows, then I crept into the sunlight,
and he crossed the plain to meet me and took me by the hand.
Lonely, blue-eyed love-child, never kiss a stranger.
Once I kissed a stranger who had fallen from the sky.
And now I watch the earth rise above the bleak horizon
And know he will not come again. I know that earth-men lie.

Contests: To Enter or Not to Enter – That is the Question

There are contests and contests -- so what should a writer know when making a decision to enter a competition or not.  Here are a list of things that a writer should know before submitting.

1.  Who is the judge?  A qualified judge is not going to have her / his name listed in connection with a contest that is not legitimate and if the journal is not one that will bring prestige to the judge as well as the winner.  Negative Capability Press is proud to say that they have had the following writers judge their competitions in the past, among them James Dickey, Marge Piercy, and W.D. Snodgrass.  Marge Piercy waived her reading fee so that the press could add another award.  W.D. Snodgrass stopped in Louisiana where the winning writer lived and took him to dinner.  James Dickey wrote personal letters of recommendations to journals and presses telling the editors / publishers about the top ten finalists' work. 

2.  Check out the Press / publication.  Does the Press / publication have a website?  Who have they published?  Have they published other books?  Check out Negative Capability Press -- negativecapabilitypress.org.  Look up Negative Capability Press on Facebook and Linked-In.

3.  And if you are interested in determining whether your work has a chance of winning, do this:  look up the judge and read what [s]he has published.  Read to learn. Reading opens new vistas that the writer may not have thought about.  For example: maybe Conceptual Writing is a new, untried way of writing.  Read Interviews with the judge. Read essays.  What books has the judge written?  What essays? 

4. Who has been published by the Press?  Negative Capability Press has been publishing since 1981.  It has published collections of essays and poems by Marge Piercy, Karl Shapiro, William Stafford and Richard Eberhart, not to mention poetry by John Updike, Diane Wakoski, X.J. Kennedy, and even President Jimmy Carter.

5.  Do you have a question?  Write the publisher.

On Amy King

Negative Capability Press is thrilled that Amy King is the judge of our Book Competition.

For more information on the fabulous Amy, we thought you would like to check out the following -- blog, article on Adrienne Rich, and an interview.

www.bostonreview.net/author/amy-king

www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/whacked-out-a-case-for-the-advocacy-of-the-unlisted-amy-king/

the rumpus.net/topics/amy-king/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/273

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_01_015554.php

In Their Words... with Irene Latham

by Patty Jameson

My Tuesday night Poetry class met one muggy, January night at Satori Coffee, a few skips away from the University of South Alabama campus, for an evening reading by a traveling poet. We squeezed close together on couches, our shoulders nudged our neighbors’, and we listened as Irene Latham charmed us with The Color of Lost Rooms, her latest collection of poetry.

Each poem is a painting—of someone you know or someone you might have been—and each painting is in a room, and you’re invited in. The Color of Lost Rooms (Blue Rooster Press) is a captivating look at the real and the imagined, a moment from history stolen and pinned inside of a page.

Irene is the kind of poet that all aspiring poets should talk to—she has published over 170 poems in various journals and anthologies, as well as two poetry books and one novel. Her new novel, Don’t Feed the Boy (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan), will be available later this year. Her first poetry collection, What Came Before (Negative Capability Press), was awarded the Alabama State Poetry Society’s Book of the Year, her first novel, Leaving Gee’s Bend (G.P. Putnam's Sons), won the Alabama Library Association’s 2011 Children’s Book Award, and The Color of Lost Rooms holds the distinction of winning the 19th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Prize for Poetry. Irene also serves as the Poetry Editor for the Birmingham Arts Journal.

I had the opportunity to chat with Irene before and after her reading, and she was kind enough to share some wonderful insights about writing and publishing, from both sides of the submission deadline.

I read on your website that even as a young girl you wanted to be a writer, yet you never took a writing class while you were in college. Instead, you pursued an education in social work. What led you on that path, and how has that knowledge helped you as a writer? 

While my parents were very encouraging of my writing, they also encouraged me to be practical. I’ll never forget my father saying, “you need to have a job in your back pocket.” So I chose the oh so lucrative field of social work. And even though I don’t currently practice social work, what I learned in those classes still informs my writing today – family dynamics! communication! dysfunctional relationships! It’s what great stories are made of.

Have you since taken any courses on craft and writing?

I was a closet writer for many years, just writing for my own pleasure, and didn’t really feel the urge to publish until I was the busy mom of three boys. I loved being a mom, but I craved something that was just mine. And when I looked around my house, all I saw were stacks of paper overflowing my counters and spilling out of my drawers. So I enrolled in a community education class at UAB on Freelance Writing for Magazines. And so my self-education began.

I tend to be a private writer – I’m protective of my process, so a lot of feedback, especially early in a project, is not good for me – and I never considered pursuing an MFA. I’ve always been kind of stubborn and wanted to do it my own way. But I have found writing conferences – particularly ones sponsored by the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) – to be of tremendous value both in terms of teaching craft and for learning the publishing end. I’ve also attended writing conferences sponsored by Alabama Writers Conclave, Mississippi Writers Guild and others. I adore books on craft, and love how the internet has all sorts of suggested remedies, whether I’m struggling with character development or plotting or how (and where) to submit a collection of poems.

The key for me has been to write and write and write. I know a number of writers who attend all the best writing classes and conferences, yet don’t invest the same amount of time actually practicing what they’ve been taught. For me, the most important learning has happened when it’s just me and my computer in a room.

You traveled a lot as a child and also as an adult. Which of your destinations has spoken the loudest to your inner muse?

The thing about having a vagabond heart is that you can’t possibly choose one destination over another. They all speak to me. In fact, it’s one of the things I struggle with. I feel pulled in a lot of different directions. I’ve had to train myself to stay put, to see one journey through before embarking on another. Right now I am exploring the weeks during my childhood that were spent at my grandparent’s orange grove in Polk County, Florida. My muse, in general, seems to be a nature-loving gal who enjoys romantic, rural landscapes.

Your book, The Color of Lost Rooms, features several ekphrastic poems. Is there a particular genre of art that you find inspires you more than others, and how do you approach the process of turning a visual object into a poem on a page?

I really enjoy the interaction of the arts and am constantly inspired by other media – film, visual art, textiles, nonfiction, nature. If it makes me feel something, I want to write about it, must write about it. I actually give a whole lecture on how this process works for me. It involves moving beyond simple description and often requires research. Then it becomes an exercise in empathy, and finally an imaginative leap. It’s about putting oneself inside the painting or film or whatever and making those very personal connections.

How did you come to be poetry editor for the Birmingham Arts Journal? How do you think the experience has made you a better poet?

A poem of mine appeared in the inaugural issue of Birmingham Arts Journal, and I was so thrilled with the publication and the folks running it – especially editor Jim Reed. I started hanging around, volunteering to promote the magazine, and eventually, when the first poetry editor moved on to other things, Jim invited me to take over the position. I’ve been there ever since and love meeting and working with the poets who submit their work for publication. The job helps me better evaluate my own work, and I am often inspired by the poems that find their way to me.

Sometimes you have hundreds of submissions to read through for the journal. How would you characterize what makes one poem stand out from all the others, and what is the greatest weakness you've noticed in the poems that aren't selected?

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was this: It’s more important to be different than better. This is certainly true when one is selecting poems to fill such limited space. I will choose a less polished piece over a heavily worked one any day, if the poem is fresh and gives me something unexpected. I really want to be surprised, and I really want to feel something when I read a poem. The biggest weakness I see in submissions is when poets settle for the early images that come to their minds (and everyone else’s mind) and not digging deeper for that astonishing observation or analogy.

Do you ever stop revising your poems?

Perfectionism is the enemy of any creative pursuit. It’s important to understand that work can only be done in stages. It takes time. So I revise long enough to get a poem in shape to submit for publication – and then later, often after publication, find ways to improve it.  Sometimes I stop revising and abandon poems not because they can’t be any better -- simply because I can’t make them any better yet. At which point I move on to the next poem, and the next. Growth requires movement. Each writer has to find her own balance.

Can you tell us a bit about your new novel, Don't Feed the Boy? How did you research the zoo setting? 

I’m so excited about this book! I remember the moment I got the idea: I was in a bookstore with my father (an avid reader – he reads a book a day!) over the Christmas holidays. I had been thinking about how we adults have these passions, but what happens when our children don’t share them? So I said out loud to my father, “how ‘bout a story about a boy whose parents are zoo people, and he feels like he was born the wrong species, and he wants to escape the zoo?”  My dad laughed, which was a very encouraging sign!

Soon after, Whit was born. The book is really about finding the place where you belong in the world, finding your very own passion and being strong and brave enough to go after that thing, whatever it may be.

Research included a lot of reading zoo veterinarian and zoo director biographies, interviews and trips to the zoo as well as drawing upon my own experience training as a teen zoo volunteer at the Birmingham Zoo.

Where to go from here:

For more information on Irene Latham or to order one of her books, visit her website at http://www.irenelatham.com/index.html.

Intersted in submitting to the Birmingham Arts Journal? Visit http://www.birminghamartsjournal.com/index.html.

In Their Words... with Mark J. Mitchell

by Patty Jameson

I’m excited to introduce you to Mark J. Mitchell and his award-winning chapbook, Three Visitors, which won Negative Capability’s National Chapbook Competition. Mark’s book introduces us to a series of three characters who welcome us into their daily doings and private thoughts. I had a chat with Mark about his visitors and their muses, and learned quite a bit more about welcoming inspiration from traditional texts and forms.

Three Visitors gives us a unique look into three distinct personalities, which you introduced with literary and historical relationships. Can you tell us more about Guenivere, your reference to Montale, and the story behind the Gangetic Plains? How did your characters grow out of these inspirations? 

The book is called Three Visitors because these characters came to me of their own accord. They arrived on their own with stories to tell. So it’s not so much their growing out my inspiration, but growing as I got to know them better.

“The Woman Who May Have Been Guenivere” turned up during a time of year when I write a poem every day. She first appeared in “Her Housekeeping.” After that she had something to say in various forms, and she tended to choose Welsh or French forms to have her say. I included a note about her when I distributed those poems to friends: I’m not entirely sure who this person is and I don’t want to impose my own will on her. I just want to make it clear that she doesn’t think she’s Guenivere—she is, in some way, haunted by her. She was either Arthur’s wife in some former life or somehow this idea has leaked into her subconscious mind. After she appeared in a couple of poems I realized I should revisit Jack Spicer’s book, The Holy Grail, as well as his Vancouver lecture where he talks about dictation.

The other two visitors each turned up in December—different Decembers, mind you—and had their own say. “The Girl in the Mandarin Collar” (who appeared long before Steig Larrsen’s book turned up in English) seems to have been a very young woman, 17 or 18, in San Francisco in 1978, at the beginning of the punk scene here, when it was still very mixed up. The center of that scene was a Filipino nightclub called The Mabuhay Gardens (or the Fab Mab as it came to be known). I’d been reading Eugenio Montale for some time by then, in the doorstop of an edition that came out around 1998. The title of the first poem in his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, is “In Limine,” which means “on the threshold,” so that’s the title of her first poem. She spoke in the form of that poem and just kept speaking that way until she was finished.

My gravedigger, as I think of him, appeared in the same way. He wanted to speak in these short bursts of blank verse. It seemed obvious to me, as we got to know each other, that this was a person who had actually heard the Buddha speak. I think, at the time, I must have wanted to write some small, hard nuggets of verse, but I don’t think my intention was much involved in the decisions.

What’s odd about these December appearances is that I was working retail at the time. Physically strenuous work, sixty to eighty hours a week, and I would come home exhausted. But these characters had to have their say. Once they did, they left as suddenly as they arrived.

After looking at all three sets for some time, I realized that they belonged together.

Is the Coda giving us more on any of these characters, or is she a completely different personality? What inspired this fourth section of Three Visitors?

The Coda was actually the first poem of the book to be written. However, over the years I have tended to think of this woman as the animating spirit of the woman who may have been Guenivere. She died at the end of her poems and this is the way she makes her way back into the world. Of course, it is also the first time she knocked on my door.

You write from both male and female perspectives, and you capture the personalities of each quite well. Which perspective do you enjoy writing most, and why?

Thank you for the compliment. I credit the characters themselves. I do write fiction from time to time (I have a novella in print). It’s not unusual for female characters to turn up in my work, especially when I am in a period of intense poetry writing. One of my personal favorites is a woman known as “The Existential Ecdysiast.”

It would be disingenuous of me to say I prefer to write from the female perspective more than the male, but I always enjoy it when female characters come to call.

Do you have any formal writing/poetry education? When did you begin writing?

I began writing about the time I began to read, I suppose. I took creative writing classes all through high school.

I majored in “Aesthetic Studies: Creative Writing: Poetry” at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s. My first writing teacher was Raymond Carver. George Hitchcock took me under his wing while I was there, as did Barbara Hull. I also studied Medieval Literature—Dante, the French Arthurian Cycles, Sir Thomas Malory’s versions and Cervantes, under the tutelage of Robert M. Durling.

Ray encouraged a poetry of character. George favored the surreal and the possibilities of automatic writing. He also taught me to appreciate different types of poetry, even the sort that I would never write myself. Barbara tended to stress the idea of control within freedom. Professor Durling taught me to respect traditions and conventions and guided me through some of the greatest writing in history.

Have you been published previously? Where can readers find your other published work?

This is the first time I’ve had a volume of my poems come out and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I’ve been publishing poetry for over 30 years in various magazines. One of my first major publications came in George Hitchcock’s legendary kayak in 1978. I helped mail out that issue and was excited to put the stamp on the envelope going to Octavio Paz.  Poems of mine have appeared in a few anthologies, the best known of which is Good Poems, American Places (Viking, 2011) edited by Garrison Keillor. That same poem appears in the anthology Line Drives (SIU Press), it’s sort of my biggest hit. Recently my poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Blue Unicorn, J Journal, Poem, and others. They have also been published on-line in The Buddhist Poetry Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, The Road Not Taken, Numinous, and Snakeskin. My novella, Sir Gawain’s Little Green Book is a print-on-demand book and an e-book available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble (look me up as Mark J. Mitchell, since my name is a common one).  (psst...We've saved you the trouble of searching for Sir Gawain's Little Green Book yourself.)

Amazon Kindle or print-on-demand

Barnes & Noble Nook Book or paperback

You show a reverence for traditional poetic forms, and mentioned that you are currently working on translating poetry by Aragon. Can you talk more about what you enjoy reading and how it has affected your own style? 

I enjoy working in forms for a couple of reasons. The first is the element of play involved when you have rules to follow. Secondly, I love formal verse because I don’t think my own ear is a better conduit for musicality than a thousand years of tradition, from the troubadours on. Writing in forms helps to keep my own ear honest. I first fell in love with form when I read the great Middle English elegy, “The Pearl,” in the early 80s. The shape of that poem is just amazing.

When I was seventeen I picked up the paperback edition of Modern European Poetry, edited by Willis Barnstone. That exposed me to a whole world of poetry that hadn’t turned up in my high school yet. That’s where I first encountered Montale and Louis Aragon. I’ve been working on translating Aragon because there is no edition of his work in English (at least not since the World War II years) and because he wrote some of the most beautiful love poetry in the French language, and that’s saying something. Since he wrote those beautiful love poems for his wife and I like to write love poems for my wife, I’ve always felt a connection.

Barbara Hull, my teacher, had studied with Theodore Roethke, and so she pointed me in the direction of Elizabethan songs. I’ve always thought that poetry was speech that aspired to song.

Do you have any advice for writers--young or old, aspiring or seasoned?

Marry money.

Seriously, I think that if you’re going to write poetry seriously you have to take a vow of poverty, and be willing to live with that and never give up.

I think every poet should be able to scan a line of verse and to write in forms, even if that’s not how they do what they might consider their real work. It’s like being a musician, you should be able to read music and practice your scales every day. It will strengthen your free verse. Never lose sight of the fact that the patron saint of free verse, e.e. cummings, was also the great master of the American sonnet.

Also, read poetry from other countries in other languages. We have a wonderful array of translations available to us these days. Try to pick up copies that have the original on the facing page so you can get the shape and sound of the original.

Keep all your tools sharpened and ready. You never know when a visitor might drop by.

If there's something I didn't touch on that you wish to answer to, feel free to ask your own question and add it in. 

I just wanted to add that Three Visitors is a very unusual group of my poems. It’s odd to see this many of my poems gathered together and not one of them is a love poem to my wife. I wouldn’t be able to keep writing without Joanie’s daily love, support and inspiration.

Mark's admiration of traditional forms are evident in his poetry, and his ability to insert a contemporary voice into a traditional setting takes the reader on a unique journey with three new friends. Keep watch for the Three Visitors -- available soon from Negative Capability!