Poetry Monday by Michelle Ovalle – Neruda (or On How a Love Poem is Done)

From my friend and sister-poet over at Roaring Out, her reading in Spanish and English of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17. Enjoy! Neruda Sonnet 17

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Welcome to full-time translating: Fall 2011 reading list

Readings, Poets Amichai, Yehuda, Selected Poetry of YA, tr. Bloch & Mitchell The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity: A Bilingual Anthology ed. Kaufman, Hasan-Roken, Hess Women Poets of the World, ed Bankier Ecco Anthology of International Poetry Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch , Chana Bloch and Chana [...]

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on making a manuscript

Here’s a great post from my friend and co-student Michelle Ovalle on creating her manuscript. She’s inspired me to try to describe what I’ve been up to, so look for a new post on that soon. Right now, I’m still recovering from the process and waiting to hear back from my mentor so I can [...]

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ecstasy remains as much a birthright

from Larry Levis The Gazer Within: Gazing within, and trying to assess what all this represents, I find I’ve been speaking, all along, about nature, about the attempt of the imagination to inhabit nature and by that act preserve itself for as long as it possibly can against “the pressure of reality.” And by “nature” [...]

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Back at Drew, June 2010

I’m back at Drew for my 4th residency. Well, I’ve been back since last Monday, but have been having the experience more and blogging about it less. It’s so deep but also so familiar, now, to be here, to know where everything is, to know the faculty (mainly, always someone new, in this case Jane [...]

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3rd Semester Reading List

I’m working with Joan Larkin this semester, and am so excited to be doing so. I have to write a long critical essay, in my case looking at 2 or 3 sonnet sequences. I’ll be studying scansion and meter (which I will learn, yes I will!) and reading Dickinson and May Swenson. Spring 2010 Study [...]

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The first time

I read this at the final student reading at my third Drew residency. It felt so good to speak it, to inhabit it, that I know the poem is done, after many many drafts and re-visions. The first time, in the Rittenhouse Radisson, was to be crazy hot, me and her and her girl- friend [...]

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New Work Workshop #2

Assignment – imagine walking through a beautiful wood and coming upon a cabin. In the cabin is a chest, and in it a single piece of clothing, clearly there just for you. What is it? What does it feel like to wear it? Sky Skin Everything. Shirt, robe, cloak, sari, warm wool socks, lightest linen [...]

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New Work – 10 Commands

our charge – write 10 commands, pretty much as fast as we could write them down. These, or variations of them, will keep popping up in the various new work workshop poems. And they were fun to write! 10 Commands Love your neighbor as yourself. Love yourself as you could love another. You are obligated [...]

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Ira Sadoff “Structure and Poetic Memory” Drew 2nd Residency

Notes and Fancies from Ira Sadoff’s Lecture “Structure and Poetic Memory” Ira challenged us to really consider the structure of the poem – not its grammar, or its form, or its meter or lines, but structure as the connection between all the craft elements and its poetic argument, as how the poem carries meaning and [...]

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