It’s long been a dream of mine to have a poem up at Poetry Daily, and today, that dream came true!  My poem “The World’s Longest-Running Scientific Experiment, 2010,” first published in The Briar Cliff Review, is today’s poem.  Thanks to the editors at both publications!  This poem appears in my second collection, Simple Machines.

Hi! Simple Machines is #15 on the Small Press Distribution July Poetry Bestsellers list.  Woo-hoo!  That was a secret, long-held dream of mine.  Now, help me crack the top ten for August!  There are 23 copies left over at SPD–if you haven’t already bought one, please head over to Small Press Distribution and get one!  Let me know you got one, and I’ll send you a signed bookplate or sign it in person the next time I see you.  And please share!  #SimpleMachinesSellOut

Gregory Pardlo won the Pulitzer last year, so it’s probably not a surprise to you that he’s a good poet to read.  I thought I’d include a poem from his earlier collection, though, to show that his musicality and wide-ranging consciousness were present in the last book, too (from www.poetryfoundation.org):

Double Dutch

Melanie Jordan recently released her debut collection Hallelujah for the Ghosties from Sundress Publications.  I wrote a review that you can read here.  Here’s a short poem, first published in Diagram:

IN THE BROKEN ZOO

They kept us and now they’ve left us.
My marble eye rides blackwater;
prey I can become. Banging on the far wall.
Soon the umbrage of pit and scale, the fur,
the thumbs. The tarsiers founder on snakes
now, but until spring on air I could survive.
I ride this stale water, I am the heir of abiding:
they shook the earth, my oldest ancestors,
they rumble my cold blood still, though
egg-sucking rats and the endless winter
laid them down like logs to die.
So long as the pool was deep enough,
so long as the need was slender,
we got along. So long as
the glass was strong.

This monologue demonstrates Jordan’s lyricism, unconventional point of view, and intelligence, her scientific know-how and her poetry chops.  I’m on board as soon as I get to that second line–the alliteration of “my marble” is bookended by the internal rhyme of “my” and “eye,” and I love “blackwater” as one word–some chaos has happened, and it’s dangerous below the surface in the aftermath.  I love “the heir of abiding,” a great description of being the result of adaptions that happened longer ago than average–a species, I’m assuming of reptile, that was so well-evolved so long ago that it hasn’t changed much since.  I enjoy the delay in the syntax of “they shook the earth, my oldest ancestors,” maybe because it’s iambic pentameter, maybe because it plays on the etymology of dinosaur names like “seismosaurus.”  Her last line is great, and it demonstrates a rule of thumb I learned from Jackie Osherow–if you know you have to get away with making a big proclamation, you have to prepare for it, sonically.  Jordan does that here with “long,” “long,” “along,” leading into “So long as / the glass was strong.”  The zoo is broken, literally, but has led to an explosion of animal life that is both dangerous and thrilling.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT:  Write a poem from an animal’s point of view.

francine j. harris is my fellow 2015 NEA Literature Fellow in poetry, and around the time that we found out the names of the other fellows, I’d read one poem of hers in Poetry magazine, “enough food and a mom.”  I can’t get the formatting to work right here, so please go to the link and read the poem there.

I love the fractured syntax of this poem, particularly the way the loaded words “dad,” “mom,” and “ghost” seem to take over and take the place of other nouns, and even other verbs:  “to keep him from going into dad” (the ghost?  or “dad” as a state of being?), “Come on now, dad.  come to ghost,” “the mom with the smell of cracked dad,” “No. says the dad:  lost in ashes,” “They ghost like the bushel of a snowflower,” “At night, I have really long dads” (“dads” instead of dreams?), “We are all sappy dad, aren’t we,” and, of course, that brilliant last line:  “I mom of you.  I mom of you a lot.”  I also love the line the title comes from:  “a good seance starts with enough food / and a mom.”  To me, this poem enacts the disjoint between the material and spiritual worlds by disjointing its language, so that the words “dad,” “mom,” and “ghost” seem to haunt the words we might expect to be in their syntactical place–in that last line, I’d expect “take care,” or “tire,” or “cut the heart out,” not “mom” of you.  But that also feels real, that “mom” is a verb very different from “mother.”

YOUR ASSIGNMENT:  Play with parts of speech.  Write a poem where nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns, adjectives become nouns (that’s called a “substantive”), etc.  Have that role swap become part of the story of the poem.

I’m excited to announce that my first full-length poetry collection, I Might Be Mistaken, has been released and is available to purchase!  Thanks to my publisher, Word Poetry (www.wordpoetrybooks.com).  You can order a SIGNED copy for $16 plus shipping, handling, and tax (a $2 discount off the cover price) RIGHT HERE!

http://thecollagist.com/collagist-blog/2015/2/13/the-grammatical-metaphor-for-my-condition-an-interview-with.html

My poem “Namesake Elegy” is available in the current issue of The Journal.

Thanks to the editors!

My essay “That There Would Be Better Pornography” is up at The Collagist!  Thanks to the editors!