SHARON FRYE is a poet from Northern Oklahoma. When not delivering the mail, she enjoys writing about those she meets along the way. Whether it’s the cashier at the Dollar Store or the man giving her a pedicure- she tries to see the person behind the persona. She hopes her words might cause you too, to look more closely at the people you pass each day. Sharon is a frequent guest poet with The BeZineand she was on the short-list for the Blackwater Poetry Prize (Ireland).
AYARA STEIN is the former editor of the arts quarterly Gypsy Blood Review, she’s published in Verse Wisconsin, The Mayo Review, Ping Pong: The Journal of the Henry Miller Library and The Delinquent (UK), she is comfortable in the company of academics and outlaws.
SILVA ZANOYAN MERJANIAN is a widely published poet residing in California. She has two volumes of poetry Uncoil a Night (2013) and Rumor (Cold River Press, 2015). Rumor won Pinnacle Book Achievement Award by NABE for Fall 2015 and Silva has 3 poems from Rumor nominated for Pushcart award. Silva is a frequent guest poet with The BeZine.
RJ LOONEYwill share his poems that are inspired by his experiences growing up in rural Arkansas, conversations in bars, and life in general. He is the author of A Crow’s Breakfast: Poems from The Low Road. He wears glasses when he needs them and generally avoids tucking in his shirttail.
Tennessee writer DONNIE LAMONcame to the Big Apple four years ago to make a name for himself, and instead made a ministry. He lost his own name but found the names of hundreds of those unnamed and uncounted. Five Loaves and Shoeleather distributes care packages to the homeless on the streets of New York. His latest book is The Cardboard Gospel.
MH CLAY is a poet, playwright and musician, active in the Dallas spoken word scene. He is the Poetry Editor for Mad Swirl. He’s excited to carry on the creative conversation that will ensue among all the poets and patrons who come to Little Rock.
and
Justin Booth, Event Host
Outlaw Poet JUSTIN BOOTHwill share some of his gritty southern goth poetry and prose, as well as introduce to Central Ar, an amazing group of writers he has met while traveling to share his own work. He is the author of four poetry collections including The Singer, The Lesbian, and The One with the Feet.
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” . . . writing is a way of continuing to hope … perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone.” Lucille Clifton in an interview with Michael S. Glaser
I am one of those – like the people of Buffalo – who think of Lucille Clifton as a New Yorker. She was born in Depew and grew-up and was educated in Buffalo. I suppose some Californian’s claim her as theirs because she lived in Santa Cruz for a while. Most of the world, however, sees her as belonging to Maryland. I don’t know that she lived there longest but she was that state’s Poet Laureate from 1979 – 1985.
Lucille and Fred James Clifton (professor and sculptor) were friends with writer, playwright and publisher Ishmael Reed. It was he who introduced them to one another when he organized the Buffalo Community Drama Workshop. They acted together in a version of The Glass Managerie. Reed took some of Lucille’s poems to Langston Hughes who included them inThe Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970.
Lucille Clifton won many grants and awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Two of her books were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to poetry collections, she wrote a memoir and twenty-some children’s books. The latter include the popular well-regarded Everett Anderson series.
“Lucille Clifton is an African-American whose consciousness of her race and gender informs all of her poetry, though she never gets preachy. Instead, she has chosen a minimalist mode that clears out human society’s clutter, the mess we’ve made by identifying ourselves in contending genders, ethnicities, nations. Lightly, as if biting her tongue, with a wise smile, she shows us a radically egalitarian world where no one or no capitalized word lords it over others. …” Peggy Rosenthal, The Christian Century
Denise Levertov wrote of Lucille Clifton’s work as “authentic and profound.” I find it marked by pragmatism, strength, endurance and humor. You will see the later demonstrated in this poem and her intro to it, her ode: homage to my hips.
these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top
“Sappho (/ˈsæfoʊ/; Attic Greek Σαπφώ [sapːʰɔ̌ː], Aeolic Greek Ψάπφω, Psappho [psápːʰɔː]) was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. She was born sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and it is said that she died around 570 BCE, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost; however, her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments.” [Wikipedia]Sunday: I began my dive into Dilys Wood’s Antarctica* (Greendale Press, 2008), spending my discretionary time engaged by this collection, which includes The South Pole Inn, a novella in verse.
“I dreamt I gave you the white continent
I wrapped it in white wedding wrap, embossed
with silver penguins and skiis …”
from Her Birthday Present in the section Love in a Freezing Climate: Four Poems
*****
“Wherever I look, the bacillus of melt
weakens the floes.”
from Future
DILYS WOOD is a poet, an editor and the founder (“convenor” as she might say) of the London-based Second Light Network of Women Poets (SLN), which produces the biannualARTEMISpoetryand includes a publishing arm, Second Light Publishing. I first encountered Dilys thanks toMyra Schneider. That award-winning poet with eleven published collections is a consultant to SLN.
While Internet and email have a way of helping to cross borders and make affinity-based connections, closing the gaps in culture and miles – in this case some 5,500 miles as the crow flies – the tools are imperfect. It’s not the same as meeting, talking and observing in person. However, when you read what people write, when they risk themselves by putting their very souls on paper, you do get to know something about their values and passions. My strongest sense of Dilys was as the quiet persistent energy behind a women’s poetry collective and an apparently indefatigable advocate for women’s right – including women over 40 – to poetic voice.
At the point in which I first encountered Myra, Dilys and SLN, Dilys had collaborated on (mainly with Myra) four anthologies of women’s poetry. She had two collections of her own poetry published,Women Come to a Death(Databases, 1999)andAntarctica. That was, I think around 2010. Since that time, we are gifted through Dilys and Myra, Anne Stewart (poetry p f) and others on the SLN team with so many fine anthologies and magazines of women’s poetry, that I can hardly keep track.
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Dilys is modest in presenting herself. Her Poet’s Page on SLN’s website says simply –
Dilys started writing poetry again after retiring from the Civil Service, where her jobs included being secretary of the Women’s National Commission. She shortly after founded Second Light, focussed on the needs of women reconnecting with writing after forty. Second Light Network developed into a support group and, on a small scale (though reviews suggest significant), publisher of women’s poetry. Together with her own writing (Antarctica, 2008; Women Come to a Death, Katabasis, 1997), Dilys has been the joint editor (mainly with Myra Schneider) of 4 womens poetry anthologies.
If The Poet by Day was a poem, its title would have to have the tagline after Dilys Wood. This site is not the product of collaboration and membership. Nonetheless, its commitment to sharing information on poets and poetry, including gifted if lesser-known poets, and promoting and encouraging poets who are marginalized by their gender, ethnicity, disability or age – is very definitely inspired by Dilys work and commitment to mature women and the work and commitment of Myra Schneider and the other SLN women as well as by my own love of poets and poetry and the whole of poesy history and culture.
This is Dilys in her own words as she “spoke” in a guest blog post here several years ago:
NEW SAPPHOS, CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN POETS
I run a network for women poets and naturally I want our members to be treated equitably, with recognition of any woman’s potential to be in the top flight of creative artists.
Some poets feel that ‘male and female he made them’ should not be an issue. I disagree because I want to celebrate and gain personal inspiration from the last fifty years. There has been a vastly increased involvement of women as students of poetry, published poets, book purchasers and consumers of ‘products’ such as poetry festivals. I also want it debated why this has not meant equality of treatment by journals.
Why do some leading journals publish fewer poems by women and use fewer women reviewers? What part is played by prejudice and what by our diffidence? Do we submit enough work and persist when submissions are rejected? Are there subtle shades of prejudice? Are we taken seriously on ‘women’s topics’ but not when writing about spiritual experience or politics?
A first step is to convince ourselves that there is no ceiling. Emily Dickinson surely lives up to the epithet ‘unique genius’? Her work is incredibly economical, dense, universal and deeply moving. She is totally original in style and thought. Her work alone ought to kill the slur that biology-based inferiority explains historical under-achievement.
So many more women have found now their voice. Let’s celebrate poets who excite us, from Emily Bronte (say) to Jorie Graham (say). We can also start thinking seriously about differences and about inflated reputations. Let’s be wary about ‘celebrity status’. This tends to narrows true appreciation. Read voraciously. Include lesser known poets and dead poets. You will be impressed by how much exciting writing is on offer.
– Dilys Wood
* “Antarctica,” Greendale Press, 2008 (all proceeds to Second Light Network funds). �5.95 through poetry p f (scroll down on the page to which this is linked)
Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945) is a new poet to me, discovered on reading Tim Beck’s article, The Other Half of a Poem. I did a bit of reading and research and in sum found that Zagajewski began as a protest poet of the Polish “New Wave.” He felt that poetry should address current social needs, incorporating but not serving politics and using unambiguous language. Poetry should undermine communist double-speak. Not surprisingly, Zagajewski was exiled from Poland in 1982.
Zagajewski I found is generally well-considered by his peers, though there are some who criticize him (Czeslaw Milosz is one) for being “one-dimensional.”
I sent for three of Zagajewski’s books. Mysticism for Beginners is among them. I find the poems in this collection beguiling and disquieting at once.
From Vermeer’s Little Girl
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665, Oil on canvas, 44.5 cm × 39 cm (17.5 in × 15 in), Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands
“Oh, Vermeer’s little girl, oh pearl
blue turban: you are all light
and I am made of shadow.
Light looks down on shadow
with forbearance, perhaps pity.”
From The Traveler
“putting his hand to his chest, checking warily
to make sure he still had his return ticket
to the ordinary places we all live”
From Holy Saturday in Paris
“And two-headed doubts
slim as antelopes,
barricade the street
Lord why did you die”
A week after the Twin Towers collapsed, The New Yorker magazine ran Zagajewski’s Try to Praise the Mutilated World on the final page of its special 9/11 issue along with W.S. Merwin’s To the Words. It became – according to a Newsweek article – “the best known poem in decades.” The poem was not inspired by 9/11. It was written a few years before.
“You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.”
So, yes: an intriguing poet full of shadow and light and two-headed doubts.
![Sappho (/ˈsæfoʊ/; Attic Greek Σαπφώ [sapːʰɔ̌ː], Aeolic Greek Ψάπφω, Psappho [psápːʰɔː]) was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. She was born sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and it is said that she died around 570 BCE, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost; however, her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments.](https://jamiededes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/800px-sahpo_embrassant_sa_lyre-jules_elie_delaunay_mg_8275.jpg?w=634&h=1024)
Mysticism for Beginners
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 