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“I’m always watching the moon and the moonlight. But I didn’t write about it.” Japanese poet Hiromi Itō talks about how the moon is linked to the menstrual cycle and her decision to write about menstruation, and reads from her poem “Vinegar, Oil” from Killing Kanoko (Action Books, 2009), translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles, at the 2018 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark.
“The other night, somebody asked, is Black poetry back? Like, we penned one verse, and it got lost at sea or slipped inside a big old crack in the big old earth, and then re-returned when everything was chaos.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Erica Dawson reads a poem about her experience while on tour for her poetry collection When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House Books, 2018).
Is your telephone number secretly a portal to mystic truths? In “This Mysterious Website Generates Weird Short Stories About Phone Numbers” published in Electric Literature, Kristen O’Neal writes about a website where the ten-digit number in its URL can be modified and repeatedly refreshed for countless iterations of mysterious and inscrutably poetic sentences in the comments section. Try typing your own phone number into the URL and select one or two sentences from the resulting page that seem particularly evocative. Write a poem inspired by the strange resonance of these words to your own experiences.
“Look at the old house in the dawn rain / all the flowers are forms of water…” In this excerpt from the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the late W. S. Merwin reads his poem “Rain Light.” Merwin’s final collection, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Maryann DeLeo is a filmmaker and writer. She has been attending the Write Treatment Workshops at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York led by Emily Rubin for more than two years.
I was listening to a talk and the speaker said, “Are your days masterpieces? Make every day a masterpiece.” I thought of my days, and my first reaction was, No, my days are not masterpieces. Then I had a flash of Wednesdays at the writing workshop! Those days—they are masterpieces.
And it’s not just for the writing. It’s because of Emily Rubin, who leads the P&W–supported Write Treatment Workshops at Mount Sinai Cancer Centers. A fellow writer, Emily brings her love of literature, art, dance, theater, and music to the class. Her enthusiasm for the arts is evident with her weekly show-and-tell—holding up a catalogue from the latest exhibition she’s seen, or the playbill from a recent theater experience. She bursts into the room at Mount Sinai with so much to tell us about what’s happening in the world. I want to go to everything she tells us about. One student says to her, “You know about everything.”
Then Emily gets down to business: writing. She brings prompts that give us a way in to the writing or not. We can jump off from there, or we can go it alone writing about anything that comes up in our minds.
Each Wednesday she patiently unpacks our stories, one by one. She only looks slightly askance when a writer hems and haws about their “masterpiece” of the day. She wants each of us to stand tall and read with confidence.
I don’t know how she does it but she always finds something in the story that’s good storytelling, good writing. She takes the pages we write in our blue notebooks to heart. “You’re publishing your writing when you read it here,” she says. I breathe that in. If Emily says so, it is so. So we read, we publish, we get to be heard, by our own ears and by a dozen others.
We have created something, and Emily loves it into existence. It’s not that every piece will go on to loftier goals but for those minutes we read, we have Emily’s attention and all the other writers (although there is one writer who groans when he sees all I’ve written telling me, “You’ve written a novel!”). We have managed to get on our conference table soapbox and express who we are this day, this afternoon, these few hours. This is no small gift.
When I was in treatment for my cancer, I spent many afternoons lying on my bed, too weary to get myself up and out. Then I saw a flyer for one of Emily’s workshops. I didn’t go the first time I saw the flyer, but a seed was planted that maybe, someday, I could go. It was something to aspire to. When I get my energy back, I’m going, I told myself.
While still in treatment and fed up with lying about, there was that first Wednesday I got myself to the conference room at West Fifteenth Street. I was a bit shy but as soon as I saw Emily smiling, welcoming me into the room, the jitters went away. I became a regular. I’ve been attending the workshops for more than two years. I’m hooked. When I don’t go, I feel my day is not a masterpiece, something is missing from Wednesday.
I’ve filled many blue notebooks. I’m always startled at what comes out during the hours I’m writing. I didn’t know I thought that. Where did that come from? Some of my notebook writings move on, progress, and expand. And some I file away, to be continued.
I never just fling anything I write on Wednesday away. It’s all for something, even if it’s just for me to reflect on a part of my life I haven’t looked at before. It’s all part of my story.
There’s a quote Emily gave us by Natalie Goldberg that stays with me: “We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded.... We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.”
Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Frances Abbey Endowment, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Photo: Maryann DeLeo at the 2019 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. (Credit: Eileen Kenny).Wild Nights With Emily is a comedic biopic about Emily Dickinson focusing on her irreverent sense of humor and inspired by love letters she penned to her brother’s wife. Directed by Madeleine Olnek, the film stars Molly Shannon as Emily Dickinson and Susan Ziegler as her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson.
“I am a love poet, or a poet in love with the world. It is just who I am…. Is it foolish to speak of little joys that occur in the middle of tragedy? It is our humanity.” In “Still Dancing” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Garth Greenwell interviews Ilya Kaminsky who speaks about writing poetry that witnesses and explores moments of joy, love, and tenderness even in the face of horror, violence, war, and tragedy. Write a poem that confronts an issue of strife or suffering, but also recognizes and allows room for the existence of love and little joys. Consider how you might strike a balance between the two emotional experiences and how they are intertwined.
Camryn Bruno is a nineteen-year-old Queens-born spoken-word poet and model who resided in Trinidad and Tobago but returned to New York in 2018. Currently a sophomore at York College in New York, she is the 2019 New York City Youth Poet Laureate, the 2017 Trinidad and Tobago First Citizens National Poetry Slam Champion, and the 2017 Ms. Tobago Heritage Personality Queen. Bruno is internationally recognized and has performed at various festivals in the Caribbean and is a two-time participant of the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival. Her poems explore social issues that affect youth and she is a passionate advocate for the rights of women, people of color, and other historically marginalized groups.
When I think of workshops, I think of them as discussions around a table a few hours every week until it’s time to showcase what we’ve learned. However, when I was asked to participate in New Settlement’s Silence Out Loud poetry workshop in the Bronx, I knew that the workshop would provide something more than just roundtable discussions. Poet and teacher Roya Marsh is no stranger to me. As the poet-in-residence at Urban Word NYC, she is the one responsible for bringing the female-identifying youths of the Bronx together to take part in these workshops.
Commuting from Queens wasn’t a problem for me on a Thursday afternoon because I knew that I was going to a place where I would feel welcomed and have fun with young women who were just like me—eagerly using the literary arts as a form of healthy therapy, using our pens to effectively express emotions. After ensuring we were all in a safe space, we spoke about our “roses and thorns” for the week.
The compelling stories that were told always led us to engaging conversations. Marsh provided us with weekly writing prompts that we shared at the end of each workshop. One of the prompts that stood out to me was: “What does safety mean to you?” As women, this question was something we all struggled with answering on the first go, but eventually we were able to write down some thoughtful responses.
The Poets & Writers–supported workshop at New Settlement has given me and other young women the opportunity to speak truths about the issues that affect us every day, by providing a safe space for us, and encouraging us to use our voice to stand up for ourselves and create revolutionary noise for all to hear.
Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Frances Abbey Endowment, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Photo: Camryn Bruno (Credit: Tajae Hinds).Lambda Literary has announced the finalists for the thirty-first Lambda Literary Awards. Established in 1989, the annual awards—also known as the “Lammys”—recognize and honor books published during the previous year by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender writers. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on June 3 at the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. Special awards will also be given to recognize writers who “have left an indelible mark on LGBTQ literature.”
“In the ongoing work of LGBTQ equality, literature plays a distinct and powerful role—offering roadmaps for loving, fighting, and thriving,” says Sue Landers, executive director of Lambda Literary. “We are thrilled to announce [this year’s] finalists, which reflect our community’s vast and continually evolving brilliance.”
This year Lambda Literary will give out awards in twenty-four categories, including a new award for Bisexual Poetry. Other categories include fiction, mystery, horror, memoir/biography, drama, anthologies, and LGBTQ Studies, A panel of more than sixty judges selected the finalists from a group of over a thousand books. Visit the website for the complete list of finalists.
Winners last year included Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (Graywolf Press) for Lesbian Fiction, CAConrad’s While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books) for Gay Poetry, and C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press) for Transgender Nonfiction.
Based in Los Angeles, the Lambda Literary Foundation has been a resource for LGBTQ writers since 1987. With a mission to “nurture and advocate for LGBTQ writers,” the organization hosts an annual writing retreat and literary festival, publishes an online magazine, and runs educational programs, among other initiatives.
Read more about the organization in Jonathan Vatner’s article “Lambda Literary Looks to the Future” from the September/October 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Poet, memoirist, and teacher Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about his experience as a teen in prison and how poetry gave him a new identity. Betts is the author of Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) and Felon, forthcoming from Norton in October, and is a recipient of the 2019 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
