SpeakEasy 27: the responses

SpeakEasy 27: A Spiritual Thread engaged five poets in what turned out to be a nine-month poetic conversation. The resulting series of linked poems was presented in five Zoom readings.

To complete SpeakEasy 27, audience members were invited to submit their own poems inspired by and directly linked to specific ideas or language in the 25-poem series. Round 6, on Sunday, March 28, 2021, at 7:00pm Pacific, will feature response poems by Sarah Brownsberger, Lauren Camp, Nancy Canyon, Bev Darnall, J.I. Kleinberg, Eric Kosarot, Rachel Mehl, Peter Messinger, Jory Mickelson, Don Mitchell, Kevin Murphy, Bethany Reid, Sheila Rosen, Paul Sarvasy, Betty Scott, Carla Shafer, Sheila Sondik, Allie Spikes, and Nik Warren.

Additional information and video of the previous readings is available on the Other Mind Press SpeakEasy 27 page. The reading is free on Zoom (Zoom link available from the participating poets or by sending an email to othermindpress AT gmail.com). Please join us!

next Friday at Elliott Bay

Mark your calendar for a wonderful evening of poetry as Edward Harkness and Bethany Reid share new and recent work at The Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. Harkness will read from his third full-length collection, The Law of the Unforeseen (Pleasure Boat Studio), and Reid from her second collection of poems, Body My House (Goldfish Press). Join them at 7:00 p.m.

the creatures are stirring!

Can you hear the yowls and yaps, the squeals and chirps? That growling sound, the one that makes you clutch one another in your tent… that’s the sound of SpeakEasy 22: Animal Beast Creature.

The SpeakEasy poetry series returns to Bellingham on Saturday, October 20, 2018, as poets Jennifer Bullis, Elizabeth J. Colen, Paul Hunter, Jeffrey Morgan, Bethany Reid, Kimberly Roe, Ely Shipley, and Sheila Sondik explore the power of animals — persona, myth, spirit, science, and a deep wildness. The program is free and begins at 7:00pm in the Encore Room of the Mount Baker Theatre. Village Books will be on hand to sell the poets’ books. Event info on Facebook.

SpeakEasy is an occasional poetry series that emphasizes themed, audience-friendly presentations of quality poetry by Cascadia-region writers. It is produced in Bellingham, Washington, by Luther Allen, author of The View from Lummi Island, and Judy Kleinberg.

Come experience the animal magnetism.

last minute!

It’s not too late! Today, Saturday, February 10, 2018, poet Bethany Reid (author of the remarkable Sparrow, among other writings) will offer a free 90-minute workshop, Writing with Emily Dickinson.

In the workshop, Reid “will set her own poetry in the larger context of Dickinson’s, attempting to introduce Dickinson to those unfamiliar with her and to ‘estrange’ the poet from those who think they already understand her. The workshop includes time for participants to write from a prompt and share their work.”

The workshop will be held at the South Whatcom branch of the Whatcom County Library System, 10 Barn View Court, Sudden Valley, Gate 2, in Bellingham, 2:00-3:30pm. Bring writing materials.

edits and revisions

We recently ran two guest posts on the subject of revision, the first by Bethany Reid, the second by Richard Widerkehr. It’s a fascinating topic, and a process we don’t often get to observe in the work of the poets we admire.

In an article in this week’s Book Review section, The New York Times opens a window onto the process of writing and revising, with brief statements by six poets and images of their works in process.

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Joanne Carson manuscript with edits by Truman Capote

Revising revisited

This is a guest post by Richard Widerkehr.

I enjoyed reading Bethany Reid’s blog that mentioned Dylan Thomas’s 67 revisions of “Fern Hill,” a poem I’ve loved for a long time. I remember hearing a story told by the poet Erin Belieu, who said that her husband, a writer, looked through her drafts of a poem and said, “I think you had it at the seventh draft, not the twenty-seventh.” It can be hard to tell at the time, and if you can tear yourself away from trying to get it just right, let some time pass, you can sometimes see more clearly what changes need to be made. Also, one change can lead to other ideas, if you let it.

The most helpful thing I heard about revision in the last few years is what Joe Stroud said: If you find yourself grinding away at a poem and can’t get it right, try reworking it in prose, which can give us sensory details we leave out. Since my first drafts are often telegraphic and leave out things the reader needs to know, putting in more can be helpful. If we’ve been to workshops, people will often tell us what can be cut. Sometimes, the hard part is seeing what we left out. We hide the Easter eggs, as Annie Dillard said. She said she asks herself when she thinks she’s done, “What did I leave out?” If it doesn’t go in this poem, it can lead to the next one.

One example of how I did this is how I worked on my long poem, “Her Story of Fire.” Someone told me Alberto Ríos had given an assignment to write one poem and then write the reply or opposite of that poem. What I did was use two speakers with different voices — one was a mentally ill woman, and the other speaker was her brother. One spoke; the other replied, though they often talked past each other. This exercise became the long title poem of my book Her Story of Fire (Egress Studio Press).

I liked Bethany’s suggestions to rewrite a poem in a different form or using different line lengths or stanza patterns. Sometimes I’ve tried that, and I’ve also tried using different pronouns (you, he, she, we) for the narrator. Often I’ve changed the verb tense from past to present if I want more immediacy.

One thing I do in revising that I haven’t heard many other poets do is find a word that sounds like or rhymes with a word that doesn’t work. Yeats changed “a mass of shadows” to “a mess of shadows.” But then I tend to write using sound and rhythm to lead me to what I want to say, so that works for me and helps me discover or uncover the meaning as I go along, which I like to do. When I wrote my novel, Sedimental Journey (Tarragon Books), it started as a short story about a geologist in love with a fictional character. Later, I made plot outlines but didn’t follow them. It took me nine years to finish the book and another fifteen years to find a publisher.

What did I leave out of this short piece? How to persist and keep writing. One thing I’ve done is switch genres when I got frustrated or bored with what I’m doing. My novel started as a fun break from my serious poems, though it changed and became funny-sad as it grew. My new book of poems, In The Presence Of Absence, will come out in September from MoonPath Press, but I don’t know what comes next.

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Richard Widerkehr’s new book of poems, In The Presence Of Absence, will come out from MoonPath Press in 2017. He earned his M.A. from Columbia University and won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. He has two collections of poems: The Way Home (Plain View Press) and Her Story of Fire (Egress Studio Press), along with two chapbooks. Tarragon Books published his novel, Sedimental Journey, about a geologist in love with a fictional character. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Floating Bridge Review, Gravel, Naugatuck River Review, Cirque, Arts & Letters, and Mud Season Review. He has worked as a writing teacher and, later, as a case manager with the mentally ill.

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A few words about revising poems

 

This is a guest post by Bethany Reid.

I was taking my very first poetry class, from Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington, when I learned that Dylan Thomas’s executors found among his papers 67 drafts of “Fern Hill.” I was all raw courage then, and the notion of revision imprinted itself on me, a little like a German shepherd adopting a duckling. So when my students get discouraged about revision, when my writing friends tell me to stop revising anything, I tell them about “Fern Hill.” It isn’t that I don’t enjoy the madwoman stage of drafting a new poem, but my heart belongs to revision. And if you recently participated in NaPoWriMo — National Poetry Writing Month — then you have 30 new poems in your notebook, and the party is about to begin.

The word, revision, looks abstract, but it’s really fossil poetry, in the best Emersonian sense. That vis in the middle means that revising is seeing again. And I think of revision not as a single lens, but as a series of lenses.

Especially when I’m not sure where to begin revising, I take out a lens for word choice. Maybe I’ll circle all of the verbs in the poem. Just bringing them to my awareness (just seeing them) begins the process of making them stronger, and for deepening the poem as well. You can use this lens for each part of speech. Are your nouns concrete? Any adverbs rattling about and asking to be excused? Too many the’s or it’s?

I have another lens for line endings. Colleen McElroy taught me to read aloud only the end words of each line. (End words in the first stanza of “Fern Hill”: boughs, green, starry, climb, eyes, towns, leaves, barley, light). No, you don’t need a strong word every single time, but becoming aware of what you do have will alert you to missed potential, and strengthen the entire poem.

Once you’ve looked at line endings, take a quick look at line openings. (“Fern Hill” won’t seem as useful here, but notice that in addition to 8 repetitions of and, words like fields, time, golden, down, and sang occur. They are almost a précis of the poem.)

There is so much more you can do, I know. I ask questions. I take out separate lenses to add color words, smells (which I tend to neglect), or emotion. I read my poems aloud as I revise. I also like to play around with line length and stanza breaks. Sometimes I try putting a poem that’s not working into a form, a sonnet maybe or something more complex like a sestina. Just to see what happens. I carry my poems with me and read them away from my desk. Even submitting poems to journals and contests turns out to be a kind of lens. As my poems move into my send-out book, they get another read through. If they come back to me…I am willing to do it all again.

Eventually, there is an end-point. And I don’t mean a point of diminishing-returns (an expression I rather hate), or the famous Paul Valéry line: “Poems are never finished, only abandoned” (though I agree). With practice, I’ve learned not only how to revise my poems, but how to see when they satisfy me. You will, too.

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Bethany Reid’s most recent book, Sparrow, won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize. Recent publications include EIL, Clementine Unbound, Silver Birch, Del Sol and Cheat River Review. After 25 years of teaching, she retired early to take care of family and write. You can learn more about her at her blog (bethanyareid.com, formerly A Writer’s Alchemy).
 
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Seattle Sunday StringTown

StringTown is a publisher and a literary journal that brings (primarily) Northwest voices to a wider audience. On Sunday, September 14, 2014, you can hear some of those voices at a reading at Seattle’s Naked City Brewing & Taphouse.

The evening’s readers of poetry and fiction include Bethany Reid, Judith Skillman, Larry Crist, Polly Buckingham, Caroline Allen, Anita K. Boyle, James Bertolino and more, followed by a reception and signing. The event is free and you can find details by visiting StringTown Press on Facebook.

Chuckanut Sandstone…tonight!

The monthly poetry gathering of the Chuckanut Sandstone Writers Theater is this evening, Wednesday, October 9, 2013, at 7:00pm at the Firehouse Café in Fairhaven (Bellingham).

This month’s featured poet is Bethany Reid, who will read for the first 30 minutes followed by an open mic. Everyone is welcome to read original writings in all styles on all topics.

Bethany Reid is the author of Sparrow, winner of the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize from Writers and Books. Her manuscript was selected by Dorianne Laux and published by Big Pencil Press. She has also published a poetry chapbook, The Coyotes and My Mom (Bellowing Ark Press). Her poem “The Apple Orchard” was the 2011 winner of the Lois Cranston Memorial Prize from Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals. She teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at Everett Community College, and lives near Seattle with her husband and their three daughters.