Just Sav

Structure and Style: Beneath all the hoof prints:

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:45:31 -0400

Structure and Style: Beneath all the hoof prints::

I’ve known little of science
but understood the heart beats
like a caged god. I’ve been too something
my whole damn life. I’ve buried chandeliers,
turned domestic work
into love. I’ve traced an elegy
to its teeth.
It looked like pushing
in reverse.
I’ve been having a hard time
separating the…

My Writing Process: Let Go and Study

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 06:40:30 -0400

At this point, it’s clear that I let myself get bogged down by teaching. My goal with this blog was to talk about books, music, and movies (and sometimes other things), but I can’t remember the last time I blogged about something I read, and that’s sad because I’ve read some fantastic literature lately.

Teaching hasn’t just affected my blogging; it’s really had an impact on my writing. I have realized that I have to find a balance where I make time for what I need to do, and writing is something I need to do. I have a manuscript that I’ve been trying to edit and revise for months now, but usually I just sit down when I have a few spare moments and try to pour over a poem or two. This is not working because I’m not making any progress. So for the last few weeks, I’ve been trying something new.

Let go: The very first thing I’ve had to do is let the manuscript go. It’s the end of the semester and I clearly don’t have time to focus on it right now, so I’ve sent it to a couple of readers. Even though I do keep thinking about how particular poems need a lot of work, I have to let them go for now. They’re in the readers’ hands and I can worry about them once I get the feedback.

Study: Even if finding time to write is hard to do at the current moment, I can find time to read. Teaching and grading essays uses a lot of mental energy and reading is a process of renewal. For a while now, I’ve made it a point to read at least a little bit of a novel each day, but I’ve begun to realize the importance of also reading poetry, and not just any poetry: I need to reading the poems and poets that are going to help me improve as a writer. I’m writing a very specific type of book, and I need to surround myself with poets who write about similar topics and with poets who are working with language the way I am and aspire to. Writing is a process, and we’re continually growing and maturing, even as we work through the same piece we’ve been working on for months or even years. Part of what will make me a better writer is dedicating myself to studying poetry as I write. I lost sight of that somewhere between my classes, committees, and task teams.

This doesn’t mean that my work as an instructor isn’t important or that I’m not going to continue to strive to be the best instructor and faculty member that I can be. But it does mean that I am going to carve out some more time for writing because if I’m not writing and working to grow as a writer, I find myself unhappy and frustrated, and that has a profound affect on everything else in my life.

I have officially been studied, y'all!

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:23:06 -0400

I spent part of my day talking to an Appalachian Literature class about poetry—my poetry. It was an awesome experience, for so many different reasons.

Oh, Boston, I am sending love and light to you on this sad, dark day.

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:25:44 -0400

Oh, Boston, I am sending love and light to you on this sad, dark day.

Structure and Style: After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong about the Sadness of Men Who Love Men

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 21:34:08 -0400

Structure and Style: After All These Years You Know They Were Wrong about the Sadness of Men Who Love Men:

structureandstyle:

It’s Palm Springs and you’ve slipped away
from a day of swimming and drinking to lie
for a minute with your eyes closed
in the other room while the air-conditioner
moan-groans outside the window—your body
chilled from sunburn and untouched
for months. Startled from near sleep
you hear a…

Structure and Style: Aunt Eloe Schools the Scarecrow

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 20:29:24 -0400

Structure and Style: Aunt Eloe Schools the Scarecrow:

structureandstyle:

As the crow flies, you say? Come now you god
of the crossroads, I’m talking ravens here.
Corvids are corvids, yes, but like a dog

compared to a wolf you can’t call a crow
a raven and have the word “nevermore”
mean the same thing. Now, two facts: ravens mate

for life, but this raven, let’s call…

penamerican: Happy Birthday, Maya Angelou, born 4 April 1928 12...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:41:05 -0400

penamerican:

Happy Birthday, Maya Angelou, born 4 April 1928

12 Remarkable Maya Angelou Quotes

The honorary duty of a human being is to love.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

Talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

Life loves the liver of it.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

When you learn, teach, when you get, give.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

Structure and Style: The Beauty of Busted Fruit

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:51:53 -0400

Structure and Style: The Beauty of Busted Fruit:

structureandstyle:

When we were children, we traced our knees,
shins, and elbows for the slightest hint of wound,
searched them for any sad red-blue scab marking us
both victim and survivor.

All this before we knew that some wounds can’t heal,
before we knew the jagged scars of Great-Grandmother’s
amputated legs,…

soulswooned: Srly.

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 20:00:36 -0400

soulswooned:

Srly.

Structure and Style: What We Take With Us

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 20:57:21 -0400

Structure and Style: What We Take With Us:

structureandstyle:

I make them memorize soliloquies,
some lines to keep, should they
be taken prisoner, like John McCain,
in some foreign jail, no words to read,
no paper to write, just the wild ranting
of Hamlet, Macbeth, to take
them through the darkest nights.
I urge them to know Emily,
Wordsworth, Whitman, some…

Structure and Style: Fear of Happiness

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:06:10 -0500

Structure and Style: Fear of Happiness:

structureandstyle:

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,
Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,
Though someone always said I’d be all right—
Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad
(The…

theparisreview: “A sign on the door, which visitors in the past have found distasteful, made...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:54:18 -0500

theparisreview:

“A sign on the door, which visitors in the past have found distasteful, made emphatically clear the owner’s unwillingness to deal with people of decidedly unliterary tastes: ‘No law books, no text books, no science books. ONLY POETRY!’ ”

Read more from Rhoda Feng on the legendary Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I must go here:

theparisreview: Brace yourselves: great books as emojis. (Yes,...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:39:10 -0500

theparisreview:

Brace yourselves: great books as emojis. (Yes, that’s The Grapes of Wrath.)

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

Photo

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:28:12 -0500

One Today by Richard Blanco

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:33:16 -0500

structureandstyle:

For today’s poem, I want to direct you to The New York Times for the full-text of “One Today” by the 2013 inaugural poet Richard Blanco. Both of us at Structure and Style are proud of our President and thrilled that he was re-elected, but regardless of your political leanings, this poem is beautiful, so read it and give “thanks for a love/ that loves you back”.

-S

Structure and Style: If

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:30:23 -0500

Structure and Style: If:

structureandstyle:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give…

Structure and Style: That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:48:53 -0500

Structure and Style: That Now Are Wild And Do Not Remember:

structureandstyle:

Where did you go to, when you went away?
It is as if you step by step were going
Someplace elsewhere into some other range
Of speaking, that I had no gift for speaking,
Knowing nothing of the language of that place
To which you went with naked foot at night
Into the wilderness there elsewhere in…

Structure and Style: Where Go the Boats

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:38:52 -0500

Structure and Style: Where Go the Boats:

structureandstyle:

Dark brown is the river,
Golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
Castles of the foam,
Boats of mine a-boating—
Where will all come home?

On goes the river,
And out past the mill,
Away down the valley,
Away down the hill.

Away down…

Structure and Style: Dawn Revisited

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 19:49:20 -0500

Structure and Style: Dawn Revisited:

structureandstyle:

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits—-
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is…

wwnorton: “Maybe only poets should be allowed to write...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 22:22:15 -0500

wwnorton:

“Maybe only poets should be allowed to write memoirs, because they know that our perception is partial, our recollection is worse, and the world is made of shards and fragments that make patterns, but leave gaps and sharp edges. Nick Flynn’s excellent new memoir embraces the unknown and unknowable as the very core of our experience.” — Rebecca Solnit, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Nick Flynn’s memoir, The Reenactments, will be in stores on January 7, 2013. It chronicles the surreal experience of being on set during the making of the film Being Flynn, from his best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and watching the central events of his life reenacted: his father’s long run of homelessness and his mother’s suicide. Enter to win an advance copy of The Reenactments on Goodreads today.