Sunday, February 28, 2010

Poetry Contest

First Annual Hanover Poet Laureate Poetry Contest
(In Honor of National Poetry Month)

Please submit up to three poems by Monday, April 12, 2010.
E-mail poems as separate Word attachments without your name on them to bradyke@gmail.com.
Please include your age category and a brief biography in the text of the email.
Winners will be featured on the Hanover Poet Laureate blog.
Judges will include current and former Poets Laureate: Dana Larkin Sauers, Michael J. Hoover, Anna Manahan Bowman, and Kate Brady.

Age Categories:
1. First to Fourth Graders
2. Fifth to Eighth Graders
3. Ninth to Twelfth Graders
4. Adults

If you have questions, please send me an email. :)

Saturday, February 27, 2010

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a _____________"

In my column for this month, I included parts of Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." I'm hoping we can use this great model to write our own "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a ________" poems. Every week I facilitate a reading and writing group in a Chicago homeless shelter. This past Thursday we wrote a collaborative piece, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wrigley Field." It is posted under the comments section of this post. Whether you write one alone or as a collaboration, please post your poem as a comment to this post!

Poems and the City





Mai Linh and I chose to read by Lake Michigan in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. Making this choice, we also chose a soundtrack for our texts: cars humming behind us and cabs beeping on Lake Shore Drive. I'm struck by the seeming clash of quiet and sound here. However, sometimes poems in our minds are just as loud. For example, in this last photograph, I am reading Allen Ginsberg's Howl. I believe there is no better location to read his genius, change-the-system work than right in the middle of the action. We also read other poems by Melissa Carl, Dana Sauers, and Crystal Williams. :)

Perspective Photograph Challenge

My challenge to you this month is to take a picture of yourself or someone else reading a poem in a particular place. Then, write a caption, describing how perspective (or place) informs your interpretation of it. I've posted a few to get us started!

February Column

(Published in The Evening Sun on February 28, 2010)

While growing up, whenever we went on a trip, my family was sure to pack a copy of the “Merchandiser,” so we could take a picture reading it in a new place and send it back to the publication. Essentially, this ritual was a practice in perspective. Reading the same publication in different places surely changes the way you interpret the text. In the spirit of the “Merchandiser” photographs, I challenge you to think more deeply about perspective and its connection to reading and writing this month. Whether you travel to Antarctica or walk to the other side of the hall, your perspective changes.

For a writer, this change helps to build a body of work. Perspective is the hammer in a poet’s toolbelt. It helps a writer reach beneath the surface of an idea and taps into the depth and layers a poet loves to work with. For me, perspective is invaluable. It has influenced the voice, style, and content of my poems and inspired my first book manuscript.

I experienced the power of perspective first-hand. After growing up on a farm in Hanover and attending college in rural Virginia, I decided to pursue an MFA in Poetry in Chicago. At the time, I did not realize how much this move from country to city, East Coast to Midwest, would influence my work. However, living in this new, urban environment, I was suddenly able to write about the country, a topic I had barely scratched the surface of while living on the farm. Poems set in Hanover began to pour from my consciousness. At first this did not make sense to me, not until I understood the gifts perspective brings.

The main reason for this new ability was distance to reflect and think. I could now see my experiences at an arm’s length and write about them without my present location raising blinders. Suddenly, I was in a world where people do not fill their freezers with their own home-grown vegetables and pasture-raised steers, where the scent of horse manure is absent, and where cement replaces fields. In the absence of these expectations, each detail of the country stood out more starkly than before.

After the shock of these contrasts set in, and I began to write more about the country, I then began to notice connections. Before I knew it, I was traveling on the bus past the projects and making connections to home, to farm life. I know that this does not sound reasonable, but it happened. The most amazing connection I made was that people in the most rural and urban areas share a sense of grit. People know what it means to work hard and live off instinct. This epiphany led me to work on my first book manuscript, titled “Grit,” which takes the reader through my transition from country to city.

Perspective certainly comes with travel and distance. However, it can also appear when one is open to possibilities. The more ways you look at a situation or object, the more deeply you understand it. Wallace Stevens, a Modern poet, illustrates this well in his study, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In each stanza of the poem, he considers the blackbird in a different way.

Stevens opens the poem with:

"Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird."

His first study of the blackbird emphasizes perspective. He looks at this enormous, white landscape of “twenty. . .mountains”; yet, only the eye of the blackbird, the most minute detail, moves. In the fifth stanza, he continues:

"I do not know which to prefer—
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after."

Here the study submerges itself in ideology, as he ponders which perspective he likes better: the song or the moment after the song. The poem continues on for thirteen stanzas, each giving a different perspective of the blackbird. Stevens ends the poem with:

"It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs."

In this study of the blackbird, Stevens cues in on the blackbird’s alienation amid this winter storm and the seemingly never-ending night. Think of how different it would be to read this poem in the summer than during the blizzard we just experienced. This is the power of perspective.

Here is my challenge to you: Log onto my blog, http://poetlaureatehanover.blogspot.com, and post a photograph of yourself reading or writing in a particular place. Then, write a caption about how perspective informs your understanding of the text. I also hope this will inspire “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a _____” poems. Feel free to send them to me!

January Column

(Published in The Evening Sun on January 30, 2010)

With great honor and respect for those who came before me, I undertake my first column as Hanover's Poet Laureate. When Dana Larkin Sauers began her tenure as Poet Laureate, she sent out her "Letter to the World." This article, mailed to me in Virginia by my mother, became essentially the first words of our friendship. I wrote back, met her at Reader's Cafe, and the rest is history. Our friendship, fueled by poetry, has branched into my friendship with the other former Poets Laureate: Michael Hoover and Anna Bowman. The close relationships I forged with them began with the words of this column, and I hope to act as a similar link, bringing people together for the sake of words.

There is no doubt that poetry has become a mainstay in Hanover culture. The circle of Hanover Poets continues to grow in number and talent. I must say that without the work of the former Poets Laureate, the work I plan to do would not be possible. You have set a rock-hard foundation, and I hope to continue to build upon this throughout my tenure as Poet Laureate.

Though I currently do not live in Hanover, it will always be home to me, the place where I developed my character. I grew up on a horse farm just south of Hanover, and I carry that heritage along everywhere I go:

Poem for Hanover


It's a risk being from anywhere.
I am from soil and of soil.

When someone mentions birth, placenta,
I think horse, not human.
The first placenta I saw and carried in a bucket was my mare's.
She was okay with this, because I sang her calm,
the scent of my breath close to her nostrils.
Meanwhile, my father buried it in the woods
away from the dog.

A year later, we gelded the colt.
My sister, a pre-vet major, stored the testicles in a jar to study them.
I bragged about them to my friends at school and
my 6th grade crush turned from the front of the auditorium
to embarrass me during chorus.

I began to like him the day we helped our dads haul sawdust.
When they asked us to sweep the beds of the trucks together,
I hummed The Judds
and thought, What a great story to tell at our wedding!

I am from tradition, but of grit.
That's why I can take a shot of tequila without the lime or salt,
why I can discuss butchering during a meal.
That's why I can taste when the soil is fertile and dark,
ready for my knees.




As I begin to plant my own seeds as Poet Laureate, I have assembled a list of several goals to accomplish during my tenure. First, I will institute a Hanover Poet Laureate blog and facebook page. Since I live and work in Chicago, my visits back to Hanover for programming will be limited. However, in this technological age, I see no reason why we can't continue to build relationships to poetry and our community wherever we are.

The blog and facebook page will act as the main communications between you and me; however, I will also facilitate poetry-related activities each time I am in the Hanover area. Plans for my work include leading poetry workshops and competitions within the schools, publishing local work on the blog, and challenging the community to take part in Hanover's growing poetry scene. Please check out my blog at http://poetlaureatehanover.blogspot.com, and find me on facebook under “Hanover Poet Laureate.”

Whether you are someone who reads every day, or someone who hasn't read a poem since high school, you cannot deny that our world is packed full of relationships, metaphors, comparisons. Our world is essentially full of poetry. The challenge is to see how this art manifests itself in our lives and to record it on the page. We all have the capacity to notice and record; in fact, we are all poets in this act alone.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Power of Poetry

Every Thursday night I facilitate a reading and writing group at a Chicago homeless shelter. Since the past two Thursdays hugged Valentine's Day, I decided to focus on love poems with the men at the shelter. Last week we began with the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. At first, the theater of it all was funny and the text incomprehensible. However, after doing a reading in the balcony of the church where we meet, we sat down together to look at the text more closely. The results were amazing!

Besides the expected line, "I need to memorize some of these lines so that I can use them on some women," men were also enamored by the depth of Romeo's words. "Wow, Kate, Romeo really loves Juliet!" They really began to appreciate the precision and depth of Shakespeare's metaphors after analyzing the text and began to make connections to their own lives and their own worlds (far from Shakespeare's London). This makes me really appreciate the power of poetry and literature.

A few days ago, back at the shelter, we read non-traditional love poems: Dorianne Laux's "Facts About the Moon" and Stanley Kunitz's "Touch Me." These poems yielded even more success. Written in more contemporary language with more contemporary takes on the realities of love, these poems spoke to the men. Two men who had never felt poetry was accessible to them fell in love with words on Thursday night. What a beautiful thing!

My experiences creating and facilitating this program have only increased my faith that literacy works. It draws people together; it feeds confidence; it makes us see the world from a different perspective. Most of all, it heals us. If anyone is interested in starting a program like this in the community, please be in touch. I'd love to help you get started.