What triggers a poem is a pretty big topic, so I’ll take it in bits and return to it from time to time. Sometimes what triggers a poem might be a story about some social issue I care deeply about. It’ll start me ruminating, dreaming. Sometimes, it’ll start me doing something concrete or just noticing where I am in the now.

One story today struck my attention.

U.S. Hunger on the Rise

See if you can make a poem out of that. Add it here on the comments, send it to me by e-mail, or if you have video capability send a short video clip to me at
http://www.tokbox.com/Vic798

The toxbox address is case sensitive with no period or / at the end.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Read about Nov. 18 Morgantown event »

Courtesy photo

Mountainline Poetry in Motion deadline Nov. 13 (announcement courtesy Jeff Fisher)

Mountain Line Transit is interested in setting up Poetry in Motion. Poetry in Motion will be an on going project where local poets’ poems will be displayed on our buses. This is a great opportunity for the West Virginia community to display their talent. Ideally the poems we are looking to display would represent West Virginia, the Morgantown area, or transportation in the area but all pieces will be accepted.

Read more about sending poems »

Ensō. Some artists draw an Ensō every day.

Zenclay Gallery, 2862 University Ave., Morgantown, W.Va., often has poetry events, and yesterday I missed a good one. The 10th was my birthday, and I was so busy having a good time that I missed an important announcement about a Morgantown event that has now passed. My apologies. I am certain the event came off beautifully without me, but I do wish I had been there. The information Lori Wilson put together about the poets is important enough for me to post the announcement anyway, just to have these two people on the MountainWord record. Some of you might want to read some of the work of these two writers: Michael Wurster and Judith R. Robinson.

Here’s the way it was… I just didn’t notice it until last night about 10 p.m.:

Reminder: Pittsburgh poets reading (announcement courtesy of Lori Wilson via Ted Webb)

When: 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 10

Where: Zenclay Gallery, 2862 University Ave.

Michael Wurster will read from The British Detective (Main Street Rag, 2009) and Judith R. Robinson will read from Dinner Date (Finishing Line Press, 2009).

The reading is free and open to the public.

Great food, coffees and teas avaiable before and after the reading.

Continue reading about these extraordinary poets »

A poet constantly zooms through transparent boundaries. No clichés. Every line floats on its own organic design. A poet sometimes startles us with his wild talk, always making up new ways of saying things.

I think of Gregory Corso’s lines:
“O I would like to break my teeth / by means of expressing a radiator!”

Mexican poet Octavio Paz addresses this notion in a poem called “No More Cliches.” Paz, who died in 1998, won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.

No More Clichés

Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.

Enchanting smile
Any man would be under your spell,
Oh, beauty of a magazine.

How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
To your obsessive illusion
To your manufactured fantasy.

But today I won’t make one more Cliché
And write this poem to you.
No, no more clichés.

This poem is dedicated to those women
Whose beauty is in their charm,
In their intelligence,
In their character,
Not on their fabricated looks.

This poem is to you women,
That like a Shahrazade wake up
Every day with a new story to tell,
A story that sings for change
That hopes for battles:
Battles for the love of the united flesh
Battles for passions aroused by a new day
Battle for the neglected rights
Or just battles to survive one more night.

Yes, to you women in a world of pain
To you, bright star in this ever-spending universe
To you, fighter of a thousand-and-one fights
To you, friend of my heart.

From now on, my head won’t look down to a magazine
Rather, it will contemplate the night
And its bright stars,
And so, no more clichés.

–Octavio Paz

“When you write a poem, you should never sugarcoat the truth or skirt reality.” — Terence Winch

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“Remember to use your five senses and use imagery.” — graduate student Latasha Weatherspoon

West Virginia Poet Laureate Irene McKinney is reading in Morgantown, 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 22. The Zenclay Gallery, 2862 University Ave. Free, open to public. Books for sale and signing before and after the reading. P.S. Take advantage of the great food at Zenclay Cafe. – Ted Webb

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Also, on Facebook, my Morgantown correspondent Ted Webb posted a trailer to a Keats movie I think MountainWord readers would enjoy:

From Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” — Photo by Vic Burkhammer

I’m always making lists. How about you? Things to do, maybe what to buy at the store, items I want to make sure I pack for a trip or a day at work, perhaps  parts of a video to tie together.

The list poem is related to that desire to hold things together,  glue the kaleidoscope. It’s an ancient form of poetry and one you might find anywhere (even as in “found poem”). You’ll see examples of it in the Old Testament and in recent work by Jorie Graham.  A beginning writer might write one in school. Whitman and Borges were masters at it.  My university poetry teacher Winston Fuller sometimes gave us brilliant examples of it.

You’ll find list poems in every language, every era. You’ll see them on cave walls, in the world’s earliest paper archive, in Indo-Pacific literature, Icelandic, Norwegian and Anglo-Saxon rune poems, in the work of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Maxine Kumin, Frances Ponge, Henry Miller, Shakespeare, Pushkin, from rap to country music to the structure of symphonies. The list poem can be one of the easiest kinds of poems to write and one of the most powerful, but just the same — perhaps most difficult. It relies on the list being just right. When the poem’s apt, it takes off magically.

On Facebook, Ted Webb points out a powerful list poem by West Virginia poet Doug Van Gundy — “West Virginia vs. Extractive Industry”…. The poem is made from several things layered together about how “extractive industry” has compromised our beautiful state. Read it here in storySouth.

NEW YORK — West Virginia native Jayne Anne Phillips was named one of five novelists nominated for the annual National Book Award on Wednesday.
Phillips’ novel “Lark & Termite” focuses on a teenage girl and her mute brother growing up in small-town West Virginia in the 1950s, and on their father, fighting in the Korean War.
Phillips was born in Buckhannon and attended West Virginia University. Her first novel, “Machine Dreams,” was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was chosen by The New York Times as one of 1984’s 12 best books of the year.
Besides “Lark & Termite,” National Book Award fiction judges picked Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin,” Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” Marcel Theroux’s “Far North” and Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “American Salvage” as finalists for the fiction award.
T.J. Stiles‘ “The First Tycoon,” a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Greg Grandin’s “Fordlandia,” about Henry Ford’s ill-fated effort to set up a colony in Brazil, were non-fiction nominees, along with Sean B. Carroll’s “Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species”; David M. Carroll’s journal of New England wildlife “Following the Water”; and Adrienne Mayor’s “The Poison King,” a biography of the Greco-Persian ruler Mithradates.
Numerous books about Charles Darwin, born 200 years ago, came out in 2009, including Young People’s Literature finalist “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith,” by Deborah Seligman. Other nominees were Phillip Hoose’s “Claudette Colvin,” David Small’s “Stitches,” Laini Taylor’s “Lips Touch” and Rita Williams-Garcia’s “Jumped.”
The winners, each of whom will receive $10,000, will be announced at a Nov. 18 ceremony in New York. Humorist Andy Borowitz will host and honorary medals will be presented to Gore Vidal and Dave Eggers.

–From staff, wire reports

Mark Brazaitis and Katie Fallon: Reading presented by the Department of English and The Eberly College of Arts & Sciences, 7:30 p.m., Monday, Nov. 2, 2009, Gold Ballroom, Mountainlair. Free and open to the public.

Brazaitis is the author of “The Other Language: Poems,” winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize, and three books of fiction. He directs WVU’s Creative Writing Program.

Click here to read more about him at WVU’s English Department online.

Fallon, who graduated from WVU’s MFA program in 2003, writes creative nonfiction. On leave from her position teaching creative writing at Virginia Tech, she is education director of the West Virginia Raptor Rehabilitation Center, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring injured birds of prey to the wild and conducting environmental education programs for the public.

Click here to visit her Web site.

Award-winning author Ethel Morgan Smith will offer a free reading hosted by Morgantown Poets, 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009, at Monongalia Arts Center, 107 High St., Morgantown, W.Va. Smith is the author of “From Whence Cometh My Help: The African American Community at Hollins College.”

For more background, click on her WVU link…

Ted Webb tells me her work has appeared in The New York Times, Callaloo, African American Review, ThatMinorityThing.com, and other national and international outlets. She has won numerous awards, has been a Fulbright Scholar and a visiting scholar at Bread Loaf Writers Conference and elsewhere. He says her novel-in-progress, “The House of Flowers,” placed second for the West Virginia Writers, Inc. Annual Writing Competition, and her play for the stage, “African Violets,” placed third in the same contest.

Her personal Web site is Ethelmorgansmith.com.