Author: karenanhweilee

Poet, novelist, literary critic, prayer warrior, and novice harpist.

susan * vanzanten

A distinguished colleague at one of our CCCU campuses, Dr. Susan VanZanten of Seattle Pacific University (home of a low-res M.F.A. Program and the literary journal, Image), announces her new publication on one of my favorites:  Emily Dickinson!

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Susan writes:  “I’m delighted to announce that my new book on Emily Dickinson is now available.    Written for a general audience, it provides an introduction to reading Dickinson that helps readers unpack Dickinson’s intense but brief poems, supplying historical background and personal stories in order to help readers to embark upon their own meditative journeys with Dickinson.”

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Prayer:  “The soul should always stand ajar. / Ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”

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amy * uyematsu

Los Angeles adventures continue at this week’s MLA Convention, where I’ll preside & present on the session, “Transnational Feminist Spaces.”

Our brilliant panelists are Josephine Park, author of Apparitions of Asia (Oxford U. Press) and Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; erin Khuê Ninh, author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter (NYU Press) and a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara; see my August interview with Professor Ninh here.

Our respondent is the splendid poet Sandra Lim, author of the award-winning Lovelist Grotesque (Kore Press) and a professor at the University of Massachusetts.  Professor Lim reads on the audio poetry CD, Autumnal: A Collection of Elegies.

On a special excursion to the Huntington Library, fifty of us will go behind the scenes to learn about digital preservation &  material book culture.  Prior to university teaching, I worked part-time in archives & special collections, so book preservation – in any shape, spirit, or form – fascinates me.   Many thanks to the MLA for arranging this!

 

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On Saturday, January 22, I’ll read with Amy Uyematsu (amazing poet-mathematician!) and poets of Indivisible: Anthology of South Asian American Poetry at the Japanese National Museum in Los Angeles.  Thanks to Pireeni Sundaralingam for coordinating this event!

   

Prayer:  Heartfelt gratitude to poet-friends who share their time, love & vision freely & with marvelous grace.  This world is a brighter ‘scape!

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denise * levertov

 

  

 

In Poetry as Prayer: Denise Levertov, Murray Bodo describes six ways to “pray” poems:  “Prayer involves discipline, perseverance, and a humility that comes from knowing that you cannot control God… You learn to pray by praying, and you learn to appreciate poetry by reading it” (91).

1. Be Committed.

Denise Levertov’s commitment to her art was a true vocation.  She made hard decisions throughout her life in order to protect and nourish her writing.  (92)

2. Try to Write as a Way of Prayer.

What I learned from Denise was to trust my words to take me where I would not have gone without them; to trust the first word to lead to the first line, the second line, and then on to stanza after stanza.  Prayer-words will likewise lead to silences and pauses not unlike those blank spaces on the page, those pauses at the end of lines… (95)

Denise Levertov was one of the most intellectually honest people I have ever met.  She would not say what she did not believe, simply in order to please another.  She trusted the truth, and her poems shimmer with a truthful articulation that frees her work from faddish posturing. (98)

4. Plan Well.

Without a course of action to pursue in the face of injustice, Levertov said, people only become frustrated and angry – another kind of violence. (100)

5. Believe in Memory.

The injunction, “Remember,” is one of the most frequent exhortations in the Bible, for it is in remembering the works of God that we are able to define who we are and see the world around us with God’s eye.  (102)

6. Know that Faith is a Journey.

For faith is a gift given to those who are open to receiving it.

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Prayer:  Lines from Levertov’s “Making Peace.”

“A line of peace might appear / if we restructured the sentences our lives are making…./peace, a presence, / … might pulse then, / stanza by stanza into the world, / each act of living/ one of its words….”

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y * madrone

New catalog available from Tupelo Press, information about the Colrain Manuscript Conference, two more days to submit to the Dorset Prize, and a new poem by y madrone of Columbia College Chicago: “Tulip is the bravest flower, I mean bird.” 

I love this poem’s sparse, elliptical imagery.  With an eloquent economy of words… tulips are birds, are pigeons, are ubiquitous… are tulips.  

Favorite lines:  “And so are we, sort of.  Tulips: / most prolific worldwide.”
          — y madrone

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A short biography:  y madrone currently lives in Chicago, IL via Olympia, Washington via Baku, Ahzerbaijan.

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cynthia * arrieu * king

Thank you, Cindy, for sharing your gift of poetry, which arrived in the mail today!  What a treat as I emerge from hiberating in the post-finals Chocolate Cave of Grading (i.e. as my beloved students know, I eat chocolate while I grade final projects.  Well, actually… I eat chocolate, regardless of grading, weather, et cetera). 

Congratulations on your stunning collection from Octopus! So sad I missed your November visit to Pomona College… 

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Now for a cup of rose & peach chamomile tea. 

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emily * dickinson

Today is Miss Dickinson’s birthday!  Happiness.  Years ago, when Amherst College opened the Homestead & Evergreens to guests, I took a summer day to visit.

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Although I grew up in Massachusetts, my childhood forays into the Berkshires were rare, so this was quite a treat!

Here is Jorie Graham’s essay on her visit to Amherst.

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Thanks to Logan Esdale, who introduced me to poet & visual artist  Jen Bervin‘s “The Dickinson Fascicles,” based on Miss Dickinson’s “variant words:”

The variant words are preceeded by the + mark and often appear listed in clusters after the poem but before the horizontal line Dickinson drew to signal the end of a poem. To read the variants, you move backwards through the poem trying to find the point of insertion, the corollary word or phrase (preceeded by a +) that the variants refer to in the poem. They are sometimes quite close in meaning to the marked word, but in other instances, they are as far ranging as “+ world, + selves + sun.”

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Prayer:  “Faith — is the pierless bridge / Supporting what We see / Unto the Scene that we do not — / Too slender for the eye.”  ~ Emily Dickinson

 

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dg * nanouk * okpik

I recently enjoyed Arthur Sze’s article on the Alaskan Inuit woman poet, dg nanouk okpik.  The article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of American Poet (Academy of American Poets).

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A Living Testament by Arthur Sze

“dg nanouk okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit, and was raised by an Irish and German family in Anchorage, Alaska. Her family had oceanfaring boats and, growing up, she fished in many rivers, lakes, and seaports. As a poet, dg nanouk okpik wants to incorporate—to embody—Inuit mythology and worldview into finely crafted poems in English. She thus draws on her Inupiat heritage, but she is firmly rooted in the complexities, tensions, and challenges of our contemporary world. She writes with clarity—’she prepares // the poultice in the mortar bowl, / cotton grass, seal liver, rainwater’—and she frequently employs the image of a map as a way of locating oneself in the natural world.”

 

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melusine * woman

Here are two new poems at Melusine: Woman of the 21st Century, edited by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom.  Melusine is “an on-line journal of literature and art by women (but not only women) about women (and just about everything else).”  I love the artwork in this issue.

Deep Sea Dolls

Deep Sea Dolls by Lindsey Bucklew


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This past Saturday, I  had the pleasure of sharing poetry with a warm-hearted audience who emerged on a rainy afternoon in San Diego.  Sandra Alcosser, Teresa Chuc, Craig Cotter, Seretta Martin, and I read from Lowell Jaeger’s anthology.  Many of Sandra’s M.F.A. students attended the reading & volunteered to read aloud poems from the anthology, too.

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Prayer: For students… who are our future, as Terry Tempest Williams says.

 

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