Pulitzer Remix for National Poetry Month

April is Poetry Month! To celebrate, I've joined the Pulitzer Remix, sponsored by The Found Poetry Review. There are 85 poets across 7 countries participating. Each poet will create found poetry from one of the 85 Pulitzer Prize winners. 85 poets, a poem a day, 30 days.  

If you go to the site (www.pulitzerremix.com/), you'll see the book covers of all 85 Pulitzer Prize winners. Click on a title to read the day's poem from that book. If you want to know more, here's a link to the project: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/about/ .

My book is GUARD OF HONOR, the 1949 Pulitzer winner by James Gould Cozzens. If you want to check on how I'm doing, starting on April 1, I'll be remixing here: http://www.pulitzerremix.com/category/guard-of-honor. You'll see an image of the book cover for each day. If you hover over the image, you'll see the day the poem was posted and  a teaser line. Click on the image to read that day's poem.

Interview with Poet Ryan Teitman

Every clock in our house
had unfinished business.
Every note my father
struck in the dark
before he left for work
was another life waiting—

-from “Hard Light Through Hemlock,” by Ryan Teitman

Ryan Teitman, a 2004 graduate of Penn State’s English Department, is the author of the poetry collection Litany for the City. This, his first book, won the A. Poulin Jr. Prize and is published by BOA Editions. Teitman, formerly the Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of an  AWP Intro Journal Award in poetry, the winner of the Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, and a finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Third Coast, and many other journals. Teitman worked as a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia before earning an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English at Indiana University. He currently works as the Emerging Writing Lecturer at Gettysburg College.

*   *   *

Ryan and I met in 2009 at Indiana University. He was a student in IU’s MFA program and I had the wonderful good fortune to read a few of his

Review of Entering the House of Awe by Susanna Childress

[The review was first posted in Poetry Matters.]

Susanna Childress

Entering the House of Awe

New Issues Press

http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/

By the numbers

ISBN 978-1-936970-00-1
Publication: 2011
Total pages: 85
Number of poems: 43

__________

I first met Susanna Childress in the spring of 2008 while I was attending the Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary. A professor at Hope College, she had been brought in as a guest instructor to teach a poetry course in the Writing-as-Ministry track. Susanna’s influence, both as a teacher and through her poetry, is one of the main reasons why I am involved in poetry today. I was swept away by her first book Jagged With Love. A fan of her writing, I am no less in love with this, her second book, discussed below. I also had the opportunity to interview her. Click here for the interview and to read more about her. —Nancy Chen Long

__________

Susanna Childress’ second book of poetry Entering the House of Awe is no quick read. It is filled with richly-layered poems that invite the reader to stay a while, to come back again and again. The title itself is the reader’s first clue of the layered-ness that will be found in the poems: the

An Interview with Poet Susanna Childress

[The interview was first posted in Poetry Matters.]

I want what you want, and the stamen, and the sun.
-from “Sweetly from the Tree,” Susanna Childress

Susanna Childress holds a Master’s from The University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from Florida State University. Her first book Jagged with Love was selected by Billy Collins for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin and was awarded the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Her second book Entering the House of Awe was published in 2011 by New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University and was awarded the 2012 Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. She has received an AWP Intro Journals Award, the National Career Award in Poetry from the National Society of Arts and Letters, and a Lilly post-doctoral fellowship. She teaches at Hope College and lives in Holland, Michigan.

*   *   *

I met Susanna back in 2008 when she was teaching a poetry intensive at the Earlham School of Religion, a seminary in the Quaker tradition, which I was attending at the time. Susanna’s influence,

The Cleave of Color

by Nancy Chen Long

(originally published in the 2011 issue of Weave Magazine)

puce. i know that	it’s a little like purple, or similar kind of
color. a little boy once said	dream
it to me	when we get older,
—we were coloring—	our petals blanched
in a field of bluebells	—our ancestors chanting in our memory
under the beam of a chestnut tree:	we are all one, child.
i, who had drawn a cart-wheeling girl,	preferring to be insular,
i didn’t want to color her.	humans graft color with artifice and so
i wanted her to be white.	what is real seems real if some other says it is.
there is no white	washing our imperfections,
silly, the boy said to me.	intellect may say we are vapor, while experience says
but you are	to stay the course, even though nothing can be seen except
white	flecks against a foreboding sky. stay the course,
i said	even if happiness should look like a point, even if
looking at his timberwolf	skin betrays the truth. what can be said about the
eyes and tumbleweed	dispersions of words, chaos and form—they are
shadows. he shook his head. no one is	ad infinitum—
white. i am peach, and	our options being finite, then
you are maize. to prove it,	let us broaden our palette—
he raised the crayon to my skin	in order to honor the original—
and the color disappeared against me.	yes, this is so like a dream. and so
i gasped. he did not know	there is no cold, there is only distance from the sun. change
the rules. let’s race, i said. i’ll race you to	the boundary of
the purple house.	what is considered home,
he said, but	those many rooms in one mansion, spinning,
racing	hurling through space. this picture
makes no sense	—a single stone in a galaxy of stones—
and besides, it’s not	the only thing that matters. the flash of
purple, it’s puce.	form is flesh, the imprint of color.
to prove it, he searched	through archives of memory,
everyplace	where we once danced to some familiar chant
trying to find it.	—still, it hums, ambient, steadfast.

Dot Product: The Cross Between Particle Theory and Pointillism

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat, 1884; image credit: Public Domain

Dot Product: The Cross Between Particle Theory and Pointillism 
(originally published in the 2011 issue of Paper Nautilus)

  Ø

Up close, everything is made up

of elementary particles, tiny dots.

They vibrate, shimmer, dance

wildly.

Maybe because they’re agitated,

maybe because they’re excited,

it doesn’t matter.

                  The countless tiny particles

that makes us and fill us

are moving, always moving,
even if just a quiver.

  ω

At a distance, anything

of any shape

will look like a dot, a mere point.

An insignificant dot risks

being missed

unless it is named.

And so those who explicate

have given a name—point particles—

to the near nothingness

of our elementary dancing dots.

And the explicators say

those point particles at the root of everything—

idealized—they have no structure,

have no mass.

They take up no space.

Up close

then, perhaps nothing

can look like a dot

because there is no

thing to see.

And yet—

here we are. We, who are made of quivering particles,

we have mass.

We take up space.

ℵ₁

At a distance, a huddle of dots                                   

will take shape, will take color.

Take pointillism: a technique of painting

that uses countless numbers

of colored dots, distinct and unblended dots

all on the flat plane of a raw canvas.

Point after point of pure and different color.

                                    When viewed from afar,

the dots will be marshaled into solid shapes

by the mind:

perhaps into the shape of a proper parasol

held by a woman,

a bustled woman,

prim and detached,

a monkey at her feet,

a romping dog by her side.

In the distance, a boat at full sail,

white and billowy.

And those dots, perhaps a division

of blues, purples, oranges, and yellows,

will converge and blend into some other color—

let’s imagine into the fragrant green of a grassy field.

Form and color, forged

from the smallest dots with no structure.

ℵ₂

At a distance, God is a pointillist painter

and time a ready canvas.

At a distance, the universe is a painting in some art gallery

            and evolution a paint-by-point particles adventure.

At a distance, humanity is a palette of constrained color
            and I am one dot, dancing wildly.

Review of Wild Flight by Christine Rhein

[I originally posted this review on 30-Jun-2012 on Poetry Matters.]

Christine Rhein

Wild Flight

Texas Tech University Press

http://ttupress.org/

By the numbers

ISBN 978-0896726215

Publication: 2008

Total pages: 120

Number of poems: 47

__________

It was the fabulous Molly Peacock, one of my mentors in Spalding's MFA program, who introduced me to Wild Flight and the multifaceted poetry of Christine Rhein. In addition to the recommendation-review below, I also had the opportunity to interview Christine. Click here for the interview and to read more about her. —Nancy Chen Long

__________

Christine Rhein's debut bookWild Flight takes the reader on no ordinary journey, from World-War II Germany to contemporary Detroit. To keep us securely fastened in our seats, Rhein provides threads of continuity, most notably through a layering of various facets of flight, such as refugees fleeing