It’s the last week of my online class, Writing the Short Poem, and again, it has been a stellar experience!  I am so gratified by the openness and genuine interest that students bring to these classes.  Working with them is such a pleasure–it feeds my own writing and thinking about poetry.  I know it’s a huge cliche, but I really do learn as much from them as they learn from me.  If all goes as planned, Writing the Short Poem will be offered again online through The Loft during the next winter session in early 2013. 

Currently, registration is open for Poetry Inspired by Art, also online through The Loft, beginning June 6.  Click on the class title or go to my Workshops page for more info and to register. 

 The plan for these online classes is that I will teach a new class I’ve proposed for intermediate and advanced poets in the fall, called “Triggering Poetic Inspiration” and using Richard Hugo’s excellent book The Triggering Town as a framework (awating approval), then  Writing the Short Poem in the winter and Poetry Inspired by Art in the summer.  My goal is to have a different class each session to provide variety and to allow students who want to work with me for more than one session a way to do so without repeating (though repeating is allowed!).

Next month, (May 11-12) I will be reading and teaching a workshop in Bemidji, Minnesota, as part of the Bemidji Community Art Center’s Spoken Word Series .  Click on the link or go to my Schedule page for all the info.  The event is also part of The Great Twin Cities Poetry Read Road Show .

Take care everybody, and enjoy spring!

Here’s a portion of the grant proposal explaining the project:

As a result of the recent U.S.occupation of Iraq, a number of antiquities that were previously un-excavated showed up for sale.  One of the types of items that has recently appeared on the antiquities market is the Babylonian Incantation Bowl, created during the 6^th -8^th Century, CE.  An Incantation Bowl is an unglazed pottery bowl, whose concave surface is decorated with a demon figure in the middle, and an incantation against a particular fear written in Aramaic in spiral fashion around the circumference.  The bowls were created for specific families or individuals, as talismans against fears.  Once the bowl was completed, it was buried upside down at the threshold of the home to ward off the demon.

 We currently live in a culture of fear.  Fear of the “other” invades the modern American psyche, with our polarized political landscape and demonization of other cultures. Our climate is changing, leading to hurricanes, droughts and tsunamis. Our safety at home is threatened, with rampant reports of child abductions, home invasions, and domestic violence. Our health is under constant threat from carcinogens in our environment, genetically-modified foods in our grocery stores, and tumor-inducing radiation from our cell phones. Our children will not survive, we’re told, without the proper car seats, exactly the right nutrition, and constant, suffocating supervision.

This is the perfect time to re-introduce the Incantation Bowl.

For this project, I have asked visual artist Tiffany Besonen to create bowls on which to paint poems that I will write as incantations against modern fears.  This will be a series of poems starting with personal fears and moving into national and global ones. I will use and adapt the structure of the incantations on the Babylonian bowls.

The project will consist of 20 bowls, each with a different incantation poem inscribed on it.

I chose Besonen as the visual artist because we have collaborated together successfully in the past, and her work speaks to this project.  The sewing pattern paper with which she will construct the bowls echoes the color and texture of the Babylonian bowls, and the re-purposing of what has been a domestic and “female” material echoes the home-oriented nature of these objects. Besonen is an accomplished artist who has had shows all over MN, as well as in NYC, and who has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards, including an MSAB grant.

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There are other elements to the project, but I don’t want to remove all the mystery! I want to give special and unending thanks to Jennifer Heath and Heather Hardester who were there when the seed of this idea was planted, and whose encouragement and brainstorming helped it take root.

My warmest congratulations go out to all of the other grantees, especially poets Heid Erdrich, Kris Bigalk, Wendy Brown Baez, Matt Mauch, Jude Nutter, Bao Phi, and Guante.  I hope I didn’t miss anyone! It is a group I am proud and amazed to be included in, and I admire the work of all of these poets, most of whom I know personally.  Minnesota is home to an incredibly diverse and talented group of poets and writers.  It’s a fantastic place to live and work.  Even when there’s no snow.

Cathedral

Under the lancet arch of pines
we follow snow’s tracery
between dripstones,
across transept paths,
as jays cry from corbelled branches
at the finial-perched hawk.

We ski the apse,
enter the nave,
where embattlements fade
in the tree-mullioned light
and our gargoyles smile
for this one cloistered breath.

First up is the online poetry class I’m teaching for The Loft Literary Center, starting Feb. 6.  The class runs until April 15, and you can get all the info and register HERE.

Plans are also in the works for a poetry reading and workshop in Bemidji, MN in early May as an extension of The Great Twin Cities Poetry Read.  I will be reading with Matt Mauch, Paula Cisewski, and Sean Hill. Half-day workshops are also planned. Scheduling is in the preliminary stages–I’ll keep you posted.

A little later in May, I’ll be teaching for what I think is the 12th year (11th, maybe?) at the Young Author’s Conference in Thief River Falls, MN.  The students are younger than the students I usually work with, which is a lot of fun, and I get to see some writer friends that I don’t see any other time: Heidi Grosch, Bill Durbin, Freya Manfred and many others.  It’s a fantastic event–really sparks kids’ interest in writing.

Further out, I’ve agreed to judge poetry for The Talking Stick, a publication very near and dear to me, as it is the first place I was ever published as a poet. Winners will be honored at the book launch event in September. I’m amazed and thrilled to find the journal and its sponsor, the Jackpine Writers’ Bloc, going strong after so many years.  It’s a fantastic publication, and I encourage all of you to submit.  Just don’t tell me you’re submitting, so I can be objective in my judging. The deadline is Feb. 20 and there will be a $300 prize for first place and a $100 prize for second place in each category: Poetry, Fiction, and Creative-Nonfiction.

As I mentioned a post or two ago, I have several grant and fellowship applications in the pipeline, and I’ll hear about a few of them in February.  The one I’m most hoping for will fund a really exciting visual art/poetry collaboration with Tiffany Besonen.  I’m not going to give any details yet, but believe me–it is interesting.  We will find a way to do it even if the grant doesn’t come through, but…here’s hoping!

We did have a bare dusting of snow around Christmas, and the jubilation was universal.  Local Facebook friends’ status updates were all about sledding, or skiing or snowshoeing.  It was only a couple of inches (now mostly gone), and I had visions of my friends and neighbors all suited up in their snow pants and parkas, standing by the back door with skis or sleds in hand for hours, watching intently out the window, and running outside whooping at the first sign of a flake.  We do like our winters up here in the North Country.

All of this strangeness should lead to some interesting poems.  Time will tell. I just can’t shake a feeling of unease and impending…..something.  It’s just too weird.

I’m hoping that the next session of Writing the Short Poem–my online Loft Literary Center class–fills up, and I start teaching it again in February.  There’s still time to sign up!  Just click on the course title above.

Meanwhile, the season of impatience for grant and fellowship application results has arrived, snow or no snow.  I have three major applications out there, and by the end of Feb., I will have results from two of them.  One is for a really interesting collaboration with visual artist Tiffany Besonen that will result in a travelling gallery exhibit.  Cross your fingers for us, and do a snow dance!

Go to my Workshops Page  for more info

There’s just something about snow.  There are few things that I find as soul-satisfying as a long walk in a heavy snowfall, or a cross-country ski through the woods by lantern-light.  It’s the silence, I think.  The silence of new snow is like no other.  It’s a cushioned silence, a velvet silence, a rabbit-soft silence.

And there are the indoor pleasures of winter:  a comfortable couch, a good book, a hot drink, and a window with a busy bird feeder just visible above the frosted corners of the glass…hot baths, new wool socks, anything filled with goosedown…these are a few of my fav-o-rite things.

Even the harsher aspects of winter appeal to me.  The Long Winter was the Laura Ingalls Wilder book that most captured my imagination.  I’ve probably read it 20 times. I will never get the image of the cows with their heads frozen to the ground by their own breath out of my mind, and I am still determined to make a faux-apple pie out of green pumpkin someday.  I know the reality wasn’t that enjoyable, and that the family probably barely survived (assuming the stories were true), but the vicarous thrill and triumph of making it through that brutal season marked me forever.

Winter around here can be a little like that–a seeming (though not usually actual) feat of survival.  It makes me feel tough to live here, and strong, and indomitable.  Maybe what I really love about winter is that it binds me in some way to all my favorite literary heroines–I can bundle up and venture out into a snowstorm like Laura and Mary taking hot water to Pa;  I can revel in the warmth of a long-awaited fire like Jane Eyre finally liberated from Lowood; daydream about the gifts I will buy like the March sisters planning for Marmee.  Then there’s Jack London’s hapless Yukon traveler and his faithful, much-smarter dog, Whittier’s “fenceless drift that once was road,” Capote’s dotty cousin crying out joyously, “It’s fruitcake weather!”   So many literary winters I’ve read of while snow swirled outside my own window.

Welcome, Winter. 

 All photos (including site header and author photos) taken by Steven R. Peterson

The ten weeks have flown by. The students’ talent, intellect, and generosity in responding to each other is really astonishing.  There have been a couple of bumps in the road, but we’ve weathered them, and I certainly learned a lot (yay–another flipping growth experience).  But the ups have far outweighed the downs, and I will go into the next session with more experience and the memory of this great class.  I feel that I’ve gotten to know these people, and I will miss them. There’s really nothing better than teaching people who want to learn.

Zooming out to a broader time period, it’s amazing for me to see how my path in poetry has developed.  If you had told me ten years ago that I would have the publications that I have, modest as they are,  I’d never have believed you.  I wouldn’t have believed that I had done readings in Grand Marais and Minneapolis, let alone New York and Great Britain, or attended workshops with poets I so admire–Jane Hirshfield, Joan Houlihan, Martha Rhodes, Dara Weir–it’s too much to fathom.  I know it’s a predictable time of the year to be enumerating blessings, and I hate being predictable, but enumerate I must.  I’ll keep it relatively professional here, and spare you the list of even-more-amazing personal blessings.  They are many.

I hope you have your own long list of blessings this year and every year.

By far my favorite local enterprise to support, however, is my fantastic local independent bookstore, Beagle Books.  Jen Geraedts and Sally Wizik Wills, who own and manage the store (as well as the equally wonderful Sister Wolf Books, open only in the summer) have done an amazing job of promoting my book and supporting me as a writer.  I am truly indebted. 

Now, for the first time, it is possible for people to buy Breaking the Glass online from Beagle Books (or from your favorite independent bookstore) through IndieBound  which is “a community-oriented movement begun by the independent bookseller members of the American Booksellers Association. It brings together booksellers, readers, indie retailers, local business alliances, and anyone else with a passionate belief that healthy local economies help communities thrive. Supporting local, indie businesses means that dollars, jobs, diversity, choice, and taxes stay local, creating strong, unique communities and happy citizens.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  As we begin the march toward our busiest consumer season, please join me in doing your best to support local independent businesses with your words and your dollars.

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P.S.  Buying Breaking the Glass directly from the publisher, Loonfeather Press, using this order form  is still a great way to get the book and support a local independent small press. However, I wanted people to have an online buying option, too.

There have been several outliers in the news this week:  Steve Jobs, whose untimely death will rob us of whatever new, world-transforming technology he might have come up with; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa’s first elected female president — her compatriot, peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner, who were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; and Tomas Transtromer, who was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature, after having been criticized early in his career for being “not political enough.”

What is it that made these people, and others like them, willing to overcome their fear, their need to conform and their apathy, to do something, be something, say something?

The Occupy Wall Street protesters inspire me, as well.  Yes, some of them are not very well informed.  Yes, some of them are not dressed very professionally.  But aren’t they saying something you’d like to say?  Are they saying anything you haven’t said in your living room, away from the threat of handcuffs and billy clubs, and pepper spray?  Is it so beyond the pale to say that it’s wrong for oil companies and health insurers to have made record profits in the last three years, when those are the two areas where most Americans have felt most financially assaulted?  Shouldn’t banks and large corporations have to obey the law, and also obey the spirit of the law, not find ways to subvert and circumvent it?  Is it right that one percent of the US population holds 40% of our wealth, or that we’re not raising taxes on the wealthiest among us, even as they ask us to?

This week I encourage all of us, myself included, to connect with our inner outlier.  Whatever you do, however large or small a blow you make against group-think, and sameness, and timidity in the face of difference, make sure it is your act, and your thought, and your voice.

Quote for the week:  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … Stay hungry. Stay foolish.      –Steve Jobs