Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway

22nd Annual Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway

Supportive. Energizing. Inspiring.

January 16-19, 2015
Atlantic City, NJ area

16 challenging and supportive writing workshops

Special Guests: Stephen Dunn and Kim Addonizio

Advance your craft and energize your writing at the 22nd Annual Winter Getaway. Enjoy challenging and supportive workshops, insightful feedback and an encouraging community. Choose from fiction, nonfiction, memoir, screenwriting and poetry. Early registration discounts and scholarships available.

Learn more: www.wintergetaway.com

Pascale Petit: Fauverie - Emmanuel

In the last days, after all he said
and didn't say, his iron tongue
resting in the open bell of his mouth,
the belfry of his face asleep,
I climbed the spiral steps of the tower -
up the steep steps of the bell cage, to the bourdon
the great bumblebee, Emmanuel.
I stared at that bronze weight, the voice of Paris,
as if it was my father's voice
and I had climbed up his spine,
all thirteen tons of

It is Paris again

It is Paris again

where we spent that

week in the knees,

learning love's a-b-c's

and thinking we'd still be

unharmed.

It is still here,

that grey asphalt,

still here, that crease

felt by love's deportees, who

once battle-ready, are now

unarmed.

There is still that

half-promise of the ferry

lights, still the breeze

comes with half-guarantees

of charm, of leaving you

uncharmed.

(after Leela Gandhi)

"Should we go to mine,"

I said, but then feeling creepy,

added "or not, you must be sleepy."

He leaned nearer, "I'd just said

let's get out of here, no one's

sleepy, don't put words in my mouth."

Tingly, that this might go somewhere,

I shifted between legs, & didn't know

where to look, right or left, north

or south, tonight, there's just one

word I want to put in his mouth.

Travel Diary - Amrita Pritam

(autobiographical sketches excerpted as 4 poems)

I

From the water of the Ganges

to vodka - this

is the travelogue of my thirst.

...

Those days,

I used to work in the radio.

One evening,

I was sitting in my office

when Sajjad Zaheer came to meet me.

For a while, he remained quiet

and slightly fidgety, then

with some hesitation, he spoke:

"A delegation of Indian writers

is going to Russia, I want you

to be among them.

At yesterday's meeting,

no writer - of any language - had a problem

with this, but the Punjabi writers

put their foot down...

they said - if Amrita goes with this delegation

then our wives won't let us go..."

II

...

There is a strange sense

of loneliness in the pages of my diary.

As I look out of the air-plane window,

it is as if someone has torn the sky into two.

It is as if I have lain below me

one sheet of this torn sky,

and the other over me.

I don't know how long it will take

to reach Moscow.

III

28 May, 1966

This evening,

I saw the preserved houses

of Bulgaria's greatest writers:

Ivanov,

Peyo Yavorov

and Nikola Vaptsarov.

Several years ago

I had translated Vaptsarov's poems

into Punjabi.

That Punjabi book is now kept in

his house.

Today,

when I touched

his table

his pen

his tea-kettle

with my hands,

my eyes teared up.

It was as if

when all those years ago,

I had translated his poems,

those lines had fallen on my ears,

those lines, which have stood there since,

and now singe my ears -

"Tomorrow, this life will come of age...

this belief stirs in my heart

and that which can come and strike this belief,

there's no such bullet in the world...

there's no such bullet in the world...".

These lines, he wrote in 1942,

a little before he was murdered by the Fascists.

It is as if, that belief,

which makes this world,

which remained untouched by bullets,

I touch it today.

IV

14th June, 1966

...

160 kilometers from Tbilisi,

on our way to the Borjomi valley,

there was the Gori town, where we saw Stalin's birthplace...

Writers have come from all over the world

and this evening in Borjomi

is theirs.

Writers

of all countries spoke

of the wish for a better life, but

when the poet from Vietnam, Che Lin, got up,

all our hearts were heavy.

Today, his words are -

"Our poem swims in a river of blood.

Today, it speaks only of guns so that

one day it can speak of flowers.

When our soldiers go to the battle-front,

our people write poems and put it in their pockets.

We pray for the pockets which

carry poems in them.

Today, if we can save those poems,

then know we have saved the man..."

And there were tears in my eyes,

when this poet from Vietnam

came near me and said, "You are Amrita?"

I was stunned, then he said,

"As I was leaving Vietnam,

the poet Svan Jiyao told me

that there would be a woman from India,

and her name will be Amrita,

do remind her of me..."

A prayer is rising from my heart - I hope

that all the beautiful poems in the world become one

and protect Vietnaam..."

(tr. from Kulwant Kochad's Hindi tr. of Amrita Pritam's Punjabi prose)

Amrita Pritam

Love Jihad

There's an uncle of mine, Jatin,
he married Noor. Both had met in
college, & to do the bended knees,
both had to fight their families.

When their first child was born,
they must have thought of a thousand
names - Rahul, Ali, Gaurav, Hassan,
Akash, Chaman; but they chose - Aman.

Celebrating Autumn with Keats

A few days before the autumnal equinox 195 years ago, 24-year-old poet named John Keats wrote "To Autumn."

You can find this ode in many anthologies and even if you have little interest in poetry, you may recognize a line that was dropped into your memory in a classroom.

Keats wasn't having a great poetic year. In November, he would tell his brother in a letter, "Nothing could have in all its circumstances fallen out worse for me than the last year has done, or could be more damping to my poetical talent." But he wrote in another letter about this ode: "Somehow a stubble plain looks warm � in the same way that some pictures look warm � this struck me so much in my Sunday's walk that I composed upon it."

Ironically, Keats scholars have since decided that 1819 was his best year as a poet because he wrote almost all his great poems that year. The poems included a group of odes - "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode to a Grecian Urn," "Ode to Psyche" and "To Autumn" was the last of them.

Poets often see autumn as a good symbol of aging. A preparation for winter. Young Mr. Keats took another view of the season, but he would die from tuberculosis in less than two years after writing the poem. He was 25.



To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss�d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o�er-brimm�d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap�d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

'Poroporoaki to the Lord My God: weaving the Via Dolorosa' by Anahera Gildea

Ekphrasis in response to Walk (Series C) by Colin McCahon

I. Bro, I noticed the absence of korowai at your tangi

II. I have made you this kahu-kuri. A taonga

for the Nga Mokai peoples and their descendants.
I have just now taken it off the line and
folded it with the sun still fresh on its limbs.

III. The unsteady warps and welts of this cloak have

I Sext the Body Electric

Did you catch a poem published last year in The Awl by Patricia Lockwood titled �Rape Joke" which went viral?

Facebook and Twitter shares made Lockwood Internet-famous. She is not a poet laureate. She is not a professor (never finished college) and lives far from the hip places for poets in Lawrence, Kansas.


Her latest book of poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, has a number of "sexts" which are her short poems that are erotic and simultaneously ridiculous. Lockwood got attention for her tweets that were inspired by the Anthony Weiner scandal, which imagines surreal sex acts.

Here are two examples:

Sext: I am a water glass at the Inquisition. You are a dry pope mouth. You pucker; I wet you

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me

"Rape Joke� changed things. People have said it is funny, harrowing, important and not worth considering. That kind of response gets my attention.

Lockwood is not an unknown. Her last collection, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, made the New Yorker�s Best Books list for 2012.

Looking through the new collection you can find poems about sexed-up forest creatures that never appear in Disney films, the Loch Ness Monster, and Whitman and Dickinson appearing as ghosts. The poems swerve between hilarious and creepy, profane and profound.

Patricia Lockwood via Twitter

In a radio interview on Studio 260, she said �My baseline voice as a poet tends to be very serious, very grave. But in my life, I tend to be a funny person. It was a challenge that I set myself to try to integrate those two voices.�

Twitter posts ("tweets") are limited to 140 characters. Not a lot of space to compose.

Then again, Ezra Pound's famous little poem, "In a Station of the Metro," fits nicely, title and all with characters to spare.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;  
Petals on a wet, black bough.

One hundred and forty characters (including spaces and punctuation) makes for a long line of poetry.
The previous sentence is only 100 characters.

Robert Frost would have gone over by only 3 characters if he had tweeted:

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow

In this shortened month, our new prompt asks you for poems composed of tweets. By this we mean "stanzas" of 140 characters that can stand alone. You can thematically thread together as many as you wish though, so your poem can be as short as 140 characters and as long as 140 X ?  Line lengths are your choice, but stanza length is 140 characters. (If you use Twitter, you might want to compose there as it counts your characters automatically.)

To make thing more interesting for readers, we are asking you to make the topic of your poem sex. Of course, that means that the serious and the not-so-serious side of the topic is fair game.

Submissions due October 4, 2015

SS Ventnor by Chris Tse