Walt Whitman 2014

Walt is all around us lately.

Did you take note of the Apple television ad for the iPad Air? It quotes Whitman's �O Me! O Life!� to promote the idea of creating and uses Robin Williams from his English teacher role in Dead Poets Society.

�That the powerful play goes on,
and you may contribute a verse.�

Walt is also on the new poster designed by the Academy of American Poets for this year's  National Poetry Month.  You can request a copy online.

The poster uses the closing lines of �Song of Myself,�

�Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.�

If you want to go deeply into Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," you can enroll in a free course offered online by the University of Iowa. This course - known as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) - will be open to thousands of people at no cost (and for no credit).

�Every Atom: Walt Whitman�s Song of Myself" will take a collective approach to a close reading of America�s democratic verse epic, first published without a title in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and later titled "Song of Myself" in the 1881 edition.

Eastbourne by Helen Jacobs

1
It is to the island
and the coastlands
that the shifting light
tethers on a fluid line
weaving water and sand
and rock.

The point of going away
is always to come back �
thrice deny, and you
come back

to the shells of your sandheaps,
allow that there could be
an old spirit or two
or simply an old love affair
with the harbour playing you in.


2

Climbing to the houses
you look down to where

Ha-Ha

The force of laughing can dislocate jaws,
prompt asthma attacks,
cause headaches, make hernias protrude.

It can provoke cardiac arrhythmia, syncope
or even emphysema (this last,
according to a clinical lecturer in 1892).

Laughter can trigger the rare but possibly grievous
Pilgaard-Dahl and Boerhaave�s syndromes.

There are choking hazards,
such as ingesting food during belly laughs.

We don�t know how much laughter is safe.

There�s probably a U-shaped curve:
laughter is good for you,
but enormous amounts are bad, perhaps.



Taken from Who Says Laughter�s the Best Medicine? in The New York Times, 20 December 2013. Submitted by Howie Good.

Stroke

In case you don�t know me, Hi. Im Diana.
I�m a 30 year old lady.
Itallerthan your average girl,
thinner tha your average girl,
and and active than your average girl.

Yeah I run an ice crea business for a living,
but like to thing
I�m healthier than your average girl too.
No priorn medical history. Nothing.

my first ever ride in an ambulance
was uneventful � the hops;ital
is a 5 minute drive from my folks� house.

By now I had somehow regained some ability to sspeak
and answered the EMT�s incessant questionsining.
still stuumbling over my words,
even laughin at my mstakes.



From Bad Year for Boars, an account by Diana Hardeman about suffering a stroke, written 30 December 2013, a week after the event. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Notes in My Barefoot Voice

Result, restful, mellow, autumnal.
How the asters cheer me! So old-
fashioned-looking, in the plump
white mug that�s making do
for a vase. In these
strange, uncertain
times, I sit
down to
write�



From Notes in My Barefoot Voice by Diana Atkinson, July 2002, Shambhala Sun. Submitted by Eugenia Hepworth Petty.

Carriage House Poetry Prize in Observance of Arbor Day 2014

The Carriage House Poetry Series and The Fanwood Shade Tree Commission announce The Carriage House Poetry Prize in Observance of Arbor Day 2014.

A first prize of $250 and publication in the Autumn 2014 print issue of TIFERET: Literature, Art, and The Creative Spirit. Selected finalists will receive certificates.

Guidelines

• Entries should consist of no more than two poems�no more than 40 lines each.
• Each poem must be single-spaced on a separate sheet of paper.
• Submit 2 copies of each poem, one copy with the poet�s name, address, phone number,and email address in the upper right corner.
• Poems must be previously unpublished and must contain reference to a tree or trees (not necessarily poems about trees). Any style or form. (Not re-writes or take-offs on Joyce Kilmer�s famous poem �Trees.� Judges will look for poems characterized by technical proficiency, striking imagery and strong sound quality.)
• Entry is free.
• Poems will not be returned, so please keep a copy for your files.
• Deadline: In-hand by March 1, 2014. Winners will be notified via email by April 7, 2014.

Send entries via snail mail to:

Carriage House Poetry Prize

c/o Adele Kenny & Tom Plante
Fanwood Borough Hall
75 North Martine Avenue
Fanwood, NJ 07023


Judges
Tom Plante (Publisher/Editor Exit 13 Magazine)
Linda Radice (Award Winning Poet & Fanwood Arts Council Member)

Final Judges
Donna Baier Stein � Founder/publisher of Tiferet; Pen/New England Discovery Award & NJ State Arts Council Fellowship recipient; awards from the Poetry Societies of Virginia and New England; founding poetry editor of Bellevue Literary Review; Breadloaf Writers Conference scholarship; Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars fellowship; author of Sometimes You Sense the Difference; Iowa fiction awards finalist for Sympathetic People (published by Serving House Press, 2013).

Adele Kenny � Author of 23 books (poetry & nonfiction); Carriage House Poetry Series founder/director; Fanwood�s Poet Laureate (appointed March 2012), Tiferet Poetry Editor; two NJ State Arts Council poetry fellowships; Writers Digest Poetry Award; Thomas Merton Poetry Award; first place Merit Book Award; 2012 International Book Award; former creative writing professor (College of New Rochelle); twice featured at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival; has read in the US, England, Ireland, and France.

Prompt: When You and I

white on white, on Flickr by Ken Ronkowitz

I was paging through an anthology of poems looking for inspiration this past weekend. Sometimes, anthologies will index poems by author, title and first lines. I noticed little groupings in the titles and first lines - ones that a number of authors have used.

A poem that I memorized for a class many years ago was in such a group of "when" poems. "When You are Old" by William Butler Yeats is a poem I have loved for a long time. I imagine it as a great dedication for a book of poems - a book to be picked up by the woman who inspired the poems many years later.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Another poem in the group is also an old favorite:

"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be" by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean�d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact�ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen�d grain;
When I behold, upon the night�s starr�d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!�then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

And that led me to another poem from the period - a poem sometimes titled "Song" or just known for its first line "When I am dead, my dearest" by Christina Rossetti

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

Sometimes, the simplest prompt can set you to writing. I attended a poetry retreat this month and the two poets leading us, Maria Gillan and Laura Boss, hit you with a shotgun blast of prompts. They might give a half dozen suggestions or opening lines and people write for twenty minutes and return with some unbelievably good first drafts that use one or a combination of those prompts, or start with one and turn unexpectedly in another direction.

And that's all we should expect from a prompt - a little push to set our boat into the water.

For this month's prompt, as an opening line, begin with "When you" or "When I" and start paddling. You might choose to use use both openings for different lines or stanzas or blend the two into "When you and I."

There are plenty of modern poems that use that opening too. Listen to "When You're Lost in Juarez in the Rain and It's Easter Time Too" by Charles Wright which starts with that title which is tangled up in some lines by Bob Dylan.

In "When I Am in the Kitchen" by Jeanne Marie Beaumont, she uses the line as her title and moves on like this:

I think about the past. I empty the ice-cube trays
crack crack cracking like bones, and I think
of decades of ice cubes and of John Cheever,
of Anne Sexton making cocktails, of decades
of cocktail parties, and it feels suddenly far
too lonely at my counter...

Submission deadline: Sunday, January 19, 2013