Trio House Press Submissions open November 1

When I began Post Poetry MFA, I did so with a mission of providing information and encouragement to Poetry MFA graduates. Given that there exists only one tenured teaching position for every 100 MFA graduates, and that publishing one's manuscript many times takes years or decades (if ever at all) after graduation, many good writers are never able to fulfill their promising beginnings. Post Poetry MFA was begun because, as writers in the post-mfa world, it is difficult to find a formal support structure; most of the time all we have is ourselves. I hope our online community has given some of you the encouragement to continue writing regularly, and information about some opportunities to aim for. Unfortunately, there are far too few presses to publish all deserving manuscripts, and that is one of the biggest problems in getting one's first book published.


It gives me a great deal of pleasure to announce a new press that I have the privilege of being a part of: Trio House Press. A small group of my colleagues (namely, Tayve Neese, Dorinda Wegener and Lisa Sisler--all three members of Post Poetry MFA) and I are editors, and Steven Riel is a collective member. We have an advisory board that includes some of most renowned, award-winning mid-career poets writing today. And our first two judges, Ross Gay and Michael Waters, are sensational. Read their bios and check us out at http://www.triohousepress.org, or simply click on the link to the left of this blog. Read our submission guidelines and submit your manuscripts to one or both of our upcoming contests (open November 1), depending upon whether you've published your first book, your second book, or no book at all. Also check us out on facebook.


More to come soon about the distinctive elements in Trio House Press that will expand the options you have as you seek a press to publish your manuscript...

Review of Suzanne Buffam's The Irrationalist

Suzanne Buffam's second collection of poetry, The Irrationalist, achieves an unusually elegant balance between the quotidian and the ineffable antinomies of human existence. This is not accomplished by carefully placing precisely measured material on either side of a stable fulcrum, but rather it is the result of moving the reader to an improbable position where the familiar predictable world appears precariously unstable, and structures caught in the act of toppling somehow become capstones for a new architecture.

But what Buffam builds is neither a city of God, nor a new Babel; it is a world that somehow embodies both the history of rational human thought AND “the dreaming sea”—a world that looks a lot like the old one, until one walks its streets and sees how (like Buffam’s work), what makes it epic is its ordinariness, because it is viewed, like some out of phase parallel universe, from a slightly (but truly) different vantage point—a vantage point totally engaged in a present that contains all of the past and future as ore, waiting to be mined for its art, an art that creates beauty from materials that might be rejected by lesser artists.

Like the Genesis account, Buffam's opening poem, "Ruined Interior," brings her world immediately to us with no ontological discussion of what preceded it:

In the beginning was the world.
Then the new world.
Then the new world order

Which resembles the old one,
Doesn't it? Its crumbling
Aqueducts. Its trinkets and shingles.

Its pathways lacquered in fog.


Then the poet invites her readers to examine evidence that the unfolding vision is no sleight-of-hand, but truly magical:

If all we've done is blink a bit
And touch things,

Notice how dust describes
A tin can by not falling
Where it sits, or how a red sleeve

Glimpsed through curtains
Mimics the tip of a flickering
Wing...

In the face of such beauty, she asks:

...was the whole day a waste
Or can worth be conferred
On a less than epic urge...

The answer is that it is the fresh examination of the ordinary that ushers in the epic:

...Bow Wow
says the doggie on page two.

Ahoy says the sailor.
Arise says the tired queen
And face the highway,

The donut shops, and the boardwalk.
It rained today. You can see
Perfect inversions of streetlights

Suspended in drops on the window.
You can see the skyline
Trying to hold up the sky.

Don't tell me there's another,
Better place. Don't tell me
There's a sea

Above our dreaming sea
And through the windows of heaven
The rains come down.

The elegant simplicity and exactitude of this poem reminds me of "If There Is Another World," by Malena Morling, which speaks to the nearness of the imaginary to the objective world in its opening line "If there is another world I think you can take a cab there." But in Buffam's world, one doesn't even have to hail a cab, all other worlds are in this one, all other streets on this street, all other images reflected from this drop of water. To discover them simply requires diligence and as much love for the beauty of the not yet, as for the beauty of the already.

Buffam is on record for saying that “It’s not art unless it breaks your heart.” But it is her mind strumming at the strings of existence that brings forth the music to which the heart responds. The result is the largely unspoken theme of The Irrationalist: beauty. It is borne from the marriage of the intellect and dream, as evidenced in one of her “little commentaries” which inhabit section II:

On The Enlightenment

Take the thing you love most and cut it up.
Arrange the parts carefully
According to the picture in your head.
Now shine your mind at them.
If their laws come striding boldly forth at you
You will soon become a great man of your time.
If instead they lie there on the table bleeding beauty
You are probably a poet or a child.


Buffam is not a Romantic in the classical sense, even though she makes liberal use of its devices, including Keats’ negative capability, even celebrating it in a six-line poem on the page following “On The Enlightenment.” But even her eavesdropping on the silence/not silence of “On Negative Capability” simultaneously subverts our expectations and satisfies our longings in a unique way that afterwards could not have been any different:


A man and a woman
Side by side

Not speaking
Not not speaking

Cross a moonlit plaza
Without plans.


The seventy-four modern-day proverbs that comprise the middle section inform, and are informed by, the imagistic, somewhat philosophical poems that precede them, and the more conversational, sometimes confessional poems that follow them. If I were to list my favorites, I would simply be copying the table of contents, but read aloud these titles to get a flavor of their musical and ideational arc.

“On Possibility”
“On Necessity”
“On Shortcuts”
“On Attachment”
“On The Fire Sermon”
“On Valleys”
“On Clouds”
“On The Enlightenment”
“On Moonlight”
“On Ghosts V. Zombies”
“On Abstract Expressionism”
“On Negative Capability”

Then the final thirteen…

“On Beauty”
“On The Seine”
“On Suicide”
“On The Logic Of Dreams”
“On Church Bells”
“On Hummingbirds”
“On White Flowers”
“On Clear Nights”
“On Antigone”
“On Where You Live”
“On Irrational Numbers”
“On Paradise”
“On Everyone”

All of history and literature, philosophy and physics is important to Buffam’s vision, and everything on the page is significant. Thus, her titles, as well as her epigraphs and her blank spaces, are as well-thought out and as integral to her work as her diction, imagery, and ideas. They all lend their weight and/or buoyancy to her vessel as it makes its journey.

The final section of the book begins with a rumination of wisdom, a natural outgrowth of the proverb-like epithets of section two, in a prose poem entitled “The Wise Man.” The opening sentence “I am not a wise man,” is wise and humorous on many levels. The poet is a woman who has just demonstrated more wisdom than ten award-winning poets of our time (probably all men). The self-effacement of this poem, along with the next one, “The True Believer,” which pits faith against doubt, beautifully sets up both the long collage-prose-poem, “Trying,” which narrates the anxiety-filled process of attempting to become impregnated, as well as the entire third section’s more personal, autobiographical pieces.

These poems personify both the ontological and axiological investigations of sections one and two much as the writers of the New Testament attempt to unite the Pentateuch and the Proverbs into a new revelation. While the latter fed a new religious movement, without totally reaching its goal of providing the comfort of assurance through belief, The Irrationalist is able to offer grace to those who do not believe, but who want to—more accurately those who “keep flipping back and forth between trying and wanting to try” (p. 66, section 3, line 3-4). Two poems that fuel this discussion are “Ideal Tree” and “A Perfect Emergency.”

In the former “God is in the forest counting trees./You are in the city writing poems.” The “you” of the poem writes a poem with a tree in it—“a tree without roots or branches/Or squirrels or sap/Without even a shadow/In its crown, for it grows/Without even a crown.” “You” call the poem “The Tree of Everlasting Love,” and leave it on the page of an unwritten book. It is finally published as part of a book of poems, but no one notices it, “No one sees it burning coldly/Through all the foggy mornings/Of your misinterpretable world.”

In “A Perfect Emergency” the poet spots a blaze in a parking lot, where kids are standing around throwing sticks at it, and kicking at it. When the poet approaches, “it shook out its golden locks and sang in a language [she] could not see”:

I am the Unburnt Bush! it cried. I am Burning but Flourishing!
I am swallowed but I am not Consumed!

The poem continues…

In my head was a page from a musty old book with its useless
list of Latin verbs. Before me I could see all the lives I
might have lived, lined up and leaping through the same
burning gate.

The final stanza of the poem is interpretative commentary—a telling, rather than a showing that Buffam seldom does—but it is an earned gorgeous description of the dross of salvation we we are left with in the 21st century:

It was a perfect emergency. The only thing worth saving was the blaze.

The ease/difficulty in reviewing a book as significant and as well-orchestrated as Buffam’s is that one can easily glean dominant themes from many single poems and each section, but one cannot accurately portray its depth and beauty without examining every poem—completely beyond the purview of this review. I will therefore leave my readers with a poem that at this moment best summarizes for me this happy dilemma. Tomorrow, if I pick up my already worn-out, heavily notated copy, I will, no doubt, find a different poem that I feel is emblematic of this terrific collection. But for now, as in the 1960’s lyrics of The Association’s “Along Comes Mary,” drinking this poem to the last drop leaves “my empty cup [tasting] as sweet as the punch.”


If You See It What Is It You See

I didn’t look at the fire.
I looked into it.

I saw a wall of books
Crash down and bury me

Centuries deep in red leather.
I saw a statue in a park

Shake dust from its fist
And a ship called Everything

Sink down on rusted wings.
Ten thousand triangles collapsed
Into a point
And the point was this.

I cannot tell you what I saw.
My catastrophe was sweet

And nothing like yours
Although we may sip

From the same
Broken cup all afternoon.

Backwater Poet: Greg Keith

Greg Keith is a poet whose work not too many people know, but he is one of the poets who contributed to the headwaters of my own poetry, one whose work I sometimes forget still abides (he lost his battle to cancer in 1998), faithfully flowing for decades, full of rich nutrients from the ground of the giant watershed, still feeding my work and helping to shape the standard against which I measure all poetry. In short, he is a part of my own personal canon, and you could do much worse to make him a part of yours.

Keith has no major awards to his credit and only one published book of poems for his decades-long love affairs with language and science, but his legacy is a body of work that joins the empirical (hard science) and the lyrical aspects of the human condition in a rare marriage that retains the romance inherent in the new and the unfamiliar, while moving beyond youthful infatuation into a mature union that holds up over time. Hear the title poem to his book, Life Near 310 Kelvin:

Life Near 310 Kelvin

Air so still stars barely twinkle, still busy inside.
Just step out into the dark yard and the air starts
eagerly stripping momentum from the skin.

Her cheek so chilled it made cool fingers hot--heat
needs these directions to go, some difference to erase.
Iron straight from the forge, fierce with tiny agitation,
donates freely the deep KE it has just received.

Hot's whatever gives you heat and cold is how heat goes.
Either way, something has happened and you know it.
She arrived. She departed. Sunlight has finally
reached the tables on the eastern side of the street.

Heat falls out of the intervals between breadcrumbs.
No trail home. Birds have devoured every morsel.

Heat, the ratchet keeping time from slipping back.


Although Keith was an expert in computer technology, his measure of artistic success was not quantity of output or publication credits. He considered '94 a good year: "one article, one story, three poems published." Keith's hesitation to "rush to publish" either in print or on line is now even more poignant than it was in his creative non-fiction story, "Literary Passions," (published in 1998), in which he pits his wit and humility against a Bukowski-type anti-hero who challenges him to a poetry write-off in a Santa Cruz bar.

The story reminds me of Bill Henderson's comments in his introduction to Pushcart Prize XXXIV about how in the literary world speed kills: "Another lust that consumes our culture today is speed, not the drug but the electronic version. This is especially deadly to writers. On-demand vanity publishers will zip out your efforts, no questions asked (and usually no readers found). It's a mistake for writers to be in a huge hurry to be noticed...it takes years, maybe a lifetime, to figure out what you want to say and how to say it. Because you can burp out a poem or short story on line, you will not immediately join the ranks of the immortals. Indeed you will be embraced in the Pantheon of Twitter. Or maybe The Kingdom of Kindle will admit you. Fast books, no binding needed. Toss when done."

Even though slow and steady does not always win the race, in the case of Greg Keith, allowing the thirteen and one-half billion year-old universe to reveal itself in his work through a diction both aware of science and the human condition, connects its history with our story, and can render the quantum just as easily as the galactic to be the quintessence of existence. And consciousness: listen to the neuron's story in "What the neuron knows:"

"How to listen, to mull the rumors in its thousand ears
and what size grain of salt to take with each.
How to speak its one word or keep mum. Given time,
how to change its little mind about the weight it gives its sources.
What the net is is
gangs of such neurons and weighted connections.
What the net knows it salts away in blind trust at the nodes,
its wealth spread out in unnumbered accounts."


Greg marveled at the discovery that photons disintegrated on their long journeys from the stars to earth. How then, do we see them? On the way, these dying particles meet up with younger free-roaming photons that become excited from the transfer of energy and information, which is carried to its final destination by those who have never seen their parent-stars.

Such is our mission--to receive the recognized pulses of light flashed by others, to add our own visible energies, and to carry the resulting message as far as we can! Gregory Keith is one of those photons. You may never have seen his star, but you can be energized by him to create your own!

MiPOesias Magazine!

Open publication - Free publishing - More fiction

Didi Menendez has a multi-channel publishing network that not only presents some of the best poets and artists working today, but she adds value by aggressively marketing them through cutting edge technology, as well as in traditional print forms. For Didi, it's about publishing as an art form and giving herself totally to that art and her artists. And even though she's all about relationships, they never get in the way of her demanding excellence in the work. Check out this issue of MiPOesias Magazine to see what I mean, as well as the link to MiPOesias, to see her other publications!

Long Poems: Galaxies of the Poetic Universe

Long poems. What are they? Book-length continuous flows of lines and stanzas or series of poems capable of standing alone, but interacting in a way that forms something more than a manuscript? How long is long? "Howl" qualifies when compared to a haiku, but how about when one considers "Iovis," the twenty-something year project by Anne Waldman, now approaching 1,000 pages? Or is "long poem" an inappropriate term for her multi-volume series--no different from any poet's life-time body of work, capable of being considered "one poem."

And how do long poems differ from shorter poems? Is length the only criterion for a long poem, or is there a qualitative difference, more akin to the difference between a black hole and a normal star, than the difference between a large jupiter-like planet and a small frozen body like the planetoid Pluto?

Indeed, in the poetic universe there are a seemingly infinite variety of ways that words and lines, stanzas and non-stanzas cluster together to form varied structures, in the same way that matter clumps together to form asteroids, planets, stars and galaxies.

The following poems are major bodies of work--a beginning list of important long poems to view and review to expand one's understanding of the poetic universe. Feel free to add to the list, post a review, or comment upon them or the idea of the long poem. It's all part of the work of producing new text that just might stimulate the birth of another long poem.

A. R. Ammons, "Garbage," and "Ommateum": both booklength poems in many sections.

Anne Carson, "Autobiography Of Red": a novel in verse.

Chaucer, "The Canterbury Tales."

Hart Crane, "The Bridge": modern poem in multiple sections centered on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Dante, "The Divine Comedy"

T.S. Elliot: "Four Quartets": long poem of ontological philosophy.

H.D., "Trilogy": three long poems of spiritual exploration, bordering on midrash, written during the London bombings of WWII: "The Walls Do Not Fall," "Tribute To The Angels," and "The Flowering Of The Rod."

Homer, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey": classic Greek tales to which all western literature owes a debt.

Robinson Jeffers, "Cawdor" and "Medea": lyrical narrative poem, based upon Jeffers own tragic love life, and a verse adaptation of Euripides' drama, created especially for the actress Judith Anderson.

Kenneth Koch, On The Edge, Collected Long Poems: A collection of six longer (36-116 pages) poems.

Larry Levis, "Elegy": In some ways this final book of Levis, published posthumously and edited by Philip Levine and Peter Everwine, can be considered one long poem.

Milton, "Paradise Lost"

Ezra Pound, "Pisan Cantos": some of the most lyrical verse in the English language.

Tomas Transtromer: several poems in "the great enigma" are longer (20 pp. or more).

Walt Whitman, "Leaves Of Grass": classic collection of poems or parts of one long poem that brought American poetry into the modern era.

William Carlos Williams, "Patterson": Williams' classic poem using the conceit of a city to describe "the entire knowable universe."

Why Do We Write?

Dawn Haines begins her essay, "To Begin, After A Long Time Gone", in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers with the following sentence: "In January 2006 I graduated from a low-residency program and stopped writing." Sound familiar? How about her analysis of why: "The deadlines instituted by the MFA program I attended had given me the incentive--even the discipline--to write, but after I graduated the reality hit me: Writing is hard."

Haines has hit upon the precise reason I write this blog and the reason I founded an online poetry community: the writing life is a life of connection--a connection with what others have written and a connection with other writers. In an MFA or BFA program we wrote, at least in part, because we purchased, among other things, an ongoing community of fellow-writers with writing deadlines imposed upon us.

Unless we find (or make) a substitute community that holds one another accountable after leaving the program, many of us will do something like what Haines did: "I thought a break [from writing] was rational...I was tired of fighting for time and for the even more difficult-to-acquire quiet space I needed for writing...Before long, I noticed I was feeling bad. Really bad. So bad that I wouldn't get out of bed. I told myself that tomorrow I'd start writing, every day, just for me. But I stayed in bed and read novels and watched movies on y son's portable DVD player. I turned on my computer only to read e-mail and catch up on American Idol news. And the longer I didn't write, the more I felt like a failure because of all the unwritten words."

The path back to writing, for Haines, came from listening to a member of her writing group who suggested she simply write about not writing. That led to other ideas that she developed into stories and she was back on track.

What is your path back into the writing life? What are you spending your time thinking about? Write about it! What are you spending your time doing? Write about it! What are you reading? (Oops, not reading--pick up that book you bought your last MFA semester, the one that you never got around to reading.) Write about it! As Haines points out, you don't have to have open-ended hours of isolation to make progress. You don't have to live the idyllic writing life in order to write. And that brings up the question: "Why do you write?" Do you write in order to fulfill other needs--to feel important, to be a success, to avoid being a failure? Or do you write for the intrinsic benefits that writing brings?

Haines writes to connect--to connect with her readers, yes. But more important, to connect to herself. "It's a process of unfolding, and what it reveals to me--however troubling--is deeply satisfying. There is no failure in discovery. Often when I'm writing, I feel most alive."

What Haines is speaking about is writing as a deeply meditative (spiritual) act. Like breathing, it has benefits outside of itself. But there is a joy in simply focusing upon and experiencing our own breath. In. Out. In. Out. Read. Write. Read. Write.

How can we not do it and be alive?

Haines concludes so well: "Writing is about making connections and creating something where before there was nothing. It's about energy and intellect and gifts. It's about hope. This day, in spite of myself, the writing did what I nearly forgot it could do. And more."

Here's hoping...

The Best of AWP: Putting Together Your First Book II

E.M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel distinguishes between story and plot: story being "a narrative of events arranged in time sequence," and plot being a narrative of events, "the emphasis falling on causality." Forster reserves story for the "wriggling and interminable, naked worm of time," the skeletal backbone of actions present in any literary organism. Plot, on the other hand, involves the hidden, mysterious, causal elements necessary, among other elements, for transforming the bones of a story into a living, breathing piece of literature.

Nicky Beer's contribution to the panel discussion ("The 25th Poem: Putting Together Your First Book) centered around Forster's distinction, applying it to the sequencing of poems in a book, with the main point that each poem is to be viewed as an action contributing to plot, rather than merely the story. Thus the poet should strive to link poems organically, rather than chronologically, to achieve the greatest effect.

James Allen Hall echoed this maxim and pointed out that a chronological structure does organizational work, but what is also needed is emotional work. One should consult the images in one's poems as one would themes in a musical score and attempt to organize them in the same manner.

Anna Journey (author of If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting (The National Poetry Series), emphasized that there is no one right way to organize a book of poems. One can group them by theme (somewhat artificial), one can utilize a linear ordering (tends to box one in), or one can "allow the poems to order themselves." (This is where I gagged!) Journey articulated her own strategy as one that attempts to "persuade a reader by voice." By this she said she meant to "sense the psychic preoccupations of the poems, and make them resonate."

Finally, Sandy Sang (author of Sediment (Four-Way Books) emphasized the overall diversity of the manuscript. She advised creating an arc (not necessarily narrative) from beginning to middle to end, where every poem is seen to have a purpose. This begins with identifying the "core poems" and discovering a direction for the book from them. Identify the themes that appear again and again and utilize them as an organizing principle.

Of course these panelists were poets and, therefore, most of the advise was couched in metaphor. But if the advise was difficult to reduce to a ten step program, at least it provided a tremendous amount of motivation to experiment with order and structure in one's manuscript. So much so that the next morning I went downstairs from my hotel room at 5:00 AM and completely re-ordered my full manuscript. It may not win any awards any time soon, or even be published, but it is better for the process, and I think I have finally laid to rest my misgivings about its weaknesses. Perhaps more importantly, I'm ready to move on and write another manuscript. Maybe that's the lesson to be learned. If, after making it as good as you can, your first manuscript doesn't get published, just write a better one! And while you're doing it, you might look at the advice of these award-winning poets.