poetry – Page 36 – Joanne Corey

One-Liner(ish) Wednesday: Mary Oliver on poetry

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force, for poems are not words, after all, but fires for the coal, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread for the hungry.”
— Mary Oliver

I love this quote on poetry. One of the greatest compliments I have received as a poet was being told that one of my poems reminded someone of Mary Oliver.

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/20/one-liner-wednesday-its-not-what-you-think-2/

I am double-dipping this week with Linda’s Just Jot It January, hence, the uncharacteristic commentary on the one-liner quote. Find out more here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/20/just-jot-it-january-20th-surreptitiously/

To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today.

One extreme to the other

Since December 17, I haven’t been at home alone. The combination of different family members on vacation from work, on semester break, and visiting from afar has meant that my usual pattern of spending most of the day Monday through Friday alone has not been in evidence.

I don’t want people to think that I am a hermit. I am often out on errands, visiting people, or volunteering, but I am able to have solitude and time to read, correspond, and write on my own schedule.

Yesterday, B headed out on a business trip. Today, I brought T back to Syracuse. The new semester begins tomorrow.

I am home alone.

I do have commitments on my calendar, but I hope to spend a lot of time catching up on writing, both for my blog and my poetry projects. I’m also hoping to get at least one poetry submission sent this week. While I am waiting for a response on a few submissions, all of my acceptances have now been published, so it would be helpful to get some more work in the pipeline.

I am hoping to minimize time spent on cooking and other chores. Tonight, I had avocado sushi for supper and I already have heat and eat food ready for tomorrow.

I wish I could say that I would be productive in the evening, but it is unlikely to be the case. I don’t tend to sleep well even when someone is in the house; being here alone is likely to mean even less sleep.

I do hope to get enough sleep to have energy to accomplish things during the day.

Will I succeed?

Stay tuned.
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This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Start by visiting here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/18/just-jot-it-january-18th-elegance/

To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today.

Getting back to work

Today, after doing a bit more promotion for my poem that was published in Eunoia Review yesterday, I finally managed to commandeer a block of time when my brain was functioning in a rested, thoughtful mode to work on some poem revisions.

I am happy to report that I was able to produce final(ish) drafts of three poems, including one that was workshopped during my Mass MoCA/Tupelo adventure. I had been particularly concerned about returning to that one, but found that my own and other poets’ notes helped me to recapture the discussion. I may impose it on a couple of Boiler House Poets or bring it to one of my local workshop groups before including it in my manuscript (she says, pretending that the manuscript existed other than as a list in her head).

There are more poems to revise from Mass MoCA, as well as first drafts and sketches I wrote there that need more drafts before they can be workshopped, plus other poems that I need to research and write to fill some gaps. Soon, Sappho’s Circle and the Binghamton Poetry Project will be resuming, with more opportunities to write from prompts, workshop, revise, and submit.

Lots of work ahead.

It felt good to make a tiny dent today, getting back to some semblance of a normal schedule after weeks of holiday-making and busy-ness.

Fingers crossed that everyone stays healthy and I can make steady progress.
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This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Start the journey here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/14/just-jot-it-january-14th-motivation/

To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today.

“The Last Night” in Eunoia Review

I have a new poem published today in Eunoia Review.

It is entitled “The Last Night” and is about witnessing the death of a loved one. I wanted to warn people who may be in a vulnerable place regarding loss so that they can make an informed choice about whether or not they would like to read it.

I would like to thank Eunoia Review for publishing this poem and invite you all to follow them on WordPress. They publish two new poems or pieces of short fiction daily so you can always find something interesting there.

You can find “The Last Night” here: https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/the-last-night/

Please feel free to comment here or in the comment section on Eunoia Review.

With thanks,
Joanne
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This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/13/just-jot-it-january-13th-sacrifice/

To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here.

2015 poems

Along with reading lots of 2016 resolutions, goals, and plans, I’ve read a lot of 2015 summary posts. I even contributed my WordPress summary post.

One of my poet-blogger-friends posted about her poem publications of 2015, which led me to the realization that 2015 is the year that I began to have poems published in competitive venues.

The one poem that I had had accepted in 2014 before joining the Bunn Hill Poets, my primary workshopping group, became available in the spring. The anthology, Candles of Hope, is a fundraiser for the UK charity Topic of Cancer. My contribution had been previously published on my blog. Generally, I don’t put poetry on my blog that I hope to submit as most editors won’t accept previously published poems, but this poem had been one I had written in the middle of the night as a personal cry and had never thought there would be an appropriate place for further publication.

With the help of the Bunn Hill Poets, further sessions of the Binghamton Poetry Project, and the new women’s writing workshop Sappho’s Circle, I was able to refine my poems and match them to publications well enough that I got a number of acceptances in 2015, which was very exciting after meeting with a number of rejection notices previously. Well, truth to tell, currently, too. While I do sometimes write about rejection notices, especially if they come with a compliment or encouragement to submit again, there are definitely lots of rejections when submitting for publication. One of the things I love about the stage of life I am in is that I know I can withstand the rejections and keep on trying. I would not have been so resilient in my younger days.

2015 saw my first appearance in a literary journal, Wilderness House Literary Review. My three poems in the fall quarterly are here.

I am pleased to have developed a relationship with Silver Birch Press. Besides their print anthologies and books, they publish series of poems on their blog, submitted to match their given prompts. I had a poem accepted in five series this year:
All About My Name
My Perfect Vacation
My Sweet Word
When I Hear That Song
Me, During the Holidays
All but one of these were written for SBP. You can hear a recording of my favorite of them “Lessons from Mahler” near the end of this video.

Which bring me to another point in my 2015 poetry story, the Mass MocA/Tupelo Press residency/workshop that I attended in November. It was my first ever experience with a poetry conference of any sort and an amazing, exhausting, overwhelming week. I’m going to be learning from and processing it for a long time. As the inaugural group in the partnership between the museum and Tupelo, we bonded with each other, named ourselves the Boiler House Poets after the setting of the video above, and vowed to have a reunion, which I’m pleased to say has been scheduled for fall 2016. I’m hoping to have the bulk of the poetry collection that is flowing from that experience and my life-long relationship with the North Adams, Massachusetts area finished by then so that the Boiler House Poets can help me refine and strengthen it.

There is one poem that was accepted in 2015 but will be published this year by Eunioa Review. Yes, there will be the usual happy squealing and posting of the link when it becomes available, although it is not a happy poem.

My last sets of poems published last year came through the anthologies of the Binghamton Poetry Project, to which I will be forever grateful for setting me on the path to publication. Our anthologies are not available online, but you can find my contributions here at Top of JC’s Mind, for Spring 2015 and Fall 2015.

Thank you to all my readers who have been encouraging me on the poetry front. 2015 was a breakthrough year for me and I’m excited to see what 2016 will bring.
*****
This (perhaps way too long to be considered jotting) post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join the fun! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/07/just-jot-it-january-7th-robust/

Thank you to the authors who participated in our poetry and prose series during 2015

I am so glad that to have found Silver Birch Press in 2015! I am so pleased to have been part of five of these series:
All About My Name
My Perfect Vacation
My Sweet Word
When I Hear That Song
Me, During the Holidays

What will 2016 bring? It will be exciting to experience it!

Silver Birch Press

thank you
During 2015, the Silver Birch Press blog featured 10 poetry and prose series. Many thanks to all who participated. All told, our 2015 writing prompts generated 965 poems and stories — the vast majority written specifically for our series. Amazing!

IAM WAITING Poetry Series (Dec. 1, 2014 – Jan. 31, 2015): 137 participants

WHERE I LIVE Poetry & Photography Series(Feb. 1 – March 31, 2015): 132 participants

ME, AS A CHILD Poetry Series (April 1 – May 31, 2015): 175 participants

ALL ABOUT MY NAME Poetry Series (June 1 – July 18, 2015): 160 participants

MY PERFECT VACATION Poetry & Prose Series (July 19 – Aug. 21, 2015): 71 participants

MY METAMORPHOSIS Poetry & Prose Series (Aug. 22 – Sept. 15, 2015): 52 participants

MY SWEET WORD Poetry & Prose Series(Sept. 16 – Oct. 31, 2015): 98 participants

WHEN I HEAR THAT SONG Poetry & Prose Series

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Resolutions, goals, and plans

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts over the last few days with people stating their New Year’s resolutions. I admit that I am not a New Year’s resolution person. If I need to make a change, I prefer to start when the need arises.

I’m not especially wedded to January first as a date. Which reminds me that I wrote a poem about it…

Some people chose to list goals rather than resolutions, but even that sounds too cut-and-dried to me.

Jay Dee, at the end of this Authors Answer post, asks what are our plans for 2016.

Plans are something I can get behind. Plans to me are more dynamic and able to be adjusted or revised as needed. Plans don’t have an expiration date.

My writing plan is to put together my first poetry collection.

Those of you who followed my saga of the Mass MoCA/Tupelo Press residency/workshop know that I had hoped returning to my home locale in its new phase of life would spawn a chapbook. Midway though the residency week, I realized that it needed to be a collection rather than a chapbook.

I have a provisional title.

A schema for organizing the sections of the collection.

And some poems that I have already written that will fit into the collection. Others are drafted but need revisions, workshopping, and more revision. Others are still barely ideas and there may be still others that become necessary to write to fill in gaps in the timeline or to balance the sections.

I am planning on marshaling my local resources, Sappho’s Circle and the Bunn Hill Poets, for help with workshopping individual poems. As I get further along in the process, I will probably ~~afflict~~ ~~commandeer~~ invite several writer-poet friends to critique a section or the whole collection. Other people are so much better at pointing out what doesn’t make sense or what is out of order than I am when I am so close to it.

I am ecstatic that our residency group, the Boiler House Poets, will have a reunion this fall. I definitely plan to enlist their help, although I’m not sure in what capacity. It will depend on where I am in the process in the fall. I may need more workshopping help, or organizational assistance, or help navigating the submission process, or may need some more art poems to balance the final section so that I would be generating new poems during the residency that would need feedback.

To me, that is part of the beauty of a plan. It can change and grow as needs dictate.

I know that many people would say that plans need to be written out with checkboxes and timelines and deadlines or things won’t get done.

I do understand that logic, but I can’t force myself – or my poetry – into that kind of straitjacket.

My life experience has featured too many unexpected events to carve any plan in stone.

Too many things can happen.

Too many things have happened.

I am confident that I will assemble this manuscript, but it doesn’t feel safe to me to say it is a 2016 goal or worse – shudder – resolution. It is a plan with roots in 2015 which will grow in 2016.

The fruit will ripen when the time is right. Whatever number gets attached to that date is not mine to say.

It’s not in the plan.
*****
Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January! Find out more about it here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/04/just-jot-it-january-4th-dachshund/

Catching up on the twelve days of Christmas

Today, Catholics celebrate Epiphany, commemorating the visit of the magi to the infant Jesus. Technically, it should be celebrated on Jan. 6th, bringing to a close the famed twelve days of Christmas, but Epiphany gets moved to a Sunday in the modern liturgical calendar. Also, the liturgical season of Christmas extends through the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord the following Sunday. (Can you tell I spent many years serving in liturgical and music ministry?)

I posted about our Christmas Eve and Day, but haven’t filled in much of the rest of our Christmas observance. We do try as much as possible to observe Advent as a time of waiting and preparation, even though culturally in the US, most of December is packed with Christmas festivities which end on Christmas Day rather than begin there.

One of the things that helps us extend our celebration of Christmas is the arrival of my sisters and their families after Christmas. This year, they arrived on Dec. 26. We met at my parents’ apartment for food, fun, Christmas cookies, and gift exchange that afternoon and evening, followed by a big dinner at our house on the 27th.

We inherited the making of family dinners when my parents first moved to an apartment about ten years ago. Part of the inheritance came in the form of the electric rotisserie that I remember from my childhood, on which we made a traditional rolled beef rib roast. We served mashed potatoes, gravy, popovers, rutabaga which my parents prepared, baked onions, Aussie-style bread which our son-in-law made, and fall vegetable chili, which is made with carrots, parsnips, sweet potato, onion, tomato, and red and white kidney beans.

For dessert, we had four pies: apple, pumpkin, apple blackberry, and cranberry meringue, an addition to our pie repertoire made by our older daughter and her husband. Four pies may seem like a lot for fourteen people, but we always want to have some left over for breakfast the next morning!

Unfortunately, work schedules and threatening weather intervened and both sisters and family had to return home on the 28th. That left us two days with our older daughter E and son-in-law L before they had to fly home to Honolulu. We went out to lunch at a couple of our favorite local eateries, spent time with the grandparents, and enjoyed quiet times at home.

On the morning of the 29th, we were all up at 4 AM to get ready to bring E and L to the airport for a 6 AM flight to Newark and then on to Honolulu. We wished they could have stayed longer, but were very grateful to have them with us for a week.

I did write about our (sedate) New Year’s Eve and Day, although I did have the excitement of a new poem coming out on Silver Birch Press.

Epiphany is traditionally the day that we take down our Christmas tree, although we were late putting it up this year and it isn’t dropping needles, so maybe we will wait until next weekend. B returns to work on Monday and next week’s calendar is filled with appointments, so it is back to reality, or at least what passes for routine, tomorrow.
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This post is part of Linda’s JusJoJan initiative. Join us! Read more about it here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/03/just-jot-it-january-3rd-frozen/

Welcome, 2016!

Happy New Year, everyone! We began our celebration toasting at midnight GMT, also known as 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, as I write about in my new poem on Silver Birch Press. We drank the very bottle of sparkling apple cranberry juice that I used in the photo, along with the wine glasses pictured. I did use some poetic license in the poem, as we do still have daughter T here celebrating with us this year.

I woke up early this morning with part of the middle of a poem for the collection I am working on this year swirling about in my head, so I got up to type it into google docs before I lost it. I’m hoping it is a good omen for my poetic work this year to start January first by drafting new work for my first ever collection.

Later this morning, we will head up to GSV, the senior community where our elder generation live, to pick up Nana for 10 AM Mass. January 1st is a holy day in the Catholic Church, dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. After church, we will have brunch at GSV with Nana, Paco, Grandma, and Grandma’s neighbor Ann.

There aren’t plans for the rest of the day, although I expect it will be low-key. As you can see, we are not the wild and crazy types!

I wish everyone the gifts of peace, joy, and contentment in 2016!
*****
This post is part of Linda’s Just Jot It January. Join us! Visit this link for more info: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/01/just-jot-it-january-1st-persnickety/

Eastern Standard, poem by Joanne Corey (ME, DURING THE HOLIDAYS Poetry and Prose Series)

I am pleased to announce that my New Year’s Eve poem “Eastern Standard” is part of the “Me, During the Holidays” series on Silver Birch Press.

Not wanting to miss an opportunity to promote the Boiler House Poets’ video, there is a link to it in my bio, as well as a link to the SBP publication of “Lessons from Mahler.”

Best wishes to everyone for a wonderful 2016!

Peace,
Joanne

Silver Birch Press

Corey Eastern Standard
by Joanne Corey

As the third millennium turned,
our family toasted with sparkling cider
at midnight Greenwich Mean Time,
seven in the evening for us,
in deference to daughters’ bedtimes.

With our children grown, the two
of us honor that tradition,
clink glasses, savor the past,
sip, hope for the future,
in evening dark as midnight.

PHOTO: Bubbly (fruit juice) and glasses ready for 2016.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: As the year 2000 began, midnight celebrations across the world were broadcast live on television. Realizing that the top of the hour was always midnight somewhere, we decided that we would celebrate at midnight GMT, so that we could all observe our usual bedtimes. We still love this quiet way to celebrate the new year.

corey1 ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joanne Corey lives and writes in Vestal, New York, where she is active with the Binghamton Poetry Project, Sappho’s Circle, and the…

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