Tag: Boiler House Poets

SoCS: art, poetry, and 30/30

Last November, I attended my first-ever poetry residency/workshop/conference at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MASS MoCA. It was held in conjunction with Tupelo Press, a non-profit independent press located just down the road in the Eclipse Mill loft.

It was amazing, difficult, intense, valuable, exhausting, overwhelming, and dozens of other adjectives. (Poets don’t use many adjectives. Bloggers are allowed.) Anyone who would like to read more about my experience can check out the November 2015 posts in my archive.

One of the many lasting benefits is that I have written a series of poems about art. I had written a few before that residency, but not nearly as many as afterward. There is a fancy name for poems about art, ekphrastic. Note:  spell check does not know what to do with the word ekphrastic.

Some of these poems, along with other poems about North Adams, the city where MASS MoCA is located, and the surrounding towns, will become my first-ever-attempt-at a poetry collection.

It’s complicated.

I grew up in a town about twenty miles from North Adams and went to high school in North Adams. We went there to shop and to visit relatives. The city has changed a lot over the years. I’ve changed a lot over the years. The poems deal with generations of our family, small towns and a small city, home, change, geography, and art.

It’s a lot.

It’s also a new experience.

I am about to print the poems that are completed and assemble them into sections and a manuscript, leaving space for some poems that aren’t yet written. I’ll look for holes that need to be filled.  And try to fill them.

I am hoping to have a reasonable working draft by the time our group of poets, who were the first group to experience the Mass MoCA/Tupelo collaboration, return for a reunion residency in October.

We call ourselves the Boiler House Poets, after an art/sound installation at MASS MoCA where we made a video of us reading poems.

I am giving a shout-out here to one of the Boiler House Poets, Gail Dimaggio, who is embarking on another exciting collaboration with Tupelo Press. She will be one of their 30/30 poets in August. She and a small group of poets will each write a new poem every day for thirty days, which will be posted on a special section of the Tupelo Press website. Everyone is invited to follow along! Gail has a new blog to accompany her journey:  https://gaildi.blogspot.com/.

Come join the poetry/blogging fun!
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “art.” Come join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2016/07/29/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-3016/

SoCS badge 2015

 

Marilyn McCabe’s Glass Factory

I’m pleased to share the news that poet-friend and fellow Boiler House Poet Marilyn McCabe has a new book of poems available.  This link:   https://marilynonaroll.wordpress.com/glass-factory/  will take you to her blog post about it with videos of her reading two of the poems, link to a readers’ guide, and more! Ordering information is included in the post, so go there right now and check it out!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
M is for Marilyn (and MASS MoCA)

New header photo

Thanks to all my blogger friends for their advice on my new theme!

I looked through my photos and found one I thought would crop well as a new header image.

Boiler House Poets and people familiar with North Adams, Massachusetts may recognize the street sign. It was just outside the apartments where we stayed during the Tupelo Press/Mass MoCA residency. (If you want to know more about the residency, check my blog archive for November, 2015.)

I will leave it to my readers to ponder the deep inner meaning of Center Street being one way and what that has to do with the Top of JC’s Mind…

I still wish I could make the title/tagline font larger, but I think it doesn’t look quite so tiny with the header image breaking it apart from the larger-font post title.

It just occurred to me that my link to my “About” page got lost in the shuffle of the theme change. I guess that will be my next problem to solve.

I’d appreciate any comments/musing/interpretations on the new header image.

With thanks,
JC

 

Poem by Marilyn McCabe

I’m sharing this link to a blog post from one of the Boiler House Poets, Marilyn McCabe. She loves sharing poetry in a multimedia way as she does in the short video here: https://marilynonaroll.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/word-up/

Check it out!

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/

JJJ 2016

 

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/

JJJ 2016

 

SoCS: Reunion!

There is an exciting event in store! Well, next year.

We got news yesterday that we Boiler House Poets have a date for a reunion residency at Mass MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art).

We met at the inaugural collaboration between the Museum’s new Studios at Mass MoCA program and Tupelo Press, both located in North Adams, MA. You can read my incessant posts about it, which start on Nov. 13.

Our group bonded so well that we wanted to get back together – and now we know we will!

There will be more writing, more art, more workshopping, more food, more conversations, and lots and lots more poems in store! And, I hope, another video. Our first video is here and explains our name.
******
This short and sweet post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. This week’s prompt is “store.” Join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/12/18/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-dec-1915/

SoCS badge 2015

 

The Boiler House Reading, Tupelo Press/MASSMoCA Residency, November 2015 on Vimeo

Another chance to share the awesome video the Boiler House Poets made at Mass MoCA during our residency there with Tupelo Press in North Adams MA. Re-blogging this from fellow Boiler House Poet Donna Fleischer’s blog. Hop on over there and enjoy!

donnafleischer's avatarword pond

The Boiler House at MASS MoCA poetry reading on November 18, 2015 was given by Tupelo Press Writing Conference poets in the order of their readings: Kyle Laws, Donna Fleischer, Gail Dimaggio, James Sneed, Kay Morgan, Victoria G. Smith, Marilyn McCabe, Ann Dernier, and Joanne Corey, with James Schley, Managing Editor, Tupelo Press books.

View original post

Re-entry

The poetry residency/workshop with Mass MoCA/Tupelo Press was amazing, but it’s a bit of a jar being back home. It is especially hard to come back to a week that is so far removed from my usual routine.

I spend most weekdays able to arrange my own schedule.  This week, with the Thanksgiving holiday and both B and younger daughter T on vacation, I don’t have my usual solitary time, so I am having to trust that I will be able to go back to processing all the poetic goodness from last week – and get to work on writing and revising I want to do. (Reassurances welcome in comments.)

Today, I got to see all the elders of the family. This morning, I got to share the video of the Boiler House Poets’ reading with my parents and talk a bit about my experience. I also got to play the recording of the piece (begins at about 12:40) on which my poem “Lessons from Mahler” is based.  It was lovely to share this with them.

The afternoon was back to reality, bringing my mother-in-law to a medical appointment. Things aren’t worse, but they aren’t better either. Sigh. At least, she is doing better than she was when she came over for Thanksgiving dinner a year ago.

And tomorrow morning, I will facilitate the spirituality class at church. Poetry may come up…