A Poet's Double Life

For poets working outside the literary world.

Tag Archives: Visual Poetry


by 1 Comment

April in NOLA


Mural of the Harriet Tubman $20 bill
Beignets from Café du Monde
Gumbo and Bloody Mary
Boston skyline from airplane

Last weekend, I met the Margaret Bashaar, editor and founder of Hyacinth Girl Press the micro-press that published my chapbook. It was the first time we had met in person and she had heard me read the poems from the chapbook. Margaret submitted a proposal for a panel reading from various HGP titles at the New Orleans Poetry Festival. I told her if the panel got accepted, I would “make it work.” In actuality, it was harder to find a flight for a decent price and reserve accommodations than it was to take time off from work.

For the reading, I selected poems from the chapbook that I do not normally read— “Peaches and Pound Cake,” “Why I Stopped Mentoring White Women,” “There’s a Graveyard in My Belly,” and “Transit of Venus”—in addition to the one poem I love to read, “Twenty Questions for Black Professionals,” which was, thankfully, the poem my editor wanted to hear. I also read three new poems I’ve written in the past year that have received the polishing after they’ve been through the weekly critiques over Skype. Although I was on the ground less than 48 hours, I got a chance to meet and hear some great poets, take in the street art on St. Roch Avenue, eat beignets at Café du Monde, have a Bloody Mary & gumbo at Stanley, and visit Marie LaVeau’s House of Voodoo before heading back to the airport.

This week’s poems were a combination of poets I wanted to make sure I included and poems that jumped off the page (or the screen) when I was reading them.

Day 23: The Abandoned Valley by Jack Gilbert 

Day 24: The White Ones by Langston Hughes

Day 25: from Citizen, VI [My brothers are notorious] by Claudia Rankine

Day 26: Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa

Day 27: The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Day 28: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Day 29: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Amiri Baraka 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.


by 1 Comment

April is a Marathon


A sea of Boston Marathon Runners

122nd Boston Marathon through Brookline

Massachusetts is one of four states that observe Patriots’ Day (or Patriot’s Day if you live in Maine) commemorating the Battles of Lexington & Concord. This state holiday is also known as Marathon Monday when runners wind their way through 26.2 miles of Massachusetts from Hopkinton to Boston. Now that I live Brookline, it’s a 3-minute walk from my apartment to Mile Marker 23 on the marathon route. Even with miserable weather, I felt it was my civic duty to cheer the runners on. 

This week, I decided to be more deliberate in the poems I chose to post, all Black women poets, most with a Cave Canem connection.

Day 16: Object Permanence by Nicole Sealey

Day 17: When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me by Tracy K. Smith

Day 18: Incident by Natasha Trethewey 

Day 19: Summer by Robin Coste Lewis

Day 20: Given to Rust by Vievee Francis

Day 21: Hash Marks by Nikki Finney

Day 22: To Be In Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

This slideshow requires JavaScript.


by 3 Comments

P is for P-town


PoeT

And poetry, and poet-friends old & new. I spent a week at the Fine Arts Work Center for their poetry festival week that featured faculty members Tim Seibles, Natalie Diaz, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robin Coste Lewis, Matthew Olzmann, & Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

I took the Articulating the Image workshop with visual arts-poet Rachel Eliza. I have a deep appreciation for photography’s ability to capture so much in a single shot. As a poet, I’ve spent countless hours and energy attempting to describe an image in my head using  only words, which are sometimes not the best tools. I had hoped the workshop would get me out of my head and able to approach poetry from a different perspective—and the workshop did not disappoint.

We had assignments to take pictures of a certain color, the natural world, and shapes or shadows that helped to focus our eyes and our mind on what is important. We also had to engage with what we saw by writing about the connection to our lives. During class we built a visual canvas of words,  images and objects. Each day we layered our canvases with more words, images, and objects from ourselves as well as from the other class participants. One of my favorite aspects of the class is being free to engage in other people’s canvases by adding questions, colors, and drawings to push their visual poems forward.

green
triangle
nature
shadow
braces
an offering

 

In addition to the many ideas and activities I brought back, the poetry workshop was a reunion of sorts with poets I knew from Cave Canem, VCFA, and one I had met in the Boston area. I also had the opportunity to meet and listen to great poets around the country and connected with a few local poets.

Such a great weekend. It will be hard to come down from this poetry high.


by 2 Comments

Planetary Influences


Transit of Venus June 5, 2012, NASA/Goddard/SDO

Transit of Venus June 5, 2012, NASA/Goddard/SDO

One of the first poems in my chapbook that was published was “Transit of Venus,” which was inspired by the 2012 event that will not happen again until 2117. What I saw with my own eyes (black drop / crossing / the sun / dipping down / curving around / up again) is now visible in some amazing pictures from a joint project between NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. I consider the Venus poem the first in a series of poems about the planets I intend to write. Last year, Construction Magazine published “To Earth, From Mars,” the second planetary poem, and I wrote “Pluto, My Brother” at my last Cave Canem retreat (back in my day there were 9 planets). My poetry-date partner, Kelly, says the Pluto poem is ready to send out, so I’ll be spending some time this weekend in the Poet’s Gym (aka UNC Davis Library) figuring out where it should land.

Photograph via Flickr by bluedharma

Photograph via Flickr by bluedharma

I love writing about the planets and other objects in the universe. They are like our distant relatives: made of the same stuff but existing in a different era. Poetry offers a unique way to consider the beauty and individuality of each body as well as explore the myths and folklore we project onto each globe. I’ve also written  poems about the spacecraft we’ve sent to explore other objects in our universe. My biggest challenge is *getting the science right* inside the poem. Often, the scientific terms are not accessible or pleasant-sounding to the average reader. It’s my job to make the connection between science and metaphor so that we can understand each planet on its own merit as well as how it relates to our own lives.

Tonight, I will get another opportunity to write about Pluto at the Science Cafe at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. The talk will feature some of the stunning images taken of our dear *dwarf* planet from the New Horizons probe. I can’t wait to see what these new images inspire.

NASA Instagram photo of Pluto from New Horizons

NASA Instagram photo of Pluto from New Horizons

Poetry in Plain Sight

by 1 Comment


photo-1
Winston-Salem Writers started a cool program this year where they put poetry on display in stores throughout the downtown area. My poem, “Something Missing,” was selected as one of four poems featured for the month of May. This poem has special significance to me because I wrote it on my birthday last year (April 12th) as part of the April Poem-a-Day Challenge and it is a poem about my father, a subject I have a hard time writing about. Here’s a link to the video of me reading this poem and two other poems, “Work Husband” and “Hold That Hot Potato.”


by Leave a comment

April Poem-a-Day Challenge, Day 13


This poem was inspired by a photograph of the same name taken by Phil Freelon, whose exhibition, “Structure“, is at the Craven Arts Gallery in Durham until June 15th.

Networking

Fishermen-near-Accra.-Gha-001
All the wooden boats are docked
to start the day. Men and boys work
their fingers through the fine green netting
so fast the camera catches only lime blur.
The women watch—babies crooked
in hip creases—studying the way these men,
their men will provide. This is happy hour
in Accra, where no one makes a three-minute
pitch or pushes cardboard in your hand.

~Pamela L. Taylor © 2013


by 2 Comments

After “One Love”


Last week on Valentine’s Day, over 2,200 14-word poems were handed out throughout the Triangle as part of the 14 Words, One Love event. I wrote over 40 poems in less than two weeks—and was ecstatic to learn we had surpassed our original goal by 800 poems!

And then I hit the wall. Runners often talk about the runner’s high—that rush of adrenalin that keeps them going during a marathon. The 14-word event definitely fed all the good poetic energy and reading and commenting on other people’s poems increased that positive vibe. That energy stayed with me throughout Valentine’s Day when I handed out poems to my office colleagues, distributed poems at an off-site meeting, and made special home deliveries to a few of my friends. But afterwards, I felt rung out like a worn rag. I couldn’t think about picking up a pen, let alone convincing my mind to conjure up an image to bring to life on the page.

That’s probably why it has taken two weeks to get back in the blog saddle. I had to re-group, feed the space that opened up after the “one love” was gone. So I turned to poetry books: first, to Rabindranath Tagore’s Final Poems, and then, to Sharon Olds’ Selected Poems. I spent time memorizing one of my favorite poems by Olds, “Topography,” which is now the fourth poem I know by heart (more on that later). Monday’s visual prompt for Living Poetry ended the drought.71752_518868581492385_1203357513_n

Danish “Heart Book”

Closed, it is a question
mark missing the finality
of the dot that holds
its fragile curve in place,
half of what it could be.

Opened, a great yearning
lives in the curlicue of each letter,
yellowed pages burdened by the black
ink of a centuries-old plea: for misery
to end and turn into good.

After that, two other poems I had jotted down in my journal and on my iPhone finally started to take shape on the page. Now I feel like I’m back on track.

Superheroes at Work

by Leave a comment


I often say being a poet with a double life is a lot like being a superhero. Here’s a cool photo from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review of some superheroes at their day jobs (maybe a few of them are poets, too!).

Window-washers from left, Mark Errico (Captain America), Jim Zaremba (Batman), Ed Hetrick (Super-Man) and Rick Boloinger (Spiderman) rappel down the side of Children’s Hospital on Monday morning, Oct. 22, 2012 as the crew of washers from Allegheny Window Cleaning Inc. rid the windows of the Lawrenceville hospital of grime. © James Knox

Special thanks to double-life poet and blogger, Jodi Barnes for sending this photo!


by 2 Comments

Ekphrastic Poetry


For me, art is a constant source of inspiration. I walk through museums and galleries with a petite notebook and matching pen in my back pocket to catch whatever comes to mind. When I look at a work of art—be it a painting, photography, sculpture, or mixed media—I try to imagine myself inside the piece, either as the subject or the person observing the scene. For example, here’s what I wrote in response to this photo of fireworks:

Spark

Photo by Katia Singletary Art and Photography

One hand gropes
in the dark
and finds its match.
Now fingers intertwine
like stacked wood
transferring heat
from pressed palms
to wrapped arms,
pulling closer
and closer.
Then lips touch
and the miracle
of fire burns slow
through hips and toes.
Embers of shared
breath rise until reds,
purples, and golds bloom
and burst into fiery
chrysanthemums.

I like photography because a photo is literally a snapshot of a moment, which goes along with the narrative elements of the poems I write. Former North Carolina Poet Laureate, Cathy Smith Bowers calls this, “shining a light on a moment in time.”

Photo by Manish Ahuja

As a poet, I have complete freedom to choose which moment to feature. The unseen creatures are the focus of this haiku:

The receding tide
leaves sand crabs bare on the shore
Raucous seagulls snack

A good ekphrastic poem should be able to stand by itself—without the requiring artwork to provide the context. At the same time, the poem should complement the artwork, enhance the meaning of the scene beyond what you can experience just by looking at it. Here’s a poem inspired by the well-known painting, The Sleeping Gypsy (read the poem and then visit the painting).

The Sleeping Gypsy

And now she sleeps—
stretched—with her water jug
nearby and the moon standing
guard overhead. I’ve stalked her
wandering scent in the desert heat,
beheld her bedazzling garments
as if a rainbow wrapped its arms
around her dark beauty. The mandolin
silent, but still singing her deep
alto into my jaws, my paws. I long
to be that instrument—what she wants
near, what her arms can hold.

Special thanks to photographers, Manish Ahuja and Katia Singletary, for granting permission to use their work.


by 2 Comments

Poetry Prompts


Last week was one of those weeks when my writing rhythm was thrown off by travel and late nights in Raleigh for work and poetrySpark.  When I can’t think of anything to write or haven’t written in a while, prompts are a way to jumpstart the creative juices.  Luckily, one of my responsibilities for Living Poetry is sending out the weekly poetry prompt. Every Monday on the ride into work, I have to figure out what the prompt is going to be—which means focusing my energies on thinking about what topic might possibly inspire me to write.  Here are a few of the prompts I’ve used so far:

skin * breath * night *  fireworks * the smell of mint

Recently, I started using a visual prompt on the 3rd Monday of the month. Last month, a photo in the UCLA Magazine inspired this poem:

Carbon Footprint

From the “Vegan Campus” article in UCLA Magazine: http://magazine.ucla.edu/features/the-vegan-campus/index1.html

I want to leave
something behind,
more than this poem,
this page, this pen,
a lineage beyond
what my fruitless
loins choose to bear.
In time, the mind purges
any memory too heavy
to carry. The soul
must be free to take
the next step without
a trace of regret.

Today, I sent out a photo from National Geographic. I’ll post the poem I come up with next week.