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Found Twitter Haiku (Part 3)

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It’s Wednesday! And that means another round of accidental Twitter haiku. In case you missed it, you can read an introduction to the project and see part 1 by clicking here or check out part 2 here.

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Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared widely in journals like PANK, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Third Coast, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.aubreyhirsch.com and she tweets as @aubreyhirsch.

Work: Surviving the Arts

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Exploring issues of sustainability in the arts.

~by Scott Pinkmountain

“Advice Column”

PANK1

I’ve taught songwriting to college students some, and a few months ago I received an email from a former student. He caught me up on where he landed after college and sent me some of his music to check out. Then he added:

I’ve played a few shows at some bars around Portland and have a streak going of quieting the room, which has been super encouraging. But, I was wondering if you had any advice for going further with my music. I don’t really have any idea where to go from here, or how to take the next step or anything.

P.S. I also got my first short story published a few months ago. Though being a school bus driver for the year made it a constant struggle to pay the bills, it gave me plenty of time for writing, and that’s been totally worth it.

Continue reading →

Wrought & Found

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Original poems & found images

By Mia Sara

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Persephone At Gelson’s

Not quite trusting myself
with the newborn year
knowing now what I didn’t know
about inevitable disappointment
I linger in the aisles at Gelson’s Market
where that sexy young guy in produce
winks at me, tossing me a pomegranate,
and that’s when it hits me,
not all fruit is bitter at the seed.

*image credit Marek Yanai

***
Mia Sara is an actress and poet living in Los Angeles. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in poemmemoirstory, Pembroke Magazine, The Write Room, PANK, Cultural Weekly, The Kit Kat Review, Forge, The Dirty Napkin, St. Ann’s Review, among others. For more please visit: http://wheretofindmiasara.tumblr.com/

Found Twitter Haiku (Part 2)

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We’re back with more accidental Twitter haiku! If you’re new here, you can read an introduction to the project and see part 1 by clicking here.

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/410531115770716160

https://twitter.com/CourtneyStodden/status/410586157416591360

https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/354690186518593536

https://twitter.com/SalPane/status/410193820597235713

https://twitter.com/the_newgent/status/410131406379962368

Aubrey Hirsch is the author of Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared widely in journals like PANK, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Third Coast, The Pinch Journal, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.aubreyhirsch.com and she tweets as @aubreyhirsch.

Found Twitter Haiku

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About ten years ago I had the great pleasure of hearing Billy Collins give a reading. During his between-poem banter, he talked about conditioning himself to listen for haiku that occur in everyday conversation. That is, listening for bits of speech that just happen to be 17 syllables in length. Fascinated, I similarly trained my own ear to recognize haiku in unexpected places.

Now that I’ve spent some time on Twitter, I’ve discovered that the 140-character limit lends itself perfectly to haiku. There are Twitter accounts that specialize in tweeting carefully-crafted haiku, but I prefer the spontaneous, accidental versions—those beautiful 17-syllable chunks of language that the tweeter doesn’t even know she’s producing.

Poets.org offers this handy primer on haiku, noting that, although many of the rules of traditional haiku have been relaxed, “the philosophy of haiku has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., by Adelle Waldman

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~by Kaya Genç

Love Affairs

Henry Holt

256 pgs./$11.73

 

In The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., her exquisitely composed debut novel, Adelle Waldman gives us Nathaniel (Nate) Piven, a young novelist obsessed with imagining the feelings and ideas of female characters around him. Like Nate, Waldman worked as an essayist for numerous print and web publications. But despite the resemblance between them Waldman’s literary creation is a very dislikable creature: a selfish man lacking the faculty of empathy that is crucial for the novelist he is struggling to become.

On the face of it Nate is a likeable figure. He is successful, well-groomed and attractive. His prospects as a writer are excellent. He has a six-figure book deal and a growing reputation among Brooklyn’s literati. The story sets off months before the publication of his debut novel and quickly reveals how Nate’s gentlemanly façade is a mere ploy that conceals his womanising ambitions. Continue reading →

Darkly Devotions

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Lyric prose meditations that play with elements from evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, reiki, Tarot and “weird voodoo shit.”

~by Cindy Clem

***

Opening exercise: Thread a needle. Pull the thread all the way through. Then, thread the needle again. Repeat for ten minutes. Each time you poke the thread through the eye, bow slightly and say, “If you would be so kind.” Each time you pull the thread through, bow again and say, “Thanks awfully much.”

If you assumed that today’s Scripture has to do with camels, you were wrong. It is, however, about water. Before we begin, please fill in the required words for numbers 1-8 below. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Kind, by Gretchen Primack

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~ by Hannah Rodabaugh

Kind

Post Traumatic Press

86 pgs/$15.00

Gretchen Primack’s most recent collection of poetry, Kind (Post Traumatic Press), is protest poetry at its best and worst. At its best, it will make you think; at its worst, it will make you uncomfortable, which will also make you think. The poems, which deal primarily with the inherent dignity of different kinds of animals, will create responses as various as the poems: humility, a sense of the dignity of animals, occasional bewilderment, excitement, and even occasional anger were a few of the many emotional responses that I often felt when reading Kind. This is a compliment. It is rare to read a book of poems, and garner such a variety of emotions and range of emotions while reading it. It certainly makes for exciting reading.

A middle poem, “The Other Half of the Simile,” reiterates what are the most salient themes of this volume. An overwhelming sense of despair fronted within factory farming becomes a short epithet-heavy discussion of human involvement. She hazards:

They beat him like a dog
They packed them in like cattle
They caged them like animals

And why do we chafe not at the beating,
but which being
is beaten?

Not the cage, but who is caged?

Why should any being be packed?

They were animals
He was a beast to her

Who are the beasts?

Just from this segment, we get a sense of how deeply thought and deeply felt concern towards animals is for Primack. This is hardly surprising given her work as a political activist in the animal rights movement. But, she weaves animal rights towards understanding with deftness. Everything is intentional in the landscape of this well-structure volume. For Primack, the rights of animals are human rights, and vice versa. Continue reading →

Darkly Devotions

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Lyric prose meditations that play with elements from evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, reiki, Tarot and “weird voodoo shit.
~by Cindy Clem

 

I.

Opening exercise [Standing meditation]: Stand, feet planted, arms by your sides, palms forward. Breathe.  Breathe up earth. Breathe into your feet worms, dirt, the many-legged things that move under rocks. Let them crawl and smear. Let them creep their way to your core. Now, breathe down. Breathe down from the sun molten tongues. Breathe into your brain the flames. Let them lick. Let them speak. Let them carry their words down the spine for the worms to eat. Breathe. Hear the life force munching.

II.

Today’s Scripture comes from the book of Isaiah. Not today the wings of eagles, mind you. Not today the beautiful news on good mountain feet. I, even I, am He who comforts you. Who are you that you should be afraid of a man who will die, and of the son of a man who will be made like grass? 51:12, NKJV

And so let us reflect and learn. Pronouns abound in this tricky verse. I, even I, am He. Who are you?

Even I, believe it or not?
Even I, who am not prone to giving comfort?
Even I–yes, really, it’s me, remember me?

Why not a simple, “I comfort you” or “There, there”? Because Even I is a poet. Even I relishes language. Even I is all Self, all He.

Who are you? Who is this man, this man like grass who will die? The man of Tao, says Chuang Tzu, remains unknown. No-Self is True-Self, and the greatest man is Nobody.

Even I to No-Self: “There, there. That man who’s eating your back with his whip will die someday. Rejoice!”

Grass sprouts from the dead, who send forth their blades under our feet. This is what happens when your God is so…God-like. He is all perspective, all terrifying calm distance.

I, even I, am He. Wholly unto Me. Selah. Verily.

III.

Closing affirmation: No One is made like grass. Nobody floats like an eagle on the wings of the comforting He.

 

***

Cindy Clem received her MFA in poetry in 2005 and has been writing non-fiction ever since. Her poems and essays have appeared (magically!) in Mid-American Review, The Normal School, Prairie Schooner, Memoir (and), Superstition Review, The Interrobang, Spittoon, and Michigan Quarterly Review (forthcoming).