VOTE FOR (MY) POETRY!

For the second time, I am a finalist and need your votes (and those of your social media friends) to put my poem on the broadside, far and wide for the annual Haiku-Year-in-Review at Broadsided Press.

Combining an old newspaper tradition and the haiku tradition of including seasons, this annual competition puts poets and artists together to make a cool letter-sized broadside (this year's image to the left) that you can print and post anywhere in the world.

Vote for your favorite for all the seasons -- I hope one of them is mine!

To cast your ballot, check out my haiku here -- the first selection in the Winter series:

two suns in one sky 
leaving us like dinosaurs 
awestruck and stricken 

 Thanks!

P.S.  If you can share this link on Facebook and ask folks to check out my poem, that would be great!

RetroLove Live! Save the Date!

Note: Venue changed to Brandywine Workshop, 728 South Broad Street as of January 2, 2014.

Yes, I will be making the leap from Page to Stage, reading the RetroLove poems, and maybe a few others, on Wednesday, January 8, 2014, 7:00 pm at Fergie's Pub (1214 Sansom Street in Philadelphia) as part of the Moonstone Poetry Series.  Here is another small taste of the series to whet your appetite....RetroLove haiku.

RetroLove: The Kiss

under the street light

at the end of the evening

lingering heartswell

© Beth Feldman Brandt

RetroLove ™

Sometimes when you are really, really stuck trying to write a poem, any poem, you need to just try something completely different.

While on vacation at the beach in August (one of my best writing times), I was trying to explain to my kids what dating was like before the age of cell phones, Facebook, pictures on your phone, yes, even answering machines. Remember having to decide whether to stay home just in case that person you had a crush on called you?  And telling everyone in your house to STAY OFF THE PHONE!

And so RetroLove was born.  I threw out all my rules of writing.  No research.  No multiple drafts in a sketchbook.  I wrote every morning,, straight to the computer.  Eight poems in two weeks. And, man, it was the most fun I have had writing in forever.

RetroLove is taking on all kinds of possibilities -- more later on that. So to whet your whistle, with a shout-out to any New Yorkers out there who will find special meaning in this one, let's take a look back.  

The Song

When it spilled from the dashboard as we drove

to the shore in my yellow Oldsmobile with the top down

and then again from the dial-tuned 77WABC, transistor radio

on our blanket on the sand at Jones Beach,

we figured Cousin Brucie was sending us a sign --

and we spun that tune from the black vinyl LP

held tenderly by the edges, dropped the needle again

and again,  so we could slow dance when we were together

and sigh when we were apart until the groove wore down

into a stutter skip right before the second chorus

which made it, irreplaceably, ours, and now Cousin Brucie

is pushing 80, and the tune has gone digital, its underlying

hiss erased, but still when I hear it, I wait for the stutter,

the way my heart still skips when I hear the first notes of us. 

(c) Beth Feldman Brandt, 2013

Read my poem in Philadelphia Stories!

kerf  

Noun A slit made by cutting, esp. with a saw You might remember this one -- check out my poem in the summer issue of Philadelphia Stories.  You can read it online here and also find out where you can get a print copy if you are in the area.  Yes, it is a real magazine with paper and ink and everything! Kerf is one of my favorite words -- the space made by a saw as you cut that then disappears when the two pieces of wood fall apart. A word made for this temporary state. I love great words -- sometimes the way they sound...or what they mean.  Add your favorite to the comment section below - we can have a vocabulary quiz!

The Mom Poems! Share yours!

In honor of National Poetry Month, a different kind of poem.

So 1812 Productions, a theatre company in Philadelphia devoted to comedy, is collecting Mom Poems as part of their upcoming production of "It's My Party: The Women and Comedy Project."

They are asking folks to create poetic tributes to their moms -- sort of a poetry by Mad Lib -- and share a photograph.  These will be posted on the website and some will be up around the city as posters.

I was proud to share this photo of my mom, Bernice Feldman, in her US Navy uniform from WWII.  I may never have learned how to knit but I love her tons.  And when it comes to poetry, she is my biggest fan.

Want to do your own Mom tribute?  Click here.

Bartram's Boxes

You have been quite patient with me as I have talked about the Bartram's Boxes project without posting up many poems.  This was a tough assignment -- each poem containing a reference to a theme, a tree, and some Bartram history.  But after almost a year, 13 poems are all done and, with thanks to my  creative partner, Claire Owen,will be delivered today in their extraordinary boxes to the Center for Art in Wood exhibition.  The show does not open until May 2014 so I will send out a poem now and again to whet your appetite for the full series.

As often happens when I write, I can miss the most obvious thing.  So when I was contemplating the last Bartram poem inspired by the Kentucky Coffeetree to go into the Caretakers box, it finally occurred to me that there should probably be a poem called...

Bartram’s Boxes

We travel at risk of health and untold loneliness

to uncover what has been seen only by Creek

or crocodile among the brambles.

How we love each fruit or flower for its singularity,

the way we love a wife’s touch, a son’s quick mind,

a daughter’s attentiveness.

Ours is the commerce of curiosity,  seeds gathered,

sifted, tenderly nestled in moss, until with sunlight

and breath, each will spark like tinder,

reveal its secret – beauty, fragrance, usefulness –

brilliant as sunset, dark as coffee, a balm –

sent to bloom across oceans like the children

who blossom in our absence.

We are men of science.  Men of faith.

This is our praise.

(c) 2012

P.S.  Remember to check out my tagged writers for this week! (see the post below)

Ragdale buddy Sheila Flaherty

My mentor and poet extraordinaire AV Christie

The Next Big Thing!

I have been asked by my friend and poet Liz Bradfield to participate in The Next Big Thing -- a sort of "Tag! You're It!" blog scheme for writers to post up about their works in progress by all answering the same questions about an upcoming book.  You can check out Liz' post from last week to get the gist. Here goes!

What is the working title of the book?  Well, the poems were written as part of a collaboration with visual artist Claire Owen for an exhibition entitled “Bartram’s Boxes Remix.” I hadn’t thought of a title for the actual poems on their own.  But now that you ask, I am thinking the title will be “Solace”.

Where did the idea come from for the book?  In June 2010, 13 trees were toppled in a storm that went through Bartram’s Garden, a historic house and garden in Philadelphia. The Garden collaborated with the Center for Art in Wood and put out a request for exhibition proposals for art made from or inspired by the trees.

What genre does your book fall under?  The book is actually three small books of poetry (by me) and images (by Claire) so we have a sort of an interdisciplinary nature/history/poems/visual art genre here.  The photo above is the inside of the "Journeys" box.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?  The poems center around the Bartram family of botanists and naturalists as well as the trees and the gardens and war and slavery and women who never get a bit of historical attention…and… and…

I pick Daniel Day-Lewis as patriarch John Bartram.  Laura Linney as Ann Bartram.  Ewan McGregor as William Bartram.  Who perhaps could bring his lightsaber.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?  If 13 trees fall in the forest, can you make art about them?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?  I wrote the first two poems for the proposal to the exhibition while I was at Ragdale for an artist residency in October 2011.  We got word that we were accepted into the show in February 2012. Then Claire and I set up a series of deadlines for each of the three books which I then passed off to her so she had time to create her incredible boxes.But I delivered the last set of poems to Claire right on time in February 2013.

 By the way, writing really complicated poems on a deadline is really, really hard.  Thanks to everyone who listened to me whine for the past year.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?  Claire and I had collaborated together on Sage and we both love old science, working together, nature things.  So this project seemed right up our alley.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? John Bartram was considered the father of botany in the New World and his home and the garden are still preserved, in all their quirkiness, on the banks of the Schuylkill River behind a low-income housing project.  If you’ve never been there, you should definitely visit come spring.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?  Well, one problem of writing poems that are going to be shown as beautiful hand-bound books in three beautiful hand-crafted boxes is that no one will be able to read them in the exhibition.  So I am starting to work on creating either a chapbook or e-book (or both) to accompany the exhibition and get the poems “out of the box”.  I have time.  The exhibition opens at the Center for Art in Wood in May 2014. 

As incentive to check out my tagged writers, I will post up a Bartram poem next Wednesday.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday, March 13, 2013 are:

Ragdale buddy Sheila Flaherty
My mentor and poet extraordinaire AV Christie (through Facebook)