SAGE Featured for National Poetry Month!

I am thrilled to share that the SAGE project is featured on the terrific "Library as Incubator Project" website today as part of National Poetry Month. Click here to see it!

SAGE would never have been imagined without the people and resources at the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Leora, Ed, and Stace represent all that is inpiring about how libraries and librarians can be open to new ways to connect people to books. Even as we speak, they are getting ready to present "Rare Seeds, Creative Harvest: Artist Books Inspired by the Rare Book Collection", an exhibition that will feature not just the SAGE books but the process by which they came about. The exhibition opens May 18th. so any Chicago folks --check it out for me and report back! I'll be out in July with Claire Owen to teach some workshops.

Go out and say thanks to your favorite librarian!

Oh, and SAGE will be in our hands on Monday. Thanks for your patience and watch this space to get yours in the mail.

Invasive Biology

First, thanks for your patience as we wait for SAGE to come back from the printer. Thankfully, living in the nonprofit world has prepared me for troubleshooting on a budget! But really, it is AT THE PRINTER and it's not too late to pre-order a copy by emailing me here. These folks will get first dibs, hot off the presses in the next few weeks.

Last time, I wrote about how I write poems but didn't tell you that my real muse is Morning Edition on NPR right as the alarm goes off. More than a few poems have been inspired by that semi-awake state and an intriguing story on the radio. So with apologies to my friend and naturalist Liz Bradfield who will no doubt know that this image above is probably not the real English grass in the poem, here my somewhat abashed confession on this environmental conundrum.

Invasive Biology

I know I should be appalled

that English grasses are growing

in Antarctica --appalled

or at least alarmed -- how once more

humans have upended nature, bur

latched to pant leg, seed fallen

from the pages of a paperback last read

in a backyard in Surrey -- alarmed

or at least dismayed -- how tufts of green

cricket lawns dot this white island where

they decidedly do not belong -- dismayed

or at least concerned.

I should be appalled but instead I am

awed, mesmerized, uplifted -- how life

makes life wherever it finds itself,

the power of the faintest pulse.

How can I be dismayed when this is

what I want -- thaw in deep winter,

improbable color, the chance to inhale,

embed, enfold the exotic other.

(c) Beth Feldman Brandt 2012

SAGE Sightings! Add Yours!

You know how once you get a thing in your head, you start to see it everywhere?

So I was playing Scrabble with my mom, looked down and there was SAGE. I swear I did not even re-arrange them. They just appeared.

There's someone in South Philly who tags SAGE on buildings. Keep an eye out and send a picture if you see it. And any other cool SAGE sightings! Email your photo here.

Which reminds me that it is not too late to pre-order SAGE which should be out in March. Just email me here to get your order in.

SAGE- Pre-Order the Book!

At long last, we are getting ready to send Sage to the printer in the next month or so. Little did I know that actually writing the poems was only one step on this long, but gratifying, road to a finished book with my collaborative partner Claire Owen.

We've decided to tackle the printing and distribution ourselves partly because we are control freaks, partly because we are on a deadline for the May 2012 exhibition at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and partly because poetry publishing is such a crap shoot, even for a book that isn't four-color, an unusual shape, and based on an 17th century botanical reference book.

It would be great if you can email us and let us know if you are planning to buy a copy (for about $20) so we can figure out how many to print. We hope to have the book in hand by late March. You can email me directly here.

Sage moves from the innocence of childhood and spring (see the opening poem, Air, in my December 2010 post) to the realities of winter, aging...and regret. Here is the poem that opens the last section of the book.

Water

All the words we regret

rise on waves of our own heat,

gather in dark clouds,

suspended.

In winter, they fall.

Each unique --

the chilling remark,

the harsh denial.

They murmur outside

the bedroom window,

slick and treacherous

blocking the last way

out.

(c) Beth Feldman Brandt

Wedding Bells!

I did the wedding thing 22 years ago and at my wedding were my dear college buddy, Arthur Cohen, and his partner Daryl Otte. So you can say it has been a long time coming but a wonderful day when Arthur and Daryl were married in New York City on July 24, 2011, the day same-sex marriage became legal in New York.

It was, as they wrote, a day fraught with potential disaster, "700+ Type-A gay couples with some serious pent-up nuptials-demand, 100 degree heat, a NYC bureaucracy that is being made by the mayor to work on a Sunday in the summer, and whatever the lovers-of-personal-freedom-but-haters-of this-particular-expression-of-personal freedom, have in store." Nonetheless, they hopped a shuttle from their vacation spot in Cape Cod and got hitched, well, without a hitch.

I was honored to honor their not-so-subtle request for a wedding poem. As one of the long-time married, I was moved by the thought of affirming, or re-affirming, long-time love.

Mazel tov, my friends.

Time and Tide

- for Arthur and Daryl

July 24, 2011

Gulls sweep the sky,

points of white unified in magnetic motion,

the way water glances, falls,

becomes waves.

Before they charted the tides,

the ocean knew -- already wedded

to the lip of sand, the way we were drawn to

the spark and shimmer,

pull and release.

We know --

still we want to name this,

chart the change and constancy of days and years,

stand and say we will, we still will,

we always will,

and kiss.

(c) Beth Feldman Brandt, 2011

Walkin' the High Wire

Just back from two weeks of 24/7 poetry writing at Ragdale in Chicago. New projects, new poems, exhibition plans, more news to come. But for now...

Some of you know me as a poet. Some of you know me as the Executive Director of the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation that supports arts and culture in Philadelphia. A few of you even know me as both.

Well, this morning at the annual conference of Delaware Valley Grantmakers (along with Philadelphia's nonprofit partners) I came out as a poet, big time, when I had the privilege of kicking off the conference with a poem. They asked me and three other poets to respond to the conference theme, "Holding Together in High Wire Times." So of course, me being me, I started with some research on the definition of 'balance' which included "an object that is stationary."

I started thinking about whether, in the nonprofit world, the philanthropic world, or even our own lives, is that something we want to aspire to? Or do we just keep walking the high wire?

Balance

Find it the young men, their low-slung jeans

and unstrung shoes, shuttling down the handrails.

Above, the El expresses itself down Broad Street,

expresses us up to to the high floor hustle

where the window washer, swaying on his twin pivots

takes a swipe at clarity.

On 5th Street, she lifts the steel window shade,

sweeps the daybreak, dust swirling to the Centro rhythm

as the 47 spins its wheels through the Market,

awnings unfurled in the commotion of commerce.

No point of stillness in this city circus --

rapid transit of mass and weight and gravity

the push and pull that deflects our progress

diverts us with forces that are not enough

and too much, and we feel

too much and not enough, but stay anyway,

step out each day into air,

risk the fall, are carried away

ride this turbulent City.

(c) Beth Feldman Brandt 2011

New Construction! New Website!

I admit there has not been too much poetry writing going on lately but I am jazzed to announce the completed construction of my new website: www.brandtwords.com .

Blogs are great and cheap and easy but not so good at showing multiple things at one time or keeping really important projects (like the Sage book) up front without posting them over and over.

The new site, designed by Liz Bradfield and Pelagic Design (poet, naturalist and stellar web designer), lets you see a bunch of poems and projects. You can even listen to recordings of two of my poems that have been set to music. (By the way, Pelagic has some artist friendly design rates -- get in touch with them for that new website or design project you have been putting off.)

The blog will keep on keepin' on every month or so but is now redesigned and accessed through the website. Check it out, click around, browse through some new poems, and let me know what still might need some tweaking.

Also happy to report that I will be heading back to Ragdale for another writing residency in late October to start a new project. Stay tuned!