After taking some time away from this space to complete a few projects, I thought what better way to return than to share a new mixtape for a new year.
I’ve been immersed in writing (mostly) poetry since last year, so it feels strange to be writing sentences again. I immediately want to line break. Shift, stanza & align right some text. This isn’t to say I haven’t been reading prose— I have, from Gabby Bellot’s brilliant essays on Lit Hub to Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math— and it might be strange to say this, to put this in writing, but I find when I enter long periods of writing prose, I (re)discover that I’m foremost a poet, and what began as a number of essays in the latter half turned into poems. There are risks I’m more likely to take in poetry. There are experiments I’m willing to conduct even if I fail, when it comes to poetry. More than a few poems were put to overwinter, indefinitely, in a folder, and I can’t promise them (or myself) that I’ll return to them as they are now, or can say which will be absorbed into new work, or resurrected on their own.
What I love most about poetry is that it makes me reconsider what “failure” is, and its place as an important part of the writing process as a poet continues to grow, rather thinking of “failure” as a stage that will happen less and less.
I think back to something I recently read from Asimina Arvanitaki, a physicist who holds a research chair at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, the first woman to do so. In an interview with New Scientist, she stated:
“I spend most of my time being confused about things and feeling like an idiot. But the way you feel at the moments where everything falls into place in your mind and you have figured out something important, it is amazing.
It is not clear when a good idea will come. It usually comes after thinking about things for a while and feeling stuck and then suddenly there is this ahamoment. You cannot really switch it off.”
I agree with her, and would like to add that I believe the aha moment that each of us as artists experiences will and does change over time. That the feeling Arvanitaki describes— when “you cannot really switch it off”— varies in intensity and endurance. I think it’s worth keeping track of these feelings, making small notes to yourself of when the aha strikes you.
In all candor, often for me the aha moment strikes at the most inconvenient time: in the shower or on the 7 Train when it is, of course, filled to the brim with my fellow subwayers. I grab my phone and quickly make a voice memo. I’m careful not to drop it under running water or on someone’s toes, shampoo running into my eyes, carefully holding onto a pole, the train shaking me back and forth, tiny droplets of water sticking to the case no matter how I try to position my body.
In these aha moments, something good might come from it, a new poem that will find its form on a page. But other times it’s simply a good idea for something I’m *just* on the verge of discovering.
In between those two types of aha moments, what we might think is “failure” might just be the real bones and blood of next growth.
—Rosebud Ben-Oni
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Let’s hear it for debut collections: both coming out this March, pick up Ysabel Y. Gonzalez’s Wild Invocations from Get Fresh Books and Sara Borjas’s Heart Like a Window, Mouth liks a Cliff from Noemi Press. Stay tuned for Ricardo Alberto Maldonado’s The Life Assignment, forthcoming in Fall 2020 from Four Way Books.
Diane Mehta’s essay “Dip Your Hand In”, published by the American Literary Review on “what living is, via the dead and capturing history and making it yours,” has recently been nominated for a Pushcart.
Listen to Tina Chang read her poem “Patience” in the newest issue of Triquarterly.
Francisco Aragón has documented the journey of his chapbook His Tongue a Swath of Sky on Letras Latinas; all proceeds from its sale will be donated to Letras Latinas.
Acts of creation and destruction rage against and toward each other in Teo Mungaray’s remarkable poem, “Haematopoiesis,” in Birdfeast which opens with: “If I could, I would mark each page/with a bloody thumbprint. Every cell of me/a reminder that I am both living and dead.”
Emily Pérez’s chapbook Made and Unmade is now out from Madhouse Press with praise from Khadijah Queen who states that the collection “holds ‘no hyperbole,’ delivering tension-filled, vivid, dynamically written poems that convey the experiences of ‘the woman / who stood beside the beast.’”
“In the year 2020, T.S. Eliot’s papers will be unsealed” begins Alison C. Rollins’s “Self-Portarit of Librarian with T.S. Eliot’s Papers” in the latest issue of The American Poetry Review.
Suzi F. Garcia has two new poems in Barrelhouse, “Run Away with Me” and “Con Mis Tías,” the latter in which ponders the reasons why “My tías were not still women. They were quick bodies, who/walked to the store and back, no matter the weather, who always//found something to clean, whose stoves were never without a/ bubbling pot, who did not know the word rest.But on their last night, / we sat on the front porch, just us women, the only people on our block.”
Millicent Accardi Borges has a new poem in The Broadkill Review, “And Rage — a Pot of Orchids you Loved (a line by Inês Foneseca Santos)” in which the speaker ponders how and why “all choices of/avenues we used to take/have become deserted.”
Shane McCrae’s The Gilded Auction Block is reviewed by Dan Chiasson in The New Yorker.
Sam Cooke fans should check out Darren C. Demaree’s tribute to his legacy, captured in his collection, “Lady, You Shot Me,” now out from 8thHouse Publishing.
Pittsburgh Poetry Houses reprinted paulA neves’s throwback-ode to summer vacation, “School’s Out 1975” from her chapbook Shirts & Skins.
Stay tuned for Norma Liliana Valdez’s chapbook Preparing the Body, forthcoming from YesYes Books in Fall 2019. (Check out her lyrical essay “Inheritance” on Wolfram Syndrome, grief and love published in The Rumpus.)
Also out in Fall 2019: Jose A. Rodriguez’s This American Autopsy from The University of Oklahoma.