Tag Archives: poetry

Why Review Books? A Personal History

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Why review books? What’s the point? To what useful end is one reader’s take on someone else’s art beyond her own delight, neutrality, or regret for having engaged?

One might return a question: why review ANYTHING? Opinions, everybody’s got ‘em, right? So.

So. Memory . . .  

In the 80’s and 90’s, my brother and I rocked the summer reading club scene at both libraries we frequented. That’s right, we competed in reading against other, unseen children, jockeying for the coveted position of Most Books Read. My brother and I weren’t opponents –these races were more like track and field where one challenges his history: his past record, his younger self.

At summer’s end, we’d conclude with fistfuls of Pizza Hut personal pan pizza coupons and, for me at least, zero memory of what I’d read beyond titles listed on a colorful sheet of paper, forgotten ever more deeply as summer’s expansiveness compressed into rigidly structured fall.

Learning . . .

My brother has four years on me and, other than a few shared Spider-Man and Garfield comics, a Robotech novel or two, we didn’t have many cross-over reading interests. Despite this, I hold dear titles that I myself never read, such as Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. The book reports he wrote for school were as amazing and sophisticated sounding to me as what he was reading. I felt eager to compose my own reports–craft construction paper covers, hand-letter the titles, staple along the edges, and present proudly to a teacher one neat bundle.

Sadly, my schooling was not his; I didn’t score any grade school teachers who assigned book reports. By the time I was invited to commune with literature, I was in high school where the culture was less about connecting with written words and more about strategizing to achieve A’s. I loved and identified with novels and poetry but still removed myself from an Honor’s English class because I didn’t care to compete and had a growing dislike of lit-tret-ture.

Memory . . .

I have a micro-myth, goes like this: I was reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, so into it, awww YEAH! This book is GREAT, this book is fantastic. Nearing the final pages, situations started to feel a tad . . . familiar, and then really familiar, and then. Oh, no. I’ve already read this book. I KNOW HOW IT ENDS. 🙁 🙁 🙁

Thus, I started keeping reading journals in high school, hardbound books usually gifted to me by my brother. Curiously, the practice failed to save me from accidentally reading The Hero and the Crown a third time (consistent, that kid), but it did help cement the awareness that I shouldn’t attempt to keep everything in my head. I quickly devised my own rating system consisting of smiley faces and frown-y faces and wavy lines. The journals doubled as a study of the writing field and I recorded authors, illustrators, publishing houses and imprints, and award-winners.

Learning . . .

The result of eight-straight-years of writing instruction in high school and college is that I’ve learned systems and strategies for analyzing the narrative arts. I peek behind and betwixt typeset words for clues about work and writer both. The why of it: to read deeper, write better, understand our lives and our world(s) in the moment of the narrative, and then again and again with each unique book-poem-play, even as those books-poems-(comics!)-plays sometimes meld together into a mash of ideas. They soak through, get integrated and because of my . . .

. . . Memory, or lack thereof, I review books and STILL forget them. Alternately, there are poems I’ve heard just once that stick with me. It’s unpredictable. It’s delicious.

When the Internet arrived (for me) in college, so too arrived ingenious applications like Goodreads. At current count, I’ve posted approximately 400 reviews. Sure, one such review (for Microcrafts: Tiny Treasures to Make and Share by Margaret McGuire) is a simple exclamation: “So cute! So tiny!” but that’s an honest reaction, yeah? It’s me talking back to the writer/artist as much as my six-paragraph rant about Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Sometimes other Goodreads users click the thumbs-up button, declaring their affinity with my analysis and I get a nice energy boost.

Aaaand learning . . .

As my world has expanded via the 0’s and 1’s, I’ve grown more careful with the reviews I pen. Words on a website are not the same as ideas on paper, bound by twin case covers, sitting on my shelf at home. I’m aware that the authors I watch from afar may one day be close-up peers. Taking care is a must. After all, care is the reason I’ve engaged, why I’m talking back to a writer or artist, explaining: this is how you reached me. See? Here’s how I’ve changed.

-Phoebe Sinclair, 2018 WROB Ivan Gold Fellow

 

Imagining Empathy

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At the beginning of May, I had the opportunity to go to a talk with Clint Smith, writer and scholar, and Jesmyn Ward, author of “Sing Unburied Sing.” I hadn’t read Jesmyn Ward’s latest book yet, but I was excited to hear her talk about it. She‘s been heralded as the William Faulkner of our time and the reviews of her book have suggested that she truly crafts beautiful narratives, especially in characters that are heavily flawed.

Jesmyn Ward talked about how she read a Psychology Today article that expressed that those who read fiction are likely to have an increased sense of empathy. I was surprised by this stat because I would have imagined that perhaps non-fiction or memoir would have this effect on readers. But fiction, being entirely imagined, seems to be the genre of writing that contributes to a shift in empathy amongst readers. I wouldn’t, by any means, identify myself as a fiction writer, but I do have a strong desire to write fiction. I have pieces of fiction tucked away in my computer and in the crevices of my mind. There are stories brewing yet to be created, yet I’ve always had this urgency to write poetry and non-fiction as a way of truly talking about an issue, injustice, or conflict that needs an empathetic perspective.

Hearing Jesmyn Ward talk about how fiction can create a heightened sense of empathy, was for me, novel and exciting, but also a challenge. Perhaps this is the time for me to write a new world, that a reader can enter, develop their own relationship with, and construct their own sense of understanding. Maybe it’s time I stop talking about how true and real pain is and why it deserves empathy, and construct an experience for a reader where they feel the pain, or experience it with a character that hasn’t been written before.

I decided to do a little research on what Jesmyn Ward talked about, in relation to fiction. The Scientific American provided the following quote:

“Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.”

There’s something inherently disruptive about constructing your own world within art. The very act of being a black woman writer and writing a story that is entirely yours is also disruptive. At the end of listening to Jesmyn Ward I found myself not only inspired, but challenged to go even further as a writer. Yes, I carry a responsibility to tell a story but perhaps I have a responsibility to craft a world that speaks to my experience and that challenges readers to enter that existence. Perhaps that is powerfully done within fiction, but maybe it can be tackled in poetry and non-fiction. Maybe empathy doesn’t just arise from a character but perhaps the readers’ understanding of a world, outside of themselves, and the injustices that can occur in those worlds. In turn, maybe this is how we gain more empathy as a society. It’s a challenge as a writer, who likes to stay true, but perhaps there’s a world that can be created where this truth shines, lives and begs to be heard.

–2018 WROB Gish Jen Fellow Tatiana M.R. Johnson

On Writing, Rage, and June Jordan

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Recently I’ve been meditating on the idea of black rage. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about stereotypes about “angry black women”—where these ideas come from, who they serve, and how black women artists engage with anger in their work.

Encountering June Jordan’s work later in my academic career gave me a lens to understand the utility of anger, and how poetry is a perfect place to wrestle with anger and grief. Her poem “Poem About Police Violence” was particularly instructive. Revisiting this piece in the context of my work now has brought me a deeper understanding of how her writing informed mine, and how it continues to be relevant today.

This poem opens with the speaker posing a hypothetical to a friend or lover. “Tell me something,” Jordan begins. “What you think would happen if/ everytime they kill a black boy/ then we kill a cop/ everytime they kill a black man/ then we kill a cop/ you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?” Here was a poet who wasn’t afraid of the “redundancies” of being sad or angry. Not only was she bold enough to wonder aloud about violence, her diction was deliberately black.

Her use of black vernacular, “what you think would happen” versus the standard “what do you think” clued me into the power of using colloquial language. As a writer and a reader, I noted how her use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) called out to me in a familiar tone. The conversation transpiring in the poem felt familiar too, reminiscent of the dialogues I have with friends and loved ones almost daily. What would it take to end state violence against our community? What would it take to move the mechanisms of systemic power towards justice? Throughout the poem, Jordan delivered an eerie parallel to the dialogue about police brutality happening around me.

In the fourth stanza, she writes “I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid/ and repetitive affront as when they tell me/ 18 cops in order to subdue one man/ 18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle.” In the era of #BlackLivesMatter, statistics like this are reported and repeated, turned into chants. The numbers get repeated like charms to ward off forgetting. Jordan showed me how numbers can tell the story, like how it is common knowledge that Mike Brown’s body was in the street for four hours, or how he was shot six times.

It is worth saying more about the man whose murder prompted Jordan to write this poem. In 1978, Arthur Miller, a black organizer and business owner in Crown Heights, went outside to see why the police were arresting his younger brother. Eighteen cops restrained Arthur, resulting in a chokehold that led to his death. Jordan’s word choice—ugly, bestial, rapid—brings to mind Darren Wilson’s attempts to justify Mike Brown’s murder, comparing himself to a five-year-old next to Brown’s hulk-ish frame. Jordan continues remarking on the language the police used to describe their encounter with Miller: “…and that the murder/ that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn/ street was just a “justifiable accident” again/ (Again).”

Jordan showed me how punctuation can be strategically deployed to highlight aspects of the writer’s argument. Her quotations around “justifiable accident,” the parenthesis around the word “again,” floating alone as the last line in the stanza. She set this up with a parenthetical earlier in the stanza: “(don’t you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue/ and scuffle my oh my).” Here Jordan calls out the ways in which people in power use language to control a narrative and, by extension, manipulate outcomes in their favor.

This is certainly true in the case of Arthur Miller, and many like him. No one was held accountable for Miller’s death. The medical examiner found “no evidence of savage or excessive beating.” The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York found “insufficient evidence” that Miller’s rights had been violated.

The word “accident” appears repeatedly in this poem, each time a conscious choice on Jordan’s part. She opens and closes the poem with a reference to the accident rate. Her use of the phrase is even more meaningful when the full scope of her advocacy is taken into account. The death of Arthur Miller, like the death of Emmett Till before and Mike Brown after him, was not a mere accident. They are the natural outcomes of a system built on the devaluation of black and brown bodies. The fifth stanza opens with Jordan’s observation that “People been having accidents all over the globe” is an excellent example of how Jordan is able to center the experiences of black people victimized by the state without losing sight of global violence enacted by state actors, and the connections between the two.

Jordan’s work often incorporates a poetic power analysis. In life as an educator, writer, and advocate, she perpetually shone a light on who was being excluded from the conversation. In 1991 she founded Poetry for the People, a program that trained undergraduates to take poetry to community groups as a form of political empowerment. Her belief in poetry as a tool in the arsenal for equity stuck with me. Not that poetry was the only tool—she was explicit in calling attention to the need for systemic change, particularly in her final essay collection “Some of Us Did Not Die.” But that arming marginalized communities with language was a tactic that undermines structural inequality. Jordan’s poetry and advocacy continue to ground me in this increasingly difficult political moment.

-Simone John, 2017 WROB Fellow

Emerging Author Dispatches: Five Things I Wish I Knew About the Publishing Process Before Starting Out

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Full disclosure: This blog post should’ve been up two three weeks ago.* Lately I’ve been negligent in my WROB fellowship duties (and many duties, if I’m being real). For the past few months my schedule has gotten more and more crazy as the pub date for my first poetry collection gets nearer. Now that some semblance of sanity is starting to appear on the horizon, I’ve identified five things I wish I’d known about the publishing process before starting out. None of these learnings are novel, but there’s nothing like being humbled by the act of doing something new to make each lesson land sharply.

  1. PUBLISHING TAKES FOREVER

The gears of publishing machinery move v e r y   s l o w l y. So much of the process boils down to an unglamorous, unending waiting. Waiting for it to be “your turn” in your publisher’s roster, waiting for your edits to come back, for galleys, for a more inspired ending of a poem to surface. I tried to create new work during that time but I quickly realized…

  1. IT’S DIFFICULT TO WORK ON NEW CREATIVE PROJECTS WHILE LAUNCHING A BOOK

When TESTIFY’s pub process (re)gained traction I was six months into working on a new book-length project— this close to turning a corner in understanding the story’s structure. I was unprepared for (and, occasionally, resentful of) the onslaught of admin that landed in my lap. The e-mails alone are a part-time job: pitching tie-in essays; planning book launches and readings; being in communication with publicists, editors, and graphic designers… Week after week new work was repeatedly pushed to the bottom of my task list in favor of practical (or paying) responsibilities. When I’m not writing poems or answering e-mails, I’m juggling a full-time job and running a small business. There’s no advance to float authors between books in the poetry world, so carving out time to create new work while launching a book continues to be an ongoing challenge. (If you’ve got tips or suggestions, I’m all ears.)

  1. EVEN IF THE PROCESS SEEMS OPAQUE AND MYSTERIOUS, IT’S ALL JUST PEOPLE

When I was submitting my manuscript the pub process seemed scary and impenetrable, especially as a young poet with a newly minted MFA and no clue what to do next. As everything moves forward I’m regularly reminded that each limb of the publishing apparatus is made up of people. People who know each other and people who don’t. People who are friends in real life and people who have only met on the internet. People who have jobs and lives and responsibilities (so no, their delay in responding to my submission wasn’t personal). Case in point: a colleague I connected with through my publisher asked me to be a contributing editor at a new press he was starting. A year and a half later, I’m plugged into the “people side” of the poetry world in a whole new way. In grad school it felt like the words “publication” and “press” warranted capitalization, faceless institutions built of books and words. Now I know a press is just a group of people, and none of them bite.

  1. YOU REALLY SHOULD BE ON TWITTER.

If this industry is made up of people, most of those people are probably on Twitter. In my non-writing life I’m social media averse. I have a laundry list of reasons why, and I was quick to rattle them off—until a publicist told me in no uncertain words that I needed to be on Twitter. (Verbatim: “You needed to be on Twitter yesterday.”)

At first I was stressed about having to think up witty tweets, as if each post needed to be a pithy 140 character poem. Then I realized I could follow intelligent-sounding people I already like and share their tweets, adding my own comment when necessary.

Since joining I realized that literary/writing Twitter is actually a landscape where opportunities can happen. Editors tweet out topics they’re looking for pitches on, or have their contact info in their bios. Grant opportunities, submission deadlines, contests, and potential collaborators—all on Twitter. Angie Thomas, YA author whose debut novel “The Hate U Give” has been on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty weeks, is an excellent example of how Twitter can help launch a career. In June of 2015 Thomas turned to Twitter to ask literary agent Brooks Sherman if he considered a YA novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement acceptable to publishers. One year later, Sherman was representing Thomas in a thirteen house publishing auction that resulted in six figure deal. Sure, it’s a Twitter fairy tale, but it’s also a reminder that social media is more than a way to stay on top of the trends.

  1. YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOU’RE FAKING IT ALL THE TIME

Writerly imposter syndrome is real. I spent so much time in the early stages of this process second-guessing myself and others who praised my work. It felt like everyone I encountered had access to some rulebook I hadn’t read, or a scorecard I couldn’t see. Even though I’d succeeded at getting picked up for publication, I spent a fair amount of time entertaining self-doubt. Should I have cc’d my publisher on that e-mail? Is that something I should do, or something my publicist should do? Should I run this idea by someone before I send this pitch?

Eventually, I found my way back to a powerful quote from my mother-poet Audre Lorde: “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.” Thought I might not have been in this exact situation before, I’m generally a diligent person. My instincts led me to write TESTIFY, and they got me this far so they can’t be all wrong. Now I know there’s no rulebook.

If I could go back in time I’d give myself the following advice: do the best you can now, take notes for next time, and know there will be a next time—whether it’s five years from now or fifteen years from now, there will be another book. And whenever that happens, whatever curveballs that experience throws your way, you’ll know more than you did the first time around.

*Thanks to my WROB writer colleagues for their patience and understanding.

–Simone John, 2017 WROB Gish Jen Fellow

 

 

What Gets Lost

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Several years ago, I bought an unbelievably gorgeous ring at a department store in Toronto. I have no idea how much it cost me. I have no idea the name of the store. No idea how to describe it. At Dave & Buster’s a year or so later, the ring did a thing–slid off, it flew, it shot in the same direction of the basketball I aimed at the net. The ball came back to me. The ring didn’t.

I’ve been reading Cape Verde’s first (and only) Creole-English dictionary. It’s a very nostalgic experience. All the words I know, the words I don’t. How the definitions surprise me. Sadden me. How I’m sure, the published definitions mean something different to someone else. The power of interpretation leads me to riff off the English definitions, aware that in the process, images facts ideas values and beliefs are sliding off, flying, landing here, elsewhere, and nowhere. I cannot stop writing This Won’t Make Sense in English definition poems:

From the dictionary:

Pasada [pasu] n step; ~ di ómi, grasa-l mudjer, short visit; badja ~, dance the pasada dance

From what I’ve lost:

dancing the pasada dance is a message: consumption is not something you do with your mouth

I’m not sure I know what I’m getting at but think I’m having a moment. Appreciating the ways in which words mean things, the ways in which all words, in every language, mean, to feel. It’s fascinating, this idea of culture and how we are because of it, in spite of it.

The loss of my ring went from clumsy

to there are worse things to lose.

Went from

is this making sense in English

to how are we making sense

of the words we use

to say what it is

we cannot.

-Shauna Barbosa, 2017 Writers’ Room of Boston Fellow

On Summer

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Lately I’ve been looking ahead, thinking a lot about summer. There’s an untitled poem about summertime I’ve been working on for four years. The last version reads:

How does the heat pluck bodies from stoops

from groups huddled under lamp light

from sidewalks that posed no threat months ago?

Why does rising mercury mean hunting season?

 

It just got warm out

It’s that shit I been warned bout

Everybody dies in the summer

So pray to god for little more spring

 

We jazz June

We die soon.

It always feels unfinished, a perma-draft rather than a poem. Maybe it’s because most of the words in the poem aren’t mine. The second and third stanzas belong to Chance the Rapper and Gwendolyn Brooks, borrowed from “Paranoia” and “We Real Cool,” respectively. I can’t seem to put our ideas in conversation with one another without the seams showing. (Then again, many of my poems are composed entirely of other people’s words, so I’m not sure that’s a valid excuse.) Maybe it’s because I haven’t clearly defined the question for myself, let alone arrived at an answer. What is it about the summer that makes black life feel more fragile?

Don’t get me wrong, I live for summer. (In New England summer feels like a reward for surviving an endless winter.) I love beach days and soul train lines at barbecues and brown skin looking crisp and sun kissed. Summer is the time I feel most alive and, somehow, most unsettled.

I’ve been rolling these thoughts over while doing admin to get my collection Testify (Octopus Books, 2017) into the world this August. Testify experiments with documentary poetics to uplift stories of black people impacted by state-sanctioned violence. To say it was emotionally challenging to write is an understatement. Though the work of creating it is complete, the challenging nature of the material persists. Even the backend tasks– picking promo images, crafting summaries, discussing broadsides & epherma – have their own eerie feel. Proof reading, double-checking death dates for departed sons & daughters. So many of them buried in summer months.

I keep wondering if we’ll make it to August without going to war. Wondering about the domestic communities already at war, living in occupied neighborhoods. Surely by the time Testify comes out there will be another police-involved murder, another homie, another hashtag. Or stories of summer violence in communities navigating failed systems and collective trauma. The question is never if. It is when and who.

I have to remember, it’s still April. There’s time to call up my lil homies, former students & younger cousins; ask if they’ve started checking for summer jobs, summer camp, summer school, summer something to make them safe. As if such a thing exists. In the meantime I keep writing poems and praying for a little more spring.

–Simone John, 2017 WROB Gish Jen Fellow

 

 

On Not Writing

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Photo credit: Lauren Chanel Allen. Readers: Shauna Barbosa, Airea D. Matthews, Ananda Lima, Maya Doig-Acuña, Koye Oyedeji, Duarte Geraldino

Last weekend I participated in Bread Loaf’s Sunday Salon reading series. The reading took place at Jimmys 43 in New York City. A charming, intimate room under the bar. It felt incredibly good to read with such good company. Felt good to chat with the audience (I apologize for that one poem I read from my phone—thank you for sitting through that). Readings make me feel, you know, like a writer. Like things are moving, things are happening—hey look, my MFA is paying off.

Then the reading’s over. I eat plant-based pizza with friends, followed by a nap before my bus back to Boston. Heavy on my mind lately is all the writing I’ve not been doing. Writing is what makes us writers, no? Why is the admin work surrounding my forthcoming book starting to feel poetic?

Not writing brings me back to a poem I fell in love with last year: “In Tongues” by Tonya M. Foster. “Because you haven’t spoken / in so long, the tongue stumbles and stutters, / sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just / a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.” This is what it feels like. Not writing. Not being able to speak. Not only is “In Tongues” a remembrance of music’s ability—it’s a reminder that we must be thankful for the ability to speak effortlessly. Though melancholic in its overall story on one not being able to speak, Tonya Foster’s poem gives it an exciting jazz element. The second section of the poem calls on music and continues with the alliteration of the first section. “What to say when one says, / “You’re sooo musical,” takes your stuttering for scatting, / takes your stagger for strutting, / takes your try and tried again for willful / playful deviation? / It makes you not wanna holla / silence to miss perception’s face.” The second stanza, again, encompasses a similar sound with stuttering, scatting, stagger, and strutting. Scatting gives us noise of a jazz scat. “It makes you not wanna holla” adds a dramatic lift to “takes your try and tried again,” painting a compelling image of the genuine attempts to make a sound, and the heartbreak in not wanting to try to communicate with those who make a mockery of the attempt.

“In Tongues” pushes me to pay attention to a voice outside of myself. The voice in this poem, as with the voice I am currently in search of, is working as struggle, as being taken away, being placed in and outside of the body. I am grateful for the opportunity to go back to my words at a reading. It’s an exercise in waiting.

“hang on/ keep your silence/ until the words/ ripen/ in you.”                                                                                              -Pablo Neruda

-Shauna Barbosa, 2017 Writers’ Room of Boston Fellow

 

 

 

 

Testimony for Together We Rise

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Ari BelatharLast month I was invited to take part in Together We Rise, a Counter-Inaugural Celebration of Resistance. As an artist who has been subjected to persecution, illegal imprisonment, torture and exile, I was asked to talk about the role of the artist in times of oppression. Here is the testimony I gave at the Strand Theatre on the evening of January 19th, surrounded by a community of dreamers and fighters:

“Buenas noches. Good evening, ladies, gentlemen and gender dissidents!

I am here today because when I was 19 years old I was persecuted and subjected to illegal imprisonment, torture and exile, due to my work as an artist, student activist, and independent journalist.

I am also here because the first phone call I got after Trump’s victory, was my sister calling from Chicago asking if I would adopt her kids in case she is deported.

When I was invited to participate in tonight’s event, I was asked to talk about the role of the artist in times of oppression. ‘The role of the artist in times of oppression…’ The notion was utterly confusing to me. The role of the artist in times of oppression is to be an artist. Because the role of art is not to open doors that are already unlocked. The role of art is to open doors that are locked, that are sealed. The role of art is to tear down walls.

Tomorrow a man takes power, a small man whose biggest dream is to build walls…and I am not only talking about the border wall between Mexico and the United States. I am talking about invisible walls that have separated us for centuries. He and his cabinet will work tirelessly to reinforce those walls. It is our job as artists to tear them down. It is our job as members of our community to tear them down!

Art cannot exist in isolation; the artist exists so long as he or she is part of a community, and a community exists so long as it creates art.

True art should be made by all and not by one…

We have serious reasons to be concerned, afraid even, about the days to come. But we also have serious reasons to remain hopeful. So long as we tear down the walls that separate us we will be fine. This is your time Usonians– is it ok if I call you Usonians? I do not like the term Americans, because it erases the rest of the continent.  This is your time my dear Usonians to tear down the walls that you have been made to believe are the foundation of your entire existence. This is not the time to challenge white supremacy; this is the time to destroy it…to tear it down.

To be an artist is to imagine what does not exist, so that it will come into existence…but if we imagine it together everything will change.

And while we are tearing down white supremacy, let us tear down all walls, all prisons…and capitalism, which is the largest prison of all.”

The morning
is an illegal child
innocent
who runs seduced
by the cold air
that pierces
through the bones

and quietly
with the fallen night
makes a star

Trump and his henchmen are merchants of darkness, but we are the makers of the stars…artisans of light!

And if they push us to the edge of the world…we open our wings!

-Ari Belathar, 2016 Poetry Fellow 

(© Ari Belathar 2017)

WROB Fellowship Applications Due 1/15/17!

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The Writers’ Room of Boston awards annual fellowships to four emerging local writers who lack sufficient funds to secure a quiet place to develop their work. Fellowship recipients receive full membership to The Writers’ Room for 12 months (March through February) at no cost. Fellows also receive a reduced rate for membership for another 12 months following the fellowship period. All fellows and members enjoy 24-hour access to a T-accessible, light-filled work space in the Financial District of downtown Boston and the opportunity to be part of a supportive community of serious writers.

boston_front copyAwards for the Emerging Writers Fellowship Program are based on the quality of a submitted writing sample, a project description, a CV or resume, and a statement of need. The Fellowships are open to writers working in any genre or form. Fellows must be committed to: using the Room on a regular basis throughout the 12-month period, writing a minimum of 6 blog posts for our website, and assisting with WROB readings and events.

For more information about the WROB Emerging Writers Fellowship Program, please visit this page on our website: http://www.writersroomofboston.org/fellowship/ 

Applications for Fellowships are due on January 15, 2017. Applications for regular membership are open all year.

The Word As A Journey

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Photo Credit: Debka Colson

Writing is a journey that has no end; a path always in the making. It is impossible to say where and when – or how – it will end.

To write is to live between the signs of a ceaseless interrogation…to wander in the infinite extension of the verb.

Without a starting point or a clear arrival, writing forges its own path in the same way that the wind ploughs through and shapes the sand in the desert; or the way in which the fingers of someone in love stroke the face of the beloved one – each minute feature.

The blank page is a desert, a discernible silence, the indelible Word.

The desert: symbol of the only place the Word can be heard and received. The blank page, the only place where the Word can be created.

To write is to interrogate oneself without rest and without answers. To put on trial all that you believe you know in order to establish a new space for dialogue with the self, with the Other, or with that “metaphor for emptiness” called god.

Photo Credit: Debka Colson
Photo Credit: Debka Colson

And given that our capacity for dialogue is born from silence and solitude, the encounter with this Other will be marked by blank spaces, parentheses, hyphens, commas, italics, annotations on the margins in which the writer asks the reader to hold a pencil and trace the map of what s/he is reading. Cartography of infinity.

To think, to write, is to make oneself equal. Words and ideas are only subtle approximations of the equality of beings, a game of semblance, in the struggle of humanity against the object. We understand our humanity in the instant that we write ourselves, when we turn into Word. And it is in the Word where we discover our similitude with the Other.

Reality is objective, therefore reality is not enough for us, and to live is to write one’s own existence. As a poet I do not understand writing to be more than a means for establishing a commitment to the Other, one’s neighbor – made in my image – incarnated since the time of the biblical prophets in the Stranger, the Orphan, the Victim of Oppression (political, social, moral, religious), the Exiled. And this commitment is a dialogue that calls for hospitality: a sacred duty that involves kinship and hope.

Photo Credit: Debka Colson
Photo Credit: Debka Colson

As I write these lines, I am traveling through Eastern Europe and from the margins arrive the murmurs of thousands and thousands of refugees beached on the shore of nothingness. Men, women and children. Children, thousands and thousands of children who have been denied the right to write, to read; the right to the Word that names a new world of colors and sounds, pleasant smells and kind voices that offer welcome. The Word that returns to create everything, the birds whose names we’ve never known, the taste of bread and salt, warm milk, honey, a sunset over the rooftops in the city that is also ours, the trees and their shadows, prime numbers, a story by Maurice Sendak, a childhood without bombs.

To write is to name what does not exist, so that it will come into existence.

-Ari Belathar, 2016 Poetry Fellow