Resources for Poets

A blizzard of manuscripts have come to Cherry Pie Press in the last few months, a result (I think?) of the increasing readership for the nine chapbooks now in print, and of the unexpected and welcome publicity from a review in Prairie Schooner of Nan Sweet's chapbook Rotogravure, and finally the attentions of Poets & Writers in highlighting Cherry Pie in their recent articles on chapbook publishers.

Welcome, poets! I'm a little slow at responding to manuscripts because of the welcome flood (and also because of the demands of the non-poetry office job, taking up much of my mental powers and many of my weekends now as we wind through yet another corporate merger -- but hey I LOVE THAT JOB just in case my boss is reading). The range and quality of the poetry is wonderful to see. My process, as always, includes reading through a manuscript at least three times. If it retains spark and complexity after three readings, it's a serious candidate or, at minimum, receives a serious and detailed response, and whatever encouragement is possible through the venue of an email.

Of special note, poetry of extremely high quality has come in from exactly the type of poets Cherry Pie was meant for -- women in the midwest (or, stretching it a little, the west) who are excellent writers, with fresh viewpoints and use of language, active in their local poetry communities and in many cases giving back significantly to that community with their time and talents, and a little separated from the mainstream well-funded well-supported larger world of poetry in the city or poetry in the academy. I am encouraged, and not surprised at all, to note that some of the finest poetry I've seen in the recent flood comes from places like a feedstore owner in Nebraska, or a mother home-schooling her children when she's not out working the ranch. (Ladies, you know who you are -- please keep writing!) Poetry is essential, but there's a real life there too in the balance. Children or an office job or some other kind of ballast is frequently a very good thing.

Submissions have also come in from Chicago, Michigan, Missouri -- many of them compelling, surprising in the best way. Thank you all!

With only one or two chapbooks a year, I send out more rejections than acceptances, and wanted to highlight some resources for poets looking for encouragement and a way to keep up their daily obligations but still get some wider connection to poetry. One well-categorized and very useful resource is http://resources4poets.homestead.com/index.html, from Bernadette Geyer. It's a series of how-to guides and articles and recordings of readings that is easy to dip into or to take a long nosedive into, as time allows.

One more slot filled in the tool-belt, girls!

I guess she didn't like the plot much...

A postcard just in from one of our favorite pugs, Squirt. Her mother reports: "I guess she didn't like the plot much."

(Disclaimer: Squirt was raised here in Cherry Pie land and frequently heard poetry being read as a pup. Obviously some of that literary influence proved lasting. The power of poetry...)

Why a small press?

Why am I doing this? The opposing twin of this question is, Why are you sending your work to Cherry Pie for possible publication, instead of to someplace else?

It's never simple. Kate Gale, co-founder of Red Hen Press in Los Angeles, does a good job of explaining what a small press is -- the 'why' of it.

Does poetry really matter etc?

Will the little poem I'm working on today really matter to anyone?

Go look and listen here, and be awed:
http://cabinet-of-wonders.blogspot.com/2009/08/hubble-deep-field.html

Now go back to your desk and finish that little poem. Every speck matters.

Found on Gaye Gambell-Peterson's Desk

Stirrup Pants gets more press

Stirrup Pants, the new chapbook store on Cherokee Street, gets a look from the St. Louis Magazine's arts blog, Look/Listen. Check it out, for pictures of the store and information about Maggie Ginestra, the owner -- http://stlmagblogs.typepad.com/looklisten/2009/07/guest-blog-post-chapbooks-on-cherokee.html.

Knit One, Poem Two

In Britain, they knit their poems: Giant Knitted Poem Takes Shape.

Read a Poem, Save the World

Words on Purpose is sponsoring another of its wonderful poetry events, this one to benefit Veterans for Peace, an educational and humanitarian organization dedicated to the abolishment of war. Veterans for Peace is a national organization, and headquartered in St. Louis.

Who's reading: James McGarrah, a Vietnam veteran and author of the war memoir A Temporary Sort of Peace, and Woody Powell, co-author of Two Walk the Golden Road chronicling the lives of two Korean War vets, one Chinese, one American.

When: Saturday August 29, at 4 p.m.

Where: Black Bear Bakery, 2639 Cherokee, St. Louis

Recommended donation, $5. All proceeds go to Veterans for Peace.

Words on Purpose is a committee of socially concerned writers who produce literary readings to support community-based efforts that improve quality of life and promote equality of opportunity. They are wonderful folks, and we love 'em.

Poetry at the Point Tuesday, August 25

gaye gambell-peterson will read from, and sign, her new chapbook of poetry+art, pale leaf floating, on Tuesday, August 25 at 7:30 p.m. for the Poetry @ the Point reading series sponsored by the St. Louis Poetry Center. The reading will be at The Focal Point, 2720 Sutton, Maplewood, MO 63143. This event is free and open to the public.

If you don't yet have in hand your own copy of gaye's gorgeous chapbook, you can view the cover and a sample poem here.

Stirrup Pants, where you can buy chapbooks

There's a new store in town, with two highly improbable characteristics -- its name is Stirrup Pants, and its sole reason for being is to display and sell poetry chapbooks. (Thanks to local poet Jennifer Tappenden for seeing this notice in a neighborhood newspaper!)

On opening day, I visited to take a look. The store is located in the St. Louis Cherokee Street arts / shopping area, in a quiet unassuming building that's easy to overlook. A tiny sign hangs on the door, and a blue and white tennis shoe hangs over the address numbers. (A bird nest in there? I wondered.) Inside, Maggie, the proprietor, was delightful, and explained she is mostly in theater but loves poetry, thinks the chapbook market is seriously underserved, and so she wanted to use this storefront to correct the situation.

Chapbooks were on display in small quantities but huge variety - Tinfish, Ugly Duckling Presse, Sarabande, Invisible Ear, Glitter Pony, and others. I bought five and felt rich and well fed. I left copies of the Cherry Pie chaps with Maggie for perusal and review.

Stirrup Pants is located at 2122 Cherokee Street, and is open Saturdays only, from 10 am - 3 pm. You can also reach Stirrup Pants at stirruppantschapbooks at gmail dot com.

Cranky Yellow hosts a poetry party

Cranky Yellow, a new arts-music-literature hub in the Cherokee Street district of St. Louis, is hosting a poetry and pleasure party with burlesque ladies! The ladies include the ever-surprising and wonderful Colleen McKee, author of My Hot Little Tomato from Cherry Pie Press.

When? Sunday, July 19th
6-8pm: Erotic poetry by Colleen McKee and others, and various additional sinful attractions
8-whenever: Turn the Other Cheek Burlesque

Where? Cranky Yellow, 2847 Cherokee, 63118

How much? Poetry is free; $5 for burlesque. Of course, there are many attractive goodies for sale at Cranky Yellow. Cash only!

For more info? 314.773.4499 or info@crankyyellow.com

Review: Fear, by Pamela Garvey

A review I wrote of Pamela Garvey's chapbook Fear, out from Finishing Line Press, is posted at RATTLE. Read the review here.
Fear was a finalist for the New Women's Voices Competition, and is available at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, and also at Amazon. Garvey lives in St. Louis, where she has long been appreciated for co-founding Words on Purpose, a group of socially concerned writers who organize benefit readings.

St. Louis photos - would this work for poetry?

Here is an interesting photo project that I think would work equally well for poetry -- anyone want to try it?

A hundred local photographers threw darts at a St. Louis city map. Each person had to follow his or her dart (to whatever city block it had landed on) within the next month and come back with photographs. This web site shows the amazing results.
http://www.dartstlouis.com/

Cherry Pie chapbooks on Fiddler Crab Review

Two of the Cherry Pie chapbooks have been reviews on Fiddler Crab Review's website. Niki Nymark's A Stranger Here Myself, and Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold, were reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer, who has been an editor at Harvard University Press and has published a poetry chapbook through Finishing Line Press.

The Fiddler Crab website / blog is a great resource for seeing the range of what's available in poetry chapbooks. It's a new venture, and full of energy -- see it here: http://fiddlercrabreview.blogspot.com/.

Cherry Pie on Poets and Writers

Cherry Pie, logo and all, is on the front page of the latest Poets & Writers email announcement! Clicking on the cherry pie logo will take you to the Small Presses database which P&W hosts -- here also is a link to that database, where you may look up Cherry Pie, or browse at will for other small presses -- http://www.pw.org/small_presses?apage=*

New and wonderful lit mag locator

Newly tops on my list of luscious and utterly useful websites for writers -- litmags.org! Go explore, and do check out the search, advanced search, and especially the "list all mags" section, where you can easily identify a publication based on color-coded criteria. This is ideal for someone searching for print-only, for experimental interests or more traditional. It's the only place I've seen where you can quickly find publications that print poetry only. For prose writers, some of the search capabilities are even more refined (e.g. word limit).

Most of the entries indicate whether they have been submitted by someone on the staff of the literary publication, to help you gauge the accuracy of the information. You can also submit comments about the publications.

The well organized and visual nature of the website make it a pleasure to use.

New chapbook! pale leaf floating by gaye gambell-peterson

Cherry Pie is delighted to announce a new chapbook -- pale leaf floating, by gaye gambell-peterson. This one is lovely to look at, and a muscular pleasure to read.

The poems gather up the objects of everyday life -- stones, a leaf, a bird, pennies, an egg -- and convert them to a wise philosophy of endurance as the poet navigates her way through illness, losses, the pleasures of grandchildren, the determination to enjoy each day and let every cup overflow.

Here's a poem:

Omens

There flew the gladdening red bird,
again, again, across my path.

There smiled the pale sliver of moon,
with a bright star at her side.

There bobbed upon flooded river, a bit
of trash that stayed afloat while I watched.

Here bloomed, after two years of making
only leaves, the purple ruffled iris.

There upon my cottonwood sat the
mourning dove – but his back was to me.
I am protected from grief.

I collected these omens so they’d tell me
the truth the way I wanted it to be.

Here on my stoop is one of my kept stones –
flecked gray, rounded, a solidity that reassures.
I turn its damaged side to a corner.

And another one, with an equal amount of grit and good cheer in balance:

Corticosteroids

“Common: loss of balance; puffy face; chronic trouble sleeping.
Rare: a sense of well-being.”
- from a list of side effects

I am at my open door, breathing,
as another day lowers.

Magenta stripe flashes a cloud belly
and Venus elevates,

hangs near my moon.
I let my attitude rise to her,

my lifted face newly full.
Some sort of conjunction, this new

aspect – between exaggerated
euphoria and dire possibility.

I’m awake on the high road,
tilting the light fantastic,

exalting for the stiff-jointed
marionette having left the building.

I am condensed to a quiddity,
leaning against my edges.

She moves away.
Comes back. Gleaming.

You might recognize gaye gambell-peterson as the artist of some previous Cherry Pie chapbook covers (Rotogravure, The Permeability of Memory, and the anthology Breathing Out). Here, she has again created the cover artwork, and also included half a dozen collages inside the book to illustrate her own poems.

pale leaf floating (ISBN 978-0-9748468-9-7) is $10, and available at Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid, St. Louis, MO 63108 (ph 314.367.6731). You may also order from Cherry Pie Press -- email cherrypiepress@yahoo.com for information, or download the order form from this blog site.

Weaving the Light: review and launch

Mary Ruth Donnelly's Weaving the Light has drawn the attention of Midwest Book Review, which notes it is "a strong pick for those looking for women's poetry with a Midwestern flavor" and that its appearance is yet one more entry "into the fine Midwest Women Poets series."

Read the review here: http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/apr_09.htm#poet

This seems a good occasion for a look back at the book launch event held in early March for Weaving the Light. Rick Spencer provided an introduction to the full house at the event. Rick, formerly part of the notable (and, regrettably, no longer published) Delmar Magazine, now teaches philosophy at Southwestern Illinois College. He's given permission to republish here his remarks introducing Mary Ruth Donnelly’s readings from Weaving the Light:

I don’t know why Mary Ruth has such a love for landscape: why she is drawn to riverbanks and plains, the cup-like hollow of a garden, the shape of a road in the hills. But she is. Perhaps it was her upbringing in Kansas City—another river city—a city near the Great Plains? Maybe it is some spatial gene she inherited from ancestors whose lives were all too influenced by the horizon? Nevertheless, it is a theme in her writing: both her prose and her poetry. Her sensitivity to the land lets her see patterns of landscape in film and literature. In poetry, it pushes the levee into the title and the mountain into the metaphor.

I do know why she writes of painful things, of loss, of tears. Poetry is one of the natural habitats for tragedy. In its environment, lamentation is never likely to become an endangered species. But, for an eye sensitive to landscape, poetry becomes more than a place to enshrine that bitter moment we can’t forget. It becomes the place to show us the truth of our losses: the fragility of this life, the vulnerability of us all, the mystery of fate, and the miracle of our carrying on.

While there are many other themes in her book, these two, landscape and loss, standout. Sure, there are trees and women, museums and mammals, art and architecture. However, I am captivated by the beauty of these two.

Then again, I, too, am entranced by the mountains, and made humble by the sky over the plains. I, too, attend to the lessons of my loss, the sacred truths inside of sadness.

It is a wonderful book. Some of the poems I witnessed as the driver, or navigator, of a car in a storm. Other poems are from places I don’t know. Still, they are as familiar as my own home, with its porch light and peeling paint—a welcome banner to me alone. This is to say these poems speak to me. I think they will speak to you as well.


Thank you Rick. Well said.

Memory and war

Helen Eisen's chapbook, The Permeability of Memory, has been mentioned in the blog Writing the Holocaust. John Guzlowski interviews Eisen about the experience of childhood in the deportation camps, and the experience of absorbing memories of the war from her parents and from other adult survivors. Eisen's descriptions of how she sees memory working, how it moves through time and distance and the body, and how it is shared and transmitted, is fascinating -- layered and nuanced the same way her poems are.

Read the interview here: http://writingtheholocaust.blogspot.com/.

Secure? Keep your poems safe: part 3

April 1 is approaching, with its usual threats of internet bots and viruses -- this year some particularly grim ones. Please take a moment to make sure your computer is secure.

The three best computer moves I've ever made (and 2 of them are free):
1) Secunia vulnerability scanning. It's free, and it scans all the programs on my computer to make sure they're up to date and not leaving any barn doors open due to known security vulnerabilities. Adobe, Flash, Quicktime and such programs are real hotpoints for that sort of thing, and Secunia will catch them all, monitor as they get updated, tell you where to get the updates, and tell you why each vulnerability is a risk. If you don't already have Secunia, go here now and download it: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal.

2) AVG Anti-Virus free. I walked away from the annual fees and the system-hogging of commercial virus scanners and started using AVG free. It is quick, effective, and has kept me safe. http://free.avg.com/ If you aren't convinced a free anti-virus program can be as good as -- even better than -- one of the paid-for heavy hitters, read this article: http://weblog.infoworld.com/securityadviser/archives/2008/12/the_only_two_th.html

3) And, finally, Mozy for computer backups. I started with the free version, and was so impressed I now use the paid version, which allows me to back up bigger stuff -- all of it! I back up photos and my music library now, not just document files. I pay a small annual fee and I control when the backups occur. I can restore a single file or a folder or everything with about 2 clicks. For a fleeting moment I considered a separate hard-drive backup instead, but all hardware fails, eventually, and I wanted something off-site, so if a tree falls on the computer and the backup hardware I can still get to the files and keep working. (Don't laugh about the tree -- the Cherry Pie Press computer has narrowly escaped two very large tree disasters over the last few years, one of elm and one of oak.) MozyHome Remote Backup, http://www.mozy.com/.